De Brits – Amerikaanse schrijver en regisseur James Clavell (pseudoniem van Charles Edmund DuMaresq de Clavelle)werd geboren op 10 oktober 1924 in Sydney. Zie ook alle tags voor James Clavell op dit blog en ook mijn blog van 10 oktober 2010 en eveneens mijn blog van 10 oktober 2009.
Uit: Shogun
“It must have been this bed that felt so soft and warm,” he said aloud. “I’ve never slept on silk before.” His weakness overcame him and he slept dreamlessly.
When he awoke there was more food in earthenware bowls and his clothes were beside him in a neat pile. They had been washed and pressed and mended with tiny, exquisite stitching.
But his knife was gone, and so were his keys.
I’d better get a knife and quickly, he thought. Or a pistol.
His eyes went to the crucifix. In spite of his dread, his excitement quickened. All his life he had heard legends told among pilots and sailormen about the incredible riches of Portugal’s secret empire in the East, how they had by now converted the heathens to Catholicism and so held them in bondage, where gold was as cheap as pig iron, and emeralds, rubies, diamonds, and sapphires as plentiful as pebbles on a beach.
If the Catholic part’s true, he told himself, perhaps the rest is too. About the riches. Yes. But the sooner I’m armed and back aboard Erasmus and behind her cannon, the better.
He consumed the food, dressed, and stood shakily, feeling out of his element as he always did ashore. His boots were missing. He went to the door, reeling slightly, and put out a hand to steady himself but the light, square lathes could not bear his weight and they shattered, the paper ripping apart. He righted himself. The shocked woman in the corridor was staring up at him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, strangely ill at ease with his clumsiness. The purity of the room was somehow defiled.
“Where are my boots?”
James Clavell (10 oktober 1924 – 6 september 1994)
De Nederlandse dichteres, schrijfster en illustrator Rie Cramer werd geboren in Sukabumi op Java, ndonesië op 10 oktober 1887. Zie ook alle tags voor Rie Cramer op dit blog en ook mijn blog van 10 oktober 2010 en eveneens mijn blog van 10 oktober 2009.
Uit: Winter
Vlak voor het raam brandt een groote lantaren
Vlak voor het raam brandt een groote lantaren
Iederen nacht, en dan zie ik den schijn,
Als ik tenminste niet slaap, uit m’n bedje
Net door een kier van het dichte gordijn.
Moedertje zegt wel, zoo’n baas van een jongen,
Hoeft toch in ’t donker niet bang meer te zijn;
Maar, weet je, Beertje slaapt óok in m’n bedje
En Beertje is nog verschrikkelijk klein.
Muschjes, muschjes vliegen aan
Muschjes, muschjes vliegen aan,
Vechten om een brokje.
‘Blijft er af, dat is van mij!’
‘Ik was eerst’ ‘Dat jok je’!
Muschjes, kom, er is genoeg.
Maak toch niet zoo’n leven!
Als ik moesje vraag om meer
Zal ze ’t immers geven!
Rie Cramer (10 oktober 1887 – 18 juli 1977)
Illustratie uit Winter
De Australische dichteres en schrijfster Louise Mack werd geboren op 10 oktober 1870 in Hobart, Tasmania. Zie ook alle tags voor Louise Mack op dit blog en ook mijn blog van 10 oktober 2010 en eveneens mijn blog van 10 oktober 2009.
Uit: A Woman’s Experiences in the Great War
“What do you do for mines?”
I put the question to the dear old salt at Folkestone quay, as I am waiting to go on board the boat for Belgium, this burning August night.
The dear old salt thinks hard for an answer, very hard indeed.
Then he scratches his head.
“There ain’t none!” he makes reply.
All the same, in spite of the dear old salt, I feel rather creepy as the boat starts off that hot summer night, and through the pitch-black darkness we begin to plough our way to Ostend.
Over the dark waters the old English battleships send their vivid flashes unceasingly, but it is not a comfortable feeling to think you may be blown up at any minute, and I spend the hours on deck.
I notice our little fair-bearded Belgian captain is looking very sad and dejected.
“They’re saying in Belgium now that our poor soldiers are getting all the brunt of it,” he says despondently to a group of sympathetic War-Correspondents gathered round him on deck, chattering, and trying to pick up bits of news.
“But that will all be made up,” says Mr. Martin Donohue, the Australian War-Correspondent, who is among the crowd. “All that you lose will be given back to Belgium before long.”
“_But they cannot give us back our dead_,” the little captain answers dully.
And no one makes reply to that.
There is no reply to make.
It is four o’clock in the morning, instead of nine at night, when we get to Ostend at last, and the first red gleams of sunrise are already flashing in the east.
We leave the boat, cross the Customs, and, after much ringing, wake up the Belgian page-boy at the Hotel. In we troop, two English nurses, twenty War-Correspondents, and an “Australian Girl in Belgium.”
Louise Mack (10 oktober 1870 – 23 november 1935)
De Finse dichter en schrijver Aleksis Kivi werd geboren als geboren Alexis Stenvall in Palojoki op 10 oktober 1834. Zie ook alle tags voor Aleksis Kivi op dit blog en ook mijn blog van 10 oktober 2010 en eveneens mijn blog van 10 oktober 2009.
