Amarna princess

Here's one for the cuttings file (which I'm sure will be turned into a TV drama soon) - the story of the family from Bolton who successfully conned the art world for more than two decades.

In 2003, the local council used grant money to buy a stunning translucent alabaster Egyptian statue from them for £440,000 only to later discover it was a fake. Shaun Greenhalgh created the Amarna Princess from a block of calcite using an ordinary mallet and chisel.

For successful forgers, the Greenhalgh trio 'had an unremarkable lifestyle.' Despite having £500,000 in the bank they lived "in abject poverty", said police. 83 year old Olive had never even left Bolton.

Read the full story on the BBC website here and see a slide show of all the various forged art pieces here.

family (2)

I wrote letters to my estranged father and other newly discovered half brothers over the next 6 months or so and then the correspondence dried up.

Just before Christmas of the following year, I had a large chunk of funds from the Arts Council deposited in my bank for a short film. My friend Penny wanted to go on holiday and so did I. Casablanca sounded intriguing but then I thought - hey Sierra Leone, why not? My friend was eager to meet my re-discovered family.

It was 1990 and after booking flights, I fired off four telegrams to relatives at various addresses in the hope that this was enough notice.

We stepped off the plane at Freetown airport down the rickety iron stairs on to the runway where a small crowd of African men waited in the 40 degree heat. Some held hand written placards. I felt a surge of panic as I surveyed the faces - seeking out the one that might be my father.

Over the years me and my sister has speculated about him. We had a few faded photographs of my mother's wedding in Edinburgh. The summer after we'd first arrived in the UK over 20 years ago, our father sent my sister a birthday present - a small, illustrated book on Roman ruins with cellophane separating each page. After this, communication stopped completely. We moved numerous times. He moved too.

Years ago he was in government or something - in forestry and we'd heard all sorts of rumours - about diamonds and the like. I now knew from recent letters that we had a half-brother - just a bit younger than me - who'd spent 18 months in Pademba Road prison. Four of his uncles had been executed for planning an attempted coup.

At the bottom of the iron steps I suddenly saw it - a placard with 'Barbee Surname' written on it. Penny shrieked. I stared at the man holding it - he was tall, well built - but not old enough to be a father. It was my half brother. There was another young man next to him- squirming.

We greeted one another. He tried to mask his disappointment. We went to collect our luggage. Mine had gone astray - to Russia - and during the 3 weeks stay, it never turned up. My brother led us to a shiny, white Mercedes parked in front. We chatted. He had expected me to be wealthy and be bearing gifts. Here we were - looking like student backpackers. His friend drove us to the largest hotel in Freetown. We went inside and discovered the prices were way beyond our budget. At this point the friend became fidgety and told us we had to pay for the Mercedes. We handed over some pounds and then asked him to take us to the cheapest B & B in town.

There was a B & B opposite the dilapidated City Hotel (immortalised by Graham Greene). Downstairs was the bar and upstairs the small, dank, smelly rooms were separated by sheets of plywood. We were tired and thankful. I fell asleep straight away.

After a couple of hours, there was a hammering on the door. It was my brother again telling me that my father was now outside waiting to see me. I pulled on smart clothes and went outside. It was night time. A thin man reached out to me and I clutched at him but I couldn't see him in the dark, narrow corridor. Penny followed. We went down stairs.

In the dim bar, I sat across the table from a thin, stern man with a deep frown. We sat and stared - a twenty year gaze. He told me; 'You look just like your mother.' We talked. He asked after my sister. He was vague - sweeping his hands through an unknown past; he hadn't expected questions. He was still cross with my mother and said she'd 'taken all the furniture' and never told him she wasn't coming back.
I told him I had hoped he was going to be rich and have lots of diamonds. He laughed.

Penny and I travelled round Freetown with my brother - we saw the prison, the cotton tree, the bars and schools. Sometimes a wave of memory came in the smell of food - 'sakitomboy' or palm oil and I was five again.

Five and remembering. There was the uncle whose house was packed to the rafters with empty, green bottles. There was Holy Rosary school and the nuns. There were the pitanga cherries in our huge garden in Kenema. There were the animals that my father brought home regularly from the forests - the owl that stayed up in the tree for a week before it fell down from the branch like a plum - dead. Monkeys, tortoises.

