Her intelligence and watchfulness
On uncertainty and light and dogs
I am in limbo. That is, according to Merriam-Webster:
I am in 2d though I could be in 1 and not know about it. Anyway this limbo is the kind you get in publishing and that every author will know about. I sent in my first draft of Fish Lipstick (my recently devised and I think damn fine title) a few weeks ago. I immediately escaped, then to France, and now I’m sitting at my desk avoiding doing my taxes. Because I must wait. Someone in the kitchen downstairs just asked me, how long will you have to wait? The answer is, as Italians say, boh. No idea. For once, I have other book ideas and have even sort of started them. I have work to do as well as doing my taxes. I know that this moment of liberation will not last and that the edits will come back (plural because I have two contracts, one with WW Norton (US) and the other with Granta UK)) and then I will return to ten hour days and the sense that I cannot afford the time to walk into town. I look forward to the edits, really. My mother often expresses surprise that I am so willing to have my work chewed over and spat out covered in red pen by other people. But the chewing and spitting makes it better.
At university, I studied Italian and French, and because my university was Oxford, the modern “languages” course was more modern “foreign literature” course. Which I do not regret, because I discovered Dante and loved him. I loved him so much I understood him in the original, and I won a prize for an essay I wrote about his book La Vita Nuova. I can now remember nothing of the essay or of the book. And although I loved Dante, and I loved The Divine Comedy, I can only remember the most glamorously horrific stories from it and mostly from Inferno. Count Ugolino, walled up in a tower with his children where they ate each other. Pietro della Vigna, a name I remember but not his story. Thanks to the internet, I know now that his real life story was as bad as Dante’s chosen fate for him: Della Vigna was a lawyer to the Holy Roman Emperor Fredrick, who turned against him because that’s what emperors do — he accused his lawyer of being involved with an assassination plot — and his former right hand man’s eyes gouged out. Ah the kindness of Christians (and all other religions). Della Vigna then bashed his head against the stone walls of his cell and killed himself, so Dante put him in the Suicide Woods, where della Vigna’s spirit was fused to a tree. It is generally thought that putting della Vigna in the woods rather than in the ninth circle with the traitors and the Devil, meant that Dante believed the emperor’s accusations were wrong.
The Suicide Woods:
Non fronda verde, ma di color fosco;
Non rami schietti, ma nodosi e ‘nvolti;
Non pomi v’eran, ma stecchi con tòsco
No green leaves in that forest, but black
No branches straight and smooth, but gnarled and knotted;
No fruits there, but toxic brambles
Dunno, Dante, would it really be so bad to live for eternity as a tree? Discuss.
Limbo, a place of uncertainty and maybe disquiet. Maybe I started writing about limbo because this morning I read this beautiful essay about finding the light in dark times, by the clinical psychologist Mary Pipher. It’s behind a paywall but I hope you can get access somehow.
I am in the last decades of life and sometimes I feel that my country and our species are also nearing end times. The despair I feel about the world would ruin me if I did not know how to find light. Whatever is happening in the world, whatever is happening in our personal lives, we can find light.
This time of year, we must look for it. I am up for sunrise and outside for sunset. I watch the moon rise and traverse the sky. I light candles early in the evening and sit by the fire to read. And I walk outside under the blue-silver sky of the Nebraska winter. If there is snow, it sparkles, sometimes like a blanket of diamonds, other times reflecting the orange and lavender glow of a winter sunset.
We can watch the birds. Recently it was the two flickers at my suet feeder with the yellow undersides of their wings flashing, the male so redheaded and protective, the female so hungry. Today it may be the juncos, hopping about our driveway, looking for seeds. The birds are always nearby. Their calls are temple bells reminding me to be grateful.
In Dante’s Limbo, his first encounter is a great castle filled with light, filled with great spirits (Aristotle, Avicenna) who speak gently. I don’t mind the dark days because we are nearly at the time when the light starts to get longer again. The dark makes the light more valuable. This is how I deal with darkness. Tips welcome:
I try not to reach for my phone when I wake up, and have my soul immediately dragged down with news.
I have a light clock that wakes me with light and birdsong.
I have a headtorch and go running on the moors and in the woods at night, where even though I am in good company, I am entranced by being in a small circle of light and by that being all that I have and all that I need.
I do yoga.
I don’t always win. Sometimes hormones drag me down, sometimes I wish I could go of an evening to my allotment and put my hands in the earth. But that will come soon. Meanwhile I manage, and I wait.
Animal hero of the week: PoW81A
Judy was a brown and white pointer, born in Shanghai in 1936. Like Able Seaman Simon, Judy was on ships in the Yangtze River in China before and during World War II. This is how she got afloat:
In the autumn of 1936, the crew of the Insect-class gunboat HMS Gnat voted to get a ship's mascot. This was due in part to the competitive nature of the gunboats, with HMS Bee, Cicada, and Cricket already having mascots of their own. The Captain and the Chief Bosun's mate, Lt. Cmdr. J. Waldergrave and Chief Petty Officer Charles Jefferey, purchased Judy from the kennel and presented her to the crew.
