Section 7: Gardens, Travel, Arts & Reviews

7

Gardens, Travels, Arts & Reviews

The Renovation of the Forum Garden by Amy Zavatsky

The ‘Forum Garden’ is the rectangular area running approximately north-south which is bounded by the Wolfson Dining Hall (Kelly Building) on the east, by the White Hall building on the west, by White Hall and Staircase VIII on the south, and by an open area to the north. The project to renovate this part of the College was conceived in 2019. The goal was to make the area, which had become overgrown and little more than a thoroughfare, a more attractive and better used part of the Queen’s Lane site. The refreshed planting scheme was prepared by Walter Sawyer, former Head Gardener at Wolfson College and former Superintendent of the University Parks, with the aim of having year-round interest in terms of colour and structure. The lighting scheme was designed by lighting consultant Francesco Miniati to highlight the new planting arrangement and to make the area more appealing. This was to be achieved with a carefully balanced distribution of light on the ground and on the walls surrounding the area. out swiftly and energetically by the College maintenance team and overseen by the Deputy Estates Manager, Alex Grant. Sourcing of plants was exceptionally difficult due to supply problems, and Walter Sawyer and the College Gardeners (Susan Kasper and Jennifer Cockram) spent weeks searching for suppliers, only to find that, in too many cases, plants advertised on websites were not available. Some plants had to be bought in sizes smaller than specified, and a few are still unavailable.

The installation of the new lighting was also delayed by supply problems and finally took place in the spring of 2022. The design scheme included luminaries along the pathway at ground-level, spotlights in two of the raised beds directed at the green wall and the new birch tree, and high-level lights on the side of the Kelly Building. More attractive low-energy light fittings replaced the basic functional lights on the east elevation of White Hall and in the doorways to White Hall, Staircase VIII, and the Wolfson Dining Hall. The timing and brightness of the lights can be controlled remotely. In addition to the planting and the lighting,

Funds for the initial design phase of the project came from a legacy from alumnus Peter Brown (1952, Geography). A generous donation from alumnus and Honorary Fellow John Cox (1955, English) helped to cover the main costs. The start of the project, planned for spring 2020, was delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown restrictions. The work began in earnest in spring 2021, with clearance of all vegetation and removal and replacement of over 40m3 of soil. This had to be done by hand (with spade and wheelbarrow) due to the difficulty of accessing the site and the avoidance of unnecessary noise. The work was carried

the external walls of Staircase VIII were repainted and an etched transom window installed above its entrance. That this elevation is the back of a Grade II listed Georgian property (48 High Street) can now be better appreciated, especially when looking south from near the Chapel. To complete the upgrade of the area, a new table with seats was installed where the old birch tree stood, and new matching planters were purchased to set off the garden seat near the Chapel and the entrance to Staircase VIII.

The Garden Fellow would like to thank all who were involved in bringing this project to a successful completion.

Amy Zavatsky, Garden Fellow

Persephone by Emma Hawkins

This summer I had the incredible opportunity of directing my new musical, Persephone, as it toured to four cities in the UK. We’d been planning the tour since the show finished its debut run at the

Oxford Playhouse the previous November, yet despite the eight months of prep I couldn’t escape the feeling of ‘how did we end up here?’ This feeling was perhaps to be expected, given the long road taken to get there. I was fifteen when I started work on Persephone (then titled Olympus), and I spent the best part of five years working on the show alone in my room at home. I’d never written anything longer than a poem before and was very shy about sharing my work, so rarely mentioned it to anyone. I just loved musicals and wanted to have a go at writing my own. I was drawn to the dramatics and relatable characteristics of the Greek Gods and so decided to write a big ensemble piece around them. However, I soon encountered the problem that every time I sat down to write I went straight to Persephone and couldn’t convince myself to write any of the other plotlines. There was something about this naïve country girl that resonated with me and felt very comfortable to write. I was familiar with the most famous Persephone myth, in which she is abducted by the God of the Underworld, Hades, but through my research I found many more stories around the character that began to weave into a rich narrative. Persephone would be my main focus for the show. It was a long time before I found the courage to share my work with anyone, but it was probably the biggest milestone I hit both personally and creatively as it led to me taking the project seriously enough to find a composer. I worked with several different composers for short periods of time before finding Carrie Penn, a Music student from St Anne’s whom I met through drama friends. Carrie’s music was a godsend in helping bring the show to life, and shortly after she joined the project in 2019 we started planning the next steps for our show.

