Flora Sophia, Anne Shirley, Kate Middleton

A few posts ago I commented on a website that deemed my www.tighsolas.ca website to be worth a booming 11 dollars. This site said so few visitors came to my site that it was not worth noting.

But I riposted that the visitors to my website, (three times what they cited) were mostly high school students, mostly from Canada, most from BC and Ontario, but also College Students, British Students, American students, and some from every province in Canada.

And I also mentioned that they ALMOST ALWAYS find what they are looking for. The list above is random, and except for search term “the meaning of apocalypse” www.tighsolas.ca has the answers to these queries.

The writer, continuity, is ME. I did that once and it is posted on my C.V.

So there you go.

I also notice that more hits from BC for my story Looking for Mrs. Peel on PDF at www.tighsolas.ca/page3.pdf.pdf

That pleases me. My story is about my grandmother’s experiences at Changi, in Singapore, where she was tortured in an infamous incident.

But it’s also about 1967 Canada, and about grandmothers/granddaughters and inter-generational tension.

This is a story that should appeal to all Canadians, but especially for Canadians of Asian origin, Chinese, Japanese, and South Asians too.

Maybe it will become a Canadian bestseller or the best selling e-book on the Net.

It’s a radio play really, (because I love BBC Radio Four radio plays and I was hoping to get it produced, as I once was a radio writer) but a Canadian publisher has asked to see a narrative prose version.

(But first I have to Finish Flo in the City).

Malaya was one of the world’s first multicultural societies – and my story touches upon that too.

Ps. I see that His and Her Royal Highnesses William and Kate are going to visit P.E.I on their Canadian visit because Kate Middleton is a fan of Anne of Green Gables. She’ll like it there. She’s a natural unaffected beauty and PEI has a lot of natural unaffected beauty.

Anne of Green Gables was published in 1908, by a Boston Publisher, and a while I back I thought about figuring a way to put that in my story of Flo in the City, because Flora visited Boston in 1908 and Anne of Avonlea was serialized in the Montreal Gazette in 1910 or 1911. I saw it there in the archives.

ScreenSingapore is the Place to Be

A page from my grandmother’s Changi memoir.

The New York Times reports today that Hollywood is going International (well, we all know that)and mentions a new film festival ScreenSingapore that illustrates the point.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/business/media/23film-screensingapore.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha210

Hollywood Presses its Global Agenda

My radio play, Looking for Mrs. Peel at www.tighsolas.ca/page3.pdf.pdf

is popular in Singapore, because it takes place in Singapore during WWII. It starts out in Canada in 1967, when the sun was setting on the British Empire, and it focuses on my grandmother’s story. I like to see my grandmother (who was born in County Durham but lived most of her life in Kuala Lumpur) as the symbol of End of Empire.

The Changi Story has been done to death, starting with Kwai, but the Double Tenth Torture Incident is VERY topical. Many people arrive at my website looking for information on the Double Tenth, many from Singapore but plenty from elsewhere. Indeed, I have learned that the the Trial of Sumida Haruzo is a Law School Classic.

That book would make a good topical movie, but it wouldn’t be fun visually. My story, that encompasses Expo 67 with all the youth culture and beautiful hostesses would be very pretty to look at – for the first bit.

The part where my grandmother is put in solitary is also topical, considering the treatment of Bradley Manning.

As I pointed out in my play, Malaya was one of the first Multicultural Societies. Canada in 1967 was just beginning its multicultural adventure.

I like to think Expo 67 (which figures large in my play) symbolizes this.

The New York Times article quotes Greg Coote, who is the Chairman of the Board of Screen Singapore as saying that ScreenSingapore is a cross beween ShoWest and CineExpo and the Santa Monica Festival.

Alas.

This can only be good news for us North Americans, who are starved for world films. Maybe some more good ones will come our way.

The first ScreenSingapore event will feature Jon Landau, who produced Avatar,for a 3-D conference; Jim Gianopulos, chairman and chief executive of Fox Filmed Entertainment; and Michael J. Werner, the chairman of Fortissimo Films

Women Only War Zone

Victoria Wood in Housewife 49.

My husband did something thoughtful for me. He saw Housewife 49 was playing on the KNOW network (out of BC) and saved it to our TV exterior hard drive.

I have the CD, but I like to have my favourite movies at the ready on the TV. Our old Blue-ray player took forever to load and I don’t know how to use the new Play Station 3 my kids gave my husband for Christmas, which was bought specifically to play CD’s.

I have recently watched Housewife 49, again, when my sister in law returned it to me in October.

It’s not a happy or funny film, like many of the others I keep stored on the backup harddrive as ‘pick me ups’ and ‘snowy afternoon comfort eye-candy”.. B J’s Diary, Mamma Mia, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Doris Day films, etc. (I don’t find much to watch on our satellite stations.)

Hmm. I’ve been reading about Oprah’s new OWN network, the debut, on salon.com and in the New York Times. Apparently, it’s feel-good TV, all the time, a cynicism-free zone. The two reviewers liked what they saw – up to a point. “But it’s not for people who like Oscar Wilde,” wrote the reviewer in the NYT. Hmm. Well, I like Oscar Wilde, although he can get repetitive.

I normally despise American afternoon TV, the fast fixes it promotes; the magical thinking, the narcissism, the consumerism; the way it mocks, even degrades, ordinary, uneducated, often plain, over-weight people who don’t seem to know they are being mocked…so, I have to say, I am intrigued (a little) about this new OWN network.

I never ever liked daytime TV. Raising babies decades ago, at home, I watched the burgeoning all news networks. As a person steeped in communications theory, I realized right away that this new format would change how things were done, (and how people thought) big time, but these stations have become more NUTSY CUCKOO than even I imagined, so I haven’t tuned in for years.

