#rob ward

[jtargaryen18]

His Last Poem ~ Coming Soon

A request... This one starts very soon.

The earth above them shook again, knocking them around on their feet. Dirt rained down from the timber supports as the tunnel groaned like a living beast that Tommy Shelby knew one day would finally devour the 179th Tunneling Company of the Royal Engineers. And here at the Somme, he thought, today just might be that day.

Tommy didn’t look up, he just kept digging. The cramped tunnel smelled like damp clay, sweat, and fear, the faint chemical sting of explosives burning his nose. The lantern hanging from the beam beside him flickered every time artillery struck the ground above.

Rob Ward, who was digging a few feet down from him, started reciting a poem. 

"There once was a girl from Ipswich town,

Who said, 'Rob, put that bloody notebook down."

Your rhymes don't make sense,

And you don't have two pence,

But I’ll dance with you if you shut it right now!'"

“Ward,” said Freddie Thorne, chuckling in the dark, "you’re a fucking terrible poet.”

A chuckle rippled through the group of them crouched and working the tunnel.

Danny Whizz-Bang snorted. “Freddie’s right. How in God’s name did you ever find a woman willing to listen to that nonsense?”

A moment of silence, another rumble above them. 

Rob just laughed. The sound carrying strangely underground, like it was defying the weight of earth pressing in on them.

“Jealousy doesn’t suit you, boys,” he said.

Freddie scoffed. “Jealous? Of your poetry?”

"No," Rob said. "Of my beautiful wife back home. I save my good ones for her."

Danny leaned forward. “Go on then. Give us one of your good ones.”

Tommy kept working, but he heard Rob shifting next to him.

“Alright then," Rob said, clearing his throat like a performer.

“'There once was a girl named Cat—”

Groans immediately filled the tunnel.

Freddie barked a laugh. “Christ, not this again.”

Rob ignored him and continued cheerfully. “Who said I was thick as a brickbat.’”

Danny wheezed with laughter. "That's true enough."

Tommy shook his head, almost smiling despite himself.

Rob continued, improvising as he went.

“'I read poems all night,

By the pale lantern light,

Till she said, “Alright Rob, but that’s that!”

Freddie muttered, “One of your good ones, eh?”

Rob shrugged in the dark, grinning. “She said yes, didn’t she? That's a true story.”

They all had a laugh, and for a moment the tunnel didn’t feel quite so small.

Tommy glanced over at him. Even in the weak lantern light, Rob looked younger than the rest of them. Hell, maybe he was. But the thing he had to admire was the way that, even on the worst days, Rob put on a smile and found a way to make the rest of them do the same, even if it was at his own expense, and it usually was. Even with mud streaked across his face, his eyes were bright with that same stubborn warmth he always carried.

“I really miss my girl,” Rob said, almost to himself.

The next moment, the world exploded. A thunderous crack shook the tunnel and Tommy's heart lurched in his chest. The lantern nearest him fell and shattered, and the timbers started snapping like matchsticks. The ceiling was coming down, and the earth swallowed the light. Men around him were shouting, someone screamed.

Tommy was thrust forward into the dirt. For one dark moment, there was nothing but ringing silence and choking dust. It felt like his heart would pound its way out of his chest.

Their voices pierced his awareness.

“Tommy!” Freddie yelled.

“I’m here,” Tommy rasped, coughing. 

He pushed himself up in the darkness, horrified to see that the tunnel behind them had completely collapsed. He had eyes on Freddie and Danny.

“Rob!” he yelled.

Scrambling back through the dirt and broken timber, Tommy found him half-buried beneath a beam. Rob was pinned, mud covered his face, and his was breathing shallow. But he was conscious.

“Tom,” Rob whispered.

Tommy tried lifting the beam, but he couldn't move it. “Freddie! Help me!”

“No time,” Rob said quietly, his hand moved weakly inside his coat.

Tommy froze.

Rob pulled out a small folded piece of paper. It was filthy and crumpled, nearly falling apart. He shoved it into Tommy's hand. “For my wife.”

Tommy just stared at it. “A poem?”

Rob smiled, that warmth still in his eyes even as he was breathing his last.

“Proper one this time.”

The tunnel creaked again, and more dirt slid in from above.

Freddie shouted from somewhere down the passage. “The water’s coming in! Tom! Rob!”

Rob grabbed for Tommy’s sleeve with the last of his strength. “Go."

Tommy didn't want to leave him, but Rob’s grip tightened.

“Look after my mum, my wife,” he rasped. "Tell 'em I tried."

Tommy looked down at the paper in his hand. And everything went dark...

