Portraits of War: Yuriy Gurzhy

Illustration by Emily Sweetman

This is the third in a series of portraits from our home city, of Berliners affected by the war in Ukraine. You can see all the portraits as we publish them here.

By Jacob Sweetman:

You can tell Yuriy Gurzhy's a singer. It's there in the way his voice rises when he's excited; talking about the success of his seminal Berlin parties, Russendisko, that spawned a phenomenon he'd never expected; or about hearing Lou Reed's 'New York' album for the first time as a teenager in Kharkiv. That was on a tape, recorded itself off another tape, taped in turn off a tape belonging to a guy who'd brought a bagful of these black plastic gemstones back from a trip to the States. 

“17 is an exciting age, anyway,” he says, noting that he is now getting to experience it again vicariously through the eyes of his son. But his late teens were spent watching the fall of the Soviet Union from within, and he was compiling his own soundtrack to it.

There was rarely much decent information about the music he listened to. Sometimes the name would be written on the sticker or on the case. Sometimes a year, but often not. He heard the Velvet Underground's 'White Light White Heat' a while later, realising slowly it was the same guy singing.

It was like he was collecting together all the pieces of a jigsaw, and only years later did they start fitting together to form a bigger picture. He was listening to bands like Dead Can Dance, to Throbbing Gristle, but also Grazhdanskaya Oborona, Egor Letov's seminal band from the Omsk underground.

“I don't know if these guys ever intended to sound like punk rock, but they had no chance. They couldn't play, the instruments were shit, the recording machines were shit, too. Probably just a tape recorder. But they were big, and they were banned in the late Soviet years so they really gained popularity in the early 90s as martyrs, suddenly able to play huge venues.”

This was a logical process, the natural emerging of a post-Soviet culture, but one that had begun a long time before, even from the Ukrainian folk songs his father knew, collected by people passing through villages, listening to whatever they could and learning it to preserve them, like Alan Lomax did in the Tennessee mountains a world away but at a similar time.

Gurzhy's dad would sing at family parties, playing on a seven string gypsy guitar, or on an old piano with his right hand much stronger than his left. They'd all join in.

His Dad was not very good on guitar, he says, but they didn't have an accordion at home, at which he was much better. 

But it was his dad's secrets that comprised his greatest loves. He was married to a Jewish woman, had banned, home-printed samizdat texts at home, and spoke fluent Ukrainian, none of which were fully apparent to the young Yuriy. He wanted to protect his family, he didn't want to attract attention to them. Yuriy's maternal grandfather and grandmother were dentists who also saw patients at home, illegally.

Yuriy's father liked the Russian songwriters of the sixties, but while far from pop, he wasn't into the “heavier stuff” Yuriy would discover later, with cryptic meanings hidden behind obscure metaphors.

“I remember hearing bands from Lviv in the early 90s and... 'woah'. You understand the language perfectly, you understand every word, but sometimes it's like, '...who's this partisan fighting again?' There weren't too many possibilities to find out more. So you have a song, and you listen to the song, and then one day maybe you get to meet the guy who sings it.”

It was the passing on of musical traditions. He calls it a folkloric process, and is also what he has spent the last couple of decades contributing to with his band, Rotfront; making pan-European music, rooted in ska and klezmer, with in-jokes about Berlin and Barcelona, dotted with hip-hop flourishes and proto-dancehall toasts, and horns that brighten corners otherwise occupied by rumbling bass lines. 

He jokes that they are thought of as German when abroad, but as a migrant band in Germany, though he later says that he wasn't really joking.

It's because he ties together all these loose ends. It's the way he is wired, curating the contents of what he calls his “internal hard drive.”

So his efforts to help his home city in its time of terrible need is centred around these connections, his ability to string together the different parts of his world into a cohesive whole, organising, communicating. 

And it's largely the same thing, anyway.

Yuriy is good company, we drink strong coffee, we talk about music, mostly. Even though he's exhausted.

But the city he and his forebears called home looms over the conversation.  

“Kharkiv was home to the new Ukrainian literature, until most of these writers and poets were killed in the '30s. So I remember wondering, when studying, where is all the good stuff? But there wasn't anything else, because they were all fucking killed.”

Kharkiv is as far from the Russian border as Potsdam is from Berlin. It's only 20 miles or so, nothing. Kharkiv is under attack as we speak, as we talk of old bands and mutual interests. Rockets rain down upon the city every day. A third of its residents are thought to have fled including most of his family, but he's still got many friends there.  

He's been writing a diary for the Tagesspiegel since February. The latest post when we meet is about a trove of old photographs taken by his father, comparing them with ones from today, with holes in buildings that were once whole, with dust and rubble lying like a shroud across previously clean, friendly looking streets, all shot in sharp, Kodachrome colours. 

It is, he says, an attempt to give some context to German readers. He says all we really need is some empathy.

Then he echoes what so many people have said to me recently. 

“I know how it works sometimes, you just turn numb. At some point you just can't react to these images any more, the numbers are just so abstract.”

It's then his voice drops half an octave into a rich baritone; like when he talks of his cousin's nine month pregnant wife sheltering 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in a cellar with 200 others, hiding from the Russian bombardment. And the tone continues, though he speaks more wryly of gigs that will likely never happen, but that were already being planned, in Mariupol and Kyiv and in Donbas for this Spring.

You can tell Yuriy Gurzhy's a guitarist, though he's better than his dad ever was. It's there in the times he doesn't know what to do with his hands; he rubs the drying skin on his forehead; he fusses around his neat Prenzlauerberg kitchen; he plays with the pastry sat in front of him. 

He gets up and sits down, he gets up and sits down. He's being pulled in a lot of directions at once.

Yuriy grew up speaking Russian. He's spoken more and more Ukrainian for years now, but remembers when it was still an alien concept.

“One of my classmates switched to Ukrainian in the fourth year, I think. It was really weird, until I realised that he actually comes from a Ukrainian speaking village... so in a way he closed the circle. But I remember what a shock it was, because it was after the holidays he'd spent back in the village of his grandmother and he came back and spoke Ukrainian to all of us. And people were like 'are you fucking kidding?' But we learned to respect that pretty soon. He was the first one.”

He says he sometimes feels ashamed for having Russian as his native tongue. That's another thing. But he also says he feels guilty all the time anyway, even though he's been living through a whirlwind for the last fifty days.

