Good evening and welcome to Big Tent.
Live events are live online event series from the University of Oxford as part of the Humanities Cultural Programme,
one of the founding Stones for the future, Stephen Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities.
My name is Regulus will know as well as Williams, and I'm the director here at Torch.
We bring you this event online and hope that you remain safe and well.
Everyone is welcome in our big tent.
As we explore big ideas together here, I'd like to remind you that you can submit questions and comments for our speakers.
Please type these into the YouTube live chat below and we'll answer as many as possible later in the session when I come back tonight,
then we're delighted to bring you this discussion of this book,
Under the Rainbow Voices from Lock Down and the discussion with the author, James Akeley,
who will introduce in a moment the event we're doing in collaboration with Blackwells of Oxford.
And if you want your own signed copy of this book, you look on the website where you've got the phone number for Blackwells.
They will a send it to you if you live outside Oxford.
If not, then they will even bring it to you by bike if long as you live within the Oxford ringroad.
Otherwise you can place an order online at Blackwells Dakoda UK.
James, then I have first of all, then the honour of introducing James Atley, who I hope will come to your screen in a minute.
James Antley is the author of Under the Rainbow. Hello, James.
Voices from Lockdown. He's also written Isolation at Different Oxford Journey Guernica,
painting the end of the World Station to station when he was the what was a writer in residence on the Great Western Railway.
If I remember rightly, that book was shortlisted for the Stanford Billman Travel Book of the Year 2017.
He's also written Nocturne A Journey in Search of Moonlight, amongst other titles.
Is Digital Fiction The Cartographer's Confession one. The 2017 New Media Writing Prise.
He works as an editor, lecturer and publishing consultant, and his journalism has appeared in publications including The Independent State, etc.
Free's and The London Review of Books. Welcome, James.
It's very nice to have you here in the big tent. I'm also delighted to welcome Marina Warner this evening, I went to a marina, comes on screen.
Hello, Marina. Marina, who is an acclaimed polymath, a writer of fiction, criticism, history and geography.
Her works include novels, short stories, as well as studies of art, myths, symbols and fairy tales.
And certainly in my working life, she's been an inspiration in many ways.
She's written for many publications from the London Review of Books through to The New Statesman and to Vogue,
and is a distinguished fellow of All Souls, Oxford. Not many people have managed to combine those two qualities.
Welcome, Marina. Thank you. And last but no means least, we welcome Professor Pablo Mukerji again.
I'll wait till Pablo comes to the screen. Professor Pablo Mukerji teaches on the English and Comparative Literature Studies programme
at Warwick University and is an expert on Victorian as well as contemporary imperial,
colonial and imperial colonial cultures. He's got a good degree of expertise then in Victorian and indeed some degree of contemporary writing.
He also happens to live in Oxford and so has some thoughts to bring to our discussion around this book,
which, as readers will know, is partly based in Oxford, but not only about Oxford.
And that, I daresay, is one of the things we'll be discussing in the course of today's conversation.
Welcome, Pablo, and thank you for joining us this evening.
I'm now going to disappear from the scrolls whilst the three of our speakers, our guests have a discussion.
I think we're going to start really with a discussion between Marina and James and then move on to more of a discussion between James and Pablo.
But then I'll stay present and then I will join you again later on in about half an hour or so to try and
intimate things between all three of you and also to bring in that stage questions from the audience.
So before you go. Oh, I'm very sorry. You're quite right.
I forgotten about this, really. Thank you very much, James.
So one of the great things about this book is, apart from the writing, is that there are some really lovely and not just lovely,
but kind of challenging, interesting rich photographs and images in here.
So Mayor is going to show us a few of them. It's about rainbows in windows.
And so here then are one or two photographs.
Thank you. So this one combining the rainbow with a Black Lives Matter image.
And this is a rainbow with an England football flag.
And here's the Rainbow Rocket, I think it's not the wrong way round, should that, in fact, be a door going upwards, James?
Yes. OK, well, there we are. Sideways rocket for now. And we can imagine it going the other way.
Thank you for reminding me.
And at that stage, I really will disappear and leave you guys to get on with the conversation and look forward to listening and joining in later.
Thank you. Yes, so I think Wes wanted me to begin by just reading a short extract,
so this is taken from close to the beginning of the book when I'm first venturing out into the city, exploring,
exploring it and using the art in people's windows as an excuse to ring their doorbells and try
and start a conversation back on the bike up the hill that always gets the heart going slow.
Down on the street of Edwardian terraces, I knock on the door next to a window decorated with a handwritten rainbow.
It's opened by a woman, a girl of five or six, peering out from behind her.
I ask who did the picture and why. Oh, my daughter, the woman says.
Then to the girl, Do you want to tell the man why you did it?
The girl picks up her mother's dress and hides her face in it because he told me to, she says in a muffled voice.
This, it turns out, is a recurrent theme. A serious faced man opens the door a little further along.
