“To hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature” (Shakespeare, Hamlet): William Bowes, the Goldsmiths Company, and the ‘Glasse of Repentance and Reformacion’

By Eva Griffith (begun April, finished May, 2022)

Today, as I am writing this, infamy is high in the news, with an MP resigning for watching bad things on his phone, and leaders of political parties accused of partying in a time of pandemic. Our screens show how another leader is at war in Europe, causing grief to the point of our fearing the End of the World. How many figureheads push boundaries to find out how far wrongdoing can go? To what extent is it all a smoothly presented act? President Putin has no background in entertainment; Boris Johnson has some. The universally acknowledged brave and true character in close-up in the frame is a man with an entertainer’s grounding: Mr. Zelensky. We are all giving him a standing ovation, including Mr. Johnson. He is a natural. And he is clean.

In my discipline of academic presentation, I am gradually learning, a little late in the day, that scholars often invoke untrue, misplaced things. It’s a kind of artifice, and some of them are naturals at it; but surely, when it comes to history, somebody ought to be responsible for writing nothing but the truth? Sparkling, one hopes, with virtue.

Today I am also conscious of a recent airing of a TV series on The Mirror newspaper mogul, Robert Maxwell, in the light of his daughter’s trial and imprisonment. A time, for her, and for us, let’s hope, of reflection in a Daily Mirror.

Hamlet, Clerkenwell, and a Mirror

Once upon a time, a long time ago, William Shakespeare put pen to paper for a play famed for its reflective material, alongside a willingness for us to think about the naturalness of virtue: “So shines a good deed in a naughty world” says the lawyer, Portia when she spies a candle in her home as she approaches it after a hard case (The Merchant of Venice, Act V, Scene 1). Quoting, as I am, The Merchant… I am writing of the prince, Hamlet, who, hearing actors are visiting his home (Elsinore Castle, Helsingor in Denmark), meets up with them to give them advice on how best to act his lines. Naturalness is the best approach:

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you – trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier had spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and as I may say the whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness… Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance: that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.

In previous articles posted on this site, alluding to the find of a 1587 survey by the distinguished City surveyor, Ralph Treswell, I have written of the ancient Clerkenwell water sources depicted there, and of the significance of those sources to British entertainment. This significance stretches back to Medieval times, long before Shakespeare’s Prince advised a touring troupe on how to act.

Close to where those water sources are shown was the Revels Office, located at the old St. John’s Priory buildings. It was here that the script of Hamlet would have been brought, so that the text could have been vetted for its suitability for performance at court.

The survey, shown and fully described in an academic article coming out later in the year, splits the land into five parts, the whole allotted as rental to aid Thomas Seckford’s almshouse charity. This effort to help poor men in his hometown is itemised in Seckford’s will and other documents.

The northern part of the Treswell survey is divided into two, with the western half of this labelled ‘The Orcharde’ where the Skinners Well is now thought to have been located. The eastern half is given to a lessee, with two strips beneath these, designated to two other people, one of them, a ‘William Bowes’. The most southerly end, unassigned, is where buildings and an avenue of trees is drawn. This is where Seckford stated he lived when in the London area, which he did until he died in that same year, 1587. This part is where the seventeenth-century Red Bull playhouse came to exist.

The Red Bull, surviving, unlike other playhouses, the Civil War and Interregnum, was known to have been particularly popular among the apprentices and citizens of London.

This article, in a spirit of reflection alluded to in the opening paragraphs, focusses on William Bowes (d. 1633), his father, Sir Martin (c.1500- 4 August, 1566), and the idea of mirrors in the context of new things learned about them and important things we can realise about us.

William Bowes and his father, Sir Martin

William Bowes was the son of a distinguished Goldsmith and mayor of London, Sir Martin Bowes. Very little is known about the son, but a great deal is known about the father.

Born around 1500, Martin Bowes was the son and heir of Thomas Bowes of York and, in circa 1513, he came to London to be apprenticed a Goldsmith under one Robert Amadas (Susan Hare, The Goldsmiths’ Review, 1975-6: ‘Sir Martin Bowes’ pp.31-32).

William was not the only son of Sir Martin. According to Susan Hare’s article in The Goldsmiths’ Review, wives had given birth to eighteen Bowes children by 1556. It is thought only seven of them survived. Of these there was an eldest son, Thomas, a “black sheep” forever in debt, a daughter who married a Sheriff of Kent called Sir George Hart, and another who gave birth to a Bishop of Ely. But it is the son of Bowes’ third wife, Elizabeth Harlow, who is the William of later interest to us here.