We had to go to Sendumei - the village where my grandfather -the Paramount chief came from.

We took a coach. My brother and father travelled ahead and said we would get a lift back. It was more than 40 degrees. On the ride I developed 'freshblood' a bumpy heat rash under my knees. After 5 hours, we arrived at the small village.

Here everyone was related to me in some way. In the small huts, the women fawned over us, plucking the earrings from our ears. We heard their life stories. 'I am Bintu Tonye' an aunt told me, 'I have had thirteen children and only one survived.'

We went to meet the village leaders - my father's elder brothers - in the central hut. There were speeches and I was presented with 'Barbee' a mask and given a gown to wear. Penny was given one too. Then together with numerous aunts and relatives and children, I had to lead a shuffling pied-piper dance through the village. It went on and on and on. I'd stepped into Indiana Jones. Later the devil dancers came out - men decked in fringes of straw whirling round and round.

The aunts cooked for us and cleared out one of the houses in the middle of the compound especially for me and Penny. Tonye pointed out of the window and told me 'That is where your brother is buried.' I knew my mother and father's first child was a boy who had died as a baby - before I was born. It was only now I found out, he was buried here.

When I tried to sleep, I felt an overpowering, ancestral quickening rolling me backwards into the past. Terrified, I got up - I didn't want to join them. I told Penny to not let me fall asleep, because I knew I would die. She had a travel alarm clock by her bed and she set it to go off every half hour. We stayed awake - our whispering punctuated by the half hourly shrills - until the morning.

The next day we went back to Freetown.

family

My sister and her new hub are coming to stay on Saturday. Their forthcoming visit has set me thinking about all sorts of things to do with siblings and location and family etc. (I'm a bit cautious about mentioning family members on the blog in case they suddenly discover it and get all sensitive or something.) Anyhow...

I think I mentioned in passing how, once upon a time, after a 20 year estrangement I saw my father in Sierra Leone again.

As it happens - finding him was a fairly easy task. First I went into the Sierra Leonean High Commission in London, sat in the waiting area for a while, told them what I was there for and was ushered into an office. The conversation went a bit like this:

Me: 'I'm looking for my father'

Large Official: 'What's his name?'

Me: 'MBD'

A ripple of frowns, then the large official turns round and bellows round the office: 'Anyone here know MDB?'

Everyone shakes their heads.

Large Official: 'No. Sorry no one has ever heard of him'

I smile politely and leave.

At the time, I was sharing a nice woody house in West Norwood with a couple of lodgers and a live-in Polish landlord. It was nearly Christmas and I'd told them what I was doing. The Polish landlord suddenly became more obsessed about the search than I was.

'Directory enquiries!' He urged and snatched up the phone.

In five minutes he presented me with 2 numbers. There were only 2 MBDs in the whole of Freetown.

A bit shakily, I sat down and rang the first number. A small boy answered.

Me: 'I'd like to speak to MBD'

The phone dropped and the boy ran off - back through time, shouting 'Daddy, Daddy!'

A man came to the phone. My heart stopped beating

'Hello' the deep voice said.

Hello I said, 'It's Me, Barbee Surname'

There was silence. Then a rapid: 'Oh my God, oh my God, Oh my God'

Across the room the Polish landlord and other house inhabitants eyed me inquisitively. I gripped the phone and hoped my father wasn't going to have a heart attack there and then. Then the rush of questions: 'How is your sister? How is your mother - when are you coming here?'

So it was a while and a bit after this I went to Sierra Leone to see my father again (I may post about that sometime.) Intriguingly - when I did see him again - he knew that I'd been into the High Commission in London to look for him.

It was a trip that my sister never made. A pity. Our father died a few years later.

****
Recently my sister has been delving into family trees and the like - history, people, location, connectedness, places. She found out a whole heap of things that none of us ever knew about my father - another family in Liberia - even half sisters with the same names as us!

Another discovery was finding that we have another older, half brother in the UK.

