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OTHER PEOPLES' FLOWERS

OTHER PEOPLE’S FLOWERS: Monsieur D’Atouffe, Tortoise of Taste – words by Sylvia Selzer, illustrations by Evie Chapman

David Selzer By David Selzer7 Comments2 min read1.1K views

SYLVIA SELZER I wrote part one of Monsieur D’Aouffe more than forty-five years ago to entertain my nine year old daughter Sarah on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Many years later, a friend working for a well known childrens’ publisher, advised that, extended, and illustrated by a colleague, it would stand a very good chance of being published. I wrote part two and completed the piece. Sadly, the publisher reduced staff and projects at this time and D’Atouffe was abandoned.

This year, while researching material for OTHER PEOPLE’S FLOWERS, David rediscovered the forgotten file and suggested that our granddaughter, eleven year old Evie, would be the perfect illustrator – and my interest in the piece was rekindled.

On the writing of Monsieur D’Atouffe, I have absolutely no idea where the story came from. I have spent my professional life in education as a teacher, head teacher and university lecturer. During that time, I wrote plays for and with young people. I also was an active board member and in-house photographer of Action Transport Theatre where I had the opportunity to have a short play professionally produced. I have also written a full length screenplay. All this time I have been surrounded with children and young people and their enthusiasms.  

Monsieur D’Atouffe is my first poem…

 

 

EVIE CHAPMAN I have been interested in art for as long as I can remember. I mainly enjoy doing drawings, though I am still interested in doing other forms of art such as painting or online artwork. However, even as I do enjoy most types of art, I do not have a specific art role-model to look up to. I see different artworks that to me are anonymous and I get my inspiration from them.

I have enjoyed working on Monsieur D’Atouffe firstly because it has been my first ever time illustrating for a book, and secondly I have no other experiences to compare it to. Nevertheless, I know in the future it will always be an experience that stands out to me.

In my illustrations of Monsieur D’Atouffe the materials I used were various watercolours, pencil (for the sketches), graphic markers for the line art and a gold pen.

 

[dearpdf id="6023" ][/dearpdf]

 

SYLVIA SELZER
PHOTOGRAPHER STORYTELLER
www.sylviaselzer.com

 

©Evie Chapman 2021

©Sylvia Selzer 2021

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

17TH OCTOBER 1961

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read617 views

My first term at Liverpool. Tuesday morning.

The professor of Philosophy’s lecture:

“All metaphysical statements are false,

or platitudinous”. My memory

of that October is of soft sun,

and clement shadows in the breezy

pollution of the river city.

 

***

 

Today, I have realised, that morning,

not quite four hundred miles due south east,

near the Pont Saint-Michel, under orders

from their chief, Maurice Papon, a Vichy

collaborator, police were beating

Algerians demonstrating against

torture, and for freedom. Scores were thrown

into the river Seine, and drowned. Le Rafle –

the Round-up. History as only rumour

for almost another forty years.

 

***

 

Though the world is all there is, and things

have no meanings beyond themselves, the busy

silence of that lecture room, before

the professor speaks, has been broken,

forever, with the cries of the beaten,

and the drowning.

 

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POETRY

BLOOMSBURY

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read643 views

‘O, there you are,’ Mr Bloom said, turning from the fire.

ULYSSES, James Joyce

 

Joyce read his poems to Lady Gregory

in Dublin. She was impressed and gave him five pounds

to help fund his escape to Paris

from the ‘coherent absurdity’ (his words)

of Catholicism. She wrote to Yeats –

her close friend and patronee, who had lodgings

a five minute walk from Euston – to meet him

off the Holyhead train at six a.m.,

give him breakfast, look after him and then

give him dinner before he took the boat train

from Victoria. She was afraid James

‘would knock his ribs against the earth’. Imagine

these two bespectacled Irishmen,

Orange and Green, very amiably

walking along Woburn Place! No doubt

Yeats introduced him to Bloomsbury neighbours

Eliot and Pound, amongst others,

to ‘help him on his way’. What if James

had torn up his ticket, kept the fiver,

of course, and stayed in this extraordinary

two thirds of a square mile – with its leagues

of floors of books and artefacts,

its revolutionary exiles,

its assorted geniuses, blue plaques,

handsome, greensward squares, cohorts

of multicultural students and tourists?

 

From the window of our budget hotel

we can almost see Yeats’ lodgings.

