Memories of Elsewere: The Secret Square, by James Carson

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By James Carson

About ten years ago, I was sitting at my desk, and longing for an end to the working week.  As a distraction from boredom, I lost myself in my computer’s wallpaper.

Wallpaper is a very personal preference. Some people choose images of their family, others prefer football or food, the Crab Nebula or Justin Bieber. I’m more inclined towards places that stir old memories, or locations that can make new ones.

In those days, my wallpaper of choice featured a small, cobblestoned square, enclosed by lovely old buildings painted in lemon and terracotta. In the foreground, a jaunty little flag hung from a sturdy stone wall, emblazoned with a single word: Bibliotek.

The image had a magnetic quality, something that beckoned me into the space, and away from the tedium of office life. I had no idea where it was, but I allowed myself the fantasy of visiting this place. I could imagine savouring the atmospheric light and the stillness of the square, exploring the public library, and capturing the scene with my own photographs.

A few years later, I took a trip to Stockholm. Civilised, organised, full of interest, Sweden’s capital city was instantly appealing. The Gamla Stan – Stockholm’s impossibly handsome old  town  – seduced me with its treasury of architecture and alluring alleyways. 

It was here, with great anticipation, that I turned a corner and entered a place that, until then, had been just a photograph on my computer screen. A bit of internet sleuthing had helped me locate it, and now here I was in the square called Tyska Stallplan.

It was oddly exhilarating. But the pleasure of finally achieving a longstanding ambition quickly melted away.

The morning light had failed to penetrate the square. Alone in the gloom, I saw that one of the buildings was smothered in plastic sheeting, and the wall at the rear of the square was adulterated by graffiti. The little library flag was missing, and so was the library.

What to make of this? Had I been deceived by a skilful photographer’s sleight of hand? Was anticipation really the better part of pleasure? 

The truth is I’d forgotten that over time all places undergo subtle and substantial change.

A little more digging unearthed the story of this modest space. Beneath the cobbles of Tyska Stallplan are the vaults of the Blackfriars Monastery. It was built in the fourteenth century, scarcely a hundred years after the name of Stockholm first appeared in any historical record. The Dominican friary proved its resilience through pestilence, fire, and siege. But its luck ran out during the Swedish reformation, when King Gustav Vasa had it destroyed. The outline of the monastery walls can still be seen in the layout of the cobblestones.

By the eighteenth century, the square was surrounded by stables. These, along with a nearby German school, gave Tyska Stallplan the name it retains to this day: German Stable Square.

As for the public library, its fate was sealed by declining numbers of visitors. The collection was moved to a more central location in 2013.

Nowhere stays the same. The picture on my computer screen captured a fleeting moment in the life of this age-old place. Since my visit, the scene will have shifted again, the plastic sheeting removed, the graffiti washed away. As winter turns to spring, it won’t be long until the bare trees on Tyska Stallplan are again in full leaf.

A virus with a diameter of one ten thousandth of a millimetre has changed our way of life, including our freedom to travel. But even when things return to normal, few travellers will be beating a path to this ordinary little square in Stockholm. That’s understandable. Yet, just because places like Tyska Stallplan go unnoticed, they needn’t be disregarded.

For those willing to take a closer look, this secret square has a tale to tell.

***

James Carson is a writer from Glasgow. His work has appeared in various magazines, including From Glasgow to Saturn, The Skinny and ExBerliner, and his stories have also been selected for anthologies such as Streets of Berlin, Tip Tap Flat and A Sense of Place.

A day at the opera

By James Carson:

It started badly. At the box office, the charmless young woman could barely have dispensed our tickets with less grace had she pelted us with them. When I asked where the tour began she mumbled something inaudible. I asked again, and she released an impatient sigh.

”Ten minutes! You have to wait there!”

She was pointing behind us, to a vestibule that was devoid of character, illumination and, most importantly, seating.

Robert glared at the woman, a familiar venom in his eyes. After a lifetime in hospitality, my other half has developed a pathological intolerance for bad service.

“There’s nowhere to sit,” he told her. But she had already moved on to not serving the next visitor. 

