24 March 2021

Seeking Solace & Sunshine

 



Life under “Lockdown” – A London Diary #7

 

Like a lot of people in the UK over the last year or so, I’ve spent a lot of time on my own. And even when out-and-about, either going for a walk or on my weekly trip to the supermarket, I’ve been alone even when in company. Passing strangers on pavements and paths, queuing with other customers all standing two metres apart. Hidden behind facemasks, like highwaymen or bank robbers. Atomised by our anonymity.

 


Being alone has never been much of a problem for me. I’m quite a solitary individual anyway. Before I got married I lived alone for many years, and whilst I travelled frequently in the company of colleagues for extended periods on work trips overseas, it’s never troubled me to travel alone for my holidays. In fact, some of my trips alone have been the most memorable and the most enjoyable. But like a lot of people, the isolation of the last year has (at times) been trying. On the plus side, it’s given me plenty of time to focus on my PhD studies, and I’ve managed to do a lot of writing and a phenomenal amount of reading. But it has also meant I’ve not been able to access the libraries and archives which I need for my research, as I had been planning to do. Other, even bigger and more important aspects of life have similarly been put on hold as I have been cut-off from my closest family members and friends, who have all been turned into faces seen only on computer screens.

 


Life has morphed unrecognisably. Everything which used to be exterior has become interior. It’s an odd thing to reflect upon; how a life put into limbo has played havoc with the natural rhythms of what used to be normal. It is almost as if, for the last year, I have been living a double life. On the one hand, the time has simply flown by because each day has basically been filled with the same now near ritualistic practices. This day last year seems like it was only yesterday, because it was exactly the same as yesterday. But, very oddly, this day last year also feels as though it were a lifetime ago, because it was another lifetime, lived by another me – a pre-lockdown “me” – someone whom I no longer seem to recall very clearly. What details I can recall about that person seem bafflingly unfamiliar now.

 


There are different ways of being alone. Being alone isn’t necessarily the same as being lonely. Many people find solace in solitude. Many more people feel lonely in the crowded confines of a commuter train, or whilst sitting at their desk in a busy office. Often what determines how we feel is the sense of control we have over what is happening to us. This is why lockdown has been hard for so many people. It is the fact that we have no control over what is happening, nor how long we will be subject to such social restrictions. It has put me in mind of a slim (but not slight) volume which I first read quite some time ago now – Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time to Keep Silence (1957). As a writer famous for his travel writing, this short book very eloquently describes a different sort of ‘journeying.’ An inward and self-reflective journey in which Leigh Fermor describes the times when he stayed in some of Europe’s oldest and most venerable monasteries. He describes staying at the Abbey of St. Wandrille at Solesmes, famous for its revival of Gregorian chant. But here he finds that something deeper seems to be driving his search for solitude, eventually leading him to the monastery of La Grande Trappe, where the Trappist monks famously take a vow of silence. And his fascination for the lives of the earliest Christian anchorites finally leads him to seek out the remarkable rock-cut monasteries of Cappadocia, hewn from the unusual rock formations of the region’s lunarlike landscape. 

 


It is the modern world which Leigh Fermor is seeking to escape by going to such places, but once he is safely ensconced in these secluded retreats, he realises that this is in fact a more complex undertaking than simply hiding himself away in the meek austerity of a monk’s cell: “Mental discipline, prayer and remoteness from the world and its disturbing visions reduce temptation to a minimum, but they can never entirely abolish it. In medieval traditions, abbeys and convents were always considered to be expugnable centres of revolt against infernal dominion on earth. They became, accordingly, special targets. Satan, issuing orders at nightfall to his foul precurrers, was rumoured to dispatch to capital cities only one junior fiend. This solitary demon, the legend continues, sleeps at his post. There is no work for him; the battle was long ago won. But monasteries, those scattered danger points, become the chief objectives of nocturnal flight; the sky fills with the beat of sable wings as phalanx after phalanx streams to the attack, and the darkness crepitates with the splintering of a myriad lances against the masonry of asceticism.”

