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July and August

Newsletter 2021

Penzance’s New Activity Centre and Cold-Water swimming venue

Message from the Chair: Heather Rowe

How will life be after 19 July; will it really be Freedom or only partial Freedom Day?

Whatever the decision, we’re going to celebrate the day outside in style with Tea and Cake in the

Park (in place of a Social and talk). Bring your own tea and chair; we’ll supply the cake. Monday 19

July 2.30pm Penlee Park (details overleaf).

The Groups are now beginning to meet up for real; it’s going to be a gradual process. Come August,

most of us will be holiday socialising so there will be no Social and no Newsletter in August; Groups

will make their own decisions about whether they meet up. Towards the end of August, the Group

Facilitators, and the Committee plan to meet, for the first time for real, to begin to plan out the rest

of the year.

What will be the rules for indoor meetings? Will some 60 of us (as used to be the case) feel

comfortable meeting up indoors? Will it be more a question of smaller numbers at, say, coffee

mornings with 20 or so selected randomly? Will we feel happier continuing to Zoom the Social? Will

all the old venues still function or suit (we’ve had a sub-committee assessing this, including on the

new criteria of space, ventilation, hand sanitiser….)?

One thing is certain: we will make the best of what is possible. And continue to – Learn, Laugh, Live.

PS. Do not miss a rather special article on page 4 by Susan Soyinka

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Tea and Cake in the Park

Come to Tea in the Park on Monday 19 July! Come and

celebrate – being alive, the outdoors, socialising,

whatever….

As with the very successful U3A Day social we had on 2

June, (see photos on page 11) we will meet in Penlee Park

at 14.30 at the tennis court end (entrance by Penlee

carpark). It’s more open there, there are some steps to sit on as well as a useful bench, but you will

need to bring your own seating – folding chair or stool, or groundsheet and cushion. And bring your

own thermos; the Penlee cafe does do takeaways but gets busy. And there will be cake on offer...

It will be for each of us to decide whether we wish to wear a mask (when not sipping tea) and to

judge the necessary social distancing. If anyone feels uncomfortable where they’re sitting, no one

will feel offended if you decide to move away.

We’ll have a U3A board to identify where the Committee are, and they will be wearing name

badges. Come and make yourself known as we will be checking people in as we do at the Socials (so

know your membership number...). We’ll have some sticky labels to identify you. New members

will be very welcome; just come and introduce yourselves.

Persistent rain might scare us off, but umbrellas can cope with a shower...

We look forward to seeing you!

Heather and the Committee

A Journey through the French Canals in 2009

Talk by Malcolm Brown Malcolm enthralled us on 21st June with a very entertaining account of his voyage through the French canals and rivers, bringing his yacht, Waimangu, back to the UK from Greece, where he had kept it for the preceding 10 years.

He entered the French waterways system at Port St Louis at the mouth of the Rhone where it flows into the Mediterranean.

The boat had its mast removed and stowed on deck and plenty of fenders fitted for the journey under bridges and through locks. He chose the summer period for this part of his journey as the flow of water down the Rhone and the Saone is less at this time of year. Travelling upriver he paused at various places to do some

sightseeing…. Avignon and its famous bridge, and Lyon with its ancient cathedral. He described

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going through the locks on the Rhone, which are vast cavernous places which must accommodate enormous ships and the huge barge trains that use this waterway... Passing further North onto the smaller canals where he had his own personal lock keeper who followed him through the staircase locks on his moped. On into the Champagne region where he sampled some of the produce on his way to Paris, which he traversed in the very early morning to avoid the “Bateaux Mouche,” the infamous trip boats that carry thousands of visitors every day. Going downstream now and soon onto the tidal section of the Seine and ending up at Le Havre where he re-rigged the boat to return to the UK. In total he took 44 days, travelled 1300 plus kilometres, and passed through 178 locks. Malcolm’s Power Point presentation illustrated by photographs taken on the trip was smoothly presented and extremely enjoyable, and for me evoked many memories of a similar journey we made going the other way south some years earlier. Thank you very much Malcolm, and we hope that in the future we may hear more of your time in Greece. Richard Wainwright

Two more lovely poems by the very observant Vicki Morley Love Lane Allotment

High stone walls on two sides

one currently being repaired

by wall craftsmen and their apprentices

who lounge on plastic chairs.

