̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Afghanistan

Afghanistan: the inside story of the withdrawal

hcf38 — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 15:03:07 +0000

It is nearly 3 years since the US and the UK withdrew from Afghanistan. A key figure in the evacuation was the UK’s last ambassador to Afghanistan, Laurie Bristow – now president of Hughes Hall, Cambridge. Here he talks about his new book Kabul: Final Call: ̽��ֱ��Inside Story of the Withdrawal from Afghanistan, August 2021 and the lessons we should learn.

̽��ֱ��doctor using smartphones to save lives in war zones

cg605 — Mon, 04 Feb 2019 09:30:46 +0000

Having survived the civil war in Afghanistan, alumnus Waheed Arian arrived alone in the UK aged 15. He went on to study medicine at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Today he’s using smartphones to save lives in war zones.

Stolen World War Two letters help author uncover the hidden lives of army wives

sjr81 — Fri, 09 Sep 2016 09:38:42 +0000

Army Wives by Midge Gillies, Academic Director for Creative Writing at the Institute of Continuing Education (ICE), uses first-hand accounts, diaries and letters to piece together some of the extraordinary stories of servicemen’s wives through history – from Crimea to the war in Afghanistan.

Exploring all aspects of army life across the centuries; from the impact of life-changing injuries to séances, public memorials and death in foreign fields, Army Wives seeks to understand the singular experience of what it means for women to be part of the ‘army family’.

But it is perhaps the wartime letters of Diana Carnegie to her husband James which provide the most personal, colourful and touching accounts of a life wedded to both the soldier she loved, and the uncertain life of a military wife.

“I wanted a distinctive voice that took me beyond the familiar stories of bombing, blackouts and barrage balloons of the Second World War,” said Gillies. “Then I read a piece in ̽��ֱ��Telegraph about a cache of letters being sold at auction which provided an uncensored account of the war that wasn’t available in Pathe newsreels: Diana talked about couples having sex outside Buckingham Palace on VE Day and ‘getting tiddly’ on the way to hear a speech by Ernest Bevin.”

However, Gillies’ joy at outbidding her rivals at auction for the letters was short-lived when the auction house phoned her to reveal that although the letters were sold in good faith, they had in fact been stolen as part of a house burglary more than a decade earlier, and that she should expect a call from Kent Constabulary.

Sophie Carnegie, one of Diana’s two surviving daughters, only learnt about the letters’ reappearance a day after the auction, thanks to a chance phone conversation with someone who mentioned the Telegraph piece in passing. Sophie and her twin sister Charlotte both realised the letters must have come from a chest stolen when their parents’ house was burgled after Diana Carnegie’s death in 1998.

“Fortunately, the family were delighted I wanted to write about their parents and would help me as much as they could,” added Gillies. It didn’t take long to see that this was rich material. Diana wrote about the Home Guard and her fears of invasion right up until the terror of the V1 bombs and, finally, the agony of waiting for her husband to be demobbed at the war’s end. Her voice was witty, sassy and vivid – I liked her immediately.”

As well as Carnegie’s letters, Gillies visited and spoke with around 30 current and former army wives, as well as visiting archives across the UK in a sometimes difficult search for the voices of the women who were both left behind – or made the arduous journey to the front lines with their husbands.

Although it seems incredible today, the wives of British soldiers fighting in the Crimea were among the last of many to witness battle at close quarters; travelling with their husbands or sometimes stowing away on board Royal Navy ships in an effort not to be parted. Army wives, especially those married to lower-ranking men, often suffered terrible hardships and lived in squalor alongside their husbands, spending years in distant parts of the Empire, or accompanying their husbands from one seat of unrest to the other.

When a regiment was ordered abroad, a certain number of places were allocated for the wives of ordinary soldiers. In 1800, six women per 100 were allowed to go with their husbands. When soldiers began to travel further afield this rose to 12 per 100 men in India, China and New South Wales, and by the 1870s it was one in eight soldiers.

̽��ֱ��wives drew lots to determine who would accompany their husbands in a tense and very public ritual that was usually left to the very last minute to avoid the risk of desertion if a man found his wife was to be left behind.

“This most cruel of lucky dips took place either in a room into which the wives filed in order of their husbands’ rank, or sometimes, at the very dock where the soldiers’ ship was waiting,” added Gillies. “This led to harrowing scenes in which distraught wives waited to find out their fate; the wrong scrap of paper or the wrong-coloured pebble meant they may not see their husband for several years – if ever again.”