 



I find echoes of ‘lockdown’ in such reflections. But during lockdown temptation comes in the form of the rabbit-holes of bickering which swiftly seem to be dug on social media, into which people readily seem to fall each time the Government has made its many U-turns in attempting to navigate us through this pandemic. Having listened to what often feels like the ever-decreasing circles of a deracinating form of logic during the daily briefings from Number 10 Downing Street at certain points during this strange collective social 'rite of passage' for our nation and the wider world at large, I have often despaired. In truth, I have had to tune out for most of it, especially during this second period of national lockdown. My head can no longer seem to fully comprehend what any of this means any more. All I know for sure is that I will continue to follow the rules, wear my facemask, and make the best of things, even though I have been segregated like a lone monkish inhabitant on a suburban Skellig Michael.




Like many people, I have found myself focussing on the solace offered by the natural world. In the brief thawing of the restrictions between ‘Lockdown 1’ and ‘Lockdown 2’, I managed to escape to Cornwall for a week. I wandered the cliffs, filling my lungs with the much-needed scent of gorse, sun-kissed granite, and the salty tang of the sea air. After months of being confined to quarters, seeing little beyond the four-square walls of my own world, to sit there, looking out across the limitless horizon of the sea was a liberation of both heart and soul. I sat watching a pair of grey seals, a male and a female, delighting in dancing together in the foaming breakwaters, and for a moment it seemed as though the world was being washed clean. But it was a bittersweet liberation, because winter was not so very far away and the impending inevitable second chapter of the pandemic meant the sky and sea were still limitless boundaries which I was not yet allowed to cross. It was a brief moment of respite from the on-going reality of a disjointed double-life caught in limbo. During the short days of winter which followed, when the lockdown was reimposed and I was once more cut-off and isolated on my own, I have often found the lines of a particular poem by John Keats arising quietly in my rather despondent mind. It is a verse which has buoyed me with its eye to the promise of future joys, waiting to be cherished in the personal reunions which are yet to come:


Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art—

         Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

         Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,


 


During that brief break in the lockdown, I also managed to ‘up sticks’ and move home. A process which had first been delayed interminably by the economic uncertainties of Brexit, only then to be subsequently stalled by the sudden onset of the pandemic. This had long been planned as the first step in a much longer journey of relocation from London to Tokyo. Moving briefly back to my ‘hometown’ was the first stage; moving back to the place where I had grown up on the outer edge of London, from the place where I’d lived for many years in the inner city. It felt like I was touching base once more with another life long since lived and left behind; touching base before launching off on a great leap around the globe. Walking around my old hometown, I found the place curiously changed but also still the same. Discernible perhaps only in hints and echoes, shadows and memories. A lot of people have commented on the resurgence of birdsong into the fore of our consciousness as traffic on the roads has been reduced during the lockdowns. In my most recent home, living on the banks of the tidal Thames for many years, I’d grown accustomed to the calls of seagulls, pigeons and corvids, as these seemed to predominate there. But here in the leafy suburbs I rediscovered the avian soundscape of my younger days. Here there is a backdrop which is filled with woodland voices: robins, wrens, blackbirds, thrushes, many different types of tits and a fusillade of finches, plus wood pigeons, collared doves, jays, and at night there are owls too. This is the soundscape I grew up surrounded by, and I realised it was still an elemental part of me.  

 



The part of suburbia where I spent the first two decades of my life is in fact an old rural Saxon village. A village which over time was surrounded and eventually swallowed into the cancerous concrete urban sprawl of greater London. These northwest hinterlands of the capital were dubbed as ‘Metro-Land’ in 1915 by the publicity department of the Metropolitan Railway. ‘Metro-Land’ was later turned into an eponymous ‘round-trip’ of rhyme in a famous film of that title by John Betjeman in 1973. Curiously a train trip along the Met’ Line reminded him of the sea in Cornwall:


Like the sound of little breakers

Spreading out along the surf-line

When the estuary's filling

With the sea.

