Alison Brackenbury, "Village"

 

Alison Brackenbury, born in Lincolnshire in 1953, is descended from long lines of servants and skilled farmworkers. She has published ten collections of poetry, most recently Thorpeness (Carcanet, 2022) and Gallop, her Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2019). Her work has won an Eric Gregory Award and a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors. The programmes she has written and narrated for BBC Radio 4 have been frequently been "Choices" in Radio Times, which praised her account of village life: "evocative, amusing and utterly compelling." After she left the village, Alison’s life ranged from a First-Class Oxford degree to industrial work. Memory, experience and the startling results of research have enriched Village, her brand-new, non-fiction prose book, honouring her Lincolnshire home. Alison’s writing about her village has recently been featured in The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Financial Times, and discussed on The Verb on BBC Radio 4. Village has just been published in both digital and paperback forms. Alison's website is here. 

About Village, by Alison Brackenbury

Witches and wheelbarrows ...

Francis Weatherhogg, saddler and Census taker, had one special form to deliver. To a "witch" ... Under the shifting shadows of the walnut tree, Mary Ann opened the door of her tiny stone cottage. There she lived, unmarried, with a man whose extraordinary story spanned three continents. And Mary Ann herself – in 1891! – was still feared in her village for murderous "spells" ...

Village tells extraordinary stories of six homes, from 1841, when the first Census taker trudged up steep Hollowgate Hill, to 1971, when its author, aged 18, was driven below its thorn trees to Oxford. But she never forgot her village: Vicarage Road where Amy Mary, her grandmother, gleefully spoke of her rebellious survival of "service"; tall Rose Cottage, up "Long Lane," where Mrs Rudkin, pioneering archaeologist, brought the past to life for village children; the Mount, the farmhouse where the author’s family camped in a few grand rooms, and the mysterious cold Manor on its limestone ridge, "the Cliff" ...

The author’s memories began with cheerfulness. Her research revealed what women survived: especially abandoned, pregnant girls, struggling "Singlewomen," including Amy Mary’s own tiny, gallant sister. Yet it was in the finest houses that young wives in farming’s "Golden Age" crashed and burned.

 

And how did old Emma Jarman survive into her 80s, despite her Saturday night sessions in the Commercial Inn? She had her lift home booked with Mr Weatherhogg. In a wheelbarrow ...

You can read more about Village here. Below, you can read a short excerpt from the book. 

From Village

What the travelling woman saw

December, 1854. A hard winter in Lincolnshire. The lane-side trees, at the village edge, are caves of white above the dark figure, bundled in shawls. She has seen many things in her calls at cottages. But never before a woman on fire ...

Beneath the bare, grey-barked arms of a young walnut tree, the cottage is tiny. Hawking or begging to survive, it is in the smallest homes she may find villagers as kind as my grandmothers will be: superstitious Amy Mary, who buys lucky tokens, or tiny, benevolent Dot, the shepherd’s wife, who gives workless men a thick slice of bread and butter, and a brief, safe place by the fire.

No answer to her knock. But through the window’s thick glass, she glimpses a dangerous light. Glinting flames lick the long skirts of a woman, crumpled on the rug. Is the traveller afraid that the villagers will call her a thief? She rushes across the lane. She shrieks to Mary Herrick.

Does Mary stamp on the creeping hems of flame? Married to a "Cottager," who farms a few acres, she can afford stout boots, stitched by John Barratt, the village shoemaker. But her middle-aged neighbour has not survived. Her fall overturned a tub. She has suffocated in a pale flood of what the Coroner and The Lincolnshire Chronicle will mysteriously call "Paste."

Blue, huge, the sky sinks. Down the lane, a young girl dawdles, carrying a tired child, returning, reluctantly, from the excitement of a village wedding.

Linda Gask, "Out of Her Mind: How We Are Failing Women's Mental Health and What Must Change"

Linda Gask is a retired consultant psychiatrist and academic at the University of Manchester and also the author of two memoirs about her own experience of mental illness, The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist’s Memoir of Depression and of moving to live in Orkney off the north coast of Scotland, and Finding True North: The Healing Power of Place. She is also a lifelong feminist. 

About Out of Her Mind, by Linda Gask
Despite advances in our understanding of mental health, women and girls are still disproportionately disadvantaged when it comes to addressing the real causes and consequences of their mental health problems such as depression and self-harm. 