In her book, Gillies recounts the experience of 24-year-old Nell Butler who followed husband Michael, a private in the 95th Derbyshire, to Crimea aboard troop ships and 20-mile-a-day marches. Watching from a ship as a major battle commenced, Nell pleaded to be allowed ashore to search for Michael after fearing he must have been injured in the fierce fighting.

Once ashore, Nell trudged her way to Balaklava where she searched hospital ships and was mistaken for a nurse; being called into action to hold a soldier’s hand as his leg was amputated without anesthetic. Despite fainting, she earned herself a nursing role, tearing up her petticoats as makeshift bandages to treat the most appalling battlefield injuries.

Eventually, she found the badly-injured Michael and accompanied him to a hospital 300 miles away where she is thought to have served under Florence Nightingale in the hellish conditions that because synonymous with the conflict and the reforms of battlefield medicine and surgery.

Not that conditions for soldiers and their wives were markedly better at home. Army Wives reveals how overcrowding, poor hygiene, and a lack of basic cleaning facilities meant that diseases such as typhoid and tuberculosis were often rife, and their toll catastrophic.

In 1864 there was an outbreak of scarlet fever among army children at Aldershot and between 1865-1874, 120 children living in huts on Woolwich Common died of the same disease or diphtheria, at a much higher rate than in the civilian population.

Disease was by no means confined to home barracks. Husbands returning from service abroad often brought unwanted gifts back to their wives. ̽��ֱ��steady supply of prostitutes to army camps led to one estimate, in the middle of the 19th century, that around one quarter of the British Army had VD.

Rates for infection remained high in India, rising to 438 admissions per 1,000 men in 1890-93, double the rate for the British Army at home, and almost six times the German Army. This was partly why more wives were allowed to follow their husbands to the subcontinent.

In the 20th century, two world wars produced new generations of army wives and widows who lived through separation, injury and the deaths of husbands by forging friendships that lasted into peacetime. More recently, the Cold War and the war on terror has produced a new breed of more independent women who have supported their loved ones through an evolving landscape of combat operations.

“While the roles, expectations and the day-to-day lives of army wives may have altered over time, there were constant recurring themes as I wrote the book,” added Gillies. “Accommodation has always been a bone of contention and the state of army housing remains a real cause for concern today.

“Likewise, although communication is a lot easier than the days of letters and telegrams, our era of instant communication brings with it its own problems when husbands in difficult and demanding situations are available on a daily basis via Facebook or Skype to hear that Jonny isn’t doing his homework or that the washing machine is on the blink when there is nothing they can do about it from such a distance.”

̽��ֱ��strain is evident in divorce rates for soldiers and their wives. ̽��ֱ��figure remains much higher than that for couples in civilian life. So many army wives put their career second to become, effectively, a single mum for the time their husbands are deployed. Likewise, they often face the strain of uprooting their lives, and the children’s lives, time and again for new postings in the UK and overseas.

“ ̽��ֱ��lot of an army wife is waiting, being there to support and almost being gagged in a sense,” said Gillies. “A lot of the wives I spoke to seemed inhibited about speaking to me either because they feared getting their husbands into trouble, or because of their fears about the war on terror after the death of Fusilier Lee Rigby.

“But on the plus side, the friendship networks they develop are fantastic and for those who throw themselves into the life, the experience can be a great one. There was a real sense of service among many of the wives I spoke to – even if their lives can sometimes be very lonely and unpredictable.”

Gillies was also struck by the importance that couples still place on letters. Lyrics for the song, Wherever you are, which was written as a result of Gareth Malone’s TV programme, ̽��ֱ��Choir: Military Wives (2011) and which reached Number One, was based on letters and poems. For army families the letter is still king – even if it is delivered electronically before being printed out as an “e-bluey”. While the rest of us have abandoned letters in favour of texts and other forms of electronic communication the Army should provide rich pickings for future historians.

A stolen chest of letters – penned by an army wife to her husband on the battlefields of the Second World War – has helped a Cambridge academic and biographer trace the history of the women behind the men in uniform.

Diana talked about couples having sex outside Buckingham Palace on VE Day and ‘getting tiddly’.

Midge Gillies

Carnegie Estate

Diana Carnegie with her husband James and her children Charlotte, Sue and Sophie

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Opinion: Confronting the Taliban – an educational encounter

Anonymous — Wed, 09 Mar 2016 15:23:46 +0000

In a country that has five million children out of school (three million of them girls) it may seem incongruous to prioritise higher education. But prestigious higher education institutions, such as Edwardes College in Peshawar – where I was principal from 2006-2010 – are capable of producing the calibre of leaders able to address the full range of educational issues.

