A Woman Wakes Up

This story was originally published in the UK Arts Council/Oldham Libraries anthology Big Sky, New Light (2004).

Kate was sure she’d never awoken so suddenly in her life before. She forgot the dream instantly.

The thing that awoke her was sound, so loud and angry that it seemed to have substance and weight, mighty enough that it could have been about shrug the walls of her little bedroom away, its power pressing her into the bed. The second peal arrived a few breaths after the first, even louder this time, enough to make Kate jump from the bed and stagger through the dark, sticky eyes blinking, to the window. She pulled open the curtains to see the storm.

But there was no storm that she could see; just the terraced houses ofThomas Streetsitting pinkish in the lamplight. There wasn’t even any rain falling from the great dark clouds, near-invisible in the midnight sky. But despite the tranquil sight the sound of thunder continued, with more menace and fury and volume than Kate could fully take in. The din was so calamitous that, had she closed her eyes, Kate might easily have imagined the houses of the little village street reduced in moments to rubble and embers. But she didn’t close her eyes, instead kept looking at the strange vision through the window. It surely couldn’t be long before the clouds burst.

The thunder didn’t get quieter, it just kept spitting and crashing on and on, and after a while Kate found that rather than disturbing her it had a soothing effect, hypnotic like pure silence.

When the rain eventually came she managed to pull herself away from the window and wandered downstairs to the kitchen. Some rational part of her mind told her that she would have to get back to sleep eventually, and a hot herbal tea seemed like a good idea. She switched the kettle on but couldn’t hear the water coming to the boil because of the sound of the storm. When the drink was finally brewed Kate found she didn’t quite know what she should do with it, so she poured it away into the sink and found herself standing still, waiting, listening. Only then did she remember the dream she’d been having before the thunder struck.

*****

“I’m going away,” Margo had said on that overcast day months ago. She said it slowly, suggesting effort, but also that she savoured it. “I’m finally doing it. I’m not complaining and wishing any more, I’m going to pack up and go.Oldhamwill have to make do without me.”

Kate and Margo were eating pasties together, on a bench in the churchyard of Saint Mary’s, more generally known as the ‘OldhamChurch’. The two friends had often spent their dinner hours here as they both worked only minutes away in shops on the High Street, and Kate had never tired of the atmosphere of the place since she was a little girl. The churchyard was spacious, clean and uncluttered, headstones standing proud and apart from each other, and several of the older graves were marked by inscriptions on great, immaculate slabs that lay flat, becoming part of the concrete footpaths. In the shadow of the Church itself, a beautiful but forbidding Regency construction, younger but more severe than the yard it guarded, the place had always in Kate’s eyes possessed an uncanny stillness made more pointed by its location more or less right in the middle of a busy town. It was surrounded by shops, cafes and pubs, and across the road from a large sports centre, but it still felt alone.

It was cold that day, the day that Margo had revealed her plans to Kate, and Margo’s nose was reddening as she spoke but her eyes sparkled with interest. “Thailandfirst,” she continued. “From there, anywhere. I’ve saved up enough money now to get me started and when I’m out there… Well, I’ll ride with it.”

Kate smiled as widely as she could and hoped it didn’t look forced. “It’s what you’ve always wanted,” she stated. Margo looked at her, her eager face silently agreeing with the comment, so full of pure excitement and enjoyment that Kate laughed and hugged her and for a moment they were there together in joyfulness and everything was as good as it could be. Kate knew that Margo had for so long wanted to travel, to explore herself and find yet more new lives to lead, and now she would have the chance. It was impossible for Kate not to feel happy for her friend.

But it didn’t last long. After a while the dread came back.

*****

And Kate stood in her kitchen in the middle of the night thinking of her dream, the dream that had been plaguing her, and listening to the storm. After a time, she didn’t know how long, she switched off the kitchen light and opened the blinds on the kitchen window, peering out at the streetlights and the rain. In the near-darkness she thought of Margo.

Above all things we all need friends and Margo had been Kate’s best. The two women had met each other half a decade earlier when they both worked on the makeup counters in Debenham’s. Kate still worked there but Margo had long since left for an endless stream of short-term jobs in shops, offices, call centres and warehouses. Margo could never settle in one job for more than a couple of years. Being a few years older than Kate, Margo had clear memories of the mid-eighties when several of her older siblings had been unemployed for years on end. Catholic guilt tainted her and she felt like she was resting on her laurels if she wasn’t always on the lookout for the next job. But Margo’s chief characteristic was her craving for new experience, and this was what kept her moving. She lived in a succession of flats with a succession of friends and had talked constantly of moving beyond Oldham’s boundaries, toLondon, perhaps, or even farther afield.

To Kate, Margo had always been both a frustration and a comfort. Despite her butterfly lifestyle Margo was tough, resilient and optimistic, excellent at dealing with both tedium and uncertainty, the two things of which Kate was always most afraid and which took turns to torment her in her daily life. Fear of uncertainty had kept Kate in the same job for so long that it seemed like forever now. It had kept her living in her Dad’s house, even after the acrimonious separation from Mum, something for which Kate thought he was not to blame and she hoped she was right. Fear of tedium, meanwhile, had kept her spending her money on fripperies and false fun, and had guided her through a number of abortive relationships with men who didn’t understand her and who she didn’t understand.

The glue that had kept everything together for her was Margo: whatever flat Margo was living in Kate would be welcome to sleep at; whatever friends Margo had made Kate was welcome to share; whatever shop or office or storeroom in which Margo was currently working, she would always walk out of it to meet Kate for lunch or just to chat. They’d talk about work and laugh about Debenham’s and why the hell Kate still worked there when she hated that counter and how she and all the other sad sacks should have left when Margo did, even though they were being paid so much more these days.

Kate thought of her Dad again and suddenly remembered that he must still be in bed upstairs. Dad was almost at retirement age now, but he was hardly deaf and Kate couldn’t believe that he too hadn’t been roused by the storm. She padded upstairs and leaned into his room to check, but there he lay, his heavy lined face serene and his chest rising and falling at leisure. Of course, he was a welder and had been for five decades, he could probably sleep through a war. Kate left him and went to her own room, where the curtains still hung open.

The lightning flashes were regular and blinding and the rain was falling in sheets and being thrown by the savage wind. Inches of water bounced across the street and fell away down the drains. There was violence in the air but still Kate felt somehow comforted looking at the terraced houses which still stood calm. The clouds seethed and rumbled and flashed and water poured off the slate roofs and clattered across the tops of cars and coated the playground ofSt. Thomas’s Primary. But at least the street seemed alive, more so than it did on those summer nights when hardly any children could be found playing because their parents were worried about paedophiles or racists or drunks, even in this relatively genteel part of town. Kate felt that someone, somewhere was smiling, and she looked at the storm and smiled back.

Then she thought about that day again, that time in Saint Mary’s churchyard when Margo had revealed that she was really, truly going away.

*****

Kate had been suspecting the revelation for some time. Margo’s latest job was in welfare at Oldham Council and she had remained in it for an unprecedented two and a half years. Kate had been astonished that Margo had got the job in the first place, given her record. But Margo seemed to settle in and work hard and rarely complained about the work.

She never stopped complaining about being stuck inOldham, though. “There’s so much I’ve never seen that I’ve got to see,” she’d say feverishly when she was in a despondent mood at lunchtime. Often she would follow the sentence by repeating it but replacing the worlds ‘seen’ and ‘see’ with ‘smelled’ and ‘smell’, just for effect. But very rarely did she say, ‘I’m sick of this job,’ or ‘I’m signing up with an agency,’ or ‘I’m changing direction,’ which had used to be her key catchphrases. And with the amount of overtime that Margo was happily doing, Kate knew she must be saving for something.

A ticket toThailandwas the answer. Some savings to keep her afloat until she settled on a definite plan. Perhaps she would do the obvious thing and teach English to the locals, before moving on and teaching it elsewhere -Korea,China,Taiwan. As ever, the sheer uncertainty of what she would do with herself, how she would get by, didn’t seem to bother Margo in the slightest. She had already informed her bosses at the Council. She would leave in six months.

Kate had been dreading Margo’s revelation and when it finally came the nightmares began: usually forgotten upon waking, but recurring and regular. Kate never remembered the whole content of the dreams, just the feel of them, and the feel was enough. It was a feeling of stillness, quiet like the churchyard at Saint Mary’s, but colder and lonelier. Kate sensed no bustling town centre beyond the calm, no comforting presence of a friend beside her.

Kate found that upon waking from the dream she’d suffer a tense feeling in her belly, a panicky, insistent pressure. And as the weeks went by and Margo’s departure drew nearer, that feeling would be summoned whenever Kate thought of her friend, and especially when Margo called her on the ‘phone or they met up. It seemed to Kate that the feeling was something like the apprehension that is associated with being in love, but soon she realised that ‘love’ wasn’t quite the right word. It was more like being in fear, like being surrounded on all sides by fear and unable to see past it, and the person to whom Kate would normally turn to for comfort could be no help, because she was the cause of it.

And always she would know when she had dreamt about the stillness, because that pressure would be inside her, somehow surrounding her, when she awoke.

Except on the night when the storm interrupted her sleep. On that night the awe of the storm grabbed hold of her and held her fast, and she had no idea she’d been dreaming.

*****

So Kate stood in her bedroom and looked out at the rainy street and listened to the thunder and thought about Margo. She’s leaving, she’s leaving, she repeated in her mind, she’s leaving and I might never see her again. She concentrated on those words and waited for the pressure to build up inside.

But somehow the pressure didn’t build, and Kate became aware instead of an evenness throughout herself, without any knots of tension where anxiety might nestle. As she thought of Margo she knew that her friend was unique and special and important, and always would be so, but the idea of Margo could not dominate the vision of the storm. The storm was flux, it was life, the endless thing of which people like Margo would always and could only be a part. This was what Kate suddenly knew as she looked out of her bedroom window, because she felt that she was part of it too, part of the vast storm that linked and separated all things. In some strange new way she felt connected as she gazed into the clouds, connected to the past and the future and the dreaming and the dead.

As long as they both existed under this sky Kate and Margo could never truly be divided, just they could never truly be one. This realisation was part of the calm that had settled over Kate now, a feeling that she recognised as the same one that met her when she walked into Saint Mary’s churchyard. And as she reflected, hardly for the first time, on the particular atmosphere of that place, she suddenly felt that the stillness there was not due to some odd dissociation with the rest of the town or with the world, but if anything an indication of the opposite. Things were real in the churchyard of Saint Mary’s. Peace existed inside there, and it didn’t matter what lay beyond the gates.

Kate felt she was thinking more clearly now than she had for many years. And, thinking clearly, she couldn’t help but suspect that her feeling of connection and awareness might not last. When the morning arrived, the clouds parted and out came the people and the sun to return everything to the humdrum, Kate could well find herself swamped and blinded by tedium and uncertainty and all the usual blights. She could simply forget the peace that the storm had helped her to find.

So she savoured it while it lasted.

