Tag Archives: michael annals

My friend Jane Norman

My dear friend Jane Norman died a year ago yesterday, on the day after the UK’s 2015 General Election. I was working on the Parliamentary expenses system that week, preparing for the upcoming Parliament, getting ready to erase the losers and import the winning MPs into the system. Jane’s godson called to tell me she’d been admitted to hospital with severe pneumonia and it was thought she was unlikely to survive. She’d been seriously ill, and in and out of hospital for several months.

The systems work at IPSA was largely done, so I was able to abandon my post to be with her as she died. She was very much herself to the last, and I still miss the fun and the fury she brought to the world, even during her last moments. She was always either for something enthusiastically or against something, viscerally – there was nothing in between.

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I spoke at her funeral, and in memory of her wonderful spirit, I repeat those words today:

I first met Jane about 35 years ago when I was living with her close friend, the stage designer, Michael Annals. Michael had arranged to look at a derelict lighthouse in Dorset with a view to exiling himself from London and its temptations, so the three of us piled into Michael’s tiny orange Datsun for a daytrip to Dorset and back.

Picture: Jane Norman & Michael Annals

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When we met for the first time Jane struck me as what my mother might call ‘actressy’. Indeed, for one horrific moment I thought she might be Glenda Jackson. But whilst my mother wouldn’t have meant the term entirely kindly, Jane’s way of making every moment more colourful, more dramatic, and more enjoyable, attracted me immediately, and I have loved her for it ever since.

Whether it was her work in the theatre, as administrator, costume and props maker, that made her what she was, or whether the theatre was a natural home for her personality, I shall never know.

Whilst she may have been theatrical, there was no posturing about Jane. She felt things intensely and expressed her feelings about them directly, immediately and with startling honesty. She was always authentic. She was always deeply curious about her friends, too, about why they did this or that, and what they ought to do instead, but she was almost equally  curious about strangers, seeming to know them and pronounce judgement on them instantly. ‘That man has a beady eye,’ she might say, if she took against a perfect stranger.

Picture: 80th Birthday Celebrations

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Jane’s talent for friendship enlivened all our lives. She was warm, supportive, loyal, loving, entertaining, honest – and explosively critical, too, if we fell short. Never black and white, she was always filming in technicolour.

Picture: Jane Norman and her best friend, Antonia Pemberton

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On her last morning, in hospital, when her godson Dexter, her friend Antonia, and I were at her bedside, she made it clear that she didn’t want to go on. But she still needed to know whether Ed Miliband had won the General Election for Labour. ‘Sadly no,’ Antonia said. There was a pause as she took the news in. Then, ‘Fuck,’ she said with all the strength she could muster. It raised  eyebrows on the ward, but it was a wonderful and entirely typical exit.

We all miss Jane’s warm enthusiasm for life, and, from time to time, her incandescent fury too.

Crossing the Alps

One of the most daunting stage directions of the 20th Century comes in Peter Shaffer’s 1964 play, The Royal Hunt of the Sun. It reads simply, ‘They cross the Andes.’ I knew the designer of the original production, Michael Annals, and I regret that I never asked him, before his death in 1990, how he turned that simple direction into a stage full of Spanish conquistadores struggling through high altitude snow and ice. Probably, he didn’t. When faced with the impossible, it’s usually best to leave almost everything to the imagination, as with Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction from The Winter’s Tale, ‘Exit, pursued by a bear.’ A man in a fur coat just doesn’t do the business.

Crossing a mountain range must be a messy and dangerous pursuit. Pizarro crossed the Andes to reach Peru with fewer than 200 men. It was a daring military manoeuvre but pales into insignificance beside Hannibal’s great crossing of the Alps in 218 BC, with nearly 30,000 soldiers, horsemen, and elephants. And yet, ever since, controversy has raged about the route Hannibal and his Carthaginian army took. You would think that such an enormous mass of men and beasts would leave their mark on the landscape.

But, in fact, it’s the mess they left behind that may be about to decide the issue. Archaeologists working in a high pass above Bourg-St-Maurice –  Col de la Traversette – have found layers of bog that appear to have been churned by the passage of thousands of men and animals,. They’ve also found bacteria and parasites that live in the guts of horses. These layers have been carbon-dated to 200 BC, lending more credibility to the theory. It will only take the finding of some coins, bus tickets, buckles or weapons to decide the issue once and for all. The problem, I suppose, is that most of what men carried two thousand years ago, was perishable.

Turner’s version of ‘They cross the Alps’.

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The pass is close to the ski resorts of Val d’Isere and Tignes. When you’re skiing in the Alps, as I am this week, surrounded by all the paraphernalia of the sport – the lifts, the high-altitude restaurants, the emergency helicopters, the easy access roads – pretending to yourself that you’re doing something effortful and daring, you have no sense at all of how these mountains must have appeared to Hannibal’s men and of how impossible an obstacle they must have seemed.

Archaeologists of the future, though, will have far more to go on, most of it plastic or metal. What will they make of the Elvis I see from my bedroom window?

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I’m close, in Solden, in the Otztal valley in Austria, to the pass where Otzi the Iceman, Europe’s oldest mummified man, was found in 1991. Otzi probably died from a blow to the head in a skirmish with his enemies whilst crossing the Alps nearly 5,300 years ago. His body and the arrows he carried bear the DNA of several other humans. It must have been a nasty encounter. Crossing the Alps was a dangerous game.

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