School days

“Gather round and see what Edwards has done.”

I saw as a boy – and sometimes participated in – the trouble which smart and lively adolescents can give their teachers, and probably my first career decision was to remove this profession from the reckoning. My unhappy tenure as a prefect confirmed this view.

The victim of our cruellest baiting was a student teacher of Physics to our fifth form (year 11). He had a tough job: our class 5𝛂 was an arts form made up of the higher Latin O-level set. Attitudes were tribal – many of the class were reluctant to learn the sciences – and we had already given this nervous trainee a tough time in his lessons.

So he was pleasantly surprised in double Physics one day to find himself in front of a model class. We listened attentively, we asked relevant questions, and we supplied intelligent answers. You could see his gratification: he started to relax, daring to believe he might after all have this teaching thing nailed.

Then the bell went, marking the halfway point of the double period. That was our signal. There was a sudden outbreak of coughing. Boys started loud conversations. Paper planes started flying round the room. Within a minute the hapless trainee had been forced to bring in our regular teacher, Mr Banbury, to restore order and sit in for the rest of the lesson to maintain discipline.

But there were many masters (as we called teachers in our very traditional school) who could inspire. I concluded that they had to earn respect, perhaps with a touch of fear, before they could move to a more relaxed, informal style allowing some banter. It was a big mistake to try to be too friendly too soon.

There was Mr Wolton, who took over the Maths lessons in our first year when our form teacher – whose main subject was Chemistry – found himself already out of his depth. Seeing me bored with the pace of the lessons, he brought in some extra books for me to work on. I was flattered and enthused, although that enthusiasm didn’t stretch all the way to calculus.

Mr Oldham was a plummy voiced French master – allegedly blessed with the middle name Godolphin – always entertaining and instructive. He told a useful story about how a pupil had corrected him during an oral examination: in response to Mr Oldham’s question “Ça dépend sur quoi?” the boy had pointedly replied “Ça dépend de” So when my oral came, I answered one question beginning “Ça dépend de” and saw a smile of appreciation that his anecdote had landed. He introduced us to Molière and Racine, and inspired me with a love of Voltaire.

School Calendar, Summer Term 1970

Mr Oldham loved to teach, and it showed. Not so with Beery, so called because of his permanently red face. This was likely caused by a skin condition rather than alcohol consumption but we didn’t know or care. He was taciturn, grumpy and unenthusiastic – Van Morrison without the music. In my second year (year 8) Beery set us a task in English of writing a story set on a North Sea oil rig. We were required to fill at least a page of our exercise books: as I recall, my story ran to two and a half pages, and I poured my creative little soul into it. It came back with two spelling corrections and a tiny red tick at the end. That was my feedback.

Nor was his sports teaching more energetic. On icy days during hockey practice, while we were standing around in our tiny shorts, our gloveless fingers frozen onto our sticks, he would demonstrate a technique one-handed, keeping his left hand cosy in his jogger pants. There was also the time that he returned to the school after supervising a cross country run with two boys unaccounted for, although the boys must share the blame for that.

Some thirty years ago my Mum showed me an obituary for this “much loved” teacher in the Watford Observer. My response was uncharitable. I said there had been many excellent teachers at the school, but he wasn’t one of them.

One of the best was our Divinity master Mr (later Dr) Raper, who had a professorial air but remained approachable. When the class had finished sniggering at his name, he taught us about each different religion in turn. Soon he had taken us through the basic principles of Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Shinto and Sikhism, and offered objective comparisons with Christianity. It struck me they couldn’t all be right. But they could all be wrong, and my childhood faith was shaken.

Dr Raper later raised his head above the parapet in the summer of 1971 during a pupil rebellion against a new school rule banning long hair. In a morning assembly he parsed the word education, arguing that education should bring pupils out rather than up. How many boys understood this coded message of support is unclear, but it wasn’t lost on the headmaster, Mr Turner – known to us as Trog. Dr Raper had gone by the next term, and I still wonder whether he was firing a parting shot before leaving, or if this incident encouraged the headmaster to move him on.

The year after Mr Raper taught us, Mr Lister – known for some reason as “Fanny” – took over. Divinity was rebranded – for us at least – as Scripture. Fanny was terrifying. A thin, austere figure, he was probably in his sixties, although he appeared at least ninety to us: he had white hair and a white moustache, and was one of the handful of staff who persisted in wearing a gown. He resembled an older version of Bunter’s Mr Quelch.