Why the silver screen is the ideal haunted house: in praise of The Woman in Black* **

*Not the Daniel Radcliffe one though

** This article assumes the reader has not experienced any version of The Woman in Black but may want to, so only minor plot details are revealed

“Another person, this time; but a figure of quite as unmistakeable horror and evil: a woman in black, pale and dreadful – with such an air also, and such a face! – on the other side of the lake…”  Spoken by the governess in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898)

It seems quite likely that the above sentence formed part of the inspiration which led Susan Hill to write The Woman in Black, the 1983 novel which stands as a distillation of the Dickensian/MR James style of ghost story.  The definite film adaptation of The Turn of the Screw is Jack Clayton’s 1961 The Innocents, in which Freddie Francis’s hallucinatory, rain-dappled black-and-white cinematography picks out the figure of the pale woman (Clytie Jessop), barely visible among the reeds on the bank, but watching with tragic air enough to thoroughly unsettle the governess (Deborah Kerr) and the audience too.  Both book and film are artful and kaleidoscopic explorations of psychological disturbances as much as of supernatural phenomena, but the lakeside appearance of the ghostly Miss Jessel is such a striking moment all on its own that I wouldn’t blame a clever author for thinking “I can make a novel out of that”.  And, whatever the truth of her initial inspiration, that is what the then 41-year-old Susan Hill did, crafting a very simple story (a young solicitor from London travels to the coast to finalise the affairs of a recently deceased client and in doing so falls foul of a malevolent female spectre) on which to hang an intricate, cumulative series of chilling encounters much like the one above.  Her book, without aiming for either the intellectual complexity of ‘literature’ or the elaborate, gory mayhem of contemporary horror, proves that there is fascination and charm enough in the purely uncanny to merit novel-length exploration.  In 1987 the late Stephen Mallatratt wrote an ingenious, thrifty stage adaptation (just two actors, barely any set) which drew huge crowds by being, in a couple of places, simply terrifying. It has been running ever since.

The people behind the new, Daniel Radcliffe-starring Woman in Black movie – resurgent British horror specialists Hammer, and Eden Lake director James Watkins – can’t have been unaware of the shadows cast by the novel and stage adaptation, and Watkins has also cited The Innocents as an influence on his approach.  But the film’s pre-publicity has (understandably) shied away from acknowledging that the novel has actually been filmed before.  This was in 1989, by Central Television for ITV.  Producer Chris Burt and executive producer Ted Childs (the people then making Inspector Morse and who are still making Lewis today) took note of the play’s success and hired Nigel Kneale to adapt the book into a 100-minute TV movie.  The 67-year-old Kneale, who had practically invented television horror in 1953 with his serial The Quatermass Experiment, knocked out the script in a week (but delayed submitting it to the producers for another fortnight at the urging of his agent, who was worried they’d think it had been rushed)¹.  The result was as solid, professional and un-showy (some might say staid) as a contemporaneous episode of Morse or Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple.  However, it remains – although this is where I must confess to a mountain of ingrained prejudice, because I was a very impressionable eight-year-old when I saw its initial broadcast on Christmas Eve 1989, and every subsequent viewing brings some of that back to me – absolutely terrifying, more so for me than Hill’s novel, Mallatratt’s play, or any number of big-budget horror films, and a key text in the case that the screen is the ideal home of the ghost story.

Given that the new film hopes to be Hammer’s real comeback movie – their first British-made and set horror piece since To the Devil – a Daughter in 1976 – it’s apt that they’ve chosen to adapt a property associated with Kneale.  After all, the breakout horror hit which initially launched the studio on an illustrious path of Gothic gore, leading all the way to the Queen’s Award for Industry, was 1955’s The Quatermass Xperiment, the company’s X-certificated film of his TV serial.  (It’s to be hoped against hope that, for the good of the British film industry and the economy in general, they can achieve similar success again.)  The new Woman, however, bears little relation to Kneale’s adaptation, perhaps for very sound legal reasons: it is alleged that Susan Hill didn’t like many of the (mostly very subtle) changes Kneale made to her story, and rights complications mean that the Central Television production remains unreleasable on DVD in the UK (I’m lucky enough to own a now-deleted Region 1 copy, and a kind soul has posted the whole thing in YouTube for those interested in seeking it out).  The screenplay for the Hammer film, written by Jane Goldman, is therefore careful in retaining everything from the novel that Kneale, who died in 2006, had ditched or altered (though Goldman goes on to make a raft of more expansive, and sometimes perplexing, changes and omissions of her own).

Now, I come to praise Kneale’s Woman, not bury Goldman’s – Watkins’ movie is an efficient, intense and beautifully crafted scare-machine which is packed with shock effects that, taking note of the style of Japanese ghost-horror films, almost entirely refrain from blood and gore; that’s creditable enough.  In its high Gothic style, packaged with a commercial sensibility, it is classic Hammer fare too, and it’s good to see that back on the big screen.  But the differing tacks taken by the two adaptations are instructive.  Hill’s novel and the Mallatratt and Kneale adaptations are ghost stories: frightening in places, because the featured ghost happens to be frightening, but mainly concerned with telling a simple story of  a collision between the natural and the supernatural.  The Hammer production is (not unnaturally) principally a horror film: frightening (in the sense of making you jump, regularly, and in between the jumps dread that you’ll be made to jump again) because the writer and director (and composer², set designer and cinematographer) are aware that’s what the cinema-going horror fan has paid for.  Everything about the screenplay and direction is designed to make the audience tense, uneasy and on the verge of dropping their popcorn almost without remission, and this results in contrivances which are at odds with the simplicity of Hill’s tale.  Kneale’s script is pitched at a broad primetime TV audience, many of whom might be horror-averse and whom, having switched on something which looks much like Poirot, need to be gently seduced into enjoying a scary story.  Goldman, confident that her audience are after nastiness, puts three (tastefully filmed) deaths into the opening scene.

However, despite the new film’s relentless horror-genre precision, the 1989 film is scarier.  I think this is because the world created by Kneale seems more real, and his script showcases countless little tricks that help turn a first-person-narration novel (with its inevitable subjectivity) into a filmed, realistic, multi-character drama.  Hill’s principal locale, Crythin Gifford, is a market town located (somewhat illogically) near the coast.  In all versions of the story, it is a town that has suffered repeated tragedy into which Hill’s solicitor hero blunders in innocent determination to do his job.  But the Hammer film – true to type – depicts the place as the kind of misty, sinister village usually located in the shadow of Castle Dracula, populated by frightened-looking women and ruddy-faced men with permanent frowns who instantly take against the stranger and try to get him to leave (“All our rooms are full” says the keeper of a really rather quiet-looking inn).  Whereas Kneale and director Herbert (I, Claudius, 1976) Wise take time to show the normal life of the town: they depict the bustle of market day and the resultant clash of rich and poor.  Hints to the place’s dark past, rather than being foregrounded in an air of brusque hostility, seep through in little individual eccentricities.  Kneale is quite free in changing names to boost character impact (the book’s hero is Arthur Kipps, but Kneale changes the surname to “Kidd”, probably to avoid association with the eponymous character of HG Wells’ novel).  Most memorably he accentuates Mr Jerome, Hill’s unhelpful local solicitor, into Arnold Pepperill (John Cater),  whose odd manner, outwardly genial (handshaking with “Excuse my glove”) but inwardly severe (refusing an offer of a fortifying brandy because he has “views on liquor”) is revealed to be a coping strategy derived from his personal proximity to the town’s tragedy.  Other residents are unhelpful, callous, mockingly vague or weirdly remote; character sketches that are as likely to be comic as sinister, but which give a sense of people with different histories and priorities who are about more than just signposting the plot.  The residents of Goldman’s Crythin, morose and apt to form an angry mob, are defined and defeated by their town’s ghost-related horror; in Kneale’s, they have been made strange by it, but at least have carried on.

Arthur (Adrian Rawlins playing the character as an amiable, slightly hapless family man) has been given two tasks to complete in Crythin: to retrieve any relevant papers from his deceased client’s old residence (Eel Marsh House, a remote dwelling accessible only via the Nine Lives Causeway – Hill’s place-names are splendid), but first to attend the funeral of the late Alice Drablow.  Here (in a moment of quiet unease present in all versions of the story bar Goldman’s) he notices an apparently shy mourner (Pauline Moran) whom other characters fail to acknowledge; when he travels out to Eel Marsh House, he finds he is not alone there.  As the blurb on the novel’s original edition put it: “There was the rocking-chair in the nursery.  There was the sound of a pony and trap.  And there was the woman in black.”  A protagonist knocking around a lonely, spooky location is hardly original territory for the ghost story – in fact the sections of the book set at Eel Marsh House have several parallels with the first half of The Hound of the Baskervilles, in which, prior to Sherlock Holmes’ arrival, the stolid Dr Watson is isolated at the mire-surrounded manor and pits his rationalism against a growing sense that something unearthly is at foot on the moor.  Nevertheless the value of Hill’s story is in paring the material down to the bare essentials and, through close engagement with the narrator, allowing the reader to feel they are experiencing the events first-hand.  Kneale sticks to Hill’s incidents and their order, but deploys a number of astute modifications which, very unusually in a tale of the supernatural, strengthen the logic while also, in an apparent contradiction, heightening the level of fear.  Chiefly he modernises the setting of Hill’s vaguely Edwardian story to about 1920 – motor vehicles and references to the recent nightmares of the trenches are common – so Kneale’s Eel Marsh House has two features not found in other versions: electric lighting, powered by a temperamental generator, and a phonograph machine.  Ghost stories tend to be most penetrating in the confrontation between rational and supernatural readings of the world, and these scientific devices help Arthur to both make sense of and fight against the terrors which beset him.  While this may push the film away from the Gothic genre (in contrast, the house in Watkins’ film is a typically rotting, cavernous Hammer pile; often the only source of light in it is a candle), the scientific additions provide (unreliable) areas of comfort and comprehension which can then be threatened.

The phonograph plays back diary entries of the house’s former occupant which allows Mrs Drablow (an uncredited but recognisable voice cameo from Herbert Wise’s wife, Fiona Walker) to drop hints of her back-story directly to Arthur as he goes through the paperwork.  This subtly adds to the feeling that he is not alone in the house while also giving him a way to rationalise the haunting as merely a series of “recordings, like the ones on this machine” (a notion in parapsychology called “residual haunting” previously explored by Kneale in his 1972 BBC-TV ghost story The Stone Tape³), which steels him to further encounters.  And the presence of electric lights allows for a wonderful common-sense moment (unthinkable for the protagonists of most horror movies, who specialise in blundering into the dark) when Arthur, spooked by an early visitation at the house, reacts as a rational person, alone and attempting to confront an irrational fear, would do: he goes through the building, opens all the doors and switches on all the lights, banishing dark hiding places.  This is a film which pays heed to a little-learned lesson taught by director John Carpenter in his 1978 masterpiece Halloween (and ignored by most of its imitators): everyone’s afraid of the dark, but if you want to really scare your audience, do it in daytime – and then turn out the lights.  Inevitably, the generator at Eel Marsh House runs down.