That being said, I like my BBC Radio Four (much much saner) with Oscar Wilde and Shaw and all those other cynical British writers, and my edgy British Films many of which are coming up on Turner Classics.

Anyway, back to Nella. Nella was born in the North of England (Lancashire) in 1889. My grandmother, Dorothy Nixon, was born in the North of England (Yorkshire) in 1895.

What a difference those six years meant.

Nella Last was married and a mother during WWI and my grandmother was a ‘maiden’ who worked as a land girl, in forestry.

When the war was over my grandmother went to Malaya to marry my grandfather, Robert, a Yorkshireman, and lived a rather extraordinary life there: the life of a British Expat, but not a typical one, by any means.

I researched and then wrote about her life in Looking For Mrs. Peel at www.tighsolas.ca/page745.html.

British Expats, and especially the women, were looked down upon by ordinary Britishers. (My story explains.)

This is because they seemed to live the HIGH LIFE, with those big bungalows and servants and gin-soaked garden-parties at “The Club.” AND THEY WERE MIDDLE-CLASS.

They turned the British Class system on its head and this caused resentment.

Giles Playfair writes in 1942, during the Fall of Singapore, that many of these Expat women don’t have any sense of ‘duty’ and, were they back in Britain, they’d be sweeping out a modest two bedroom bungalow.

True. My grandmother, but for the six year gap in their births, might have been Nella Last, living a claustraphobic, confined existence in a small industrial town, except in her own clever head.

Instead my grandmother got to hobnob with Sultans and high ranking British 0fficals (making sure they were surrounded by the prettiest young women) and score cricket matches at the Royal Selangor Club.

But a sense of duty, she had. She was a war heroine.

She experienced confinement during the WWII, when she was interned by the Japanese at Changi and then put in solitary for 7 months.

Nella Last, like may British women, was “liberated” during the War. She applied her many homely skills as seamstress and economist and cook to the war effort.

What my grandmother didn’t get to do, is raise her own kids. Like most colonials, she sent them away to England at 5 years old. Nella Last, the loving mom she was, wouldn’t have changed places with her, not for all the tea in China – or all the rubber in Malaya. Of that I am sure.

Looking for Mrs. Peel Part 1

Me at 12. In the Kitchen on Coolbrook,which I call Lemon Creek Road in my story, in homage to the Japanese Canadians who were interned unjustly during WWII in the interior of British Columbia. Dig those 60′s curtains.

I’m going to interrupt Flo in the City (since I’m struggling to figure out where to go from here) to bring you Looking for Mrs. Peel, my play about the 60′s, WWII, and waterboarding. I spent years researching the background to this play and I do believe I nailed it. The complete play is at www.tighsolas.ca/page745.html

LOOKING FOR MRS. PEEL: Script of a play for radio about The Fall of Singapore and Changi POW Life and The Double Tenth Incident at Changi Prisoner of War Civilian Internment Camp from a first hand account INTRODUCTION:”All Things are Connected” Chief Seattle The year 1967 has been described as The Last Good Year, by Canadian historian Pierre Berton, also as The Year That Changed Cinema, by Time Magazine, as well as the Best Year Ever in Pop Music by, well, just about everyone. In and around anglo Montreal,that memorable year, radio was the communications medium of choice for young people. Kids listened to the likes of Buddy Gee on CKGM, Dave Boxer on CFCF and CFOX’s Charles P Rodney Chandler on their chintzy transistor radios and kept track of the respective weekly hit lists. One of the most popular new DJ’s was an import, a former British merchant marine sailor named Roger Scott also on CFOX. In late May of 1967 Scott aired ‘pirated’ tapes of the Beatle’s Srgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Album,before it was officially released. My older brother was mightily impressed.

. In the US it was the Summer of Love and the Summer of Race Riots -two facts I couldn’t ignore because my British father preferred getting his news from American Walter Cronkite, on the CBS television station WCAX Montpelier Vermont – and as was the norm, we had but one black and white tv. But these same heady Expo months were also a time of tension in the Middle East with Six Day War where we came close to nuclear war ….again… and ‘the tipping point’ for Vietnam and a time when decisions were made that ‘signaled the end of Britain’s’ imperial adventure’.* According to Historian Matthew Jones, in 1967 the British wanted to pull out of ‘East of Suez’(Singapore, Malaysia and the MIddle East) entirely. While school children from Victoria to Gander were learning the words to CA NA DA, Bobby Gimby’s giddy centennial year signature song , the Americans were putting pressure on the British to stay. President Lyndon Johnson even bribed them, offering to back the pound sterling and “solve all your financial problems.”*

So, if Lyndon Baines Johnson appeared to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders, as he rode that long long escalator up past the kitschy photographs of Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart in the American Pavilion at Expo 67 on his official visit, that’s because he did. (* Matthew Jones’ Decision Delayed Historical Review.)

Malaysia, the 15th country to sign up for the World’s Fair – in July ’64 (plot 3320 Ste Helene’s Island) didn’t have a pavilion in the end. They had pulled out; perhaps because Singapore had been expelled from the Malaysian Federation in 1965 ( to quell the unrest between the Chinese and the Malays) and couldn’t come up with the money.

Tunku Abdul Rahman Malaysia’s first PM had visited the Expo site in ’64. One wonders what Bobby Gimby felt about all this: the so called Pied Piper of Canada, a former CBC musician and bandleader, and a Canadian cultural icon, is reported to have composed them an unofficial anthem, Malaysia Forever, and earned his whimsical moniker, on a visit to Singapore in ’62. The song itself is steeped in mystery; no former colonial or expert in Malaysian studies I have reached has ever heard of it. Negara Ku has been Malaya’s (Malaysia’s) national anthem since 1957