Sir Martin must have been a formidable man to have as a father. Elected to the livery only four years after the end of his apprenticeship, he went on to have twenty-five apprentices of his own between the years 1530 to 1566, the year he died. He was made Master of the Mint, an important role associated with the Goldsmiths, between 1533-44, and was made Prime Warden of the company an unusual thirteen times from 1537. With reference to hospitals (we celebrate seventy-five years of our National Health Service next year, 2023), Sir Martin was made Treasurer of St. Bartholomew’s in 1547 and Controller-General of Hospitals ten years later. He served as alderman in four different City wards in his lifetime, was made Sheriff of London in 1540, was knighted the year after, and became Lord Mayor in the year 1545-6. Like Seckford, he donated property towards charitable almshouses, and left money in his will to support them. He also acted as a Member of Parliament and is thought to have been a cupbearer at Queen Elizabeth I’s coronation banquet.

A related skill to that of working in gold is that of engraving, and it is here that William Bowes comes into the story as someone engaged with workmanship of this sort. Recorded as grateful for the Goldsmiths’ care in keeping up contact after his father’s death, Bowes set out, among an ambitious set of wishes in his will, to see godchildren, grandchildren and great grandchildren inherit his maps, describing these as “of the English and Welsh Shires” as well as “printed paper of all my other printes in black and white”. In a world before Google Maps, Bowes saw educative virtue in seeing his younger relatives informed about geography, at least of their home country, and to own prints.

William Bowes, was, as I say, was very grateful to the Goldsmiths’ company for their hospitality, figured as “their yearlie inuitinge me unto their hall”, which one imagines was on his “late father Sir Martin Bowes his funerall Sermon daie”. With this in mind, William, who must have been elderly himself at the time, recorded wanting a device printed. This was: “one Table of remembrance of my owne inuention” called “the Tree of knowledge of good and euill … neatlie and fairelie gilt and colored after the best manner, and sett in a faire frame gilt, in fashion of a lookinge glasse, with a faire lookinge glasse for a Couer to the same and the foyle unto the same table belonginge, which will shewe the meaninge thereof”. Both the Table of Remembrance and its cover together would be called “the Glasse of Repentance and Reformacion”, which Bowes wanted the Goldsmiths to hang in their Parlour “where the cheifest of the said Companie use to dine once euerie yeare”.

How William Bowes quite imagined this glass would be used is open to question.  I have asked at Goldsmiths Hall and nobody knows of a special framed object respectfully known as either ‘The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil’ or a more complete thing, with the appearance of a mirror, called ‘The Glass of Repentance and Reformation’. Such an item, however, gives an imaginative person an excuse to theorise, especially in the context of an understanding about fathers, and knowledge of the workings of this man’s father especially.

In her essay in a 2016 issue of Past and Present (Supplement 11), Jennifer Bishop explores the activity of ‘Civic Writing in Sixteenth-Century London’ through her investigations of a Goldsmiths company clerk called Raphe Robynson (‘The Clerk’s Tale’). In it she describes how Robynson, newly made clerk on 21 October 1557, had been asked to meet with Sir Martin Bowes a couple of days later, and was told that he should bring the company record book with him. Anxious to please someone as important as Sir Martin, Robynson did this, finding Bowes in his ‘counting house’ with one Sir Thomas Stanley, an officer of the Royal Mint. Robynson, within the context of a subsequent court case heard in 1573, possessed a network of connections as someone who had gone to school with William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, a major confidant and wielder of power for Elizabeth I. Stanley had once been Sir Martin’s apprentice, and so the two were now friends. Robynson was asked to read out the minutes from the meeting of the 21st October, and when he did so, Sir Martin wondered out loud why Sir Thomas’s grant of property was “lefte owt”, with Robynson replying that for certain there was nothing there about it, at which Bowes instructed Robynson to put in a statement giving Stanley a thirty-year term of a Goldsmiths-owned house in Maiden Lane, London. All of this came out in the court case, when Stanley’s widow put in an objection to her lease having ended when it hadn’t. By that time both Sir Martin and Sir Thomas were dead.