His children are there somewhere in the background, but they're not invited to join our conversation.
Why did his family create the artwork in their window?
It was a way of being able to express support to health workers and also an activity that got the children involved stop them getting bored,
he tells me. So partly it was for something to do, but also said the children would understand the impact of the crisis,
appreciate what the health workers are doing, having they have a sense of what's at stake.
No danger that education is on hold in this house during lock down the Rainbow artwork's suddenly feel less spontaneous,
more a task that has been set.
I move on through sunbake, streets I know would have been decorated with artworks just two months ago, but are now a gallery scrubbed clean.
Builders are busy on scaffolding, fixing roofs, giving houses a post pandemic paint job,
their conversations providing a quazi divine commentary from above gruff Carabine in a Renaissance painting.
I've developed a cycling technique that involves pedalling slowly while moving
my head from side to side to scan each property from behind dark glasses.
It provokes some suspicious looks for understandable reasons.
Thank you so much, James.
I must say, I feel that you've written in a very provocative book, absolutely full of thought about the current crisis we're in.
But we're in a very perceptive book with infinite paths of attention.
The quality of attention and listening that you show to your interlocutors and to the sum of many of them strangers to you is very,
very striking in the book. But as you mentioned there, you people could have been suspicious.
So I'm interested about your you know, your method, because it seems to me that you're in a literary tradition,
even though you're not being self-conscious about it.
But you're in a literary tradition which runs definitely back to Orwell, at least, of documentary witness testimony,
gathering voices, but also a kind of situationist situation, situationist attitude of the chance encounter.
The and I'm amazed you didn't have more trouble, as it were, as you charged into people's lives.
I kind of I reckon sometimes I had about five seconds when someone opened the door to engage with them.
And quite often children played a role in getting me past that initial suspicion.
I mean, because, let's face it, when people strangers ring your doorbell, they could be coming for the rent.
They could be causing trouble. They could be anybody, you know.
And so I had did have one, you know, one or two occasions where someone would open the door and sort of say what you want,
you know, in quite an aggressive way. And if I was able to say, well, I just saw that beautiful rainbow in your window and I wondered how you did it,
then they'd say, Oh, that's my son, I'll get it for you. And the children have this kind of magical role in defusing suspicion.
Yeah, but as you say, I think probably what I've.
Learnt, if anything, from the situation is that thing of being open to chance and to being sensitive to the kind
of psychic atmosphere of different parts of the city and being alert for that sort of.
What somebody called the dog whistle of chance, you know, that would just make you think, oh, I'll just go down that street, I'll just turn here.
And there was a sense of urgency,
as I tried to explain in that extract that a lot of people were taking the art down by the river because it was feeding their children,
have moved on to other things and so on. Yeah.
So I think. I'm sure I've learnt a lot from the situations, but it's all just part of my DNA now, you know, after a long time.
But I think just through doing a number of books where I've kind of wandered about and spoken to people and met people,
I just when I go into the zone, I'm I just feel very relaxed.
And I think people read your body language and they know it was almost as if they've been waiting for me,
some of these people that a lot of pent up emotion, things they wanted to say.
And it was almost as if I was the recycling guy is coming to pick up the recycling.
You know, here's the story. Collecting, you know, a big one.
Quite understood the idea. Yes. You want to hear our stories about this strange time?
Yes. I think that you catch that very well with your finger very much on that pulse.
The people are cooped up that they haven't been allowed to touch or see other people.
Suddenly they're allowed to speak. But you have a very vivid cast of characters.
And I wondered if you did actually consciously think I must do this.
I must cover that. I must. You have a very vigorous landlady pub landlady.
You have the supermarket attendant, you have many medical people.
Several ages of children is a marvellous gallery.
Well, not I shouldn't say gallery are marvellous actual chorus voices.
And that reminded me of a very great contemporary writer who is Svetlana Alexievich.
And your book has something in common with her book Conscionable, which is called Chernobyl Prayer,
in which she gathers these voices of people who have lived through that. Of course, we're still living through the voters.
So, yeah, we are. I mean, it was as you sort of, I think guessed it was a mixture of chance encounters.
And then we think it would be great to find someone, you know, a nurse, for instance, who could really tell me.
You know what she experienced during the first lockdown and you know, when I heard that somebody knew somebody whose parents moment was.
Infected with Kofod, really,
because somebody had been released from hospital with it on the very day that supposedly a ring had been pushed around by care homes,
they found out that actually the hospital was have been told to send people back, appears in the book from her testimony.
So. I of course, I did seek out particular people, and I also have many conversations that don't appear in the book because they were too like others.
So they were unremarkable, you know, so it's a mixture of those those things.
And I did sort of feel. A bit like sort of Studs Terkel lugging a big, great big kind of reel to reel tape recorder around Chicago,
and I felt quite grateful that now you can just float like a leaf on the current with a with an iPhone and you've got it covered.
