Nika

After posting yesterday’s piece on  Miep Gries I’ve been thinking about bravery. I write about bravery a lot. Nika’s story, ‘What’s Ukrainian for Football’ is about bravery.  In it, Nika re-tells the true story of FC Start, a Ukrainian football team who, in 1942 occupied Kiev, bravely defied the order to lose to the German team, with tragic consequences.  Their bravery inspires Nika herself to be brave; she confronts a team-mate who has been taunting her about being foreign.

Yet bravery isn’t always about fighting and wars. In the book I’m working on at the moment, Tabinda is scared of heading the ball.  It seems such a small thing, doesn’t it, but it’s taken over her life. It not only effects the way she plays, it effects her relationship with her dad. He doesn’t understand why she’s so inconsistent on the field and because she daren’t tell him, everything gets blown out of proportion. Tabinda calls it headerphobia.  People can have phobias - irrational fears - about all sorts of things. I saw a TV programme once where someone had a fear of baked beans. Then there’s Genuphobia (fear of knees) Helminthophobia (worms) Alektorophobia (chickens) Chionophobia (snow). The thing is, no matter how silly these things may seem to other people, to the sufferer it’s real and frightening.

As a writer, I am sometimes asked by journalists, publishers or bloggers to list my favourite things. Books, films, paintings and so on. I always find this difficult, if not impossible. How can I name one painting out of all the amazing works of art that exist, for example? Besides, my answer fluctuates from mood to mood, phase to phase, season to season.

Futility by Wilfred Owen was my poem of choice for a posting I was kindly invited to do recently for Norman Geras’s highly acclaimed  ‘Normblog‘.  I chose it because Wilfred Owen was the first poet I came across at school that I understood and that didn’t bore me witless.  He died in action right at the very end of the Great War aged 25.

Futility

Move him into the sun-

Gently its touch awoke him once,

At home, whispering of fields unsown.

Always it woke him, even in France,

Until this morning and this snow.

If anything might rouse him now

The kind old sun will know.

*

Think how it wakes the seeds,-

Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.

Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,

Full-nerved - still warm - too hard to stir?

Was it for this the clay grew tall?

- O what made fatuous sunbeams toil

To break earth’s sleep at all?