Sharp practice, dirty dealings and the City of London are nothing new. It’s nothing new in any context. Putting in something that shouldn’t be there… Finding the space to do this…

Year on year after Martin Bowes’ death in 1566, his son, William, was asked to come to dinner at the Hall, and must have seen the impressive citizens and aldermen there, and remembering how his father was and operated, thought he would leave the Goldsmiths some money for some jobs to do. The Tree and the Mirror were not the only ones.

More of that anon.

For now, it is sufficient for me to inform you that the maps gifted to William Bowes’ godchildren were not just about Goldsmiths and engraving. The reason Bowes was given a lease of land on Thomas Seckford’s estate in the first place, fourteen years after his father’s activities were dissected by the Court of Requests and some years after Sir Martin’s death, was that his mother, Elizabeth Harlow, once widowed, married Seckford quite soon after. She was Seckford’s only wife, predeceasing him. This made William Bowes Thomas Seckford’s step-son, a step-son to a great patron of map-makers and surveyors. Bowes’ maps were probably once Seckford’s.

Raphe Robynson’s school years may have been spent with the powerful William Cecil, but Seckford knew Cecil from law-school at Gray’s Inn and supplied him with Christopher Saxton’s important maps. Like passing the ball from one wife to another and then the wealth from one husband to another, good fortune came in those days, within early modern networks of connection acquired cleverly and treasured in Portia’s naughty world.

The thought occurs: the Court of Requests where Martin Bowes’ behaviour was examined was the court where Thomas Seckford was made a Master in 1558. This is yet a further twist to put into an understanding of these hard-world characters.

A few days ago, on 13th May, The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge exhorted us to consider The Lonely in a message delivered on radio stations Britain-wide. This is an idea not without virtue, making our reflection in the nation’s mirror a good one today, and natural to those who, readying themselves for Royal Jubilee Street Parties, knock on everyone’s doors with an invitation, hoping for new friends. Recently Duke William bestowed a damehood on a woman who has tirelessly managed to get us to engage with bowel cancer.

William Bowes may have known words from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and chewed upon them as he invented, pen in hand, the ‘Glass of Repentance and Reformation’ for his father’s people to fashion. Both Williams, however, would have surely known their Scripture, and St. Paul’s words from 1 Corinthians 13, using the metaphor of mirrors. Are they about Love? Or Charity? Or the meaning of the Latin, ‘caritas’, taken as equalling “Charity”, which in fact means just caring:

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then, face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” (verses 12-13, King James Version).  

St. George’s Day

by Eva Griffith 30/4/2022

I started this article on St. George’s Day, 23rd April, which happens to be Shakespeare’s birthday. As I started it, I sat near where the 1599 Globe playhouse (Shakespeare’s theatre) was located, opposite the new Globe reconstruction. I was about to eat Turkish food.

This makes sense to me, as the night before, the 22nd, I was reminded by a ‘Professor’ that St. George came from Cappadocia and Cappadocia is in Turkey. Beautiful Turkey seems constantly caught between its current-day Muslim identity and its extraordinary contribution to a Western, Christian history and Culture. Included in this mix is the Roman-soldier/dragon-slayer person that would not give up his Christian faith, not for a wilderness of monkeys. What a pleasing muddle. What an irony that England’s patron saint came from there. It is appropriate in some strangely curdled way.

The actor, Alan David, who plays the ‘Professor’ in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, a play I re-visited for its final preview of this airing, spoke the speeches most relevant to my research, although everyone and everything lent me a connection. He talked of fairs and puppet shows, bears and dogs. And of St. George. The actor reminded me of my father. David, in this play, represents a Welsh academic in a suit. I have talked of Welshmen in suits before. David’s Professor is the character who knows; Rylance’s is the character who is.

The last time I saw this play was in New York the first time it was produced, and I was so astounded by Mark Rylance’s performance that I stayed behind to stand, waiting, up to my ankles in snow, across the road from the Stage Door just to see him come out. I had to make sure he was real. The wait seemed like hours. He never did emerge from that Stage Door… I would say Rylance has matured into Johnny Byron now. He still astounds me. Mackensie Crook again played ‘Ginger’, a very subtle commentator in the play, situated midway between Byron and the ‘young’ people who congregate around the train carriage where he lives, parked in the middle of a wood. Just like the first time I saw it, the curtain call saw an immediate standing ovation. It is past its first night now, I can only wish it well for the rest of its magic run.