Why are they hurting so much today and why is it so hard for them to find the kind of help they really need? What is happening in a health care system overburdened by demand? Why have so many women and girls lost faith in mental health care? Are women, once again, being forgotten? 

Drawing on many new interviews with women of all ages and backgrounds who tell her their stories, expert commentators, current events, recent history and her personal and professional experience, Linda Gask examines how society, mental health care and even feminism are failing women’s mental health. 

And above all she answers the questions "What must change?" and "What can we all do?"

You can read more about Out of Her Mind on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the book. 

From Out of Her Mind

"Men are the losers now": Discuss.

Manchester 2016. An email arrived out of the blue asking if I would like to take part in a debate for Women’s Week.

"Why me?"

"Because you know the facts – you are an academic."

But I’m also a psychiatrist.

"OK, so which side do you want me to speak for?"

I didn’t really want to argue for the motion but knew I could make a case for it if I had to. A good one. For two decades we have been bombarding men across the world to try to get them to talk about their feelings before it’s too late. The suicide rate for men in the UK is three times the rate for women. It has always been higher for men but since the crash in 2008 and the recession that followed, it hasn’t just been young men who have been taking their own lives – the greatest rise for suicide is in middle-aged men who not only lose their self-esteem, but also sometimes their will to live when their jobs disappear, and their relationships break down. How we feel about ourselves and the way in which the world treats us has a significant impact on our mental health. It is key to our sense of wellbeing, and it can be very hard for men; but that’s not the whole story. Many women are desperate too and women really are still losing out disproportionately, particularly in the mental health stakes.

"We have speakers for the motion," came the reply. "We’d like you to second on the other side."

Assuaging the slight dent to my ego at not being asked to lead with a huge dollop of relief that I wouldn’t have to speak first, I agreed to do it. Because women are still suffering with their mental health and are not being heard ...

Sam Alexandra Rose, "The CMMRD Book"

 

Sam Alexandra Rose is a three-time cancer survivor with an ultra-rare genetic condition called CMMRD. She is a PhD student at Teesside University researching how she can use Creative Writing to shape meaning from her illness experiences. She works as a Patient and Public Involvement Manager for charity Bowel Research UK. Sam has had poetry and prose published in over 70 literary magazines and anthologies, and has written two nonfiction books. 

You can read about her memoir, Gut Feelings; Coping with Cancer and Living with Lynch Syndrome, on Creative Writing at Leicester here. Below, you can read all about her latest publication, The CMMRD Book. 

About The CMMRD Book: A Mismatch Memoir and Guide, by Sam Alexandra Rose

While on average people with CMMRD get their first cancer diagnosis at just 7.5 years old, Sam Alexandra Rose is beating the odds in her mid-thirties. But it comes at a price, with three cancer experiences and a whole lot of fear and trauma to sort through.

Part memoir, part guide and with a little poetry thrown in, this book illustrates what it’s like to live with a rare genetic condition and significantly increased cancer risk.

This is a book of denial, hope and eventual acceptance, ideal for families wanting to know more about a CMMRD diagnosis and for healthcare professionals looking to better understand the patient experience.

You can read more about The CMMRD Book here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the book.

From The CMMRD Book

I had assumed I had accepted cancer and Lynch syndrome, and it wasn’t until I interrogated my innermost workings a little deeper that I realised I hadn’t really accepted it at all. I was getting knowledge confused with acceptance, and knowing something is going to happen and accepting it are two different things. Even if you acknowledge that something is happening, and agree to deal with it and make accommodations so that it can happen, that isn’t necessarily acceptance. And I needed acceptance because it was so difficult to be pulled from normal daily life into the medical world every time a new appointment or set of results cropped up.

I was treating each appointment, surgery, screening, and cancer diagnosis as an individual event rather than part of a whole – the whole of course being CMMRD, though I didn’t think about it in those exact terms at the time. I wondered if it would help for me to accept that I was a person with CMMRD, that CMMRD was an ongoing thing that was always there, rather than something that came and went like a horrible tide pulling scalpels and hospital gowns to my shores when I least expected it. I often felt as if I were straddling two worlds, trying to exist in the “normal” world while the medical world was waiting for me and could pounce at any moment. I would be in the office at the digital marketing agency where I worked at the time and I would get a phone call from the hospital asking to book me in for an appointment. All of a sudden I’m not thinking about writing blog posts or emailing my clients; I’m once again considering the prospect of the cancer returning and having to ask my boss for time off to go to my screening. But what if I didn’t have to deal with it all bit by bit? After all, you don’t need to worry about returning to the medical world if you never leave it. Is that really better? At first, I thought it was admitting defeat to resign myself to the reality that I would always be going back and forth to the hospital. But acceptance is not defeat. It could in fact mean more peace of mind.