His lesson was first period on Thursday morning, which made for a restless Wednesday night. Lister would give us a passage of the Authorised Version to learn – maybe fifteen or twenty verses – and set us a test the following week.

It was usually from the Old Testament, full of difficult names and smiting. If there was any spiritual content, I never discerned it. The pass mark for the test was 7/10, and you could get a detention for failing. Of course we all crammed the text into our heads on the way to school on Thursday morning, so it was completely forgotten by the weekend.

“Dusty” Miller was also a disciplinarian. A martinet of military aspect, he taught Maths, and under his iron glare the brightest pupil could fumble his answer and have his ear grabbed. For a while he was placed in charge of set two of five: when the test results of Set 3 nosedived – because nobody wanted to be “promoted” – equilibrium was restored only when Dusty was moved to take charge of the bottom set. He famously challenged someone in the quad, asking them why they weren’t wearing school uniform. The young man replied “Because I’m a teacher.” Dusty could be funny, but as his humour was used to intimidate and humiliate – and because we all knew we could be next – he didn’t get many laughs.

Truncheon no.2, 4th December 1972

Probably the scariest teacher for me was Mr Vale, the woodwork teacher. In fairness to him, half of my fear came from the woodwork itself, my worst school subject by a mile. We decided he must have had a chip on his shoulder, being one of only two masters in the School Calendar not boasting letters after his name. It was double woodwork early on Wednesday morning during the first half of my first year, and I could never eat much breakfast. I’m still haunted by the sound or Mr Vale’s voice: “Gather round and see what Edwards has done.”

The Second Master (or deputy head) Mr Topsfield was another of the older masters. Bald, with a physically tough appearance, he was strict, regarded as enforcer for our younger, outwardly more progressive Head Master. But Topsfield was seen as straightforward and fair, and was respected. One torrential Friday afternoon I was standing dripping wet at the stop after missing my bus when Mr Topsfield pulled up, flung open the passenger door and said “You live in Chorleywood, don’t you Edwards? Do you want a lift?” I accepted, and we chatted as he drove me to my front door. I warmed to his relaxed good humour, and liked him better afterwards. Understandably no teacher would put themselves in that position now, and children must be protected, but still I feel we’ve lost something.

Most older teachers struggled to connect once they were closer in age to the boys’ grandfathers than their fathers. Some, like Dusty and Fanny exercised fierce discipline, and those who did not often became laughing stocks and could have a torrid time. Like the language master who had to endure boys yelling “Cyril!” behind his back. Or the Classics master – who could be an inspiring teacher, but while I was at the school he went from being seen as a likeable eccentric to being the object of ridicule. He liked to place his chair atop the table at the front of class. One day a helpful boy placed his chair there before he arrived, but with one of the back legs hanging half off the back. Thank god the master noticed and adjusted the chair before taking his position.

Harder to comprehend were the younger teachers who persisted although they clearly hated it. Typically they had tried too soon to be seen as friendly, had accrued no respect and could not keep discipline. In many jobs you can get through from nine to five without any enthusiasm and take home your pay, but teaching seems a dreadful career to be stuck in if you’re not suited – each day a parade of humiliations.

Some teachers seemed to be stuck in a rut, perhaps because they had stayed at the school too long. One French master seemed rather jaded. He could be very good with boys individually, but he seemed to hate kids en masse. Even we could tell that his French accent was weak – we had real French audio for comparison – and my French exchange partner from the suburbs of Paris didn’t hide his amusement when he heard it. But this teacher’s real passion was music, and despite plainly finding us all very irritating, he cajoled 120 first form boys into giving rousing performances of The Daniel Jazz and The Jonah Man Jazz. We had a glimpse of his real personality during a fairly downbeat music lesson when to illustrate a point he suddenly launched into a rollicking passage of boogie-woogie piano. He was clearly a man of energy, talent and passion, but most days we saw little of it.

When it was my turn to be a parent at parents’ evenings, I observed my daughters’ teachers with a critical eye – especially perhaps in the case of the older girl, who attended a fee paying school. There was the French teacher who had announced a test in class: when the girls protested that they didn’t want one (“Could we not?”) she had simply backed down. She expressed a wish that our daughter would continue to study French: she hadn’t noticed that our daughter hated foreign languages in general, and French in particular. One Economics teacher had temporarily confused her class by asserting that if you increase a number by 10%, then decrease the result by 10%, you end up back at the same number. We weren’t impressed either, and as we came away from our meeting I urged our daughter “Please tell me you have a good Economics textbook.”

