Matt Hilton Works

In the bloodline tangled squirearchy of England’s West Country the Cornishes (my ancestors) and their middle distance relations the Kitsons trotted out their regular nags for generations. Sense and sensibility usually fell right way up; George Cornish pulled the poet Coleridge out of his soldiering tent and a military Kitson wrote a book.

“ … I saw two or three men squatting round a watchman’s fire some fifty yards away”¹

At a hunt meet Kitson eyed a horse whose price was beyond him. The owner Leopald Ullstein stuck up like a rock in the county flan. He was an executive director of the publishing firm Barrie and Rockliff (the Barrie indeed a ward of the creator of Peter Pan - adopted when his father fell at the first day of the Somme.)

Barrie and Rockliff joined Jewish acumen and Etonian flair (or perhaps the other way round) and long pockets to dip into literary side-streams. Their translator from French, Humphrey Hare, worked at night in a green eyeshade on Maurice Druon the creator of the Resistance anthem Chant des Partisans.

"Friend, do you hear the dark flight of the crows over our plains? Friend, do you hear the dulled cries of the country in chains?".

A deal was struck book horse horse book.

Chaplin does it and we laugh. Soldiers see it and don’t speak. At Bradford in 1985 there was a fire at the football stadium. I saw a man with a shorty overcoat some way away beating at the fire which was his head. Beating at his head with his hands. He looked “silly” as people do whose dignity has been done away with by, for example, munitions.

On the Internet, a clip from Chechyna a Russian soldier being shot at, killed - and how he looked as he stumbled and slid about on a muddy track - “silly”.

A forbidden glimpse into horroro vacuii the indeterminate grey wall upon which the human project made of material garbage, waterfalls.

Their is a cliché about the artists distancing act - the pitiless asocial noticing, the split vision that thru analogy with stereoscopy is not split but doubled and gives, for instance, writing depth. But in those frozen moments of noticing is the ego annulling its context? Beneath the social self is there another watcher: deep, limbic, cold? And how do these viewpoints map onto each other thru language?

Just as architecture has been called frozen music could at one time song have been frozen memory until, in the Transition², the real thing came along.

Kitson stands back as he realises that it is the oscillation human/animal/thing that is queasy making since humans are in trouble when they can’t categorise. In a long and interesting passage he takes us thru the process of desensitisation, decontextualisation necessary to handle horrors.

The key is to re-fashion the references so that for example flesh becomes part of the world of material substances like wood or iron rather than an outward sign of beings like our living selves.

“… soon what was a vague composite picture of general ghastliness sorts itself out into its component parts”

His book came up into my hands out of a box at a charity fair. And opened up at photos - posed groups; what were they? - and faces blacked or black or blacked out - what was it that hit the spot.?

I got no more than three pages into the text than I felt it blow thru me in several directions at once. 1953 Kitson was twenty six and posted to Kenya. I was six at Fox School, Notting Hill.

During the years that he was out there tangling with ritual I was in a gang of three that ferreted at lunch break in bomb sites for trouvailles like dead rats and discarded stockings with which to sculpt complex mysteries, who looked astonished at Gosney as he spoke about space, who passed round Smiffie’s Dad’s Tube Train Guardsman's Key, who walked down Bayswater chanting secret language with Harrison with the wide slow smile and easy feet.

At home my mother’s quartet ripped, in jagged segments, thru music pieces; the sweet sickness of pub song came from across the way and hurling across the night waves came jazz...

We used to burn effigies. Each year in autumn  rubbish was piled up in back gardens and lit - and sitting atop was a “guy”.

Who supplied the clothes for the spineless bundles pushed in a pram thru Shepherds Bush to the Tube for the odd copper from the people who poured out in shifts of hot air and clacking heels?

As we tugged that old grey green musty jacket round the lumpy newspaper carcass some thousand miles south at more or less the same time there had been the same tugging and pulling and stepping back to inspect fictitious representations.

Sections of the indigenous people of a part of the African continent known as Kenya rose up against the dominating Europeans during the period 1952-60.

Kitson invented special techniques including "counter gangs" to combat active resistance to settler rule. Small gangs of loyal (to the Crown) Kikuyu or turned rebels often including exceptionally adept Brits were dressed in rebel wear and then let loose to infiltrate, masquerade, get information and kill.

The indigenous people used to the utmost their traditional resources including the power of unseen forces. Their own “imagined communities”in the forest, made central by women, became a social laboratory³ for new gender relations.

These currents separated out issues of work sharing and literacy, marriage and combat, mediation and fundamentalism.

I can do no better to set the scene for the opera’s under plot, its forest parts than to quote from Luise White, scholar of women’s role in Kenya:

As the state attempted to manufacture class and kinship out of the grim dormitories of their urban work force Africans themselves began to rethink and restructure the gender categories so designed... ...The revolt of these men and women articulated and debated the nature of that distinction (skilled/unskilled) - their revolt was about marriage, about the allocation of domestic chores. This did not make their revolt any less political, but it situates thos epolitics in everyday private life. In this way Mau Mau contested all aspects of birth, life, and death: The british built a gallows on the ruins of Kenyatta’s Githunguri Kenya Teachers College and women prisoners at kamiti buried the men hanged there with their heads facing Mount Kenya.⁴

1. General Sir Frank Kitson Gangs and Counter-gangs Barrie & Rockliffe London 1961

2. postulated period of overlapping homo sapiens and neanderthal communities

3. Marina A Santuro The colonial... the mau mau case African Affairs 1996 95  & B Anderson Imagined communities - reflections on the origen and spread of nationalism verso london 1983

4. Luise White Separating the men from the boys: constructions of gender sexuality and terrorism in central kenya 1939 1959 International Journal of African Studies vol 23 No 1 1990 http://www.jstor.org/stable/219979