Edwardes College, affiliated to the ̽��ֱ�� of Peshawar, is one of a number of higher education institutions in south Asia founded a hundred or more years ago by British administrators and missionaries. Although conceived by the utilitarian administrators of the Raj as the creator of interpreters between themselves and “those whom we govern” – to quote the imperious Lord Macaulay – it initially taught in the local vernaculars and have maintained well above average academic standards. ̽��ֱ��College's progressive ethos and international contacts have enabled them to take on board the education of women and disadvantaged minorities more readily than comparable educational institutions, and they have consistently trained some of the most outstanding leaders from the south Asian region.

In the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly the North-West Frontier Province) Edwardes College was the first men’s college to admit women, the first of whom was admitted to the computer science department. By the time I joined in 2006 about 10% of 2000 students were women, and there was a somewhat higher proportion of women lecturers. By the time I left both proportions were significantly higher, and the college boasted a well-equipped women’s centre. When some of the more conservative professors complained about my preoccupation with women’s participation my answer was always in terms of the examination results: at the end of my fourth and final year the 14% of the total student body who were women were carrying off 53% of the top academic prizes.

There are considerable differences between the social situations of women in different parts of the Pakistan/Afghan region. Benazir Bhutto, from a rich landowning family in Sindh, was not only prime minister of Pakistan twice but, as an undergraduate at Oxford ̽��ֱ��, was president of the Oxford Union Society. However, in Pashtun society, on both sides of the border, women are unlikely to achieve such distinction; their literacy rate is much lower than that of men, and many are severely discriminated against. They can vote in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, but may be prevented from doing so by their menfolk and public opinion. Child marriage was made illegal in Pakistan in 2000 but continues in some places.

̽��ֱ��Taliban’s opposition to women’s education (or sometimes only to co-education) was aggravated during the late 1970s and 1980s when General Zia-ul-Haq became president of Pakistan and imposed a rigid version of Sharia law. In some respects this was surprising because Zia’s early years had been spent as a student in the liberal and cosmopolitan atmosphere of St. Stephen’s College in Delhi. With funds from Saudi Arabia he constructed large numbers of madrasas along the Pakistan/Afghan border, populating them with imported Wahabi mullahs. Such policies paved the way for Taliban militants from Afghanistan to find refuge in these same tribal border regions from which they could plan campaigns inside both countries.

Peshawar bore the brunt of a furious backlash by Taliban militants against “soft” targets during much of my tenure as Edwardes College principal. What happened recently in Paris happened on a monthly basis with much the same number of casualties. ̽��ֱ��international press only began to pay attention to these in September 2013 when suicide bombers killed over a hundred worshippers at All Saints’ Church (four were my own former students). Then in December 2014 a hundred and forty children were shot to death at the Army Public School in Peshawar. ̽��ֱ��first incident was stated by the Taliban to be a response to US drone attacks in the tribal areas, the second a reaction to Army atrocities in Waziristan.

One of the most effective counters to terrorism is quality education which offers hope and employment to the disenfranchised youth in places such as these border areas of Pakistan. A few years ago the former Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Haroon Ahmed, collaborated with General Musharraf and Atta ur Rahman, the distinguished Pakistani chemist, to set up several technological and vocational universities in Pakistan with funding and personnel from several countries, which, unfortunately, did not include the UK. This programme collapsed when General Musharraf left office, but it is an example of the kind of initiative which could help to redress the current imbalances of opportunity between rich industrial countries and their poorer counterparts.

On the basis of my educational experiences in Pakistan such collaborative activities will not lead to a lowering of standards – possibly even the contrary – and will equip and encourage potential leaders (and especially women) from unstable areas to rectify the unjust imbalances which fuel much current domestic and international violence.

David L. Gosling's new book, Frontier of Fear: Confronting the Taliban on Pakistan’s Border, is now available, published by London, IB Tauris ( ̽��ֱ��Radcliffe Press), 2016.

Dr Gosling will launch the book at an event in Magdalene College, with an introduction by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, on Wednesday 9 March at 6:00pm. All welcome.

Inset images: David Gosling at Edwardes College (David Gosling); Taliban ammunition (Resolute Support Media).