Many of their teachers, like mine, were excellent, but the variation in ability and enthusiasm was as wide as ever. True of any profession, of course, but teachers are particularly exposed. If you’re not up to the job, the kids will find you out: but if you’re one of those with the gift to connect and to inspire, they will remember you with affection for the rest of their lives.

***************

Post script. After writing the above, I managed to track down my second year English exercise book, which gives me the opportunity to test my memory of fifty-four years ago against the hard evidence. There, dated 28th February 1969, is Explosion on the Rig. In fact it is five pages long, not two and a half. There are three spelling corrections, not two. The red tick is not so tiny. And there was more feedback. In the same red ink, he had written “Well done!” with an exclamation mark. Beery, I owe you an apology. R.I.P. sir.

The umbrella

He was giving me the chance to jump before I was pushed…

It took me until I was 23 to realise that getting wet was avoidable. I bought a cheap folding umbrella in a hardware store on the Kilburn High Road. I couldn’t have known the effect it would have on my career and my life.

It had not been a good year. Accountancy, my career choice on leaving university was not going well. I didn’t enjoy auditing, which made up ninety percent of the work: demoralised and unmotivated, I was struggling with the professional exams. I failed my driving test for the fourth time. I was sharing a damp and cold flat in Kilburn, playing gooseberry – third wheel these days – to a young couple very much in love. Their comfort and happiness contrasted with my lonely malaise.

In November I had a halfhearted second effort at PE1, the first and easier part of the accountancy exams. The year ended on a suitably miserable note with the murder of John Lennon, a brutal full stop marking the end of my youth, as it did for a generation.

1981 did not show any immediate improvement. In January, I learned I had, as expected, failed my PE1. I was called into an interview with a partner in the firm. It seemed Deloitte Haskins + Sells could no longer overlook my technical differences with, er, the examiners, and he asked me where I thought my future lay. He was giving me the chance to jump before I was pushed, and I took my cue. “Not here” I replied. I was allowed to continue working there for a few months while I looked for a new employer.

There followed a discouraging parade of interviews: some jobs sounded interesting, but not the ones I was offered. I was pointed towards vacancies as bookkeepers or junior accountants, where it was obvious that without any qualification, responsibility and reward would be modest.

On my rounds I visited a slightly down-at-heel employment agency on Liverpool Street. A young woman there scanned my CV – a basic thing in those days – and said there was a vacancy for a statistical assistant at a small firm of stockbrokers. It didn’t sound glamorous, but what could I expect? So I said yes please, I’d like to go for an interview.

So one dark morning in May I set out on the half mile from the audit I was currently plodding through. Rain was pelting down, but luckily I had remembered my cheap umbrella. One of the ribs was buckled and it was a crumpled mess. But it just about did its job, and I managed to reach Gilbert Eliott’s offices looking more or less employable.

I was ushered in to the small room which served as the stats department, where I was interviewed by a formal and slightly grumpy man in his early sixties. He said his name was Denis, but everyone called him Dick. I wondered why anyone would go out of their way to be called Dick.

He told me about the job: I would be working just with him in that small room providing statistics and publications for the fixed interest department. He tried me with a few questions: I remember giving him a passable definition of a debenture.

When I reported back to the agency, I was ambivalent. I liked the idea of working for a firm of stockbrokers – stocks and shares had fascinated me since my school days – but the work looked deadly dull, and the thought of spending five days a week cooped up in a small office with this fellow and his cigarette smoke wasn’t enticing.

The agency woman pointed out that once I had my foot in the door, I might get the chance in due course to move over to the broking side. I was sceptical – that stats room had the look of a prison about it, and of course the agency were keen to take their commission – but could nonetheless see the possibilities. So when, a few days later, they told me I’d been offered the job, I decided to take it.

From that point, things started to look up. The young couple bought a flat and moved out: my rent wasn’t high, so I didn’t look for a new tenant, but enjoyed coming and going as I pleased. After a few months of work, I had established a steady if low key working relationship with Dick, and had my feet firmly under the desk.

