A Life in Boxes

Donald John Harper (1924-2003)

A small black box. It is empty. Or is it?

There are two small, empty black boxes. A lining of soft cream-coloured fabric. Felt perhaps. The hinged lids are lined in white silk, yellowed slightly with age and printed with a crest bearing the words ‘The Royal Mint’. I don’t remember having seen these boxes – they were my father’s – until after my mother died in 2006. Although perhaps I did; I may well have forgotten. They might not have meant much to me earlier. But now they do.

Let me take you back in time. My father left behind no diaries to give me any real insight into the parts of his life outside the boundaries of our daughter–father relationship. What was he like as a child? As a teenager? As a colleague? Too late to ask him these questions, I had instead done what many others have done. Tracing my family tree back, across and down I spun a web of connections to each of my parents. This uncovered secrets and previously untold stories, some of which must surely have had impacts down the generations. I want to ask my father:

Were you ever told – I am almost certain that you weren’t – that you had a maternal uncle who died as a baby? That your father’s death when you were seven years old was the result of a dreadful disease that probably rendered him insane in his final days? Surely your mother’s life was affected by these things and that in turn affected you?

But perhaps not. There is nothing to directly confirm these suspicions of mine and the women who lived through the First World War and its aftermath may simply have been very resilient – they were, after all, the generation who would ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ as their children went off to face another war.

Now I look to the boxes for some answers. The two small boxes are inside another: a metal file storage box that sits between a sofa and cupboard in my study and has been there almost twenty years. It is blue. Did Don Harper choose a blue one deliberately, I wonder, to keep his important Royal Air Force documents in? ‘Air Force blue’ – like royal blue, Oxford blue or Cambridge blue – shades of a favourite colour that I grew up hearing about. Proud blues, famous blues. Two decades since his death, the contents of his box are unchanged: the two small black boxes, four blue hardback books and some papers.

The papers in the box include evidence of the politeness of the age. On thin paper, carbon copies sent on by more senior officers, there are thank-you letters from two Air Chief Marshals, two Ministers of Defence and a Defence Secretary, all of whom expressed their personal gratitude to my father for flying them to what may well have been internationally important meetings in Australia, Germany, the Middle East.

Each of these boxes has a story to tell – they contain stories. Some of these stories I know to be completely true; some I can only piece together from fragments. I will tell you anyway because ‘an object can lose its meaning when it has lost its owner’s story, like a body detached from its soul, or a refugee from his homeland’.[1]

These boxes are nothing without their owner’s stories. Without the stories, the small boxes are doubly empty.

The blue file storage box is a treasure chest in a family history otherwise so short of sources of information. Four blue Pilots Flying Log Books. They cover January 1943 to September 1965. The handwriting is immaculate. My father left school aged 15 shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War but he had twice won first prize in essay competitions at primary school and had left secondary education with seven Scottish ‘Highers’. The pages of his log books are completed in clear capitals, sloping very slightly to the right, easy to read and somehow very comfortable to look at. Only where he has signed his name is a fully cursive style used – a signature that never varied throughout his adult life. There is no hint in these written records of any tension, fear or apprehension. Despite the contexts in which many of these numerous flights occurred, all is calm and ordered. I have had a lifelong need for things to be neat and tidy whatever else is happening; now I wonder, is this an inherited trait?

What the blue box contains is a tangible link to a young man who spent three wartime years as a teenage despatch clerk in an Edinburgh brewery and enlisted in the RAF Volunteer Reserve before being sent on a troopship to Southern Rhodesia, aged 18. There, he learned to fly a plane and his life would never be the same again.

In late 1942, teenager Donald Harper left his home, his mother and the schoolfriends and workmates about whom nothing at all is now known, and in a far-off, much warmer country he became part of a new community. From a small local family to a large RAF ‘family’, which took him to numerous countries and brought him into contact with statesmen (and they were invariably men) and royalty.