Tommy woke with the taste of earth in his mouth. For a moment, he didn’t move, couldn't move. The ceiling above him was the same as it always was, silent. There was no dirt falling or timbers snapping. It was the quiet darkness of his bedroom at Arley Hall.

His breathing was too fast. He focused on the ceiling until his racing heart slowed. Until he could get a hold of himself.

The tunnel was gone. France was gone. But that perfect witch's brew of dread, fear, and guilt remained, poisoning his mind.

Swinging his legs over the side of the bed, Tommy's elbows sat on his knees and his head dropped into his hands. The room was cold, the clock on his bedside table telling him there was an hour until dawn. And he already knew sleep wasn’t coming back.

So he stood, pulled on his trousers and shirt, and made his way down the quiet corridor toward his office. The house was silent around him. Even the servants hadn’t stirred yet.

In the office, he turned on the lamps, poured himself a drink. The whiskey burned all the way down, clearing away the rest of the cobwebs from sleep. 

Sitting at his desk, he eyed the work waiting there for him. The ledgers and accounts to review. The shipments he needed to confirm. Work usually helped.

Tonight, this morning, fuck. The memories refused to settle. He'd heard Freddie's voice in the dark, Danny's laughter. And Rob's ridiculous poetry echoing through the tunnel.

Tommy rubbed his eyes. He'd promised himself he wouldn't keep doing this, but he reached for the bottom drawer of his desk. Using the small key he kept on his watch chain, he unlocked it and pulled out the small wooden trinket box he kept there.

The lid creaked softly when he opened it. Tommy kept three things inside. 

The first was a small silver brooch, elegant in its design. It had belonged to his mother. He ran his thumb over the worn metal, studying it. He couldn't remember her wearing the brooch, nor could he remember her smiling very much. He'd been almost twenty when she'd decided to end it all, and at the time, he'd been angry and hurt. Didn't she realize how much her family needed her? Why had she been so fucking selfish?

Years and experience gave him a better understanding of why she made that decision. He wasn't proud of it, but he'd fought that battle himself a time or two.

Returning the brooch to the box, he picked up the folded note next. Tommy already knew the words written inside in Grace's neat, unmistakable handwriting. It was a small message she'd left on an ordinary day. Reminding him that the rum shipments were late, and they were running low at the Garrison. She'd left it for him on a day when he still believed she was just a barmaid and that they had a future together that stretched out like an endless road.

Tommy closed his eyes for a moment.

Grace Burgess had died trying to catch a train out of Birmingham. Shot dead. The police had ruled it a robbery gone wrong, but he knew better. He remembered Chester Campbell's smug lecture about broken hearts the day they faced off against Billy Kimber. It was the same day they lost Danny Whizz-Bang. The day he found out Grace had betrayed him. 

The day she said she loved him. He couldn't say it back, turning his back on her out of hurt. Maybe if he'd taken the time to hear her reasons, maybe they would have had a future. But someone snuffed out that possibility with a pull of the trigger.

Chester Campbell had pulled the trigger. In his heart, Tommy knew this. He swore to himself as he carefully placed the note back in the box, that if he ever saw that bastard again, there would be a reckoning. 

The final item had been beneath the note. An old, crumpled scrap of paper. It was just as filthy as it had been when it had first been pressed into his hand beneath the Somme.

Tommy unfolded it slowly, with care. The paper was worn now from years of careful handling. 

Rob Ward’s final poem for his wife.

Tommy had carried it through the rest of the war, through Birmingham’s rise, and the Shelby Company’s expansion. It had been in his care through every deal, fight, and sleepless night. And there had been so many. By the time he'd made it home after France, Rob's wife had already left Birmingham. She'd returned to Ipswich to care for her own mother, that was the story.

Rob’s mother, Charlotte, still ran her bakery in Small Heath, barely surviving the war years. 

Tommy had made sure it continued to survive after that. From the day he returned to Birmingham, Ward's Bakery had been under his protection.

Unable to bring himself to re-read the beautiful words written there, he folded the poem again carefully and placed it back in the box.

When he closed the lid, the first light of the morning was just starting to creep into his office.

Tommy was still here, the only one remaining from that bloody day in France where they had been nothing more than an unground pocket of humanity in hell. Freddie had died the previous year from pestilence, and Billy Kimber had killed Danny the day the Peaky Blinders faced off against Kimber and his crew. And Rob...

Tommy slid the box back into the drawer and locked it again. Pouring himself another drink, he finally looked down at all the files on his desk that needed his attention. 

