Tendring Topics…….on line

A Glimpse into the future?

The above news cutting from a German regional newspaper was sent to me by a friend living in the Black Forest area. It shows a ten-years-older (and wiser) German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, commenting in 2020 on the failure of the Copenhagn Climate-Change Conference to come to a satisfactory concluson. It is doubly prophetic since the newspaper is dated 4th December, before he Conference had even begun!

The print of the caption is, I regret, too small to read on this blog. My ability to read German is distinctly limited. However I have managed to work out that it is headed 'Late Repentance' and goes on to say that this is one of the posters that greeted Angel Merkel, and other national leaders when they arrived at Copenhagen airport for the Conference. It was part of a Greenpeace Poster campaign.

I don't really think that Chancellor Angela Merkel (or Prime Minister Gordon Brown) need be repentant about their roles at Copenhagen, except perhaps that, unlike Greenpeace, neither of them had foreseen inevitable failure.

A Lucky Year?

To ethnic Chinese, ‘eight’ is a lucky number. That, so I am told, is why they were so keen to hold the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008. Ariel, my elder grandson’s Taiwanese girl-friend was convinced that the year that is coming to an end would be an extremely fortunate one for me. It was the year of my 88th birthday and my house number is also 88!

Myself and Ariel, Grandson Chris’ Taiwanese girlfriend

Actually, I often feel that I have been blest by good luck all my life. No, I have never won the lottery…..but as I have never bought a lottery ticket that is hardly surprising. Over and over again though my life has been punctuated by extraordinary coincidences, and circumstances that seemed to be disasters, but have turned out to be blessings in disguise.

Right -grandson Nick and Romy, his Belgian girlfriend.

2009 isn’t quite over yet, but yes, despite the recession it has so far it has been a good one for me. I had an enjoyable Easter, attending with my daughter-in-law a wonderful Choral Eucharist in Southwark Cathedral that was televised and transmitted on BBC tv. To celebrate my 88 years I visited Brussels with my son and daughter-in-law, to see my grandson Nick who lives and works there. I was introduced to his girl-friend….a charming young lady whose native tongue is French but who also speaks fluent, and virtually unaccented, English. Returning to England for the actual birthday, my son, daughter-in-law and I had a celebratory meal at the very posh Essex pub run by the parents of Jamie Oliver, the well-known tv chef.

Left:Me on my 88th birthday.

Right: Jo

AKA Miss Josephine Hall M.A., B.Sc.

Later in the year my other son and daughter-in-law drove me Sheffield for a weekend to spend time with my granddaughter, an M.A., B.Sc., of whom I am immensely proud. Still in her mid-twenties she works as a social worker attached to the Renal Unit of a large Sheffield Hospital. We drove out into the Peak District and, for the first time in my life, I was able to see traditional Derbyshire ‘well dressing’.

In July I was able to return to Zittau in Germany for my third (and, I think, final) time since the end of World War II. It was to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the town’s restored Lenten Veil (in the 500 year history of which I am believed to have played a tiny part) in its own museum/church of the Holy Cross. Grandson Nick organised the visit and accompanied me. This time I travelled by rail, from London to Brussels by Eurostar and then, with Nick, from Brussels to Dresden with just one change of train at Frankfurt. By booking well in advance we travelled first class at second class prices and, believe me, first class on a German long-distance train really is first class!

Nick drove me from Dresden to Zittau, sixty-odd miles, in a pre-arranged hired car. It was a great pleasure to meet again my friends Dr Volker Dudeck and his wife Julia, and Ingrid Zeibig and her family, including her little niece Maja, now almost three! This time I managed to get to the summit of Mount Oybin, where I had helped take the heavy cases containing the famous Lenten Veil, in February 1945.

From the Left: Ingrid Zeibig, Maja, Ingrid’s mother Frau Ingrid Kulke, Ingrid’s sister-in-law Kornelia (Konnie) and brother Andreas. Konnie’s second baby was born in September; a boy, Tom Friedrich, a brother for Maja.

The view from the summit of Mount Oybin the far distance, swathed in mist, is the town of Zittau.

To my great surprise and pleasure, I was also given by Dr Dudeck proof copies of a long article of mine entitled ‘Return to Zittau’. It had been translated into German and published as a glossy booklet, illustrated with photographs taken locally, and pictures culled from my Flickr web site, www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea More copies of this booklet have since been published and are on sale in the tourist shop at 5€, profits going to the upkeep of the Lenten Veil, which has recently had its 300,000th visitor (an English tourist!) in the ten years that it has been on public display.

Inspired by the German booklet, I am self-publishing a similar booklet entitled ‘Zittau…..and I’ Incorporating my original Return to Zittau’, but with a great deal of additional material and half a dozen or so photographic illustrations. I am having 150 copies printed for family and friends. The typescript has gone to the printer and I hope to have them before the end of January..

Yes, it has been a good year, though I don’t think that ‘all the eights’ has had a great deal to do with it. Those who read this blog a year ago may remember that my New Year Resolution was to ‘count my blessings, count them one by one’. Two thousand-and-nine certainly gave me many to count. As, in two thousand-and-ten I shall, if I am still around, be entering my ninetieth year, I ought perhaps to hope that it will be a little less action-packed!

