Compiled by Alan Wheatley
There are gems to be found in earlier issues of Bonzer! and it’s my intention and hope to seek these out and reproduce them on a monthly basis. Revelation of character is the major criterion, but selections may also add something to our understanding of life.
It’s not always easy to track down the authors of material I’ve selected. If yours is one such, please forgive me and let me know I’ve broken one of the rules of Bonzer!: that authors hold the copyright of their work and it should not be reproduced without their permission.
This month, my selection comes from Christina Crossley Ratcliffe, who lives in Melbourne, Australia.
Christina Crossley Ratcliffe and Alan Wheatley met at a gathering of people interested in setting up a seniors’ website, when such things were excitingly new.
Christina was a newspaper subeditor and desktop publisher wanting to learn web technology, while Alan was an established seniors’ columnist and children’s author who wanted to produce an e-zine. Together they created Bonzer!’s forerunner, Dinkum, which despite its many unpaid contributors was expected to make money or go. Dinkum went – and re-emerged as Bonzer! directed by Alan, subedited by Christina and published by a succession of volunteer webmasters.
After an initial whipround from the workers, Bonzer! has remained proudly not for profit. Time passed and rather than learning web development with Bonzer!, Christina left Fairfax to became a Hansard reporter with the Victorian Parliament. The late hours of work encroached on former Bonzer! time, forcing her to reluctantly bow out, but not before introducing four friends who became regular contributors: Elaine Lutton (Bribie Diary), Gerda Aaberg (Tassie Tales), Les Yemm (writer and reviewer) and Ken Sillcock (Point of View).
In 2006 Christina was one of the speakers at the first Bonzerfest in Brisbane. Now retired, but hardly less busy, Christina is a committee member of the Society of Editors (Vic.) Inc. and recently received the award of Accredited Editor from the Inst. of Prof. Editors Ltd. She plans to continue working as a freelance editor, travelling with her wireless broadband laptop.
Hate Opera? La Bohème’s For You
I well remember my first experience of opera. It was La Bohème at Leeds Grand Theatre in the late 1950s and I was in my teens. I still have the programme in a box of theatre programmes which date progressively from then. The death scene was deeply moving, and perhaps it was an indication that I was maturing somewhat that I wasn’t embarrassed for my “aunt and uncle” to see me blowing my nose, though I would never have done so in the local cinema among my peers..
These cultural mentors were my mother’s friends, Alexander and Vilma Mazurek, wartime immigrants to England. Alex had been in the Free Polish Air Force and he and Vilma had met in Italy. Vilma was a teacher of French at Pitman’s College in Leeds, Yorkshire, but they always spoke to each other in Italian. They had met in Florence during the war and Alex had returned with a stack of 78rpm Italian records. My first memory at about 2 1/2 was of sitting on Alex’s knee listening to Torna a Surriento. Later he became the president of the local Polyglot Society which was like L’Alliance Francaise, a way for Europeans or anyone wishing to refresh or keep up a European language to socialise and practise their conversation. Alex and Vilma took me to a variety of operas —The Magic Flute, Rigoletto, Rigolettoi, Carmen, Cavalleria Rusticana—and uproarious Gilbert and Sullivan operettas with the D’Oyly Carte company, to my first musical film, The Dancing Years, and later, South Pacific, subtly supervising my teenage exposure to adult encounters. In those far-off days such things were not considered a suitable topic for discussion.
My mother played the piano and had a love of music, though more for a melody to dance or whistle to, or a sentimental song than “highbrow stuff”. My grandparents were great ones for community singing with the Daily Mail song book and the little pale blue soft-cover books with the words that went with it. We still have half a dozen in the piano stool. Our singing mistress at high school also encouraged our wider musical education and I remember hurrying to finish my two and half hours of daily fifth form homework to get a one shilling (20c) standing position at the back of the auditorium at Leeds Town Hall—which looks exactly like Melbourne’s Parliament House, except that the town hall sports Melbourne’s missing dome—to hear Sir John Barbirolli conduct the Leeds Philharmonic Orchestra or maybe it was the Hallé. A well-built man, he reminded me of a genial black beetle in his black, pointed coat tails.
That same year I stood alone behind the seats in the gallery of Leeds Grand Theatre, gazing down entranced by the scenery and choreography of the oratorio Samson. Several of the younger Sadlers Wells opera company were staying at our house, one of those huge Victorian mansions which widows sold after the war for a song. It was a long song for my mother in 1949, bringing up two children on her own, but she paid it off in 25 years, letting rooms to students. Leeds is a university town and our dining table was like the United Nations. When some of the Samson cast boarded my home bound tram after the show I remember thinking how wrong it was that these exotic young artistes should have to stand. They had worked physically hard all day, rehearsing from early morning. The girls and even the boys were still wearing bright blue or green eye shadow, heavy black mascara and red lipstick, carrying flowers and their baskets of stage props—real curiosities on a Yorkshire tram. This was all before I turned 18 and came to Australia.
Alex died soon after of a heart attack and Vilma returned to Florence where she had met her beloved “Sandor” and died within the year. I miss them so. I always thought I would see them again, to tell them how much I appreciated their interest in my musical education and everything I did. They would have relished one of my adventures—how I had the good luck to see and hear Joan Sutherland in La Traviata for free, through a chance meeting on a Melbourne train with the second violin in her orchestra, an adorably mischievous elderly man (who was probably not much older than I am now, but I was in my early 20s then) Mr John Morris told me he had “gone into long pants” to play the violin for Dame Nellie Melba.
When I told him we couldn’t afford tickets to the opera he offered a solution: the doors of the coffee lounge would be thrown open to the street in the interval after the first short act and he would meet us there and take us in. And so he did! In bow tie and dinner suit he bought us cake and coffee and before bidding us a cheery adieu showed us where to stand at the back of the theatre to watch the rest of the show. What a thrill! The black-beaded dress Dame Joan wore that night was recently on display in the foyer of the Melbourne Concert Hall, and as I gazed in close up I relived that night with all its excitement, and sent a silent thank you to dear old John Morris.
My music-loving mentors haven’t made me a connoisseur of the classics, but they certainly gave me the best possible start with La Bohème—just as the remake of the film of Romeo and Juliet brought the younger generation a new appreciation of music and Shakespeare, so too does Puccini’s poignant love story of student life in Paris give opera its second wind with the young. La Bohème will always be my favourite.
Christina’s story first appeared in Bonzer! in the June 2002 issue.
This entry was posted by Alan Wheatley on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under At the Edge.
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