Wallflower Dispatches

Wallflower Dispatches has been invited to speak about Freelance Journalism at a Creative Careers Forum hosted by the University of London.

The forum will take place this Wednesday 3 March in the Windsor Building Auditorium from 5.30 – 7.30pm at Royal Holloway, Egham, Surrey.

Other speakers will include: Tim Burke, BBC Editor and Richard Turley, a BBC Director.

Jodhpurs Nr. 38 sporting white jodhpurs by the 23rd Cavalry Polo Team in 1908 courtesy of the Mansell Collection

Amira is Dutch.

It is strange to think that in what she calls “her former life”, she probably was a “Marijke”, perhaps a “Trijntje” or even a “Wilhelmina”. I have a feeling we will never know.

Despite the fact that she looks 52, she has actually led a very long, eventful life and crammed into much into 78 years, her real age.

Born in the 1930s, she was interred by the Japanese in WW II and is a concentration camp survivor of the other sort. Her father died young and her mother – by Amira’s account – was an upper class Dutch lady with airs and graces and a matching cold heart. Sometimes parents and children are not cut from the same cloth.

Amira (or as she might have been then: Marijke) tried very hard to be a good upper class Dutch lady herself when she settled in Holland some time after the war. She married, had a daughter and mixed easily with the intellectuals at Amsterdam University where she worked.

Soon, she felt uneasy with the wealth in her life; the penthouse, the holidays, the semblance of a contended life that comes with these trappings like a free promotional gift.

She described one holiday in Morocco where she was staying with her husband. She called herself a prisoner of an exclusive holiday compound that fulfils all the fantasies of the Western traveller. One morning she escaped, as she puts it: “I had to see what it was like outside.” So she stepped across the border of iron gates, saw the poverty of the real life and never returned.

Shortly afterwards, this escape took on grander forms when she left her life, culture and husband to live in the Maghreb desert amongst the Arabs. Her daughter was grown up. It was easy to leave.

The Bedouins with whom she lived in the desert named her with the name she still bears. Amira was named for her courage, her uprightness and fearlessness, for the fact that she – a woman – dared to travel alone in this harsh environment. She became a Muslim – after her own fashion it appears. Amira left her Dutch persona behind, like an exquisite, but useless alligator skin.

She walked for years, lived in a village in Kurdistan and finally worked for a Jewish couple in Israel, looking after their plants, vegetables and flowers; highly effective Dutch green fingers in the land of milk and honey.

It appears that she has shied away from close human relationships that involve long-term commitment and intimate closeness. Instead, she returned to Europe with three dogs. The adoption process had been mutual.

It seems fitting that we met her thanks to her dogs who appeared from nowhere in a dusty car park after we had just gotten out of our vehicle. She saw us, talked to us as if we had known each other for years and uttered incisively in her direct Dutch manner: “I can see that you are honest and can’t lie.” Who could refuse this unusual friendship?

Today, here in France, Amira lives simply with her dogs, which she calls her children. She has daily chats with Allah and lives willingly on the poverty line. Back home in Holland there are means and possessions, but her real treasure is her freedom, her “children” and the fact that she is no longer attracted to the superfluous materialistic things in life. “I am rich, can’t you see,” she will say regularly. “HE looks after me. Look…” she will say pulling the short mane of her grey hair and jumping up. “HE has left me this and I don’t walk like an old woman.”

The large variety of injustices of this world (cruelty to animals, children, people, boring conversations, lack of interest in this world etc.) is always wonderfully summed up by one word: “Freselik!!!” (‘Awful’) which Amira spits out with great passion. Sometimes events take such a turn that it’s “Heel freselik.” We chat in English, German, French, and have learned many new Dutch words.

She looks to the future in terms of “another twenty years.” She has found a small patch of her private paradise. She is a genuine rare human create.

Jodhpurs Nr. 26 by Jean Harlow in beige cavalry twill breeches, December 13, 1933

February is the time of year when everything turns YELLOW and spring is in the air.