Dr David Gosling (Faculty of Divinity) discusses his time on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, his encounters with the Taliban and why education is the best weapon against terrorism.

One of the most effective counters to terrorism is quality education which offers hope and employment to the disenfranchised youth in places such as these border areas of Pakistan

David Gosling

Hashoo Foundation USA on Flickr

Pakistan schoolgirl

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Earthquake rocks Afghanistan and Pakistan – an area prone to magnitude 7 quakes

Anonymous — Tue, 27 Oct 2015 12:35:31 +0000

A devastating earthquake struck the Hindu Kush region of north-east Afghanistan just after lunchtime on October 26, rocking communities as far away as Tajikistan, Pakistan and even India. A devastating earthquake struck the Hindu Kush region of north-east Afghanistan just after lunchtime on October 26, rocking communities as far away as Tajikistan, Pakistan and even India.

̽��ֱ��strong quake, estimated at magnitude 7.5 by the US Geological Survey (USGS), had its origins more than 200km deep beneath Earth’s surface, and was felt as strong shaking across a very wide area. Casualties have been reported from across the region, with widespread landslips causing potential further damage to infrastructure.

So far it has been reported that 150 people have died, but this number is likely to rise.

̽��ֱ��quake is the second large shake to hit the Alpine-Himalayan earthquake belt this year, following the one that devastated Nepal in April. A region stretching from the Mediterranean through Anatolia, Iran and Central Asia into the mountains of South-East Asia, the Alpine-Himalayan belt is the home of around a fifth of the world’s largest earthquakes.

Tectonic plates collide. LennyWikipedia~commonswiki, CC BY-SA

̽��ֱ��earthquake was driven by collision between the Eurasian tectonic plate to the north and the Indian plate to the south. ̽��ֱ��area marks the scar of the closure of an ancient ocean, the Thethys, which once separated the continents of Gondwana, including most of the landmasses in today’s southern hemisphere, and Laurasia, made up of most of the countries that are today in the northern hemisphere.

̽��ֱ��Hindu Kush has experienced many such earthquakes before today, and this latest appears to follow closely the pattern of those of the past. Preliminary analysis by the USGS indicates that it was caused by a deep fault in which rocks thrust past each other instantaneously. They point out that seven earthquakes of magnitude 7 or more have hit within 250km of the current earthquake over the past century. Most recently the magnitude 7.4 earthquake, some 20km west of the latest event, killed over 150 people in March 2002.

This type of deep fault, a near-vertical a thrust fault, is a process that has previously been associated with the tearing off of sections of ancient ocean floor sinking into the Earth’s mantle beneath today’s continent. Researchers have previously suggested that earthquakes in the Hindu Kush can be caused by the break off of strips of such slabs, stretching and tearing free, on geological time scales, as they fall deep into the mantle.

Whatever the geological triggers for the quake, grieving communities will now be gathering themselves together and guarding against the inevitable aftershocks. With increased understanding of the risks that Earth poses along this seismic belt, it is important to be aware and prepare for future large earthquakes. If buildings are not to be destroyed time and again, it is important to adopt and adhere to construction and planning codes. A key step in promoting legal enforcement is educating the community about the risks, as well as how to respond as safely as possible during an earthquake.

Efforts such as the “Earthquakes without Frontiers” continue to highlight the risks of earthquakes, and have drawn attention to the tectonic forces that stand poised to strike along Tethys’ former shores.

Simon Redfern, Professor in Earth Sciences, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Professor Simon Redfern (Department of Earth Sciences) discusses the devastating earthquake that struck Afghanistan on October 26 and the geological triggers that caused it.

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Topography of Hindu Kush.

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For lust of knowing what should not be known

amb206 — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 06:09:28 +0000

There are few pictures of Clare Holtham. This is partly because she was always diffident about having her picture taken, and partly because she was for many years estranged from her family. As a keen amateur photographer, Clare was generally the person behind the camera, taking thousands of pictures of people and places in a pre-digital age.

Of the handful of photographs of Clare that do exist, one is remarkable. It was taken in Afghanistan and shows Clare sitting cross-legged but demure on the floor of a rough courtyard next to a smiling young man wearing traditional robes. He was an Uzbek chieftain and the picture was taken to record their marriage – a union that lasted just 24 hours.