Insect class! Those military lads are so wacky. I’ve just written about the football class of fighting fishing trawlers in WWII, in my book. HMT Huddersfield Town, Bolton Wanderers and the like. I think if you were stationed on a ship called Gnat, you’d want something to add to its appeal. Judy did that. She was a popular ship’s mascot, and although the crew thought she might be able to be trained as a gundog.
Initial attempts to train Judy as a gundog for shooting parties ashore were a failure and she would often end up falling overboard, forcing the ship to come to a stop to retrieve her.
The crew started treating her as a pet instead and the gundog opportunity sailed on by and no-one much minded. The Chinese cooks didn’t much like her, so she was trained to avoid them. She earned her keep by alerting the crew when river pirates were about to board the Gnat. She also heard Japanese aircraft approaching before humans did.
Insect class? It gets better. Soon the Insect Class were replaced by the Locust Class of ships, and Judy moved to HMS Grasshopper. Grasshopper and Dragonfly evacuated people from Singapore when that fell to the Japanese and Judy apparently greeted every refugee who came on board, personally. (How? A lick? A jump? A nuzzle?)
In 1942, both the Grasshopper and Dragonfly were attacked from the air, and the survivors had to land on an island in the South China sea.
Leonard Walter Williams, a British seaman who served on board HMS Grasshopper, recalled his memories of Judy in an interview for the Imperial War Museum.
He said:
We landed on the island and naturally water was short. Judy was lost one day and we couldn’t find her so we went to search for her and she had found a patch where she dug a big hole and she had found fresh water for the survivors of the Dragonfly and Grasshopper.
Judy was a saviour then. She was a marvellous life-saver.
Men and dog walked for hundreds of miles to try to get somewhere they could be evacuated. They reached Padang in Sumatra but just missed the last evacuation ship. Instead, they — men and dog — became prisoners of the Japanese. At the camp in Medan, an aircraft man named Frank Williams shared his rice ration with Judy and from then on they were together. When the prisoners were told they were being moved to Singapore, but the Japanese refused to let Judy board the ship, she was hidden in a sack and carried on the men’s shoulders. The ship was torpedoed the next day, and 500 of the 700 aboard were killed, but Judy survived.
Mr Williams added:
When we were torpedoed we heeled over and luckily Judy was by a port hole.
We opened the port hole and Judy was pushed through and she ran down the ship’s side.
Quite a few of us were lucky to get out at that particular time. A lot of people owe their lives to Judy. She was pushing pieces of wood towards people who couldn’t swim.
The Japanese threatened to execute Judy, but the chief of the Medan camp, also evacuated to Singapore, defended her. He gave her an official Prisoner of War number so she couldn’t be executed. She was Prisoner of War 81A. This also qualified her for rations, which Judy liked.
Judy was reunited with Frank and remained with him throughout the war, surviving several camp moves as well as gunshot wounds, alligator bites and attacks from wild dogs before the Japanese surrender in August 1945.
That bald summary is from the UK government’s page on Judy. Here is more vim and colour from (sorry) Wikipedia’s page on Judy (Dog):
After four weeks at the new camp, they were moved back to Sumatra by paddle steamer. They had been told that it was a "special mission" to pick fruit. Instead they spent a year in Sumatra, with the Japanese using the men to cut through the jungle to lay railway track. She also proved useful in conducting trades with the locals, as she would indicate when someone was hiding near to the track. Her barking deliberately alerted the guards to when there was something too large for her to handle in the jungle, such as tigers or elephants.
The experience saw a change in the dog, with Frank later writing, "She wasn't that tame, obedient dog anymore, she was a skinny animal that kept herself alive through cunning and instinct." Because of the remoteness of the work camp, she was at a reduced risk from the local population who Frank feared would eat her. A radarman named Tom Scott later wrote that Frank and Judy shared an unusual bond, with Frank able to send the dog into the jungle with a click and recall her with a whistle. On one occasion, Frank found Judy attempting to bury an elephant's leg bone.
In early 1945, Frank began to find that Judy was more aggressive towards the Japanese and Korean guards. Although he'd normally send her into the jungle to avoid them, on one occasion, the guards gave chase and shot at the dog. He later found Judy bleeding from the shoulder where she had been grazed by the bullet. He covered the wound with some palm fronds, but could do nothing else to treat or reward her. After moving camps once more, Judy was sentenced to death by the Japanese as part of a plan to control a lice breakout. She disappeared for three days, with guards conducting sweeps in an attempt to find her. She only reappeared when the Japanese forces abandoned the camp.
After the war she was sent to England, a country she had never been to, where she was awarded the Dickin Medal and became famous, although she manages to look entirely unimpressed in official pictures:
Her Dickin medal citation:
For magnificent courage and endurance in Japanese prison camps, which helped to maintain morale among her fellow prisoners and also for saving many lives through her intelligence and watchfulness.
She was euthanized at the age of 14 after developing a tumour, and was buried in her RAF jacket and with medals. Here are Judy and Frank, best pals.