Yesterday it all turned white. Escota who manages the motorways here has announced 40cm of snow.

The roads are closed, life is paralysed, we are asked to use electricity sparingly and not leave the house.

Life isn’t only sunshine on the Côte Du Blanc.

Jodhpurs Nr. 36 by unknown model posing for the Kauffman & Sons* Catalogue in the 1930s. Tailoring by Nardi.

Funny how you can find similar riding boots at Hermès and shop Bottega Veneta for same-style belt.

*For years, Kauffman & Sons Saddlery was a New York Landmark. In 1875, the very same year the Coaching Club was born, a Prussian immigrant named Herman Kauffmann set up shop in lower Manhattan, supplying harnesses for the nags that pulled police carts and fire wagons.

Almost 50 years later, in 1923, H. Kauffman & Sons Saddlery Co. opened at 139 East 24th Street and became one of the largest retailers of riding equipment in the country. It remained there until 1991, when Baruch College acquired the property.

Hermans’ son Isidor Kauffman’s died in 1947. His obituary mentioned that the company “boasted as customers some of the most prominent families in the nation.”

Together with the Miller Harness Company, an equally well known and well stocked tack shop and horse haberdashery a few doors down, Kauffman’s made the block on East 24th Street the equine epicenter of New York.

Bernard Kauffman (1905-2004) constituted the third generation in the business. Bernard Kauffman’s son, Charles Kauffman, was head of the business in 1991 when Kauffman’s left their 24th St. location.

The following was reported in the New York Times (3 March 1991): “One of New York City’s oldest specialty retailers, H. Kauffman & Sons Saddlery Company, is continuing a long evolution uptown and upscale. The purveyor of saddles, boots, riding crops and other equestrian goods, which opened in 1875 on Division Street on the Lower East Side, plans to leave its current 24th Street location and open a new store by May 1 at 419 Park Avenue South, at the corner of 29th Street. Charles Kauffman, chief executive of the family-owned retailer, said the move has been prompted in part by the uncertain future of stores [the store's] current location, a two-story Beaux-Arts building at 139 East 24th Street, between Third and Lexington Avenues. Although preservationists have begun a campaign to have it protected by the city as an historic landmark … it has been slated for demolition by Baruch College, which has its main campus on the same block and wants to expand. Kauffman & Sons has leased space since 1925 in the building, which is currently owned by the L. B. Oil Company of New York. L. B. Oil has agreed to sell it to Baruch…”

Sadly, as of December 2008 the successors to Kauffman’s were a mail-order and internet business.

Amelia Earhart continues to fascinate and influence. Her life, her personality and her sense of style are constantly being discovered by new generations.

Over 40 books (“The Sound of Wings: The Life of Amelia Earhart” by Mary S. Lovell, Susan Butler’s “East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart”), films (Hilary “Amelia”, Amy Adams in a rather dubious “A Night at the Museum 2” – Diane Keaton’s definitive “The Final Flight” anyone?!), clothes (Belstaff’s Amelia Earhart Bomber Jacket) feed off her life and the mystery of her death. Why publish another book?

Susan Wels had unprecedented access to the both the papers of Sally Putnam Chapman, a granddaughter of Earhart’s husband George Palmer Putnam and Purdue University Library. The result is a richly illustrated book with new material ranging from unseen photographs of Amelia herself and personal items such as her goggles and other historic periphenalia such as letters, membership cards and train tickets.

The chapter on Amelia’s disappearance lists the major theories of her final flight and adds new information.

Whether you are a dedicated Earhart fan or just want to find out more about the award- winning pilot, this book is a rich but concise introduction. From a visual point of view, it has the largest and best selection of Amelia photographs both from her youth and later life.

Jodhpurs Nr. 35 by Daniel Macmillan, Viscount Macmillan of Ovenden, Heir to the Second Earl of Stockton.

