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The Silver Sword – Book Review

31/01/2019 By ACOMSDave

The Silver Sword is a children’s book which is equally at home on an adult’s bookshelf. It is a story about family, about hardship, about war and its impact on the order of things. The Silver Sword is a novel by Ian Serraillier, a children’s classic, first published in the UK in 1956 by Jonathan Cape and then by Puffin Books in 1960

The Silver Sword

The story shows us a glimpse of human depravity, and of human goodness.

Re-reading this story after a gap of ovr 50 years, brought a new understanding. As an adult I now bring my own life experiences, but also a better understanding of a well-written story, but of equal importance is that of an understanding of history – in terms of my understanding of Nazi Germany, Western Germany after the war, but also of more recent history and the refugees who are trying to escape from the Middle East wars.

The journey undertaken by the Polish family named Brlick from Poland to Switzerland, the depths of despair, the hardships they face and the goodness they come across are just as liable to be applicable to those of the children we see in the camps in France, Italy, Cyprus etc.

The family ends up in four units; the father (Joseph) taken away to a forced labour camp for ‘re-education’, which is a joke gone wrong as he was a teacher who loved teaching and didn’t want to be curtailed by Nazi propaganda. The mother (Margret) was forceably taken away to work in Germany

We also then have the three children, Ruth of 18 years, Edek of 11 and Bronia 3 years old; the three children then spend the winter living in the cellar of a bombed house on the other side of Warsaw, and the summer living in woodlands outside the city

The father and mother gone, the children have to go on the run because Edek shoots and wounds a German soldier and the Germans thus take away their mother.

I don’t want to give more than this away except to bring into the story Jan, a young boy who has lost everything and everyone, and has learnt to survive on his own on the streets, and who befriends Joseph in his escape to Switzerland, which is where The Silver Sword comes in.

The Silver Sword Journeys

I highly recommend this story but also ask you to put it in context in relation to today’s refugee children. In 2015 it was estimated that there were more than 60 million displaced people in the world. This equated to nearly 1 in 100 people worldwide being displaced from their homes and in a lot of cases from their countries. Some areas have a higher rate than others; for example, more than one-in-twenty people living in the Middle East are displaced. Between 2008-2015, about 198,500 unaccompanied minors entered Europe seeking asylum – nearly half of which arrived in 2015 (FACTANK)

Unicef has stated that nearly half of all refugees are children. The following graph shows the breakdown

This is a global problem, which needs to be resolved by some joined up thinking and actions. Otherwise the story outlined in the Silver Sword will become the blue print (if it isn’t already) for the millions who have become without home. Kate Todd, The Guardian)

Further reading:

Wikipedia – The Silver Sword

Global Forced Displacement Reaches a New High

Global forced displacement hits record high

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Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: book review, journey, Nazi Germany, Poland, Switzerland, The Silver Sword, World War 2

Caring for Family

13/05/2015 By ACOMSDave

Over the course of the next few months/years I will be writing about my experiences of caring for my father, and also about the development of his dementia – an illness which is different for every person.  This fact is something that I only found out as I read about the illness and how it affects each person, about the methods and medication(s) that are available, and what affects these may have.

For over five years I have been the carer for my father, and in the last two years I have had to take on more and more responsibility for his affairs and his life,  He is now 86, his birthday was in March, and it has been sad to see a once vibrant man disappear in front of me on a day to day basis.

The symptoms which first indicated that something may be wrong, was his short term memory lost, his inability to remember things, even when they has been put on paper for him, or on the calendar.  Then there were things like his shuffling, which he had developed over the years, and which I had put down to him being unsure of his feet due to an accident he had whilst crossing the road.

In the last two years his memory problems became more and more obvious,; even things like going to the barbers’ where I had dropped him off, and was sitting in the car waiting form him, when he came out he had forgotten I was with him, or where the car was.

For anyone this is stressful, and I am certain for my father it was also – he would often come out with phrases like ‘I’m stupid’ etc when referring to not being able to remember things.