‘Well’, of course, is my operative word. In my last article for Lemon Shakespeare, I wrote about entertainment’s need for refreshment, borne out historically by the wells of Clerkenwell, my interest, and how these were associated from the first with the drama and sports that were found there, including a newly identified site for the Skinners Well. This play, Jerusalem, swims in drink, from the rancid milk and raw egg tossed mercilessly into the stalls at Rylance’s first entrance, to the vodka which makes it down his throat. Intoxicating substances name the game, including alcohol. I diverge into criticism, only to refer to my interest in water and what we do with it.

To the east of the Seckford Estate, on the other side of St. John Street from where the Red Bull playhouse was active, were breweries and watering holes, created, perhaps, to cater for thirsty people associated with play. The term “play” can mean a lot of things. It can be a verb to do with games and sports, and this field saw those. This field, prior to the Reformation, and like the ‘Seckford Estate’ one, belonged to the Augustinian nuns of the priory of St. Mary. Butterworth’s drama about good-time ne’er-do-wells, both teenaged and older, in touch with a land so centred and dependent on Byron, reminded me of the kind of social perspective that must have taken place in those fields.

A prioress wrote to King Edward I in the early 14th century, complaining (in French) of how men would ride out from the City of London determined to play their games, trampling the nunnery’s crops with their aggressive pastimes. The Red Bull also catered to the apprentices and masters of the square mile. It saw thefts, assaults and even riots. But they were the ‘bums on seats’ at the end of the day, and no one was really complaining.

The End of April

It’s now the end of April, we teeter into May and its May games, and thinking about this effort I’d say we make a mistake if we don’t understand that the roots of entertainment were always meant for everybody. On one level, the Jacobean Red Bull playhouse may have just been an extension of the games and ‘plays’ that were active in the area over a much longer period, from long before the formalising of ‘literature’.

The mythology of giants and dragons to which the play Jerusalem refers is not far away from Red Bull fare, with its references to Merlin, and its mythical creatures recreated, for example, in Thomas Heywood’s Ages plays. His Four Prentices of London drama, and the multi-authored The Travails of the Three English Brothers, both performed at the Red Bull, possessed their own relationships with both what it is to be English and the Islamic world. In those fields across the way, I fear, archery was sometimes practised, not with arrows trained on a Bull’s eyes, but aimed towards mock-ups of Islamic ‘Moors’, in confusions of identity.

Standing stones, May Queens, Morris (or Moorish) dancing, St. John Ambulance, and even the stagnant pond where St. George’s dragon lived, are all mentioned in Jerusalem, somehow expressing what is the zenith of being English, while all the time referring to the Holy City of the Promised Land. Let’s not forget this play is comi-tragic. There is a lot of comedy in this play.

And did those feet in ancient time,

Walk upon England’s mountains green?

And was the Holy Lamb of God

On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine

Shine forth upon those clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here

Among those dark satanic…

I walk along the streets around Shaftesbury Avenue after the show, and I realise it’s just a continuation of the forests of Wiltshire. The young people having a good time, some girls in short skirts, some boys sporting crew cuts, all taking footage of themselves on their mobile phones in an all-too now post-Brexit Britain. I clutch my programme as if it’s my very Welsh surname.

There are 50 days to the Easter festival, however, the time we now enjoy, after Lent, when we can drink again. But here’s the warning as I watch a programme about the much-loved comic, entertainer of the people, Tommy Cooper, and how he died to the sound of his audience’s laughter, wearing his Turkish fez: my father, brought up Methodist, took ‘the pledge’ not to drink alcohol when he was a teenager. When I knew him he drank a little Guinness occasionally, never constantly, and never regretted caution. I guess I am careful too. My friendly advice to you is to #BeDrinkAware.

And have a care with the drugs.

Those dark satanic… Satanic… What was it again?

For My Father, Kenneth Griffith: the best.

By Eva

Kenneth and Eva Griffith in the 1970s

It is October 2021, I am in Spain, and I am troubled.

The weather is lovely, but I have a very important article to finish on newly discovered ancient water sources in Clerkenwell, London, and I don’t have everything I need.

An external drive has lost its ability to connect with my computer, it’s a busy Miguel de Cervantes week in Alcalá de Henares, and a Waitrose bag with some USB sticks in it was stolen from me on a bus from Madrid. Those sticks had my latest work on them. It’s no joke.