I had taken a cut in pay compared to Deloittes, but Gilbert Eliott made up the difference with a bonus equivalent to about a month’s salary. In those innocent days of relatively affordable property, I had saved enough for the deposit on a flat. So with the help of a mortgage from the Abbey National and a contribution from my parents for furniture, I moved into a two-bedroom flat in Tottenham at the end of the year. It wasn’t grand, but it was modern, neat, warm and dry: and the area wasn’t smart, but it was decent, and the commute to the City was tolerable.

The following year the agency lady was proved right. I was asked to join the broking desk, initially to help out with the admin, but with a view to training as a broker. It took a while to get going, but within a couple of years I had become established on the desk. My personal confidence grew with my career, and a few years later I proposed to a wonderful girl called Debbie. And it’s nice to think that that umbrella led me to a vow.

Devinylisation

They were now tainted with a vague guilt, like distant elderly relatives I didn’t visit very often

The first record I bought – or had bought for me – was Telstar, by the Tornados, when I was six. I was fascinated by its raucous, spacy sound. Ownership seemed too good to be true: I asked my Dad how many times I would be able to play it. “You’ll be tired of hearing it before it wears out” he said ruefully. Perhaps he was already tired of hearing it.

When I started paying attention to pop music, singles were 6/8d (33p) and LPs were 32/6d (£1.62p). That was a hefty sum in pocket money, and until my brother and I were old enough to do paper rounds, all albums and most singles we owned were bought with grown-up money as presents. The LPs I remember us playing repeatedly in our shared bedroom include Summer Holiday, With the Beatles, Help!, Peter and the Wolf, and The Sound of Music. We were that cool. We also had an EP of Twist and Shout, and for some reason, two different EPs from Oliver!.

Look at those little nerds

After about 1967 the collection grew rapidly, mostly from Rob’s purchases, and by the time he was due to leave for university six years later, my anxiety at his imminent departure took the form of a frantic attempt to record his entire collection onto cassette, including B-sides and albums which I didn’t even like. “He will be coming back” Mum reminded me.

Over the next few years I discovered rock’n’roll, then soul and 1950s R&B, and my collection broadened and stretched back in time. When it was my turn to go to university, I spent many happy afternoons in the junk shops of Coventry looking for discarded gems. As I’d always been more excited by individual songs than albums, a large part of my collection consisted of greatest hit and multiple artist compilations.

When CDs emerged in the 1980s, I treated myself to a combined CD/record/cassette player and radio, and a CD to play on it: The Whole Story, the Kate Bush hits compilation. I didn’t rush to replace my vinyl with CDs, not at the scandalous price the record industry had set for the new technology, citing “the higher cost of manufacturing CDs”.(Within months they were being given away free with Sunday newspapers). Vinyl, CDs and cassettes coexisted happily in my collection for a few years. The last vinyl record I remember buying was Shaggy’s Oh Carolina in 1993 – so gritty it didn’t seem right in digital perfection.

For the next few years, CDs dominated music sales. Then in 2003 Apple launched the iTunes Store for downloading digital music, and downloads started to take over from CDs: and when Spotify and similar streaming services became popular around 2010, streaming started to take over from downloads. I’ve had the opportunity to pay four times over for Telstar.

Typically I’ve paid a mere three times, duplicating the music I had already bought on vinyl either with CDs or downloads, and now subscribing to Spotify Premium, where I now stream most of my music, supplemented by YouTube. At £9.99 per month (ad-free) to access just about all the music I care about, old and new, this seems extraordinarily good value for customers.

Meanwhile, I haven’t had a working record player for five years, and haven’t troubled to replace it or get it fixed, because even when it did work I have barely used it this century. My record collection has been taking up physical space in my lounge and emotional space in my head. So many records, once so much loved and treasured, each item reminding me of the joy of discovering new music. They spoke of happy times sharing music with loved ones and lonely times when they supported me, but were now tainted with a vague guilt, like distant elderly relatives I didn’t visit very often.

But unpacking these thoughts, I realised that I haven’t played these records for so long because it’s the content – the music – that I love, not the hardware. This was a liberating, if obvious insight, and mentally my record collection shrivelled to a pile of cold plastic and cardboard. I can and do listen to the music anytime. So I resolved to dispose of my collection. The current vogue for vinyl should work in my favour – although presumably the high prices were what the buyers paid, not what the sellers received. Knowing how much music means to me, Debbie was a little shocked at my resolve, and gently tried to protect me from my rash impulse. Perhaps she was worried it was a sign I was somehow growing tired of life. I replied that if I could take it, so could she.

