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Llandudno

ON LITTLE EYE

Only the highest tides reach this small island’s

sandstone rocks. A collar of flaxen sand

surrounds it. A quarter of a mile north

is Middle Eye. A hundred yards further

is Hilbre, habitation of hermits,

custom’s officers, weather stations.

These three are rugged, stony outcrops

in the mouth of the estuary.

 

Leaving West Kirby’s suburban promenade,

we had walked, at low water, to Little Eye

across the Dee’s hard, striated sands.

Westward is Wales, and the redundant lighthouse

at Point of Ayr, and, beyond and looming,

Llandudno’s Great Orme like the dragon’s head

the Norsemen named it for. Here is the earth’s

sweep, our planet’s generous curve and grasp.

 

Nearer, on West Hoyle Bank, a colony

of maybe thirty, forty grey seals

has hauled out, dark shapes only at this distance –

their calls plaintive as gulls’, chesty, guttural.

In the channel between – filling with tide –

two kite surfers skim noisily into sight.

The giant sails swell, billow, with chancy air.

The seals begin to stir. We are tiny

on the arc of the world.

 

 

 

 

FOUR SCREEN PLAYS

I wrote the screenplays between 2001 and 2008. They are presented below in the order in which they were written. Each is set against the background of armed conflict.

I was inspired to learn how to write screenplays as a result of a number of conversations in New York in August 2001 with Annabel Honor-Lissi, a fellow creative, and digital tutorials with her which followed.

 

THE MEMORIAL

The Memorial is about redemption through kindness, compassion and love.  Set in the immediate aftermath of the 1st World War, it is a love story that explores class, religion and anti-war issues through the eyes of Captain Edward Standish VC.  Much of the action takes place at Standish’s country seat, in a Midlands village dominated by a colliery, as well as in London where the Captain meets and commissions artist Clara Zeligman.  The Memorial also takes us to the battlefields on the French/Belgian border where Standish had faced the toughest moment of his military career – an event that haunts him throughout the story.

Download The Memorial by David Selzer (Copyright David Selzer)

 

 

LOYALTIES

Loyalties begins in 1936, when Kathy, sixteen, beautiful, a film fan and fascinated by Elizabeth, last Empress of Austria, about whom she secretly writes romantic fiction, leaves Llandudno to train as a nurse in London. In 1940, she goes to the Isle of Man to nurse refugees from Nazi Germany interned as enemy aliens and falls in love with Peter, an Irish barman, whom, she discovers, is an IRA Bomber whose real name is Pearse. He renounces violence, though not the cause, for her – until she is the victim of an attempted rape. Pearse murders the likely suspect (who is an undercover Special Branch officer). In despair, she rejects Pearse. She returns home pregnant – and tells her mother that she was married in the Isle of Man but that her husband has been killed in action. In 1946, Pearse – now prosperous and married but still active in the struggle – finds her (and their daughter). She rejects him again.

Download Loyalties by David Selzer (Copyright David Selzer)

 

ALTOGETHER ELSEWHERE

Altogether Elsewhere is a tragi-comedy of errors, driven by character, coincidence and circumstance. Both of the main protagonists were born on the same day in 1953 in Liverpool and Daytona respectively. One becomes an acclaimed documentary and fashion photographer, the other a Vietnam Veteran selling oranges by the roadside in Portugal. The story – set against a background of the decline and fall of empires – focuses on key episodes in their lives from 1961 to 2002.

Download Altogether Elsewhere by David Selzer (Copyright David Selzer)

 

IN THE LION’S MOUTH

In The Lion’s Mouth is set in 1865, in a Venice under Austrian occupation, and against the background of the Risorgimento, the revolutionary movement to unify Italy. The story describes a love affair which, bedevilled by jealousy, possessiveness, intrigue and racial and religious prejudice, comes to a tragic and violent end. Though set in the past, the story portrays contemporary issues – particularly those of mixed race and of terrorism. The two main protagonists are a Liverpool sugar heiress of mixed Afro-Caribbean and European origin, who is in her early thirties, and a Austrian Jewish doctor in his forties, a widower, who is attached to the Austrian occupation forces but an active though covert supporter of the Risorgimento.

Download In The Lion's Mouth by David Selzer (Copyright David Selzer)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A RIGHT CHARIVARI!

All seemed particularly dystopian

as I walked out one morning down the high street,

towards MacDonald’s and KFC,

Café Nero, Costa and Starbucks,

boarded-up shops and charity shops,

and two young men selling the Big Issue.

Maybe it was the noise: the traffic’s grind,

an elderly busker’s cacophonous chords,

the fire engine howling – outside the KFC!

I approached the forming crowd, and overheard,

from customers smelling of smoke, rumours:

that one of the Kentucky Colonel’s

deep fat fryers had exploded into flame,

but the fire had been well doused, and no one harmed –

and I thought of the secret seasoning

of the incinerated chicken pieces.

The bell of the parish church opposite

began the slow toll for a funeral –

like some ironical, adagio

serenade to Mammon.

BANK HOLIDAY

The heavy shower drilled on the frosted glass.

We sheltered under one of the high street’s

open arcades with sloping glazed-roofs  –

a Victorian refinement to the resort:

shopping sheltered from seaside weathers.

We were, by chance, in front of Poundland:

one window displayed Pepsi Max, the other

Cadbury’s Highlights, both cut-price sugar.

The Bank Holiday crowd sheltering with us

seemed disproportionately stricken, impaired,

overwhelmingly loud or utterly

silent, with austerity’s complexion.

 

As the rain began to clear a man,

middle-aged, passed using a zimmer frame.

He was engaged in some angry, solitary

dumb show. A woman arrived, high on something.

She had left her whining pug dog tied

to one of the arcade’s wrought iron pillars.

I noted that ‘Punch and Judy’ was to start

on the expansive Promenade, where,

as for a hundred and fifty years and more,

there would be much business with sausages

and Toby the Dog, and Mr Punch

would throw Judy’s baby out of the window.

Only the privilege of good luck perceived

such a continuing farrago of

history and dismay.

BILLY GOATS GRUFF

After dark, down the steep lanes of the Great Orme –

a two mile long limestone promontory,

named by Norsemen for a dragon’s head –

past the synagogue and the funicular,

avoiding the temptations of the Pier,

into the lamp-lit, locked-down thoroughfare,

came the Kashmiri billy goats, white as snow,

as clouds, as sea spume. Runaways or outcasts

from a flock imported for their wool,

occasional mascots for the Royal Welsh,

those noisome foragers with their prophets’ beards

and trophy horns capered to the churchyard

and its privet hedges, while the nannies

and the kids slept on ledges above the sea.

 

All were indifferent to what was written

in the pages of Ecclesiastes,

left open by chance in the church where no one

worshipped now, on the eagle-shaped lectern

made of brass: ‘But if a man live many years,

and rejoice in them all; yet let him

remember the days of darkness; for they shall

be many. All that cometh is vanity.’

 

 

HIGHWATER

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read466 views

The incoming tide brings shoals of mackerel fry.

Herring gulls, perhaps a hundred, more,

young among them in their mottled plumage,

are yelling at the water’s edge, feeding

in frenzy as the small waves scatter.

Far out on the low, narrow, wooden jetty

my small family leans over to marvel

at the fishes before landfall. At my back

is the white crescent of hotels, the town,

the estuary, the mountains, sun setting.

 

They cross the beach, granddaughter running ahead,

towards me, as the frenetic birds

yell and flap. Along the horizon,

the forest of white wind turbines slowly

disappears, becomes a blurred prism of green,

ivory, red – like an attenuated,

distant, gaudy city.