I’m Nina Milton, and this blog is all about getting out the laptop or the pen and pad to get writing. My blogposts are focused on advice and suggestions and news for writers, but also on a love reading with plenty of reviews, and a look at my pagan life, plus arts and culture. Get all my posts as they appear by becoming a subscriber. Click below right...

Thursday 21 July 2016

Playing at Shakespeare


My father, on his 21st birthday
My father was a Victorian, born before the century moved from 19th to 20th, but he had modish ideas about playtime. When I was quite small…five, six, seven…and my mother wanted a day out shopping in town, I’d stay with Dad and we’d play together. He was in his fifties and already retired when I was born, so he was always there, in the house, a ready-made nanny when my mother needed a break.
If it was sunny, we’d go for a steady walk together, maybe to the local farm, where we could see the animals and pick up eggs, but I didn’t enjoy that. Dad was not a well man. He’d stop all the time, resting on walls while his breathing steadied and his colour returned. And I was shy of the farmer’s wife because I knew Dad had told her a lie on our first visit. She’d looked down at me, kicking my sandals against the doorstep, and asked him if this was his granddaughter.
“Yes,” he’d said. 
Now, as a grown-up, I understand that little fib. We’ve all told them, when the truth is just way to complicated to go into with a stranger. He could have said, “This is my daughter by my second marriage. I have a son in Australia, a married daughter with children of her own and I lost my eldest son in the war,” but of course, he wasn’t going to go into all that. Even so, the little fib rubbed on my young conscience and on my guilty distaste of having such elderly parents, whom I loved, but wanted to hide away from my friends. 
So it was when it rained, that I enjoyed our times together best. I much preferred to stay in the house and play at Shakespeare.
Print by Charles Sherwin (1764-1794)
after an original work by Henry Fuseli (1741-1825).


Shakespeare was my favourite game to play with my father, and of all the versions, the Three Witches of Macbeth
was the best of all.
Firstly we’d have to find the props. I’d rush round the house and garden, collecting a cauldron (usually Mum’s old enamelled washtub), plus evil things to throw into it. Building the fire was the most challenging, but usually I sneaked into my parent’s bedroom, because there would be soft silky things in scarlet. Once we had the fire lit in the middle of the dining room, with criss-crossed sticks from the real pile of kindling and the soft silks peeking out between, the cauldron was balanced on top. Then we dressed ourselves up, draping counterpanes and old curtains round our shoulders and making pointed hats from newspapers or cereal boxes. Dad would start the game, reading from a copy of the complete works that long ago had fallen into disrepair.
“Thrice the brinded cat hath mew’d!” He used a cracked, high-pitched voice which instantly hit me in the stomach, dispatching me into a dark wood, to the mouth of an even darker cavern. When it was my go, he mouthed my words at me (we only had one copy) – “Tis time, 'tis time!” I screeched back, and we circled the fire, me skipping, him taking his usual steady pace.
“Round about the cauldron go; 
In the poison'd entrails throw…”
I had all the entrails in one of Mum’s forgotten shopping baskets and we took turns to throw them in, choosing items which at least vaguely resembled the original.
“Toad, that under cold stone…swelter’d venom sleeping got. Fillet of a fenny snake, Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting, Lizard's leg and owlet's wing…”
And then, my favourite bit, which we’d cackle out together.
“Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.”
When we ran out of things to throw in the pot, and I’d have to scamper off again, searching anew for something that, with a bit of imagination (and we both had plenty of that), could represent the next batch of magical ingredients.
Scale of dragon…waxy laurel leaves usual did the trick. Tooth of wolf…a sliver off a tallow candle. Witches’ mummy…an unfortunate rag doll.  Maw and gulf of the ravin'd salt-sea shark…frankly, if there had been fish in the fridge, we’d’ve commandeered it, but mostly we managed with a cut-out fishy shape. Root of hemlock was nice and easy, a weed pulled from the flowerbed (least, we hoped it was a weed), and slips of yew even easier as we had a hedge full of it. In fact, not much stumped us, certainly not nose of Turk and Tartar's lips – I had saved a set of grotesque plastic lips and false nose from a cracker, just for this purpose. Even finger of birth-strangled babe, however macabre that was, however much I shivered at the thought of it, was easily got – there was always an old wine cork in the pantry somewhere. But liver of blaspheming Jew…that was tricky. For a start, I wasn’t sure what a blaspheming Jew was, and Dad never precisely explained, and liver, which I utterly hated the taste of, was not something I fancied handling. Dad usually dealt with this by throwing in the soft, round red cushion that he used for the back of his neck. Once all of these were in, we’d set off again.
“Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.”
Then Hecate would appear. Dad would swap his witch’s hat for one of my mother’s best ones, further raising his voice so that it trilled out. “And now about the cauldron sing, live elves and fairies in a ring, enchanting all that you put in.”
This was my cue; the best line in the entire game. “By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes. Open, locks, Whoever knocks!”
Dad would throw off Mum’s good hat and put on his trilby, transforming into Macbeth.
This game could happily take an entire rainy afternoon, but, despite the deep love for Shakespeare it gave me, what I recall most about it are not the words – powerful and iconic though they are – I had no idea that this stuff had been loved and studied across the world for almost five hundred years. My happiest memories are searching for the cauldron’s ingredients, scabbling in the cupboard under the stairs, at the backs of kitchen drawers and in my mother’s wardrobe, where odd-looking items like corn pads could always be uncovered. Playing The Three Witches of Macbeth grounded me in my own home in a way the other Shakespeare games couldn’t do. Hamlet only required bedsheets (even so, the ghost frightened me to the core), and Romeo and Juliet, although needing pretty things for me to dress up in, was a bit long-winded, in my view, and Dad never attempted climbing to the balcony, he merely took the stairs to where I stood on the upper landing. R&J was generally a bit of a let-down compared to The Witches.
Naturally, my mother never knew about the game of Shakespeare; she was always out when we played it and the entire thing was rapidly cleared away before she returned – silken petticoats (probably snagged) back upstairs, the washtub stored outside, and the pointed hats smoothed down, ready to screw up for the fire.
I would love to be able to thank my father for his introduction to the Game of Shakespeare, but I’m sure he was well aware of the long-term results. And anyway, he loved our secret afternoons together just as much as I did. They remained our secret, until I shared them with my own children.
The original Complete Shakespeare, in tiny print on wafter-thin paper, had fallen  apart long before my kids were
old enough to dress up and dance around cauldrons, so I bought a three volume edition, embossed in a dust-proof slipcase, which I’ll still get out and read, before a trip to the theatre.