While in Chesham I dropped into a shop specialising in vinyl (and boxing memorabilia) to enquire whether they would be interested in buying my collection. The fellow was straightforward and helpful. He could visit my house and make an offer, aiming to double his money. He would take them all away, whether he wanted all of them or not.

This seemed fair, and after allowing a couple of months to adjust to it, I called him and made an appointment. But then I thought: what about my niece – is she still interested in LPs? She was, so I arranged them in stacks and took photos so she could choose what she wanted by reading the spines: she came back listing the ones she and her boyfriend wanted, and before long they came round to collect them, and to plunder a few more. And I realised that, happily, I wasn’t too bothered about the few hundred pounds I might receive in proceeds: it was more important to me that these records, which had been so much loved, went to good homes, as if I was giving away a much-loved pet I could no longer care for.

So I asked my music-loving family members – which is roughly all of them – whether they still played vinyl, and whether they’d like any. I asked friends and Friends on Facebook, and had a few responses. I farmed out a few selected records on request. Several visitors picked through the collection to choose a few. One or two others expressed initial enthusiasm, but on reflection realised that, actually, they didn’t play much vinyl themselves these days.

Albums by classic acts went quickly: Beatles, Stones, Led Zeppelin, Bowie etc. But there were still plenty left cluttering up our art and music room. It was time to call the man from Chesham.

So today I arranged the records around the lounge for easy browsing and Mike went through them with an experienced eye. “An eclectic collection” he noted, seeing Butcher Baby by The Plasmatics featuring Wendy O. Williams nestling against Snowbird by Anne Murray. Well, I never cared what was cool, just bought the ones I liked. He said there was little demand for singles or for compilation albums, only really for original album releases. We agreed what I thought was a fair price – not high, but it would take time and effort to sell them for a decent profit. I helped him load them all into his car.

I might regret this of course. The digital apocalypse might end streaming, or corrupt my downloads. Or the streaming services might increase their prices dramatically to give artists (or themselves) a better return. And there are gaps on Spotify where original hits have been replaced by inferior re-recordings, or where major artists have withdrawn their music. So I’m hanging on to my CDs, for the time being, at least. But as I write, I feel liberated from the pieces of card and plastic which have gathered dust in my cupboard and attic for most of this century.

Before the giveaways and disposals, I went through and put aside a few which I couldn’t part with. There was In the Red, a quirky 45 rpm “mini album” from my 1980s favourites the Panic Brothers, and One Time, the live album from the wonderful Mint Juleps. Nor was I parting with Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye by Ella Fitzgerald, which I bought for my Mum, a song we played at her funeral. Or Adeste Fideles, the carols which Dad would play every Christmas morning before breakfast. Or a homemade ten-inch bootleg of Professor Longhair, clearly issued for love not profit, because the records weren’t previously available in England. Or No One’s Gonna Change Our World: “The Stars Sing for the World Wildlife Fund”, where, amid gems like Cuddly Old Koala by Rolf Harris and When I See an Elephant Fly by Bruce Forsyth, sits the first version released of Across the Universe – early access to this Beatles track must have boosted sales hugely.

And there was Rock Lobster by the B-52’s. Jonathan and Gina each owned a copy in the early 1980s, so I asked them please could they get on and marry their fortunes together, so I could have the spare? They did indeed get married and duly gifted me the 45. (Whether they were compatible was not my problem, but they’re still going strong 39 years later). And Telstar? That record is going nowhere.

Thanks to Jonathan, Phil, Robyn, Simon, Mark and Jackie who gave good homes to some of my once treasured vinyl.

The Boys at the 100 Club, 7 January 2023

A perfect punk hit-and-run on a totalitarian state…

Matt Dangerfield and The Boys at the 100 Club

I first encountered punk rock (unless you count Iggy and the Stooges or Dr Feelgood) at a gig in 1976/77 at the University of Warwick. I don’t recall the headline act – presumably the usual tired prog-rock fare the Students’ Union served up – but I certainly remember the support act. It was Ultravox! in its early incarnation, when the band still sported an exclamation mark, and when John Foxx (not Midge Ure) did the singing. They were sharp, aggressive, fresh and thrilling, everything the headline act was not.