Also in the bag was a tin of Coke, a half-eaten tuna sandwich, and a rather-too-heavy ‘Rough’ guide to Spain. And two small Nokia-type phones (don’t ask). There was someone in an Oscar Wilde play who left a baby in a bag in a station waiting room, wasn’t there? Hmm… Police in Madrid know about this.

            The other day, in the Cervantes Birthplace Museum on the Calle Mayor, my Pembrokeshire ‘Two Red Dogs’ back-back fell too suddenly from my shoulder with a thud on the courtyard floor. It had my computer in it. And as I tried to switch it on this morning the thought crossed my mind, well what would Cervantes have done with a computer? He only had one hand working after the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. Luckily it was the left hand. All he needed was his right hand, a quill pen and he was away.

            My father, Kenneth Griffith – the subject of this article – born in Tenby, Pembrokeshire a hundred years ago on 12th October this year, and an actor-friend, not unfamiliar with how a world can be unkind to Quixote-like adventurers, took a dim view of the modern age – the internet – and its belongings. I remember them sighing about it in corners, never quite revealing the facts they knew. Today I understand where they were coming from and wish they’d told me all about it.

            It’s October 2021, I am in Spain, and another day I awoke to the sound of bells from a little church just across the way. I rushed to get dressed and crossed the road to mass at the church of Carmelite nuns there. It was the 7th of October, a special day for the rosary, and I am moved to hear singing beyond the grille and be among people counting beads and hoping for the best. We are coming up for Spain Day, also on the twelfth, and I knew I had to be here – although I have no idea of Daddy’s opinion of Christopher Columbus. During the war, on his twenty-first or twenty-second birthday – I think – a bomb descended on Tenby (there weren’t many), obliterating my father’s birthplace room at back of the house where he was born. Luckily for me he wasn’t in the house at the time, but other people may have felt differently over the years. He was an extraordinary person.    

            It is October, I am in Spain, and I am conscious that some people don’t like me going to church. I see the empty foil packets of contraceptive pills on the street, and I hear the young women think: “Don’t you know we are subjugated by these places, these people?” Spain has changed a lot since Franco. We live in an imperfect world. What is for sure is that ‘subjugation’ is not a word in my language of Hope. Freedom is – somewhere in my head. And that is Daddy’s fault. And I can see him smile at me – with one side of his mouth at least. It could have been both sides if I had been an ‘activist’. My father was an actor and controversial filmmaker who died in 2006. Whenever the BBC would introduce one of his films they would make it clear that his was a: “personal view”. While he lived, and with his dying breath, he would love those who stood up, made a fuss about their life, their culture, and would not give up until someone heard what needed to be said. He was cross when I became a Catholic, not because he had any problem with me having a faith – far from it. But because he said: “You will never be able to fight for those people again.” By which he meant: “I stand up for people who are not like me. I can do this because I have a background in Methodist Wales, far removed from those I support, and can stand up for people who are not like me with a distance between us, so people listen, because I have no vested interest.” It’s like assessing a work of art, not close-up, but from several steps back so you can take in the composition properly. And then stepping closer to see the brush strokes and feel the passion of the thing. And take on the length and breadth of the medium. And, in a sense, become it, but never be wholly it. Because that wouldn’t be helpful.

            “Well done, God!” as Turner said when he saw a stormy sky over pitching waves and so painted it. Daddy liked William Turner.

            I hear a squeak of someone’s shoe underfoot, and oddly it sounds like a cuckoo. Well, I thought it was somebody’s shoe. It could have been somebody’s communication device – you know – they make all kinds of sounds. I am reminded of my father’s cuckoo clock in his dining room which would sound at the oddest of times. We wondered why he kept it, as it used to wrong-foot him every time. It was supposed to chime on the hour, as is traditional, but it went peculiar after a while and fired off at will. We, the family, would be relieved to hear it, just as he got his most impassioned about the things he cared about (“Cuckoo! Cuckoo!”) which we didn’t necessarily understand or care about too. It broke a Turneresque mood which was received gratefully. Eventually the mechanism broke, and the birdsong was no more, but he kept the clock on his wall. Dying from Alzheimer’s (curse it), the family moved him into the basement dining room for easier access to arrangements without too much need of a wheelchair. It was then Daddy told me that Jesus stood in corner of the room underneath the cuckoo clock spot. Daddy had been very cross with Jesus because of the then Pope’s attitude to same-sex relationships. I didn’t try to defend the then Pope (we have a different Pope now). According to Daddy, neither did Jesus. Strangely, however, I could imagine Christ standing under that clock. It would have been an appropriate place to be while Daddy struggled with Death.