Edward Parnell, "Ghostland"

 

Edward Parnell, photograph by K. Walne

Edward Parnell has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He’s been the recipient of an Escalator Award from the National Centre for Writing, and a Churchill Fellowship to fund a research expedition to the Australian Outback. The Listeners, his first book, won the 2014 Rethink New Novels Prize. His latest book, Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), is a work of narrative non-fiction that was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize 2020 for memoir and autobiography, and for the East Anglian book awards. Edward is a keen birdwatcher and naturalist, which also informs his work. His website is here.

About Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country

In his late thirties, Edward Parnell found himself trapped in the recurring nightmare of a family tragedy. For comfort, he turned to his bookshelves, back to the ghost stories that obsessed him as a boy, and to the writers through the ages who have attempted to confront what comes after death.

In Ghostland, Parnell goes in search of the ‘sequestered places’ of the British Isles, our lonely moors, our moss-covered cemeteries, our stark shores and our folkloric woodlands. He explores how these landscapes conjured and shaped a kaleidoscopic spectrum of literature and cinema, from the ghost stories and weird fiction of M. R. James, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood to the children’s fantasy novels of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper; from W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and Graham Swift’s Waterland to the archetypal ‘folk horror’ film The Wicker Man …

Ghostland is Parnell’s moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – and what is haunting him. It is a unique and elegiac meditation on grief, memory and longing, and of the redemptive power of stories and nature.

Below, you can read a short excerpt from the book. 

From Ghostland, by Edward Parnell

From Chapter 5: Memento mori

I arrived with the dusk on a biting, slate-skied afternoon, a mixture of sleet and snow starting to fall as I made my way up the path that coiled around the hillside. The light, dim to begin with, grew steadily darker as I wound higher. Three redpolls – small finches I picked out from their high-pitched, questioning calls – flew over my head, looking for somewhere to roost, though they would have more luck down in the shelter of the mound than at its summit.

I was visiting Glasgow’s gothic monument to death, its sprawling memento mori (from the Latin ‘remember you must die’): the Necropolis. The site covers a hill behind St Mungo’s Cathedral, giving an impressive panorama of the city. Formerly rocky parkland, in 1831 it was given over to afford ‘a much wanted accommodation to the higher classes’ that would be ‘respectful to the dead, safe and sanitary to the living, dedicated to the Genius of Memory and to extend religious and moral feeling.’ Since then, various extensions to its original area have been made, alongside fifty thousand burials in 3,500 brick-partitioned tombs.[1] 

No one else was about – they probably had more sense on this bitter afternoon at the back end of 2014. I’d gravitated here, pulled by the name, and by the pictures I’d seen of the place’s impressive architecture – as well as the melancholia of my own mood – after tagging along to the city with my partner, who was here for a work conference.

In particular, I was drawn to one of the Necropolis’s most imposing structures, the Aiken Mausoleum, its classical pillars and portico half-hidden by tangled ivy and creepers. Peering through the wrought-iron gates that locked across its front I could just read some of the words on the memorial plaques inside. 

More disconcertingly, in the darkness I could also make out a rectangular opening that presumably marked the steps down to the graves themselves, though the paltry torchlight from my phone did not show any detail. Was it spooky? Perhaps a little, but the lights of the city, multiplied at this time of year by those of Christmas, were close. And I was used to wandering in such places – albeit not quite as grand as this – as, for five years as a boy I had been a chorister;  for a dare we would sometimes run through the graveyard of the town’s thirteenth-century church after evensong on winter Sunday evenings, pausing midway to touch the top of the coffin-shaped tomb with the foreboding cleft through its lid.

In my present, too, walking back from the train station to my own house after dark I have to pass along an unlit lane that runs beside the local cemetery. Just before the darkest point, where the trees crowd in from both sides, the curve of the road and the low flint wall to the left look almost identical to the Victorian artist John Atkinson Grimshaw’s Moonlight Walk – the self-taught Yorkshireman specialised in realistic, slightly unsettling nocturnal scenes – which features on the cover of my paperback copy of M. R. James’s Collected Ghost Stories. Sometimes as I enter that last stretch I picture myself as the painting’s lone figure, dwarfed by the darkness.