The bleak foyer was a chilly prospect. We returned to the sweltering streets and found a bench in front of the theatre.

Sited between the Plaza de Oriente and the Plaza Isabel II, the Teatro Real occupies perhaps the finest piece of real estate in Madrid. The theatre has a majestic view of the Royal Palace and is embraced by elegant apartments with filigree balconies, and flowerbeds bursting with colour.

For the next ten minutes we baked beneath the midday sun, listening to the bluesy meanderings of a busking saxophonist. In the middle distance, a fake matador was posing for selfies with tourists. Every now and then, he gave his cape an exaggerated swish.

When we returned to the vestibule, there was still no sign of our guide, and the box office was also deserted. We had a look in the theatre’s shop: DVDs, CDs, scarves decorated with dancing treble clefs, mugs with mugshots of composers. I bought a couple of bookmarks. It was now nearly an hour after the scheduled start of the tour.  We returned to the vestibule and waited disconsolately.

Finally, a woman wearing a long, floral skirt and a frilly, dark blouse appeared. She looked to be in her seventies; small, smiley, full of life, she introduced herself as Hortencia. We were the only ones on the tour, and when she heard we were from Scotland, she beamed. “A great country, “ she trilled, “I love it!” Robert nodded wordlessly. It was going to take more than a bit of tartan-trimmed soft soaping to defrost his nuclear winter. 

She led us to a small elevator and we squeezed in. Hortencia gave a puckish grin: “First, I’m going to take you to Paradise.” We glided up in silence, and as the doors opened, Hortencia led us into the auditorium.

Traditionally, the ‘gods’ of a theatre contain the cheapest, most uncomfortable seats. The ones here in ’Paradise’ certainly looked a tight fit, something confirmed by one dyspeptic online critic who also had a go at the central heating: “Ok for dwarves with hypothermia.”

From this lofty vantage point, there was a fine view of the stage.  An empty theatre is a joyless place. But even in the half darkness, it wasn’t hard to imagine the expectant buzz of an audience in their finery, the orchestra tuning up, a mezzo soprano hovering nervously in the wings

Our eyes were drawn upwards to a glistening chandelier which, Hortencia informed us, came from the royal crystal factory at La Granja. Robert was about to take a photograph, but Hortencia intervened: no pictures allowed in the auditorium. Robert bristled:  “In that case, why is she allowed?” He was pointing to a woman down in the stalls, merrily snapping the red seats, the gilded balconies, and that magnificent chandelier. Hortencia frowned and shook her head sadly. “It is not allowed.”

I’ve never understood the photophobia of some tourist attractions.  At best, it’s a barrier to a bit of free publicity; at worst it can spoil the whole visit. Once, in Berlin’s Helmut Newton Museum, I was about to snap the great man’s silver-blue jeep when a supervisor barked at me: Kein fotografie!” I could have stopped to explain to him the irony of a photography ban in a photography museum; instead, I silently christened him the Stasi bastard and moved on.

Back at the Teatro Real, Hortencia was explaining how an opera house works. This was more interesting than it should have been, mainly because she used a cute little model of the building to demonstrate the lifts and pulleys deployed when changing the scenery. From the outside, the Teatro Real seems to occupy a modest space, in contrast to the sprawling opera houses of Vienna and Paris. But what it lacks in girth it makes up for in the inventive use of its vertical space, with 18 overlying platforms allowing scene changes in seconds.

Hortencia led us downstairs and onto the theatre’s external balcony with its superb view of the palace and the Almudena cathedral. 

“I’m going to give you some dates that you won’t remember,” she said, and gave us a potted history of the theatre that mirrored the story of modern Spain itself: construction, damage, decay, reinvention, restoration. 

One date I did retain, mainly because it was plastered in big white figures on a red banner above us, was 1818: the year when King Fernando VII decided Madrid had waited long enough for an opera house to match those in the other great capitals of Europe. 

After a lot of stopping and starting, the Teatro Real finally opened in 1850, and quickly attracted the world’s great operatic performers. But after just 75 years the curtain fell when work on the nearby metro station afflicted the theatre’s foundations. 