 

Then Harrow-on-the-Hill’s a rocky island

And Harrow churchyard full of sailors’ graves

And the constant click and kissing of the trolley buses hissing

Is the level to the Wealdstone turned to waves

And the rumble of the railway

Is the thunder of the rollers

As they gather up for plunging

Into caves.


 

But my native part of London never lost that sense of itself as a rural village. Pinner is filled with old buildings, many dating back to Georgian or Tudor times. And it still has a working farm, meaning that there are still fields which can be wandered through as well as ancient weald land, with woods and copses surviving in pockets neatly bordered by cul-de-sacs, closes, avenues, and old country lanes which have long since been macadamised into London’s quintessential leafy garden suburbs.


 

When I was at junior school my class went on a long ramble on a sunshine-filled summer’s day through ‘the village’, with our teacher telling us the history of the old buildings, showing us how we could identify their respective ages by comparing certain characteristic architectural features. It was one of the first things to ignite in me a passion for history and a fascination for archaeology. During the summer holiday, wading along the local brook which flowed through a wooded oasis behind our house in my welly boots, I stumbled upon a small ceramic jar which bore the berried monogram of ‘J. Sainsbury.’ It dated back to somewhere between the 1920s-1940s. 



When I was a few years older, I trained as a bell ringer at the parish church at the top of the high street, and I relished the fact that this gave me access to one of the most fascinating and hidden parts of the church building. I loved looking closely at the stone sets of the stained-glass windows into which church-goers, decades and centuries alike before my time, had carved their initials and floral doodles into the soft stone. It felt like history was something which could be found all around wherever one went, if you only knew how to look for it. But some elements of history as it had been lived locally could only be etched into memory, unless it was fleetingly caught in the old flickering images saved on celluloid; like the memory my grandmother re-told, of her standing on the steps of the village bakery where she worked, waving goodbye to my grandfather as he walked off down the high street on his way to fight in Italy during World War 2; or the old cine film of my great grandfather, who was the blacksmith in Wealdstone, showing him shoeing a horse.


 

Illustration by J.W. Ferry in 'The Villager' (1943)


My grandfather may have set out from here and travelled overseas to fight in the War, but the War itself came to Pinner and has left its traces here too. Only the other week, while on my regular amble through Pinner Park Farm, I stopped and scanned the corner of one of the fields which I’d seen on a WW2 bombsite map, which had shown that two "H.E." bombs dropped from a German bomber had exploded there in 1943. And sure enough, I could just make out the slight indentations of the impact craters still faintly discernible in the grass. My aunt had been friends with the daughter of the family who lived and worked at the farm, and they had ridden on the farm’s cart horses in this very field in the late 1940s/early 1950s.



The farmland at Pinner Park was one of the places where I used to seek solace and solitude when I was growing up. In the summertime, I’d frequently install myself at the top of the hill in one of the fields which still command a wonderful semi-rural view even today. Fringed by tall oak trees, many with trunks thick enough to be several centuries old. I’d sit there in the warm sunshine, reading a book, or meditating. Casting an inward eye to the future, thinking of ways and means to escape one day, setting out in search of far-away places. A hole in the fence in one of my school’s playing fields meant I could sneak off and elude the tumultuous rabble of the school yard, disappearing up here at lunchtimes, seeking a moment of stillness during the school day. There is something about the solace of nature, even (or perhaps more especially) in the midst of an otherwise built-up environment which is a true tonic. A balm to soothe the senses, reset the mind, and help us to breathe freely once again.