Work kept the ghosts quiet. Most of the time.

Still, he made a mental note. He’d stop by the bakery later that day to check on Charlotte and make sure everything was running smoothly. To offer again to hire a helper since she was getting older now. And like she always did, she'd politely tell him that wouldn't be necessary, and thank him with a sincerity of a good heart and with the same eyes she'd passed along to her son.

It was the least he could do.

After all, Rob Ward had died saving his life. And there wasn't a day that went by where Tommy felt he actually deserved his sacrifice.

[consort-pr-blog]

New Post has been published on Consort PR

New Post has been published on http://consortpr.com/featured-news/venice-musical-heritage/

VENICE – A MUSICAL HERITAGE

When one thinks of opera in Italy, one automatically thinks of the famous La Scala opera house in Milan. But, in an article published in The Guardian in 2013, John Julius Norwich sets out the case for Venice as the city that created opera. Although initially occupying a position of political and maritime power (Shakespeare’s Othello was the commander of the garrison at Venice, where he met Desdemona, before setting out to defend Cyprus against the Turks), the spread of the Ottoman empire, the discovery of the New World and the Cape Route to the Indies had all combined by the late 15th Century to make the Mediterranean little more than a backwater. However, as Venice’s political fortunes declined, argues Norwich, so her culture flourished.

  This was initially in the area of painting, but music started to gain the ascendency. The combined effects of the death of Pope Leo X in 1521 and the Sack of Rome in 1527 had caused the eclipse of the long- dominant musical establishment in Rome, as a consequence of which many musicians either moved elsewhere or chose not to go to Rome. Venice was seen as one of several places to have an environment conducive to creativity. In music history, the “Venetian School” was the body and work of composers working in Venice from about 1550 to around 1610. The Venetian polychoral compositions of the late sixteenth century were among the most famous musical events in Europe, and their influence on musical practice in other countries was enormous. The innovations introduced by the Venetian School, along with the contemporary development of monody and opera in Florence, together define the end of the musical Renaissance and the beginning of the musical Baroque. To begin with, the music of Venice was firmly centred in the Basilica of St Mark, which possessed not one but two organs. Andrea Gabrieli and his nephew Giovanni, the two greatest Venetian musicians of their time, evolved the practice of using two choirs, placed in different parts of the building. While this may seem like a recipe for chaos, somehow it worked marvellously well! In August 1619, Claudio Monteverdi arrived in Venice, after 30 years at the court in Mantua, and music came into its own even as painting took a rest. Already well known as a composer of religious works – his Vespers of 1610 have stood the test of time – he spent over 20 years as maestro di cappella at St Mark’s. But he also became popular for his secular music, and, as Norwich says, his 1607 work, “La Favola d’Orfeo” must have a good claim to be the first example of opera as we know it. When Monteverdi died, on the 29th November 1643, it was said that all Venice went into mourning.

However, even before the death of Monteverdi, his musical legacy had borne fruit. The first public opera house was in Venice. The Teatro San Cassiano was a stone building owned by the Venetian Tron family, and took its name from the neighbourhood where it was located, the parish of San Cassiano near the Rialto. It was considered ‘public’ because it was directed by an “impresario”, or general manager, for the paying public rather than for nobles exclusively. The first operas to be performed were “L’Andromeda” by Francesco Manelli (1637) and “La Maga Fulminata” by Bendetto Ferrari (1638). And if those names do not seem to slip off the tongue like (for instance) Verdi or Wagner, it must be remembered that, in the 17th Century, opera as an art form was in its infancy. Imagine a Shakespearean play, with the plot-building dialogue interspersed by set speeches such as “To be or not to be….”. Early operas could sometimes be little more than a series of songs (arias) joined together by the loosest of narratives and reams of “Recitative” – sung dialogue where the singer appeared to have forgotten the music altogether! The position was complicated even further by the arrival of the Castrati, men whose beautiful boy soprano voices had been preserved at puberty by a surgical operation, and who could then sing with all the power of a fully-grown man, but could reach the highest notes on the register. The proliferation of Castrati was designed to compensation for the fact that women were banned from performing on stage. The best of them were treated like latter-day film stars, adulated and spoilt. The problem was they were so much in demand that they were allowed to sing their own favourite songs – indeed, pretty well anything they liked – whether or not it fitted into the plot of the opera in which they were performing! They could perform cart-wheels (literally and figuratively), and the crowds adored them! However, it was a good start. Venice became the opera capital of the world. After the 1650s, the Teatro San Cassiano was surpassed by others, and its number of performances declined, but another ten opera houses opened. At this point, the Teatro San Cassiano could count first performances of 37 operas. By the beginning of the 18th Century, a city of some 160,000 inhabitants – roughly equivalent to the size of Reading – could boast no fewer than seven full-time opera houses. Unfortunately, as Norwich relates, it was about that time that Venice found a new occupation. She became “the pleasure capital of Europe, the Las Vegas of her time. Here the gambling was for higher stakes, the courtesans more skilful and obliging, than anywhere else on the continent. Carnival – during which the wearing of masks dissolved all inhibitions – went on for three months a year, and the arts flourished. Painting rose up again from its 17th-century nadir: the city was celebrated as never before by the Vedutisti Canaletto and the Guardis, while the old Venetian fascination with light and colour reached its apogee in the work of Giambattista Tiepolo.”