We decided that, before we hit the stage, we’d hold a workshop for a few months to test out the script and score with a group of actors. Whilst this ended up happening over Zoom due to Covid, it was still extremely helpful in the development of the show, leading to some major changes that have had a lasting impact. We then began wondering how to get the show on stage. I was already directing work through my student production company, Jazz Hands Productions, alongside producer Ana Pagu and choreographer Max Penrose. With them on board, it wasn’t long before we decided to put in a bid for a slot at the Oxford Playhouse (OP) for Michaelmas 2021. This would be a bit of a gamble as the OP had never previously programmed an original student musical, but we knew that was the best place for our show. So we went for it. One very long and painful bidding process later, we’d secured a fiveshow slot in the Playhouse in November.

The subsequent process of staging Persephone at the OP was long, intense and yet surprisingly smooth sailing. We auditioned and cast at the end of Trinity term, bringing eleven talented individuals into the company. Over the summer Carrie and I fine-tuned and completed the script and score (bar one song that was finished in the first week of rehearsals!). The first few weeks of Michaelmas 2021 were a familiar balance of rehearsals, degree work, production meetings and more. I think a particular highlight for me was the first Sitzprobe (run-through) where we got the band and the cast playing through the show for the first time. None of us had heard the orchestrations before, so it was the first time we got to hear the full sound of the music come together! The OP run went down a success with the cast of 11, 8-person band and 82 crew members pulling together five shows for the around 1700 in-house and online audience members. The question now was “what next?”.

I was always keen to take the show on tour, wanting to reach wider audiences and to also develop it further. A similar feeling rippled through the company as no-one seemed ready to let it go; the after party felt less of a ‘farewell’ and more of an ‘until next time’. So, the day after Persephone finished at the OP, I messaged our Producer Ana about taking the show on tour. She told me not to talk to her for at least a week.

I waited and, once the aftermath of the run had begun to settle, we began to think seriously about the logistics: there’s a reason why student OP shows don’t go on tour. For starters, the show was too long for the typical Edinburgh Fringe show, so we’d have to cut it down or stick to regional theatres. Eleven cast members plus band and crew would be too big so we’d have to find as many places as possible to double up or cut people. Not to mention the set from the OP (flying trees and steel deck) would never be tour-able, so we’d have to re-think the design from scratch. Yet all of these things felt very doable and with a dedicated team behind it we reckoned we could just about make it work.

After a lot of spreadsheets and emails we managed to get programmed into venues in Cambridge (The Junction), Doncaster (Little Theatre), Liverpool (Valley Theatre) and London (The Courtyard). Ana worked tirelessly to secure funding, our company stage manager, Mina Moniri, set about booking accommodation and working out the logistics of touring eighteen people around the UK, and I started adapting the script, building off changes I’d planned to make from the OP run.

done, I jumped straight into rehearsals. We chose to take a week at the end of Trinity term to start working in some of the new actors (having lost some of the original cast) as well as to re-workshop new bits of script. We also managed to record an album which we later released on streaming platforms to help promote the show.

In late July we reunited in the Student Union for our official rehearsal period. I’ve had some rushed rehearsals in my time, but even I wasn’t entirely sure how ten days to rehearse a show that originally took five weeks would pan out! I remember sitting in the first run-through, nervously eyeing Max on my left and thinking through all the bits I thought would be under-rehearsed. But I wasn’t giving the actors enough credit and by part-way through I was reassured that we were not only on track, but that we might actually have something worth touring. And lucky for us because, before we knew it, we were packing up into cars and heading off to our first venue: Cambridge. Writing this a few days after returning from tour it’s hard to summarise what tour was like, especially when compared to the distance I have to the OP staging or the writing process. It was a melting pot of bonding, stress, triumphs, failures, set-backs and discoveries. There was a familiar rhythm to each location with getin, tech and shows all unfurling similarly to the last place, and yet each city and each venue also had its own personality. I think one of my favourite aspects of tour was being allowed to live completely in what was going on, not having to fit it in around the edge of degree life or work. I could spend three hours trekking around Cambridge looking for a certain kind of green paint and not feel like I’ve somehow wasted time. The length of the tour was also an interesting new dynamic to play with. Whilst each venue brought new problems to be solved in terms of blocking or the like, having more shows to perform gave a certain amount of freedom to the performances. I noticed the actors really sinking into their roles and becoming more

creative with their choices as the tour moved on. By the last few shows Max and I put down our notebooks and sat back to enjoy the show, fully handing it over to the cast.