Kneale had worked with Carpenter, penning the original screenplay of Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)⁴.  Like Goldman – who collaborated with director Matthew Vaughn on Kick-Ass (2009) and X-Men: First Class (2011) – he went to Hollywood before Crythin Gifford.  Unlike Goldman’s, his experience was not happy: he took his name off Halloween III after it was rewritten (into a box-office bomb) and his script for Joe Dante’s remake of The Creature from the Black Lagoon went unproduced.  Years of this kind of thing had undoubtedly familiarised Kneale with a studio’s preference for generic conventions and narrative neatness over the kind of complexity or innovation which might put off the supposed wider audience, something he’d first tasted when the weird ending of his 1953 Quatermass serial (in which the hero saves the day by somehow convincing the monster to kill itself) was changed for the movie (in which the hero stands aside while the army electrocute the monster to death).  He deplored such tactics, but he is able to employ them to great effect when they benefit the material at hand.⁵

Every version of The Woman in Black has a slightly different ending.  Hill’s is ruthlessly effective, but derives a great deal of its power from the intimacy which has built up between the reader and the narrating Arthur who, as a middle-aged man, is still troubled by memories of events at Crythin Gifford and has decided to finally set them down on paper as a kind of self-therapy.  Mallatratt’s stage adaptation has a framing story about Arthur telling his tale to the young theatre director who will help turn his memoir into a one-man show; a logical (and necessarily self-reflexive) extrapolation of Hill’s telling, albeit one which alters the story’s structure and forces the adapter to add an epilogue.  This kind of device, in which a first-person narrator not only recounts the story in which they were a participant but also takes the time to explain how, why and when they have come to write it down, goes back at least as far as the Gothic novel.  Allowing the reader to come to know the narrator as a character – a trusted observer caught in the events being described, rather than an anonymous contriver of them – it can be especially useful for making fantastic narratives more convincing.  On screen, however, a depiction of a narrator in the form of a voice-over or within a filmed framing sequence can have the opposite effect: reminding the audience that what they’re seeing is someone’s interpretation of events, undermining the appearance of objective reality for which the mise-en-scene of the film may otherwise aim.  After all, when narrators are characterised in movies it is often to show that their relation of events is unreliable, as Akira Kurosawa demonstrated in the oft-cited Rashomon (1950), and passages in which the storyteller revises their tale as it goes along appear in the work of film-makers as different as Michael Haneke, Guy Ritchie and Michael Winterbottom⁶.  Elsewhere, voice-over narration tends to be used to fill in back-story that would otherwise be difficult (or expensive) to convey, or to import into a movie adaptation something of the style of a very prosy literary source, as in Sofia Coppola’s film of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides (1999).  Wiseley, with none of these techniques really required by Hill’s story, the screen versions of The Woman in Black refrain from the use of narration or framing device, and Kneale and Goldman keep their scripts in the present tense but craft their own endings which aim to equal the punch of the revelation with which the novel’s Arthur chooses to end his story.

Kneale’s conclusion is the most elaborate of the various endings and seems somewhat modelled, incongruously enough, on the closing moments of Friday the 13^th (1980), a terrible and brainless slasher movie whose startling but nonsensical last scene is pretty much its only redeeming feature.  Kneale happily steals the moment⁷, but actually takes care to tie it to the preceding narrative, aided by the fact that he has provided the story with something that a screenwriting tutor would note as lacking in the novel: an ‘inciting incident’⁸.  This is the initial occurrence that starts the plot moving, such as the moment in Duel (1971) when motorist David Mann overtakes an apparently innocent tanker truck on a lonely stretch of road.  It would be crass to say every screenplay needs a moment like this, but it does seem odd that in neither book nor play, Arthur Kipps doesn’t actually do anything at all to merit being targeted by the woman in black with the same fury that David Mann is subsequently hounded by the tanker truck.  Why does she come after him?  This question may have bothered Jane Goldman too, as her script seems to see the woman (actually the long-deceased Jennett Humfrye, Alice Drablow’s sister) as the sort of wronged spirit repeatedly featured in Japanese horrors like Ju-On: The Grudge (2003), who revenges herself on anyone who enters her house regardless of their irrelevance to the original crime (“Fear her curse” read the posters for the Hammer film).

Kneale’s answer, strengthening the whole structure of the piece, is to add an early incident in which Arthur saves a gypsy girl from being killed in a freak accident at the market (“should’ve left well alone,” comments an onlooker, “too many gypsies round ‘ere”).  At that point, he has crossed Jennett, though he doesn’t realise it until much later – and if this is a ‘grudge’, it’s extremely personal.  I don’t know if it says anything about society as a whole or just about the horror genre that the most repeatably terrifying vision possible on the screen in the last decade or so has been the unexpected appearance of a pale-faced female with long black hair, like Sadako in Ringu (1998, a template followed by Watkins’ film in several respects).  At least Pauline Moran’s superficially comparable Jennett seems more like a proper character rather than an out-and-out monster – troublingly both human and inhuman, mixing specific and universal malevolence.  The actress, who gets fourth billing in the credits, makes a considerable impact with her stare alone; in return, Rawlins ably conveys innocent openness quickly freezing to terror as, unlike the protagonists of many ghost films, Arthur Kidd doesn’t just catch glimpses of her at the window or in a flash of lightning, he gets a lingering look into her incomprehensibly malicious face.

A literary ghost story’s success in being frightening often depends upon the narrating character’s ability to convey his or her sense of personal unease to the reader⁹.  A screen adaptation is by necessity a third-hand retelling by a director, and its success will depend on the director and cast’s ability to persuade the audience to empathise with the lead character(s).  Films like The Innocents, The Haunting (1963) and The Others (2001) are extremely adept at this, acquainting the audience with a hysterical protagonist’s perspective to a degree that casts doubt as to whether the supernatural experiences which befall the character are any more than the symptoms of a delusional mind, like the apparitions that drive Catherine Deneuve’s Carol to murder in Repulsion (1964).  While courting critical respectability by allowing the films to trade as psychological studies as much as horror thrill-rides (publicity for The Innocents chose to stress “the most controversial concept in human relationships ever presented!” rather than the ghosts), this approach need not negate their effectiveness as supernatural horror (while it’s very likely that Miss Giddens in The Innocents and Eleanor in The Haunting are seriously disturbed, that doesn’t mean they aren’t also being haunted).  However, this psychological ambiguity has been co-opted by a great many subsequent ghost dramas¹⁰, and when less carefully employed stands merely to mask lazy plotting.  Again finding strength in simplicity, The Woman in Black avoids this: in the novel, Arthur is certain that Jennett exists even though he doesn’t want to believe in her, and the screen versions are explicit that she’s objectively real (other characters can see her too, as of course can the audience).  In the 1989 film, director Wise is nevertheless careful not to depict the apparition except when Kidd can also see her: and rather than attempting to dictate to them, he allows the viewer’s emotional response to be guided by Rawlins’ reactions.

Many directors of such films would eschew such a straightforward approach, seeming to think that their job is to shock, startle and upset the audience directly, using any and all lighting, sound design and special effects tricks available.  A typical shock of the lesser ghost film is to have someone/thing unexpectedly appear in a mirror or behind a door, seen to the audience but not the protagonist (often accompanied by a sudden stab of orchestral music). This can create a decent jolt but is founded on a technique of dramatic irony in opposition to audience empathy with the characters, reducing the people on screen to stooges of the director and thereby lessening the effectiveness of the story.  The hard-to-define feeling of awareness-bordering-on-fear of a possible supernatural presence, central to any ghostly tale, is a subtle emotion with which to ask the audience to empathise, and that empathy is wont to be obliterated by the clattering artifice of deafening music and manipulative editing which are the horror director’s usual tools of the trade in crafting films based around more prosaic threats like serial killers, say, or zombies.  Better that directors keep their hand hidden beneath the most banal, ‘invisible’ conventions of the prevailing realism, or else disguised as that of another kind of director entirely (as in Ghostwatch, 1992, or The Blair Witch Project, 1999, which are dramas but pretend to be documentaries, therefore acknowledging their status as ‘constructed’ realities).  For the supernatural parts of a story to stand a chance of being halfway convincing, then the non-supernatural events surrounding them must seem utterly real – ‘everyday’, and not in any way designed.  From this point of view it is easy to see why the most financially successful supernatural horrors to come out of America in the last twenty years are Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity (2009), the near-unmediated nature of their ‘found footage’ approach being the screen equivalent of the collection of diary entries and newspaper extracts Bram Stoker uses in Dracula to give his very outre tale an edge of veracity.  However, this approach also alienated a significant section of the (vast) audience unwilling or unable to enjoy a horror movie lacking the stylistic gratifications of big-budget offerings like Se7en (1995), Dawn of the Dead (2004) or Pandorum (2009).

I would recommend The Woman in Black in any form (there was also a decent Radio 4 adaptation by Mike Walker in 2007), including the new film, but I would suggest trying one of the earlier versions first so as to purely enjoy the story without foreknowledge of the plot revelations (which Goldman re-jigs anyway).  But what the Herbert Wise/Nigel Kneale version shows is that there is a way to make supernatural horror that retains subtlety without throwing out cinematic form, and while still inspiring visceral terror and sustained perturbation in the audience, and it’s because it succeeds in that so well that I believe this kind of story works better on screen than on the page.  It’s admittedly a tough argument to make stick, as while there are countless successful literary ghost stories (every horror author tries at least one), there are relatively few really effective cinematic ones other than those I’ve mentioned – certainly in the English language¹¹.  But the films and TV shows I’ve referred to in this essay, along with brethren like Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968), ‘The Exorcism’ (Dead of Night, 1972), The Signalman (1976) and Crooked House (2008), beat their prose equivalents because the films force us to go with their protagonists into the supernatural realm.  Starkly, we have to see what they see and hear what they hear at the same time as they do, instead of having the strange events filtered first through a narrator’s re-telling and then through the safety net of our own imaginative interpretation.  If the film-making is done with sufficient imagination and skill, our emotional bond with the characters is only increased, because the experience is one being shared, rather than related.

Beautifully shot and scored – enough to satisfy those audiences who demand on-screen ‘production values’ – and built around Rawlins’ capable ‘everyman’ performance set against brilliantly chosen, natural-looking locations, Wise’s film exemplifies that kind of skill and imagination.  Rachel Portman’s music does occasionally get out the Psycho strings to underscore moments of shock¹², but is mainly present in the form of appropriately haunting, lullaby-like melodies which almost feel part of the melancholy landscape through which Arthur wanders.  Lest I should appear slavish in my adoration though, I suppose I should concede that it is hardly a critic-proof production.  The opening domestic scenes showing Kidd with his (frankly odd) son could have done with another take, and some of the Crythin Gifford sequences raise unintended laughs due to Kneale’s fondness for crafting ornately rustic dialogue for working-class characters (“Nine Lives Causeway.  Like what the cat’s got.  It’s what you need ‘ere”), even if the occasional weirdness of the townsfolk is justified by the material.

However, because of the choices Wise and Kneale made, their film stands in comparison to Watkins’ and Goldman’s as a reminder that horror film-making doesn’t have to be about hitting the audience with periodic scare effects to keep them in a permanent state of tension.  Rather, it can be about leading them on a pleasant-seeming stroll into the woods, only for them to slowly realise they don’t know the way back, which can lead to an even greater pitch of terror.  Moran’s Jennett is not frightening because her appearances are unexpected, or because she’s visually horrible (mostly, she isn’t), but because her simple presence hints at matters more deeply incorporeal, leading to the disturbing sense that she remains somehow present even when not seen.  And I haven’t even mentioned the brilliant use of the dog, the football, the toy soldier, the sea ‘frets’, or the understated performance of Bernard Hepton as the reassuringly bluff Sam, all of which contribute significantly to the effect and help to explain why viewers who never saw the film again after its initial broadcast still remember it vividly, two decades later.

Impassioned as one must be to write 5000 words for no money, I end with a series of pleas.  Someone do some detective work and unravel the rights confusions preventing the 1989 film from getting the restored re-release it deserves, and someone else release a talking book of Hill’s novel, preferably read by Samuel West: it would be an ideal, grown-up bedtime story.  Film and TV producers: more good ghost stories need to be made that heed the lessons of the above successes.  Possibly the territory has been fully mapped, but I’d love it if a new film proved otherwise.  Hammer: if you want material on which to base new horror films, you could do far worse to go through Nigel Kneale’s back-catalogue and pick out the items that could deserve a re-telling: The Road (1963), The Stone Tape, ‘Baby’ (Beasts, 1976), the original draft of Season of the Witch¹³.  And everyone else who might be interested: just watch Kneale’s Woman in Black if you can.  I might arrange a screening round at our house this Christmas…

The Woman in Black

Central Television, 1989.  Director: Herbert Wise.  Producer: Chris Burt.  Screenplay: Nigel Kneale, based on the novel by Susan Hill.  Director of photography: Michael Davis.  Music: Rachel Portman.  With: Adrian Rawlins (Arthur Kidd), Bernard Hepton (Sam Toovey), David Daker (Josiah Freston), Pauline Moran (Woman in Black), David Ryall (Mr Sweetman), Clare Holman (Stella Kidd), William Simons (John Keckwick), John Cater (Arnold Pepperill), Fiona Walker (Mrs Toovey/voice of Alice Drablow), Trevor Cooper (Farmer), John Franklyn-Robbins (Vicar), Stephen Mackintosh (Rolfe).

