Anthrow Circus

Tag: England

Sitting in Beauty: How Choral Music Made Me Less Lonely

WORDS & IMAGES BY CALLIE RADKE STEVENS

Behind the steeple of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, clouds gathered and boiled, preparing for a storm or a show or something wild, surely. I zipped my coat all the way up as my husband and I picked our way down the narrow street.

I was determined to see at least a little bit of the city before we had to drive an hour south to where I was doing grad school research. This was Dublin, after all. We were there, and we had limited time. We had to see it. My husband, on the other hand, was tired and cranky and being exasperating. I was also tired and cranky, but I was going to have a good time. I was going to see the city. He was being annoying.

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Tracing the History of the Barbados Martindales, Part 3

TEXT AND IMAGES BY ELEANOR MARTINDALE

At the end of Part 2, we learned of Martindales who survived against the odds in Barbados.

A 1679 census shows a John Marting (an abbreviation for Martingdale, a common misspelling of our name) owning 10 acres, one slave, and no servants in the St. James Parish of Barbados. This John was the grandson of John Sr., from Part 1 of this tale, and 10 acres is the same amount of land his grandfather owned in 1638. In 40 years, the Martindales had not expanded their farm, nor sold up. It seems they had simply stayed put for three generations.

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Tracing the History of the Barbados Martindales, Part 2

TEXT AND IMAGES BY ELEANOR MARTINDALE

Picking up where we left off in Part 1 of this tale, upon discovering these early Barbados Martindales, I began picturing the lives of 17th century European settlers in the Caribbean, and the literature scholar in me couldn’t help but turn to Shakespeare. The Tempest was written during John Martindale Sr.’s lifetime and epitomizes a popular vision of a faraway, exotic island, uninhabited apart from strange spirits and magical creatures. Shakespeare, who probably never traveled outside of England and certainly never went to the Caribbean, used the collective imagination of his time to set the scene of a wondrous lush, green land with wild, fearful wind and waves.

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Tracing the History of the Barbados Martindales, Part 1

STORY BY ELEANOR MARTINDALE

Like so many retired people, my dad, Peter, has spent the past few years “doing the family tree.” He’s spent hours on genealogy websites, downloading baptism certificates and wills from archives that go back generations, looking out for matches with unusual names, coming up against wall after wall and dismantling them brick by brick, name by name.
In a sense, our family is easier than some—at least through the paternal line. Our surname, Martindale, is fairly unusual, and my dad has worked our line back to a Rowland Martindale who died in 1660 in Cumbria, in the northwest of England.

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Seagull, a Summer Remembered

STORY BY LAURA JACQUOTTET

“Mum, are we nearly there?” we whine for the five-hundredth time. A tired car, and an even more tired dad, turns off the main road and attacks the last leg of the journey along narrower and narrower high-hedged country lanes down to the familiar holiday home on the rugged coastline of England’s Cornwall.

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View From a Pandemic: Masked Protests

PHOTOS AND TEXT BY TUNDE ALABI-HUNDEYIN II, CÉSAR ARREDONDO, AND SYLVIA ASARE

In this “year of the pandemic,” every big news story of 2020 takes place against the backdrop of the pandemic, a reality that affects these events in ways sometimes obvious and sometimes not yet clear. Protests in the United States over police violence dominated world news cycles this summer. But like the pandemic, the protests didn’t stop at national borders. In this article, we bring you observations in word and image from correspondents of differing nationalities who witnessed protests in Brighton, England, and in Los Angeles and Paris. Their reports remind us that protests over police violence have been a worldwide story taking place in the midst of a pandemic, an event that—as our View From a Pandemic series shows—has tied humanity together in a common struggle. Together we are humans combatting a microscopic virus as well as jointly fighting the universal disease of prejudice against people who are different from us.

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