His log books provide precisely regimented details that I can flesh out with additional research. Returning from training in what is now Zimbabwe, my father, aged just 21, joined 170 Squadron Bomber Command as a Lancaster pilot in the closing days of the Second World War. He piloted supply missions, dropping food over Rotterdam in the final week of the war. This was still referred to as ‘bombing’ and the formerly secret records, now available from the National Archives,[2] provide vivid details. On 7 May 1945, the day the Germans surrendered:

Twenty aircraft took part in this, the biggest Manna operation so far required of this Squadron, and again the venue was Rotterdam. … Even more enthusiasm, larger crowds and a greater number of flags were reported by all crews. The rejoicing and flag waving was seen all over Holland.

In the weeks after the end of hostilities there were continuing training exercises – air-to-sea and air-to-air bombing – and on 30 May my father piloted what the official records refer to as a ‘sightseeing tour’ over Germany; in his log book he calls it a ‘Cooks tour’. Starting on 25 May, these flights were designed to give ground crew the opportunity of seeing the results of operations to which they had contributed and they were apparently very popular. The following months included participation in ‘Operation Dodge’, repatriating soldiers from Italy.[3]

Then, in early November 1945, 170 Squadron Bomber Command was disbanded and on New Year’s Eve Flying Officer Donald Harper left for India. He was to spend the following two decades almost exclusively in Transport Command.

For the first three months of his two years in India, my father was based in the northwest, flying Dakota aircraft back and forth across northern and central India on training exercises, before joining 52 Squadron in the northeast, now near the border with Bangladesh, and then 77 Squadron in Mauripur in the northwest, now in Pakistan. As I look through his first log book covering the 1940s I become ever more grateful for my father’s meticulous record-keeping. I see that he was engaged in ‘Operation Lohit’ from November 1946, dropping supplies to the men of frontier forts in north Assam.[4] Then, as hostilities associated with the partition of British India and the creation of independent states of India and Pakistan worsened during 1947, he was dropping food supplies or ferrying refugees, troops or other passengers in further named operations: ‘Beaver 3’; ‘Streamline’; ‘Kashmir’.

In the folder of documents in the blue file storage box I find another letter, relating directly to my father’s time in India/Pakistan. It is a copy of a letter from the Deputy Secretary, Government of Pakistan, to the Secretary of State for Air, British Government. It is marked ‘by the hand of the Pilot of the last R.A.F. aircraft on regular service in this country’. It appears that when he piloted RAF Dakota KP242 back to the UK at the end of 1947 via the Middle East and Malta he marked the end of an era. And he was to do so again.

Six months into the following year a crisis occurred in western Europe. In one of the first major incidents of the Cold War, the Soviet Union blockaded the areas of Berlin controlled by the US, the UK and France. While these countries wanted a democratic Germany resisting communism, the USSR wanted all of Berlin under its authority and were attempting to starve the West Berliners into submission. The US and the UK responded by airlifting food and fuel into West Berlin. The American ‘Operation Vittles’ began on 26 June 1948, the British ‘Operation Carter Patterson’ two days later. However, the Soviet Union spotted that Carter Patterson was the name of a British removals firm and so on 3 July it was changed to ‘Operation Plainfare’.

My father flew a total of 244 missions during the Berlin airlift, his first on 30 June 1948, his last on 6 October 1949. Although the blockade of Berlin was lifted in mid-May the airlift continued in order to ensure that West Berlin had sufficient supplies in case of a further blockade. As reported in Edinburgh’s Evening Dispatch of 7 October and Flight magazine of 13 October it was Donald Harper who piloted the final flight of ‘Operation Plainfare’, taking coal into Berlin. Over half a million tons of supplies were delivered by the RAF; two-thirds of it was coal and my father’s log book details the weight of every load his aircraft carried.