 


Now that I am back here, but stuck yet again in another lockdown, waiting for my exit visa back into the ‘real’ world which we have all been banished from for a second time since the pandemic began, I have reverted into my sixteen-year-old self. Making my weekly trudge through those old familiar fields of the farm, as well as ambling around the streets and back lanes of my old hometown; revisiting and pondering once more upon the respective ages of old buildings and thinking about the layers of time which this place has accumulated through the centuries, ending in the here-and-now with me and my personal memories of growing up here as did the generations of a part of my family before me. Now augmented by another fresh and unexpected set of memories which are currently being formed and laid down in my psyche having found myself becalmed here once again, waiting for lockdown to lift so that I can get myself a genuine exit visa to leave these Betjeman-like native shores once more, but this time cutting those natal ties and sailing away for good, emigrating to a new life, to permanently sink my anchor in a bay located somewhere along the sheltering coast of Japan.

 


We’ve all been stuck in limbo during the lockdowns. Counting the days and months. Waiting for the future to arrive. Waiting for the past to return. All the while, both consciously and unconsciously, recalibrating our experience of each. And yet, once this strange time of stasis is gone, many of us may well come to feel like nothing has happened because it was all so unreal, the days all blurring into a single undifferentiated mass, but I think we will all come to realise eventually that in actual fact a lot that is unseen has shifted during these long days in a time of dark shadows. It might not be so readily visible on the surface, but surely something will have changed within all of us once this pandemic eventually ends and we regain our freedoms. Our right to roam further afield will certainly feel very different. In the same way that I felt different sitting in the autumnal sunshine on those Cornish cliffs watching a pair of seals in close company bathing in the bubbling foam of the breakers upon the beach. It felt as if I was watching “The moving waters at their priestlike task / Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores.”

 


I hope the things I’ve learnt and the insights I’ve gained from being enforced to remain alone at home will help me to appreciate, and so never lose, the relevance of my reflections upon the importance of place to who we are and how it shapes our individual worlds. Because home is not just where we are, it’s also who we are, because we take that essential element of ourselves with us wherever we go – whether we wander near or far, but most especially when reunited we make our homecoming returns.







Harrow-on-the-Hill, by John Betjeman.


Pinner Fair in 1918 (Pathé News)




 

PINNORA’S LAND
 
 
Think of the Ancients in their easeful sleep
As you walk the way through Pinner Park Farm,
Along green hedgerows where the sparrows cheep
And black marauding crows squawk their alarm
At the fork-tailed kite wheeling high above.
Climbing the cinder track up Wakehams Hill,
To see the view which all the locals love;
Then onwards to Tooke’s Green, wand’ring at will,
First down then up the dip along Church Lane,
To the place where Saxon Pinnora’s band
Settled long ago. Where each yeoman thane
Built here a homestead on Pinnora’s land
In the shelt’ring lee of Pinner’s proud church,
Where old Skenelsby and the Loudons lie;
Its flint-walled tower looks down from its perch
Atop the High Street, vaunting the blue sky
With its tall cross, sheathed in godly green bronze;
Shading the green weedy brook which winds by
The foot of ancient Pinner’s sacred mons;
Flowing on, along leafy Cannon Lane,
Through Cheney Fields towards Haydon Hall Park,
Where blackbirds chorus at the evening’s wane;
Over Eastcote Village the sky burns stark
With the sunset’s red-golden flames alight,
As another warm summer’s day becalms
Itself asunder, passing into night.
Yet the birds keep singing; their vocal charms
Lulling the Ancients in their easeful sleep,
Lying content in comfort, as long time
Slowly accrues the centuries they keep;
Their lives and memories enshrined in rhyme
Scripted while walking these old lanes and ways,
Through the farm fields and over the green hills,
Along the winding brook’s soft purling maze,
Listening to the bird’s sweet chirps and trills,
Just as joyful birds have always sung here.
Our forebears from Saxon Pinnora’s day
Live on in local sounds which echo clear
In old paths and place names, which oft’ we say;
Our history hands down through the ages,
But the birds, trees and streams recall them too,
Like strolling players telling the stages
Of a play ever enacted anew –
And so, I dwell with full warm-hearted care
Upon my early kin’s generations
Who lived here long before me, unaware
Of their future’s far accumulations;
And I think of them in their easeful sleep
As I walk the way through Pinner Park Farm
Along green hedgerows where the sparrows cheep,
And black marauding crows squawk their alarm
At the fork-tailed kite wheeling high above;
Climbing the cinder track up Wakehams Hill
To see the view which all our kinsfolk love;
Then on towards Tooke’s Green, wand’ring at will
First down and then up the dip along Church Lane,
To the place where Saxon Pinnora’s band
Settled long ago; where a kindred thane
First made our home, here on Pinnora’s land.
 
