By HILARY GAVIN
I’D forgotten how gripping old movies and telly shows can be until I re-played the first series and beginning of the second series of Shetland on BBC iPlayer over the weekend.
Now, I’m not sure why the BBC decided to feature crime writer Ann Cleeves’s third novel Red Bones in Series One of Shetland in 2013 because it seems she introduced DI Jimmy Perez to her readers in her debut novel Raven Black.
And it was this dark, brooding story Raven Black screened over the first two episodes of Series Two of Shetland, and starring the brilliant Scots actor Douglas Henshall, that caught my attention on Saturday whilst I was simply pottering about at home.
Being the ignoramus I am, I’d never heard of the Raven Paradox, or Hempel’s Paradox, before Googling “Moral Raven Black” this morning and discovering a new line of philosophical inquiry proposed by Carl Hempel that I’d never previously contemplated.
I’d also had no idea that university students and academics across the globe have pored over and dissected Ann Cleeves’s crime novels for lengthy journals, books and papers because I simply watched the BBC series with my sister for enjoyment.
According to online reports, Ann Cleeves doesn’t consider writing crime novels to be a job, but more of a hobby, however, as she doesn’t make this admission herself in her website biography at anncleeves.com, I’ll take it with a pinch of salt.
Ann’s biography page makes fascinating reading, though, and – if you can click on the link to the featured Daily Mail You Magazine profile of her by journalist Sam Baker in 2023 – you’ll discover that she likes to know “what makes people tick”.
You’ll also discover that Ann, who was born in Herefordshire seventy-odd years ago, dropped out of Sussex University because she felt she didn’t fit in with the trendy “posh” undergraduates who sat around drinking wine and discussing poetry.
And as she goes on to explain in the You Magazine interview she believes that murders are often banal. As she explains: “‘I met killers when I was a probation officer and they’re usually boring ineffectual men who, for instance, killed their wife because she got on their nerves when they were drunk. Few are planned in advance.’ “
Which brings me back to the Raven, or Hempel’s Paradox (see my AI screengrabs below) and the seemingly “creepy” Shetland island recluse Magnus Tait, played masterfully by the maddeningly talented A-list actor Brian Cox, in Raven Black.
As you can see from the AI screengrab summary above, it says “in essence the phrase ‘moral raven’s paradox’ encapsulates the novel’s core elements: the ominous presence of the raven, the exploration of morality within a community, and the potentially misleading nature of appearances.”
Now, I wouldn’t want to spoil the storyline of Raven Black for those of you who haven’t read the 2006 crime novel or watched the two-part episodes in Series Two of the BBC crime show on iPlayer, but it begins when the body of a sixteen-year-old girl called Catherine Ross is discovered in a field with ravens circling overhead.
Suffice to say that detective DI Jimmy Perez and his team’s subsequent police investigations expose deeply ingrained prejudices which are misguidedly held as unquestionable truths by the members of the close-knit rural community.
If you’re like me, you soon begin asking yourself why the loner Magnus Tait chose to shut himself away from his fellow islanders and why he avoids any contact with the local police as the story begins to unfold in Raven Black.
And it doesn’t take long to wonder why the seemingly repressed, tyrannical village schoolteacher Mrs Margaret Henry is so quick to act as Magnus’s judge and juror.
Forgive me if I’ve given away too much of Raven Black’s plot, but I’m mentioning this bullying schoolteacher after discovering that Ann Cleeves’s father had been a village schoolteacher just like my Welsh Nan Mrs Margaret Anne Davies.
Of course, my Nan died almost fifty years ago now in the 1970s after retiring as the headteacher of Singleton Primary School in West Sussex in mid-1960s just as the old methods of teaching were giving way to more “progressive” ones.
At this point, I should admit that I know very little about the teaching profession, and I can reveal that my Nan never taught me in a classroom environment but she did give me valuable lessons in reading, writing and mental arithmetic as a child.
And, rather than finding these informal lessons arduous, I relished being tutored by my intelligent and engaging Welsh Nan. In fact, she made learning fun as we often played cards and mentally challenging board games together.
So, I was dismayed and, if I’m totally honest, upset and hurt when a stranger I met in my local pub in Hunston told me about the Singleton School Days Facebook page which he followed because he’d grown up in East Dean close to Singleton.
It was obvious to me that the pleasant pubgoer I spoke to at my local on Saturday evening was too young to remember my late Nan, who was headteacher at Singleton from the tail-end of the Second World War to the mid-Sixties.
