Everyone has a comfort zone. Everyone steps outside their comfort zone sometimes. Well, I've just been so far outside of my comfort zone that I think I ended up approaching it from the other side. I've come back from one of the most demanding and exhilarating weekends of my life, a firearms for theatricals course with the incredibly patient and proficient people at Bare Arms. I am bruised and exhausted and amazed. But… the hardest thing was not being able to report it all to Tim. So my friend Carrie suggested that I write it as if I was telling him. And call it Tales for Tim.


My darling Tim

You remember that night I called Jules to see how he was, and ended up sitting on the stairs talking through a sticky plot point in his latest screenplay for an hour. And he told me about the crazy drama firearms training course he was going on. And I said it sounded fun. And he said that there was a spare place on it. And I decided that it was too scary and too expensive, and you persuaded me to go for it. You said it would be good for me, an amazing experience, and a chance to spend an entire weekend with Jules. Well. I've just come back from it. Amazed and dazed and bruised and exhausted and still giddy on adrenaline two days later.

After Thursday working in Manchester and a drive down to Dorset via every single set of roadworks in the entire UK I emerged blinking into the night, at Monkton Wyld Court, once a Victorian rectory for a country vicar and his brood of many children and now a sustainable living centre. And accommodation location for 7 actors, an am-dram actor-cum-writer, Ben, an ex-Army officer, and Al, an RAF officer. I'm not sure that the nice people who were there to volunteer in the grounds or attend a shamanic course in the village hall quite knew what had hit them.

Friday started with theory. Well actually, Friday started with the indignity of being the only person who couldn't fit into a Bare Arms boiler suit after being told that they fitted everyone, but we will park that one there. Suffice to say at that point I wanted to go home. But I didn't. I knew you would be cross with me if I did.

So – Friday started with theory. How guns work. What the parts of a gun are (leaving me with 'Naming of Parts' by Henry Reed dancing in my head). What is (and isn't) a bullet. What makes up a shell, and how it fires. And the science and engineering part of me loved it. And then the writer part took over – while the others went for a coffee, I felt the weight and coolness of the shells and noted how they warmed up in my hand. Looked at the colours of the copper bullet jacket and the brass shell case. Smelled the whiff of cordite, tasted the tang of copper on my fingers, bitter like the smell of pennies. Heard the sound the shells made as they rolled together in my hand. What would your synesthetic brain make of the sounds and the words?

Next – the Lee-Enfield. Or to give it its full name, the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield bolt-action, magazine-fed, repeating rifle. This appeared on our desks, bigger and heavier that certainly I expected. The guns were World War I vintage, and the wood was smooth with handling, pitted with use. The shell – I keep on wanting to call it a bullet, and I know it's wrong – was large, heavy, pointed. Designed to do damage. We practiced loading and unloading, hearing the satisfying click as the bullets – no – shells pushed down from the clip into the magazine, making ready, the feeling as the bolt pulled up, back, forward, down, chambering the shell, making the gun hot, ready to fire. The reassurance of the safety catch. And all of this with dummies, but we knew that next it would be for real.
We learned how to be safe around guns. How dangerous even blank firing guns are. How to recognise the state of a gun and make it safe. Safety catch on, magazine off, shell ejected from the chamber. Three point check. And yes I know you know all of this, but let me show off a little my newly-learned skills.

Finally, we headed down into the range, a road tunnel left derelict after the building of a bypass and now made into The Tunnel shooting centre. Surreally, the road's centre markings still run down the middle of the 100 m shooting range. And then we got busy. Learning how to hold the guns. Where to tuck them into our shoulders. Aiming standing, kneeling, lying prone, always with the gun ready. Surrounded by actors from their 20s upwards, martial arts experts, dancers (both ballet and pole), lithe and fit, I felt every bit of my 50-year-old size 18 body protesting – however fit I am as a runner, my flexibility and lack of upper body strength was slowing me down. And yes – I can hear you – I just haven't lifted enough boxes of books lately.

And then we were handed shells. The target was an orange sheet with a German soldier of dubious vintage, with a pointy hat, a bayonet and a dodgy moustache. I loaded with slightly shaky hands, made the gun ready, and lay down on the floor in an approximation of the position I had been shown. Wedged the rifle into my shoulder and squinted down the sights, completely wrongly, as it turned out later. Slipped the safety catch and squeezed the trigger as gently as I could. I felt the shot deep in my gut and the recoil hard into my shoulder, enough to bruise. Heard it through the heavy ear defenders. Smelled the cordite and tasted the rusty tang of blood where I had bitten my lip. Four shots prone. Two shots kneeling, two shots standing. Ben patiently talking us through it. Shell cases falling to the ground with a metallic tinkle. And my status as a pacifist is confirmed. I missed every time. As I said to the proper actors, I'm just there to make them look good. But I have now handled and fired a gun for the first time in my life.