I rarely get emotional when watching my own shows – perhaps it’s the overfamiliarity, the sleep deprivation or the critical objectiveness with which I tend to watch performances as the director. Yet on the last night of the tour I sat at the back of the theatre and let myself be absorbed into the story. I’ve held off writing too much about the show itself as once I start, I can’t stop. There’s a number Persephone sings that leads into the finale called ‘Last Days of Spring’. It’s always been a bit of a tear-jerker for the company, acting as a cathartic release to all the emotional trauma in the show (it was often the reason why actors appeared tear-stained for their final moments on stage). There are points in the music where Persephone’s solo is supported by a group of five voices (the Narrators) singing harmonies offstage. However, on this particular performance there wasn’t the light touch of harmonies, but rather a wall of sound pushing through from behind the backcloth as the harmony section was hit with every cast and crew member backstage joining in. There was something about feeling the warmth of the whole company in that moment of that song that made the whole process condense into a singular moment. I thought of all the milestones we’d gone through, all the people who put time and trust into this project. My favourite parts of directing are those moments where you realise that little idea you had has spiralled into a sprawling patchwork of collaboration and creativity – and in that moment I managed to let go just enough to see that this had become quite some patchwork. It’s uncertain where Persephone will be going next. With many company members, including myself, recently graduating we’re all set to scatter into new lives with new interests and projects. We of course all hope that Persephone may one day be brought back, taken on to new things, but for now I think we’re ready to let go. There are new stories out there to tell and with all the lessons this show has taught us I think we’re ready to move on to new things. But who knows, maybe Persephone will come back one day. In her words, “maybe tomorrow”. Emma Hawkins (2018, Fine Art)

Le Tour de St Edmund by Raghul Ravichandran

The Matt Greenwood Travel Scholarships were established in 2017 by the students, staff, alumni and friends of the Hall in memory of Matt Greenwood (2013, Engineering Science), who loved to travel and sadly passed away while a student at St Edmund Hall. Each year, a prize of up to £1000 per year is awarded for travel in the UK or anywhere in the world for good purposes, with a particular emphasis on projects which embody Matt’s gifts of courage, adventure and concern for others. This year, Raghul Ravichandran (Raggy) (2019, DPhil Engineering Science) received an award to support his travel by bicycle along the landmarks of the life of the College’s founder, St Edmund of Abingdon. Raggy cycled 800km from St Edmund’s tomb in Pontigny, France to his birthplace in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. He raised around £4,200 for the Bone Cancer Research Trust and Kidneys for Life charities. The cycle along the route of the life of St Edmund of Abingdon was initially an offthe-cuff suggestion to a group of friends at the Teddy Hall bar at the start of the year. This pretty quickly snowballed into a realistic route based on cycling range and cities of interest: • Pontigny – home to the Abbey containing St Edmund’s tomb; • Paris – where he studied and taught, as well as the location of the famous

Cistercian Collège des Bernardins, where his students were particularly influential; • Canterbury – where he served as

Archbishop during Henry III’s reign; • Abingdon – his site of birth and education; • Oxford – where he founded a small academic hall, of which some of you may have heard. Extra historical context was given by Professor Henrike Lähnemann, who was particularly keen for me to keep an eye out for the distinctive architecture of the Cistercian Order. One ferry ticket and a Channel crossing later and we were ready to go: I was on my bike, while my partner Philippa Warman (Lincoln College, DPhil Materials, 2020) was in the official Tour de St Edmund Support Car.

Days 1-2: Pontigny to Paris via Fontainebleau

We drove out to Pontigny Abbey, tucked away in the outskirts of Auxerre: the ‘Gateway to Burgundy’. The Abbey itself was quiet and beautiful with the old, cobbled paths outside, and the tall, whitewalled interior stretching far above us. St Edmund’s tomb was placed in an ornate shrine above the main altar, with a small descriptive plaque. The start of the trip was exciting and difficult, simply due to the unfamiliar roads and area. I explored every small town I passed through, sampling the delicious pastries of the traditional boulangeries and adhering to the golden rule of endurance sport: food is fuel. Yes, that includes chocolate eclairs for lunch. No, not if you’re in the support car. Perhaps the best pit stop of the trip was the Basilica of Saint Mathurin: a gothic church in part-ruin, dwarfing the tiny village that surrounds it. I stumbled upon the church accidentally, but stopped for a couple of pictures under the nesting pigeons and collapsed roof. The route from Pontigny started as deep

woodland, with a healthy number of friendly pelotons whizzing past during the French bank holiday weekend. This slowly transitioned to highly cobbled side streets, as I avoided the main traffic arteries into Paris. Cycling in central Paris was absolute chaos (though a lot of fun), where clearly traffic laws were optional for some people. We were able to stay in central Paris thanks to the kind generosity of Fr Mark Osborne and Fr Jeffrey John of Saint George’s Anglican Church, and by chance met Aularian and Honorary Fellow Sir John Daniel (1961, Metallurgy and Science of Materials) after the Sunday service. Days 3-6: Paris to Canterbury via Beauvais, Amiens, and Montreuil-sur-Mer

The route from Paris to Calais involved small roads through stereotypical small villages in the French countryside. It was here that I gained a huge appreciation for cycling in France compared to the UK: the small country roads were very wellmaintained (take note Oxfordshire County Council), and drivers were generally patient and friendly. The Normandy region of France was mostly agricultural, quite flat, and adorned with wind farms scattered across the landscape. Watching the turbines rise and fall over the horizon was fantastic, but only when they were pointing the right way (i.e. when the wind was helping me along)! This section of the route had the hardest days of the cycling trip where I battled constant headwinds with no cover. The best views were along the final stretch to Calais, where it became increasingly hilly but boasted blue skies and excellent tarmac.