For full cast and crew go to http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098672/fullcredits#cast

Notes and references

1. Mark Gatiss tells this story in a BBC News article on the occasion of Kneale’s death, ‘Quatermass creator was TV giant’, November 2006: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6107564.stm

2. Marco Beltrami, no less – the horror music specialist who, with Scream (1996) and many others, defined the sound of Miramax subsidiary Dimension Films, the company Hammer will have to beat if they want to again stand as the definitive ‘house of horror’ on the movie map.  His noisy, string-heavy approach is not too different to that of the late James Bernard, who wrote (scores of) film and TV scores for Hammer between 1955 and 1980.

3.  Hutchison, Thom and Haley, Guy, “Time Trap: The Stone Tape”, Death Ray issue 19, Blackfish Publishing, June/July 2009.  Again a Christmas special, The Stone Tape is a brilliantly written example of Kneale’s techniques being applied to a modern-day, technological ghost story, and had sufficient impact that residual haunting came to be referred to as “stone tape theory”.

4.  Carpenter had been a Kneale fan since seeing the Hammer Quatermass films as a child.  His 1987 film Prince of Darkness, self-written under the pseudonym ‘Martin Quatermass’, is a combined remake of The Stone Tape and Quatermass and the Pit via his own Assault on Precinct 13 (1976).

5.  Simpson, MJ, “The SFX Interview: Nigel Kneale”, SFX # 14, Future Publishing, July 1996; also Brosnan, John, The Primal Screen: A History of Science Fiction Film, Little Brown and Co., 1995.

6.  Respectively: Funny Games, 1996; Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, 1998; 24 Hour Party People, 2001.

7.  The lesson here is “be careful what you steal from”.  Kneale dropping a bit from a Sean S. Cunningham slasher film into a period ghost story results in something thoroughly distinct, whereas when Goldman peps up the middle of her script by adding a bit out of WW Jacobs’ ‘The Monkey’s Paw’, it just looks like copying.

8.  As defined in McKee, Robert, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, ReganBooks, 1997.

9.  This generally remains true even when the narrating character is not directly involved in the action.  Even MR James’ ghost stories, told in the third person, have a characterised narrator who often explains how he came to hear of the events described (sometimes second- or third-hand, as in ‘A School Story’), achieving the feel of true stories that have been told and re-told while also opening up areas of vagueness, due to some details being emphasised and others lost as the story has been passed on, about which readers are invited to speculate.  James had probably realised that in tales of suspense, horror and tragedy, having a main character who is guaranteed from start to survive to relate the tale can make things difficult for an author, which is why the epic love-beyond-multiple-deaths tale of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1848) is narrated from the sidelines by several supporting characters.  Imaginative solutions to this problem are found in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Agatha Christie’s  The Murder of Roger Aykroyd (1926).

10.  For example, Sea of Souls (BBC, 2005) and almost every cop drama’s barrel-scraping ‘weird’ episode.

11.  At the moment, it’s the Spanish ghost story that’s on top.  El Orfanato (The Orphanage, 2008) is currently being remade in English.

12.  She’s far from the only composer to mimic Bernard Herrmann’s music for the 1960 film, Pino Donaggio’s Carrie (1976) and Richard Band’s Re-Animator (1985) scores being only the most blatant.

13.  A new Halloween III is imminent from Dimension Films, but it’s a sequel to Rob Zombie’s Halloween II (2009), not a remake of the 1982 film.

Footsteps 2011

 

Just taking a break from my Ethiopian chronicle and getting up to date, I thought it would be worth writing a few words to commemorate this year’s full day of fund-raising entertainment at Jackson’s Pit.

Footsteps 2011. It was many things.

It was the hottest October 1st since the first syllable of recorded time.

It was hi-energy MC work of Howard and Chopper keeping things moving for 10 hours!

It was the amazing Yolanda, Barry and Gary (aka Positive Moves) and the kids and adults of the Earl Dance Centre kicking us off at 2.30pm, raising the roof downstairs at 8pm and dancing on the cobbles in between, never letting the energy or the acrobatics drop.

It was the stunningly talented Ed wooing the crowd with her afternoon serenade.

It was the wow factor of the multi-talented Hippy Rick, first singing as Big Shiver, then being our big finish as the bassist for the furious punk of our headlining band, Buff, and finally taking us into the morning with a warm and rumbustious DJ set..

It was the Neil, Dave, Glyn and the sheer Irish gusto of Slainte and their brilliantly performed folk ballads.

It was the Bigsby Brothers out in the sun with their gobsmackingly intricate dual guitar style.

It was the haunting and kinetic rock of Nathexious.

It was the mega-stylish mega-fearless pop covers of Sergio and Estaban.

It was Matt, Matt and the men from Gunrunner shaking the Earth and stunning the crowd.

It was none other than Adam, Mr Anderson himself, and his incredible team of supporting artists with their hip-hop and soul, creating a haunting and heart-touching moment of connection.

It was 3days – Adam G and his superb crew (stewarded by the wonderful Yvonne), thrilling us with punky panache.

It was Brian Teddy Boy Lewis on the piano, conquering the blues classics and seducing the crowd (with excellent canine support).

It was ‘James Taylor’ (Jim) with his mood-and-mind-expanding electronica.

And it was everyone who turned up to have a good time – there were a lot of you and the vibe was great – not least my friends and relatives Ruth, Laura, Sarah, Eileen, Mark, Finn, Rick, Jam, Sian, Tim, Amanda, Paul, Steph and Robert. You made it what I wanted it to be, a day of the community.

I am indebted to all of the above, plus of course the staff at Jackson’s – Kevin, Carl, Matt running the sound, Danny on the door, Kate and especially the incredibly hard-working Rick on the bar, and the ever-smiling Dean and Robert providing great hot food and cakes at the BBQ.  I must thank the legions of very good-hearted people who gave up hours of their time for free – the reassuring presences of Mac and Rachel on the doors; Lindzi and Tom from Skylight Circus, Audra from Oldham Play Action Group with the face-painting and Amanda, Carol and Lesley from Oldham Writing Cafe. Then there’s the constantly, effervescently supportive Lucy from Retrak; Abi with patient ferrying to and fro in her car at the start of a busy work day; Martin from Oldham Music Centre braving the flu to provide us with vital gear; Charlie and Anthony Buckley for sorting us out with lights (and Ruth for collecting them); the brilliant Martin Munchie for his great poster design and Maurice, Jamie and Nicola at Hurriprint for printing it; Paul for the gazebo that we were lucky enough not to need; Lionel, David and the St Edward’s Thursday Club for the piano; Bren and the folks at Muso’s for covering our emergency needs; Christie and Sarah from N-Gage; and most of all Nathan Smyth, for incredible hard work and for doing and knowing all the things I needed to know and do but didn’t, and without whom it would not have happened.  Again.

We raised £333.65 to share between the charities, Retrak and N-Gage – not as much as we’d hoped, but something. So we succeeded in our aims of making a little difference to the lives of young people both at home and overseas, and of creating an event that brought together people of many ages, backgrounds and talents to remind us of the great and diverse community we have in Oldham.

(And if any of you have any photos, please share them with me so I can illustrate this blog!)

Day Three in Ethiopia: Wednesday 17th November 2010

AM: Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes

My scribbled diary notes for the Wednesday of the trip – the day upon which we commenced the renovation work for real – begin with just three letters: ‘RTC’.

Lucy had drilled us to be on our feet and breakfasted by 8.15am so that we could be collected by Atto Gaemma and taken to the new building.  This did not quite happen – I think Steve and I were among the later arrivals, emerging at around 7.30, and with the mass of breakfast orders our omelettes were only arriving at 8.00.  However, by about 8.30 we were on the road – and we ended up staying there for a while longer than planned.

The atmosphere was jolly, the bunch of us packing out the minibus, chatting, taking photos and generally enjoying our first real glimpse of Addis Ababa in the morning.  The pavements were crowded with people going up and down about their business – literally up and down, many of the streets being steeply inclined, the city centre built on hills – and lined with businesses bearing proud signs with names rendered not only in Amharic script but also in eccentric and poetical English (Tracy, snapping away happily as the group’s designated photographer, spotted ‘Kids Love Fashion’ and ‘The Passion for Burger’).  According to my guidebook the majority of Ethiopians in employment will get to work around 7.30am, so therefore, presumably, we had missed rush hour.  Exactly what benefit we might have gained by this avoidance I’m not sure, however, because by 8.45, ‘rush’ had clearly given way to ‘nudge’ as Atto Gaemma gingerly manoeuvred the bus, in stop-start fashion, through a shifting grid of both pedestrian and vehicular traffic which seemed to stretch the whole length of the journey between our hotel in the city centre and our destination in Merkato.  By the time the hills of the city’s dead centre had given way to the wide-open, dusty, and flat roads leading out of it, we were getting used to the slow progress.

During one of the many static periods for the three lanes of vehicles on our side of the road, while Atto Gaemma waited patiently for the traffic to begin to flow again, an old man appeared just in front of our bus.  He seemed to have been picking his way slowly across the entire width of the road and, as he appeared at the left-hand side of the windscreen to politely nod to our driver, Atto Gaemma gestured for him to cross our path.  This the old man did, laboriously – he might have been seventy or older, I won’t pretend to be an accurate judge of the age of Ethiopians – and it seemed an eternity before he passed from view.  Then, after a further pause, and as the traffic showed signs of easing forwards, Atto Gaemma released the clutch.  We lurched forwards about a foot, and then there was a sudden halt.  And a thump.

As we passengers struggled to see what was happening, an assortment of around 40 men from both sides of the road stepped between the inching cars and surrounded our bus.  It became clear that the old man was lying on the road by our front wheel.  Some of the men formed a protective bunch around him as the traffic began to move off.  Others closed around Atto Gaemma’s cab, grim-faced and calling to our driver with voices which sounded accusatory.  Atto Gaemma talked back quickly – I managed to pick out the repeated word “aydellem” (roughly “it isn’t”).  Soon a white-shirted traffic policeman appeared and insisted Atto Gaemma park the bus at the side of the road, then step from the vehicle and walk up the road with him.  Some of the men, perhaps acting as witnesses, followed; others remained with the old man or standing by our bus, but we remained inside, doors firmly closed.

As visitors we didn’t really know how to take this situation.  Some of us were worried, some trying not to worry and some on the back seats chatted about football, but then this was our first morning on the streets of Addis and the only one of us who had a yardstick by which to judge what might be a normal or dangerous situation was Lucy.  She insisted we keep an eye on Atto Gaemma as he talked to the other men.  I found out later that she was predicting that, if his encounter with the street cop did not go well, then he might simply be arrested and taken away, leaving us abandoned.  If this had actually happened I’m still not sure what we could have done for him, though a call to our taxi agency might have got us another driver within the morning.  I hope.