So, wandering in the Necropolis at dusk – even with the ghost of a snowstorm in the offing and ghosts in my head – I didn’t find the surroundings frightening. Indeed, the stones, with their solidity and timelessness, seemed to extend a kind of comfort to me. I felt worn out and undone and, at that moment, if I had been offered the chance to step inside the bars of the mausoleum and to take an unending sleep within its walls, I might well have chosen the memory-wiped relief of that option. But the stinging wind had gathered pace and was pushing me onwards, along with a darkling winter thrush – a redwing that skittered up in front of me from a leafless tree.

Towards the lights of the city, towards the lights of the living.

Notes

[1] I’m not sure anyone else does a graveyard with quite the grandeur and solemnity of the Scots. Edinburgh, too, is riddled with impressive assemblages of dark-stoned monuments to the departed, in kirkyards like St Cuthbert’s and, particularly, Greyfriars. At the latter, the maudlin Skye terrier Bobby supposedly sat in mourning by his master’s grave for a fourteen-year stretch in the middle of the Victorian century – the canine embodiment of the public grief of the monarch for her lost husband, with which the lone dog’s vigil coincided.

[2] I was lured into joining my local church choir through the promise of its midweek games club and various exciting-sounding day trips out – not because of any religious devotion on my part (or of that of my parents).

Alexandros Plasatis (ed.), et al, "the other side of hope"

By Alexandros Plasatis

the other side of hope is a UK-based literary magazine edited by refugees and immigrants. We publish fiction and poetry by immigrants and refugees, and non-fiction, book reviews, and author interviews by anyone as long as the subject matter sheds light on migration.

We do not charge submission fees and we pay our contributors. For our first print issue we offered £100 per contributor, and for our forthcoming online issue we offered £50 per contributor. For writers who are seeking asylum and have no bank accounts, we offered the same amount as a gift card. 

Our first print issue has now been published, and features refugee and immigrant writers from around the world. The reader of the magazine will find prose and poetry about our hopes, dreams, fears, realities, nostalgia, trauma, about our accents, our laughter, and what home truly means. The cover image is an original artwork by George Sfougaras. Our first print issue includes: 

• Fiction by Qin Sun Stubis, a Chinese immigrant living in Washington DC, Radhika Maira Tabrez, whose home is split between Delhi, Dhaka and Penang, Marina Antropow Cramer, born in Germany, the child of Russian refugees from the Soviet Union, who emigrated with her family to the United States, Madalena Daleziou, a Greek writer living in Glasgow, J.B. Polk, Polish by birth, a citizen of world by choice, and Musembi Wa’ Ndaita, a Kenyan writer based in Philadelphia.
• Poetry by Atar Hadari, an immigrant, Bingh, a refugee from Vietnam who lives in the US, Kimia Etemadi, who moved from Iran to England as a baby with her mother, who fled political persecution, Amer Raawan, a Syrian refugee who lives in London, Middle Eastern Women’s Friendship Group, a group of refugee women writers who live in Edinburgh, Alberto Quero, who fled Venezuela and now lives in Canada, Flower, who arrived in the UK from Africa and was held at Yarl’s Wood detention centre, and Bänoo Zan, an Iranian immigrant who lives in Canada.
• Non-fiction by Dan Alex, who arrived in the UK from Eastern Europe, Murzban F. Shroff, who lives in India, Jhon Sánchez, a Colombian-born writer who arrived in New York seeking political asylum, and Sahra Mohamed, a Somalian immigrant who lives in London.
• Book reviews by Lucy Popescu and Kathryn Aldridge-Morris.

The magazine can be ordered from the website here. 

Our first print and forthcoming online issues were made possible with National Lottery funding through Arts Council England. We are thankful for the financial support from ArtReach, and the continuous support from Journeys Festival International, the annual refugee arts festival taking place in Leicester, Manchester and Portsmouth. We are grateful for the support of our patrons, A. M. Dassu and Lord Alf Dubs.

We hope that people will get a copy of the magazine and that they will enjoy reading it. For those who can’t afford to buy it, we will publish an online issue that will be free to read on our website, and will feature different immigrant and refugee writers from around the world.  