Since the route was quite rural, navigation was a bit more tricky. A huge thanks to my GPS system for thinking that paved roads and agricultural access tracks are the same thing; I’m genuinely impressed that my road bike held together for miles of rocky dirt paths and fields. During the evenings, we managed to do a small amount of exploration: Beauvais Cathedral and market (more pastries!); preserved WW1 trenches and war graves in the Somme valley; the cold beach at Berck; being yelled at by old ladies for cycling on top of the walls of an 800-yearold citadel at Montreuil, which incidentally was part of our youth hostel.

Days 7-8: Canterbury to Oxford via London and Abingdon

We dropped back onto the shores of the UK with a Spitfire flypast at Dover for the late Queen’s jubilee weekend. Every road from Dover to Canterbury was the name of a hill (to the detriment of my quads), and every hill had a village decorated with Union Jack bunting. Another thanks to Fr Max Kramer at Canterbury Cathedral, now Chaplain at Keble College, for his generosity and company in letting us stay with him inside the walls of the Cathedral grounds. Cycling in and out of London was busy. Due to the jubilee road closures, we avoided the most direct route through central London and detoured south of the Thames instead. There, I had my first and only mechanical breakdown: a rear hydraulic brake failure, locking the brake onto the wheel. I encountered yet another moment of kindness in the form of a bike store owner who graciously donated a late evening brake service and bike-check, getting me back on the road again. Thank you to Jono at Kemsing Bikes in Sevenoaks for your generosity and expertise. After spending the last of my legs crossing the Chiltern Hills, it was time to take the story full circle, to the site of St Edmund’s birth at St Edmund’s Lane in Abingdon. In the town centre, there was a huge throng of people trying to intercept currant buns launched from the top of the County Hall. A bit perplexed, I detoured around, but not before catching one in my helmet: the last of the journey’s snacks. I later learned the bun throwing is carried out on every occasion of a royal event. Pulling back into Oxford was a bit of dream: reaching Teddy Hall at around 6pm, and then going for a curry down Cowley Road straight after. It was good to be back.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank everyone else who supported the journey: St Edmund Hall, and Michaela and Peter Greenwood for enabling the journey through the Travel Scholarship in Matt’s name. Thanks to Philippa for her official support car services in the form of endless patience, snacks and photos; and for her meticulous organisation. Thank you to Mum and Dad for their encouragement and advice before, during and after the trip. Thank you also to the College Chaplain, Revd Dr Zachary Guiliano, for reaching out to help us organise accommodation in Paris and Canterbury; and to Subha Aunty and Dhileep Uncle for hosting us in London. Lastly, a massive thanks to everyone that supported the fundraiser; I read through all the messages of kindness and encouragement, and kept them with me through the endless hill climbs, headwinds and questionable terrain. Raghul Ravichandran (2019, DPhil Engineering Science)

Diasporan Wilderness by Gold Maria Akanbi

Hall student Gold Maria Akanbi (2021, Master of Fine Art) is BritishNigerian and a multidisciplinary artist and craftsman, specialising in painting, performance, assemblage, garment creation, writing/ book-making and perennial research. Gold’s exhibition ‘Diasporan Wilderness’, which ran at the Dolphin Gallery (St John’s Gallery) in June 2022, looked at the ways in which a disruption in one’s internal equilibrium is experienced, as often being a second-generation immigrant from the Global South means that there is no simple concept of ‘Home’. Here, they describe their inspirations and experiences in putting the exhibition together. The materiality of Fine Art is often called into question in this present day and age. ‘Why should we take this banana on the wall seriously’, ‘this painter only does abstraction because they can’t REALLY paint’ or even, ‘why would you create something that has no function?’ But to be honest, art has long ago ceased to just be about craftsmanship and is now about the ability to move or even transcend one’s audience.

As I lay there, half awake, I rummaged around my bed a little and found my new favourite red pen and Byzantine-decorated notebook and went to work.