Two borders are hedges

a rampage of hazel, holly and bramble

sprinkled with bind-weed trumpets.

Wild green plants mesh

to keep out vegetable thieves.

Strong squalls from the southwest wind

swing the pirate scarecrow

who pivots to protect

runner beans, peas, and courgettes.

A wood pigeon nested in the holly tree.

Two squirrels race on thin telephone wires

trapeze artists, in search of new hazel nuts.

The council allotment queue

for a patch is six years and growing.

Vicki Morley

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ON BECOMING A WRITER IN RETIREMENT by Susan Soyinka

It was my privilege to be invited by Bodmin Keep, in partnership with the Imperial War Museum, to give

two online talks on 14th and 21st June. This arose because the IWM will be reopening its WW2 and Holocaust

Galleries in September 2021 and as part of this programme, various institutions around the country were asked

to share related histories. One of Bodmin Keep's projects was to research "Jews in Cornwall during the Second

World War." Hence my involvement, having written two books on this very topic: From East End to Land's End,

The Evacuation of Jews' Free School (JFS), London, to Mousehole in Cornwall during World War Two and Albert

Reuss in Mousehole, The Artist as Refugee.

How did I become involved in writing these books, and a third one about my family history? By an

extraordinary coincidence, I have connections with both sides of the stories. My mother was a Viennese Jewish

refugee who came to England to escape the Nazis. She lost eight members of her family, including her only sister

Sonja. Whilst researching my family history, and by way of connecting with my Jewish heritage which I knew

little about, I started working as an educational psychologist for a Jewish charity in London. One of the many

Jewish schools I worked with was JFS.

On the other side of the story, I first visited Cornwall with my family during the 1950s. Furthermore,

the grandfather of my son, Alex Trembath, was born in Mousehole. In 2008, when introducing my grandchildren

to the village, I visited Marian Harris, a distant relative of my son, then in her 80s, and learned from her the

evacuation story. I was treated by Marian to some charming anecdotes, including that of a former evacuee

returning to Mousehole for the first time in 1999. He knocked on her door and asked if she knew about the

evacuation. Marian responded, “you're not little Jacky Goldstein, are you?” Whereupon, little Jacky Goldstein,

now in his 70s, burst into tears.

This moving story prompted me to find out more. I tracked down and interviewed former evacuees,

as well as villagers, unearthed archives, and newspaper articles, and obtained access to some amazing

photographs. My book was published in early 2010, and a few weeks later 13 June, the exact 70th anniversary

of the event, we held an evacuee reunion in Mousehole.

What is particularly poignant about this story for me is that at the very time these children were

travelling south-west to love and safety in Cornwall, my own aunt Sonja – born like several of the evacuees in

1927 – travelled on a train going in exactly the opposite direction from Paris to Auschwitz, where a very

different fate awaited her.

For several years prior to writing From East End to Land’s End, I had been researching my Viennese

Jewish family history, and written a number of articles. My publishers suggested that I use this material to

publish another book. Thus, was born A Silence That Speaks, A Family Story Through and Beyond the

Holocaust, published in 2013.

Having now written two books during my retirement, I was satisfied that this was the conclusion of

my writing career. However, in 2015, I visited an exhibition called The Bigger Picture at Penlee House in

Penzance and saw two paintings by a Viennese Jewish artist, Albert Reuss, who had been living in Mousehole.

Given my background, this was a story I could not resist. Further research revealed that Reuss was born in

Vienna in 1889, only two weeks after my Viennese grandfather, and came to England in 1938, as did my

mother. I also uncovered a massive archive of Reuss papers in Vienna, which had originated in Mousehole.

Finally, I was able to publish Reuss’s biography in 2017.

For any of you who missed my talks and would like to listen to them, they have been recorded and are available on Bodmin Keep’s You Tube page at the following links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HeT4kiO0BY (FromEastEndtoLandsEnd)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7973-4MHrkU (Albert Reuss)

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Scarlet Lining In an elbow of granite step bordering a shallow stream a smell of burnt matches from minute figwort flowers cousins to snapdragons but fiery red and gold. Stems beetroot red and square leaves in pairs, but tell-tale caterpillar poop in the tracery. Yellow, black and white it rippled behind giant jaws froze on a stalk. Was it ready to pupate? Next time I looked it was a wasteland. Cormac men had strimmed edges, banks, and paths Figwort flowers their visors splattered green. The figwort has deep roots is sprouting dark green shoots ready for next spring. I‘ll be armed with a jam jar coax it in, feed with yellow ragwort watch for the splitting chrysalis the whirl of a black cloak reveal of scarlet lining A Cinnabar Moth and celebrate the cinnabar moth. Vicki Morley

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Diana Dixon wrote a poem in a previous newsletter called, The Doorway, with an illustration by Rene

Magritte. As a follow up, Vaughan Allen has written the article below about the artist.