About the editors

Founding & Lead Editor Alexandros Plasatis is an immigrant who writes fiction in English, his second language. His first book, Made by Sea and Wood, in Darkness: A Novel in Stories (Spuyten Duyvil, 2021), is shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize. Stories from this book have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of The Net. His work has been published in US, UK, Indian and Canadian magazines and anthologies. He has a PhD in ethnography-based Creative Writing, lives in Bolton, and works with displaced and homeless people. www.alexandrosplasatis.com.

Fiction Editor Hansa Dasgupta is an Indian writer. She has authored Letters to my Baby, The World Beyond and After the Storm. Her short stories, articles and chapters have been published online as well as in various journals, anthologies, books and magazines in India, UK and in the States. Some of her short stories, short films, short scripts, and feature length screenplays have been shortlisted, nominated and won awards over the years, including nomination for the Culture and Heritage Award.

Poetry Editor Malka Al-Haddad is an Iraqi activist, academic and poet. She has a Masters degree in Arabic Literature from Kufa University in Iraq. She is currently undertaking an MA in the Politics of Conflict and Violence at the University of Leicester. Her debut poetry collection, Birds Without Sky: Poems from Exile (Harriman House Ltd, 2018), was longlisted for the Leicester Book of the Year award in 2018. 

Non-Fiction Editor Maria Rovisco is Associate Professor in Sociology at the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds, UK. She has research interests in cosmopolitanism, new activisms, citizenship, migrant and refugee arts, and visual culture. Among her recent publications is Taking the Square: Mediated Dissent and Occupations of Public Space (2016). She is currently writing a book on cosmopolitanism, art and the political imagination, and co-editing a book on visual politics in the Global South.

Interviews and Reviews Editor Rubina Bala was born in Albania just after the fall of the country’s Communist regime and grew up through a chaotic political scene that has shaped her passion for writing and ensuring the right stories are told. She then immigrated to the UK where she completed a first-class degree in Creative Writing and Journalism. Since then she has worked as an interpreter for asylum seekers as well as participating in writing projects in marginalised communities.

Design & Art Director Olivier Llouquet is a French visual ethnographer, designer and filmmaker, based in Nottingham. He studied in Freie Universität Berlin and conducted a year-long ethnographic research in Leicester, engaging with refugees and asylum seekers through creative projects and filmmaking.

From the other side of hope, issue 1

To the Editors*  

By Bänoo Zan

If my poem glorifies Islam

you accept it—

but if it critiques my fellow Muslims

you reject it

If it invites sympathy for the displaced 

you publish it—

but if it exposes violence in immigrant communities 

you reject it

If it denounces a Western politician 

you feature it—

but if it denounces the dictator in my home country

you reject it

In your pages

My religion is perfect

My community is perfect

My country is perfect

You exercise 

self-critique—the authentic critique—

but deny me the same right 

No one is healed

by claiming they are healthy 

and have the lie taken for truth

No community is perfect—

neither yours nor mine—

I wonder how long it will take

for my people to question our ways—

to stop murdering, torturing, raping ourselves—

to stop oppressing ourselves—

to stop our unending exodus 

to your part of the word—

only to be told

we cannot criticize ourselves

Meanwhile, dictators

sincerely thank you

for your support 

*Note: many North American and Western literary magazines have disclaimers to the following effect on their submission pages: ‘We do not publish work that includes racism, bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, ableism, etc.’ 

Stephen Johnson, "The Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910"

 

Stephen Johnson studied at the Northern School of Music, Manchester, and composition under Alexander Goehr at Leeds University, then at Manchester University. Since then he has written regularly for The Independent and The Guardian, and was Chief Music Critic of The Scotsman (1998-9). He is the author of Bruckner Remembered (Faber 1998), and studies of Mahler and Wagner (Naxos 2006, 2007). As a BBC broadcaster he presented Radio 3’s Discovering Music for fourteen years, as well as a series of fourteen programmes about the symphonies of Bruckner. He is also a regular contributor to the BBC Music Magazine. 

Stephen's radio documentary, Shostakovich: Journey into Light, was nominated for a Sony Award in 2007. And in 2009 his radio documentary, Vaughan Williams: Valiant for Truth, won a Sony Gold Award. His book about music and mental health, How Shostakovich Changed My Mind (based on the Shostakovich documentary) was published in Spring 2018, followed in 2020 by a book about Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, The Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910 (Faber). In 1997, Stephen began composing again. His orchestral work Behemoth Dances had its premiere in Moscow in April 2016, followed by its UK premiere in London in May. In January-February 2019 his Clarinet Quintet Angel’s Arc was performed by Emma Johnson and the Carducci Quartet. The premiere of his String Quartet, to be performed by the Brodsky Quartet, is planned for November of this year. 