Seen in Vanity Fair in celebration of the painter John Singer Sargent who in 1922 painted Macmillan’s great-great-grandfather Maurice Macmillan  and his great-uncle Daniel Macmillan (whose brother Harold was Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963) in 1887.

This book collects some of the most famous art work of British graffiti/street artist Banksy. His name is a pseudonym and little is known about him. It is believed that he was born in the 1970s near Bristol.

His work can be seen around London, throughout the UK and abroad.

In 1980s England social, cultural and political criticism was often expressed through pop music, the theatre, TV and some of the national press.

Throughout the 1990s these voices were largely silenced or disappeared and thanks to Banksy’s art satirical commentary of British society moved into the street.

Some pieces are specifically English, while others – such as the Segregation Wall in Palestine – have wider meaning.

Although Banksy is anti-capitalism, a number of his works have been sold by Sotheby’s London for large sums of money. His comment on his website the day after: an image of an auction house scene showing people bidding on a picture that said, “I Can’t Believe You Morons Actually Buy This ****.”

Regardless of the image his has managed to create for himself, Banksy must have a highly talented agent/marketing person that promotes his work and sells the product ‘Banksy’ successfully.

The funniest photos in the book document him hanging pseudo paintings in the Tate Gallery, the Louvre and other great art museums and clocking how long they managed to stay part of the exhibit before someone spotted them.

This week, Banksy’s first film Exit Through the Gift Shop premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

Here is Banksy’s website. Click here if you want to be updated when a new Banksy street art appears and see a location map of his work.

The first love for an object – Nutella-soaked breakfast crackers, Glenn Gould and his variations on Goldberg, before Florence in May, even before the nimble feet of Fred Astaire – the love that came before all others was England, and more specifically: London.

Like all other first adolescent emotional attachments this love was abstract, idealistic, unconditional, blind, pure, destructive, passionate, self-indulgent, all-consuming, inspiring and absolute. It remained unrequited, deliciously unfilled and took its allotted place amongst a number of other objects of the same fate.

Unrequited love unravels itself thus: you change, the object of your affection changes or quite simply you learn to live with it, growing a secret inner chamber in your heart.

Now and then coming face to face with your elapsed past you are projected back into this particular moment. The London that hit met full force all those years ago was raw, ugly, beautiful, honest and angry like Paul Weller screaming about injustice for The Jam.

London was the living embodiment of contradiction (one of the worst malaises of adolescence) where Punks hung out on King’s Road and bowler-clad gentlemen ambled along the same path. Both could turn out to be equally polite if asked for directions.

London, the only European city where colour, nationality, social status REALLY didn’t matter and one’s worst character fault was sense of humour failure.

Where the Royal Family was sacred and aloof, but you could find yourself next to the Prince of Wales on the Windsor Polo Field, treading down the divots between chukkas; where you could bump into Terence Stamp, have lunch with the Duchess of York and watch John Malkovich antique hunting. A strange romantic urban paradise that still follows the traces of small lanes from the Middle Ages.

But slowly and unperceptive this handsome unique boy turned into a middle aged sell-out: self-satisfied, spreading mid-waist, materialistic, pre-occupied with insignificant little indispositions and always, always looking inward and into the past.

London was so easy to love, but has downgraded its heritage. Where there was literature, we find confessional autobiographies of second tier never-have-beens. Instead of culture, there is Celebrity Big Brother.

Individuality and personal freedom are confiscated at security, education and knowledge eyed with suspicion. Liberal tendencies are only admitted if they fit into a 16oz Ziploc plastic bag.

The fainting couch at Brown’s Hotel has been replaced by bland European chic, Earl Grey tea time with hooded cappucinos. Tastelessness has been elevated into a style.

Now and then it’s urgent to return and track down these hints of a memory that can suddenly spring into your face on Piccadilly where some men still wear orange corduroys. Or it hits you in Hackney where Caribbeans live in pride and poverty and you bump into the Morrissey wannabee changing trains at Angel station.

Some loves are harder to forget.