This was another one of those dreams that I was going to interpret and turn into an artwork. My dreams are masterpieces of personal agony, academic research, popular news and culture, psychology, colour theory, mythos, and allegory. The day that I can truly recreate my dreams to my expectations, is the day that I would have officially become a ‘Master’ of sorts. So it may never happen – because mastery to me seems extremely boring. Experimentation is far more interesting. That said, I’m a bit obsessive so…

I get to work on understanding my dream and how others could relate to the installation that I am planning.

1) The Personal: Blue + Red = Purple

In my dream my mother was beside herself about how ‘different’ I was to the rest of the family. I’m on the spectrum (and loud about it), I’m bisexual, I’m not conventional, I practice the traditional Yoruba religion of Ifá and not Christianity (she and all her siblings and parents are literally pastors), I’m somewhat passably attractive and yet not dating or even very social and my British accent gets stronger and ‘posher’ every time I see her, I am also extremely sex and body positive. Also, I am WAY too nice in comparison to her other kids, almost constantly being in the servitude of others – this was also VERY weird to her.

So in my dream, when the whole family wore traditional blue attire and I wore purple, my Mum needed an answer and a friend and ‘elder’ came to her and said that I am borne from a similar cloth as her and the rest of the family, but that the red inside of me could not be denied or ignored. That it was part of who I am, and it was something that strengthens me.

2) The Mythological: Yemọja + Ṣàngó = Something Unheard Of

In Yorùbá mythology Yemọja is the mother of all Òrìṣà (Yorùbá Gods & Goddesses), as she suddenly birthed them all from a large body of water after undergoing distress. Ṣàngó is an offspring of Yemọja, but is the embodiment of lighting + thunder and Yemọja is the embodiment of water – a fairly chaotic mix when they come together. And this was apparently the reflection of my own internal self.

3) The Research: Environmental Instability

An aspect of my dream that reflected not only mythology but existential dread about the environment, was the submergence of the man-made Lagos Island into a tumultuous and ravishing flood. And I was being asked to enter it. Now, a significant part of Yorùbá mythos is Òrìṣà becoming overwhelmed with emotion and turning into a body of water as a result – this is what was happening in my dream. In my dream, the violence experienced by the land and the violence experienced by the bodies of women and girls in Nigeria was creating a reaction within nature. And the waters had decided to begin to swallow up humanity. It is true that, in reality, the floods in Nigeria have become so problematic that they are killing whole families with one rush of water.

Similarly, one of the main health issues that West African women of this particular region experience is water retention, creating high-blood pressure in otherwise healthy people. I guess my mind saw a connection with this. The body retaining water – the land becoming overwhelmed with water All because of trauma.

But I wonder about inspecting the waters, finding out what causes this instability. But I am just an artist, not a scientist. I can only critique and bring attention to – and so I try to.

4) Personal Agony: It’s just being different generally

So I’ve always been different. Sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a way that makes a lot of people around me frustrated. Or uncomfortable.

I’ve been popular (by accident) and I’ve always shied away from it, but this often means loneliness in order to have peace of mind.

From having fairly painful invisible disabilities to dressing completely out of place in most environments, to simply refusing to conform in order to be my most honest self.

I’ll admit that the level of vulnerability I feel calls for a constant protection, but also a level of confidence and self-esteem that I do not like to compromise on. Which is where the solitary aspect of my individuality comes into play. Someone else wanted my space for this exhibition, and if it was by popularity rather than a first-come-first-serve basis, it wouldn’t have happened. And this was in my dream. Solitary Gold, who was not popular, but who made everything look great because I refuse to fall into the pitfalls of self-pity and insecurity. Is it shallow to always try and create beauty? Well to be very honest I don’t care, because the beauty of fashion and garment construction has always been a form of expression, and also the aspect

of me that is the most heavily critiqued. And with all of this I create ‘Diasporan Wilderness’: an intense over-analysis of self, how the world interacts with myself and of the world I reside in general. As I wade through the intense emotion needed to survive life, I wonder what would have happened if I kept dreaming and journeyed into the flood. Does my ‘difference’ mean I’ll survive, or does it just mean I’ll experience it differently? Through this exhibition I wanted to immerse the audience into strong feeling, via the sound of a story, through murals painted on Yorùbá adire fabric (the traditional fabric of the Yorùbá people of West Africa), by installing instruments of worship collected at Osun’s sacred grove in Nigeria and through my use of cowrie shells scattered on the ground and adorning the bodice of the one singular garment. A garment that represents the individual born of two very different worlds.

And individual that wishes to survive and tell their tale of life.

I’m not too sure how the audience felt, walking through the antiquated quad of St John’s College and entering my own personal wilderness.

There is no one way to feel.