 
By Tim Chamberlain – 14 April 2021. Hatch End.

 





Also on 'Waymarks'





The Old Village Bakery, Pinner, c.1930s


Silent Film footage of Pinner in 1926 (BFI)

1 March 2021

Postcard from Old Saigon



The south coast region of Vietnam around the Mekong delta has experienced successive waves of settlement and colonisation over the centuries. Founded in the fourth century, its principal city was first home to the Champa and Khmer peoples before the arrival of the Vietnamese in the seventeenth century. In the nineteenth century it was colonised by the French and Spanish, with the French assuming full colonial control after 1862. It briefly came under joint Japanese-Vichy French control during the Second World War, before Vietnam achieved its independence, but even then it changed hands again with the conclusion of the Vietnam’s civil war. Reflecting these changes, the city’s name has changed over the centuries – known as Baigaur to the Champa, Prey Nokor to the Khmer (the name by which most Cambodians still refer to it), and then first Gia Dinh to the Vietnamese, then Saigon, and now, Ho Chi Minh City.

Notre Dame Cathedral, Saigon


Of all these names, that of Saigon is undoubtedly the most evocative, particularly for Westerners and Vietnam’s own diaspora communities. For the French, with many of its grand French colonial era buildings still standing, it is somewhat nostalgically thought of as Saigon. For Americans, and for the Vietnamese who left Vietnam in the 1970s and 1980s, it remains, rather more defiantly, Saigon. The end of the Vietnam War in 1975 saw the city renamed in honour of the reunified country’s Revolutionary leader, Ho Chi Minh (who died of heart failure aged 79 in 1969) – yet even its locals still refer to the downtown area as Saigon. So the name – Saigon – lives on, equally redolent to differing emotions, to different people.

Central Post Office, Saigon


For me, when I visited in 2009, I wasn’t sure which name felt the most appropriate. I’m not French and I am not American, so it doesn’t hold the same associations. The cultural echoes which had reached me growing up in Britain were mostly derived from Hollywood movies – such as Platoon, Good Morning Vietnam, and Full Metal Jacket. My awareness of the Vietnam War was probably more closely associated with the 1960s peace movement – student demonstrations in Europe and the USA; protest songs, such as The Unknown Soldier by The Doors; Alice’s Restaurant Masacree by Arlo Guthrie; Give Peace A Chance and Happy Xmas (War Is Over) by John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

Photo by Hubert van Es, 1975


Ho Chi Minh
Arriving in Ho Chi Minh City I was surprised to find myself in a minority. The majority of other Western tourists were either American or French, and it was interesting to note how their nationalities clearly determined their sight-seeing priorities. I found there were lots of Americans visiting the Independence Palace – this building was the former seat of the President of the Republican Government of South Vietnam, until it fell with the front gates which were knocked down by three North Vietnamese Soviet-made T-54 tanks which burst through and roared across the front lawn on 30 April 1975. A highly symbolic act which signalled that the North Vietnamese had won the War. The Communist Government subsequently renamed the building Reunification Palace. An old US Army 'Huey' Helicopter parked on the roof commemorates the aerial bombing of the Palace on 8 April 1975 by a rogue South Vietnamese pilot who was a Viet Cong sympathiser/defector, but no doubt it serves as a reminder to all Western visitors, and US tourists in particular, of the iconic photos of “the last chopper out of Saigon,” airlifting people from the rooftop of a nearby building. Most evenings there would be busloads of US tourists in my hotel lobby returning from a day tour to the famously claustrophobic 200 mile complex of Viet Cong guerrilla warfare tunnels at Cu Chi. Whereas wandering around the areas close to the Catholic Cathedral, the Central Post Office, City Hall, or the Municipal Theatre, all buildings built during the French Colonial Era, there were always more French tourists than any other Westerners. In the grand old Central Post Office a giant portrait of Uncle Ho’s smiling face looks down on them from on high and seems to relish this palpable sense of nostalgia which is all that’s left of the colonial rule he wrested from their grandparents’ grasp. It’s almost as though he might be whispering with a chuckle to himself – Liberté, égalité, indépendence.