I have one other source of information about my father as an individual and the times in which he lived. From thirty years ago there are letters from former RAF colleagues and friends – letters that my sister and I collected together and combined with photographs into two large red albums as a ‘This Is Your Life’ surprise for his seventieth birthday. These tell of a young officer much admired, respected and liked by his companions. They also tell of exploits that would almost certainly see today’s serving men or women ‘drummed out’ of the RAF. But remember, these reminiscences dated from a post-war period when many young men had recently fought and died for their country. More than fifty-five thousand Bomber Command air crew members had perished. Perhaps some of the pranks recounted in these letters were seen not as insubordination but simply as high spirits?

There was the occasion in the far northeast of what is now Bangladesh when my father and members of his air crew caught a piglet in the jungle and planned to fly it to Karachi and release it onto the dance floor of the club they frequented. The piglet had other ideas and escaped from a makeshift wire pen before their plan could be executed.

Some years later, in a smart hotel in Kampala, Uganda, my father and his crew – wearing their ‘natty grey lightweight suits’ all ended up in the swimming pool after his engineer accepted a challenge to dive off the top board. The hotel receptionist was sympathetic when they asked to have their suits pressed ‘after being caught in a storm’ but was less nice when told the truth. The manager suggested they might prefer another hotel!

These letters from the 1990s display his fun-loving side but they also suggest an element of rule-breaking that I found, and still find, quite surprising.

Let us return to the two small black boxes, each about six inches long, three and a half inches wide, half an inch deep and hinged in brass. The first small box is a case that once held a medal. An Air Force Cross nestled in the cream lining, its shape perfectly sculpted to fit the shining ‘gong’. It was awarded to my father in 1959. After he retired from the RAF in the 1970s and was no longer going to be wearing his medals on important occasions, the AFC was mounted with his other medals in a display frame and the empty case was consigned to the file storage box.

The award of the Air Force Cross was established in June 1918 by King George V, after the RAF was formed from the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service. It is awarded for ‘acts of valour, courage or devotion to duty when flying’, not in active operations against the enemy. The citation explaining why my father, Donald John Harper, received his AFC says that:

Squadron Leader Harper is a Flight Commander in No. 216 Squadron. During the past two and a quarter years he has flown 900 hours on Comet aircraft. He has displayed airmanship of a consistently high quality and has contributed considerably to the efficient and effective operational standard achieved by the Squadron. He has also undertaken a considerable number of V.I.P. Flights, his passengers having included Her Majesty the Queen and the Prime Minister…

What it doesn’t say is that on 4 June 1957, a year and a half before his award of an AFC was announced in the 1959 New Year’s Honours List, it was Donald Harper at the controls of the Comet 2 aeroplane when Her Majesty the Queen flew in a jet aircraft for the very first time. A slightly grainy black-and-white film – a recent find on YouTube[i] – shows the crew of six, standing at ease, their hands behind their backs as they await the royal party. My father is on the left. The Queen arrives onto the runway at RAF Marham in Norfolk in a Rolls Royce, accompanied by Prince Philip. Apparently, there was some debate among the very senior officers present about which of them should present the crew to Her Majesty, but Prince Philip turned to my father and said, ‘I think, Squadron Leader, it would be better if you introduced your crew.’ The scene changes, it is raining, the VIPs are ushered up the aircraft steps and the plane is seen taking off for its short flight to Leuchars, near St Andrews in Scotland.

A report in the Cirencester & Swindon Express tells me more about that day, and to my surprise it mentions my sister and me. But I am sceptical about some of the details. Did we really – aged just two and a half and three and a half – ‘share some of the excitement’ from Malmesbury? I don’t remember ever being told that as toddlers we had watched anything about Daddy on television – and if we had, then it cannot have been at home because we certainly didn’t have a TV set in our house.

