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Vietnam

THE PLOT AGAINST THESE ISLANDS

One February night in ’74

the Army occupied Heathrow Airport.

The BBC’s Nine O’Clock news explained

the occupation was an exercise

in how to deal with a terrorist threat.

The new Prime Minister, Harold Wilson,

learned of the exercise from the TV,

recognised it as the dress rehearsal

of a coup against his premiership –

a coup that would have been sanctified

by an announcement from her Majesty,

an emergency government led by

her husband’s uncle, supported solemnly

by appropriate newspapers, and followed

by one or two assassinations –

but he kept his counsel, did not react.

 

His misdemeanors were: the wrong sort of school,

the wrong sort of accent, being ‘too clever

by half’; believed to be a KGB agent,

and to have poisoned his predecessor

as Labour leader, a Wykehamist;

believed to want peace in Ireland rather

than the IRA’s annihilation;

refusing to join the US in Nam, thus

causing the defence industry to forego

extra profits, preventing working class oiks

from becoming dead heroes, denying

regiments additional battle honours.

 

Wilson resigned less than two years later.

So, Jeremy Corbyn, what chutzpah

on your part to assume you could succeed!

 

 

 

 

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 POEM FOR MY DAUGHTER

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read430 views

To have a child, as you know well, is to have

someone always with you – their shadow,

their echo, their breathing – whatever

has happened, whatever may happen.

To have a daughter is to shape the future.

 

When we lived in a Victorian third floor

attic flat, that had been the nursery

and the children’s bedrooms, and the trees,

planted when the house was built, touched the panes,

and you were only a few weeks old

fifty years ago now, I began

a poem with this title — inspired

by Yeat’s poem ‘A Prayer For My Daughter:

‘Once more the wind is howling, and half hid

Under this cradle-hood and coverlid

My child sleeps on’ – when the Black & Tan War

raged, rampaged:  houses shelled and burned.

A first time father in his fifties,

he wished his daughter a modest beauty,

a becoming wit, and a good marriage!

 

It was a gentle, English May, and Wilson

was keeping us out of Vietnam.

I was a young man proud and fearful

of fatherhood – unmastered in either

the grandeur or simplicity of words.

All I could think to wish for you was health.

The poem stalled, was left unfinished, lost.

 

A few days old, your daughter lay in her crib,

in another Victorian house.

Outside the snow continued to fall

in that provincial city, slowing traffic,

drifting in gardens. Across an ocean

one of the worst earthquakes on record

razed the flimsy houses of the poor.

As you entered the room talking – wittily,

kindly, hopefully – she turned her nascent head

in your direction, hearing that sound

she had heard forever.

 

 

 

JOHNSON’S WAR

‘This is not a jungle war but a struggle for freedom on every front of human activity.’

Lyndon B. Johnson, US President, 1963-1969

 

From the silent village on Hill 192,

a girl is torn by soldiers into

darkness and raped many times: discarded,

dead, with Coke cans and expensive shell cases.

All but one of the men shake the landscape

with her screams. Imagining her horror,

its hugeness, knowing its fear, he suffers,

saves it for somewhere of tomorrows,

legality – and vilification.

Though, in the discarded subways of home,

girls are held open and torn, in the quiet

counties of peace, sisters, mothers

of poor, murdering boys know instant

righteousness.