And then, of course, the thread that you so wonderfully noted is the symbol of the rainbow.
And you treat it very with great respect. Every artefact you treat with great respect.
And you actually unfold a story very unexpectedly to me of the changing meanings in real time of a symbol.
Yes, I. I did kind of think, where the [INAUDIBLE] did all these rainbows come from, you know, and.
It appears that the symbol first appeared in Italy during lockdown, together with the phrase and Andrew Tutto Bene.
Everything's going to be all right. But also one has to remember that Italy is the sort of power centre of Catholicism.
So inevitably, the rainbow symbol is is inflected also with the biblical overtones of the rainbow during those flood and.
Of course, on that occasion, God told Noah that he was going to destroy all living things on Earth,
and I know we should get on board the boat that he built together with his family
and two of every living thing and just wait for the destruction of everything,
everything else. And at the end of the flood, the rainbow appears as a promise, like, OK, you've got free that I'm never going to do that again.
So in that way, it's the Rainbow posters.
I think initially you were saying, like, if we get through this global catastrophe, that's like a great flood, everything will be fine again.
So it came then to Spain and then it came to England.
And to start with again, it had just this simple, positive message to it, but it quickly became symbolic of the NHS.
And I wondered how that had happened. And I traced that back to 2018 when a report came out that said that a lot of LGBTQ people
had experienced prejudice when getting help from the NHS and a particular hospital,
the London Children's Hospital,
the Avellino hospital decided to make rainbow badges for their staff to show their hospital was an inclusive, safe space for everybody.
And that spread throughout the NHS. The health secretary took to wearing one in his lapel.
And so in that, in the minds of the public, I think the two symbols got conflated.
But of course, that rainbow badge was a symbol of pride, you know,
and knowingly used in that way by the NHS to start with and of gay, you know, gay pride and so I speak.
I have a good conversation with with an artist who who explains how the community felt.
So as though the symbol have been stolen from them without permission and changed into something else and even used for government propaganda.
So that was really the story of its mutation in real time before our eyes, as it was to be fascinating,
but also very perceptively remarks that it became children putting it up.
We're actually putting it up as a protective symbol. It becomes rather like the hand of Fátima or the eye against the evil eye.
Exactly. Often if I rang the doorbell and an older person might emerge a sort of grandparents figure,
and it would turn out that the child had sent them that because they were no longer allowed to visit.
So they would send rainbows through the post or pop through the door or whatever.
And it was to protect that loved person and to prevent the plague from entering the building, as it were.
So again, I was reminded of the hand prints that are found in caves where children have
apparently been lifted up to place their handprints high up on the walls of caves.
And these are not just children being entertained during a lockdown.
The children that are invested with kind of power by the tribe and they have a role.
And I think children did have a very big role during lockdown and families in an unaccustomed way lived together for for a long period of time.
You have another theme, which is very, very interesting. I know Pablo wants to come in on this, but I just ask you one thing.
First is that these messages are, as you've just said, personal messages.
Yes. This is a card sent to to a granny, but the granny doesn't usually put a birthday card in the window.
So this is a way of speaking from the private sphere, the domestic sphere where we were all locked in to into the street.
And you then relate the rainbow, these rainbow messages to the whole history of graffiti and protest banners
and making a statement in the free the still free area of the public forum.
I mean, things were happening in the world. The boycott, the cancellation of world.
You know, Earth Day, yeah,
so people had a lot of concerns and also about the way the pandemic was being handled and they couldn't meet with people face to face.
So this was a way it was like going an alternative to social media where we're all talking to our own bubble, as it were.
People were putting them in the window and making a statement of their position to the streets.
It might be a statement of solidarity or protest or whatever and other messages were, I think, sort of wrapped up in these rainbows.
So, Pablo, I think over to you. Yeah. Thanks, Marina.
And thank you for for raising that point about what I was going to tell James is this
is obviously a very intimate book for me to read because I walk the same streets.
Sometimes I go to the same pubs. I can name many of James's characters by name, which I won't do at this moment.
But I want to I really loved what I loved about the book was the Segway, as James has oftentimes from a very intimate local Oxford setting.
And then he would he will widen the scope and really allow us to see Oxford as as both the both a very English city, but also world city in some ways,
which is appropriate in writing about pandemic, of course, which is a global phenomenon, as well as having a specific English form.
I wanted to start by asking James about one such moment when he's with his friend Darren by the river and he
sees that is he's one of those little houseboats party boats go by and then there's a switch in register.
And then he suddenly recalls Conrad as he looks at the river and he says he thinks of that famous opening lines,
opening moments in the heart of darkness. This, too, has been a place of darkness.
And I wanted to ask James about what he was thinking in terms of, you know, making that move.
A very, very local Oxford scene suddenly takes on quite dark, but also global undertones.
So if I might invite James to sort of speak to that for a little, then yes, I think.