Saigon, 30th April 1975


Graham Greene
I suppose, if there is any British connection to old Saigon it is a less tangible one. Not so much a building, a place, or an event – but a person. The writer, Graham Greene made several visits to Saigon in the early 1950s, acting as a war correspondent for The Times newspaper. In these years Vietnamese nationalists were fighting the French, aiming to secure Vietnam’s independence in the wake of the geopolitical turmoil wrought by the Second World War. The Viet Minh independence movement was led by Ho Chi Minh, and defeated the French in 1954, establishing the Communist Democratic Republic of North Vietnam. The war from 1955 to 1975 pitted Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnamese Army, and the Viet Cong People’s Liberation Front, based inside South Vietnam, against that of the American-backed South Vietnamese Republic. The two wars are respectively known as the First and Second Indo-China Wars. Graham Greene’s novel, The Quiet American (1955), very evocatively brings to life the events of the First Indo-China War. Written whilst Greene was staying at The Continental Hotel in Saigon at the time of the events it describes, the novel is notable for its prescient assessment of the likely outcomes of increasing American involvement in the conflict.

The Continental Hotel, 1950s


I bought myself a lovely old Penguin paperback edition of The Quiet American from a secondhand bookshop in Tokyo’s Jimbocho area before travelling to Vietnam and read it during my trip there. The novel’s atmospheric turn of phrase is what is quintessentially characteristic of Greene’s writing-style:

“I can’t say what made me fall in love with Vietnam – that a woman’s voice can drug you; that everything is so intense. The colors, the taste, even the rain. Nothing like the filthy rain in London. They say whatever you’re looking for, you will find here. They say you come to Vietnam and you understand a lot in a few minutes, but the rest has got to be lived. The smell: that’s the first thing that hits you, promising everything in exchange for your soul. And the heat. Your shirt is straightaway a rag. You can hardly remember your name, or what you came to escape from. But at night, there’s a breeze. The river is beautiful. You could be forgiven for thinking there was no war; that the gunshots were fireworks; that only pleasure matters. A pipe of opium, or the touch of a girl who might tell you she loves you. And then, something happens, as you knew it would. And nothing can ever be the same again.”

However, not being very well versed in the historical background to, nor even the facts of the struggles which preceded the Second Indo-China War, meant that I found some of the political aspects of the novel a little hard to fathom. Two books which I read subsequently helped to elucidate this lacuna in my knowledge: Brian Crozier’s South East Asia in Turmoil (1968), and Milton Osborne’s Southeast Asia: An Introductory History (1979).

Crozier argues that the post-colonial governments of Southeast Asia are themselves essentially neo-imperialist, even though they professed to be otherwise. Written in the period just prior to the American military escalation in the failed defence of South Vietnam it gives an interesting contemporary political critique of events leading up to that point in time. Hence it can now be read as a history book turned primary source in some respects. An eye witness to history which can be cross-examined by hindsight.

Osborne’s book takes a more detached view. Written a little later, and updated in subsequent editions up to 2016, Osborne gives a very good introduction and overview of what is essentially a huge topic and a vast region, covering the history of Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. In light of this fact, Osborne frequently points out the book’s limitations in a way which is helpful. He also reiterates the main events and the historiography occasionally which is necessary to keep such a broad survey flowing for the reader in a connected way. As with any introductory history, it's perhaps best read as a launch-pad book, or used thereafter as a quick-reference guide. It has a good bibliography which is arranged by theme/region, a wayfinder for further avenues of more focussed interest in the history of the region.