Jesus: “Don’t get too serious, Ken. People like it when you are funny – when you tell funny stories. Do you know what Kenneth?  I think I will stand in the cuckoo clock’s corner. Now tell me about the Pope.”

            When an actor, my father leaned towards comedy. A type of straight man for Peter Sellers – but always funny himself – he was in films like I’m All Right Jack and, most appositely, before Sellers was huge, Only Two Can Play. Much later, he performed a cameo role in the much-loved comedy-romance, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and followed that with another Hugh Grant film, The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill And Came Down A Mountain. Other people remember, fondly, the parts he played in the 1970s-80s Euan Lloyd films: The Wild Geese, The Sea Wolves and Who Dares Wins.

Whatever he did he would tremble with the passion of it. Daddy always trembled. Nobody knew why. He didn’t drink. He didn’t have Parkinson’s. It was just part of him. Trying to get it right. Doing his best. And shaking, preacher-like, with the effort.

A story Daddy told about this, concerned a meeting he had with the Revolutionary Committee in Iran – just after the Revolution there – when he was looking to make a film about the Magi, or Three Wise Men of Jesus’ fame. They were believed to have come from the Iran/Persia area. On my father’s passing, a journalist confirmed to me in an email (I precis wildly) that Daddy flew into Tehran around about the time when everyone else was flying out. Some sub-committee of the Revolutionary one agreed to meet with Daddy concerning his wish to make a documentary film in their hard-won territory. Knowing he lived in England, they proffered him tea. Daddy, the Welshman, accepted. Trembling, as usual, he recognised his mistake when he noticed these men take in the nervous-sounding clink-clink of cup-on-near-saucer as he brought the tea to his lips. The group visibly curdled before him, hearing something sounding like fear, and they responded, quickly, that as much as Daddy wanted to make a film about the Child Isa in Iran (Jesus is regarded as a prophet in Islam, going by this ‘Isa’), and as much good as such a film might be for the ungodly outside their country, they didn’t feel he should do this at this time.

It’s now the 9th October, the day they celebrate Cervantes’ baptism here. And as I am given to thinking about water these days – because the planet is in trouble and the subject of water is a primary one for those who care about the world – I am put in mind of a visit to the River Jordan undertaken with my father in Israel. This was when he was forced re-think how to approach the Three Wise Men film, turning it (in fact) into a life of Jesus. We were accompanied by a military gentleman. At this time, the site where Jesus was said to be baptised by John the Baptist, was surrounded with barbed wire, as far as it could be when the location involved a river. You didn’t have to look for long to see evidence of previous pilgrims – small glass water bottles lay on top of the sand in the desert-like territory, abandoned, I imagined, in fear of life-threatening danger. I don’t know how it is now. I just remember the sand, the glass, the barbed wire, and something glinting on the bank of the river on the other side. “What is that?” Daddy asked our guide. “If we are lucky,” the gentleman said, “it’s the army looking at us through their binoculars. If we are unlucky, it’s their bayonets glistening in the sun.” This was everything my mother never wanted for me, but Daddy wanted it. I also remember a reggae song called ‘Living on the Front Line’ being a popular one played on the radio channels in our car. I’d hear it again and again travelling from possible filming venue to possible filming venue. I liked it. And recognised the lyrics’ value in this beautiful if troubled country.

Daddy was tremendously pro-Israel, believing that after the Holocaust, the Jewish people needed a homeland. Being Daddy, he would talk to anyone about it. I was sixteen, very earnest, and happy to be visiting the sites that meant so much to me for that film. We took an evening walk down the Via Dolorosa – the site of Jesus’s final walk with his cross – in Jerusalem. It was then a place where the Palestinian community sold interesting things in the many cave-like shops. Daddy struck up a conversation with Islamic young men selling fabrics who, on hearing his opinions expressed in no uncertain terms, ushered us further in to the shop. They got a tape-recorder out. I remember thinking “Ah, there we are, then, I am going to die. It was a nice life. Sorry I didn’t experience much, have children and all, but there we are.” I imagined the guns coming out, being hustled into a car, and a summary execution in some Jordan-like wasteland. This didn’t happen. My father repeated what he had said into the tape recorder with his best Shakespearean theatre actor annunciation. The young men looked serious but quietly appreciative, listening to what Daddy said.