As you say, Oxford is a strange place because it's basically a sort of market town with a couple of universities and a car factory attached,
but yet it is globally connected in an extraordinary way.
And it's also very cosmopolitan. You know, the car factory doubled the population of Oxford between the wars.
People came from all over the Commonwealth in the 50s and 60s to work in there and in associated industries.
At the same time, academics and students are coming from all over the world to the university.
People are coming to work in our hospitals and in the service industries.
Lots of people from the EU at least, were living here because they were working in those industries and in the same way.
I think the discussions that we have here resonate around the world and the river at that moment just struck me.
I mean, I was talking to Darren who? Wasn't this was my first meeting with Darren, you know,
that conversation and we've been talking about his experience as a child of the Windrush generation,
parents living in Oxford, and suddenly that boat boat went by and it sort of lifted our moods for a
second as they sort of sailed off into the distance and they were all partying.
But it just I suddenly had that sense that that physical river joins us,
not just that it is the same river that goes all the way to the mass of the Thames where Conrad's
characters sat on that yacht as the sun went down and know speaks begins his terrifying story,
really. And he says that the river is is something that has served the inhabitants on its banks well.
But then he goes on to say that the conquest of the world is not a pretty sight by which he
says he means taking it away from people with a different complexion or slightly flatter noses.
That's the way he puts it than us. It's not a pretty sight when you look into it too much.
And I suppose that resonated with the discussion I've been having with Darren also about the statue of Cecil Rhodes, which,
of course, is live today with with what's been in the news about academics protesting about its continued presence in High Street.
And I think sometimes. It's a mistake to think this is just something that concerns students and academics in the university,
because Darren was very clear that I mean, he worked for three years as a young man during his catering a level and so on.
He worked in the kitchen, Auriel for three years without ever knowing there was a statue of Rhodes.
And yet now he says now he knows and we see you for who you are.
He says to Rose and we know you've been sapping the life from the inhabitants of this city.
And that echoed very strongly from the words of John account for the artist about Bristol and Coulston, this constant statue,
and saying how, you know, these these objects have a sort of mystical, evil, unpleasant influence on the area in which they're sited.
And Darren's real anger was about these histories, history not too far from erasing history.
It's a question of actually teaching history. And I never knew there was a statue of Cecil Rhodes in the high street of the
city that I live in until Rhodes must fall campaign began five or six years ago.
And so that that statue was teaching me nothing by being up there.
But since then, it's taught me a lot because I've read Rhodes's writings and things like that.
And I've got a better idea of what kind of person he was. Yes.
So so those are the kind of things that made me think about the river as a physical symbol of that interconnectedness.
I mean, I spoke to one student who's been very involved in the Rosmus full campaign, and he told me that they'd had a letter from Canada,
from a primary school named after Cecil Rhodes, who had read about the campaign in Oxford, and they decided to change the name of that primary school.
So that's what I mean, is we can't just imagine we're living in this isolated bubble because there are these global connexions.
Yeah, and I really I mean, in a weird way, then then the virus, which is all about connectivities, the kind of connexions that maybe you don't want,
then allows you to think of Oxford as a city, not just the university, but the relationship between the city and the university.
And I really love that bit about your book and the second scene that what you've just said about people working in service industry,
for example, the supermarkets that have often been written out really of the pandemic narrative.
We don't hear and we hear the tragedies in the care homes and the hospitals and so on.
But that section you have about food chains where you speak to one of the guys who work in the supermarket,
and I was really struck by that same kind of dynamic between interconnectivity is global and then these local,
very shrill kind of, I suppose, disavowal of those interconnectivity that this guy is talking about,
a packet of prawns that we buy that goes from Scotland to Thailand and back to UK
for because the the Thai workers are supposed to be nimbler with their fingers,
but actually it's because they get paid much less, etc. and they come back to Oxford and we go to the local supermarkets.
And then these guys are coming face to face with people who are anxious about the virus, about being too close or etc. from the people.
It's a very weird I think, you know, the government's slogan was, if you can work at home,
stay at home, by definition, most kind of working class jobs, you can't do that.
And I think the sense that this man I was talking to who worked in the supermarket had was
almost as if he and his colleagues were living in a different world to everybody else.
And people would queue in an orderly fashion outside a supermarket.
But once they came in, they'd come up close and ask questions and even touch people.
The union representative was saying, and, you know, these people were expected to carry on functioning.
And then, of course, there was the famous case of one of the early fatalities from covid in the UK was a woman who was working in a.
A food processing plant, and her employers didn't provide proper sick pay to people who got covid,
they just told people that they could have the statutory sick pay of 95 pounds a week.
And for a lot of people, 90 pounds a week might be their rent. They've got dependents.
There's no way they can do that. So this particular woman, even though she had symptoms, she felt terrible.
She felt compelled to come back to work and stand on a production line.