Before us is St Pancras Parish Church –

in Greek Revival style with terracotta

caryatids and cornices embellished

with lions’ heads. On Euston Road the world

passes – endless pedestrians, black cabs,

red buses. How I longed, as a youth,

to be here – to live and work among these

acres of ideas, the palpable shades

of literary men and women, shakers

and movers in that enduring tradition!

 

Our train passed the same blackened walls

he would have seen – perhaps even the same

stunted buddleia! Not until just before

Bexley did there seem to be some woodland –

or, until after Bletchley, ploughed fields

with murders of crows in the furrows.

We watched a shower of rain move towards us

through the obsolete radio masts

near Rugby, and I thought of James Joyce

creative in exile.

 

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

GERTRUDE BELL AND THE TREATY OF SÈVRES

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read472 views

Paris, 1920

 

The treaty was signed in the Exhibition Room,

overseen by Marie Antoinette’s

dinner service. Like porcelain owls’ eyes,

they were witnesses of the delegates’ harsh

geometry, the fretwork jigsaw of desk

wallahs – Ottoman Mesopotamia

become modern Syria and Iraq.

 

Gertrude Bell was one of the delegates:

daughter of a philanthropic iron master;

Oxford graduate like T.E. Lawrence;

cartographer, mountaineer, linguist;

archaeologist, administrator,

public servant; Arabist, Al-Khatun,

‘Queen of the Desert’; poet, fluent

in Farsee, translator of Hafiz;

confidante of seraglios, anti-

Suffragist; anti-Zionist, maker

of the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq.

 

London, 1915

 

Between postings, lobbying powerful men,

as always, to let her be useful,

she continued her letters to ‘Dick’,

Charles Doughty-Wylie, career diplomat

and soldier, the unrequited, married

love of her life – eclectic letters

of Whitehall gossip, geo-political

tactics, romantic longing, and sorrow

for the Great War’s slaughters. Her last letter

was never finished. She had learned

of his death in action at Gallipoli.

 

Baghdad, 1926

 

She died from an overdose of sleeping pills.

There was no evidence of suicide.

King Faisal, the monarch she had made and whom

she was finding ‘difficult’ of late,

watched, from the shade of his private balcony,

the coffin carried through the dust to the thump

and blare of the garrison’s brass band.

He could see the Tigris beyond the graveyard.

His grandson’s disfigured body would be hung

from a lamp post near the square where Saddam’s

prodigious statue would be toppled with ropes.

 

‘To steadfastness and patience, friend, ask not
If Hafiz keep–
Patience and steadfastness I have forgot,
And where is sleep?’

 

 

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

JEWISH TUNES

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read452 views

Cole Porter was an Episcopalian,

a farmer’s son, from Peru, Indiana,

whose ambition was to write ‘Jewish Tunes’.

My mother’s favourite song was ‘Begin

the Begine’, which Cole Porter composed,

the story goes, one evening at the piano

in The Ritz Bar of the Ritz Hotel, Paris.

The love song is in a minor key.

It personifies longing, wit, irony.

 

My mother and father met in the city

of Kano, Northern Nigeria.

‘When they begin the beguine,
It brings back the sound of music so tender,
It brings back the night of tropical splendour,
It brings back a memory evergreen!…’

She and my father, Gentile and Jew,

danced to the music at their wedding

in Kano’s driest, dustiest month –

the month Heydrich’s Wannsee Conference

agreed The Final Solution in

less than ninety minutes.

 

 

 

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POETRY

LOVELOCKED

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read512 views

We first saw them in Taormina
on the railings of the piazza
overlooking the Bay of Naxos;
then on the railings at the Albert Dock
behind the Tate opposite Birkenhead;
and on the steps by the old County Hall
from the Embankment up to Waterloo Bridge.

They are usually small padlocks, some
combination although most are keyed,
the sort used for suitcases or garden sheds,
some with names or initials but most seem
anonymous – though perhaps the weathers
have made them so – some obviously purchased
for the occasion, others found in a drawer.

Does one of them keep the key – or is there
a duplicate so each could unlock
eternity? Maybe they throw the keys
into the air. Environmentalists
and authorities are justly concerned.
There were bridges in Paris imperilled
by the weight! Perhaps, if we were young again,
we would – yet we were never ones to
score our names on wood or stone. Love is private.
Who would have thought that there were so many
narcissists! The lovely lock of hair kept
in a locket has been forsaken.
So, let hard won gold and diamond tell
locked on our ring fingers.

 

 

 

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