For much of the early twentieth century, the Teatro Real was a forlorn shell, treated with indignity and disrespect. During the civil war, it was a storage depot for munitions, and shortly after General Francisco Franco took control in Madrid, an explosion destroyed the interior. 

During the 1960s, the Teatro Real was rebuilt as a concert hall. On YouTube, a grainy film of the opening night shows General Franco, arriving in evening dress, accompanied by his wife. A few steps behind, there’s a young crown prince Juan Carlos looking seriously uncomfortable.

An aerial view of the theatre uncovers something unexpected: the Teatro Real is a coffin, a perfectly formed hexagon. In reality, this casket for the dead is a music box where audiences across the centuries have been brought to life by the sounds of Stravinsky and Verdi, Carmen and Aida.

And - unlikely as it may seem - the Teatro Real occupies a curious place in Eurovision history. In 1969, the song contest was staged here.  At the time, this was a big deal for Spain, which many western European countries still regarded as a fascist dictatorship. Spanish television used the competition as a golden PR opportunity, and recruited Salvador Dalí, no less, to design the stage. The surrealism spilled over to the final result, when four countries received the highest number of votes. With no provision for breaking a quadruple tie, Spain’s moment of Eurovision glory ended on a flat note.

Six years later, Franco was dead, triggering a remarkable transformation of the country’s political and cultural life. Hortencia explained that the Teatro Real was not immune to the winds of change sweeping a newly-democratic Spain. “The Socialist government wanted to show its cultural credentials, and they decided to rebuild the Teatro Real as a world class opera house.” 

We were now in the Cafe del Palacio a swish restaurant with shiny marble floors and carved Lebanese cedar-wood. 

Hortencia pointed to the walls, where framed remnants of the old auditorium hung alongside the heavy costumes singers had to wear in the 19th century. 

“Today, singers also have to act, sometimes to dance across the stage, and so the costumes have to be lighter.” She told us about recent productions, including a Philip Glass opera on the life of Walt Disney. Robert sniffed. “I prefer more traditional operas.” 

“Me too,” said Hortencia, and recalled a memorable performance of The Magic Flute at La Scala.  And with that, the thaw was on. Robert can be grumpy, and sometimes frustratingly stubborn. But his heart is as big as the sky, and whenever he encounters sincerity, he’ll always reach out to find common ground. I left them happily discussing their favourite operas, the genius of Pavarotti, unforgettable nights at the Met and Covent Garden. 

I wandered into one of the public salons where audiences can mingle during performance intervals. In the spirit of the new democracy, it was stipulated that these rooms should be open to all, not just the great and the good. The salons have been tastefully restored, with deep and sumptuous carpets, woven from Castilian merino wool, La Granja chandeliers and portraits of King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia, who opened the restored Teatro Real in 1997.

Our final stop was the royal box, where I resisted the urge to give a regal wave to the technicians on the stage. Hortencia shook our hands and smiled uncertainly:  “I hope it wasn’t too boring for you.”

We returned to the summer afternoon, joining laid back  Madrileños and sunburnt tourists. 

From a cafe nearby came the sounds of a city at ease: the clink of glass on glass, the sizzle of paella, the hum of conversation. 

We lingered to listen as two guitarists set about their instruments with passion and intimidating skill. In the shadow of the Teatro Real, they were playing their very souls out, as if to convey that a life without music is no life at all.

***
James Carson is a writer from Glasgow. His work has appeared in various magazines, including From Glasgow to Saturn, The Skinny and ExBerliner, and his stories have also been selected for anthologies such as Streets of Berlin, Tip Tap Flat and A Sense of Place.

Life and Death and the Walls of Weetabix: A walk up Glasgow's High Street

By James Carson:

It’s best to stop at the lights. With traffic coming from all directions, the slightest trip could put me in hospital. But it’s too long a wait for one young lad, who strikes out for the other side, ignoring the blitz of angry beeps. Beside me, a baldy bloke with hairy ears glares at the youngster, who’s now happily powering up High Street.

“Obviously trying to make a statement,” he says, eyebrows twitching. “And the statement is he’s a dickhead.”

I’m at Glasgow Cross, once the bustling centre of a medieval burgh. Today, the fish and cloth traders of old are long gone, replaced by pubs and pawnbrokers, chip shops and bookies. 