Side by side with her colleagues, she died and many people in that outfit contracted coronavirus,
but it shows the sort of interconnectedness of all these these things, I think.
Well, yeah. And what you also spoke to, there's another moment.
We speak to two very different ladies, don't you?
If you're a professional historian and you also speak to a woman who complains really about about why rule songs like Rule Britannia,
etc., have, she feels, become slightly not quite banned, but taboo, almost uncomfortable to sing.
So what I what I found in your book was really interesting was this, I suppose, relationship between closeness and distance,
how people are having to reappraise their own sense of who they are,
which city they belong to, which country they belong to, what kind of world they belong to.
And that struck me as something that really the virus that's allowed or forced people to do that you capture brilliantly.
If I say so myself. And I really I really enjoyed that.
But I know we have a big conversation coming up or a wider conversation coming up about this.
So I might go back to Marina and start our roundtable chat.
Well, I think that one of the things that is if considering it's not a very long book,
I think people have already realised that it's a very, very richly layered book.
And actually one of the other stories that tells it in a way mirrors your national your story of a place belonging and internationalism is the
evolution of relationships to the hope that the rainbow represented told through the account of people's changing feelings about the clapping.
I mean, James is the book is very trenchant about a political masters.
I mean, wonderful, wonderfully, unflinchingly critical,
and and this story of how people began to realise something we were being had in a way, by being in the news that you tell the story, James.
Yes. Well, you know, I think we all remember when the idea came first arose that on Thursday evening we should clap for the NHS.
And I think a lot of people's experience was that to start with, that was a very positive thing.
We wanted to show appreciation and, you know, just honour those, you know, who were working so hard for us.
But I think after a couple of weeks and and beginning to realise that many NHS workers were very conflicted about this and about language,
about heroes and so on, I mean, you know, as the nurse says, that's that's just what we do.
We do. That's what we do.
If I get a call that needs me at the hospital in five minutes because there's been a major incident, I'll be on my bike and I'll get there.
You know, that's what we do. And they didn't want they didn't want clapping, really.
They wanted perhaps further funding and admission through fair pay and things like that.
And there was also a sense that once you saw politicians standing outside their dwellings clapping that, OK, this has become a kind of smoke screen.
And at the same time, the NHS brand, in a sense, was being put on privatised activities that were catastrophically not.
Useful or not, not functioning properly, allowing people to make money out of things, but branding them, you know, NHS track and trace, for instance.
So so I think there was there was manipulation going there, going on there.
And I think there was gradually I just sort of noticed this sort of increasing discomfort with all of that.
Also capture, you know, the I mean,
the fact that the problem about deception in the public sphere authorities is that it undermines people's trust in all discourse.
And you actually come across some extremely vivid spokespeople for anti Vax and so forth.
Mm hmm. I mean, one of the things I really wanted to do in the book, if I could,
was to get outside the bubble of people who have opinions much like my own, you know?
I mean, because how boring is that? At the end of the day? Much more interesting if you're going on a sort of journey of this kind to.
Have encounters with people who think differently to you.
I mean, Montane, I think, says in his travel journal something like, you know, mixing with mixing with the world, rubs and polishes your brain.
You know, I think we all sort of miss that when we were locked in our house.
It's just that kind of back and forth with people who have slightly different opinions to you.
I mean, in the case of the anti Vox's, I guess, you know, I didn't have an awful lot of sympathy with what they were saying,
but I think I kind of believe in in face to face human conversation rather than
interchanges on the just because when you're in somebody's physical presence,
it's much easier to engage with them as another human being and perhaps feel why they see things differently.
But yes, they were interesting people. I mean, Pablos, you want to jump in?
I know. I was just I was just saying that does the only moment I in normally you're a very patient and curious listener,
and that's the only moment in the book where I sense a little bit of discomfort on your part or
how you portray yourself when you're listening to the Five Conspiracy's and the anti voices,
etc. And I was just wondering what what your I mean, a sense of what Marina was just a moment ago about trust.
A lot of what they're saying, you hear in a general really deeply felt hurt in our public sphere about mistrust and a lack of trust.
So, for example, the woman who keeps on going about crony capitalism, etc., a lot of their analysis of why we shouldn't trust the you know,
the what they call the covid narrative in, in a sense, has a wider resonance.
Right. And then and then it falls back into a kind of, you know, quite specific sort of conspiracy theories, cetera.
I was wondering what you meant,
because was your discomfort to do with the fact that you recognise some of what you're saying and maybe even find yourself in what they
were saying in terms of mistrust and then find yourself to be suddenly thrown from thrown back by the other half of the conversation?
Yeah, I mean, I think the historian actually pointed out that.
You can hear slogans from one source and agree with them and believe them,
and then when you hear them from another source, you're sceptical about them.
And so I do point out that much of the language that that particular woman used about crony capitalism
and billionaires profiting and so on could equally have come from from a left wing source.