And then, when all was done, they let us go. I mean they saw us to the mouth of the cave and waved us goodbye.

These are just random memories. There is much more I could say. But perhaps it should wait for the long-promised book: Dr. Griffith and the Rabble-rousers as it has always been called – in my head. About me, Daddy, and anyone I met – mostly men – mostly from the entertainment industry – who made the kind of fuss nobody makes these days. There are different kinds of fuss to be made today.  

If anyone knows of anyone who could supply an advance for such a book, please tell me. I have a few trips around Europe to pay for, you see…

My computer is still working. And everything is doable. The hotel where I have been staying has found me a room every day while I have been waiting for the authorities to help with my losses. But today is the second day of the Mercado Cervantino de Alcalá de Henares, I don’t have Spanish really, and I sense I may be dreaming an ‘Impossible Dream’ when it comes to staying here for the twelfth. But I remain positive.

Always remembering the cuckoo clock, Quixote-like, I may be less of an idealist and more of an activist than I think. In a few weeks’ time, I hope, I will have journeyed, suitcase rolled along unrelenting cobbles, to the south, being me (because I can only be me) and learning as I go. For I am using the excuse of the water sources to expand my knowledge, so I can communicate about the subject, urgent and essential as it is, in the context of today’s spiritual and environmental issues – always with my entertainment roots close by my side. I’d like to go to the Glasgow conference, to interview people and learn some more about water and the environment. But I am wary of the Scottish cold, warm as the people are, and because my knees hurt from a torn meniscus (I’ve been told) and too much walking. But I keep walking. I will keep going, as far as I am able, taking what looks like the best path.

Here are the words on my father’s gravestone from a favourite poem of his by Robert Frost. He used a phrase from it as a title for one of his films for India:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

And I see my father’s eyes glinting like a bayonet across the water. He is standing not far from a cuckoo clock in the too-hot sunshine. And he says: “Tell us about it then, Eves. Tell us about a Cervantes-time entertainment world – and the World’s Water”.

Key Stage 2: Shakespeare’s Clowns

What makes you laugh?

Much of the time, what makes people laugh can be the same thing as what makes people cry. What do I mean by that and why should it be so?

If someone slips on a slippery banana skin, they could really hurt themselves. Pick up that banana skin before someone slips on it, please! However, slipping on a banana skin is a funny joke at the circus where a performer does things we would not normally do. We might not do them because it could make someone unhappy. A clown might throw a bucket of water at someone on the stage, or throw a pie full of cream in another clown’s face. But if anyone did that to you, you might feel unhappy because it would mess up your clothes!

Think carefully about what makes you laugh. It could be something from the television or something from ‘real life’ and think about the bit of it that might be hard or cruel in some way. What makes it funny if it is not kind?

In Shakespeare’s play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a man called ‘Bottom’ (sorry – what was his name? Bottom? Well, that’s funny for a start!) has a magic spell cast over him changing his head into a donkey’s head. Goodness! How would you feel if you woke up and found your head had been turned into a donkey’s head? Well, Bottom does not really mind because he wakes up next to a beautiful fairy queen called Titania. She has also had a magic spell cast over her so that she will fall in love with the next person she sees. And the next person she sees is… donkey-headed Bottom!

Oh dear! If both of these characters make us laugh, are they both clowns? Bottom is a weaver. He makes beautiful fabrics using threads on a machine called a ‘loom’. I imagine a weaver could be a funny man. But can a queen be a clown? I am not sure. I would like to hear what you think. What makes her funny if she is not a clown?

First write down or draw a picture of something that made you laugh. Then have a think about how you would feel if it really happened to you. Then think about Bottom and Queen Titania and write down or draw what you think they might be like. Would you like to be a weaver? Would you like to be a fairy queen? There is nothing to stop you being both – especially in your imagination! If you would not like to be either a weaver or a fairy queen or king, tell me why that is.