The effect on the audience was startling. Three quarters of the crowd responded with boos or stony silence. The rest of us were on our feet, cheering and dancing. There couldn’t have been a clearer demonstration of the schism about to hit pop and rock music.

I first encountered The Boys one evening in 1977. I was probably working on an essay due the following morning, when I heard them, I guess, on John Peel’s show, which went out between 10 and 12 each weekday night – where else could it have been? No-one else was flying the flag for punk on national radio. It was 1 minute and 53 seconds which burned into my consciousness and has not departed since. Sick on You was vulgar, noisy and completely captivating.

I ain’t sadistic, masochistic
You and me are through
I`m sick to death of everything you do
And if I’m gonna have a puke you bet yer life I’ll puke on you
I’m gonna be, gonna be sick on you
I’m gonna be, gonna be sick on you
I’m gonna be, gonna be sick on you
All down your face, your dress, your legs and your shoes…
Sick on you

Not exactly Baudelaire is it? Or perhaps it is, I wouldn’t know. Nor did I know at the time that it was a faster and shorter revamp of a 1973 recording by the Hollywood Brats, the Stones-styled glam-rock band in which Boys keyboard player Casino Steel had previously played. In keeping with rock songs of the time the Hollywood Brats version ran for over five minutes.

I met Jana in 1995, when she was recruited to the stockbroking firm I worked for. Bright, efficient, sparky and fun, it was easy to see the spirit of adventure which had led her to leave East Berlin for London in the years after the Wall came down. I was starstruck when she told me that her boyfriend (now her husband) was none other than Matt Dangerfield, who had sung, played guitar and written songs for The Boys. Jana was probably surprised to discover that her rather awkward and sedate colleague remembered the band with such affection, and, of all their records, was especially fixated on Sick on You.

She told a wonderful tale about growing up in East Berlin, concerning the David Bowie song The Bewlay Brothers from Hunky Dory. She and her friends, being Bowie fans, wanted to play his music to the class. The teachers were wary of exposing their pupils to western culture, and like most behind the Iron Curtain were especially suspicious of western pop music. But she was able to get The Bewlay Brothers under the wire because the lines

Lay me place and bake me pie
I'm starving for me gravy

enabled her teachers to use the song as evidence that people in the capitalist West didn’t have enough to eat.

My connections to celebrity are few and far between, so please excuse me making the most of this tenuous connection to punk royalty. I met Matt Dangerfield at a work event a few months later. I don’t imagine that’s his true surname – other band members had adopted fanciful sounding names like Jack Black(!), Kid Reid, Casino Steel and Honest John Plain. I found Matt thoughtful, articulate and charismatic, like many other punk figureheads. Less typically he was also friendly and approachable.

He had been one of the godfathers of punk. In the mid 1970s he had converted his rented basement flat in Maida Vale into a home recording studio. 47A Warrington Crescent became pivotal in the development of the UK punk scene. Mick Jones, Brian James, Rat Scabies, Sid Vicious and Billy Idol were regular visitors. Amongst others, the Sex Pistols, The Damned, London SS, The Clash, Chelsea, Generation X and of course, The Boys, made their first recordings there.

In September 1975 Dangerfield left Mick Jones and Tony James’s fledgling punk band London SS to form The Boys with ex-Hollywood Brats songwriter and keyboard player Casino Steel. Dangerfield’s art college friend, guitarist Honest John Plain, soon joined. The following year they held auditions for the bass and drum roles with Kid Reid and Jack Black completing the line-up.

The Boys made their debut at London’s Hope and Anchor Pub in September 1976. Mick Jones, Billy Idol, Joe Strummer and Tony James were all present in the packed venue. They became the first punk band to sign an album deal when they were signed by NEMS in January 1977.

Despite an outstanding live reputation, the Boys never breached the UK singles charts, although The Boys was a Top 50 album, just. In a revealing 2019 interview with Brighton and Hove News, Matt offers an explanation for their lack of chart success:

“It was great (being the only UK band at the time with an LP record deal), but in a way we signed too early. We signed to NEMS because they were a very good live agency…The problem was that (they) weren’t a very good record company. After we’d signed for them we were approached by lots of major record labels, and we’d have to tell them that we were already signed.”