Stephen's website is here. You can read more about his book How Shostakovich Changed My Mind on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

About The Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910, by Stephen Johnson

As the title suggests, this book attempts to shed light on Mahler’s epochal achievement in composing and staging the premiere of the Eighth Symphony by putting it in as broad a cultural and political context as possible. It is therefore also a book about the extraordinary period of Mahler’s lifetime in which adopted home city Vienna became a kind of modern Athens: a fiery crucible in which so many ideas that inform the modern world had their first, dazzling flowering. Not just in music, but also in literature, the visual arts, and in the revolutionary new discipline of psychoanalysis, the energy created when freshly emancipated Jewry met and embraced the greater German artistic and intellectual traditions had far-reaching consequences. At the same time there were ominous political undercurrents, soon to lead to far darker consequences. The book attempts to show how Mahler’s Eighth Symphony reflects and engages with all of these, and goes on to examine the work he began in 1910 and very nearly finished, the Tenth Symphony, concluding that understanding of Mahler is incomplete if its message is ignored.

Below, you can read an extract from the book.

From The Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910

A Gift to the Nation

One comment Mahler made about his Eighth Symphony has baffled several of his commentators: he refers to it as his "gift to the entire nation" (Geschenk der ganzen Nation). Mahler goes on to call it "a great joy-bringer," thereby aligning the work directly with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and particularly with its concluding Ode an die Freude, "Ode to Joy." But where the Schiller text set by Beethoven offers its "kiss to the whole world" (Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt!), Mahler offers his to "the entire nation" (der ganzen Nation), by which, it seems clear enough, he specifically means the German nation. Mahler a German nationalist? It seems unlikely, and yet it is possible to argue that there were aspects of the Eighth Symphony that Mahler considered specifically German. For a start, there is the setting, in the symphony's significantly larger second part, of the final section of the iconic text by the iconic German writer and thinker. We have already seen how closely Mahler identified with Goethe, to the extent of knowing passages from Faust Part II by heart. As Mahler would have been well aware, he wouldn't have been alone in this, at least not amongst educated German-speakers in the first decade of the twentieth century. For many in the larger German world, and particularly in the recently unified German lands, Goethe was the proudest of all the young nation's cultural exhibits. The breadth of Goethe's achievement was awe-inspiring in itself: poetry, novels, dramas, literary and aesthetic criticism, research into botany, theory of colour and, from the age of thirty-three, a career as a highly active and influential statesman at the Ducal Court of Weimar - it must have seemed that there was nothing Goethe couldn't do. He was the type of the Universalische Mensch, the "universal man" - or rather, since the word Mensch is supposed to be non-gender specific, "universal human being." (Mensch remains, however, a masculine noun). Though Goethe had been dead for nearly eight decades in 1910, his stature and his contemporary "presentness" was as high and as relevant as ever. For some, Goethe was more a prophet than an artist: hadn't he predicted in Faust Part II, with almost forensic precision, the way human society would develop after the Industrial Revolution - an epochal event, it was now argued, with far more important long-term consequences than the French Revolution? (Downplaying French attitudes and innovations had become fashionable in Germany since the newborn country's emphatic victory in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1). 

By 1910 Goethe had become a figure of almost religious significance. To take just one example, as Mahler was preparing for the premiere of his Faust-centred Eighth Symphony, Rudolf Steiner, the philosopher, mystic and founder of the science (or pseudo-science, if you prefer) of Anthroposophy was making the first designs for his fifteen-hundred seater Goetheanum - a cathedral-like synthesis of artistic design and sensory effects consecrated, naturally, to the Universalische Mensch. At one point in 1910, Stefan Zweig was rendered "dizzy" by meeting the daughter of Goethe's physician, Dr Vogel. Zweig later developed quite a flair for meeting people who offered a touch of physical contact with "the heights of the heroic and Olympian world ... But nothing stirred me so much as the face of that old lady, the last among the living to have met the eye of Goethe himself. And perhaps I, in my turn, am the last who can say today: 'I knew someone whose head was touched tenderly by Goethe's hand for a moment.'" Nor was this kind of reverence exclusive to the intellectual elite. I remember, on one of my earliest trips to Germany, meeting an old man who delivered, after several beers, an unexpectedly hilarious account of his modestly middle-class family hymning Bismarck to the theme of the final of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, while the bust of Goethe beamed approvingly from his place of honour on top of the family piano, just as he did in countless other German households ... 