‘Incapable of running a bath!’……..yet the best in Essex!

It was, of course, our MP, Mr Douglas Carswell who claimed that the previous ‘Clacton First’, non-Conservative coalition administration of Tendring Council, was incapable of running a bath. Not everyone however regards him as the greatest living authority on local and world affairs. Rather more reliable is the Government’s Independent Audit Commission which awarded the Council three out of four for performance, and declared it not only to be the best local authority in Essex, but in the top twenty-five of the two hundred plus local authorities in the country! I wonder what Mr Carswell, who is perhaps best known as a climate change sceptic, and for his purchase (at public expense) of ‘a love seat’ and a £60 kettle for his second home in Thorpe-le-Soken, has to say about all the other Essex authorities. Unlike Tendring Council, several of them invested their tax-payers’ money in high-interest-earning banks in Iceland…..and are now regretting it!

Most of the data on which the Audit Commission’s report was based was garnered during the previous non-Conservative administration of which Mr Carswell was so scathing. Possibly that is why the reaction of the present Council leader, Mr Neil Stock has been distinctly low-key. He praises the Council’s staff (not the Council!) for their hard work but says that the Audit Commission has given a loud and clear message that they still have some serious concerns. The report had pointed out that the council’s public image was poor, with less than half of local people surveyed expressing satisfaction with the way it ran things.

He added encouragingly that the report said that Tendring had ‘a firm foundation for future improvement’ (under Mr Stock’s new Conservative administration of course!)

There are, of course, several reasons why Tendring Council has a poor public image. The current in-fighting between the two, almost equal, opposing Parties doesn’t help. Then again many people imagine that all public services are the responsibility of the district council. Mobility scooter users like myself for instance, are particularly conscious of the atrocious state of many of the pavements away from the town centre. How many, I wonder, realize that these are the responsibility of the Conservative County Council (who received only an ‘adequate’ rating from the Audit Commission) to whom the greater part of our Council Tax is paid. I think that many of Tendring Council’s services, including, for instance the refuse collection and recycling collection services and the street cleansing service, that are second to none.

Then again, for both the local and national press, local government disasters provide much more attractive stories than local government triumphs. The news story about the Audit Commission’s findings is to be found only at the bottom of Page 7 of the Clacton Gazette of 17th December, with the headline, ‘Council staff earn a pat on the back’. I suggest that had Tendring been rated the worst, instead of the best, local authority in Essex, the story would have been on the front page with some such headline as ‘Tendring First’ Council comes Last! and a story about how the new administration was doing its best to clear up the mess left by its predecessor.

Tendring Topics……on Line

Some Pictorial Memories

It was just as I was posting last week’s blog on the internet that my grandson Nick’s photographs from our trip to Zittau arrived by email. They were far better than mine (well, he did get a B.A. Honours degree in photography at Westminster University) and really revived my memories of that very happy and action-packed weekend.

There was the picture of the high-speed train pulling into Frankfurt Airport station where we changed trains on the way home. Its streamlined glass-fronted driver’s cab reminded me that on our outward journey we had been in a carriage just behind the cab. It was possible for us to move forward so as to be just behind the driver, able through the glass windscreen to have a driver’s-eye view of the rail-track ahead.

Then there were the pictures taken on the summit of Mount Oybin: the arched doorway to the crypt through which, in February 1945, we had carried those heavy cases that we now know contained the historic Great Zittau Lenten Veil, and the nave of the monastic church with its soaring stone walls and windows. How on earth, we wondered, had those medieval builders managed to create such a magnificent and beautiful structure at the summit of a mountain? While we were there, concealed loud-speakers brought us the sound of plainsong chant from an invisible monastic choir; very spooky!

The following day had been the celebration of the restoration of the Lenten Veil and tenth anniversary of its installation in the museum/church of the Holy Cross. Speeches in German, most of which neither Nick nor I could understand, were punctuated by captivating performances by a Polish choral group, two violinists, two guitarists and four singers (though the musicians also sang). The lyrics, some in German some in Polish, all so we were told, had their origins in the Bible. The music was arranged by one of the choir members and had been inspired by traditional folk music of Polish, gypsy and Jewish origin. It was just the kind of light-classical/folk music that I, and it was obvious the German audience, enjoyed.

Among the speakers was my friend Dr Volker Dudeck, retired director of the Zittau Museum, who referred to the contribution that ‘the Englishman, Ernest Hall’ had made to the history of the Lenten Veil and how honoured they were that he and his grandson were with them on this occasion!

When the speeches were over, but before we repaired to a posh mayoral reception at the Town Hall, Dr Dudeck presented me with three copies of a glossy, illustrated booklet entitled, in German, ‘Return to Zittau’ by Ernest Hall. It was a German translation of the long, nearly 8,000 words, article that I had written after my visit to Zittau two years earlier, illustrated by local pictures and pictures taken from my Flickr site. It came as a complete, and very pleasant, surprise. The photograph shows my friend Ingrid and myself each holding one of the booklets.