I just hope that they felt. Gold Maria Akanbi (2021, Master of Fine Art)

Travels in South Slavonic Lands by Martin Alldrick

The Graham Hamilton Travel Award was established to provide up to £1000 to support students of the college who need financial assistance to enable travel

abroad requiring initiative, enterprise or endurance. In Trinity 2019, Hall student Martin Alldrick (2021, MPhil Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics) was awarded the Graham Hamilton Travel Award to enable his travels in the Balkans and support his studies. Here, he provides an account of his travels: For as long as I can remember I have always been fascinated by the Slavonic world. Throughout my academic formation I have studied and travelled through both East and West Slavonic countries, but never have I had the chance to experience South Slavonic culture. Thanks to the Graham Hamilton Travel Award, this trip gave me the opportunity to answer three key questions I had been asking myself for some time: How similar are the South Slavonic languages to the rest? How true are the Balkan stereotypes? What is the relevance of national identity in the twenty-first century? My journey through Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Montenegro, and Albania, intended to answer all three.

1. Croatia

Walking out of the air-conditioned Zagreb Airport into the 40°C heat, it became apparent that my original plan of walking through the Dalmatian hinterland to see the ‘real’ Croatia was not going to happen. A discussion with the mountaineering association seemed to confirm this as they uttered the phrase: “Do you want to become a statistic?”; a line I would hear many a time whenever I was about to do something stupid. I instead decided to focus on visiting some of the more historic cities on the Dalmatian coast like Zadar, Šibenik, and Trogir. Croatia is a fascinating country in many respects, chief among them being that it is the only current EU country that had to

fight a full-scale, years-long war of independence (Domovinski rat or Homeland War as they call it) within living memory. With tourists (and their money) once more pouring into the country, the physical scars of the conflict have been patched up. There is no real indication that a war was fought thirty years ago on Croatian soil. In this respect, the experience of the contemporary visitor is a world away from the stories told by those who visited in the early 2000s.

In spite of the admirable reconstruction work that has happened over the past two decades, there are still certain signs that point towards the rawness of feeling. Graffiti (along the lines of ‘Never forget Vukovar’) is in abundance and every major city has a museum dedicated to the war, always displaying a long list of the fallen. Seeing that most of the men who died for their country were in their twenties was particularly sobering. In the south, which was particularly badly hit by the conflict, there are plenty of posters advertising concerts by turbo-folk singers performing the same war songs they have been singing since the 1990s. Croatia is also home to some beautiful areas of absolute wilderness; two of my favourites being the national parks Plitvice and Krka. There is an indescribable quality to feeling so detached from civilisation – even the simple clarity of the water there appeals to a higher aesthetic. Although it is impossible to describe the feeling of standing face to face with raw nature adequately, this was undoubtedly the highlight of my trip. In many respects Croatia is indistinguishable from any other Central European country. However, there were two Balkan traits that were immediately apparent. One, which I had no problem with, was the obsession with meat dishes. The miješano meso (or mixed grill) which is available seemingly everywhere, became a firm favourite of mine. The other was what the locals called ‘Balkan time’. Buses would systematically run one to two hours late. Although by the end of my travels I knew deep down that the bus would turn up eventually, I was still always apprehensive that a no-show from a critical connection would leave me stranded.

2. Bosnia and Herzegovina

I only had the chance to visit the Croat part of BiH, and it seemed a nice enough place. The people I spoke to were not particularly enamoured with the current political arrangement. In the city of Neum, there is a strange monetary situation where Convertible Marks, Kuna, and Euros are all in circulation, reflecting the ambiguity of the national identity question. Although BiH is ostensibly a multilingual country with Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian being official languages, the Cyrillic text on road signs in the region has been painted over, so that only the Croatian text remains. This too serves as a reminder that many of the issues

concerning inter-communal relations have not been settled – only frozen for an indeterminate period of time.

3. Montenegro

I did not notice any substantive difference travelling from Croatia into Montenegro (aside from an increased usage of the Cyrillic script). Montenegro is often feted as the next EU accession state and had EU flags been hanging from every government building, as they do in Croatia and Slovenia, I would have easily believed that it had already joined. The Balkan obsession with meat is strong here too. Tucking into yet another miješano meso at the Montenegrin approximation of Wetherspoons, I noticed that the family at the next table had ordered an entire sheep’s head for lunch. Judging by the skull that was grimacing back at me half an hour later, it seemed that they very much enjoyed their meal.