A. J. Lees, "Brazil That Never Was"

A. J. Lees was born in St Helens and qualified in medicine from The London Hospital, Whitechapel in 1970. He trained in neurology at University College Hospitals, London and La Salpêtriere in Paris and was appointed to the staff of the National Hospital, Queen Square at the age of 32. He is one of the three most highly cited Parkinson’s disease researchers in the world and was responsible for the introduction of apomorphine therapy as a treatment for advanced Parkinson’s disease. For his contributions to medical education  and his research achievements  he was elected a member of the Brazilian Academia Nacional de Medicina in 2010. 

His first book to be published by Notting Hill Editions, entitled Mentored by a Madman, described how the writings of William Seward Burroughs helped him to operate effectively within the complex milieu of UK medical research and inspired some of his research. Several of Lees's books, including Ray of Hope and The Hurricane Port, grew out of a deep love for the port of Liverpool.

 

About Brazil That Never Was

By  A. J. Lees

Brazil That Never Was is about my yearning for an idealised past. When my visits to the Liverpool docks with my father abruptly ended, a library book that told the story of an explorer who had  disappeared in the Mato Grosso came to the rescue. The evenings I spent reading about his vanishing  were as alive as any I can remember from my childhood and reconnected me with Brazil. Lieutenant Colonel Percy Fawcett had written in his log book: ‘The forest in these solitudes is always full of voices, the soft whisperings of those that came before.' His adventure insulated me from my first perceived failures and created an enclave of mystery beyond the scope of charts. I hoped that Fawcett could lead me to a place where there was no way out.

Even after I had become a neurologist and learned to diagnose brain injury in the street, the Brazil of my bedroom remained. In spite of  my new deductive skills and  love of material rationalism I was sometimes overcome with a dangerous sentimentality that stemmed from an indelible screen memory of Brazil. I felt as if something had gone missing and increasingly desired a fugitive moment in time that I feared would never return.

Fifty years after I had first read Exploration Fawcett, I set out on a quest to try to get answers. What I discovered was far more extraordinary than any of the wild notions put forward to explain Fawcett’s vanishing in 1925. A psychedelic encounter in the Amazon convinced me that my past had never really existed and that I could never go home.  

From Brazil That Never Was

By A. J. Lees

The Oakwood Library became my sanctuary. Its grand drawing rooms, with picture rails and sunburst stucco ceilings, were lined with hardbacked books, fresh and stale, fat and thin, large and small. I roamed the shelves, following paths that fascinated me, and taking in the scent of wisdom. The hours flashed by in minutes as I sat on the ledge of the bay window absorbing the colourful stories of the dead. Cocooned in this place, I was able to divine the Atlantic from a grain of salt. 

My father brought down a dog-eared book with soiled green cloth boards called Exploration Fawcett. It still had the remains of its dust jacket showing three men in a canoe confronting a giant snake. 'You’ll enjoy this,' he whispered with that knowing voice and quiet smile that had made him such an inspiring and popular schoolmaster. 'It’s about an explorer who vanished without trace in the Amazon' ....

In bed at night I read about Lieutenant-Colonel Fawcett, one of the very last heroic Victorian explorers who for ten years had trekked down death-filled rivers surveying stretches of disputed territory on the borders of Bolivia, Peru and Brazil. At the river port of Rurrenbaque he had watched a woman suckle a litter of pigs and at Santa Cruz de la Sierra in the tropical lowlands of Bolivia he learned of new-born children being fed to swine. He wrote that one night he had been awakened by a jaguar rubbing against his back as it slunk under his hammock.

Fawcett wrote that no imagination could conjure up a vision equal to the beauty of the reality. The Mato Grosso was irresistible, with its low whistling bird song and gorgeous butterflies. The monochrome photographs in the book depicted a lost world but one that felt intensely familiar. A sketch of a drowning man being eaten by piranhas at the beginning of one chapter emphasised the dangers, while the line drawings of ruins and hieroglyphs raised my expectations of an El Dorado.