I’ve hardly dared switch the radio on over the last few days so blissful has been the quiet engendered by the Ash Crisis.
I’ve hardly dared switch the radio on over the last few days so blissful has been the quiet engendered by the Ash Crisis. The absence of noise is uncanny; this new soundtrack of life so deep, stretching way up into the empty skies. Why spoil it by turning on the radio? Yet an election looms, my sister’s stuck in Sri Lanka and I discover that my mind is just too addicted to grazing on news and ideas, facts and opinions to stop listening.
On Saturday night, Terence Davies, the film-maker, produced his first documentary for radio, Intensive Care (Radio 3), a meditation on his much-loved mother and his struggle to leave home and find his creative voice. It was, like one of his elegiac, magical films, fuelled by memory and lit by love. Davies himself was the narrator.
At first his measured, almost artificial delivery was rather irritating, but gradually his careful knitting together of memories of childhood, the songs his mother used to sing, the poetry of Auden, Sassoon and Betjeman, and an underscape of clocks ticking, children playing, snatches of Stravinsky and Shostakovich, drew me in. His voice acquired a musical quality like listening to a carefully paced recitative.
Davies forces you to slow down, to pay attention to the insignificant, to hear the difference. ‘It is the small things that hold the weight of memory,’ he says, using his script as if it is a camera and he the director, looking down through the lens, each word or phrase creating not just the image within the frame but also what is implied beyond it. With the death of his mother, of old age in a nursing home, Davies says that everything loses its meaning, but in attempting to catch hold of his memories, he gives back meaning not just to his life but to ours too, as we share with him the feelings engendered by family, by loss and by the casual malice of random fate.
Sunday’s The Reunion on Radio 4 gave us one of those startling moments when the conversation stops dead but the meaning carries on unfolding in the mind. Sue MacGregor was talking to three former prisoners of the Maze prison in Northern Ireland who had been involved in the dirty protest and hunger strike of the late 1970s and early 1980s, along with a prison officer, a Catholic priest and a journalist. Usually the gathering together of people who have once been bound together by an unusually vivid, life-altering experience but who have not met for many years provokes a torrent of memories, a sharing of reflections. Not on this occasion.
When Sue asked the prison officer, Des Waterworth, for his side of the story, after hearing from Pat Sheehan, the Republican ex-prisoner, of the beatings and bullying, the hostility and harsh handling, he replied, ‘I must have been in a different prison … Because I’ve worked with most of the boys here, and locked them up …I personally had nothing to do with it. And I think Pat actually knows this because many’s the time Pat was in the same wing as myself. And I’m sitting here six feet away from Pat Sheehan.’
The silence that followed was shocking. A few seconds of in-drawn breath. You could almost feel the menace as these men sat facing each other across the table. What followed was more like an Archive on 4, piecing together what happened as the dirty protest turned into the hunger strike in which ten prisoners died. No conversation was possible between the ex-prisoners and the man who had once ‘worked with them’, only an empty silence.
The announcement of Mark Damazer’s departure as Controller of Radio 4 was quite rightly greeted with much wailing and gnashing, since his input has much energised the station, and its schedule is now crammed full of thought-provoking series. Maybe his leaving could be marked by a moment of silence for, as we are discovering, there is much to be learnt in the silence.
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