It was the early 1970s; Clare was 23 and a fiercely independent undergraduate at Newnham College, Cambridge. In her journal she describes meeting a ‘tall and handsome’ Uzbek while travelling in a jeep on the road to Mazir-i-Sharif. She notes that he owned ‘700 sheep, 200 camels, 25 horses and the same number of rifles’. They conversed in Farsi, a language she has picked up on the road. She writes: ‘I was very taken with him.’ She offered herself to him and they agreed a bride price.

She records in handwriting that races smoothly across the page that their marriage was consummated that night ‘in a little room overlooking a courtyard with a wall and tethered goats. ̽��ֱ��sun was low… In the outer room the Turkomans were unwinding and rewinding their puttees, the Ouzbeks were laughing over something as they sipped their green tea, and the world was at peace’. ̽��ֱ��next day she continued her journey.

When Clare died in February 2010, after a struggle with cancer, her friends began to piece together the extraordinary story of her life – a narrative full of apparent paradoxes. She was a brilliant linguist and an intrepid traveller; she was a computer analyst and a prize-winning poet. As a teenager she was, in her own words, “a beatnik and rebel”; she was expelled from a reform school. For a while she worked as a bus conductor to make ends meet.

Today a book of Clare’s poetry will be launched at Newnham College where she studied English from 1970 to 1973. Some of the most powerful of the 59 poems contained in ̽��ֱ��Road from Herat, published by Five Seasons Press, brim with her love for the wild landscapes of Afghanistan and its proud people. Roger Garfitt, the lyric poet who was Clare’s tutor at the Institute of Continuing Education at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��, says: “It was in Afghanistan that Clare’s imagination found its first home, an emptiness where ‘the thread of being’ can fray until it is ‘unbearably light’ but where a traveller might still descend to the sound of a rabab being played beside a well under the lemon trees.”

Clare had a vivid imagination and steely determination. Aged eight, she visited Cambridge where, in the gardens of Newnham College, she decided that this was where she would study. But the circumstances of her life were stacked against her. Her parents were committed communists at a time when many intellectuals embraced the heady ideals it seemed to represent. She was just two when her mother disappeared to China with another activist. Clare was left with her grandfather in Devon. At the age of five she joined her father and his new wife in London – but they did not get on and she was sent to a school for maladjusted children in Bexhill.

Despite her troubled family relationships, Clare’s poems that address her disrupted childhood hint at a sense of ferocious attachment. ‘Lamplight’ describes how: ‘the very world might crack / from side to side ‘When your father gets home!’’ In a way that is typical of Clare, the poem moves towards an eventual resolution. ‘‘Children’ (and poems) ‘are like wild animals’ – that / was what you said, in the nursing home where you sat / fifty years on – ‘They need to be disciplined’ / (and cannot be left like reeds to blow in the wind).’

At Clare’s death, Newnham College inherited an archive of her papers and some of her books. Clare was a meticulous record-keeper and diarist: her notebooks capture the minute detail of her travels – where she went, whom she met, what she ate and where she slept – and hand-drawn maps show the routes she took across Europe and into Asia by public transport and cadging lifts. A list of what to take includes brandy and Dr Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne, and notes that J-Cloths are ‘better than flannels’ for washing. ̽��ֱ��reverse of a map of Europe is used as a fold-out hitch-hiking sign with the names of the chief destinations on her route spelt out in bold red letters outlined in black.

In a type-written account of her early life that is part of the archive, Clare describes cleaning her parents’ flat at the age of nine or ten. Passing her duster over books with intriguing titles, and opening them at random, she became transfixed by the world of ideas that lay within the covers. On a shelf halfway down the stairs was a volume of poetry by James Elroy Flecker. She opened it and read: ‘For lust of knowing what should not be known / We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.’ ̽��ֱ��imagery of these lines burnt into her mind. Written many years later, the poem recording her temporary marriage to the Uzbek chieftain ends: ‘In the morning / the wind rose… / … and touched our feet.’

By the age of 15, Clare’s life had gone badly awry. She had been expelled from the school in Bexhill and for a while she lived rough on the streets of London. Her intelligence, however, was evident: when she was given an IQ test, she came out top of the MENSA scale. It was at Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology (known locally as the Tech), where she went to study for O and then A levels at the suggestion of an older friend, that she began to find her feet academically. She worked on the buses and in factories, while devouring literary classics and teaching herself Persian languages.

Applying to Newnham College (through the Oxbridge Entrance exam), Clare chose to write about the epic poem, Gilgamesh – one of the earliest known works of literature. This came as a shock to Clare’s Director of Studies, Jean Gooder, and colleagues, who had never read Gilgamesh – and had quickly to get hold of a copy.

