DIARY JOAN BAKE WELL
The police have given up on the theft of our family silver. In the absence of pho- tographs to identify each piece, it is unlike- ly it can be traced. (It wasn't Georgian or very valuable, you understand, but it was all we had.) So whoever took it won't be too alarmed by Michael Howard's draconian proposals to increase sentences, because like many other petty thieves he's quite confident he won't be caught. On the day the silver went missing, there were four strangers working in the house: two decora- tors and two gardeners. Both of the compa- nies for which they worked were sympa- thetic to our loss, but believed that their employees were trustworthy. The two deco- rators had been in their regular employ- ment for years. Of the two gardeners, one was casual labour from an agency, who `has been with us for a month and we've had no complaints'. The police interviewed each of the four, but said there was absolutely no evidence against any of them. They were right. And there were no fingerprints at the scene of the crime — the sideboard of our ground-floor dining-room on which the sil- ver stood. So the police invented another suspect, someone none of us ever saw or knew of, someone, they suggested, who might have been passing the house and, on seeing the front door ajar, seized the moment to wander in and snatch, without anyone noticing him, the silver items not visible from the street. `But the front door was shut at all times,' I insisted. Apparently not. The police had been ruthless in their investigation. One of the gardeners — as it happened, the casual with only a month's service — claimed he had indeed had to leave the door open and unattended while he went to fetch his van. Important testi- mony, eh? Meanwhile, the two of them had been traipsing back and forth with black plastic bags full of garden rubbish which they loaded into their van and drove off. Funny thing, that.
Ihave been spending time in a maternity hospital recently. My daughter gave birth to a son, and concern for his welfare meant there was much coming and going for med- ical tests, while I helped take charge of his toddler brother. Maternity hospitals are full of the calm joy of life's hopes being ful- filled. Nurses come and go, padding sound- lessly in their sensible shoes. There's a pre- vailing sense of order confidently able to contain the squalls of talk and laughter from visitors and the noisy eruption of small siblings. There's a mood of whole- some values taken for granted. Then, last Monday, I went to the Royal Court Theatre to see a new Irish play, Portia Coughlan, by Marina Carr, brought over from the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. Within the first pages of the play's text, which the Royal Court help- fully sells as a programme, there was the following announcement: National Maternity Hospital, Dublin. As part of its Centenary celebrations, the National Maternity Hospital commissioned Marina Carr to write a play. Portia Coughlan is the result and has been an outstanding success. Marina was based at the hospital while writ- ing the play.
There is then appended a list of some 90 Irish women, `both at home and abroad', who provided money for the project. `The National Maternity Hospital is both proud and delighted.. . . 'The serene language of this announcement is at odds with the tone of the play itself, a gruelling descent into the depths of suicidal despair by a woman trapped in the incestuous passions of two generations. The dialect is thick, the senti- ments violent: plenty of what's expressed in the text as Tucha ya!' and `Swate sufferin' Jaysus'. No wholesome values taken for granted here. That such a powerful and grim work sprang to life within a maternity hospital is an oddity to make Joyce or Beckett chuckle. But it also characterises a culture where the poet, the creative artist, is a natural part of the scenery and where his or her work can be honoured by its most traditional institutions, however dis- turbing and subversive it may prove to be. I like to picture Marina Carr strolling in the hospital's corridors, nodding, perhaps, at mothers and babies, then sitting down to render her horrific picture of family life as a tribute to its anniversary.
is certainly not a natural part of the scenery in Oxford. We stopped off there to visit the Carl Andre exhibition at the Muse- urn of Modern Art, but spent a goodly part of the time available finding the place. There are no signposts giving directions. The one person we asked sent us on a wild- goose chase to the City Museum instead. Arriving in a fluster is not a propitious start to a visit. But the spell cast by Andre's work soon soothed our spirits. Blocks of wood and squares of different metals are on show along with the famous bricks, which have been re-ordered and given a room to them- selves. A notice at the door reads, 'Some of the sculptures in this exhibition can be walked on; however, none of them should be touched by hand.' So walk on them we did. '6 Metal Fugue' is the largest piece, covering almost the entire upper-floor space, a series of squares in different met- als, each reflecting light in different tones as you walk across it. It has the presence of some great, jewelled Venetian pavement. People came and went, stopping, talking (of Michelangelo?), the art beneath their feet, themselves reflected in its shifting colours. The museum, I understand, has a battle with the City of Oxford to get ade- quate indicators of its whereabouts. This is more than a matter of street furniture, whose unnecessary proliferation I deplore. But if people don't make their way in suffi- cient numbers to see modern art, then those who believe their three-year-old could do as well may easily argue that there is no demand and suggest that grants be cut. In fact, modern art is hugely popular, especially with the young. But philistines will use any pretext!
Now an update on Bury St Edmunds' hopes of building a tower for its cathedral in time for the millennium; total cost, LS million. By the legacy of Stephen Dykes- Bower, the architect who created its 1960s extension, the cathedral already has £2 mil- lion towards the enterprise, those matching funds so necessary but usually so elusive in flushing out millennial cash. In fact, the Millennium Commission has now turned down the project, judging it `not to have as distinctive an impact as others we received'. They probably considered the design poor, which it is. But the Dykes-Bower legacy goes with this particular design and no other. The provost spoke bravely of this being a `temporary setback'. They could apply again, of course, or approach the Heritage Fund — or abandon the Dykes- Bower design entirely and come up with something the Millennium Commission might prefer. Certainly, it seems that a request from a cathedral should be given weightier consideration than, say, a ferris wheel, for after all the celebration is of 2000 AD, and anno Domini is a Christian landmark.
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