Short Stories for a Long Mountain – by Nigel Phillips

Note from Jae: You’ll remember Ben & Alex’s lovely blog post last week. They are Sheila’s great nephews, and Louise is their mum. Today we have a contribution by their dad, Nigel – which now means their entire family has written for the blog. Thanks for the support Lou, Nigel, Ben and Alex!

Nigel, Lou, Ben and Alex (at Xativa April 2014)
Nigel, Lou, Ben and Alex (at Xativa April 2014)

A few months ago now there was a piece from Sheila about possible books (or E-readers!) to take with you up Kilimanjaro – which included a succinct plot summary of the Hollywood version of Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ and an allusion to Gregory Peck’s blue eyes and rugged jaw-line. The conclusion was there was no sense in taking heavy volumes to this remote and inhospitable place where what you carry needs to be reduced to the bare necessities of life (cue ‘Jungle Book’, also set in Africa?) And as for E-readers, well there would be no possibility of charging them so they can be discounted. In any case it could rightly be assumed that everyone would be far too knackered at the end of each day’s walk to consider doing anything other than having dinner, brushing one’s teeth and turning in for the night. Clearly a very sensible decision.

Bare Necesseties
Bare Necesseties

But stop a minute. Try taking a giant nano-technology leap forward. Imagine that each of you were taking with you up the mountain a featherlite 14th generation Kindle Extrema (Severe Sports model) with wire-less micro solar panel attached to your climbing hat. Imagine also that much of the rest of your gear is similarly scaled down in weight and dimensions by the now-taken-for-granted new materials from which they are made (knocked up by the portable 3D printer you left back at base camp). So you can look forward to skimming an hour off the old daily walking time as you skip up the mountain pursued by your porters ( I suspect life would still be hard graft for them….) Yes, you have time for a little after-dinner recreation, and for some an opportunity to catch up on your reading.

Let us therefore extrapolate a Desert Island Discs moment. Instead of having to choose eight records to listen to as a solitary castaway, what you have to do for this exercise is decide on just one book to download on to your micro e-reader – and maybe even share with the rest of the party? What’s it to be then? Radio 4 regulars will of course know that this is one of the final questions asked of the interviewee, but there’s nothing wrong with lifting someone else’s good idea.

The Bible (should you want it) and the complete works of Shakespeare are already on your wondrously tiny device. So what are you going to take? Me? Well, actually I’m a bit of a short story fan. I’ve been in a U3A Short Story reading group for the past 4 years, and I did write a few myself for an evening class in Leeds about 30 years ago. I also lead a Creative Writing group at the mental health recovery project in Crawley where I work four days a week. The astonishing facility of some of the group members to knock off some really accomplished stories or pieces of poetry in about 25 minutes never ceases to amaze me.

So what is it about anthologies of short stories by writers with something to say which butters my parsnips? Well, I guess it’s partly because the format by definition has a short structure so even someone like me who is a slow reader can finish it in one sitting, and maybe go back and read some of it again in order to work out what the author was trying to achieve. Or instead you could go out for a run and mull over some of the ideas thrown up by the writer. Actually I know someone in Horsham who runs with heavy metal on his iPod which he seems to find relaxing, but that’s another story….

So I’m going to suggest the book that my U3A group is currently working its way through (as some of you will know U3A groups are very systematic in these things) partly because I think it’s an excellent anthology of work in that format by some great writers, but mainly because I think it touches on many of the issues that Sheila and Leslie and some of the other contributors to this blog have identified over the last few months.

A World of Difference book
A World of Difference book

The book (should you wish to order it from your local library, or even get it from Amazon) is ‘A World of Difference’: an anthology of short stories from five continents edited by someone called Lynda Prescott. There are 15 stories so that future Kilimanjaro trekker would be hard put to finish them all by the time he or she gets back to base. However most of the stories are about 15 pages or less, and don’t forget your E-reader’s back-lit screen should allow you to read on into the small hours of the African night without disturbing your daughter/ grandson/ mum or any other member of the family who’s come along for the ride. Yes, I know it’s a walk but let’s not be pedantic about it…..

Each writer seems to have something that is interesting or profound (perhaps even funny /touching/ tragic) to say about the experiences of migration or uprooting or dislocation from a person’s homeland or cultural traditions, missing one’s home and then finding that what you thought was home has changed when you return after a long time away. One or two of the stories are I think more about how we as observers see differences in others, while failing to recognise the similarities that can draw us together if only we identify them, and water and nurture them.

And is there a story about Africa? Well actually there is just one. It’s called ‘The Ultimate Safari’ and it’s by Nadine Gordimer a white South African writer, brought up in the apartheid era, whose books and stories tried to deal with some of the complex issues thrown up by that hideous regime. She died in 2014 having won the Booker Prize in 1974 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991.

Nadine Gordimer
Nadine Gordimer

The Ultimate Safari is told in the voice of a nine year old girl who is orphaned by the violence that swept Mozambique in the 70s and 80s. She finds herself taken care of by her grandmother with whom she joins a small group of starving refugees who try to escape the conflict and likelihood of their own death by crossing over into South Africa. What they encounter in the nine pages of the story is the seemingly bountiful wild life (reference Jean Wilson’s recent contribution) to be found in the Kruger National Park as they seek some kind of safety. They see “elephants too big to need to run from anyone”. The girl says “I lay on my back and saw those ugly birds with hooked beaks and plucked necks flying round and round above us….. I saw our grandmother, who sat up all the time with my little brother on her lap, was seeing them too”.

Eventually they arrive at a refugee camp and are allowed to stay. The girl describes “ a very big tent, bigger than a church or a school, tied down to the ground….Inside, even when the sun is bright, it’s dark and there’s a kind of whole village in there. Instead of houses, each family has a little place closed off with sacks or cardboard from boxes … to show the other families it’s yours….”

According to her Wikipedia entry Nadine Gordimer believed that “ the short story is the form for our age, …. where contact is more like the flash of fireflies, in and out, now here, now there, in darkness. Short-story writers see by the light of the flash …..”

So that’s it. If you haven’t already, you might want to give short stories like that one a go. Or if you want to load your gleaming little device with something a little lighter you couldn’t go far wrong with the Just William stories. He would have found himself quite at home on a trek for the duration of which he wasn’t expected to wash very much, or to be well behaved when his Aunt Agatha came round for afternoon tea.

Happy trekking (if not reading) to all involved in the expedition. This family greatly admires your spirit of adventure, the fantastic level of preparation (at least on Sheila’s part but no doubt by the other two as well!), and your determination to go through with it – and no doubt have many laughs on the way.