But, of course, the photos also recorded something of the friendship that has developed between my family and the Kulke family of Zittau. There was Ingrid’s little niece Maja, who will be three in September and, at about the same time, will have a new brother or sister. Her mum and dad, Ingrid’s brother and sister-in-law Andreas and Kornelia, and Ingrid and Andreas’ mother Frau Ingrid Kulke who has always been so friendly and hospitable. And, of course, Ingrid herself, who now lives in Bayreuth in Bavaria but who made the long car journey to Zittau to see us.

Nick and I are on the photograph too. My eyes are shut and my mouth open (I hope I wasn’t snoring!) and I appear to be asleep. Perhaps I was! It was at the end of three very busy and tiring days and, as I constantly need to remind myself, I am eighty-eight!

‘Forty years on…….’

No, I wasn’t at either Eton or Harrow. Nor, as far as I know, have I ever met anyone who was. However I have always had an ear for a good lyric and the opening lines of the Harrow School Song have stuck in my mind.

Forty years on, when afar and asunder
Parted are those who are singing today…….

It was forty years ago, on 12th July 1969, that our then-new Quaker Meeting House was officially opened by George Gorman, Secretary of the Quaker Home Service Committee, in effect, though I doubt if its members would have cared for the description, the Quaker home mission organisation.

Clacton Quaker Meeting House as it looked when first opened. We have more recently added an extension to provide a toilet with wheelchair access

I was the Clerk (secretary, chairman and general dogsbody) of the Clacton Quaker Meeting at the time, so I had been deeply involved in the fund raising, the building and furnishing, and the official opening. We had invited members of every Christian tradition to attend. I am not sure if all sent representatives, but many did, and I know that there were, among others, Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Salvationists present. With Clacton Quakers and others from Colchester and Sudbury, the Meeting House was full and those present overflowed into the entrance lobby. Luckily we didn’t, in those days, take ‘health and safety’ quite so seriously as we do today.

The interior of the Quaker Meeting House today. The central table and the stacking chairs were there for the opening but many of the chairs have since been reupholstered.

We didn’t do any singing at the official opening. That’s not the Quaker tradition. However, those who were present on that occasion certainly are scattered ‘afar and asunder’ and many have departed from this world. I was shocked to realize that I would be the only Clacton Quaker who remembered that official opening and who would be able to attend our Meeting for Worship on Sunday morning 12th July and the Area Business Meeting (with Quakers from all over north-east Essex and from Sudbury in Suffolk) in the afternoon. At both these Meetings our Meeting House’s fortieth birthday would be remembered with thanksgiving.

And so it was. The paragraphs above were written before 12th July and it is now the day after. What I haven’t so far mentioned is that that date was not only the 40th Anniversary of the Meeting House’s official opening, but was also the third anniversary of the death of Heather, my wife for sixty years.

The last fifty years of her life had been inextricably intertwined with that of the Quaker Meeting. We had attended Meeting for Worship most Sundays, for the last year or so with Heather in a wheelchair friendly taxi. In the 1960s and ‘70s she had run a successful Quaker Children’s Class. Until disability overcame her in 2004 she had visited the sick and disabled and written long and chatty letters to absent Friends. She had often provided the flowers for the Meeting Room table and served tea for an after-meeting chat. For thirty years she had organised the letting of the rooms at the Meeting House to local organisations, and had made firm friends of some of their secretaries. It was in the Meeting House that we had held meetings of celebration and thanksgiving to mark our silver, ruby, golden and diamond wedding anniversaries. It was in the Meeting House that, three months after our Diamond Wedding Celebration, we held a Memorial Meeting of Worship to give thanks for the Grace of God made evident in Heather’s life. All our F/friends and family were present and I was very pleased that the vicar of St. James’ Anglican Church and the Christ Church URC Church Minister were both there.

At 0ur Golden Wedding celebration at the Quaker Meeting House on 27th April 1996. Heather and I were still in our early '70s (well, I was almost 75) and we were both still pretty fit.

At the Sunday morning Meeting for Worship on 12th July, sitting where Heather and I had so often sat together on Sunday mornings, it was difficult to accept that she was not still sitting there beside me. I rose and spoke about her, as I felt impelled to do, with only the greatest difficulty.

I had promised to talk about Clacton Meeting and the official opening of the Meeting House for about thirty minutes at the end of the afternoon’s business meeting. Remembering how I had felt in the morning I wondered if I would manage to do so. I needn’t have worried. There’s nothing like a Quaker Business Meeting (or I imagine the business meeting of any church!) to dampen the emotions and restore calm to the mind. I managed to give my thirty minute talk and I think that Friends found it acceptable. At least nobody fell asleep; nobody got up and walked out; nobody came quietly up to me later and said, ‘I wish Friend, that you hadn’t felt called upon to say this, that or the other’, and several did thank me.

Afterwards I, and I think everybody else, thoroughly enjoyed the tea that a few untiring and unseen Clacton Friends had provided for us.

It had been, I thought, a good celebration of forty years of Quaker service to God and to the local community, and of the service that Heather had rendered to the Quaker Meeting.