Occasionally, when the wind is in the right direction, you can hear a train whistle, when it enters the tunnel, which goes underneath Mount Sion from the station. Today in the rain, the sound comes across as a mournful cry rather than a whistle.
A pigeon and a squirrel occupy for a moment or two the same stretch of fence. The squirrel pursues the pigeon, which, after a tame waddle, takes off.
In Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper's book Paris after the Liberation, I read about a production in Paris of Tennessee William's play A Street Car Named Desire, called, in French Un Tramway nomme desire, in November 1949. To convey a sweltering, hot summer night, the play opens to the sound of crickets, but the crickets, not helped by the absence of heating in the fuel shortage of that winter, had a hard job to convince the freezing audience.
2 comments:
I rememebr going to a production of The Wild Duck during the Miners' Stike in the seventies. During a power cut the play continued by candlelight. The Line "Ah beautiful dawn - see how bright - it lifts my spirits," fell rather flat.
There's an account somewhere of a production of King Lear at the Old Vic during an air raid in World War 2. John Guilgood, as Lear, got a special round of applause when, in the storm scene, he came to the words:
And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world,
Crack nature's moulds, all germens
spill at once,
That make ingrateful man.
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