The 2010 Ruskin Writing Competition, in honour of the late Alistair Wisker (a former Creative Writing tutor at Ruskin), had three worthy winners. The poetry category was won by Sue Rose-Wray and the winning piece of prose was by Desmond Logan. A third category, for a sonnet, saw Zoe Ansell winning a prize donated by Brian Abbott who himself won the first ever poetry prize, five years ago. This year’s judges were Barrie Keeffe, Steve Attridge, Gina Wisker, Helen Kidd and Audrey Mullender. Barrie Keeffe, who wrote the film script ‘The Long Good Friday’, is pictured reading from his play ‘Sus, which has just been made into a film. Also pictured are the prize winners (behind) with the judges.

 

The competition was held at our Walton Street site on Monday 17th May 2010 with a £25 prize for each winner
Below are the winning entries.

Sonnett

Stars that fall – Zoe Ansell

This sonnet is about a necklace my grandmother brought for me. She had put it into an envelope with my name on the front, but died before she could give it to me. It was found in one of her desks and given to me some time later, and I treasure it greatly. The necklace is beautiful; a burnt orange star on a chain and a smaller one next to it, and I have always loved stars. It makes me sad that I never got to say thank you to her, so I like to think me attempting a sonnet about it would have been some kind of thank you.

Crisp white envelope, slashed with one straight fold halved the size to squeeze in the drawer with mink and pressed campsite flowers of summer’s gold. Ribbon handwriting in once new, blue ink fluttered across the front and chose my name, my hand curls curiously. My heart beats fear.

Time’s fingerprinted seal, is this a game of yesterdays I wish to meet? A tear lost in regrets smudges the ribbon trail, and I pull out the stars that fell to me, she must have caught and chained during the gale.

The necklace spins and suddenly I see, though she is gone, it’s never for that long. I wear the star she sent me with time’s song.

Poem

Party Animals - Sue Rose-Wray

David Attenborough is coming to dinner.
His jacket jingles with jungles,
an ocean deep in each pocket,
a smile full of diffident wolves.
Time-lapsed
brush-combed clouds
scud-scudder
around his head.

He brings a frozen desert dessert,
Incan chilli-chocolates
and a bunch of wild flowers
trailing hummingbirds;
neptuning their wings.

His boots,
the seven league pair,
stand by the front door.
No treading steppes into my carpet.
For he’s as poised as a porpoise
schooled in conduct
sociably sonar scanning.
Entirely natural
and seldom solitary.

Sipping spring water he’ll say,
“there’s nothing common
about the common dolphin.
Leaping for joy
clicking cowboy
of the sea, corralling
up spates of sardines
glittering like tins.
Bait balls
in splintering whorls.”
Unanimous small fry swarm,
unsafe in the shallows,
as doll-eyed, dull-eyed, dead-eyed
silent sharks,
radiator gilled,
cruise the sidewalks,
stalk seafood,
belch a bit
and pick their teeth
with Pilot fish.

Over our Moules Marinieres,
once mussels; wrenched,
clenched, desperate as limpets,
prised
from mossy glossy rocks,
I’m baleened, beluga’d,
blown off course
by the whale in his wineglass
erupting wild whalesong
by plankton lantern light.

David looks up.
His gaze scrambles
a feathered battalion;
Egyptian eye-linered gannets.
Max Factored apricot and cream,
painted and mated for life;
Pharaohs freed from papyrus tombs.
“Watch them wheeling.”
By candlelight
they spread-eagle,
deltoid to diver.
Hiss their fire-arrows
into the sea.
Lean mean fishing machines,
vapour trailed
by cloudbursts
of champagne bubbles.
Oh, David!

Down where the sun has no warmth,
peaked perma-frosted
water-ice caverns —
More sorbet, David?

We turn hard to port,
walnuts crack like bone.
Fair-tradewinds coffee mistrals
his sundowned brow.

His eyes now drowsy
as dormant volcanoes.
Stay David,
melt the frozen wastes
of my white bed,
my aeon-rippled ice-floe sheets.
Sleep David,
go deep.
Skipper your green glacier galleon.
Odyssey east, voyage west,
head north, search south
find me the place
where the blue whale mates.