My mum and my dad met at Edinburgh University in the late 50s. Before my mum, my dad had a brief fling with a young woman. When she announced her pregnancy he denied the baby was anything to do with him and never ever saw him. So our half-brother grew up with no contact with his father.

But now my sister has met our new brother and his family and everything.

And weirdly in photos - he looks a bit like me....

circles and spirals

So on to 'the stories we tell and why we tell them.'

Some people say that we all only really have one story, which we tell over and over again in different forms. Sometimes it’s a circle and sometimes it’s a spiral. *

I read an interview somewhere, ages ago with the Weinstein brothers who spoke about how their Jewish experience informed the stories they wanted to tell ‘We make films about the outsider who comes in and changes things’.

The stories I tell are often about 'the insider who doesn’t fit in and wants to run away.’ A different migrant experience. When I look over vastly different scripts I've written - it is a theme that keeps popping up.

So here's an interesting exercise - try and sum up what you write about in a short phrase or a single sentence...

* sometimes it's simple and sometimes it's a bit more complicated

neighbour

The 82 year old lady next door, popped round to ask if I'd seen a bunch of flowers that she'd signed for at the door but which then disappeared. I said 'no'. She huffed and puffed and then asked if I thought she was mad. I arranged my features into a suitable expression and then said 'no'. I asked if it was her birthday and she said 'no' - the flowers were for a friend in hospital. She then launched into a story about a woman who was stuck in her bath for 3 days and had to drink the bathwater until people came and broke down the front door and found her. Then she started to rail against her son in-law. I kind of knew she was going to get round to this. They argue a lot these days. One of their windows is about 3 yards away from where I type. When they fight it sounds exactly like Egyptian geese.

Taboo

I do love a bit of taboo. Every so often I read a news story that, in my opinion would make a fantastic film and which I'd love to write the screenplay for. So in a first for this blog, I've decided to declare my interest in this news item - "75 year old Granny & her 25 year old Gambian lover" here .

I know that there are all kinds of legal issues with scripting a real story (about real people.) But aside from this and in the unlikely event that anyone has managed to snap up the film rights from this duo, I'm your writer.

How I'd love to get right inside their heads. She - sedate, reserved, well travelled and now 'livid' with her granddaughter's betrayal in a revelatory article in the Guardian earlier this week. He - the softly spoken black outsider, forced to smoke out of a bedroom window and with no one else to talk to.

It's not just the obvious age and cultural differences that attract me but the whole idea of 'impropriety' in middle England and the subtly embedded prejudices at play within and outside the family. I know this 'type' of story pops up fairly frequently but this particular tale resonates with me.

The 'family values' sub text of the Daily Mail's story here focuses on why a gentile, respectable elderly lady of means from the 'picturesque village of Buriton' should embark on such an 'unsuitable' and (probably) doomed relationship. No one seems too interested in imagining what the young man may be thinking.

Yes there have been other films about supposedly 'mis-matched romance' notably The Mother brilliantly scripted by Hanif Kureishi and Vers le Sud (Heading South) with Charlotte Rampling and my all time favourite: Harold and Maude but this story seems to offer even more fascinating possibilities.

What do you think? And have you come across a news story you'd love to script?

Butternut

Was going to post about what's cooking writing-wise at the moment but thought it best just to keep things simmering away (on low) on the back burner. And I'll post about butternut instead - which is a staple food over here - with butternut soup, butternut mash, butternut pie. Hub loves it and now I'm a reluctant convert.

When my daughter was little I used to sing her this little song:

'You can't butter up a butternut
You can't butter up a butternut
La la la la'

The one day hub brought home a particularly big butternut and I drew a face on it and some ears and my daughter fell in love with it and named it 'Baby Butternut' and wrapped it in a blanket and took it for walks in her pushchair and kissed it and put it to bed. Ah. Then she forgot about it and it rolled away down the back of something, somewhere in her bedroom.

One day - weeks later, craving his favourite vegetable, hub remembered the butternut and retrieved it sneakily. Hearing a bloodcurdling scream I ran to the kitchen to find my daughter in tears and orange slices piled up on the table.
'Daddy's killed Baby Butternut!' she sobbed.

Ow

The post below was a little dark - so now for something lighter (see it's all about pace and tempo...)