The art of music was not forgotten, by any means, although perhaps it started to be second best to hedonism. Oddly – and one cannot help wondering at the coincidence! – the best music in Venice could be heard among illegitimate children, in the four orphanages for foundling girls: the Ospedaletto, the Incurabili, the Mendicanti and, most famous of them all, the Pietà. In these institutions, music occupied the most important place in the curriculum. By the beginning of the century, the standards were so high that the nobility regularly sought places for their daughters as paying students. There was, of course, an obvious logical objection. The orphanages were for illegitimate children. On the south side of the Pietà there still exists a long inscription, threatening with fulminazione – being struck by lightning! – anyone who tried to pass off his legitimate daughter as an illegitimate one in order to gain her admission. History does not recall how many nobles managed to get round the rules, and what subterfuges they used, nor how many were incinerated by bolts from the sky!

The Director at the Pietà was Antonio Vivaldi. Perhaps best known for his “Four Seasons” series of violin concertos, he also wrote 45 operas. With his death – in 1741 – Venice lost her last great composer. The final hammer-blow came in 1797, when Napoleon Bonaparte brought the Venetian Republic to an end. For the next 70 years, the city was under foreign domination – sometimes Austrian, sometimes French – until in 1866 it finally became part of a united Italy.

As is well known, the rise of Italian nationalism (Risorgimento) was in no small part influenced by the composer Guiseppe Verdi, but his operas were being staged at La Scala in Milan – over 170 miles away. And it seemed that, when Venice lost her independence, she also lost her creative genius. There were no more Canalettos or Tiepolos, Monteverdis or Vivaldis. New operas – and for the average 19th-century Italian, no other type of music existed – continued to be produced at the Fenice and other theatres. Rossini and Verdi were regular visitors. In 1858, Richard Wagner completed the second Act of “Tristan” in one of the palaces, and he died in the Palazo Vendramin-Calergi in 1883. But none of these worthies were Venetians. With all this, it is hardly surprising that the baton should have been passed so completely to La Scala.

The last truly great composer to be associated with Venice was Igor Stravinsky, who even brought his own grand piano with him. It had to be hoisted by crane through his hotel window. The first night of his “Rake’s Progress”, at the Fenice theatre on 11 September 1951, marked the apogee of musical life in 20th-century Venice. Stravinsky did not die in the city as he had hoped to do, but was buried, after a magnificent funeral, next to his friend Diaghilev on the cemetery island of San Michele.

However, at least the Venice Carnival has been preserved, albeit less prolonged than in former days. This year, we will have the pleasure of hearing the voice of a prominent dramatic soprano, Anna Sanachina, trained and resident in Venice, who will be singing for us at the Glass Slipper Ball on the 9th February. We will have the reassurance that, however diminished it may be, the musical heritage of Venice is alive and in safe hands.

Written by Robert Wade

https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=robert%20hilary%20wade https://www.facebook.com/search/str/alan+barrington+books/keywords_search

Organiser :

https://www.facebook.com/VeniceCarnival2018TheGlassSlippersMasquaradeBall/

Web-site: www.alanbarringtonbooks.com

https://twitter.com/RobertHilaryWad

[motiongraphictrend]

Kenzo

[theartfulgarden]

Rob Ward's sculpture explores drawing in space, combining simple structures, with poetic intentions, often taken from a frozen moment

[rawwandroll]

I'm in love!

[rob-ward]

Tiny Picture of Me

In this issue of Computer Arts there is a tiny photo and mention of my name and my friend Sarah Wickens in an article about Trunk.

[rob-ward]

A freelance animator who specialises in Adobe After Effects and Photoshop. I am confident working closely with clients and experienced at working to a brief and tight deadlines, with nearly 2 years full time experience at The Mill using Adobe After Effects and over 2 years freelance experience.