Uit: Seven Brothers (Vertaald door Richard Impola)
“JUKOLA FARM, in the south of the province of Hame, stands on the northern slope of a hill. near the village of Toukola. Around it the ground is bestrewn with boulders, but below this stony patch begin the fields, where, before the farm fell into decay, heavy-eared crops used to wave. Below the fields is a meadow, rimmed with clover and cleft by a winding ditch: and richly it had yielded hay before becoming a pasturage for straying village cattle. In addition to these, the farm owns vast forests, bogs and backwoods, most of which the founder of the farm, with admirable foresight, succeeded in adding to it at the first great settlement of boundaries in former days.
On that occasion the master of Jukola, with an eye more to the benefit of his descendants than his own best, had accepted as his share a forest ravaged by fire and by this means received seven times the area given his neighbours. But all signs of this fire had long ago disappeared from his holding and dense forests had replaced them. Such is the home of the seven brothers whose fortunes I am about to relate.
Their names, in order of age, are: Juhani, Tuomas, Aapo, Simeoni, Timo, Lauri and Eero. Tuomas and Aapo are twins, and so are Timo and Lauri. Juhani, the eldest, is twenty-five, while Eero, the youngest, is barely eighteen. In build they are sturdy and broad of shoulder: all of middling height except Eero, who is still very short. The tallest of them is Aapo, though perhaps not the strongest. The honours in this respect are with Tuomas, Who is indeed famous for the breadth of his shoulders. A peculiarity that marks them all is the brownness of their skin and the stiff, hemplike quality of their hair, the coarseness of which is especially striking in Juhani.
Their father, a passionate hunter, met a sudden death in the prime of his life while fighting an enraged bear. Both were found dead, the shaggy king of the woods and the man, lying side by side on the bloodstained ground. The man was terribly mangled, but the bear, too, displayed the marks of a knife in its throat and side, while the keen ball of a rifle had pierced its breast.”
Aleksis Kivi (10 oktober 1834 – 31 december 1872)
Portret door Albert Gebhard, z.j.
De Nederlandse dichter en schrijver Robidé van der Aa (eig. Christianus Petrus Eliza van der Aa) werd geboren op 10 oktober 1791 in Oosterbeek. Zie ook alle tags voor Robidé van der Aa op dit blog en ook mijn blog van 10 oktober 2010 en eveneens mijn blog van 10 oktober 2009.
Het schrijven
Die niet op zijn voorschrift let,
Zal nooit netjes leeren schrijven:
’t Zullen hanepooten blijven,
Wat men heel zijn leven zet.
Als men achtloos of verkeerd
Aan de tafel is gezeten,
Of het soms wil beter weten
Dan de meester, die ons leert,
Zal men later zich gewis
Dit verzuim vergeefs beklagen;
Wijl ook nog, in onze dagen,
’t Nette schrift een sieraad is.
Het goede voornemen
Als, in ’t kortste van de dagen,
Winter met zijn’ grijzen baard
Sneeuw en ijs heeft aangedragen,
Kruip ik bij den warmen haard;
En bij ’t koestren mijner leden,
Dank ik God, die, eindloos goed,
Mij zooveel gaf hier beneden,
Dat een ander derven moet.
Zou ik klagen, ontevreden,
Als de koude snerpend woedt,
Ik, die mij zoo warm kan kleeden,
Die zoo smaaklijk word gevoed?
Foei! dan zou ‘k mijn Schepper honen;
‘k Wil veeleer, in ’t bar saizoen,
Mijne erkentlijkheid betoonen,
Door aan armen wél te doen.
Robidé van der Aa (10 oktober 1791 – 14 mei 1851)
De Amerikaanse schrijver, zakenman en officier Kermit Roosevelt sr. Werd geboren op 10 oktober 1889 in Sagamore Hill in Oyster Bay, New York. Zie ook alle tags voor Kermit Roosevelt sr. op dit blog en ook mijn blog van 10 oktober 2010 en eveneens mijn blog van 10 oktober 2009.
Uit: War In The Garden Of Eden
“There are few things more desolate than even the best situated “rest-camps”—the long lines of tents set out with military precision, the trampled grass, and the board walks; but the one at Taranto where we awaited embarkation was peculiarly dismal even for a rest-camp. So it happened that when Admiral Mark Kerr, the commander of the Mediterranean fleet, invited me to be his guest aboard H.M.S. Queen until the transport should sail, it was in every way an opportunity to be appreciated. In the British Empire the navy is the “senior service,” and I soon found that the tradition for the hospitality and cultivation of its officers was more than justified. The admiral had travelled, and read, and written, and no more pleasant evenings could be imagined than those spent in listening to his stories of the famous writers, statesmen, and artists who were numbered among his friends. He had always been a great enthusiast for the development of aerial warfare, and he was recently in Nova Scotia in command of the giant Handley-Page machine which was awaiting favorable weather conditions in order to attempt the nonstop transatlantic flight. Among his poems stands out the “Prayer of Empire,” which, oddly enough, the former German Emperor greatly admired, ordering it distributed throughout the imperial navy! The Kaiser’s feelings toward the admiral have suffered an abrupt change, but they would have been even more hostile had England profited by his warnings:
“There’s no menace in preparedness, no threat in being strong,
If the people’s brain be healthy and they think no thought of wrong.”
After four or five most agreeable days aboard the Queen the word came to embark, and I was duly transferred to the Saxon, an old Union Castle liner that was to run us straight through to Busra.”
Kermit Roosevelt sr. (10 oktober 1889 – 4 juni 1943)
Portret door John Singer Sargent