For a garden. I found this in the weekly email from houzz.com, and was absolutely blown away. This is hands-down the most ugly, unusable, unpromising location for a garden … basically a square concrete cube, twenty feet down. And yet the designers pulled it off.
Whole story with pictures here – If there is some kind of contest for making a silken garden out of a concrete sow’s ear, these designers ought to get first prize.
The two brothers were the McCulloch brothers, Ben and Henry – and the twin sisters were a pair of six-pound cannon, which were sent by the citizens of Cincinnati to Texas at the start of the Texas War for Independence. The good citizens of Cincinnati were persuaded to support the rebellious Texans, and so raised the funds to have a pair of cannon manufactured at a local foundry and shipped down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and from thence by coastal schooner to Galveston, where they were presented to the representatives of the harried and scattered government of the Republic of Texas sometime around early April, 1836. A resolutely determined settler in Texas, Dr. Charles Rice had arrived on the same schooner, accompanied by his family – including a pair of twin daughters. This was too charming a coincidence to pass unnoticed – that the schooner had arrived with two pairs of twins, and so the pair of Cincinnati-cast and paid-for 6-pounders were christened ‘The Twin Sisters.’ By the time that they caught up to Sam Houston’s expeditiously-retreating army, temporarily camped at Groce’s Landing on the Brazos, they would be the only cannon possessed by said army. (All other artillery pieces had been captured at the Alamo or after the defeat of the Goliad garrison at Coleto creek, or dumped in the Guadalupe at Gonzales to lighten the retreat).
The McCulloch brothers, Ben and Henry, were the scions of the adventurous frontier McCulloch family – a fearless and much respected one, numbering among their acquaintances a very much younger Sam Houston (when he was a school-teacher in Tennessee for a brief time) and Davy Crockett – a close neighbor, who tutored Ben in hunting and wilderness skills. Restless and tired of eking out a living as a farmer, Ben planned to join Crockett’s party of Tennessee friends on their jaunt to Texas on Christmas day of 1835. His brother Henry planned to tag along – but one thing and another – mostly the temptations of rich hunting grounds along the way delayed the McCulloch brothers. Ben convinced his brother to return to Tennessee, while he hurried to catch up to his friend Crockett. Which he did, at Nacogdoches early in January, but was immediately sidelined with a case of the measles which kept him bed-ridden for weeks. By the time he recovered, it was too late; Davy Crockett and his Tennessee friends had made it as far as the Alamo. Somewhere along the line of Sam Houston’s cat-and-mouse retreat into East Texas, Henry McCulloch joined an army … for the first but assuredly not for the last time.
In the fullness of time, the pair of six-pound cannon trundled along with Sam Houston’s strategically retreating army. At San Jacinto, they anchored the center of Houston’s center – two ranks of hastily-drilled and raggedly-clad soldiers methodically advancing on General Lopez de Santa Anna’s somnolent camp in the thin heat of an April afternoon. A scratch crew of volunteer cannoneers attended the Twin Sisters – including Ben McCulloch. They kept up a furious rate of fire, so much so that they ran out of cannon-balls. Not very much deterred, the two crews loaded the Sisters with whatever they could reach – scrap iron, broken glass and handfuls of musket balls.
After the San Jacinto victory, the treasured pair were eventually shipped to the various new capital cities of Texas and used now and again to fire at celebrations and observances. Henry McCulloch joined his brother in Texas, alternating bouts of professional surveying with fighting Indians, exploring, terms of elected office, and terms as US marshals. Ben McCulloch never married, but Henry McCulloch did, siring a dozen children with his wife, and one wonders how he ever found the time or the energy.
Eventually, following upon Annexation to the United States, the Twin Sisters were incorporated into the Federal arsenal and for reasons unknown, removed to New Orleans. In 1860, anticipating that Texas would secede, Ben McCulloch (whom one would never have expected to be that sentimental) asked Sam Houston, then governor of Texas – to get them back. Sam Houston, undeniably sentimental – asked for their return from New Orleans. And so the Twin Sisters returned – just as the Civil War began in earnest. One had been sold for scrap, the other to a private citizen but they were retrieved from the foundry and the owner, and adorned with memorial plaques, courtesy of the state legislature of Louisiana.
Ben McCulloch, having fought in four different wars with three different armies (five if one counts various campaigns against the Comanche) – fell at Pea Ridge the next year. His brother served loyally as the commander of frontier defenses in Texas throughout the war – alternatingly defending against Indian raids, and chasing after deserters and bushwhackers all along the frontier. In spite of his strenuous life he lived to a respected old age and died of more or less natural causes.
