Jill and Adrian Chatfield – Christmas Letter 2017

We have lost count of the number of conversations that we have had this year about what ‘retirement’ means, and the word grows more meaningless by the month! We don’t like the Portuguese ‘aposentado’ with its hints of ‘sitting down’ – not much chance of that! Our favourite is the Spanish ‘jubilado’ – from the Biblical idea of jubilee. You can work it out for yourselves.

Life on the street in Cotmanhay is such fun. We have no fence and a grassy space in front of the house, where we have had many brief and a few significant conversations about life, illness, death, God, sexuality, divorce and caravans. Both the Midlands context and the so-called working-class environment mean that people are refreshingly open and accept us for who we are, while being rightly cautious about deep trust. And as for worrying about the Oxbridge label, it’s been refreshing to be asked where Cambridge is.

The shape of the year has in some ways been determined by Jill’s Dad’s failing health. We came back a week early from French holidays because he’d fallen and been hospitalized. After rehab, everyone agreed that he was not strong or mobile enough to go back home, and he’s now living in a good care home in Carrington, a suburb of Nottingham. Suffice to say that he’s accepting of the change, but quite troubled, and struggles with life. We visit regularly, and are working hard to get him in his wheelchair to us for Boxing Day and for his 91^st birthday on 30^th December.

We helped out in St Nic’s in the centre of Nottingham until Easter, and made some good friends. Thank you! We are settled for now in a small and welcoming congregation at St Laurence, Heanor, part of a team of four churches in the exotic locations of Marlpool, Aldercar and Langley Mill. This too is part of settling into an area which is very close to where both of our families come from.

Jill has been volunteering with the chaplaincy team at A&E in the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham, and has now also been signed up as a bank chaplain. It remains to be seen how much call-out she will do: it’s taken an unconscionable length of time to be interviewed and do all the paperwork. Adrian, for his part, is busy with spiritual direction and conducting retreats. He’s currently taking bookings for 2019, and he and Jill are looking forward specially to leading the Advent retreat 2018 at Launde Abbey together.

We’ve had good breaks in Snowdonia and Nidderdale, as well as three excellent weeks caravanning in France. It was special, too, to go back to France at the end of September for Adrian’s niece wedding reception, and a great opportunity to catch up with his two sisters.

Adrian has taken to running in a big way, and has now completed 9 half-marathons and five marathons over the years. Jill goes regularly to the gym, and has added badminton to her range of exercise and sport. Her knees give her regular trouble, but it’s unpredictable and so she’s not yet sure how to take it forward.

Those of you who don’t know our family can skip this bit (!), but Michael and Helen are based now at RAF Odiham, with Michael currently on RAF placement in the Falkland Islands. So Helen, Hannah and Naomi fly out there to spend Christmas with him and the penguins. Hannah (17) is doing A Levels and applying to a range of universities including Cambridge, York and Nottingham. Naomi (15) is moving towards the GCSE season. Helen has stopped teaching, frustrated by political and bureaucratic pressures, and is now Youth Officer for her local churches.

Rachel continues as a senior occupational therapist in the NHS, with all the joys and sorrows of that organization. Dave has settled well into being a civil servant i.e. working for Broxtowe Borough Council as an electrician in their housing department. Charlotte (13) is in her third year of secondary school, so GCSE choices are around the corner, while Lucy (10) is having a final carefree (?) primary school year.

We love hearing from some of you, either by snail mail or through FB during the year, and receiving the annual letters. They are much appreciated. We do pray for many of you, and if you ever have something special you’d like us to pray for, you only have to ask. Our prayer in a troubled and unpredictable world is for integrity among our leaders and a reduction in corruption among the ruling castes of the nations. It’s a sombre time, and so we end with one of Malcolm Guite’s sonnets from his Sounding the Seasons, called simply ‘Refugee’:

We think of him as safe beneath the steeple,

Or cosy in a crib beside the font,

But he is with a million displaced people

On the long road of weariness and want.

For even as we sing our final carol

His family is up and on that road,

Fleeing the wrath of someone else’s quarrel,

Glancing behind and shouldering their load.