“I've not done that much. I still feel like it's not enough. I hate myself...” It's not self-pity, though, just a rumination. “But also on good days I feel like I'm doing more than ever. So there's strength, and there's an energy coming from out of... I don't know where, but probably just of necessity. And as long as it keeps me going and going.”

He bristles when I ask him about hearing the news of February 24th. 

“The war has been going on for eight years”, he says.

“I played Donbas a couple of times, I saw the places affected by the war, the people affected by the war. It's not 'coming', it was already there, we are just in the escalation phase.”

I try to say I meant this, but I too still think of this war as being a sudden development. He cuts me off. It's something he has to say in every interview he does, and he's doing a lot of interviews now we are all suddenly interested in Eastern Europe again.

We talk of the importance of music to all this, of how in the modern world it can cause tangible change in terms of instant distribution, of exchanging information, and the fundraising capabilities unheard of a decade ago. 

We always come back to music. 

“I think the real music freak was my grandpa, my mothers dad,” he says. “He hated all this songwriter shit, he was into pop. And when I was growing up we lived in the same apartment, six of us, grandparents, parents, my sister and me. I was sick a lot as a kid and I'd stay home and my grandparents stayed at home too.”

Yuriy still has his grandfather's tape deck at home in Berlin.

He then tells me of a friend who arrived in Leipzig with her son, a 14 year old, who'd had to leave his guitar behind. Yuriy managed to sort one out for him in four minutes. 

“It was a personal best” he says, allowing himself the small consolation that he's helped, because he knows of an instrument's inherent importance. 

His grandfather wanted to pursue a career in music as a young man, but then after the 2nd World War he became a dentist. His violin had been stolen, and he probably thought he needed to do focus on survival, to do something less fun, more solid instead.

So I ask Yuriy if he thought his path to becoming a musician was, in a way, making up for the dreams he missed out on.

“Absolutely,” he says. “Both him and my dad, I had it from both sides. I had no choice.”

His inheritance is in the knowledge passed down that those strings, however loosely strung and amateurishly struck, that that neck, however wide or well attached to that body, however battered and chipped - and that the voices, singing in whatever language is at hand, holding a simple melody for a fleeting moment - are as important, sometimes, as anything else.

***

Jacob Sweetman is a writer and sports journalist, at home in Berlin. His work has appeared in 11Freunde, The Guardian, The Berliner Zeitung, Wisden amongst others. His writing about 1.FC Union Berlin can be mostly found here and he has a website here

Emily Sweetman is an illustrator, at home in Berlin. She is a genius, and her work can be seen here

Outer space in Währinger Strasse

By Pippa Goldschmidt:

It was a weekend of dissonances. I’d gone to Vienna to talk about outer space at a symposium held in an arts centre called WUK; a complex of dilapidated brick buildings which started life in 1855 as a railway locomotive factory. This soot-stained evidence of Vienna’s industrial past contrasted sharply with the fancy Baroque palaces for which the city is famous, their gold-and-white decoration gleaming in the early March sunshine.

Amongst the topics for discussion at the symposium was the Outer Space Treaty, a utopian attempt by the United Nations in 1967 to declare that no nation state can stake a claim to any object in ‘outer space’ – wherever that may be exactly, the treaty avoids having to define its location. But in the decades that have passed since it was originally drafted and ratified, many companies have decided they want to stake a claim to objects in outer space, such as asteroids, in order to mine them for metals which are rare on Earth. The symposium agreed that outer space should be accessible to all, and not colonised for the purposes of making rich people even richer and we shared a hope that the future of space exploration might be profoundly different from its past; more egalitarian, less connected to military and imperial aspirations.

The symposium had an online audience, perhaps connected to us by those invisible satellites we were discussing, and I was constantly distracted by my image on a screen just off to one side of me. As I read out part of a short story, so did my on-screen doppelgänger, but she was always half a sentence behind me. When I finished, I watched her mouth move silently before she too stopped and we regarded each other.

The speakers at the symposium discussed the origins of satellites and rockets in metal that has to be dug out of the earth, and described how workers in some of these mines have gone on strike over the dangerous conditions and environmental damage. This juxtaposition between shiny rockets soaring apparently effortlessly into the sky and people working underground was mirrored by the half-imaginary entity of outer space – a legal no-place far above us – contrasting sharply with the post-industrial spaces of WUK and its rusting iron pipes.

Once the capital of a vast empire, Vienna now feels like a city out of time, not quite sure how it can fit into the 21st century other than presenting itself as a theme park with endless statues of emperors and empresses, with the percussive clip-clop of horse-drawn carriages taking the tourists for rides around the Ring, and where these tourists (after their carriage rides) can queue outside traditional cafés to eat Sachertorte or Kaiserschmarrn. Cafés where everything, even the strong and bitter coffee, is covered with a thick layer of whipped cream.

But there is yet more juxtaposition for me personally, and on much smaller scales. WUK is situated in Währinger Strasse, a long street that juts like the spoke of a bicycle wheel out of the city centre towards the woods in the north-west. I had heard of this street before I came here because it is where my grandmother was born and grew up. She left in 1938, one of the few Jewish adults able to get a visa to enter Britain, possibly because she was young and could speak English. Her parents, who had no savings, and were neither young enough to work nor able to speak English, were left behind in Vienna. She never saw them again.

So for me, Währinger Strasse is not a place associated with nostalgia or coffee served with Schlagsahne. When I was young, my grandmother repeatedly told me to visit Vienna, to see the imperial art collections and the architecture; the magnificent churches with shining domes and steep patterned roofs, as well as the Modernist Secession building and the Bauhaus-influenced house designed by  Wittgenstein for his sister. She did not tell me to go to Währinger Strasse and see the apartment block where she spent her childhood, and from where her parents were evicted in 1939 before they were forced into an overcrowded ghetto in the city centre. There her father died, and her mother was deported east.

My grandmother didn’t tell me to go there because she never talked about this part of the family history, but she had written down the address and so I went there anyway.

There was nothing to see, of course. There never is anything to see at these places, their very anonymity heightens the horror. If it could happen here at this four storey apartment block on a bend in the road and with a tramline running past the front door, it could – and did – happen anywhere. I stood and watched the building from the other side of the road, perhaps wanting to see a sign of life. But nobody inside gave me any such sign, the windows remained blank and dark, and so I left.