But what happened to the Twin Sisters? No one really knows for certain. They were used to defend Galveston in 1863. Rip Ford, as commander of the Cavalry of the West sent for them before his last-gasp campaign against the Union forces in the Rio Grande Valley. They were supposedly being stored in Austin late in the war, but no one can say if they ever arrived. Some reports have them as being in a decayed and dangerous condition – more a hazard to their crews than to the enemy. Some say that they were buried secretly after the Confederate surrender – hidden away somewhere in the cities of Houston or Harrisburg, or perhaps dumped into deep water. It’s an enduring mystery – and some historians even wonder if the pair returned from Louisiana with all due ceremony in 1861 were the original Twin Sisters anyway.
From the temple of Poseidon at Sunion, Greece
Never mind about the romance and all … dumpy and rather plain fifteen-year-olds, cursed with glasses and metal braces – still have a wistful affection for romance. Even if the prospective hero is at first meeting grumpy and impatient – even slightly mysterious. Someday, my fifteen-year old self hoped – I would go to Greece, or the South of France, although the romance part was perhaps a little bit too much to hope for.
And I did – but that is another story. At any rate, she and Rosemary Sutcliffe were among the first writers that I came back to, over and over – because of the way that they wrote about a place; every leaf and tree and flower of it. I would like to think that I have taken some lessons from them, or at least had their very good example before me when I began to write about specific places.
We have carried on with watching Upstairs, Downstairs – warming up to it every evening with a half-hour palate cleanser of Blandings … which reminds me, I must steer my daughter towards those copies of PG Wodehouse which I have on the shelves, and my volume of the collected works of Saki, otherwise HH Munro … a writer of short stories only equal in my estimation to Rudyard Kipling … whose collections I also have on the shelves. Yes, HH Munro died in WWI, and so did Kipling’s only son, John. One was in his forties and over-aged for the military combat duties, the other seventeen and a trifle young for it … but they both rushed to join the forces, such was the tone of the time. (Munro turned down a commission and served in the ranks, John Kipling’s influential father wrangled his near-sighted son a commission in the Irish Guards.)
This once-proud and forward-thinking world and it’s brutal disillusion is reflected in the current series of Upstairs, Downstairs – first, the tenor of the time, of optimistic patriotism, outrage at German brutality in Belgium and France, the honestly-felt obligation to serve King and country … and then shading into war-weariness and despair, as the casualties mounted, up and up and up. England, France, Germany and Russia were gutted of a whole generation of men – some time in college (or maybe it was a grad school course) there was reason in one of my textbooks for a couple of tables of statistics for males by age in certain Western European countries. There was a considerable divot when it came to the male population of certain countries who would have been of an age to serve in WWI. That was statistics on a page; brought home now and again by the local war memorials in various towns all across Britain, France and Germany – a small stone obelisk in a corner of the town square, or a panel let into the side of a wall, with fifteen or twenty names on it. Heartbreakingly – especially in smaller places – there would be a couple or three identical surnames. Brothers, fathers and sons, cousins … the only wartime losses in the US to equal the English toll in WWI had happened fifty years before, in the Civil War, when local companies went down in sheaves like wheat under the scythe, in a storm of shot where the minie balls came down like hail, and there went just all about the fit men of age from some small town in Illinois, or Virginia, Vermont or Ohio, in some contested field – a sunken road, a wheat-field, a peach orchard or an angle of trench.
In Upstairs, Downstairs, this carnage all happens off-stage. It was a television program after all – and even if by Season Four it was a winner in the popularity stakes, additional budget largess went to more scenes set on location, rather than the studio set, and rather better costuming for the female characters. I have not noticed so many eye-blindingly awful selections with obvious zippers up the back as there were in the first two seasons. It is telling, though – that the fashion for rather more practical and shorter skirts for every-day wear is quite obvious, although the older generation, exemplified by Lady Pru resolutely keeps to toe-length, and Mrs. Bridges holds on to the old-style of dress, apron and cap. The sun will never set on Mrs. Bridges in a hair-net and a knee-length dress.
James is a total and self-centered jerk … but there must have been something to him, else why would Hazel ever have seen something to him, and stuck around? Perhaps she was just out of her mind for a couple of months in 1912 or so. Poor Rose missed her chance of domestic happiness – kick and scream as she must, she’ll be the rest of her life in service. Hudson still holds up his end – although as blind as a bat himself, he had a go at volunteering for the Army. And there we stand, with four or five more episodes and the final season – the one which I never actually saw, since I was in the military myself and overseas when it aired on PBS the first time around.
Yes … striking, isn’t it? About a dozen other vendors came up during the course of the day to admire it, ask where we had gotten it, compliment us on how eye-catching it was, or to ask our opinion on it’s durability and functionality.
The rack for the origami earrings is a show rack for energy drinks, which we bought for $3 at a yard sale and repainted and modified for use. It very much reduced the containers and displays needed to transport them.
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