Whilst Herod rages still from his dark tower,

Christ clings to Mary, fingers tightly curled,

The lambs are slaughtered by the men of power,

And death squads spread their curse across the world.

But every Herod dies, and comes alone

To stand before the Lamb upon the throne.

Love and blessings to all

Jill and Adrian

Small change, rich story

When I arrived in Brazil in 1957, this was the smallest banknote, 1 cruzeiro, and it was worth about half a penny. There were millions of them in circulation; they were the small change for bus and tram travel, and they stank. I can still close my eyes and smell them. I have never seen a crisp one. I think they went out of circulation sometime before we left in 1964. By then, a pound was 5000 cruzeiros, so they were pretty useless!

It’s only in later life that I have stopped to look at the artwork, and it carries a fascinating story, of the ‘Brazilian Nelson’, commemorated here and in a coin from 1936. The figure on the obverse is Joaquim Marques Lisboa, Marquis of Tamandaré (1807-1897), an officer in the Brazilian navy at the time it was fighting for independence from Portugal. He eventually rose to the rank of Admiral. As Patron of the Navy to this day, a kind of secular saint, his birthday is observed as Sailors’ Day [Dia do Marinheiro].  

His Portuguese father was the port manager of Rio Grande, one of the most southerly ports in the country and state capital of Rio Grande do Sul from 1835 to 1845. He and his brother Henrique accompanied their father on his visits on board ships in port, which is presumably where he gained his love of ships and the sea. When he was seven, his brother enrolled in the Academia Real, and he joined the navy himself in 1822, the year of Brazil’s independence from Portugal. 

His first posting in 1823 was on the frigate Niterói, then under the command of the English mercenary James Norton. This itself is interesting, as the United Kingdom was in the 19th century very supportive of independence movements in South America, mainly because the Spanish Empire was a major natural competitor!  In this role, he took part in a number of battles, including one against the northeastern provinces [Bahia, Maranhão, Pará, Piauí e Cisplatina] which had remained loyal to Portugal.

He returned to Rio de Janeiro and joined the Naval Academy, there studying English among other subjects. Meanwhile, the War of Independence continued, with rebellions against the newly indepedent nation breaking out sporadically, notably the formation of an Equatorial Confederation [Confederação do Equador]. In July 1824, he fought against this group on Admiral Thomas Cochrane’s flagship Pedro Primeiro. Cochrane was yet another British mercenary naval officer. In February 1825, he was promoted to Second Lieutenant, at the tender age of 18. 

Further battles followed against those who sought to overthrow the fledgling monarchy, especially in the Regency after Dom Pedro I’s abdication in 1831.

By 1840 he was captain of a frigate, and in 1844 he was appointed commander of the Central Naval Region. In that role, he went to England to collect a new corvette, the Dom Afonso (the first under sail and steam in the navy), under orders from Dom Pedro II. In 1859, he was back in Europe again with his wife, recruiting sailors and technicians, and commissioning 10 cannons from French and British manufacturers. Not long afterwards, he was commander of the naval division that took the Emperor and his wife to Pernambuco, to the town of Tamandaré, where there had been an uprising.

As a result of this, in 1860 he received the title of Baron of Tamandaré, which appears on the banknote’s obverse. In 1864, he was deeply involved in the longest of Brazil’s 19th century wars, the Paraguayan War. Following this, he was promoted to Admiral, and twenty years later, became Count, then Marquis, receiving the Order of the Rose.

He was clearly a notable man, of great dignity. One biographer describes him as ‘of a humble personality, who mixed with the slaves who were liberated by the Golden Law’. In the 19th century, this marks him out as a person of astonishingly liberal values.

He was also a staunch monarchist. He stood beside the Emperor in 1889 at the age of 82 during the overthrow of the monarchy, and asked the Emperor’s permission to fight back against the insurgency. The emperor, however, refused, and went into exile in France. In his will Tamandaré comments that the Emperor died in exile without honour, so he would like to be buried without any military honours whatsoever, in a simple grave with the marker ‘Here lies the old sailor’.