It’s the last day of winter. Tonight, the golden hands on the face of the old tolbooth clock tower will be wound forward into British Summer Time. As ever, Mother Nature is one step ahead. This afternoon, Glasgow is wearing her spring collection: a cloak of yellow sunlight, with matching cerulean sky, accessorised by feathery white clouds.

To the south of Glasgow Cross lie Saltmarket and the River Clyde; to the east is Glasgow Green – the city’s oldest park. And westward is Argyle Street, a place of pilgrimage for those who worship at the church of St Marks (and Spencer). But today I’m heading north, up High Street. It’s a road well-travelled; I often use it as a shortcut when I’m in a hurry. Today I’m taking my time.

The 120-foot clock tower at Glasgow Cross was once attached to the tolbooth, a multipurpose building whose functions included town hall, jail and reading room. Perhaps most importantly, the tolbooth was a gathering place, a stage for the mercantile glitterati to see and be seen. It was built in 1626, the same year as the finishing touches were being put to the new St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. But while St Peter’s endures, Glasgow’s tolbooth was demolished in the 1920s, one of many fine buildings the city fathers have sacrificed to the wrecking ball. Only the slender clock tower remains, marooned on its own little island as Glasgow flows around it.

History is in the stones of this quarter, and in the street names: Brunswick Street recalls the House of Hanover; Blackfriars Street is named after an order of Dominican priests who founded a church near here in 1248.

High Street gets its name from the High Kirk, better known today as Glasgow Cathedral, which crowns the top of the street. If this were Bordeaux, say, or Zagreb, this quarter would be known as ‘The Old Town’, with quirky little shops selling vegan shortbread, clock tower fridge magnets and inflatable kilts made in China. There would be restaurants with buxom wenches in authentic medieval smocks, serving authentic medieval haggis. A historical tramcar would jangle its way up and down the street, ferrying tourists from Baltimore and Brisbane. 

On the lower reaches of High Street, the vibe is very different from this imagined world. People are doing Saturday afternoon things: football fans on their way to the match, students brunching on sausage rolls. There’s a Turkish restaurant (“opening soon”), a pub (closed), a charity shop (closed down), a bedding store, another pub, student flats and another pub.

Actually, not just another pub. A sign outside declares it to be Glasgow’s oldest, dating from 1515. This is a bit of creative PR on the part of the owner. The bar actually dates from the 19th century, although its shabby appearance wouldn’t look out of place in The Flintstones.

The pub may be nothing to look at, but its neighbour is a real beauty. With a two-storey step gable and a gorgeous little domed canopy (a tempietto, if you please), the former British Linen Bank building is like an exotic fusion of Amsterdam townhouse and Mughal temple. It stands now in solitary confinement, badly in need of some TLC.

In fact, this whole stretch of High Street feels rundown, although little shops are doing their best to cheer things up (“The Best Steak Pie in Glasgow!”). It’s possible that Billy Connolly was thinking of this very spot when he once mused that if a nuclear bomb ever fell on Glasgow, no-one would notice the difference afterwards. Since the Big Yin made that observation, much of the centre of Glasgow has been given a makeover, morphing from industrial relic to Barcelona of the north. Decades of grime were removed from civic buildings and a constellation of starchitects sprinkled the city with their fairy dust.

It’s been an impressive transition, and Glasgow has somehow managed to achieve it while retaining its essential character. It’s a city that can celebrate the great works by Van Gogh and Dali displayed in its galleries, while simultaneously applauding the artistic genius who used the medium of spray paint to declare that “Boris Johnson is a pure fanny.”

The final section of High Street curves round towards Cathedral Square. There are lots of empty properties here, but also a cluster of new-age businesses, dispensing everything from aromatherapy to tarot card readings. And there’s an off-licence, so if the cards say your future’s not looking rosy, you can quickly hit the rosé.