Malmesbury in Wiltshire: the third of the 13 or 14 places where I’d lived by the age of 30. The nomadic life of a service family. But Malmesbury is the first from which I have any memories. Coincidentally, they are of television: between 1956 and 1958 my sister and I made afternoon visits to the home of neighbours Ron and Mollie Pierce on Charlton Road to see Watch with Mother on their television. On a Monday it would be Picture Book; on Tuesday, Andy Pandy; on Wednesday, Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men; on Thursday, Rag, Tag and Bobtail; and on Friday, The Woodentops. I read now that almost seventy years ago the title Watch with Mother was chosen ‘to deflect fears that television might become a nursemaid to children and encourage “bad mothering”’.[6] Back then it was black-and-white television, with slow-moving puppets whose strings could be clearly seen; now it’s mobile phones with brightly coloured, action-packed cartoons – warnings about young children and screens haven’t changed much. My sister and I were probably excited about Andy Pandy but perhaps not so much about seeing a plane on television.

The second small black box also once contained a medal. This was perhaps even more special to my father. In 1968 he was awarded the Order of the British Empire (Military Division) in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. Also established by George V, the great-grandfather of King Charles III, the OBE dates back to 1917 and is awarded to civilian and military recipients ‘who have made major contributions at a local level, or whose work has gained a national profile’.

Now, when we are quite rightly questioning much about Britain’s imperial and colonial history, I feel uncomfortable about the honours that include ‘British Empire’ in their titles – it is probably time for a change of name. Nevertheless, I have fond, proud teenage memories of accompanying my parents and my younger sister through the imposing front gates of Buckingham Palace and into the building, long before parts of its interior were opened as a tourist attraction. Along with other smartly dressed people we were ushered into the Throne Room, where Queen Elizabeth II pinned the medal onto my father’s uniform. I remember, more than half a century later, that I was wearing a new scarlet wool cape on that special day just a week before my fifteenth birthday.

There is a mystery surrounding this second black box: the medal citation has never been published and although I have written letters to all the relevant organisations no one can tell me why my father was given it. Perhaps there are some hints in the log books? He had been appointed as the Officer Commanding 216[7] Squadron at the end of 1962 and in the following three years had flown several senior politicians and members of the royal family. Indeed, on the day that his new command was made official, he was the co-pilot – his log book tells me that he was also ‘Escort Officer’ – taking British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to the Bahamas for a meeting with US President John F. Kennedy. Their talks over three days resolved a crisis and resulted in the Nassau Agreement, with the United States agreeing to sell Polaris missiles to the United Kingdom for their nuclear deterrent. There followed a number of other VIP flights recorded in the log books, some associated with particular international events such as the Aden Emergency that began at the end of 1963. There were also VIP world tours: with Secretary of State for Air, The Right Honourable Hugh Fraser, and Lady Antonia Fraser; and with Vice-Chief of the Air Staff Sir Wallace Kyle. As children, my sister and I followed the progress of at least one of these tours on a world map pinned up in the kitchen of the RAF married quarter that was our home at the time.

From signing up as a 17-year-old volunteer reservist in 1941 until he retired in 1976 the RAF was Don Harper’s world. Those 35 years were less than half his lifetime, but they provided many of his long-term friendships. They took him around the world and into situations and levels of responsibility that would have been completely beyond the comprehension of the teenage clerk who had left school at 15. There was life after the RAF but it was different: disappointment at failing to find employment in the late 1970s; renovating a first owned home and tending a large garden; a holiday home in France; new friends with no service history; and then grandchildren. But close ties with former RAF colleagues and their families endured and there were regular 216 Squadron reunions. The bond that these people shared was demonstrated when many of them contributed to his seventieth-birthday albums and I believe my father would have said that the years recorded in the blue storage box – his flying years – were among the very best years of his life.

The boxes have told some of their stories but it will be up to future generations to keep the stories alive.

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[1] Sophy Roberts, The Lost Pianos of Siberia (Penguin, 2020), p.201.

[2] National Archives, AIR/27/1097/9; AIR/27/1097/10; AIR/27/1097/11.

[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/38/a2241938.shtml

[4] Ian Hall, A Goldstar Century: 31 Squadron RAF, 1915-2015 (Casemate Publishers, 2015), Chapter 18.