Soon, however, Atto Gaemma returned to our bus having apparently convinced the traffic cop – who was luckily an understanding fellow – that we did not knock the old man over.  This seemed borne out as the old man got up and continued on his way, having apparently been shamming.  I don’t know how everyone else felt, but I was intensely relieved.  The crowd of men dispersed, Atto Gaemma got us back on the road and in a few minutes the bus had pulled up outside the gates to the new centre.  Again, Merkato kids, teenagers and younger, hovered curiously as we disembarked.  I paused by the driver’s window to show my gratitude to Atto Gaemma for having got us out of a tense situation.  I shook his hand and thanked him; he smiled, but said a few words of Amharic which I couldn’t actually follow but which seemed to mean “Don’t thank me, just give me some money.”  I nodded, stepped through the doorway – away from the watching boys – and fished 100 birr from my money belt.  I stepped back to the bus and handed this to him discreetly and he smiled a bigger smile, shaking my hand firmly.  From that point on, Atto Gaemma was always pleased to see me.  No wonder – when I discussed this later with Lucy, it became apparent that, even given the circumstances, I had somewhat over-tipped him.  100 birr (roughly £4) is probably most of a week’s wages for him.

It was by now around 9.25.  Myself and the other four members of Team Green Hats were due to deliver our classroom session to the boys at the old drop-in centre between 10 and noon.  With everybody else kitting up into CSI J-suits and rubber gloves, the work of emptying the building of rubbish and obstructive furniture began right away.  By the time Lucy was ready to lead Alli, Lauren, Nadine and myself on the 10-minute walk between the new drop-in centre and the old, the courtyard was already filling with rubbish and swirling with dust as the aptly-nicknamed “black hole” downstairs began to be cleared out.  That room would still be far from empty when we returned from our class.

I don’t remember a great deal about the walk to the old centre, except that I was nervous (I’m always nervous about meeting new people, about speaking before an audience, and about any contact with children, so it was possibly going to be a hum-dinger this one).  Lucy kept us moving and made sure we didn’t get distracted or wonder off – although the wide streets were hardly crowded, there was constant bustle, and frequent attention from beggars and street-vendors and people who smiled and said hello.  It was fair to expect some unwanted attention would come to a group of four attractive young white women on the streets of Addis (even with an unimposing man such as myself present as an ironic guardian) and I was a bit tense about this, but nothing unpleasant happened.  Culturally in Ethiopia it’s considered inappropriate for a woman to have her legs or shoulders uncovered, and the girls had dressed accordingly.  (On the other hand, exposed breasts are considered okay – and indeed, during the week I saw many women begging while openly breast-feeding their tiny babies, a heart-rending and depressing sight.)

On arrival at the old centre we found Fekadu, a number of Retrak’s teaching staff and about 20 boys waiting for us.  The boys sat around the table-tennis tables looking up at us eagerly as Fekadu let us introduce ourselves, translating.  Wanting to utilize more of my scrappy Amharic, I told the boys my name (“sim-meh Daniel nuwh”) and was rewarded with a cheer – Ethiopians really do enthusiastically appreciate it when you’ve made the effort to learn even a little of one of their languages, which is perhaps odd when you consider that many of them will be speaking more than one language from a young age.  Maybe they’ve become aware of the English inability to cope with other languages, possibly through their impressive knowledge of our football players!

We began by explaining to the boys (again through translation) that we had devised an exercise for them using illustrated worksheets (produced courtesy of a friend of Lauren’s).  The worksheets featured pictures of people doing various types of job opposite pictures of a variety of tools or pieces of equipment; the boys had to link each tool to the appropriate job.  The teachers helped with explaining the task and then we sat with the boys, helping any who were struggling.  Most of them knew some English as well as Amharic so communication wasn’t too difficult, and most seemed pleased to meet us, although there were a couple of boys who were too studious, suspicious or plain shy to want help.  (There was also one boy who, coming from a remote province, could speak neither English nor Amharic on his arrival at the centre.  Undeterred by the lack of a common language the Retrak staff were integrating him into their programmes and helping him to pick up the languages bit by bit.)  When the boys were finished, the teachers collected in the papers and called the boys forward individually so we could hand them stickers and sweets by way of a reward.  As each boy came forward, the others clapped and cheered; some smiled a little bashfully at this attention, others seemed somewhat in awe of us, but some thrived on the moment, bounding forwards with a dance-like swagger.  One took his sticker and went straight to his little locker on the room’s far wall, fixing it to the door proudly.

It was clear that the boys enjoyed supporting each other and enjoyed themselves.  During the course of their next activity – using fabric pens to personalise plain baseball caps which we had brought for them, baseball caps being very practical and popular but also very expensive in Ethiopia – we again mixed into the group, helping the boys who needed help with the task; but I noticed several boys who, having decorated their own caps, would then look to help one of the strugglers.  (One thing we did ask of the boys was that they include the distinctive Retrak logo in their hat designs which, combined with the fiddly nature of the paint-pens, was perhaps easier said than done.)

Our final activity, we decided, would be musical, possibly including dancing.  At our Green Team planning meeting a couple of weeks before the trip (I’ll never forget that evening – it was at Alli’s and involved lots of pizza, coke and olives) we talked about teaching the boys a simple song involving actions that they could easily copy.  We all delved into our primary school memories; I suggested ‘The Wheels on the Bus’, a song which tragically, these days, reminds me as much of Madonna as Monday morning Assembly at St Edward’s.  I think it was Alli though who suggested ‘Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’, and this was the song we chose to teach to the boys.

At the drop-in centre class room, we invited all the boys to come and stand with us and watch as we gave a quick run-through of the song and actions.  One of the male teachers – I think it was Yosef – looked on with amused appreciation, then copied us, with appropriate translation for the boys.

Now, some of those boys were pre-teens, but some were as old as 17.  I hoped to hell we weren’t patronising them to death asking them to sing a silly song like this; and although I was aware that they were from a different culture and many of them had grown up in extremely deprived circumstances, I thought it was a risk.  But we had to choose an activity simple enough for the whole range of the boys to embrace as one, and it turned out to be the best choice we could have made, and one of the best illustrations of what it is that Retrak gives to these kids.  The boys copied Yosef’s actions, and then we all joined together in a rendition of the whole song.  Pretty quickly, all the boys were smiling – maybe some with a little embarrassment at first, but then fully, as everyone was taking part in the silliness equally.  I couldn’t not smile.  As we went through the song a second time, this time at twice the speed, the smiles gave way to a building-up of little giggles, and then when we got to the end of the song, the boys burst into laughter, and clapping, and leaps into the air, and cheers.  I’ve never seen so much palpable joy inspired by something so simple, and it was a lesson.  As adults we often become jaded and forget the wonderment that we found as children in the smallest of things.  But in places like Ethiopia, a harsh life can contrive to make some children jaded almost from birth.  Some of these boys are almost men in terms of their years, but they may never have had the chance to enjoy childish things like sharing a silly song with a bunch of friends; they have never really had a childhood at all.  That’s what Retrak gives back to them: a stage of our development which we all need if we are to cope with the world in all its madness and stay sane ourselves.

The point when we sang ‘Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’ was the moment when I started to understand this.  And a few moments later I got my strongest indication that Retrak’s approach is successful in helping these boys to develop positively as people.  As our two-hour session was drawing to its end, we gave out more lollipops and boiled sweets to the boys, leaving any leftovers (for we had brought Home Bargains mega-packs) to be given out later by the teachers.  One boy who looked about 11 – and I’m sorry that I don’t know his name – looked in his hand and counted two sweets and a lollipop.  Then he looked across at me, leaning against the iron wall a few feet away from him, and saw I had nothing in my hands.  He came forward, looking up at me, and proffered the lollipop.  “For me?” I asked, patting my hand to my chest.  He smiled and nodded.  I didn’t know what to do.  Of course I didn’t particularly want the lollipop and I wanted him to enjoy it, but I didn’t want to be rude to him, and I knew the value to him of what he was offering to give to me.  I took the lolly from him (how often can you say that legitimately?) and, feeling massively humbled, I thanked him, hoping my gratitude would be conveyed.  After a beat, several of the other boys came forward, offering their sweets to Nad, Lauren, Alli and Lucy.  Thankfully, Lucy, being made of sterner and more sensible stuff than I, was able to quickly convey: “No.  They’re for you.  You keep them.”  The boys retreated, and didn’t seem put out.

These boys had grown up on the streets, still lived on the streets; if they weren’t being helped by Retrak they would survive purely by begging, or perhaps by stealing.  But Retrak is helping them; not just giving things to them, but turning them into people who understand the power of giving.

I would like to dedicate this instalment of my blog to the memory of the actress Elisabeth Sladen (1946-2011), star of Doctor Who and The Sarah Jane Adventures on BBC Television, who spent four decades entertaining, inspiring and empathising with children of all ages.  An example I’d love to follow.

Dropping In: Day Two in Ethiopia, Tuesday 16th November 2010

My sleep had been limited on that first night. The mattress on my bed was thin and hard and I spent much of the time when I should have been sleeping observing the sun creep through the curtains to illuminate the bright yellow walls of the spacious room, or listening to the hotel maids going about their work. At about 11.30am Steve’s smartphone told us that it was time to get up. (Thank God he brought it, as there was no clock in the room and, being the cheapskate owner of an O2 phone on a very limited contract, I’d left my mobile in England.)

We stumbled into life and began making use of the room’s facilities. There was a western-style toilet into which toilet paper was not to be flushed but instead deposited into a plastic bag, sealed if possible, which we’d been advised to provide ourselves. There was a marvellous shower with a fixed chrome head, rather like the one in Psycho, which didn’t always run hot, and didn’t always run. There were two European-style twin-prong power points, neither of which worked, and a large television, strictly for decoration. The single window looked out across a very neatly tended lawn towards the main hotel building, and some overhanging trees meant we could get dressed without worrying too much about our modesty. Being midday it was fairly hot, so I dressed lightly. Lucy had created an information pack for the team which warned us of Addis Ababa’s high altitude and the attendant dangers of sunstroke and mosquitoes (which due to the altitude did not carry malaria, but instead denghi fever, which is incurable). Determined, if possible, not to take a single risk during the trip, I sprayed every inch of my exposed skin with factor 50 sunblock, then with 50% DEET insect repellent, and put on my green hat. ‘DEET’ is the short name for a chemical developed by the US Army during WWII jungle campaigns (N,N-Diethyl-meta-toluamide according to Wikipedia); less than 50% isn’t enough to bother insects in Ethiopia, and if you accidentally spray it up your nose, it makes you sneeze until you pray for death.

Suitably attired and wearing shades like a couple of cool guys (mine were prescription), Steve and I emerged into the dazzling day and walked over to the main hotel for breakfast. Most of the team were sitting at small tables positioned rather fetchingly around the steps leading to the tall double doors leading to the bar, overlooking the guest lodge and the city’s hazy panorama of interlocking slant roofs. Petite waitresses in smart green uniforms flitted around collecting menus and distributing baskets of thickly-sliced toast. Up to twenty-one ferenj appearing and demanding breakfast more or less all at once must have been pretty baffling for the staff, especially when the ferenj were pretty baffled themselves, but the waitresses all spoke a little English and took our multiple and conflicting orders in their stride. As I remember, most of the others had already ordered, so Steve and I just followed their lead and asked for the full breakfast. This cost 40 Birr (or about £1.50!) and included freshly squeezed orange juice, a small coffee (wetet ba buna – ‘milk with coffee’ or rather, as it is called at Taitu with its Italian inheritance, macchiato), an omelette (with or without meat) and unlimited toast. I think you will agree, this is a fairly comprehensive breakfast, one which would become staple to the group for the duration of our stay and which alone confirms Taitu – dodgy showers or no – as a much more luxurious temporary home than we had any right to expect for our stay in Ethiopia, especially at roughly £70 per head for seven nights. Right, that’s the tourist bit over with for this part of the blog. Basically, if you’re going to Addis, stay at the Taitu hotel.