In the same interview, Matt explains the band’s breakup in 1982:

“I think that by that time we’d realised that things had moved on in the music business. The days of the Specials, Madness, were upon us, and punk was no longer the leading light that it had been. Punk never died out, it went out of fashion and went underground to an extent. At the same time it was being picked up on all around the world. Internationally, the punk scene now is bigger than it was in the 1970s.”

The band reformed in 1999 to play gigs in Japan. Despite their modest record sales, they have a decent worldwide following and an impressive legacy, and have established themselves as global ambassadors for punk. Die Toten Hosen, a German punk band whose name translates literally as “The Dead Trousers” (but actually means more like “The Deadbeats”) transformed The Boys’ reputation in Germany by championing the band and regularly covering their songs.

In 2015 The Boys embarked on an ambitious trip to China. They arrived in Shanghai for a nine-date national tour to promote their new album Punk Rock Menopause only to find that the tour had been cancelled by the Chinese Ministry of Culture due to “crowd control and security issues” – a few weeks earlier 36 people had died in a stampede at a New Year celebration in Shanghai. The Ministry had contacted each venue on the tour and told them they would be closed if they went ahead with the gigs.

Nevertheless Chinese TV station LETV invited the band to come to the TV studios and record two songs live. The Boys accepted but replied that they would like to play a full 70-minute Boys set to a small live audience. Although The Boys had been banned from playing any live gigs in China by the Ministry of Culture, LETV had the cojones to agree to this. During the TV special, one of Matt’s interview responses seems quite bold, and could easily have been seen as subversive by the Chinese authorities:

” It’s music. It’s just kids having fun. It’s not dangerous, you know, it never was dangerous. There’s no way that Johnny Rotten was going to overthrow the British government. Or change anything really. It was just kids expressing themselves and being rebellious. That’s what kids should do. And there’s not enough of that in this…”

Here he pauses and it seems for one delicious moment that he might say “this country” i.e. China. If so, he thought better of it.

“…modern world…kids rebelling, rebelling against their parents…what older people say how they should behave…every generation is a new generation, they have different things to rebel against.”

At any rate, even the mild suggestion that kids should rebel against their parents was risky enough in view of the hypersensitive Chinese government.

The band set off on a cultural tour of China and managed to play three secret underground gigs promoted entirely by word of mouth, carefully avoiding official Chinese chat rooms and social networks like Weibo. They also recorded a live album, which was released in July 2015. The 55-minute TV special was subsequently aired after the band had safely left the country. A perfect punk hit-and-run on a totalitarian state. I wonder if they’ll ever go back there.

So, during Saturday lunchtime I realised that The Boys were playing a gig at the 100 Club in central London that evening. The 100 Club – so called because its address is 100 Oxford Street – is a historic venue established in 1942 as the Feldman Jazz Club, which over the years has hosted performances by Louis Armstrong, B.B. King, Muddy Waters, The Who, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, and in the heyday of punk, The Sex Pistols, The Clash and Siouxsie & The Banshees.

The Boys’ appearance was part of a ten day punk festival called Resolution ‘23 which offered the chance to see some lesser known but fondly remembered bands, also including The Members, The UK Subs and 999. I’d never seen The Boys, so I seized the opportunity.

I hadn’t been to the 100 Club since I saw Q-Tips and the V.I.P.s there in 1980. It’s a buzzing basement venue with the stage in the middle of a long space, with a bar at each end. It wasn’t full, but there was a good crowd – as you would expect, mostly of a certain age (plenty of bald heads in evidence) but there were also plenty of people young enough to know better.

As I listened to (or at least heard) the support bands, (Continental Lovers and The Vulz) I was reminded that the artists who transcended the first wave of punk were those who had actual talent for composition or melody besides merely energy and attitude – Elvis Costello, The Police/Sting and The Jam/Paul Weller spring to mind. The Vulz played an energetic but for me, uninspiring set. When they kicked into what sounded like the intro to 20th Century Boy and then went into their own song, I was disappointed…a bit of T Rex would have been very welcome.

The Boys came on stage, and the difference in class was immediately apparent. Real songs, pacing, precision and bite. Of course by now they’re Men rather than Boys, and a couple of strategic caps were in evidence, but the original, older band members looked in good nick, hopefully having avoided the worst punk rock excesses in their youth. They were enthusiastically received, although mercifully I didn’t see any gobbing or any ill-advised pogoing.