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3guOqRk0n4; https://www.britishpathe.com/asset/207323/

[6] British Film Institute, http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/445994/index.html accessed 18 May 2024.

[7] Always referred to as ‘Two Sixteen’ Squadron.

I don’t do New Year resolutions, but …

I have so far failed miserably to produce any of the writing that I had hoped would be inspired by an excellent Cambridge creative non-fiction diploma course completed in 2024 and despite having spent innumerable hours instead growing a family tree that is groaning under the weight of its 50,000+ inhabitants, I have also still not succeeded in identifying either of my biological grandfathers. Nevertheless, I am aware that hidden among the leaves and branches of that centuries-spanning tree there are stories waiting to be told. Some of these I have written up over the years and circulated to immediate family members. However, a number of writing courses, together with reading family history-based stories, have demonstrated that sometimes too much detail can be distracting and I probably need to revisit these pieces and resist my science-educated tendency to include every piece of data that research has produced. I am hoping to make a good start on this during 2026 and will begin by posting something about my late father in which I attempted this approach.

2025 in books

There was a good mixture of history, science and mystery in my reading this year. I read 35 works of fiction – plus the 16-volume boxed set of Roald Dahl books (a number of which I read twice), read aloud to my grandson. The 21 non-fiction books included memoirs by two broadcasters, a former women’s magazine editor and a female American priest. Other non-fiction was a spread of science, politics and climate change. Among the novels, the ones that stood out were the latter two Wolf Hall books by Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror & the Light, together with Rules of Civility by Amor Towles, The Last Voyage by Brian D. Mclaren and Robert Harris’s Cicero Trilogy. I only managed one Dickens novel during 2025 but it was probably my favourite of his so far, Dombey and Son. As we enter 2026 I already have a well-stocked To-Be-Read shelf and a couple of advance orders placed with our wonderful local independent bookshop for new titles due out from favourite authors in the coming months, so all is looking good for my reading in the year ahead.  

2024 in books

Last year was a good year for reading. I not only managed to get back on track with Dickens – reading another two volumes – but read 34 non-fiction books, 28 novels and one book of poetry. (As you will gather, I am not a big poetry reader!). The non-fiction included a good deal of memoir, especially as I read a number of books as part of a creative non-fiction diploma course, completed in the summer. The stand-out titles for me were, in non-fiction, Braiding Sweetgrass, Fire Weather, Life After Doom and The Serviceberry. Of the novels, the ones that have stayed with me were Demon Copperhead, Burnt Shadows, The Ministry for the Future and Orbital. These eight books in particular really made me think and it is probably no coincidence that in different ways they all have something to say about the state of the world and/or of human nature. Given so much that dominated the news during the year it seems to me that without addressing some of the problems of the latter we stand very little chance of resolving the huge crises affecting the world.

2023 – another reading year

During 2023 I read 59 books in total, 26 fiction and 33 non-fiction and of the latter 19 were autobiographical or memoir.

My favourite novel was A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles and because they relate closely to my own writing interests the stand-out non-fiction works were Unravelled, Homelands and Kiss Myself Goodbye although I very much enjoyed the whole range of this year’s books and managed to include some older works that I knew of but had never read before. A particular failing was not to have made any further progress with the works of Charles Dickens. I will attempt to remedy this in 2024.

Another year in books

It was a good year for reading and in 2022 I worked my way enjoyably through 23 novels, 10 memoirs/autobiographies, three biographical books and 15 other works of non-fiction. The latter ranged from science – Covid and climate change still featured – to collections of essays. This latter is a genre I had not really delved into much before, but Rebecca Solnit, Hilary Mantel and Philip Pullman have convinced me and I hope to include more in the future. I only succeeded in reading another two of the novels of Charles Dickens, so there is a way to go yet before I have worked my way through them all. Having been given a year’s gift book subscription in late 2021 the year included a number of titles that I might otherwise never have come across or considered reading and although a few are carried over into my 2023 ‘To Be Read’ pile, I really enjoyed the surprise that each month of 2022 brought – and the very thorough bookshop questionnaire meant that I received nothing that I had already read. It has also meant that I am well prepared for the coming year with a couple of dozen new books waiting to be read and another 11 volumes of Dickens!