I returned to my hotel near the busy shopping street Mariahilfer Strasse, and just across the road from the Westbahnhof, the station from where my grandmother would have caught that train in 1938. There is a memorial in this station to the Jewish children who escaped Vienna on the Kindertransport in 1939. But it says nothing about the adults who also escaped. Given how large it was, the destroyed Jewish community of Vienna has remarkably few memorials, the city apparently prefers to dwell on more distant events. And perhaps I do too, after all my main reason for coming here was to talk about outer space, rather than be confronted with what happened to my grandmother and great-grandparents. But the buildings dragged me back down to earth.

When I left Vienna to return home I caught a train from the Hauptbahnhof, which was crowded with refugees from Ukraine. Hundreds of people waited on the main concourse to travel further west; exhausted women, children, old people and pets were all being given food by volunteers. My train, advertised as nearly empty when I booked my ticket at the beginning of February, was now full. I sat next to a teenage girl who slept almost the entire six hour journey to Frankfurt, her pet rabbit in a travel carrier at her feet. I thought of my grandmother and great-grandparents, and cried.

***

Pippa Goldschmidt lives in Frankfurt and Edinburgh. She’s the author of the novel The Falling Sky and the short story collection The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space (both published by Freight Books), and most recently she’s co-editor (with Drs Gill Haddow and Fadhila Mazanderani) of Uncanny Bodies (Luna Press) an anthology of work inspired by Freud’s uncanny as it reveals itself in the human body, the forest and the city. She’s recently completed a memoir/family history The German Lesson about what it feels like to ‘return’ to Frankfurt, the city her grandfather fled in 1938.

Website: www.pippagoldschmidt.co.uk

Portraits of War: "Anna"

Illustration by Emily Sweetman

This is the second in a series of portraits from our home city, of Berliners affected by the war in Ukraine. You can see all the portraits as we publish them here.

By Jacob Sweetman:

After we spoke in early March she sent me a message about what to call her. She wrote, “In Max Frisch style: let my name be... Anna” 

Anna smiles guiltily when she says she's started smoking, knowing how ridiculous it is after all these years. But I don't blame her, and God knows it's understandable. For smoking may well be the last thing she has any agency over at the moment, seeing as she has no idea when she'll be able to return to Russia,  if ever. 

But she also senses that much of Germany - the country she lives in, and has done for more than a decade, and in which her daughter was born - regards her with ill-concealed suspicion. Though Anna faces neither daily shelling nor tanks, and her home city remains intact, at least physically, still, she feels helpless and lost, and she doesn't know what to do. 

Still, she feels a crushing pressure, from without and within. 

Anna was born in Chelyabinsk, “in the Soviet Union”, she says as if to emphasise that it is a different country to the one currently waging a war inside of Ukraine. It's a city of about a million people, flanked by the Ural Mountains, equidistant between Yekaterinburg and Magnitogorsk (where the first of the triptych of huge sword featuring sculptures, that includes the Soviet memorial in Treptower Park, stands. The other is in Stalingrad). 

It is an industrial city, an isolated city on the edge of Siberia, famous mostly, not for its production of tanks during WWII or even its tea packing factory, but for the meteorite that exploded above its skies and onto the screens of our phones a few years ago.

She was still in single figures when communism collapsed, though the old textbooks hung around in school a while longer. I ask first if she remembers a sense of optimism around the time, but she says not. 

“Other people saw a chance to make business, maybe, but we were just worried about what to eat the next day. There were no hopes. Just survival, from one day to another. We were in a one room apartment, my mum and I." 

She says it was humiliating watching the flashes of sudden wealth on the backs of others while she was wearing worn out clothes. Later on, of course, Vladimir Putin would weaponise this feeling across much of the populace.

She laughs as she toys nervously with the small golden crucifix around her neck, sunflower yellow painted fingernails flashing in the Spring sunshine. It's not entirely convincing, her laughter. She's come so far geographically, 2,000 miles. But it's as if she's gone backwards, too. 

She sits near the window in a two bedroom Berlin apartment she shares with her daughter and her mum, who came over before the war started to help Anna out after her marriage collapsed. Her mum speaks no German or English apart from a flawlessly annunciated, polite and practised 'hello'. Anna says she wants to return - to what, she's not sure - but she's trying to keep her here as long as she can. It's ironic, she says. They tried originally to move to Germany in the 90's, Anna ultimately making it in 2004.

"And now she's here, she doesn't want to stay." 

Anna says that her mum still harbours plans of a Crimean holiday in the Summer, despite her daughters' protestations. Her mum's memories of state TV news reporting that all is well in the annexed region linger somehow. 

"I remember visiting my family and watching TV. They always started with 'the President did this today... He visited...' and the next part was 'The Crimea is going very well, they are very happy with being part of Russia'."

Anna says she already understood that the prospect of Putin resetting what she calls the "embarrassment" of Boris Yeltsin's drunken, corrupt presidency was impossible a long time ago.

The gaps in her sentences grow longer, partly because her English isn't as good as her German. But mostly because for a lot of the time she just doesn't know what to say.

"I started to understand it when he exchanged the presidency with the Prime Minister. I was very scared back then, it was just so obvious. I went to demonstrations and I voted, but there was always this sense of being observed. It was a touch screen and I was thinking maybe they were also saving my fingerprints." She will need to renew her passport at some point in the next year, but the idea of entering the Embassy again fills her with dread. 

"It's Russian soil," she says. “I never feel safe there.”

She knows that someone in a building opposite the Kremlin has been looking at her website, that they know she's been critical of them, and that her breaking of new laws could mean her imprisonment. 

"As a linguist, I am scared by the use of language, and how they have started to tell you what to say, what to call things.  I know it's a war, they shouldn't tell me not to call it a war if its a war, you know. But if I call a war a war, I go to prison."

Though she's been in Germany for a decade and a half she's never felt at home here. She lived in Leipzig for a few years at first where she learned to speak German as flawlessly as if it was a mother tongue to avoid the stares of people on the trains, on the trams. 

“They just wanted me to leave,” she says. 

Berlin was better, at least through the comparative anonymity offered by the city – and she is keen to point out her neighbours have offered meals if she ever finds herself stuck, though a lack of food is not the problem - but the staring on the trains and on the trams, and the fear of speaking her language has started to return.

She fears the wave of rage against any Russians, and mentions the recent firebombing of a Russian school in Marzahn, one of hundreds of attacks on buildings and on people since the invasion. She says it doesn't feel safe here. She's glad her daughter doesn't go to a Russian school.

