One Eye Grey, Penny Dreadful for the 21st Century, takes over the Pullens Centre at the heart of the best historic artisan yards in central London this Friday for a night of tall stories and short songs.
Friday December 4th 8pm to 10pm
Pullens Centre, Crampton Street SE17
*Murder ballads courtesy of Jude Cowan
*Scary stories by One Eye Grey writers
*Incredible tales of south London wonder from Scott Wood of the South East London Folklore Society
*The marvellous Nigel of Bermondsey and London Dreamtime singing stories from the streets
Click here for the One Eye Grey site.
“All flourishes and twirls should be rigidly avoided; they are vulgar and pointless” is the sound advice which kicks off How Shall I Word It?, a letter writer for men and women on domestic and business subjects published in 1943. There’s a letter for every situation that might crop up in modern life, starting with the essentials, like how to address the King. Everything’s covered, from domestic issues (Gentleman Asking for Character of Chauffeur) and neighbourly concerns (To Complain of a Boy’s Window Smashing) to awkward social situations (From a Stranger to Another, Telling of her Nurse’s Unkindness to Child) and relationship niggles (Letter from a Gentleman Reproaching his Fiancée with being a Flirt).
Everyone in How Shall I Word It? is either, a) fearfully sorry, b) frightfully disappointed, or c) unutterably wretched. Or, if things are going well, a) tremendously excited, b) immensely flattered or c) bubbling over with happiness. Everyone is particularly happy in the marriage section. Mrs Rhodes is happy about dear Herbert’s happiness at his engagement, as she has always worried he would never find a girl to make him happy. But now she’s sure she can trust her happiness, which relies on Herbert’s happiness, to her new daughter-in-law Maisie. Masie is also extremely happy – she’d been worried that Mrs. Rhodes would be unhappy about the engagement, but now she knows she isn’t, she is herself is much happier, which just adds to how happy she already was at having won Herbert’s love. She is, in fact, the happiest girl alive.
Whatever the situation, the letter-writer has the words to fit. You might think that being sent a chair as a present would have you stumped when it came to penning a thank you note, but no. (“It is the only chair which I have had sent to me, and I like it exceedingly”)
Less pleasant situations are covered, such as seeking compensation from a railway company (“I endeavored to alight, only to fall onto the railway line”), and (not very) threatening letters (“we do trust that you will not force us to this extreme measure.”)
There are even some marketing tips for small businesses, ranging from enticements (“There is a £1 awaiting you in my shop. Yes, this is fact – and the reason is not because we are philanthropic; it is because we are slack”) to vaguely sinister threats (“I am taking the liberty of calling upon you tomorrow evening at 7pm, when, even if you do not wish for any repair work to be done, we can talk cars for a while, for you may be in the market for a new car before the year is out.”)
Often better than old books are the strange things you find inside old books. Here, the previous owner was putting the book to good use, and has left a first draft of one of their letters inside. It lifts commendable sections from Letter of Condolence – On Loss of Child, but then goes off track somewhat when they throw in some creative asides of their own like “may you both live in fear of God and die in peace,” which must have gone down well.
The Mechanics Institute Review: Issue 6 is in the shops now, featuring one of my stories, Mr Bonner’s Dream the Night Before His Execution. This collection of twenty stories by new writers from the Birkbeck creative writing MA and Certificate, plus established authors including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of A Half of a Yellow Sun, and Richard Milward, author of Ten Storey Love Song.
Click here to pre-order the Mechanics’ Institute Review.
“MIR6 is a window into the future of fiction. Here, you can glimpse writers that your friends will be recommending to you in six or seven years time. Here, you can discover their energetic but controlled, reckless but accomplished beginnings. This is the most rewarding kind of reading you can do.”
Toby Litt
Dervishes are followers of the mystical Sufi tradition in Islam. Their traditional stories are meant to help Sufi practitioners understand mystical concepts. They’re flash fictions, short and to the point.
My favourite is about Jesus, who is a prophet in Islamic tradition. Jesus is hanging around in the desert with some guys, and they ask him to tell them the Secret Name that he uses to do freaky stuff like bring the dead back to life. Well, you would, wouldn’t you? But Jesus isn’t keen. He says that if he tells them the Name they will abuse it.
But the guys argue that they’re totally in the right place spiritually to know the Name, and in any case, knowing that it really exists will actually strengthen their faith, and so it’s really Jesus’ moral and religious duty to tell them.
Jesus says something Jesus-like, along the lines of “You know not what you ask”, but then tells them the Name anyway. (You get the impressions he’s enjoying this.) So, the guys go away happy.
But later they start to wonder if Jesus has fobbed them off with a dud Word. I mean, would he really tell them the actual Secret Name and just let them walk away with it? Handily there’s a heap of whitened bones nearby which they decide to test it out on. They say the Word and the bones grow flesh and fur and the teeth spring back together, and the wild mountain lion rips them to pieces. Jesus is proved irritatingly right again.
I came across this rather mysterious and lovely phrase while I was flicking through a copy of Brewer’s Britain and Ireland, and was pleased to find that the explanation was equally as intriguing. Thankful villages are those places in Britain where all the men who left to fight in the First World War came back home alive. The phrase was coined by Arthur Mee in his series of The King’s England guidebooks written in the 1930s. Mee identified 28 villages in England which had no war memorials, but since then others have been identified.
The list is a roll call for the sleepy lanes and rustling hedges of the English coutryside; Little Sodbury, Middleton-on-the-Hill, Chantry, Nether Kellett, Claxby, Woolley. I wonder if the residents of Upper Slaughter in Gloucestershire pondered on the irony of their village’s name after they had welcomed all their 44 boys back home in 1918?
It makes you wonder why these particular places were spared. Were the men sent by chance to a less dangerous area, or did they come through hell intact? 
Did they realise at the time how lucky their village had been, and how did it make them feel? The village of Cayton in Yorkshire was even thankful twice over, escaping the Second World War casualty-free as well.
That only such a tiny handful out of the sixteen thousand villages in England escaped the horrible death toll of the war is an indication of the impact the conflict had on the country. It’s because it is such a part of the English village that we rarely notice the quiet memorial cross with its list of names and wreath of poppies, other than perhaps as a convenient place to sit and eat our fish and chips. Almost a million British men died in the war, and the social fabric of the country was ripped apart by the huge loss of life.
After the war, thousands of villages across the country must have been scarred by the absence of their young men, a silent loss at the centre of village life. The thankful villages escaped this, and instead were marked by the absence of a memorial to the war for many years. Now, some of the villages now have memorial plaques commemorating their men who fought for their country, and their reason to be thankful.
Norman Thorpe or Tom Morgan’s compressive website on the subject identifies the 49 villages that can lay claim to being truly thankful.
November 22nd, 2009 About Me
Fiction
My short stories have been published in various literary magazines and performed at live reading events.
Non-Fiction & Copywriting
I offer copywriting and article writing services for websites and print media. I have a background in television research and writing, and have published articles in a range of magazines and websites.
Contact me on mail@emilycleaver.net for more information.