4. Albania

Going into Albania, I abandoned the crutch of intelligible language. Up until this point I had been able to combine enough Czech and Russian to understand roughly what was being said in Serbo-Croat. Given that Albanian is a linguistic enigma to me and English is spoken by almost nobody, I had to surrender myself to the idea of not knowing what was going on and become very good at miming very fast. The legacy of Hoxha’s isolationist policy casts a long shadow over the country to this day. There is a seeming disconnect with what is going on in the rest of Europe. The communist era buildings are in a state of severe disrepair. I had – unfortunately – only left myself enough time to see some of the key communist-era sights in Tirana. There was a shocking contrast in observing the extent of isolation and the constant purges on the one hand, and how ordinary people just got on with their lives on the other during that time. It served as a potent reminder to me of just how lucky I feel to live in a country like the United Kingdom which has not had to endure such a period of repression. My travels through the Balkans showed me a new side to Europe. It seems to me from my experiences that, although in some respects the countries may not be as economically developed as those in the West, the resilience and hospitality of the people who live there stands to be admired and emulated.

Martin Alldrick (2021, MPhil Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics)

Aularian Poetry

To Constantine Constantinople was not built upon these shores, There are but creeks and passageways, where a boat may store, To muddy sites, fringed by rocks, we trail a hopeful oar, And unswept floors belie the oaks, whose velvets promised more, Whose lichened boughs enquire their hours in soundless semaphore. We rise in hopes, past rounded slopes, to glance a distant tour, From pagan rites, Trengilly’s sights, we’ll walk up to The Fore, Which starts a Christian settlement, in gentle windy showers, And waxing heights, to chance all rights, to make from idle, awe Some will revere the great tree, in a quiet granite tower. Stuart Barrie (1989, Jurisprudence)

The Graham Midgley Memorial Prize for Poetry Winner

Treason of an artist Constellation Consolation There are people who create their own reflections in bronze and marble. Their shadows slick with gold, with prayers composed for them on mellow Sunday mornings by strangers who taste their name on their lips and smile. I am not one of them. There will be no children folding my name into the cavity of their brains one late Tuesday night, trying to fork me out of a history text book and into their memory. It would be fun to have my name twisted into a curse, something to be written about with ice breaths in dense journals, with a niche cult following evolving so that would get its own hushed documentary. But where would I find the power to command such evil in the first place. It would burn my hands, then be snatched away by someone else who would relish the welts it would bring. The welts and the light. Giant red tongues scoring the confessional of my mind at night as I wonder how many people fall asleep on an island of pavement with a throat-full of worries whilst I just- nothing. So I branded constellations into my retinas. I worshipped the spit-soak of coffee cups and the cross-stitched, half-rung jamming conversations, trying to distil it all. And I said hello to the worms as I passed. Always. Tara Sallaba (2021, History)

The Graham Midgley Memorial Prize Proxime Acessit

A Letter Dear hand...to my hand, hand. How do I address you? You can’t read and yet you can write. Tiny shakes and jolts, out of which Grows, funnel-like, a moment, Alive in time. Transport me, Let me enter this theatre that you build. The walls are breathing, bending.

Pockets of time which bunch and Release as though pulled through a draw string. Walls of water that surge and crash Bursting droplets of liquid silver thought. Or maybe just a puddle-- or tea ring left by that jolt. Florence McKechnie (2020, English ) Monument to Balzac I lingered too long on your face. Hasty departure and carelessness that morning so... unspectacled; blind as a bat – again! Disgrace! Your face, so miniature, was encased in swathes of material cocooning your bald head and swept over your diminutive body embraced by some enormous rug stretched over a queer old pram, the wheels peaking out underneath and all I could see was that snug little face and I laughed to see such brooding eyes in a face so young, so babyish. How quaint to see such crabbiness in teeny-tiny infantile features protruding. Cooing as I closed on you, my little Balzac, something configured clicked. I felt some shudder, some ghastly bizarrerie to find you transfigured Those lines of contemplation, now thickly engrained, wrinkled That toothless mouth, now no prospect of pearl Those doe eyes now gummy, watery, lurking under deep hoods sitting above bags bulging, divulging your smooth hairlessness. Soon I saw the proportions were all wrong. Your body was bigger underneath the swaddle but crunched into a foetal cramp. Annabel Stock (2019, English)

Book Reviews

Sophie Jai: Wild Fires (HarperCollins, 2022)

Sophie Jai joined the Hall in Hilary 2020 as a Visiting Fellow and Writer in Residence. Wild Fires is her debut novel. Wild Fires opens with Cassandra ‘Cass’ being called home to Toronto, following the death of her cousin Patrick ‘Chevy’ Rapersad. As Cass gathers with her mother, sisters, and aunts to mourn Chevy, the bitter cold of the Canadian winter is far from the only thing with which she has to contend. The icy, inhospitable outside makes a fitting backdrop to the tensions inside the family home, where feelings and relationships seem frozen into unhappy stasis. As the narrative moves between presentday Canada and the older generation’s Trinidadian past, we come to realise that the strained relationships between all the women in the house – in particular between Cass’s mother and aunts – are deeply rooted in a family history of which Cass has had only glimpses. Glimpses are precisely what Jai offers her reader, too, through flashbacks to Trinidad and to Cass’s childhood, which interrupt the present-day narrative. As readers, we join Cass in trying to piece together snippets of conversation and flashes of memory into answers to questions which lie at the heart of the novel: why, for instance, did Chevy (almost) never speak? Silence, in fact, plays such a crucial role in Wild Fires that it becomes nearly a character in its own right. Its presence is felt constantly as we and Cass attempt to fill in the gaps in her family’s history. There are closely guarded family secrets, and decades of feelings left unspoken, stories left untold.