But know self, right? Oh, yeah, exactly.
So I think. Yeah, but yes.
So that that does make it difficult to sort of navigate your way through these things.
And also, I think I'm obviously sympathetic to people who for historical reasons,
have a distrust of, you know, stuff coming from the government towards them.
You know, there might be many reasons for that, but I think yeah, I think perhaps I loud I mean,
consciously, I allowed my slight impatience to show at that point.
You went back to her, didn't you? You didn't go back. I mean, you kind of fled and then you decided you must listen to her.
Yeah, I did. I went back and I listened. And I'm glad I did, you know.
Yes, they do. In a way, the unpeeling of these layers is a very sad story.
I mean, not only the desolation of the pandemic itself, but also of all these points of disillusion and estrangement that seems to have happened.
The actual buoyancy of the book rises towards the end.
I mean, people have spoken to you, you've spoken to them, listen to them.
And then you actually ask you quote Thomas Brown saying, you know, is there a way to build a novel Britannia?
I think that's what you said. I mean, do you feel there's some hope?
Yeah. Well, I feel I've got a feeling that we've kind of somehow got to.
Come to understand other people's opinions, and I mean what struck me, Pablo, is something that you alluded to with with the two different women,
the historian and the V Day enthusiast who wanted to be allowed to sing Rule Britannia because she
said she grew up in the war and it was about Britain's never being slaves being taken over by.
She didn't see it as being about the trade of enslaved people.
She saw it as about, you know, being safe from invasion.
But I think something else that we've touched on, you know, Pablo,
when we've chatted is the sort of slippery nature of terms like Britishness and an English and so on.
And I think the problem is that we've become very polarised and people have got a very different idea of what these terms now mean.
And of course, we're living at a time when the union might be anyway coming to an end in the form that we now understand it.
But. At some point, we're going to have to come to a sort of agreement about what is what do we think
our country is and what it means and what can we kind of gather around that we
agree on or because there's a certain mode of politics that we've seen in America
recently that just is based on perpetual division and stoking up those divisions.
But I think eventually I mean, my hope is that people get exhausted by that and they then look for something else.
And so, you know, we've got to have some hope. But I think it is is sort of.
Dan, to us to somehow find a way of having a dialogue with people that don't have the same opinions as ourselves.
I mean, there's a great moment, but raise the question of hope.
I mean, for me, the book was is actually full of hope. And it comes out in very little moments.
For example, I'm thinking of the redoubtable Pavulon landlady who's facing you, but as she's facing you out of the corner of her eye,
she can see the van being parked in the space of the binmen and she runs out and
chases the van away because she says it's very important to keep the binmen on side.
Right. So what do you what you have is this extraordinary story.
Yes. Who who she is. She knows the value people bring, such as binmen to her own lives.
And she's horsehide an eagle eyed about about protecting that kind of alliance.
And I found the book full of alliances of of that sort.
And perhaps for me, the greatest hope out of the book is how resilient people have been despite everything to preserve and fight for those alliances.
And I found that I mean, partly because obviously I know the pub and I recognise the landlady.
I thought I thought that was a great example of small hope's small acts of hope.
Absolutely. Lighting the candle. You do quote the paper, is that you liked the Tapert post in the paper.
I don't think this is an idea that, you know, you have to light a candle, light another candle, which it doesn't diminish or your light it on.
Yeah, no, I think you're right. The sort of.
The strength and resilience of some of the characters I talk to and their openness about what they've been through is extraordinary.
And, you know, for obvious reasons, I sort of said to everybody is fine if you want to be anonymous.
And most people chose to follow that.
But there was one particular person who got back to me, and it's quite nerve wracking writing about where you live,
because, of course, people will agree to be recorded and interviewed and it's going to be in a book.
But sometimes I was just worried that people, when they actually saw it on the page, would feel a knock on your door.
You've got one particular person said to me that.
It started a conversation in their family because.
Their parents hadn't known quite how. Distressing it had been for them during the pandemic, but.
When they saw that, they thought, right.
I've got to have that conversation and they sent the book to their parent and had that conversation and that sort of move something forward,
and other people have said that it's been a way of processing things that have happened.
I mean, the the fantastic nurse who when I spoke to her, I managed to get a time when she wasn't on shift.
She was just like, sit there. And she just sort of spoke in an unbroken way so powerfully.
And she she read the book and she was very positive.
But she actually gave me an update in the last couple of days where she said the first way she'd worked for the second wave as well,
which is in January and February. And she said the first wave that she describes in the book, which made her so angry the way things were happening,
she said second wave made the first wave look like a picnic.
She said in the first wave, we saved more than we lost in the second wave.
It was the other other way round. But she said, strangely, reading her own words, she realised how angry she'd been.
And she said now she's almost calm and resigned because just determined to live her life to the full because she'd
seen so many people whose lives have been ended before they could do the things they've been wanting to do.