And there were some tears in the quiet. For feeling the odd one out. For missing the target. But most of all for not being able to call you and tell you what I had done.

More soon.

Love you for always and miss you for ever
​
Suzanne

Part 2 is here

This was written the day I returned from Bergen-Belsen from the 70th anniversary commemoration, and the day my father died.



​In May 1945, my mother, not yet 25, entered the gates of the Bergen Belsen concentration camp in Lower Saxony, Germany. She was in the Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service (QAIMNS), the 29th General Hospital, and a qualified nurse. My mother spoke little of this time – I have pieced together things from a couple of conversations and the only two letters we still have. She sent these to her husband of less than a year, my father. One was sent the week before her transport to the camp, one a day or two later.


The hardest thing about these letters from Captain Kathleen Elvidge is that they are in the hand I know so well, from the notes that got me off PE, the letters that lightened days at college when I was homesick, and the birthday cards that I still miss. And here this beloved handwriting talks of brutality and hatred and pain and suffering.

For the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen in April 2015, Tim and I stayed in Celle, a few miles from the camp and a beautiful mediaeval town full of timbered and decorated houses and shops from the 1400s and 1500s. My mother mentioned the town in her letter, and it was a strange feeling that I walked amongst the buildings where she would have walked too. Sitting outside a cafe in the sun, I looked at the older people there and wondered who had been there then, either in the camp, or outside in the 'real' world.

I think what was so shocking at first about the camp was the beauty. The wooded glades, the open grassed area, the birdsong and the sunshine. And then I realised that not a single tree trunk was bigger than a span wide; nothing older than a handful of decades, and the grassed areas, bounded by low walls, were the mass graves. 'Hier ruhen 1000 tote'. 'Hier ruhen 5000 tote'. A total of at least 23,200 dead. I couldn't take much in, that first day, just a feel for the place, the beauty and the horror, and a feeling of disconnect.

The day of the ceremony it rained. As I walked across the camp under a now dark and cloudy sky, I could hear the haunting strains of a Jewish choir, and see the wreaths laid by groups around the area and around the world. At the gathering under the towering obelisk, people spoke in German and in English. In Roma languages. In Hebrew, Hungarian and French. Much of it I didn't understand, but some things just don't need words. I laid a yellow tulip by one of the mass graves, and the disconnect was gone.

The exhibition tells the story of the camp, from its early days as a prisoner of war camp, through the horrors of the time as a concentration camp, where gas chambers weren't needed, because it was enough to let the starvation and the disease do the work, to the liberation and beyond as a displaced person's camp. The stories are captured in words, while they are beyond words – tales of inhumanity and terrible, terrible death, with pictures of twisted and emaciated bodies where it is hard to tell the alive from the dying and the dead. And around this are the elderly people who survived, some alone and subdued, some with families. Some greeting each other with the feel of a school reunion, or of meeting long-lost relatives from family long separated. Sadness and joy. Bitterness and love.

In these awful images, I saw only a fraction of the horror that must have greeted my mother. Despite her arrival at Belsen being around a month after liberation, the camp was still strewn with bodies, and she had to watch the ex-camp warders throwing bodies into mass graves and covering them with earth using bulldozers. The nurses made sure that the dead were at least dignified by a wrapping of clean cloth, and ensured that their passing was marked with a prayer from the padre.

She worked at the emergency hospital established at the military barracks that made up part of the camp, now making up part of a British Army base. The prisoners – dissidents and homosexuals, Roma and Sinti, Jews and anti-Nazi Christians, Poles, Russians and Hungarians, children and babies – were beyond bone-thin. They had been given only the meagerest of meagre rations, including watery turnip soup and bread, and my mother spoke of how hard it was to hold back food from people who were starving, but whose bodies could not cope with anything other than tiny portions. She also talked of women stealing bread from others, and from the dead, to feed their children, even after food was available. They were scarred physically and emotionally, diseased, lice-ridden and afraid.

While I was there, I mourned my mother's loss all over again, but also feel closer to her than ever before, because I have seen a little of what she saw, and walked a few of the places where she walked. Perhaps I have laid a few ghosts.

And now I'm back, with a feeling that something has irrevocably changed, and so I wonder why the rest of the world is carrying on as normal. It's like coming back from hospital the morning my mother died, and wondering how other people could drink tea with friends, and shop, and call to their children, as if nothing had happened. Because of course for them, nothing had. I just need a little time.​