My mum, who has been told many a time that she looks like one of the Golden Girls (remember them?) - the one with a deep voice - even though she actually has quite a high pitched voice, loves entering competitions - sudoku, crosswords, everything and anything. So she wins things all the time which can come in quite handy. Anyway once upon a time she won 280 pounds worth of 'Instant Weave' hair from the Voice newspaper. Conceding that her grey bob was unlikely to be enhanced by a woolly weave-on, she sent me to receive it in her stead. So off I went, with a mate to the 'Afro Hair and Beauty Show' which at that time - took place inside an airport hangar off the north circular.

I had to sit, perched in the middle of a podium while four women with frighteningly curly fingernails pulled at my roots and cackled at the state of my dandrufty-tufty afro while attacking my head with a frenzy of clips and twists. '100% pure Chinese hair' they kept telling me. In big helpings - with gold safety pin things attached to the ends. It took hours and hours. My friend kept wandering off to have a look around at the wigs, gels, conditioners, straighteners, tongs and other delights. And each time she returned to check progress, she crumpled up on the floor in hysterics.

The crowd that gathered provided an unflattering commentary. Someone shouted out 'Poodle head'. Finally, transformed into an incarnation of Diana Ross (at her most hairy), I was set free.

I tried to stand up but the sheer weight of the new head of hair yanked me back down. I felt as though I was in drag. I understood why long-haired rocker blokes bob their heads in that jerky way - as they walk along. It was like having a curtain sewn on to my head.

I kept it in for 2 days and then pulled it all out.

Autopilot

My friend from Chapeltown in Leeds once told me how, as a child her whole family were asleep in the house one night, when the front door opened and an old drunk man staggered up the stairs and attempted to get into one of the beds. The family woke up and threw the man out.

It turned out that this man lived in their house 15 years ago and still carried the front door key on his bunch. Being an alcoholic he was used to stumbling home on autopilot.

Unfortunately that night, his memory played a trick on him...

Faction

Inspired* by a UK-friend-in-scripts' broadcast commission to write a film treatment, I thought I too would take a foray into a genre that up till now I had never even considered.

And weirder still, when I did consider it - hey - there was a story already there - complete, intact and waiting patiently to be told.

Of course now (understandably) during the telling, the story is becoming a little anxious, prodding me in the elbow at regular intervals and proving quite a tough write. Plus this is the first time I've ever had to consider 'chronology' quite so punctiliously...

* 'propelled out of one's comfort zone by the desire for similar achievement'

Laters

Where are the stories?

The expert (who had contemplated the cosmos from observatories all over the globe) mentioned that there were now lots more stories from 'all over' and 'they were in a box somewhere.' The expert preferred stars to people. He had grown pallid and flabby from years of sedentary study.

The co-ordinators made an appointment to collect the stories. They arrived to find sheaves of stories and myths on odd shaped papers, in numerous languages, some typed up, some handwritten - in a stack that touched the ceiling. 'Oh you can't take them away', the expert said, 'that's years of research'. He pointed to the photocopier in the corner. The co-ordinators made another appointment and came back early in the morning. They were looking for moral stories - not just any old stories. The expert giggled knowingly into his telescope.

The co-ordinators shuffled and stacked and read and sorted until they grew dizzy. Finally they had a pile of stories that was not too big. Photocopying took a whole day. Then they took the stories back to the office and tried to order them.

The producers grew impatient 'Where are the stories?' they asked the writer. 'I'm waiting for them' the writer replied. The producers emailed the co-ordinators 'Where are the stories?' There was no reply.

In the office, the co-ordinators started to panic - the more they read, the more unmanageable the task became. The stories were unruly - they had no morals, they were uncontrollable - they refused to be sorted.

*update*
In the end the co-ordinators gave up and stuffed the photocopies back into boxes and hid them at the back of the stationery cupboard. One of the co-ordinators put half a ream of blank paper into an envelope. The other typed an apologetic letter.

The producers emailed the co-ordinators again, 'Where are the stories?'
'In the post' came the reply. The producers waited three days then emailed the writer; 'Do you have the stories yet?'

'Yes' she replied.