RENE MAGRITTE (1898 – 1967)

The Surrealist artist Magritte was born in

Lessines, Belgium and christened Rene

François Ghislain Magritte. He became

interested in Surrealism in his mid-twenties

befriending several of its adherents after

moving to Paris in 1927 where he lived until

1932. Unlike the art of Yves Tanguy, Max

Ernst, Andre Masson, Salvador Dali or Joan

Miro he was less concerned with trying to

illustrate the subconscious with

unrecognisably distorted forms, preferring to paint realistically. In spite of his radical art in all

other respects Magritte was the epitome of convention; invariably attired in pin-striped suits

with a wife of longstanding and residing in a salubrious district of Brussels.

By juxtaposing objects in unlikely settings, he intended to surprise the spectator and have

them question the nature of the way we see the world. An example being ‘The Empire of

Light’ 1950 where a night scene of houses with a streetlamp is shown beneath a bright

daylight sky. Another typical Magritte shows a view through a window onto a landscape

where a canvas on an easel is painted with the exact section of the landscape it covers.

Though a very serious artist much of whose oeuvre can appear quite disturbing, he could

also be whimsical. An early work such as Le Trahison des Images (The betrayal of pictures)

1928 merely shows a perfectly painted smoker’s pipe beneath which he’s self-evidently

written “this is not a pipe.” On occasion when stuck for a title, he even allowed friends and

fellow artists to name his paintings.

Magritte revelled in creating illusion using visual metaphor to explore different

interpretations of reality. Though many objects in his paintings were quite banal in

themselves by combining them incongruously they automatically assumed a disconcerting

often haunting significance. Although born into a prosperous bourgeois family his mother

suffered severe depression spending hours secluded in her room. Tragically one night in

1912 she walked into the nearby river Sambre and drowned herself. Discovering the body a

few days later the nightdress had become wrapped around her head leaving an otherwise

naked corpse. Despite Magritte and his father’s presence when the body was removed from

the water the artist always denied that the trauma explained why so many of his figures

featured obscured faces.

Of his paintings he was to say, “My pictures are visible images that conceal nothing, they

evoke mystery and if you ask, ‘what does it mean’, it means nothing because a mystery is

unknowable “

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Sue’s Big Trek

The Team completed the 13-mile trek in

25 degrees on Saturday June 5th, around

the streets of London.

The team raised a whopping

£2,400 to be donated to the

Alzheimer’s Society.

Sue wishes to thank everyone who

supported her.

Thoughts from Shirley Wainwright

I was sitting in my garden delighting in watching the butterflies that are in such sad decline these

days, when suddenly out of the bushes a cat leaped up and brought one down. Before I could do

anything, the butterfly had been crunched up. This followed on from the previous day when I saw

another cat with a slow worm hanging from its mouth. These two events got me thinking about what

if anything could be done to prevent the huge number of wild creatures being destroyed by

domestic cats…….according to Chris Packam over 55 million garden birds are killed in the UK every

year, and 275 million animals over all.

Pondering on this it occurred to me that most dogs have lost their hunting instinct through

hundreds of years of training, whereas cats have been allowed complete freedom to roam and hunt

as they will. So would it be possible to breed out the cats’ hunting instincts over a few generations?

In trying to think of a way this might be done I realised that most dogs seen in the streets today wear

a muzzle. So, could these be worn by cats?

Obviously, you couldn’t expect an adult cat to take to a muzzle, but what if it was started as a

kitten, getting used to wearing a muzzle in the same way that many get used to wearing a collar?

I know many devoted cat lovers will say that would be cruel and unnatural, but no more than it is

for dogs, and surely if it could save the slaughter of 55 million garden birds it would be worth a little

inconvenience to the cats?

I would be interested in members’ views.

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National Garden Scheme

Two of our members, David Puddifoot and Lizzie Houghton

opened their splendid garden in Penzance in aid of charity.