Prose

Blue White and Pure – Desmond Logan

    The long walk and three flights of stairs left Izráel weak and tremulous. Like a worried child holding close to a favourite toy for comfort, he placed his right hand on his head and thoughtfully adjusted his black silk yarmulke. He took a clean white handkerchief from his overcoat pocket, shook it open and slowly mopped his withered face, white beard and wispy side curls. Relics of troubled times and hardship were etched in deep seams around his eyes, reflections of the straggle of black clad villagers, small traders and artisans, trundling their few belongings westward as they fled from yet another pogrom in Russia. Often in his dreams he would see the mocking smile of the youngest of a group of soldiers lounging by the roadside, as he spat into the plate of beans, before reaching it down to the outstretched hands of the begging child, who took it to his starving parents huddled in the rain. The little family shared the beans gratefully and gave thanks to God. ‘Hunger is a stern master,’ he thought, ‘and now the nightmare starts again. Hitler will surely reach for Poland, and in doing so will plant his jackboot on Czechoslovakia. So little time left.’

    The pendulum clock on the peeling blue wall made the only sound in the dingy office. The fat man stared unblinkingly across the table at Izráel’s bony white hands, his skinny, wasted frame, listened to the rasping breath.

    ‘Have you decided how many?’ he said, his flat white-moon face furnished with a monstrous moustache and black eyes completely devoid of emotion.

    ‘Three,’ said Izráel.

    The fat man leaned forward, the stench of his putrid breath hanging between them. ‘In this, timing is everything,’ he whispered. ‘It won’t be easy and no one will wait for stragglers. Are they fit for the journey, the hardship?’

    ‘Don’t worry about it, they’re young and healthy; I won’t be with them.’ Izráel’s voice shook slightly as he counted on his fingers. ‘My daughter Rachel, her husband Moise Grunhut, and their son Leo; he’s only fifteen, but he’s a good boy, strong. Thank God, he has a good heart.’

    He attempted to wipe a furtive tear from his hollowed cheeks surreptitiously, so as not to show weakness, but the fat man’s piggy eyes missed nothing. Izráel was well aware that he wasn’t interested in sentiment, only the integrity of his operation, which in these perilous times was very profitable.

    ‘You know the price; can you make it?’

    ‘We agreed the price already,’ Izráel said, his voice low and secretive, eyes scarcely visible beneath the wrinkled brow. “But as I told you, I have no money. Sadly therefore, I am forced to pay you more than double, maybe three times.’ He adjusted the fringes of the prayer shawl around his waist, fumbled inside the waistband of his trousers and drew out a small black leather pouch, from which he took a single folded paper, three inches by two inches. He placed it between them on the table.

    The fat man took a white linen cloth from the desk drawer and carefully spread it like a napkin across his lap. Slowly he unfolded the paper and with podgy fingers smoothed it flat. The eyes betrayed little of his excited avarice as he looked at the single brilliant cut diamond. With his right hand he extracted a small loupe from the recesses of the waistcoat straining over the bulk of his enormous belly. Holding the loupe close to his left eye and using a pair of long tweezers in his left hand, he grasped the diamond expertly at the girdle and raised it until the little finger of his right hand rested gently on his left thumb. In this steady position, he swivelled his chair towards the window to get the full benefit of the north light. There was a long silence as he studied the gemstone, occasionally adjusting his hands to rotate it gently in the tweezers with the ring finger of his right hand so that he could examine it from every angle of its facets and at every level of its depth.

    ‘Nice colour,’ he whispered, almost inaudibly.

    ‘White, blue white,” said Israel, ‘just a kiss of natural boron. This is rare and very desirable.’

    ‘I see no inclusions,’ said the fat man.

    ‘It’s a clean stone; blue white and pure. A couple of points under eleven carats,’ said Izráel.

    The fat man sighed, sucked audibly on his yellowed teeth, and carefully replaced the diamond in its paper folder. The silence seemed interminable as he sat staring at the tiny packet on the green leather of the desktop, his fingers like ugly white slugs crawling slowly through the damp undergrowth of his heavy Polack moustache. He had underestimated this old Jew. Maybe he should have asked for more. Finally he looked up at Izráel.

    ‘Consider it done. Within four weeks they will be out of here on their way to England.’

    ‘You know the value of the goods,’ said Izráel, with more hope than conviction, recognising that he was in no position to bargain. ‘Maybe you could help me; maybe consider a small cash adjustment?’

    ‘My friend, things are very bad now, everybody selling, nobody buying. Trust me to get your family out. Really that is something beyond a price.’

    As they shook hands, the diamond deftly disappeared into one of the numerous pockets of the fat man’s waistcoat.    

    ‘Shabbat shalom,’ said Izráel, placing his mink hat over the yarmulke on his head.

    ‘Yeah, shalom,’ said the fat man.