And, you know, I find I found these people extraordinary.
I also found the young woman I spoke to about extinction rebellion,
who was 13 at the time and who was undertaking various actions and getting time off school before before school was closed, of course, to do things.
I found her testimony very powerful because I was just so conscious listening to her talk of the sort of weight that her generation,
the carrying of the stuff that we landed them with, really.
And there were some moments when I just said, how does it feel?
How does that feel? And she said, well, it's strange because I was asked about what she sees I'm going to be doing next year.
And I just thought, well,
there's not much point about thinking about the future because I might not have much future anyway unless we stop what we're doing.
And I just found that so powerful to hear from this young person who was also so determined to make a change.
And I think those things are incredibly hopeful.
Yeah, really. I want to ask you something, because your last book or perhaps not your only last book,
but it was Guernica, the famous painting, and that's sort of permanent.
What is this is about impermanent art. And I want to I wanted to ask you if you feel that it's a good idea to move towards permanence.
I mean, your book is a permanent work in a way or the equivalent.
But would it be an idea, for example, to actually try to have a kind of a statement, a kind of pandemic?
Should we commission something not not necessarily a statue, maybe, maybe something like what's the back of your book,
your on the back of your screen sort of a map that would kind of capture experience.
And I actually the my main question is between the ephemeral nature of the rainbows and the idea of the permanent masterwork like the Guernica.
Yes, I'll give you Frohna, you've thrown me a question that slightly floored me then mean I'm not sure what what form that will
take and maybe it will just be in multiple novels and poetry and some books that come out of it.
And, you know, I'm just not sure. I mean, I know that people have been collecting people's testimonies and all of this kind of saying,
I think various museums have been at work in this way, but I can't nothing springs to mind.
I mean, on the subject of statues,
it did occur to me that just returning briefly to Cecil and his statue and and the idea that it was so expensive to take it down and what would we do?
I just thought one could detoxify the legacy which is now being used for positive things, finances and so on, by remembering, you know,
that Mandela Rhodes Foundation and the fact that the Mandela sort of agreed to have his name alongside Cecil Rhodes,
knowing full well that what that legacy is in a sort of positive frame of mind that you can't have.
You know, you can't have reconciliation without reparation and truth.
But I thought, why not commission an artist of African descent to make a statue of Nelson Mandela and put that in the place of Cecil Rhodes?
And you would still be honouring the work of the Rhodes Trust and the abandonment?
Yes. I mean, I think it's disingenuous to say it's too expensive to take down because they could just screener's and shroud it with another artwork.
There's many other people thinking and talking about that.
I guess if I if what I know is about to jump in, Marina's question is very, very interesting about about the statuesque and ephemeral.
And just to two blocks down from me, there's a street.
And one of the interesting thing about this art has been it has a year to change and and and disappear and reappear.
Just a few blocks down from me,
there's a street which has now become almost a semi-permanent display of art of all kinds related to pandemic's rainbows,
but also to do with schools, to do with just just people's daily responses of a two year pandemic.
And that's you know, it changes. It's not the same thing. Things get taken down, things get put up.
It seems to me a splendid example of what public art can be that is not statuesque.
That's not monolithic in a sense. It's a very interesting point, a community that's been energised and brought together by the shared experience.
Yeah, I don't want to stop this amazing discussion.
It's really very, very enjoyable and really kind of insightful on so many levels.
But I suppose, well, it is partly my job to bring in questions.
One one is to do with in a sense, you've already addressed it, but I'd like to come back to it.
And that's the question of how much is this book a book about the first lockdown?
How much is it in a sense, therefore, already about a time that we're not living in anymore.
And indeed, James, you mentioned that the nurse in particular came back to you and said, actually, look, this isn't like it was.
And I wondered, you know, do you now need to write another one about now, about the second book, about the third lock down?
I mean, in other words, is this about a particular time that's actually already historical on some level?
Well, the weird thing is that so many of the things that people talked about in the,
you know, at that point are now being played out in current political debates and questions.
And it still feels very sort of topical to me.
And I think in one sense, it's like a bubble in the Arctic ice that scientists can find and release and feel.
What was the ER like at that time? I mean, I sort of try and locate it in time between the spring and the autumn equinox of last year.
But of course I was priests were still going back and forth till December or something, and there was time to tweak a few little things.
But I think the issues, the. Raised beyond that particular moment for a really let me be clear, I really didn't mean it moment has gone.
It was more a question. It's partly about that thing,
about how one of the things you trace so powerfully is the sort of instrumental ization of hope or the instrumental ization of
a particular symbol that then becomes used by other people in ways that are both positive and negative across across the book.
And I think I think what the person is asking is, you know, what has happened to the hope that people had at the beginning?
Have we had to lose that or is there a new kind of hope now and so on?
So it's yeah, it's about how do you sustain that hope over time when when we've been through in a sense,
we've been through this before, but we also haven't because it's different each time, you know.