My father died shortly after my eleventh birthday, and he never had the opportunity to take me to a Shakespeare play, but when I did finally see one – which was not until I took my English Lit exams – I instantly fell in love with them. I cannot, to this day, hear the words, “round and round the cauldron go,” without being winged back to that old house, the rain drizzling down the windows, the smell of the drawers by my mother’s bedside, and me and my dad playing at witches.

Sunday 10 July 2016

Further Adventures at the Hay Festival




I'm not the only one with happy, if quixotic memories of a day at the Hay. Photographer Amano was out and about with his camera, trying to get pictorial imagery of the world of book festival;

 … an official accosts me. Perhaps he saw me taking a photograph of the bus stop outside where people were queuing up or maybe he just noticed the camera, a small one hardly bigger than a phone, strung around my neck. Of course, I am used to being challenged as a photographer but am still surprised to be told that no photography is allowed on site and that if I am seen with a camera, I might be asked to leave since cameras are not actually allowed on site unless one has permission… 
Read more of Amano's adventures at the Hay Festival here

Friday 8 July 2016

‘We Need New Names,’ by NoViolet Bulawayo – "How They Got Published – Stories of Writing Success"

 NoViolet Bulawayo
 a Guardian first book award nominee for
We Need New Names.
Photograph: Mark Pringle
Novels sometimes grow out of short stories. In a previous blog, I talked about Jonathan Strange and Mr Morrell the 900 page fantasy that only got noticed after its author, Susanna Clarke, had a short story published. 

Now, in the occasional series;  

In this occasional series, "How They Got Published  – Stories of Writing Success", we are looking at how writers got their very first contract; the story of how that happened and how they are so very willing to share their advice with other hopeful writers. 