Above the shops, sturdy tenements in red sandstone lend an air of dignity to the street. If Toulouse is La Ville Rose, and Aberdeen is the Granite City, then Glasgow is simply red. The russet colour features strongly in tenements all over the city. They’re made from an iron-rich building material that dates back nearly 300 million years, when Scotland was covered by a vast desert. The same colour can be seen today in the sands of the Sahara that are sometimes carried by dust storms to fall on Glasgow as ‘blood rain’.

The vision of Glasgow Cathedral at the top of High Street is an uplifting moment. It was built between the 12th and 15th centuries, and is the only mainland Scottish cathedral to have survived the Reformation intact. The interior has soaring gothic arches and sublime stained glass. Below, the tomb of Glasgow’s sixth century founder, St Mungo, underlines its historical resonance. When it was completed, Pope Nicholas V declared that a pilgrimage to Glasgow Cathedral was the equal of one to Rome. It’s fabulously beautiful. 

Across the square, the Museum of Religious Life and Art is less so. Opened in 1993, it was intended to blend in with its venerable surroundings, but doesn’t quite get there. The exterior walls seem to have been crafted from breakfast cereal (it’s known locally as Fort Weetabix), and there’s a Disneyfied attempt at a bishop’s castle. The whole effect is less medieval masterpiece, more product of the muddle ages. I could spend the rest of the afternoon exploring its exhibits, but I’m enjoying the warmth of the sun on my face. It’s time to walk among the dead.

Glasgow’s Necropolis occupies a hill overlooking the cathedral, with panoramic views across the city. I feel at peace among the tended plots, but I’m not alone. The place is teeming with tombstone tourists, with voices from France and Germany, Poland and America.

Here, every stone tells a story; different circumstances, but always the same ending. Death at war, at sea, and all too often, in childbirth. Most of the permanent residents here are from well-heeled Victorian and Edwardian families – merchants and magnates, aristocrats and knights of the realm. But there are surprises, too: a Polish freedom fighter, the matriarch of a Gypsy dynasty; the first woman to graduate in medicine from Glasgow University. Even in a graveyard as grand as this, there are no answers to existential questions. Only an eternal verity: life goes on until, at some point, it doesn’t.

From up here, I can retrace my afternoon walk. I’ve only covered about half a mile, but I’ve reached across the centuries. It was the medieval High Street that nourished the relationship between the cathedral’s community at one end and the market traders at the other. Which is why, for all its faults, this stretch of land retains a special place in the city’s history and heart: no High Street, no Glasgow.

***

James Carson is a writer from Glasgow. His work has appeared in various magazines, including From Glasgow to Saturn, The Skinny and ExBerliner, and his stories have also been selected for anthologies such as Streets of Berlin, Tip Tap Flat and A Sense of Place.

Motzstrasse

By James Carson:

On a warm autumn night, I ordered a beer at a bar in the Schöneberg district of Berlin. On one of the plasma screens positioned behind the bar, Danny Kaye was duetting with Kermit the Frog. On another, a different coupling was in progress between a half-naked firefighter and a young man with a hunger for a half-naked firefighter. A third screen was advertising forthcoming events: Leather Pride, Halloween, Christmas. Before long, another year would have passed into memory.

In a city freighted with history, Schöneberg carries the weight of the past with a rare delicacy. A few blocks from the bar, the art nouveau U-Bahn station on Wittenbergplatz is a testament to Berlin’s imperial heritage, and to its 19th century transformation from  “a dingy city in a marsh” – as Mark Twain put it – to “ the Chicago of Europe.“

Next to the station, an understated sign displays the names of  Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dachau and the other prison camps where millions were murdered. Many of them began their hellish journeys at Wittenbergplatz.

Further south, the sandstone city hall of Schöneberg was the location for John F Kennedy’s famous speech, in which – depending on who you believe – the President of the United States may or may not have proclaimed himself to be a jam doughnut.

This well-heeled quarter is an architectural Irish stew. Gründerzeit apartments, sporting preposterously ornate balconies, rub shoulders with plainer post-war facades painted in unexpected flavour combinations of aubergine and custard, beetroot and lime. Modern, glass-fronted hotels share the streets with antique stores, booksellers and sex shops. The famous names attached to Schöneberg are as diverse as the landscape: Helmut Newton, David Bowie, the Brothers Grimm.