Lockdown Log Day 703 / 478 / 417

Just as a reminder, those are the number of days that have elapsed since the imposition of the three Covid lockdowns in England. But today is the first day in almost two years when there are no laws still in place in England to prevent the spread of Covid-19. That is not to say that the pandemic is over by any means: there are still over 39,000 people testing positive in the UK every day and there are almost a thousand deaths each week of people who had tested positive within the previous 28 days. However, both of these figures represent an ongoing decline after a further peak in this country at the start of this year. Globally, the number of deaths from Covid is standing at almost six million: an appalling loss of life and representing a mortality level around 1.4% of total cases. One can only imagine what this figure might be if effective vaccines had not been developed so rapidly. According to the really excellent website of the John Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, there is now nowhere on the planet that has escaped the pandemic; there have been eleven cases in Antarctica and seven in the Marshall Islands. So, while in England there is no longer a requirement to isolate if you test positive and no longer a law stipulating that you should wear a facemask on public transport or in certain enclosed spaces, such precautions are still legally enforceable in many other countries and with public opinion in England very divided it seems highly likely that many people will continue to be cautious here as well. Medical advice seems also to be that such caution is wise. While the omicron variant of SARS-Cov-2 has resulted in less serious illness for the majority of those who have contracted it, it has proved to be more transmissible and only time will tell whether there are more variants yet to come.

If today’s lifting of restrictions was, as widely suspected, a largely political move to distract attention away from a Prime Minister whose own conduct during lockdowns over the last two years has increasingly come under scrutiny, then – as recent news makes clear – it may not have been needed. The media have been dominated in the last week by two other much more disturbing stories than ‘partygate’. Growing tension between Russia and Ukraine, with a threatened invasion that had been predicted towards the end of last week, finally resulted in bombing in the early hours of today and non-stop news coverage is already talking about the worst conflict in Europe this century. Under what sound like completely ridiculous pretexts – to prevent the genocide currently happening in the separatist eastern regions (there is none); and to halt the ‘Nazification’ of Ukraine (whose head of state is Jewish) – President Putin of Russia has sent some of that country’s very considerable military might westwards. The Cold War may have ‘officially’ ended on 26 December 1991 after almost 45 years, but something pretty sinister is heating up now.

The other worrying events in the last ten days have been to do with the weather, always a topic of concern in this country but justifiably so when the first ever ‘red weather alert’ was issued for London in the face of severe storms. Storm Eunice battered much of the country, bringing down trees and causing widespread disruption; all train services in Scotland were suspended and in Wales all schools were closed and trains cancelled. Eunice was followed in quick succession by Franklin and Gladys, raising questions about just how much weather patterns are being altered as a result of our failure to respond rapidly enough to the climate crisis. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a ‘code red for humanity’ in its Sixth Assessment Report last August and this year it is due to publish its Synthesis Report, providing ‘an overview of the state of knowledge on the science of climate change’ with an emphasis on new data since the previous Assessment Report was published in 2014. For the sake of everyone everywhere, we can only hope that its ‘Summary for Policymakers’ will be heeded and acted upon this time, because progress since 2014 has not been nearly sufficient.

(SkyNews)

While all this ‘big stuff’ is pretty grim and we can be left feeling helpless in the face of so much suffering and misery, it is worth acknowledging that we are in a very privileged position, with each day bringing things to be thankful for. Family members who were pretty unwell with Covid – ‘our’ first cases – have made good recoveries; spring flowers have survived the wind and rain and gardens are becoming greener and more colourful by the day; and while many regular events, such as our church services, are continuing to be in hybrid form, which is of significant benefit to those who are vulnerable or otherwise housebound, other things are back to ‘normal’ and my local choral society is meeting and rehearsing again in hopes that the Easter concert postponed from 2020 may go ahead, albeit two years late.