Yeah. Another one of the the questions is, is about this sort of statue question and somebody suggests that and this is actually very nice.
Obviously, somebody is a regular for torch suggests that we might all go and see something.
Campbell, Bali's exhibition in modern Oxford, I don't know if you have already,
but where one of the things is precisely as sort of the elephant made of my gowns.
And as I mentioned in the conversation we have with something,
it would be very nice to parade those elephants up and down the high street, for example.
And yeah, so I mean, clearly. But in the sense that that's more the question about distributing whatever public art is across
and name a number of different spaces rather than necessarily monumental in one moment.
Yeah, we're all nodding faintly at that. Do you want to go on to say more about that, James?
Is that enough? I don't know. What about you, Marina?
I mean, I think yeah, in a sense,
the discussions about statues that we're having are sort of warning about attempting to create
a permanent historical artefact that will resonate down the generations in the same way.
You know, and you give an example of the monument to the Great Fire of London that left the inscription keeps being changed.
And actually the Beckett exhibition of the moment, the British Museum first exhibition I went to,
a sense tells you that tells is absolutely cataclysmic story in which one moment is
people are drinking his blood in order to be cured of leprosy because he's such a major,
a working saint. And then 200 years later or three years later, he's expunged from the annals.
You know, if you go to his relics of smashed, the country is destroyed.
He's not to be mentioned. So so these historical vicissitudes do point to not trying to make permanent truth.
Absolutely. And the monuments in London, you know, was erected in memory of the great fire.
And then a conspiracy theory came along that the fire had been started by papists plotters.
So a sentence was added to say that, you know, that it was all their fault and it was taken off and then it was put on again.
And it stayed there until the eighteen thirties, accusing the Catholics of having lit the fire of London.
And I wondered if those who argued against the erasure of history would think that it should still be there.
Of course, it's been removed now in the 19th century, as Ruth. But would those same people say, oh,
you mustn't remove it because it's history and it's fine to make all the Catholic people in London feel slightly terrified.
And, you know, there's also a peculiar vision of history, isn't it?
Because as you yourself said, you've lived in Oxford all your life till or a large part of your life.
And only a few years ago, you became aware of Cicero, a statue.
So the equation of statues with history is a very odd gesture, I think.
I think the message of some of the people that I spoke to is what hurts is not telling history.
Then, you know, and by taking statues down and putting them in museums and contextualising them,
then you really you tell people, you know, to teach people about history.
And a lot of us you know, I lived in London for a long time.
And, you know, you walk around those statues all over the place and unless you were really looking, you don't even think, who was that?
It's just some bloke on a horse. You know, I've got one more question, which is about the title.
And the question is why under rather than over?
I guess, you know, it was a little pun on the song Over the Rainbow,
but it was it was sort of leading to a feeling that we were somehow living beneath this sign.
It was kind of omnipresent and. Yeah, so that's that's I suppose if I'm interpreting the question, it's partly again, about hope.
The song Over the Rainbow is the song about hope and about somewhere, some other world that might exist.
And and obviously the whole question of, you know what for what at the end of the rainbow and so on.
And I suppose, yeah,
that you're right that the or the question is right and your response is right there under give the sense of a sort of constrained,
a constrained living, but nonetheless with some measure of hope in it.
Yeah, because look at the traditional drawing, the one that James has recorded, not the usual Similac.
Now that leads up to heaven, the sort of celestial sign.
It's a it's a it's an arch. It's a hoop. It comes back to earth.
Yes, yes, yes. I mean, it is a slightly different rainbow from what one usually.
I mean, I've hardly ever seen a rainbow that touches on both ends. I think I've seen once.
Yep. Yep. We're running out of time now, finally.
But I just want to thank everybody present.
So, Marina, Pablo, James, everybody listening and watching online.
And [INAUDIBLE] catch up online on that part of the strange world we live in.
Now, if that things happen at.
Different paces whilst also life, but really just thank you so much for what, James, first of all, for writing the book and.
Yeah, absolutely. And then Pablo and Marina for responding so warmly and generously.
Thanks. Thank you. All three. It's really been great. Great pleasure.
Yeah. And to thank our listeners watchers for being here, to thank the backstage team and Mia and Holly George for making this possible.
And then before I leave, just to say our next event is Thursday, the twenty Fourth of July.
So in two weeks time, one more time this time we have another Big Ten live event before the summer break.
And then we'll be we'll welcome award winning poet, lyricist, musician, etc and activist Benjamin Zephaniah at five pm for this time alive discussion.
So we will actually be in a room, we will be in discussion, in collaboration with the arts, in action and the postcolonial writers make World Project.
The Faculty of English will be coming to you live from the Story Museum. So some of us at least will be like others can be watching at home.
But for now, thanks once again to all three of you and to thank you so much and have a good rest of an evening.
Goodbye. You too.