Lucy was hovering around the edges of the group, monitoring her unwieldy flock and waiting for us stragglers to get breakfast out of the way: Maggie had arrived, Retrak’s head honcho in Ethiopia, and the briefing was ready to begin. At around 1pm we shuffled inside and arranged ourselves around a communal area on the hotel’s first floor, where Maggie and her right-hand man Fekadu would begin the process of gently easing us into an understanding of what we had let ourselves in for. The laborious business of renovating the drop-in centre would wait until Wednesday; this first full day in Addis was just about getting oriented. We were handed our spends for the week (the equivalent of £100 each – about 2600 Birr – although I’d already brought £100, safely divided into different bags, books and my money belt, which I never took off due to paranoia), asked if we’d like to sign up to a bus tour of the city on the Friday afternoon (without exception we did), and given some photocopied sheets including essential contact information and a hand-drawn map of how to get to and from the old Retrak drop-in centre and the new one.

It was a strange atmosphere in that room, the twenty-one of us arranged around the walls, some squatting on the floor, some sitting in wooden armchairs, some lucky enough to lean nonchalantly in the doorway leading to a sunlit balcony, as we listened to Maggie and Fekadu. They were instantly warm and welcoming, and though a very contrasting pair – she a white, ginger-haired Australian, brisk and full of laughter; he a typically dark-skinned Ethiopian, tall and softly-spoken – both were equally ready with reassuring smiles. The formalities concluded, it was quickly time for us to see with our own eyes what Retrak were about, and that meant visiting both drop-in centres – current and would-be – in Merkato, the sprawling, labyrinthine marketplace of Addis.

We piled back onto Atto Gaemma’s bus, travelling in convoy with Maggie and Fekadu in the former’s magnificent mustard-yellow Lada. Roads are relatively new to Addis. Those through Merkato are bumpy dirt tracks moated with foot-deep ditches for drainage. Traffic flow is pretty unregulated and seems to function mainly on optimism. At one point we spent minutes stuck at a street corner while Atto Gaemma tried to lurch the bus’s back wheel clear of an overground sewer pipe. There was a sweet-sour odour everywhere. People swarmed about our vehicle, going about their daily business, buying, selling and carrying spices, water, fabrics. The roads were wide, but the countless shops – mostly small sheds or kiosks – are piled next to each other without much apparent space in between. A busload of ferenj couldn’t pass through this area without attracting attention – mostly dignified curiosity from the men, smiles of both astonishment and welcome from the women and children. Instantly children were running alongside our bus, waving and shouting “Hello” and “I love you.” This was ineffably cheering – children, some looking as young as six, freely running around outdoors in apparent happiness and freedom – and a sight I’d welcome in any context. That particular day happened to be Eid Mubarak, the Muslim festival which is a public holiday in Ethiopia, which possibly had something to do with the large amount of pedestrian traffic, and certainly with the happy faces of the children.

Turning and heading up a shallow incline, our small convoy pulled over by the side of a corrugated iron partition, two metres or so high, which ran most of the length of this stretch of road. Maggie knocked on a metal, windowless door, which opened to reveal a friendly-faced Ethiopian boy in his late teens. He was clearly expecting us and smiled welcomingly, but perhaps a little sheepishly, the mass arrival of strange foreigners probably overpowering him somewhat. As we filed through the doorway, I hung near the back of the group, always keen to let others go first like any self-respecting gentleman and coward. When I finally stepped over the drain-moat and through the partition, the boy closing and securing the door behind me, I found myself in a jagged iron-walled corridor eight or ten metres long, standing on a roughly concreted path and open to the sky. At the end of the corridor was another door through which I could see the team members stepping, the taller among them, like Ivan, ducking a little as they did so. Beyond this door was the Retrak drop-in centre itself.

(While I’m thinking about it, I should introduce Ivan – the only non-Caucasian member of our team and so, I suppose, not technically a ferenj, a ‘white foreigner’. Just so you know, Ivan, when I refer to us as a bunch of ferenj, I’m not forgetting you. You’re an honorary ferenj.)

It was an oblong room about ten metres square, the walls and the high slanted ceiling made from mismatching panels of more corrugated iron. Painted in the Retrak colours of orange and blue, it was windowless and lit with fluorescents, though some shafts of daylight got in through skylights and little holes in some of the ceiling panels. The back wall was lined by lockers, another decorated by examples of children’s artwork, while three doors to one side led to tiny anterooms little bigger than broom cupboards. Overlooking everything was a blue-painted baseball hoop and centrepiece of the room was a large table surrounded by chairs – actually two table-tennis tables positioned side by side. Sitting around the table, we listened as Maggie told us the story of this small building, which had been the site of the majority of Retrak’s operations since 2006.

In December of that year Retrak had purchased the building and negotiated with the city council to arrange water and power supplies. A lady neighbour donated a little of her land so the corridor could be constructed to connect the front door safely to the road (the building’s other door, at the back wall, opens directly onto the tannery operating behind, and so wouldn’t be a suitable way for children to enter the building. Judging by the constant noise from out back while Maggie spoke, business was booming in the tannery). The room would function as both classroom, mess and lunch area for the street children enrolled on Retrak’s programmes of education and rehabilitation, while the side rooms provided areas for a clinic, counselling office and general administration. Maggie and Fekadu explained that Retrak’s programmes were aimed at the most vulnerable of street children – the very young, sick and those who wished to escape their situation. A census undertaken by Retrak indicates there are more then 600 street children in Merkato alone. Retrak’s current capacity was for 40-60 boys at any one time and, although another two non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Addis were helping up to 100 street children each, this still accounted for a mere fraction of the number of vulnerable children on the streets. This was our first inkling of the difference we would be trying to make here – refurbishing a new drop-in centre for Retrak would allow the organisation to multiply the number of children whose lives it could affect.

On a bench in the corner of a room, under a blanket, was a boy. I don’t know if he was asleep the whole time, but he certainly remained huddled and quiet for the duration of our visit. Maggie explained that he was a boy from the Kenyan border who makes a living by running a mobile night shop – business skills he acquired through Retrak’s schooling. He runs his business on the streets of Addis at night and sleeps at the drop-in centre during the day. This was a neat demonstration of one of Retrak’s approaches – to help these boys help themselves by imbuing them with relevant skills. Fekadu explained that one of his jobs was to school business trainers who can then pass on skills to the boys. Retrak operates vocational training too, such as tailoring, hairdressing and plumbing. Retrak’s ‘clients’ are boys who have found themselves living on the streets of Addis. With so many children living on the streets in the city, their reasons for finding themselves there are manifold, but Maggie outlined a few common causes. They could have been orphaned, perhaps due to AIDS, and have no other family to turn to; or they could have run away from their family due to some form of abuse or family conflict. Some may have been passing through Addis to join relatives in another part of the country only then, having had their money or travel documents stolen or lost, to find themselves stuck on the streets. Street survival for a boy means, essentially, begging or thieving. Retrak’s mandate is to inspire the boys to find a different way of living, but in order for the programme to work the boys must themselves want to escape life on the street. The charity’s workers – from Maggie and Fekadu downwards – all spend time on the streets looking out for boys and getting to know them, making sure they know about the Retrak centre, but also making it clear that attending the centre means a commitment to an ongoing programme, not just a place where the boys can pop in when they’re hungry. Once the boys having begun attending the centre, the charity’s social workers can begin to gently tease out their stories and needs – the boys often beginning by telling lies, before gradually gaining enough trust in their counsellors to reveal their true histories. If it is possible to return the boy safely to a nurturing family environment, Retrak will take the steps necessary to do so – including resolving any familial conflict – and then operate follow-up checks to make sure the situation remains safe. Maggie told us that of the boys helped by Retrak, most of whom are teenage but with some being as young as seven, around 75% ultimately return to their families, mostly to stay there. For those boys who have no-one to return to, Retrak operates a small hostel in the suburbs of Addis, which houses twelve teenage boys under the care of two foster parents. Fostering is virtually unknown in Ethiopia, but Retrak hopes to change this by introducing a programme of training in foster care.

Maggie took a moment to clarify that the children helped by Retrak are all boys. Although one in five of the city’s street children are girls, they are almost uniformly victims of sexual abuse; one estimate suggests that a girl alone on the streets of Addis will be co-opted into sex work within two days. Retrak’s staff are not trained in counselling girls with this kind of history and the charity, although working wonders with minimal resources (“You care for a lot with a little bit in this country,” as Maggie told us), simply isn’t big enough to affect the kind of boy/girl segregation needed to protect children with that kind of vulnerability. However, other NGOs do offer help to street girls, and Maggie expressed hope that when its operations in the city are bigger, Retrak might be able to follow suit.

In the meantime, the boys attending the drop-in centre have a set of simple rules to follow:-

Keep the place and yourselves clean.

Respect the staff.

Obey the objective of the programme.

Listen to each other.

Forgive.

No stealing.

No drugs.

No sex.

Now with some idea of the scale of the problem and the programme – and following a few minutes after the break-up of the ‘meeting’ to spend individually getting to know the centre for ourselves, including the little side rooms, the neighbourly goat and cockerel tethered out back, and the gruesome-looking toilet down another outdoor corridor which I was too frightened to use – we bade goodbye to what we would now be calling the ‘old’ drop-in centre. Piling back into our vehicles for a further few minutes’ negotiation of the bumpy Merkato streets, we were soon to get our first look at the ‘new’ one. It was located off a wide road seemingly on the cusp of Merkato and the suburbs – although there was a little stall selling spices on the corner, and plenty of other stalls down the road, there was also a mosque within hearing distance and (we would later discover) a primary school. The new centre sat inside a compound, like many larger Ethiopian buildings including the Taitu hotel – high stone walls surrounding the building to offer both shade and security. Two huge and rusty industrial gates, shut tightly, prevented any clue as to the nature of the operation within. Again Maggie knocked and one of the gates creaked open, revealing a short-ish Ethiopian man in overalls. This was Aberra, the guard. Maggie moved her Lada through the gate into a wide courtyard and, following, we saw a large two-storey house at the end of the yard, its first-floor balcony overlooking us. Over to the left stood a single-storey out-house with a roof that jutted forwards, awning-like, creating a shaded area just beside the big house, while on the right a pathway shaded by the enclosing compound walls led another to open area and out-house around the back.

In the shade of the awning we sat on wooden benches and again looked to Maggie, who produced a white board on which plans for the renovation had been laid. It did not look like it would be easy. The compound included fourteen rooms which would need to be emptied, cleaned and painted, one of which was a huge dark cavern (the ‘dirty room’) full of all kinds of abandoned rubbish and several walls that would need tearing out. All the foliage in the outdoor areas would need cutting down, lots of wooden doors and metal railings would need sanding and varnishing, ceilings would need to be made strong, electrics made safe, and toilets cleaned and in some cases unblocked. The table on the white board was divided into sections per task, per room, with a tick-box next to each. It looked like a large amount of tick-boxes.