Yet at the same time, it is precisely through stories of the family’s past that Jai draws in-depth, complex portraits of her characters. Indeed, Wild Fires is filled with storytelling – by a range of narrators whose voices weave and merge with Cass’s. What will stay with me about this book is how carefully Jai presents these stories as at once emphatically shared – each family member has, it seems, a stake in what is said, a version of the tale – and as intensely personal, even private. The uneasiness between silence and storytelling, sharing and secrets, is exceptionally compelling. Jai uses it to draw in her reader so that we, quite all of a sudden, realise just how much we too want answers to Cass’s questions. But we have also learnt to be wary of what will be revealed. As Cass herself admits: ‘I keep secrets about my family from my family, too’ (p.193). Wild Fires, is a deeply moving exploration of one family’s attempts to handle their history, their grief, and – perhaps most importantly – their relationships with each other.

Heather Barr, Graduate Trainee Library Assistant

Vivian Ridler: Diary of a Master Printer A Year in the Life of the Printer to the University, Oxford (Perpetua Press, 2022)

Vivian Ridler was the last great Master Printer to the University, serving from 1958 to 1978. Readers may remember him as an enthusiastic member of the Senior Common Room (Professorial Fellow 1965-1978, then Emeritus Fellow until his death in 2009). He donated hundreds of books to the Library, not just during his time at Oxford University Press but also from Perpetua Press, the private fine press he operated. For the College, he printed the declaration sworn by Fellows, the College Grace and the bookplate that marks books bequeathed to the Hall by A.B. Emden. After his retirement, he and his wife Anne were regular participants in the Hall’s art weeks in the 1980s and 90s. A glass bowl he donated decorated with the College arms and Floreat Aula graces the SCR. Vivian Ridler’s son Colin has edited this volume of his Father’s diaries. The centre piece of the book focuses on the pivotal year of 1970-1971 when the University Press faced radical reform following the ‘Waldock Report’ on its operations. In the Diary we see Ridler struggling with the pressures and contradictions of OUP’s byzantine structure, with tensions between the printing press (which he ran), the London office of the main publishing business, the scholarly Clarendon Press and the struggling paper mill at Wolvercote.

Much of the world evoked seems, perhaps surprisingly, topical again. The Press faces the head winds of global recession and troubled industrial relations; its old practises and craft traditions struggle to adapt to economic realities and new technologies – a computer newly installed at Neasden and its possibilities loom large at several points. At other times though, what we see is a lost world where Ridler, as Master Printer, judges the printworks’ open-air swimming competition or, touchingly, visits current and retired members of staff in hospital. The Diary is peopled with a vivid range of characters including the Machiavellian officers of OUP, academics such Maurice Bowra and Helen Gardner as well as various members of the great and good. The Prime Minister Ted Heath, for example, has a cameo holding forth with uncharacteristic bonhomie at the bar during the annual British Federation of Master Printers dinner. A particularly enjoyable strand of the book concerns the wait for TS Elliot’s widow Valerie to deliver the introduction for a facsimile edition of The Waste Land. Through all of this, a portrait emerges of Ridler as a tough but caring manager determined to preserve the expertise and role of the Press in difficult circumstances. The Diary also shows his deep love and knowledge of printing as well as a frankly astonishing cultural breadth – barely a week goes past without his attending at least one of a concert, a play or a film. We also see the close and loving bond between Ridler, his wife and their children and friends The Hall features mostly in the background of events, with a dozen or so fleeting appearances. The new Senior Common Room provides a sanctuary which is “pleasant and possible to read [in] without interruptions.” A dinner is “rather

dull” but he is pleased to be sat next to then Law Fellow and Librarian Jeffrey Hackney as “I always enjoy arguing with him.” In an extended comic set-piece, Ridler and his wife arrive in evening dress for the Fellows’ Christmas Dinner only to find themselves not on the seating plan: “Consternation! Panic! Chagrin! What to do? Risk embarrassment by going up, or slink off? We slunk off…”

As befits Vivian Rider’s legacy this a beautifully produced book, lavishly illustrated, accompanied by appendices and essays, and set in an attractive Adobe Caslon type. James Howarth, Librarian