2021 in books

During 2021 I read 25 novels, eight memoirs or autobiographies, 14 works of non-fiction (two on Covid and four related to climate change and/or sustainability) and two short story collections. Forty-nine volumes in total, which was rather fewer than in 2020. I put the difference down to two things: fewer long train journeys as a result of Covid restrictions; and including the first three works of Charles Dickens, which took up a significant proportion of my reading time. I am anyway a slow reader but with some sentences taking up as much space as a paragraph or even a page of a twentieth-century novel, Dickens’ style took a bit of adjusting to.

In 2020 I had read 60 books, only 20 of them novels. This tendency to read more non-fiction during the lockdowns seemed to be something other readers noticed as well. Real life had taken on sufficient unreality, becoming more like something usually experienced in a film or in fiction, and so we turned to reading more about the world as others had experienced it in the past or to the sciences that were already helping people to tackle the pandemic and that offered some reassurance that things could get better, while also sounding warnings about other global problems.

With a towering TBR pile accumulated during 2021 – and with the certainty that the year will bring yet more volumes to be added to it – I look forward to another year in books. Happy New Year!

Choosing the right battles to fight

As anyone who reads my blog or who knows me will be aware, I love reading and have always loved books. I thought that this was a relatively uncomplicated preoccupation but the last couple of years have cast doubt on that. I have been saddened to read of the way in which books and their authors are now being criticised not on the grounds of literary merit, relevance, quality of research or writing, but for wholly different reasons. There was all the controversy over J K Rowling and her comments that prompted a storm around transphobia and feminism among other things and resulted in some people declaring that her books should be boycotted. Having read in full the statement of hers that prompted the furore, my conclusion was that she had been unfairly misrepresented and that it was a great shame – but perhaps they were understandably reluctant to put their heads above the parapet – that her friends from the LGBT community had not spoken out in her defence loudly enough to affirm her actually very sensible position, which sought to protect vulnerable females while asserting the rights of trans people.

Now Kate Clanchy is under fire. I read her wonderful memoir – Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me – and it would never have occurred to me that anyone could take offence at it. Now I do know that this may, of course, be because I am white. (I confess that it took me a little while last year to understand why ‘All Lives Matter’ was really not good enough and that after centuries of white privilege, the slave trade and racism ‘Black Lives Matter’ did indeed need to be the rallying cry from people of all skin colours.) Clanchy has been vilified for using expressions that include ‘chocolate-coloured skin’ (interestingly, the acceptability or otherwise of this phrase in a fictional work was recently discussed in my local writing circle) and various other descriptions that have been regarded by some as racist or ableist. I accept that she made an error of judgement in initially claiming that she had not used these words, but would suggest that as she probably wrote them between three and five years ago and has no doubt written a lot else since, that may have been a failure of recall. But her book is a personal memoir – is she really not ‘allowed’ to record her own perceptions as they occurred to her; cannot the reader then be allowed to decide for themselves whether that leads to a suspicion that she is prejudiced or even racist (the affectionate and respectful way in which she writes about her students, some of whom must have been quite difficult, really suggests quite the reverse to me)? Isn’t it a form of insidious censorship that she and her publisher are now considering rewriting certain passages? Perhaps, most crucially, would any of this criticism which has come from BAME writers have arisen had Kate’s skin been brown or black? If the answer to that question is ‘No’ then there is surely a double standard here that amounts to prejudice against white writers: ‘We can say these things because we aren’t white but you cannot because you are’? If writers of colour refer, for example, to ‘aggressive white colonists’ don’t we accept that this is justified by whatever the context happens to be rather than suggesting that it is ‘prejudicial stereotyping’ of all white people? If a character in a piece of writing is called a ‘pasty-faced Englishman’ or a ‘typically pear-shaped, middle-aged white woman’ don’t we just accept those as reasonable ways of describing individuals? I (even as a rather pear-shaped woman!) would regard it as ridiculous to criticise an author for such descriptions. But does the argument in favour of BLM perhaps apply here too – it simply isn’t a level playing field? I really don’t know, but I am still very uncomfortable indeed about the nature of these personal attacks. I would much prefer that the passion and energy were directed against the actions, systems or institutions that are really the problem; perhaps I feel that it is too easy to scapegoat individuals and harder but better and longer-lasting to work for real change?