NoViolet Bulawayo has experienced something like this; she won the Caine Prize for African Writing with Hitting Budapest a short story which tells the story of poverty-stricken children on the hunt for food at any price. Now she’s been shortlisted for the Man-Booker with what feels like an expansion of this tale; We Need New Names. A great title, by the way, as it both demonstrates the major theme in the book but is also uttered by one of the children in the story as they play their games around a grim shanty town ironically named Paradise. Bulawayo uses the eyes of ten-year-old Darling to portray everything she believes is wrong with government policies in her home country, Zimbabwe. Her characters are destitute – and desperate – they no longer have a school or a house, or even enough food, since the police bulldozed their township.

Darling, and her gang of friends, Bastard, Chipo, Godknows, Sbho and Stina may be children, but they have experienced a lot of life. Chipo is pregnant after being raped by her grandfather - later in the novel we watch her childhood disappear as she matures into a very young mother.

Playing in the scrubland, they see a body suicide hanging from a tree. They steal the woman's almost new shoes to sell for bread.Then  Darling's father returns from South Africa with AIDS and she empathetically describes how the children respond to a terminally sick person. 

In the Guardian, reviewer Helon Habila, does raise the issue of cramming into the novel every ‘African’ topic” …as if the writer had a checklist made from the morning's news on Africa…  (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/20/need-new-names-bulawayo-reviewand this is a good point, new writers should always do well to avoid the temptation to ‘tell all their world’, but I think she pulls this off using a brilliant combination of continued action with a fine sense of rhythm and use of language. Bulawayo uses original images to portray her scenes of Darling’s world…the bulldozers appear boiling… constructing a powerful ‘voice’ for Darling’s narration, which imbues her with dignity, resilience and a fighting spirit. In a tense chapter, the gang are ‘scrumping’ for guavas in a posh neighbouring suburb, when, still up in the trees, they witness a pro-Mugabe attack by black partisans on the whites living in the huge houses, binding their hands and taking them away, chanting "Africa for Africans!”

Darling has been promised that she will be sent to America, where her aunt Fostalina lives. This move is needed in the novel – Bulawayo clearly wanted to contrast Darling’s two lives – but I enjoyed the first half of the book a lot more.

Being a very real pre-pubescent girl, Darling soon reinvents herself as a typical US kid, and this weakens the link with the core themes of the novel. Even so, we’re reminded just how much work that might take…“The problem with English is this: You usually can't open your mouth and it comes out just like that--first you have to think what you want to say. Then you have to find the words. Then you have to carefully arrange those words in your head. Then you have to say the words quietly to yourself, to make sure you got them okay. And finally, the last step, which is to say the words out loud and have them sound just right.
But then because you have to do all this, when you get to the final step, something strange has happened to you and you speak the way a drunk walks. And, because you are speaking like falling, it's as if you are an idiot, when the truth is that it's the language and the whole process that's messed up. And then the problem with those who speak only English is this: they don't know how to listen; they are busy looking at your falling instead of paying attention to what you are saying…

Darling naturally begins to forget her old land and previous love of her old friends, although not so completely that we can’t keep tabs on them in the book; during a Skype call Chipo tells her, “Darling, my dear, you left the house burning and you have the guts to tell me, in that stupid accent that you were not even born with, that doesn’t even suit you, that this is your country?”


 NoViolat Bulawayo is the pen name of Elizabeth Zandile Tshele. Born in Zimbabwe, In 2010, she gained a fellowship after completing her MA in Creative Writing at Cornell University.  This short, very readable book that bravely recounts a life in a country we’re usually allowed to know very little about.

Friday 1 July 2016

An OCA Excursion into Literature

Marlon James, 2015 Booker prize-winner,
with OCA alumni, Pat

A  Day at the  Hay with the OCA


A day in the sun at Hay…it’s one of the selling points of the Hay Festival – photos on the website are focused on people under sun umbrellas reading their latest purchase and drinking cool lager. This is a risky ploy for a Welsh summer event, but it paid off for the Open College of the Arts posse that arrived at the festival grounds on bank holiday Saturday. We’d come for the culture, of course we had. We’d come for the literature, naturally, for the heightened conversation we’d enjoy with each other after sharing events. But the fact the sun was out certainly helped. We'd come to see the stars of the literary world, and they turned out to be really nice people as well as great writers...
A Nobel Laureate, a Man-Booker winner,
the Samual Johnson Prize winner...
no, not us in the selfie, the great writers we'd come to enjoy
to read the rest of this blogpost, follow the link to weareOCA