Prior to reading either of these two books much of what I had read previously about Vietnam was what I’d found in the pages of the National Geographic Magazine. But the late 1980s weren’t so very far removed from the events of the Vietnam War, and the Cold War itself wasn’t yet over, so the perspective which the National Geographic articles gave was very much still that of an emotionally engaged USA. For different reasons the Vietnam War is a deep bruise on America’s national consciousness which is even today still a long time in healing. The old adage frequently holds true that “history is written by the victors,” but in the case of Vietnam the opposite is very much the case in the West. As mentioned above, the US perspective has deeply inculcated complex responses and representations of the conflict in Hollywood movies, yet the protest songs and the legacy of the peace movement have equally swayed our cultural idea of Vietnam and its civil war. In many senses, in the West at least, the present reality of modern Vietnam is largely obscured. For me, before I actually visited the country, my conception of Vietnam remained unconsciously stalled by these familiar tropes of Huey choppers flying into a blood red tropical sunrise accompanied by a Rolling Stones’ Paint It Black soundtrack. The hell of jungle warfare, American soldiers pitted against an unseen ghostly foe who never seems to die. The distraught, screaming faces of innocent children running down the roads in terror. The B-52 bombers, ugly black angels of death, senselessly raining down bombs across the impassive green jungle. Quips about relishing the smell of napalm in the morning, etc., etc.

Photo by Horst Faas, 1965


Consequently, getting off the plane I really wasn’t sure what to expect of Vietnam or Ho Chi Minh City. Apart from a stony-faced immigration official in military uniform who stamped my passport at the airport, the trappings of Communist Government which seem so all pervasive in a city such as Beijing appeared to be largely absent here. The Vietnamese people I met during my stay there all seemed very relaxed, very welcoming and friendly, even the Vietnamese soldier at the gate of the US Embassy compound who discouraged me from taking a photo of the place did so with amicable good cheer. The soldiers guarding public buildings in China certainly aren’t like that! – I suppose I was expecting the scars of the war still to be fresh, the distrust of foreigners, especially white Western ones, to be more sharply marked. Maybe it is for Americans? – I don’t know. Certainly, when it was found out I wasn’t American or French it was often something which was remarked upon with surprise, and so may well have exempted me in some senses which I couldn’t clearly measure. I was an anomaly amongst all these culturally invested outsiders. Hence perhaps why I kept finding myself returning to these questions and speculations, ever revolving and ever to be unresolved …

"Hanoi Jane"
Maybe it’s been easier for the Vietnamese to move on? – Perhaps what’s past has passed. I soon realised that far from being a topic to shy away from, the Vietnam War was something to be openly extolled here. From the Vietnamese point of view it wasn’t a tragedy, and, if it was viewed in any sense as a sacrifice, ultimately it had been a successful one. In that sense, “to the winner go the spoils” and the honours too. The displays and information boards in the Reunification Palace clearly reflected this fact. Studying the famous series of photographs of the tanks bursting through the palace gates my preconceptions of the Vietnam War were further confounded by finding out that the British poet and war correspondent, James Fenton, was apparently on-board one of the tanks at the time. It was like my mind was a radio dial struggling to tune itself between two wavelengths ... “And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for?” … This fact evoked echoes in my memory of photographs of the American actress, Jane Fonda – “Hanoi Jane” – posing on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun ... “And it’s five, six, seven, open up the pearly gates.” – If the Vietnam War is anything to Westerners, it is certainly far from straightforward.