However, with Maggie insisting on serving us tea with powdered milk and home-made buns, with the sun shining overhead but plenty of shade to be had, it still felt to me something like a pleasure jaunt. Although the task ahead looked formidable, for this afternoon we were still at the leisurely stage of simply discussing the work, and there was something luxurious about being able to just stand there, mug in hand, taking in our new surroundings and taking stock of what we had to hand and what we needed. I remember Neil and Adam being particularly key on how the group should be divided up to tackle each task, and the gear that would be needed by each team within the group. It was established quite quickly that while we had brought lots of paint rollers with us from the UK, we had only brought one roller tray. It has to be admitted that as an overall bunch we had been pretty uncoordinated on the fetching of supplies, with us all just fitting into each other’s luggage whatever bits and bobs we could bring. I was gutted about the roller tray thing, as I’d actually bought one specially (two quid from Home Bargains), then had to leave it at Manchester Airport with Carol’s husband because it couldn’t be fit in the luggage. It was a problem that could have easily been avoided, as Adam and I later reflected, because if you can fit one roller tray in your suitcase you can probably fit four or five – they slot together with little use of additional space. It was also established that the ‘dirty room’ (or ‘black hole’) would be such a mammoth task to clear that a special team should be allocated to nothing else for the first day or so. I’m pleased to say that I wasn’t part of the ‘dirty team’ – Carol, Ivan, Neil and Tina (if I remember correctly) stepped forward so that I didn’t have to. And Maggie indicated that most of the practical materials we needed could be bought from local dealers.

Despite the amount of work it was clearly going to take to renovate the thing, it was exciting, too, just to compare this building with the ‘old’ drop-in centre we’d just visited. The ‘old’ centre was basically a little shack slotted together from bits of iron. In comparison the new building was like a dilapidated mansion, its opulence gone to seed, but still pregnant with thrilling potential in its varied rooms, vista-giving balconies and sheer space. Plus it was hard not to be energised by the near-tangible positivity of Maggie and Fekadu, seeming so calm and happy not only in the face of the work ahead but in the wake of the logistical nightmare it must have been to get us there; all this on top of the real work of Retrak, the work with the boys, which must have been tiring enough by itself, not to mention sometimes distressing. Maggie and Fekadu gave no sign of this, however. It struck me that Maggie was infused throughout with the sort of jollity only ever possessed by people who are genuinely hard as nails; a quality I recognised from the most wonderful and formidable of teachers, mums and dinner ladies I’ve met through life, and doubtless one which is essential when dealing with as many young people as Maggie does.

As final plans were laid, it was soon time to call it a day and head back to the hotel – there to eat and get more rest, for we would have to be breakfasted and on the road by 8.15 in the morning, when the real work would begin. I found myself chatting to a boy who lived at the Retrak hostel, but had been staying at the new building, helping Aberra to guard the site. His name was Danny, which is a good job, because it helps to have something initially in common with someone when you don’t share a language with them. Actually he knew some phrases of English and I had my small stock of Amharic fragments, so we could communicate on a basis of swapping equivalent words. In fact, due to our similar names, he taught me to say ‘the same’ (‘aiy-neut’ in Amharic).

Soon we were packed off back to the hotel. Some of us agreed to go out as a group later on to sample one of the many Italian restaurants in this sector of the city. In the lull beforehand Steve lay on his bed exuding calm while I bumbled around the room, trying to work out how best to unpack and what clothes I should change into for an Ethiopian evening. Between five and six o’clock it was already getting dark and surprisingly cold, and we weren’t overburdened with warm clothes. After a while Alli knocked on our door – she and Lauren staying in a room across the corridor. Bless her, she was enquiring if our shower had a detachable head, the better for washing her hair. Well, if I had hair as long and gorgeous as Alli’s I think I’d want to use a detachable shower head too, but it wasn’t to be at the Taitu. We were still in the area of culture shock, and remained there during our trip some of us made to the Italian restaurant, which was located a couple of streets away from the hotel. We strolled there in two groups of around six. Surprises abounded. Everyone got a free starter – an innocuous-looking plate salad that turned out to be spicy-hot. Pete ordered a pizza which the menu described as ‘Calzoni’ (sic) and it arrived flat. “Fold-it-yourself”, quipped Karen. Not being much for beer and wine, I ordered Avocado juice. Something like a sweet green protein shake arrived in a tall glass, and I was happy.

It was a gentle evening; Brits abroad. Tomorrow would be the real stuff.

The Wild Geese: Day One in Ethiopia, Monday November 15th 2010

“It is difficult for such a person to conform to what Ford Madox Ford in his book of recollections has called the sole reason for writing one’s memoirs: namely, to paint a picture of one’s time.  Your short-piece writer’s time is not Walter Lippmann’s time, or Stuart Chase’s time, or Professor Einstein’s time.  It is his own personal time, circumscribed by the short boundaries of his pain and his embarassment, in which what happens to his digestion, the rear axle of his car, and the confused flow of his relationships with six or eight persons and two or three buildings is of greater importance than what goes on in the nation or in the universe…”

James Thurber, Preface to a Life

After months of preparation, the time had come.  In Manchester’s Terminal One they gathered, the 20-strong team charged with transforming Retrak’s new Addis Ababa building into something fit to be a drop-in centre for young kids.  Someone once dubbed us ‘The GMP 20’ (a bit like the G20 presumably, but with even less cash between us).  I’d prefer to think of us as the Wild Geese.  Admittedly, we weren’t Richard Burton and a bunch of old white guys flying into a made-up African country to rescue an imprisoned political leader in three hours flat, but the task laid out before us – to completely renovate the new centre in (after time taken out to rest, take part in activities with the kids, run in Haile Gabreselassie’s Great Ethiopian Run, and get in and out of Ethiopia) five days – seemed about as unlikely as that movie (which I’ve already referenced once in this blog and won’t mention again).

This blog has so far been all about the things that have happened to me on the journey to this point, to heading to Ethiopia with Retrak.  Now we’re at the point of departure, less than a week after the team surpassed their collective fundraising goal of £40,000.  The important stuff to record is what we learned when we were out there, about Ethiopia, about the work of Retrak, about ourselves, and what we achieved in real terms.  I’d like to keep to the point and not end up writing a naff travelogue.  However, I think anyone on the team will agree with me that what we went through in those nine days was a multi-faceted, extraordinary time.  Exactly what it all means, I don’t yet feel quite able to interpret.  So I’m just going to have to say what I remember happening, and hope it makes sense later.

So, Monday.  I remember it as a long, but pleasant day.  Most of us were there at 8.30am, many armed with various gardening and DIY accoutrements (paintbrushes, rollers, trays, scrapers, trowels) that we’d find hard to get hold of in Addis.  We didn’t know exactly what we’d need, what the tasks at hand would be, but these were the kind of items we’d been told to bring.  These we frantically shared out across each other’s suitcases so as not to breach the 20 kilo limit per each piece of luggage.  From then until touchdown in Addis Ababa at 2.10am Tuesday, local time, it was a day of flying and mooching in airports – we had a couple of hours in Istanbul in the middle.  Both flights were courtesy of Turkish Airlines, and may I say a word in their praise.  Their staff are courteous, their plastic-encased meals are unfeasibly appetising, and theirs drinks are free and pretty much unlimited.  These helped the flights to pass pleasantly enough.  The in-flight movies didn’t (kids’ movie Romona and Beezus, twice) and the appeal of the music channels accessible via my chair-arm earphones, each of which seemed to consist of around an hour of tracks on a continuous loop, was limited.

However, we had each other’s company and plenty to talk about to while away the time.  The GMP 20 had been divided into five teams of four, each charged with devising a 90-minute class with Retrak’s kids on a subject of our choice.  In one row of seats on the four-hour flight between Manchester and Istanbul, I was lucky enough to be accompanied by my team – Lauren, Nadine, and Alli who, as Team Leader, would be responsible our welfare and for ensuring we did nothing stupid.  Lauren managed to buy matching green US Army-style caps for each of us on the team to wear, and so we became Team Green Hats.  I wore my cap for most of the journey.  “I love you in that cap, Dan,” chuckled Lauren in her soft Mold accent, “you look really friendly.”  She also took advantage of the free wine situation and ended up rather charmingly merry.  Myself, being a near-teetotaller, I just had lots of hazelenuts in between meals, and the odd fruit juice.

We flew into Istanbul under cover of dark, dashing my hopes to get a good look at the city and the body of water it straddles, linking the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara.  (I should point out once again that I’m not a traveller, and that most of my experience of Istanbul comes from James Bond movies.  Not being overly used to being an aeroplane passenger, I banged my head on the overhead luggage rack three times during the day.  This would be a foretaste of things to come in Addis.)  As we flew over the darkened Bosphorous, I looked out of the window anyway to see what I could see.  The natural and man-made islands glowed like huge jellyfishes in the deep.  Seeing the fantastic outlines of the islands, glittering with thousands of tiny lights from buildings and highways and separated from each other by vast inky waters, it was like looking at a microcosm of the continents and oceans of the Earth from above.  It felt like we were in space, not coming into land in Turkey.  Plugging in the earphones and hearing ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’ by Crowded House added to the strangeness.

Istanbul Ataturk Airport (named after the leader who last century transformed Turkey from a proudly Muslim country to what now seems to me an uncomfortably secular one) is a deceptive place.  It’s bright, huge and full of attractive shops.  Most of us were pleased to stretch our legs, consider duty free purchases and sample free Turkish Delight.  “Hi, ice cream?” came the plaintive cry of a handsome vendor who seemed to be targeting me personally.  My heart went out to him – he’d gone to the trouble of wearing a fez and yet no customers were troubling his brightly-coloured booth – but I wasn’t hungry.  Meanwhile, Lauren’s spider sense was tingling.  “I’ve been to this airport before,” she said darkly, and added her opinion of it in words of one syllable.  But we didn’t listen to her.  Then Alli bought a round of drinks for maybe five of us and set herself back 36 quid.  The shock reverberated throughout the group.  I’d promised to sell Alli my spare bottle of Repel 50% DEET anti-insect spray as she’d forgotten to bring one, but after realising how much money she’d spent on my Limonato, I decided she’d already earned it.  “I told you so,” said Lauren.

We landed at Addis Ababa a little later than our scheduled 2.10am arrival on Tuesday morning and then took a long time to make it out of the airport due to the rigmarole of baggage reclamation, handing in security cards demanded by the Ethiopian government, getting our money changed into Ethiopian Birr (around 26 to the pound) and, finally, discovering we had left something on the plane.  Earlier we had all chipped in a little money to buy a thank you gift for Lucy, Retrak’s woman on the ground who had been our marshal throughout the preparation for this trip; indeed, she had been our coordinator, something not in her job description.  Having flown into Addis the day before to ensure the city was ready for us, she was now waiting for us in the arrivals area, and we realised that somehow her gift had been left under a seat on the plane.  Lauren explained the situation to a helpful official, but he wouldn’t let her on the plane as she didn’t have her passport to hand.  I did, however.  “Be fast”, the man said.  I ran back through the security area and up the stairs.  The corridors leading to the plane were disconcertingly empty as I passed the sign declaring “Welcome to Ethiopia” in English.  Welcome indeed – within half an hour of landing I was separated from my party and on the wrong side of the security gate, bearing my passport and ticket stub, but none of the other appropriate papers.  When I got to the plane, the passengers had boarded.  I ran onto the docking arm anyway.  The staff at the door to the plane stopped me in my tracks, but listened.  After a few moments, it became clear they had already found the discarded present (a box of makeup) and taken it off the plane.  Luckily, no-one seemed to have suspected it to be a bomb.  They let me have it back, and I went back through the security desks and rejoined the others.  Lauren had been charming the official by teaching him some words of Welsh.  With relief all round, we thanked him warmly.  “Igziabbher ymmesgen”, I said (“May God be praised”).  He chuckled at that – my first, but not last, instance of making an Ethiopian laugh with the clumsy sprinkling of Amharic in my chatter.