But I couldn’t resist taking a look at the Facebook page after returning home and – as I’d feared – I was soon reading a handful of flippant, throwaway comments bemoaning my “anxiety-inducing” Nan by some former pupils.
According to one rather prolific contributor to the Singleton School Days site, my Nan’s lessons were joyless as pupils were told to concentrate on their sums. Pupils were told to sit quietly and WORK, WORK, WORK whilst my late Nan sat at the front of the classroom sucking on her solitary false tooth, according to others.
Apparently, the “prolific contributor” says Nan would scan classrooms with her eyes like a Stalag searchlight, so I wasn’t surprised to read him admitting elsewhere on the Facebook site that he and his pals would play up visiting student teachers.
I cannot deny that my late Nan didn’t suffer fools gladly so I can only imagine her honing in on naughty schoolboys who might be disrupting fellow pupils. Still, I was happy that this particular FB contributor admitted elsewhere that he had learnt things in Nan’s classes that possibly stood him in good stead later on.
And – although I can appreciate that old unenlightened teaching methods in our nation’s schools left many pupils with dyslexia and number blindness suffering from anxiety – I wasn’t surprised when another FB contributor revealed that Nan hadn’t caned him as a schoolboy unlike his previous teacher.
Luckily, I was never caned at school as a child or teenager and neither my parents nor my Nan smacked me or “gave me the belt” growing up.
My Nan never caned my mischievous Mum too when she taught her at East Marden, but she would tell her stand in the corner if someone had been naughty in class and she hadn’t been sure who it had been. “She didn’t want to show favouritism,” Mum would tell us.
My late Nan didn’t terrify me growing up, I enjoyed her company, but I knew when she was displeased, which was infuriating for a wilful young girl. One of my Nan’s most frustrating habits was to tell me to leave a room when her friends visited her. “Why?”, I asked, but got no reply.
In hindsight, after Nan’s sudden death in 1977, it gradually dawned on me that she had been protecting me from adult conversations that I would have been ill-equipped to deal with as a child at the time.
Which brings me back to the pros and cons of so-called “progressive” teaching and modern-day parenting in our permissive society that has broken down boundaries between old and young.
When my late Mum was alive she told us about the mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell (1892 – 1970) who set up a “democratic” school with one of his politically radical wives near East Marden.
Of course, I’m not sure how much my Mum really knew about the school, which was established in the late 1920s, because she was only a young girl in the 1930s but you can research it online and elsewhere.
As far as I can ascertain, Bertrand and Dora Russell’s school gave their very few pupils the freedom to learn by themselves; unfettered by religious instruction and rigid discipline imposed by reactionary schoolmistresses and schoolmasters.
Now, I don’t remember my late free-spirited Mother saying anything derogatory about the Russells or their privileged aristocratic lineage. But I do find it ironic that my Nan came from the Welsh mining Rhondda Valleys where the community encouraged gifted schoolchildren to dig their way, so to speak, out of the black hole of deprivation through hard work and disciple at school.
As far as I can ascertain, Bertrand Russell became disillusioned by his school’s libertarian experiment, as it possibly descended into a Lord of the Flies free-for-all. If only he’d realised, as my realist and practical late Nan did, that “naughty boys will be naughty boys!”
And, as for parental boundaries, I should say that I was shocked when I sat in on a sexual assault Crown Court case involving a minor recently where the mother freely admitted that she got drunk with her teenage daughter who also smoked weed supplied by the youngster’s stepdad at home.
Of course, I have to admit I haven’t been squeaky-clean all my life because smoking cannabis at Aberystwyth university was the norm among my circle of undergraduate pals and Fleet Street journalists were renowned for their heavy drinking. And I also had a dear friend who died possibly through cocaine abuse in London and I dabbled too.
Saying that, I was never addicted to drugs and I didn’t buy them myself but, I, like so many of people of my generation, found myself caught up in a permissive drugs culture that has now became mainstream across Britain.
I have to say that I’ve only mentioned the court case in passing to very few people who have wrongly assumed the family must be “lowlifes” but I’m afraid to say they appeared on the surface to me to be like any other working, middle or upper-class family living in the south of England.
During the Crown Court hearing, the mother excused her drinking and drug-taking with her teenage daughter by saying she would have been made to feel like “an uncool mother” if she hadn’t partaken.
All I can say now I’m older and wiser is give me an uncool Nan who wiggles a false tooth with her tongue but knows the importance of preserving family boundaries to “a cool” parent any day of the week.
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