Jean Gooder says: “Clare was very bright and she was also absolutely clear about what she wanted to study. She had no truck with anything she thought was second rate. Her circumstances were characteristically irregular and this led to the College adjusting many of its normal practices. We gave her a place without the O level Latin required at the time. We organised for her to study Russian and we allowed her to work part-time during term at the Cambridge Arts Cinema.”

At the start of Clare’s second term at Newnham, Jean Gooder asked her casually whether she had had a good Christmas, to which Clare replied that she had spent Christmas Day weeping silently in a corner of the accident and emergency department at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. Nobody had even asked her why she was there. Newnham promptly organised for Clare to have student accommodation all year – and the Gooders also took Clare into her own family home. “My children especially gained a huge amount from her. She gave them an education in film that resulted in two of them becoming film producers,” says Jean Gooder. “Everything she did, she did with huge attention to detail.”

On graduating from Cambridge, Clare worked and lived with Eddie Block, manager of the Cambridge Arts Cinema. Together they founded the Cambridge Film Festival and then moved to Sussex to transform the Duke of York Cinema in Brighton into a flourishing art house venue. When Eddie retired, Clare retrained as a computer systems analyst and travelled all over the world for a number of well-known companies, finally setting up her own business, Small Blue.

̽��ֱ��small girl who fell in love with maps and atlases – and wanted to see the steppes and the Oxus River for herself - became an adult who never stopped learning. In her 50s Clare trained as a Blue Badge Guide, studied genetics at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education at Madingley Hall, and at the time of her last illness was close to qualifying as a homeopath.

It was at Madingley Hall that Clare met Roger Garfitt. Discovering that she wrote poetry, he persuaded her to join his Masterclass and found that she liked nothing better than a formal challenge. He remembers: “Set up a flight of hurdles and she would leap over them. ‘Walter the Tramp’, the sequence that won second prize in Scintilla’s Long Poem Competition, is fluent in the tight ballad metre, which is by no means easy, while her ‘Elegy for the Buddhas of Bamyan’ makes use of a repeated refrain, a technique we had been studying in Yeats, varying the repeated phrases so skilfully that they never seem wilful but become integral to the development of the poem.”

̽��ֱ��archive of Clare’s papers at Newnham speaks of a life lived absolutely to the full. Her notebooks spill over with an urgent sense of adventure: so much to see and do. In 1969, aged 21 and with no family backing, she decided to visit India, obtained visas and had the relevant jabs. She writes: ‘ ̽��ֱ��day finally arrived and I took a train to London. It’s an odd feeling boarding a train full of ordinary commuters when you are en route for the Orient. One thinks: Don’t these people realise that I am going to India?.'

Anyone interested in the archive of Clare Holtham’s papers is welcome to contact the Newnham College Archive at archives@newn.cam.ac.uk. Newnham College has set up a student travel scholarship in Clare Holtham’s name. ̽��ֱ��Road from Herat is published by Five Seasons Press http://www.fiveseasonspress.com/.

Clare Holtham (1948-2010) had a huge enthusiasm for learning. After a troubled childhood, which led to a spell of homelessness, she became an intrepid traveller and independent-minded student at Newnham College, Cambridge. A book of Clare’s poems called ̽��ֱ��Road from Herat, launched today at Newnham, reflects a life lived to the full. It included working on the buses and a rapid marriage to an Uzbek chieftain.

Clare was also absolutely clear about what she wanted to study. She had no truck with anything she thought was second rate.

Jean Gooder

For lust of knowing what should not be known

Newnham College Archive, Cambridge

Poet Clare Holtham and Uzbek chieftain in Afghanistan, early 1970s

White Morning

On the road to Meshhed we stop
at Chaman Bid, the place of the willow.
We shiver in the dawn, or sefideye sobh1 –
one of the several stages of morning
noted in the Persian language.

Later, in the bazaar circle
round the shrine of the Imam Reza,
forbidden to Westerners,
there is dazzling light –
cut mirrorwork, water gold;
and dazzling darkness -
heat from generators,
cries, and the heavy
press of pilgrims shrouded in black,
or backs flailed and bleeding,
seeking an unbearable bliss.

Sefideye sobh again,
waking in my bed on the roof
under the thin quilt, a lightness
as though a fever had left me.
White birds wheeling
on the breath of dawn,
and a distant smoke rising
in the bowl of the mountains.

Clare Holtham

1‘White morning’

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