We hooked up with Lucy, who advised us to buy drinks now if we wanted them because the bar would be closed back at the hotel.  She led us into the car park where our minibus was waiting with the man who would be our regular driver, Atto (Mr) Gaemma.  He’d been waiting for us for an hour or so, but seemed happy enough.  Luggage transit happened courtesy of a bunch of guys in the car park who, for a small fee, hauled our cases onto the roof of the bus and secured them down with ropes and a tarpaulin.  Driving us down the spooky midnight streets, Atto Gaemma only had to stop the vehicle once to retrieve a fallen case.  All tired and woozy-headed, we sat on the bus more or less in silence, the passing of the empty streets increasingly dreamlike.  Occasionally a street detail would raise a titter of interest, such as when we passed Kaldi’s Coffee, part of the small Ethiopian café chain which, Lucy later informed me, had the balls to challenge Starbucks by ripping off their logo wholesale (Kaldi’s won the court case, by dint that no Ethiopian business concern could feasibly be a threat to the US mega-giant).

We turned a corner and sudden noise and bustle greeted us – a street of clubs pulsing with lights and loud music.  People – men, as I remember – lined the pavements here, enjoying a night on the town, regarding us with the natural curiosity attending the arrival of a busload of ferenj (the local word, used mostly with affection, for white foreigners).  Pop music mingled with the call to prayer of a nearby mosque.  Another turning brought us into the compound of our residence, the Itegue Taitu Hotel (est. 1898) in the Piazza (Italian) district.  We would find out later that it’s Ethiopia’s oldest hotel, named after the Empress Taitu, wife of Menelik II (Ethiopian Emperor from 1889 to 1913, during whose reign Addis was made capital).

Somewhat groggy, we disembarked.  The bar was closed and the hotel seemingly deserted, aside from the kindly assistant concierge who handed out keys, helped us with our bags and smiled a lot.  The hotel, all white stone walls and brown-painted wooden beams and balconies, had yet to reveal its secrets, but it was clearly full of character.  It was divided into a main building and a separate guest lodge, and a further building featured the hotel reception, a Bureau de Change and a printing shop.  I was billeted in the guest lodge with my roommate, Steve Wood.  Steve and I found ourselves standing on the steps leading down from the main building, reflecting on our arrival in Ethiopia.  It didn’t feel real yet, and the hotel, with its cavernous halls, eccentric design and eerie desertion, added to the strange sense of being children in an unknown playground.

It was coming up to 4.30am.  Breakfast had been scheduled for around 12 noon the next day.  We decided to get some sleep and leave reality for later.

The Taitu Hotel by day.

Touching the void (or: Hardly touching the velodrome)

The smudge of black in the middle is Tracy.

Saturday August 21^st: a day of much celebration, the sixth anniversary of the wedding of my best friend Baz and his brilliant wife Gem.  I always forget this date, even though I was Baz’s best man and it was one of my proudest days.  In 2010, however, I had a better excuse than usual for forgetting to ring them up and wish them well: I was suspended a hundred feet in the bloody air.  For thirty seconds, anyway.

A while back, GMP/Retrak team member Tracy Coward had an ace fund-raising idea: a sponsored abseil.  Tracy had the contacts to make it happen at basically no cost.  She knew that the National Cycle Centre (commonly called the Manchester Velodrome, near the City ground) had hosted charity abseils before and she also knew she had a good chance of getting technical support and equipment from GMP’s Tactical Aid Unit.  Finally she knew she had plenty of friends who were mad enough to dangle off a rope.  Although I wasn’t involved in the planning of the event and don’t know what hoops Tracy had to jump through, from this vantage point it seems like everything came together quickly, smoothly and as planned.

Very kindly, Tracy invited the rest of us on the Ethiopia team to take part in the abseil, provided we could each bring to the party at least £50 in sponsorship.  I say kindly because she didn’t need to let us in on her personal fundraising effort, nor to let us each keep the sponsor money we would be getting to add to our individual totals.  And of course, it was nothing but humane of her to allow those of us with vertigo, like me, to confront and conquer our entirely rational fear of gravity-related sudden death.  Out of impulsive masochism I casually agreed to having a bit of an abseil, but having only recently recovered from the Footsteps experience and already being busy with preparations for appearing in a piece of site-specific theatre (Tales of the Unexpected, which would be taking place at Manchester’s John Rylands Library the weekend after the abseil), I didn’t really have time to prepare, gather sponsorship, or even think about it.  In fact, not thinking about it was the only way I could deal with the prospect of dangling on a rope over a 200-foot drop.

Luckily, not for the first time in my life, the ActingLAB came to my rescue.  They’re my friends from the adult acting classes run at the Oldham Coliseum Theatre, and both they and the theatre itself have always been very supportive to me, particularly with my fund-raising.  A few of the members of the LAB are experienced fund-raisers themselves and when I started off on this whole journey, they were good enough to shower me with useful advice.  In July, the LAB had staged a production of Cake, a new comedy written and directed by Studio Salford playwright Mike Heath.  The Coliseum had kindly allowed me to do a brief talk about Retrak and the Ethiopia trip after each performance, followed by a collection from the audience.  On the Tuesday before the abseil, I organised a meal for the LABbers at Blue Tiffin, top Indian restaurant in Shaw (in the trading estate off Higginshaw Lane).  With a captive audience, I broke the news that I was abseiling and needed immediate sponsorship (or I would kill them all).  Within minutes I had £80 worth of sponsorship, plus £10 commission for arranging the meal, which they said I could give to Retrak.  That’s characteristic of the generous and nurturing quality of the group.  My abseil was assured on the spot, so a huge thank you goes to Fran, Val, Janet, Andrew, Denny, Ash, Sharon, Allison, Dave, Rhys and Teresa.

Now I just had to do the thing.

We had to be at the Velodrome for 12.30pm on the Saturday.  In the upper spectator area, overlooking the vast floor of the dome, the participants gathered – Tracy’s workmates and friends, those of us from the Ethiopia team (Tracy, Karen, Alli and Kevin, who was even more frightened than me and all power to him for being there) who were taking part, and also Jennie (who was on the team, but not abseiling – she’d sensibly persuaded her fiancé to do the drop in her place).  Nearby were scary-looking (because of their safety harnesses, padded suits and high domed helmets, not their nice friendly faces) members of the TAU, ready to kit us up and make us safe for the drop.

Now I don’t know about you, but I’d never done this before, and to me the word ‘abseil’ always implied bouncing comfortably down a wall or structure of some sort.  Not so, apparently.  As I gazed at the set-up here – which involved walking across the inside of the dome via a thin, curving gantry until you reach a cage affair hanging at the dome’s centre, from where you would then be lowered 200 foot straight down to the stadium floor beneath – I realised this was a popular variation: a free drop abseil.  Straight down, with nothing solid to come into contact with at any point until you hit the ground. Probably for the best, really: wouldn’t want to run the risk of distracting from the sheer terror.

The process of suiting up, getting the safety brief, crossing the gantry, waiting in the cage and then descending took about twenty minutes each and there were twenty of us.  Karen, myself and several others leaned on the spectators’ railing and watched in fearful suspense as we awaited our turn.  First to take the plunge was Tracy.  In no way characteristic of her surname, she led from the front.  That’s her in the picture above – to give a bit of scale to the thing, she’s the tiny black smudge hanging halfway between the roof and the floor.  Sorry, my Nokia is too slim for a zoom lens.  She came up from stadium beaming.  Tracy is marvellously enthusiastic and marvellously fearless.  I was warm with admiration, but still scared.  It didn’t help when Kevin did the drop shortly afterwards; Kev’s a strapping, sensible, jokey, sure-footed guy, but came up visibly shaken.  Utterly terrified, he’d descended to the floor as quickly as safety allowed.  Now he looked in need of a little lie-down.  “Never again,” he said; he was pleased he’d done it, but hadn’t remotely enjoyed it, and had a minor regret:  “I just wish I’d had the presence of mind to stop and wave when I was halfway down,” he said.  Inadvertently, he gave me a personal goal.  I thought: I’ll see your wave and raise you a thumbs-up.

Soon it was my turn.  At the bottom of the gantry, the TAU team harnessed me up and explain how the winch control works.  You pull the handle down gently, the rope is released slowly and you make a controlled decent.  You pull down further, and the rope releases faster, but you pull down too far and the mechanism jams – descent is halted so as to prevent plummeting – and needs to be reset before the descent can continue.  I thought: sod that.  I’m not jammed up and getting stuck in mid-air where I have to use my brain to get the mechanism working again.  I’ll have a nice steady slow descent, thank you.

I ascended the gantry.  This was pretty nerve-shredding in itself.  The curvature of the crawlway (a word I have just invented) and handrails, which you don’t dare let go of, leads you to lean forward, staring through the holes under your feet at the stadium floor hundreds of feet below.  Then I got to the cage and waited on the outside balcony, with a couple of others, in funereal silence.  When I was finally ushered into the cage itself, the TAU guys ran through the winch safety details with me a couple more times.  Incidentally, time’s passed and I’m sorry, I can’t remember the names of these men and women, but I want to assure you I bloody love every one of them.

The ropes were hooked up – primary and safety.  I was assured that even if the winch mechanism gave way, the guys were controlling a second rope which would take my weight.  Then I was encouraged, gently, to turn my back on the sheer drop and calmly sit down on sweet thin air.  This, as anyone who’s done an abseil will tell you, is the difficult bit, the leap of faith, where you just have to lean back and trust the rope to hold you.

I freaked out, hanging on to the metal of the cage for dear life.  I could see the look in the eyes of the TAU team: “We’ve got a live one here.”  “Easy, fella,” I was told.  “Relax now.  You’re safe, you’re completely safe so just breathe, let the rope take the weight and you’ll be fine.”

Eventually I did let go of the cage, transferred my hands clumsily to the rope and hung on it, legs splayed to the edge of the cage, breathing through puffed cheeks like a mother in labour.  “Good lad,” said one of the guys, “you’re doing well.  You look like a professional.”

“What, like Lewis Collins?” I said, referring to the huge-nostrilled star of ITV’s The Professionals (1978-84).  After all, this might be my only chance ever to make a really dated joke about TV while suspended in mid-air.

“No,” came the reply.  “Not like Lewis Collins.”

“Right.  I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“It is a compliment.”

Talking nonsense did the trick.  It calmed me down.  Time to do this thing.

I let my feet slip under the ledge of the cage and let them dangle freely.  Then I released the winch handle.  The rope paid out, nice and easy.  My attention was fixed hypnotically on keeping that rope paying out at an even pace, not jamming up.  It’s a shame, because Tracy had fitted me up with a little camcorder to film my drop and capture any thoughts I cared to share by way of commentary.  I had hoped to impart some wise philosophy in measured David Attenborough-like tones (“In conquering primal fears of falling, one achieves a higher state of freedom” or something), but I had no brain left for words.  (Possibly I am making up for that now.)  However, I did remember to wave, in honour of Kev.  I paused the descent, stuck out a hand mechanically and shook it around, hoping it was vaguely in the direction of those watching – I think there was some response – then continued the drop.  Soon I reached the ground.  The safety guys at the bottom of the rope unhooked me and made sure I was okay.  Then I walked out of the stadium on extremely shaky legs.

It was not enjoyable.  It was bowel-troublingly intense.  I felt physically in shock for the rest of the day.  The only solution was to go into Manchester and get a burger down me which, together with the company of Howard Whittock and Martin Clare who were just out of a Comedy Store lesson, quelled the trembling a little.  But I am plenty glad I did it.  At least I know that £80 for Retrak was well-earned.

Retrak’s scheme for next year apparently includes staging an abseil down the side of Guy’s Hospital in London for a minimum of £200 sponsorship.  Not exactly a cake walk.  For some reason, I am tempted.

Masochism is its own reward…