Her daughter is about the age Anna was when the Soviet Union collapsed, but she has access to the outside world in a way Anna never did. She watches kid's news. She asks Anna every day how it could be that Russia have invaded Ukraine, that they have started a war?

Anna says she doesn't know how to answer any more. She doesn't know how it happened, herself. Even until the invasion, like so many of us, she was convinced it wouldn't come, that this was all just a game, the timeless noises of little men in far away places, puffing out their chests. 

But it was an act of self-delusion, a bit like her Mum wanting to go to Crimea. 

And in turn Anna has friends and family who now call her a traitor.

"Yeah, they were very angry at me. They said now that I'm a 'foreigner, I'm different now', that I don't see the truth. And, 'look at the Crimea,' they say. 'It's so good and it's ours it has always been ours... My aunt is very much pro-war, and she screams at my mum on the phone, saying 'how dare you say Putin is a shit, because if we didn't go in, the next day they would attack us...' It scares me because just a few weeks ago I could visit them without talking about politics, but now that's over. I cannot go there any more. It just wouldn't be... it wouldn't be me."

Her father is "patriotic" (when she says this, she thinks first long and hard about the correct word to use) and works in education. “He studies means of measuring patriotism in children.” 

She says he has a list of qualities each girl should have and each boy should have. 

"It's so Soviet," she says with a smile.

She says contemptuously how people are still making jokes about the war, how there's one doing the rounds about the men of Russia being happy that Apple pulled out before International Women's day, so they didn't have to spend money on expensive gifts for their wives and mistresses and girlfriends.  

"They say, 'oh we don't care about McDonald's', and the Prime Minister says 'we can produce cutlets and rolls ourselves.' Well I don't care about McDonald's and it's not about cutlets and rolls."

She estimates that 70 percent of Russia supports the war, and that there'll be no getting through to them.

"I spoke to a  theatre director, a Russian, who lives here, and he says the only thing for us to do -  for the 30 percent - is to leave, we cannot deal with the rest of them... We need to establish a Russian life here."

She sees beauty in so much Russian culture, classical and contemporary, but she talks sadly of her favourite actors, musicians, poets, being scattered around the globe. They have no choice, she says.

"I'm afraid to lose the connection, and I'm afraid the day we try again we'll have nothing in common any more... I'm losing my people," she says. 

"Yet at the same time," I say, "you're here and you don't feel you have these people behind you either."

"I never had them."

"But you're not thinking of leaving Germany?" I ask.

"No, not yet. Because of my daughter, and, as well, where to live? Europe is united. So South America or what? China? Turkey? But even if I leave I'll carry it with me. Even if they stop tomorrow the damage is done."

I'm reminded of Kurt Tucholsky, a man who knew what it was to have to leave his country, who died by his own hand in exile, who wrote in 1929:

"We have the right to hate Germany, because we love it... Germany is a divided land. But one part of it is us." 

Well Anna isn't talking about Germany. But through the pregnant pauses in her sentences and the way she  plays with her necklace, and stares at the pot of yellowing Russian tea that sits in front of her, untouched, I know she feels a similar divide.

"There's no Russia - my Russia - any more. It’s gone."

***

Jacob Sweetman is a writer and sports journalist, at home in Berlin. His work has appeared in 11Freunde, The Guardian, The Berliner Zeitung, Wisden amongst others. His writing about 1.FC Union Berlin can be mostly found here and he has a website here

Emily Sweetman is an illustrator, at home in Berlin. She is a genius, and her work can be seen here

Portraits of War: Ingo

Illustration by Emily Sweetman

By Jacob Sweetman:

Not long after Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24th I started writing a series of portraits of Berliners, affected by the war. It was out of my own feelings of inadequacy, largely, realising the only tangible help I could be would be to try to tell some stories otherwise unsaid. 

But the first thing I learned is how little I knew. Whether it was the look on Ingo's face when I asked if Belarusian was a distinct language from Russian, or on Yuriy Gurzhy's face when I suggested that the war had started on February 24th. It had been going for eight years already, he told me, trying to hide his annoyance. Not to mention the influence of the Omsk rock underground from the 1970's, but that's a story for another day.

I have spoken to a terrified Russian mother, a French journalist working on the borders, a Ukrainian musician, and two Germans, one about people of colour trying to flee, and this one, Ingo, a man who fell in love with Belarus a long time ago.As Ingo says in this  piece, we could all do with learning about the cultural complexities of Eastern Europe, and he's right. It's only now we seem to care, to have noticed at all. I hope it's not too late to try.

– Jacob Sweetman, Berlin. 30 / 4 / 2022

Ingo Petz is tired. Friends ask after him, but he doesn't know how to answer them, he's not sure how he's doing any more; he hasn't really stopped for long enough to think about it. He and his Belarusian wife, Alesja, are living in a “kind of in-between world”. 

But for Petz - a journalist with long standing expertise on Belarus, a past working in Ukraine and studying in Russia, and a humbling knack of being unable to turn his back on a part of the world most of us still fail to understand with any kind of clarity - this war started long ago. 

As it did for so many others, too.

The flood of people leaving Belarus since Aleksander Lukashenko's stolen 2020 election has been unending, the need to keep Ukraine and Russia's neighbour in the spotlight, somehow, never more urgent.

He's been working 10 hour days “curating” independent Belarusian press for the Grimme Online Award winning website, Dekoder, since then. And now an amendment to the constitution means that Belarus could become a base for Nuclear weapons, while its mortuaries are reported to be full to bursting with the bodies of Russian soldiers killed in the war.

He's also trying to help get 45 people out of a town 100km west of Kyiv.

“We know so many people in Ukraine. And of course you have no resources and you need to make sure you don't go mad, crazy, freak out, or get too tired. But you try to help,” he says.

He's had friends withdraw away from him, and he understands why. They don't want to face the tragedy of it all. “It's human,” he says. Others have become closer, too, but it's hard. “Sometimes in weak moments I think I want to get rid of all this, it's so problematic.... we are in a kind of... a... never stopping machine.”

Petz grew up in a small town. The son of 'typical working class west Germans', he was largely unaware of politics. But he is stubborn, you can't tell him not to do something, or that it is pointless trying. Like when his teachers said he was no good at writing, or when the university said he'd never be able to learn Russian in six months so as to be able to study it. 

He also likes to tell stories, about people, about places, about underdogs. 