For the present he is in a nursing home, which I will talk about more in my next piece; however as I have said dementia is different for everyone, and I include a link to a wonderful uplifting article on the use of technology and dementia ‘ ‘Life after diagnosis: Dementia Diaries, stigma and the media‘

dd ownphone

Credit: On Our Radar. The OwnFone diarists use to send audio reports is designed for simplicity

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Filed Under: Editor to ACOMSDave Tagged With: caring, family, friend, journey

Book Review: The Journey Home

08/02/2015 By David McFarlane Leave a Comment

The Journey Home
 
By Dermot Bolger
Penguin
 
 
 
The Journey Home by Dermot Bolger is an exceptional novel from one of Ireland’s leading contemporary writers.  The author, with the release of this title, has been recently nominated for the Irish literature prize in the Irish Times/Aer Lingus awards.
One can immediately see why.
Mr Bolger, to coin a phrase, is a master of modern-day grotesquery in that he portrays a horribly vivid picture of Dublin life as seen through the eyes of his principal characters: Hano, Shay and Katie.
The former enjoys too much lavish drunken debauchery with is soulmate Shay; whilst the latter has a sordid past of solvent abuse and robbery.
Briefly, Hano meets Shay whilst working in an electoral office; the two begin drinking heavily together and become best friends. Hano gradually places Shay on a pedestal. The latter moves to the continent, returns, and is eventually murdered by Hano’s ex-boss: the shady (homosexual) Patrick Plunkett (extortionist extraordinaire).  In revenge, Hano murders Plunkett and goes on the run with the outcast and social victim Katie.
Behind all this marvellous maundering is a background of drug abuse, homelessness, prostitution, alcoholism, corruption rape, destruction of innocence, death, and street-fighting (PHEW!).  The whole structure of the novel would make Dickens envious.
Bolger is incontrovertibly a craftsman. Structurally The Journey Home is a delight to behold; for the author incorporates flashback/memory with the present; and manages to restrict the story’s time-span to four days (Sunday to Wednesday).  Further to this his seemingly “out-of-place” passages (in italics) give his work a strong cinematic quality.
Moreover, the characters portrayed in the book are extremely lifelike.  It seems that very few authors around today could mould such moral deviants; such villainous, putrescent scum; as does Dermot Bolger.  I actually sat down after reading this little gem of skulduggery and imagined what type of life, and what kind of people the writer in question has had the misfortune to have known.  The Plunkett brothers are nasty pieces of work.  Patrick is a high-powered sexual deviant; Pascal is a corruptible junior minister. The two, in my opinion, would have battled well against the Kray twins.
The whole tone of the book is one of no hope as the narrator (Hano) struggles with his guilt.  Indeed, this novel could be very easily compared to Jean-Paul Sartre.  It has an essentially existentialist outlook and moves often from one morose setting to the next:
…”But always the fun was jolted out of the night by the interruption of the journey.  We’d sit on the floor around an electric fire, opening six-packs and trying to get back into the happy ambience of the pub.  But slowly the conversation froze back into the endless dissection of work and promotion, character assassination and grudges”…
The book carries on in this vein incessantly.  It can make reading somewhat arduous at times; sometimes strangely interesting at others.
One essential point to note about the Journey Home is that it can shock quite easily.  I issue this very serious warning:  DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES PURCHASE THIS NOVEL IF YOU ARE EASILY OFFENDED.  For within this work there are numerous passages of gratuitous violence; bad language; and explicit sex scenes (including a homosexual rape scene).  On the other hand, if you are open-minded these passages are a riveting read:  for they practically drip realism onto the page.  They are also arguably essential to the plot in that they aid the reader to visualise the harsh realities that the author is trying to convey.  Indeed, the author attains his goals in this respect with consummate ease.
The Journey Home, surprisingly, is a refreshing, rather than a depressing work.  It can serve as a lesson to us all on how to avoid the evils of modern society.  The book’s greatest attribute is it’s commentary on the destruction of innocence, and collapse of society (Hano’s family being the prime example of this).
One really wonders if the author leaves us with any hope of salvation from the sordid state that Dublin, and, more importantly, the characters within this novel have got themselves into.  Is It is really their fault thought?……we can only speculate.
Overall, this is a book that will no doubt have you completely enthralled from the moment you pick it up until you put it down.  I strongly recommend its purchase, despite the fact that I previously thought that I disliked this genre.
The Journey Home is worthwhile: not only is it thoroughly entertaining, but it will no doubt stand the test of time as a social commentary.  Just like Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier it is vastly ahead of its time.  The novel has something in it for everyone; and the discerning reader will find it hard not to see it for it’s true worth.
Granted, I didn’t come away from reading it with a sense of catharsis – but I was pleased to discover that my initial perceptions of the book were wholly unfounded.
At its current price it is at least worth considerable consideration.
 
JOURNEY INTO its PAGES IF YOU DARE TO STARE REALITY IN THE FACE.
Me? …..well, I’m going to buy another one of Bolger’s books!
 
Mark McCormack

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Filed Under: Book Reviews Tagged With: bolger, book review, dermot, dublin, home, journey

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