Group News

Poetry Group

The Poetry Group has recommenced. Meetings take place at St Marys Church, Chapel Street every

third Wednesday of the month, between 2and 4pm.

The facilitator will send a reminder, with details, a weekbefore each meeting including the session’s

theme. New members welcome

Vaughan Allen

Line Dancing

Ever since the first Lockdown,the Line Dancers adopted as their theme dance Gloria Gaynor’s “I will

Survive” (with steps devised by Joy). Now, over a year later, they feel confident enough to advance

in sentiment to Bob Marley’s “Everything’s gonna be alright”….!

So its back to Joy to craft the steps. When possible, there could be a rendition…….

Maths Group

I am still waiting for Maths enthusiasts to contact me. No group as yet,please contact me by email

and I will promise you a good time.

Barry Jewell

Philosophy Group

There are two groups up and running at the moment, meeting outside the Orangery café in Penlee

Park.It was decided to meet outside throughout the summer. Each group will meet at 11 o’clock on

Tuesdays on a three weekly rota. The next meeting will be on 29th June, the participants have been

informed.

Barry Jewell

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French Conversation

The French conversation group have been meeting as a socially

distanced group of six in the garden for the last few

months,weather permitting. Sadly, because of the limitation on

numbers, the whole grouphas not always been able to meet.

However, this has been amicably resolved amoungst us.

Fortunately, there will be space in the garden for all of us to meet

outside now that larger numbers are allowed. We are obviously

looking forward eagerly to being able to travel as we have talked

about places we would like to go and what we would do there. We

have talked of memories of going to the cinema and have also

brought along our favorite gadgets to talk about. However, the chat

tends to wander from the subject and much else besides has been

discussed.We are hoping to arrange a summer lunch and a game of

boules in the near future.

Jean Gray

Walking Group

Four of us met at Penzance bus station last Thursday and after enjoying a slight mystery tour on the

no.16 (the driver was under instruction, and we went the ‘pretty way’) we left the bus at Hellesveor

just outside St. Ives. It was, despite earlier bad forecasts, a gloriously bright sunny day. We set off

down a farm track heading west and after navigating through a herd of cows who were nonchalantly

sauntering from one field to another, we soon found ourselves in beautiful open countryside.

There were so many lovely wildflowers to look at in the

fields and hedgerows including wild orchids, trefoil-

bird’s-foot, drift, and stitchwort amongst others as well

as hosts of purple foxgloves and valerian. We were also

lucky enough to hear and see a lark hovering above one

of the fields. We reached Travail Mill with its beautiful

garden and babbling brook and headed towards the sea

arriving with the Carracks in front of us just off the coast.

Turning right towards St. Ives we followed the coast path

admiring the stunning rocky scenery as we went. We

even came across a small stone circle. As with most coastal

paths in West Cornwall it was very up and down, and a pit stop

on top of a large granite boulder was necessary halfway back

to gain breath and take on fuel and water. We arrived back at our starting point somewhat tired having

covered about 7 miles and after a very short wait caught the bus back to Penzance.

With thanks to Vaughan for leading the walk it had been a thoroughly enjoyable time.

Yvonne Davies

The dates for the walks are the 1st, 15th, and 29th July. Anyone who is not already a member but would like

details of the walks please contact Shirley Wainwright.

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LET US TEMPT YOU….

We’re wild water swimmers in dry robes,

With trolleys, rucksacks and ‘Crocs’

No wet suits needed,

Rain hail or shine

And no weather warnings are heeded

Our costumes are bright, our swim caps divine

As we make quite a show in the harbour

Or off Battery Rocks

With its steps to the sea

Near the pool and the old Penzance docks.

And now brighter weather might lure you along

To join in our wild water ritual

Outdoor swimming is good

For the spirit, the mind

And the warm comradeship lifts your mood

Blue Cornish seas,

The gulls and the breeze

All troubles ease….

Susan Roach

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Pictures from the first U3A Day in Penlee Park

Pictures taken by Margaret Thomas

Our first U3A Day event was held on June 2nd at 10.30am. Luckily it was a fine day and 32 members joined the

gathering in Penlee Park, with their various refreshments.

Diana Wayne promoted her leaflet on the “Restroom” provisions in Penzance.

As you can see from the pictures there was a lot of chatting and discussion taking place.