This is what lead him to clamber onto a bus that took him the thousand miles to Minsk for the first time in the 90's. No-one knew about Belarus, and fewer cared. It was just seen as a backwater with few natural resources, dour faces, and this strange throwback of a moustachioed man in charge.

His mum worried, of course; it sounded like the end of the world. But he says he felt like an eighteenth century explorer. 

It was music that helped draw Ingo into a love affair with the country, as it also gave him a reason to learn the language, distinct from Russian. A rock scene was already building up momentum back then. Clever, brave, young punks, singing in their own tongue at last, pissed off at a lifetime's unfulfilled promises, were daring the authorities to try and stop them. 

He fell in love with N.R.M., the Independent Republic of Dreams, at a festival full of Belarusian speaking bands. There was something about the fervour they inspired, something about the fire in their bellies. He says you could feel the energy. That this actually meant something.

But it was also there he saw the first signs of the brutality inherent in the regime when someone shouted 'Fuck Lukashenko' from the stage. 

The police arrested the singer. They then pulled the plugs and waded into the crowd. One of Ingo's friends was one of them, so he joined the group of people heading to the police station.

“We were waiting outside, demanding to know what was going to happen, there were other people gathering there, and the local police chief came out. He was a small fat guy, a typical post-soviet character, you see them sometimes in films. He was a bit drunk, and he was shouting in Russian that he was going to arrest everybody.”

He called them all Satanists.

He laughs at the memory, and it is funny. But at the time - maybe it was because of his youth, or his lack of political understanding, or maybe because he seems to fear nothing - Ingo says he wasn't scared, not really. 

But not long ago Ingo sent me a link to Aliaksei Paluyan's award winning Arte documentary “Courage”, in which a similar scene develops following the 2020 crackdowns. It shows a crowd built up outside a larger prison, this time in Minsk. They are mostly women, smoking and crying, pacing up and down, waiting as the names of the recently incarcerated are read out, erupting into applause when the gates finally open and people with blackened eyes and clenched fists pour out.

But the fleeting joy is delivered with a punch to the throat.

And as the film focuses on Minsk's most influential independent theatre company, we are left with no doubt about the significance of art to all this, of its ability to reach the people and to hold the powerful to account. As it was music that gave him a way into Eastern Europe, Ingo speaks powerfully of the need for it to bridge the gaps between us, to shine a light into lands we consider alien, but that are more like our own than we'd ever imagine.

On Dekoder there is an interview with Svyatoslav Vakarchuk, the Ukrainian lead singer of the band Okean Elzy, a star also in Belarus, but he hasn't been able to appear there since 2020. He has been playing impromptu shows around Ukraine (“like Batman”, as Yuriy Gurzhy says to me later, “he's everywhere at once”) sitting at any piano, playing on any guitar. 

Vakarchuk talks of orphans and of amputees, of war crimes and, darkly, of revenge. And he urges his Belarusian friends and fans to keep going, to oust Lukashenko, to not  allow them to be used in Putin's war. To continue what they've been doing in what Petz calls the “flying universities”, a cross between parties and wakes and public meetings, where the courtyards of the high rises have been transformed by musicians and academics and poets to discuss the future of the country, trying to cure themselves of what Belarusian philosopher and writer Ihar Babkou calls their “post-colonial sickness”. 

Petz calls it a “revolution in progress”. Because a revolution can't be called a revolution until it is successful. 

Then I ask where he was the morning Russia invaded Ukraine.

“At home. In bed. It was four o'clock.”

“Did you expect it?”

“Yeah.” he says. “Not this large ground scale invasion, but still... A lot of people said it was just hysteria, but I thought when looking and listening to Putin's speeches, and how they took troops from far in the east, you don't do that just for manoeuvres.”

A military base had been established in south east Belarus, the shortest route to Kyiv. 

“So I had a very bad feeling, from the beginning of the new year... Then when it happened Alesja woke me up, we couldn't go back to sleep.” 

They both cried, he says.

But that's when he started moving again, from day to day. Trying to help us understand what we wilfully ignored for so long about the cultural complexities of eastern Europe.

He says that he and Alesya had plans to move to Minsk at some point, and failing that to Kyiv, but neither will happen for a while now. He then says that Alesja fears she will never see her parents again. 

A friend of theirs and her daughter have been staying in Ingo and Alesja's flat in Oberschöneweide since they managed to escape Kyiv (he likes it there because it always had a broader mix of people than he found in the Friedrichshain he lived in a decade ago. There's better stories there.) The daughter comes into the room and offers us soft, freshly made apple pancakes. 

She needs to practice her English, she says, because they'll be moving on to Ireland next week, though she's never been there before. 

Her Mum and Alesja  follow her in, bringing a bottle of champagne, a smile on their faces despite everything. Alesja says that the worst of times is the perfect time to drink champagne and Ingo nods.

It's hard to disagree.

***

Editor’s Note: Jacob is currently looking for an outlet for the entire series of portraits he has collected. We feel extremely privileged to have been given the opportunity to publish the first, and we hope that someone reading this can help bring the entire collection out into the world. If you are such a person, please let us know and we’ll put you in contact.

Jacob Sweetman is a writer and sports journalist, at home in Berlin. His work has appeared in 11Freunde, The Guardian, The Berliner Zeitung, Wisden amongst others. His writing about 1.FC Union Berlin can be mostly found here and he has a website here

Emily Sweetman is an illustrator, at home in Berlin. She is a genius, and her work can be seen here

Beachy Head: trauma and transformation

By Julius Smit:

I'm standing on Beachy Head, a chalk headland rising to 531 feet/162 metres above sea level and despite intermittent spring sunshine, there's a sharp wind coursing over the wide open space. Beachy Head is known as the highest chalk sea cliff in Britain. It's found west of Eastbourne in East Sussex, on the south-east coast of England. The name originates from the corrupted French beau chef meaning 'beautiful headland.' The writer and walker Richard Jefferies wrote about the place in 1883 in an article aptly named The Breeze on Beachy Head. 'The great headland and the whole rib of the promontory is wind-swept and washed with air; the billows of the atmosphere roll over it.' I agree. I too am wind-swept and washed with air. The headland is visited and walked on all year round, more in good weather than in bad, but even in November mists or strong February winds, the site can make you refocus on yourself and your sense of existence. It can turn you inside out.