It’s in this multifaceted neighbourhood that I found myself on a still, September night. Like many a gay bar from Brisbane to Baltimore, this one had a cross section of clientele: locals and tourists, the handsome and the hopeful, the deluded and the desperate.

A low buzz of conversation – punctuated by the occasional grunt escaping from the darkroom – was overlaid by a soundtrack of Europop. The barman conveyed quiet authority, his burly figure contained by a leather harness that was less of a fashion accessory, more a work of civil engineering.

I was embarking on my second beer when the cops arrived. Two, then four, then half a dozen police officers entered the small bar, and paused to survey the scene. Hello, I thought, it’s somebody's birthday, and I sat back to enjoy the show. I had to hand it to them: they looked the real deal, right down to their off-yellow uniforms and don’t-fuck-with-us expressions.

They fanned out, resting glances on clots of men around the bar. From somewhere, a wolf whistle was followed by a snigger. One of the cops caught my gaze, then released it before heading into the darkroom. The occupants must have thought Christmas had come early.  

Two officers were stationed at the door. One nudged the other and gestured in the direction of the plasma screen, where the firefighter was no longer merely half-naked. The cop’s mate gave a little smirk.

The lights went up, Sophie Ellis-Bextor was cut off in her track and the show began. I looked on as the police did their thing: asking questions, taking names. The years fell away.

During the 1920s, Berlin was a magnet for people in search of the freedom to be themselves. In Motzstrasse, Marlene Dietrich performed at The Eldorado club, where men dressed in lace frocks and called themselves Letty and Countess Marina. A few streets away, Christopher Isherwood chronicled a decade of decadence in the company of Sally Bowles and an assortment of male playmates. Beyond Schöneberg, more than 100 Berlin bars, cafes and clubs welcomed homosexuals, lesbians, transvestites, and any curious souls open to the idea of difference as a way of life.

The new era of tolerance extended to wider society. In print, on the stage and on the cinema screen, gay men and lesbians began to emerge from the shadows. And in medicine, a pioneering physician, Magnus Hirschfeld, attempted a better scientific understanding of homosexuality.

While some regarded Berlin as enlightened, others viewed it as degenerate and perverse. By the beginning of the 1930s more bars were being raided by the police. Names were taken, arrests were made and most bars were closed. A fortunate few, like Christopher Isherwood and Magnus Hirschfeld, escaped the worst. Hirschfeld’s library was an early victim of the Nazi book burning frenzy.

Homosexual men now lived in fear. Affection and affectation became incriminating acts. A gesture or a look could lead to the concentration camp. Once there, inmates were ‘re-educated’, through slave labour, castration and horrific forms of surgical experimentation. Almost two-thirds of the 50,000 homosexual men sent to the prison camps died there.

I approached the barman who was grimly observing the police as they checked ID cards.  “Is it drugs?” I asked, in a low voice. He rewarded me with a look that Berliners hold in special reserve for imbeciles, and nodded towards an ashtray on the bar.

As quickly as they’d arrived, the cops were gone. The soundtrack resumed, accompanied by a chorus of resentment.  

“They made us feel like criminals!” said one aggrieved voice. “Yeah, said another, “You can smoke dick in here, but you get treated like shit for a fucking cigarette!” I’d never answered tobacco’s siren call. It was this that had spared me a brush with the law.

Today, The Eldorado is a supermarket, with a photograph of Marlene Dietrich at the door, and further down the street, the Hirschfeld pharmacy is named in remembrance of an early champion of gay rights. On nearby Nollendorfstrasse, a plaque outside Isherwood’s apartment offers a reminder that these storied streets are where Cabaret was born. And at Nollendorfplatz, a triangle carved in pink marble remembers the homosexual victims of a regime that promised to make Germany great again.

It was business as usual when I returned to the bar the following evening. Except now there was a hand-scrawled note taped to the door:

NO SMOKING – BY ORDER OF THE GOVERNMENT

***
James Carson is a writer from Glasgow. His work has appeared in various magazines, including From Glasgow to Saturn, The Skinny and ExBerliner, and his stories have also been selected for anthologies such as Streets of Berlin, Tip Tap Flat and A Sense of Place.