I have so many questions here, which is perhaps just a reflection of the fact that the various media articles I have read on these issues all seem to generate more heat than light, but it makes me sad that instead of focussing on the under-representation of BAME people within the publishing industry or on stamping out institutionalised racism wherever it may occur, there are writers fighting battles with other writers instead.

Lockdown Postscript?

Whether this really will be a postscript to lockdown – which officially ended on 19 July in England after a phasing out of restrictions over a number of months – remains to be seen. There are warnings that the return of schools next month, along with colder weather and people then staying indoors more and mixing with others without restrictions may all contribute to a further surge of Covid here in the autumn. And despite the media being understandably preoccupied with other important things over the last ten days – first with the release of the latest IPCC Report which sounded a ‘Code Red’ warning on the climate, and then with the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban – we should not forget that the pandemic is still the main concern for many people around the world, especially in areas where the proportion of people who have been vaccinated is still appallingly low. As of today, the total number of reported deaths worldwide is standing at over 4,375,000 but the true numbers probably far exceed the official figures for countries where medical services have been overwhelmed and many victims may never have had medical attention. The very informative website on the coronavirus from John Hopkins University of Medicine (https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/ – Topics/Tracking/Global Map in particular) states that the first case of Covid-19 in the United Kingdom was reported 563 days ago on 31 January 2020 and, since then, the country has reported 6,325,515 cases, and 131,296 deaths; it is a mine of information on every country and well worth a look.

Since the removal of almost all restrictions there have been some very noticeable changes here. Although still requested to wear face masks in shops – and required to do so, unless exempt, on public transport in London – rather fewer people are wearing them out and about. This seems perfectly reasonable given what is now known about the much lower risk of virus transmission outdoors as long as people are not in close proximity to each other for more than very short periods. We are also in the extremely fortunate position of knowing that over 60 per cent of the population (and very nearly 90 per cent of adults) are now fully vaccinated. While that carries no absolute guarantee against contracting Covid, it is reassuring to know that even if that does happen there is much less likelihood of becoming seriously ill. When visiting places, there also seems to be a lot less emphasis being put on ‘checking in’ to a venue using the NHS app, but this may partly be a result of the so-called ‘pingdemic’, when people who had been in the same place as someone who then tested positive for the disease were required to isolate at home. At one stage about one in five workers in the hospitality industry were isolating and many venues that might otherwise have been open for business were forced to close because they had insufficient staff.

After a year and a half of small-screen life I enjoyed visits to a local cinema twice last week and at the weekend spent a day in London, visiting a gallery, a restaurant, a concert and another cinema. The streets were busy – much as I would have expected to see on a summer Saturday pre-pandemic – as was the transport system. There were weekend numbers of people on the Underground and our mid-evening journey home was reminiscent of the worst of rush-hour commuting: engineering work and multiple cancellations resulted in standing room only on a jam-packed train. Only as a nearby passenger – no mask, as was the case for approximately a third of those on the train – breathed heavily onto my neck did I feel even slightly concerned about the virus, and there was nothing I could do about it, so worrying would have been pretty pointless! Overall, at none of the venues, either locally or in London, did I get the feeling that people were being reckless about their own or others’ safety: the vast majority were complying with the requirements or requests on distancing and face-covering and it was really good to feel a sense of normality about spending time with family and friends – and seeing some really good films on a big screen once again.

It is now days 512, 287 and 226 respectively since the introduction of lockdowns and for a while at least I will still be keeping track on my calendar, but I may also turn to other things for the occasional blog. Watch this space!