Local inhabitants and visitors from all over the globe are attracted to the area for its space, height and the views: to gaze out across the light of the English Channel with a post-Brexit vision, to imagine the land mass of Europe beyond the horizon. It's a place of meeting and transience, evocation and conversation. It's also a darker place given the number of people who come here to end their lives. On average twenty people a year throw themselves over the edge. On one of my previous walks up here a man with tears in his years walked past me and muttered that someone had gone over. Division of land masses, division of existence.

The Beachy Head Chaplaincy Team, set up in 2004, is a volunteer led organisation whose members are trained in skilled crisis intervention support. Members take regular patrols along the length of this coastline ready to save lives and help anyone in need. I often see them on their walks dressed in their high-viz jackets. The headland is an 'edge place', physically and psychologically, signified by the number of wooden signs conspicuously announcing in stark white lettering 'Cliff Edge'. In the past, friends and relatives used to leave bunches of flowers with written card notes attached to the thin wire fence which runs at intervals alongside the cliff edge. Sometimes, small crosses have been placed in the ground near to the spot from where the deceased person jumped. In 2018, Eastbourne Borough Council decided in its wisdom to remove these memory tokens and shrines, no doubt in a move to counter a site favoured for suicide in favour of encouraging more positive tourism. 

On this Sunday afternoon I feel pivoted between air, land and sea, and I think of Caspar David Friedrich's painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog for not only seeing what's around me but also what's within me. Admittedly there's no fog to be seen, but the vast sky with its scudding clouds makes me feel insignificant on the land's design.

A road not far away runs past the Beachy Head public house, the Countryside Centre with its shop and rotating exhibitions and a large car park. A public telephone box bears a prominent sign stating that the Samaritans are always there, night and day, to receive your call. They are there to listen. Listening. At the beginning of the Cold War, Beachy Head was chosen as a strategic site for a government radar installation. An underground bunker was built and by 1954 the 'looking and listening' site was fully operational. It was only around 1960 when decisions were made to wind down the activity that the complex was eventually demolished.

Although concrete slabs and grass have now covered over most of the surface evidence, traces of the operation are still around if you know what to look for. As I walk around I notice a ring of metal barriers with Keep Out notices has been erected around a grassy mound, part of which has been ripped apart exposing smashed concrete slabs. I go closer to investigate and can just make out a narrow flight of rusty metal rung steps leading down into an underground darkness, no doubt once an entrance to an operations room monitoring codes and signals. It's not only the height I must be aware of, but also what's under my feet.

There's more to the breeze on Beachy Head than is realized, as it's one of the prevailing natural forces which continue to batter and pummel at the chalk cliff, wearing away half a metre of land a year. Regular news reports in the local press announce alarming splits near to the cliff edge, followed later by reports of large rock falls onto the beach below. Emergency barriers are then erected and the Cliff Edge signs are moved once again. The visitors walk around and the land moves. All notions of stability are questioned on this 'edge place.'

During WWII, Beachy Head was the last land formation many aircrews saw on their missions to occupied Europe. To mark their operations a large memorial block of granite has been placed on the headland with images and inscriptions relating to the work of the squadrons. Now, in place of aircraft, there are regular meetings of a paragliding club whose members are often seen exploiting thermals, floating and soaring above a once defensive landscape, attached to their curled coloured fabric wings like surreal insects. I've often heard their 'music' as they swished above me.

I'm not tempted today by the ice-cream van parked strategically in one corner of the car park. It has a small queue of customers desirous of icy satisfaction. I turn away and start on my walk back home. On the way down I spot a discarded plastic printed arrow, black on yellow, a reminder of last year's annual autumn Beachy Head Marathon. Yes, add runners to the mix. All is movement, all is flux.

***

Julius Smit is a photographer, poet, zine maker and a member of the Walking Artists Network - Website

In the littoral (a song cycle)

By Sarah Frost:

The sea is noiseless tonight,
crickets creak a quiet refrain.
Somewhere in the valley
an owl calls for something he lost.

A snake glides across the black river,
slides into a waiting tree.
Behind him water furrows in mushroom folds,
soft as the forest floor. 

***

Cuttlefish clouds shear the salmon sky,
wind exfoliates the beach.
Full of blue motion, waves compete for the shoreline
where a jelly fish lolls, like a severed head. 

In the mountain shadow, there is no wind.
From a rockface, a lone flower extends
over a dark pool, orange fire.
Nothing disturbs the milky foam’s calligraphy.

Lost in branches the loerie hops,
his tail feathering bronze as a cormorant
diving into the gale-rimmed sea,
a body visible, then not. 

***

Under the sea-slicked sand
where finger plough snails sail across the wet
on creased oval feet,
the sand clam burrows,
ligamented halves clasped tight.

At the backline white stallions roar,
siring tsunami foals –
but it is quiet here in the littoral
where layered waves mantle in the swash. 

In the shallows’ ebb and flow
I bend to touch a snail’s proboscis.
Boldly he probes the foam,
sniffs ozone heady as a drug.

Under us, the sand mussel clenches,
siphoning water through her secret straws.
A knife of gulls prises whelk-clouds open
pearly sponges, dripping light. 

***

Where sea shallows meet sand, salps,
small blobs of ointment on shore scraped raw by the sea.
Stretching spinal, their line hooks a plunder of plough snails.
Unphased by relentless wash of waves
and wind funneling from the dunes,
these see-through crescent moons bloom
an axis of notochords threading clear as water,
a broken jellyfish splatter, gelatinous diamonds,
strange viscous secretions, singular and many,
like daubs of clear silicon, gluing me
to the backbone of the world, its animal tides. 

***

At the lagoon’s edge, I held her on my hip,
our heads leaning in, river stones.
Suddenly, I saw not what my daughter saw
but how she saw; the morning leaping,
a silver fish, from hills cupped like hands
to catch fern green water, a forever of trees.
Diamond air danced as laughing,
she reached for my sunglasses,
inviting me to look through them with her.
My feet sank heavy into the wet estuary.
Her touch at my neck was a dune breeze.
Child time, sage as the sea pumpkin’s shade,
turned her sky blue gaze
to polaroid gauze,  intensifying light. 

***

Like broadband, the waves graph a beachy spectrum,
static hum sounding through sonic boom.
Three cormorants fly in a faithful motif
familiar as the jut of headland into the current. 

A Tabard -green sea rolls in from the deep,
clear as an eye.
It blinks at the sun trawling ultramarine,
oyster catchers’ beaks red javelins. 

This ocean churns with sidewash, backwash,
spindrift stitching swathes as if mending a tear,
I navigate a path over the crags to the gulley,
where the secret daisies grow.