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Key Stage 3: Romeo, Juliet and Anne Frank

In the story of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet the couple in the title are young people who live in the same town in Italy. Unfortunately, their families do not like one another. Romeo belongs to the ‘Montague’ family and Juliet, the ‘Capulets’. The story Shakespeare used for this play made Juliet Capulet 16 years old. But Shakespeare made her younger at the beginning of the play – 13 years old. Why did he do that? By the end of the play, when she realises she loves Romeo so much she cannot live without him, she may have been 14 years old. It is a very sad story about disagreement, ‘peer-group pressure’, violence, and true love caught in the middle. Both beautiful young people die because their families do not like one another and because they love one another so much they realise they cannot live without one another. The words “disagreement”, “violence” and “love” are all terms you may know. But what about “peer-group pressure”? This is when the group you are in or a group of friends around and about you might get so carried away with a way of behaving or seeing things that they start to encourage one another to do something dangerous. Eventually this can lead to bullying, fighting or death. To stay ‘in the group’ and not be judged by anyone else in the group, you do what you think the rest of the group would like you to do instead of the thing you know is right. If one friend smokes, and then another, you might start smoking just to keep those people as friends. This is unfortunate as smoking can kill you! ‘Knife crime’ can have a lot to do with peer-group pressure. The play Romeo and Juliet has several fights between the young men of the two opposing families and two boys die during them.

Romeo and Juliet may have been based on a true story about something that happened in the town of Verona, Italy. The Diary of Anne Frank is certainly a true story about tragic events in Europe during the Second World War of 1939-45. Anne was a Jewish schoolgirl living in Holland who had to go into hiding when members of the political party called the Nazis were in power and had decided they did not like Jews. A leader called Adolf Hitler made powerful speeches, and Germany, the country he led, fell under the belief that he was right. If you did not believe what Hitler and the people around him believed, you were not part of the group, and might be arrested or killed. Anne Frank kept a diary during her time in a secret set of rooms in Amsterdam during this time, while she was hiding with her family there – away from the Nazis. Unfortunately, the people hiding there were discovered – including Anne – and they were taken and put into ‘concentration camps’. These were cruel and unhealthy places where Anne and her sister died. Anne was 14 when she died, the same age as Shakespeare’s Juliet.

I have pointed out where ‘peer-group pressure’ came into the story of Romeo and Juliet. Can you see where it might ‘play its part’ in the story of Anne Frank?

After the war, Anne’s father was given her diary by his secretary, Miep Gies. Can you imagine how Mr. Frank felt? He had lost his whole family because of the war and then he was given the diary of his daughter. Here he found how she vividly brought to life what it was like to be ‘in hiding’. He must have been very proud – am I not right? Or what do you think? Write down an imaginary speech for Mr. Frank about what had happened and how you think he felt.

When he read the diary, he saw that it was so good he decided to get it published. This was so people could buy the diary as a book, read it and know what it was like to be together, apart from everyone, and frightened about being caught. He had, however, one dilemma or difficulty. Part of the story that Anne told was very similar to Juliet’s. While she was in hiding, she fell in love, briefly, with a boy who was there, and she wrote about it. Mr. Frank must have wondered about this. It was very true to how human beings are, even young human beings. In the end Mr. Frank decided to keep some of her diary describing Peter, the boy, but ‘cut’ some parts where his daughter, Anne, described personal feelings.

In Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet, Juliet is very ‘vocal’ or expressive about her feelings of love:

“Oh Romeo, Romeo,” she says to the night sky, thinking she is alone (but Romeo is listening secretly in the garden below) “wherefore art thou Romeo?” (meaning “why are you Romeo?” because she wishes he did not have that name because it is the name of her father’s enemy!) She also describes her love to him, describing it as if it is as big as the sea: “My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep. The more I have, the more I give to thee, for both are infinite.” Much of Romeo and Juliet is about when it is ‘safe’ to express your feelings and when it is not so safe.

Romeo and Juliet’s families were certainly mistaken in being argumentative or ‘feuding’ families as they ended up with the deaths of their two children. They regretted what happened very much. Mr. Frank was a very good man, but was he right to cut how Anne Frank felt about personal things? What do you think?

Whether you are a boy or a girl, imagine you have written a diary with your most private thoughts included. Imagine your parent, or someone who looks after you, deciding to publish your diary when you died. Would you be angry or pleased if they had taken something away? Write down what you would say to that person and draw a picture of how you would feel about it (the picture could be of people or a pattern expressing how you would feel).

Write down and draw a picture of anything that you have felt while reading about Romeo, Juliet and/or Anne Frank either here or elsewhere.