Reunification Palace, 2009


Notre Dame Cathedral
I tried to equate my experience at the Reunification Palace with my visiting the Check Point Charlie Museum in Berlin in early 1993. Here in Ho Chi Minh City the Cold War was weirdly refracted back on itself, the narrative going in the opposite direction to what was innately expected, coming from my side of the old Iron, or in this case the Bamboo Curtain. Yet on Dong Khoi Street there was little to suggest this is a Communist State. Coco-cola is on sale in the cafes. American Dollars are acceptable as a dual currency alongside the Vietnamese Dong. Much like India’s Rupee, the Dong is a closed currency, meaning you can only change it within Vietnam. Hence the first thing you have to do at the airport is run the gamut of bureau de change stalls. When I reached this point in the airport terminal I paused for a moment, standing to one side rummaging in my backpack, trying to find my money while my fellow passengers went ahead of me. Inadvertently in doing so I reaped the reward of their eagerness as my advanced guard, because it meant that by the time most of them had haggled their way down the line and I got my turn to change my money, the exchange rate had come right down as the stalls had all been loudly vying with one another to secure the most customers. Meaning I very happily got more Dong for my Yen. Vietnam is a poor country, for sure, but the cost of living there is very low. Hence tourism is clearly both a boost to the nation’s economy and a boon to the thrifty backpacker’s budget.



Notre Dame Cathedral
It seemed odd to me though, that Western tourists could wander around with such ease and were so readily catered for on their own terms. Smart hotels, boutique shops, artisan cafes, bars playing Western music. But then, even in the 1970s and 1980s, Communist Yugoslavia was a popular holiday destination for decadent Westerners too. I’m not sure how closely the two equate with one another, nor am I sure as to how well the lives and livelihoods of the average Vietnamese compares to the former citizens of Yugoslavia or the USSR, or present-day China for that matter. But these were things I kept finding myself coming back to and wondering about as I dodged the crazy drivers on their motorbikes and in their mini-vans riding and driving pell-mell around the streets and traffic islands of old Saigon. I never did manage to figure out the rules of the road in this city. But one thing was abundantly clear. Life is lived at a different pace here. Different norms too. I saw one woman calmly breastfeeding her new-born baby whilst riding pillion and helmetless on a speeding motorcycle which was weaving through the traffic in a manner which made my hair stand on end. Crossing the road here is an act of faith. On the busiest streets I learnt that the only way to do it is to step out and maintain a sure steady pace, and somehow the traffic parts around you like water round a rock in a fast flowing river. Believing you are a Jedi Master and that the Force is strong with you is just one means of helping you to hold your nerve!

The Continental Hotel, 2009


Writing Postcards in the Central Post Office
I don’t think even now I’ve managed to reconcile all the questions that this trip set buzzing around inside my head. It’s hard to say whether or not a different sort of politics might mean life here would necessarily be lived any differently in its essentials. Ideology doesn’t always correlate with culture. Had the Communists not won the war would Vietnam now be more like South Korea? – And who’s to know how it might yet change in the future? – But perhaps the fact that Vietnam isn’t closed off to the world, as is North Korea, for instance, is a good thing. Perhaps the fact that Western tourists – especially those with familial ties intimately linking them to past conflicts and former colonial connections – can visit and freely wander the streets of Old Saigon is all to the greater good. The fact they can talk freely to the locals, as well as observing the realities of their lives forty years on from the last war, some sixty or seventy years since Vietnam was a colony, the fact that Westerners are so warmly welcomed might help in reconciling the past with the present. In lifting the veil of such Western preconceptions of the past, experiencing Vietnam as it is today – the opportunities such openness presents may well help to bring peace at last to both personally engaged outsiders and Vietnamese alike. Past and present divisions aside, in time bamboo may yet prove to be more flexible and therefore more resilient than iron. Who is to say? – One thing I do feel sure of though, having seen it for myself, is that Saigon is a city which endures.

Hotel Continental & Municipal Theatre

Notre Dame Cathedral, Saigon
Central Post Office
 
Reunification Palace




















Central Post Office





City Hall





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"Je ne suis pas un vieux colonial français ..."