As if binding lovers in a handfasting,
incoming waters grasp the gulley’s rocky wrist,
tie it to sand bare as a promise. 

*

About Sarah:

Sarah Frost is 48 years old and mother to a 17 year old boy, and an eight year girl. She works as an online editor for Juta Legalbrief in Durban, South Africa. Sarah has been writing poetry since she was 19 years old. She has completed an MA in English Literature at UKZN and achieved a first class pass in a module in Online Poetry at Wits University. She won the Temenos prize for mystical poetry in the McGregor Poetry Competition in 2021. Her debut collection, Conduit, was published by Modjaji in 2011. She is currently fine-tuning a second manuscript, The Past, which she hopes to publish soon.

Border Crossing

By Martin Ransley:

Often, on Sunday mornings, I’m usually the first to duck beneath the colonnade arch, ascend the steep steps - making the transition from the land of the living to the land of the dead. As if the steps, and hill, the cemetery is built on help those, who believe in such things, that they are already on their way to heaven. Almost all visitors to Highgate Cemetery do exactly same, because the gothic arch at the entrance, linking the two chapels, gently guides visitors directly toward Bunning’s simply designed arch; treading a path mourners have respectfully trod since 1839. 

Once the transition is accomplished, visitors struggle to orientate themselves, as their senses become overwhelmed by the sight, sound, scent, and sheer beauty of the place. Change is sensed immediately; the air cools, light darkens, and from early March there is a scent of wild garlic – not as defence against vampires - there are none at Highgate, but because the ground offers perfect growing conditions, where it thrives in abundance, until its delicate, white flowers begin to fade in late May. Then, surprisingly, there are sounds of life heard among the trees and undergrowth. A blackbird, almost always first to break the dawn with its wistful, melancholic call; then a robin calls out with sweet, cheery short bursts of song. The bittersweet notes of native birds are often rudely interrupted by the squawking of parakeets, which some say, despite beautiful colouring, lower the tone somewhat, and threaten the inherent harmony of place. 

Then there are the stones looming out of the undergrowth: granite, slate, sandstone, marble; occasionally wooden markers in the shape of a cross - sometimes a shrub marks a grave, which flower annually and takes on a significance of its own. These markers signify something – a meaning - a language uniquely theirs. Highgate cemetery is a curious place, and a place for the curious, who, when they enter, embark on a journey, a quest to find answers - each stone, every marker begs a question, who am I, what did I do, am I remembered? That is the purpose of being here – an abiding memorial to remind relatives, friends and visitors of their status, and to pray for them in perpetuity, until an angel, perched above a grave, reaches for her horn and blows. 

Few do, though. Initially a grave is marked with a wooden cross, and remains in place for six months, sometimes a year; allowing the ground to settle before a permanent memorial is erected to commemorate the terminus of the corpse below. That is what the grave is, a terminus, generally understood as an endpoint, and for Victorian believers, signified a final border-crossing– or a first step on the stairway to heaven.  Twenty percent of wooden crosses, though, remain the only indication a burial has taken place. Visits become infrequent and then cease. Perhaps, relatives are reluctant to return to graveside and reawaken recent sorrows, or, maybe, the cost of a stone memorial is no longer justifiable for those faced with an acceleration in the cost of living in this world. Then again, once grief subsides, maybe remembrance occurs in the imagination, and the grave loses its function for contemplation of loss and silent reflection. Memories of the dead emerge randomly while taking the children to school, putting the rubbish out, or maybe not at all, and memories drift - forgotten – lost to history. It is reckoned after fifteen years, no relative or friend visit the stones, leaving them for the curiosity of visitors; those curious of knowing more. 

Suddenly there are splashes of colour - red, yellow, green. A bouquet left on a stone, in fact two, in different sections of the cemetery – graves from a time which no longer exists! No card attached with a fond message or signature. Anonymous. Whoever left them, the living certainly doesn’t need to know who was responsible for floral tributes reaching out through time. More questions for the curious – who, why? Surely not a token of grief – can grief be passed down through generations? 

One possibility is whoever found the stone, had been searching for ancestors, curious about those who had preceded them, and found a name – a continuity with the past linking them – an affirmation of identity, and the laying of flowers, heralds a prodigal return, albeit momentarily, paying a final tribute to an ancestor, a last hurrah of remembrance, one final trump. And what was lost, is now found, and their descendants might tell others what they did and how it was done. Maybe, a reaction will be set in motion – perhaps others will become curious and embark on a search for those who have gone before them and leave flowers in celebration of shared identity and a past, or perhaps not.

***

Martin completed a BA in English Literature at Birkbeck College in 2019 and is a former teacher. He lives in North London and swims, each morning, at a local lido during the winter months. Once spring arrives, he migrates to the ponds on Hampstead Heath. While cycling there, swimming, and then returning, ideas for writing form, which he writes down on his return. Border Crossing is the result of the method, such as it is! He is a guide at Highgate Cemetery.

Return to Lewis

By Ian Grosz:

It had been fifteen years since I had last sailed on the Lewis ferry. The largest of the islands of the Outer Hebrides, Lewis is separated from the mainland of Scotland by an often stormy stretch of sea known as the Minch, the crossing twice that of Dover to Calais. This distance, and its Celtic, Gaelic heritage, has maintained Lewis’s mystique in the imagination. Romanticised through the ages but found often lacking by its visiting authors, a series of historic writers from Johnson’s infamous eighteenth-century post-Union A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, to Louis MacNeice’s I Crossed the Minch in 1937, have been less than kind about the islands.[1]

MacNeice, a Belfast born, Oxford educated poet, playwright, BBC producer, writer and critic, declares in the opening to his travelogue of the journey he took through the Hebrides, that ‘I doubt that I shall visit the Western Islands again.’ Filled with the memories of childhood visits to Connemara and the vicarious childhood memories of his father’s own Connemara childhood, MacNeice experienced an ‘out-of-placeness’ that came as a surprise on an island where he hoped to find something of his own ‘Celtic soul.’ 

‘What is shocking is to find an island invaded by the vices of the mainland,’ he says, his sentimental view of what life should be there, knocked off-kilter to find a crofter industrialise the weaving of Harris Tweeds, capitalising on the work and skills of his own community. Islands, no matter how romantic, are never as isolated and changeless as we might imagine. I sit at a window table and look out to Ullapool’s slowly shrinking harbourside cottages, and the mist and drizzle beginning to shroud the hills. The Summer Isles slip by to starboard and the boat passes quietly into the strangeness of the sea-swell and the mist, the horizon indistinct, a thin grey line between sea and sky. 

*

Driving off the boat and into the town, the years that have passed since I lived here suddenly contract to meet me. Nothing at first appears to have changed: like I have never left and am simply returning from a visit to the mainland, but I stop at a new supermarket to pick up some supplies before driving to Achmore where I will be staying ten miles south of Stornoway. The supermarket is full of teenagers on their lunchtime break from school, their universal Americanised accents shaped more by social media and Netflix than by the islands. At the checkout, the lady putting my shopping through the till is English.

The first morning I wake to find it wet and windy: the kind of wind that makes the rafters moan and snatches a car door from your hands. After breakfast I take a drive down the single-track road to Stornoway through the moor, chasing the ghost of Lewis poet Iain Crichton Smith. Crichton Smith had grown up in Lewis during the Second World War, learning English as a second language in school and leaving the islands to attend University in Aberdeen, before becoming a school teacher which he remained until he retired in Oban on the west coast of Scotland to write full-time in 1977. He was one of few island poets to find success writing in both English and Gaelic, and although he never returned to live on the island of his youth, it remained a fundamental part of his identity as both poet and person. 

Passing cold grey lochans alive with waves, and peatbanks signalled by rows of tattered plastic bags and upturned wheelbarrows scattered along their length; lonely looking, makeshift shielings sitting high on the moor, I pull over and look out across its undulating expanse, feeling its apparent emptiness in the pit of my stomach. I am reminded of Crichton Smith’s description of the setting for his childhood home. ‘My house lay between the sea and the moor,’ he tells us; ‘the moor which was often red with heather, on which one would find larks’ nests, where one would gather blaeberries: the moor scarred with peatbanks, spongy underfoot: blown across by the wind (for there is no land barer than Lewis).’[2]

No land barer; and yet the moor was filled with untapped memory and story, locked away like the carbon stored within the peat. I wondered how the moor appeared to the local crofters on their way home from the town. The moor’s monochrome appearance to me, a result of the lack of colour that can be painted by the brush of emotional attachment, but even Crichton Smith had articulated this chromatic sameness: ‘The sky of Lewis above the stones, the sea, the bleak landscape almost without distraction of colour.’ Today it seemed a fitting description. I put the van into gear and continue on, following the long and empty road toward Stornoway. I arrive at the town by the land-fill site, gulls crowding greedily overhead, before the road gives way to familiar looking streets and houses that almost erase the time since I lived here completely. I stop at the supermarket again, picking up some last-minute supplies I’d forgotten yesterday. The people inside are warm and friendly, chatty and open. I have not heard any Gaelic spoken yet. 

I am making my way to the village where Crichton Smith had been raised under the regime of his strict Presbyterian mother, ever terrified of her sons falling ill after losing her husband to tuberculosis when the future poet was still only an infant. The church figured heavily in Crichton Smith’s early life and the Sabbath strictly observed. Even the village’s name has a darkly biblical resonance. Bayble, or Pabail, like most of the island’s place names has a Norse rather than Gaelic origin, and is derived from Papa- býli meaning ‘dwelling of the priests’, possibly named so when the Norsemen who first settled here found the Culdee already inhabiting the fertile peninsula where the settlement is situated. It lies on the headland east of Stornoway, on the other side of `The Braigh’ (pronounced Bry): a narrow sea-battered spit of land connecting the eastern arm of Lewis – known locally as ‘Point’ but officially as The Eye Peninsula, or An Rubha – with the main island.

After crossing the Braigh, I head east a mile or two and then turn right down a long, minor road following the sign for Upper Bayble. The village is divided into two parts: upper and lower, its houses, some empty and dilapidated, scattered like pebbles either side of the single-track road that cuts a line between the moor on one side, and steep cliffs that meet the sea on the other. I try to imagine growing up here under the watchful religious gaze of the widow, the town of Stornoway with its little harbour and its few shops the highlight of my week; school and literature my escapism and my chance of escape; a wider world invisible beyond the horizon, seeping in only through the radio and the stories of returning servicemen and whalers. I would have wanted to leave too, and yet Crichton Smith never really escaped. He looked for it ever after, finding it always just beyond his grasp. 

It’s the island that goes away, not we who leave it.
Like an unbearable thought it sinks beyond
assiduous reasoning light and wringing hands,
or, as a flower roots deep into the ground,
it works its darkness into the gay winds
that blow about us in a later spirit. [3]

This haunting Crichton Smith conveys – the ghost memory of the island of his imagination – is expressed in much of his poetry: a lament for an island not only diminishing in personal memory but its language and culture slowly being lost, slowly sinking beyond the horizon of the collective past. 

I drive down to the pier where I sit and watch the waves jostling each other into the small bay, and wonder how many times Crichton Smith may have come here to do the same, dreaming of the wider horizons that lay beyond the Minch; the view of the headland, and the moor beyond the row of small houses lining the cliff-tops, as familiar to him growing up here, as the tightly-packed terraced houses of the street where I grew up in the northwest of England, and a knowing deep-down that to thrive meant to leave. In that way we are similar, but the difference is that I did not have to leave my language behind, and without a language that you grow inside of, that fundamentally connects you to home but that you see in slow decline, you will struggle to know who you are no matter how many times you return. 

***

Ian Grosz is a writer based in the northeast of Scotland. His writing features in the forthcoming book Four Rivers Deep, a collaborative deep mapping project that explores the rivers Don and Dee in northeast Scotland and the Swan and Canning rivers in southwest Australia, due for publication by UWA Press in 2022. Ian is currently working on a narrative nonfiction project exploring the ways in which landscapes help shape a sense of place and identity. He has a website at https://groundings.co.uk

Notes:
[1] Louis MacNeice, I Crossed the Minch, (1938, Longmans, Green & Co, repr. Edinburgh, Polygon, Birlinn Ltd, 2007).
[2]  Iain Crichton Smith quotes taken from Iain Crichton Smith, Towards the Human, Selected Essays, (Loanhead, Midlothian, MacDonald, 1986)
[3]  Iain Crichton Smith, ‘The Departing Island’ from Three Regional Voices, 1968, in Mathew McGuire (Ed.), Iain Crichton Smith, New Collected Poems, (1992, repr. Manchester, Carcanet Press, 2011), V 13-18, p.65