Their set included all their best known songs: Weekend, Living in the City, their 1977 debut single I Don’t Care followed by the anthemic Brickfield Nights, First Time, and of course Sick on You. I’ve noticed with other punk bands I’ve seen in recent years that decades of gigging since the seventies have made them better, tighter musicians. Naturally today’s gigs lack the edge of danger present in 1976/77, but in compensation the quality of playing has increased hugely, And we lapped it up, of course we did. You don’t get to hear authentic punk rock like that too often these days. You can also find a high quality video of their gig at the same venue, recorded in 2017.

Jana couldn’t be there, as she had just started a new job, and was looking after their young family at home in Berlin. She told me to say Hi to Matt. I didn’t, of course. Gods and mortals should never mix at these occasions – it would spoil the magic.

Betty’s last wiggle

Nothing bad will happen to me, she seemed to be saying, now that Mum and Dad are here.” Warning: concerns the death of a dog.

It is the nature of life – and death – that we don’t always know when we are doing something for the last time: sitting your daughter on your lap, taking the kids to the swings, swimming in the sea, having lunch with your father. Or throwing a toy for your dog…

One cold day in December, we tried taking Betty for a walk. Her progress, never rapid, was glacial. We thought perhaps she just didn’t like walking in the snow – although she had managed her normal pace in snow the day before. It turned out to be the sign of a bigger problem.

Nevertheless, a week later Betty seemed her normal self. She gobbled down her food, went for her usual slow walk, and energetically chased her favourite toy, Piggy, through the house as we flung it for her. But then she was hesitant about jumping up to her favourite spot on the sofa, and when Debbie went to lift her up, she let out a yelp of pain.

Something was clearly wrong, so Debbie took her to the vet the next morning, and left her there for tests. A few hours later the vet phoned with the news: Betty had large internal growth affecting her spleen, and her liver, very likely cancerous: she was also suffering from anaemia, probably caused by internal bleeding. Any surgery would be extremely difficult, with a modest chance of success, and would be unlikely to prolong her life for long. It was clear that Betty was in a very bad way, and we felt that we had no choice but to have her put down.

So that evening we drove to the vet’s practice to say our goodbyes. I expected to feel sad, but I had no idea how hard this was going to hit me. We waited for her in the small examination room, and when she came out, she seemed in surprisingly good spirits: she wagged her tail and – no doubt buoyed by painkillers – gave us quite a lively welcome. But she was anxious when she was placed on the table: that was where bad things happened. So we brought her down to the floor, and sat with her, and fed her a few treats.

Her relative normality and good spirits were heartbreaking. She looked at us with love and trust in her eyes, and gave me some kisses, which felt like an accusation in view of the decision we had taken. Nothing bad will happen to me, she seemed to be saying, now that Mum and Dad are here. She even managed her trademark wiggle, scratching her back on the floor – something she would only do when she was relaxed and happy.

Soon the vet came in with her paraphernalia, and gently explained what would happen. Betty still had a cannula attached to her leg, which would make the injection easier. Feisty to the last, Betty squirmed as the vet approached to attach the syringe, causing the vet to say that Betty seemed quite suspicious. Well she’s not entirely wrong, we thought. Finally the pink liquid went in, and Debbie felt Betty go limp on her lap.

I don’t cry easily, but this did it. Every pet owner who has been faced with a similar decision will recognise the extra pain and guilt caused by their unwanted agency in the event.

But why did I find this so much more upsetting than saying goodbye to Cracker, objectively a better behaved, more likeable dog? Probably because we had known for many months that Cracker was not well, so we were better prepared, whereas Betty’s diagnosis, and its severity, came very suddenly. Perhaps Betty’s arrival as a rescue was also a factor. We don’t know what hardship she might have gone through before we met her, but I felt – although I might have imagined it – that her affection was especially heartfelt as she slowly learned to trust us in her new home, after we brought her here from Dogs Trust three years ago.

There is also guilt at the occasional resentment I had felt at the chores and restraints she brought into our lives. Most of these would apply to any dog we owned: early morning and late night trips into the garden in all weathers, walks on cold or wet days, making arrangements to park her when we took a trip into London or a holiday abroad, having to take turns while exploring a church or museum, being limited to dog-friendly pubs or tea shops, not lunching in restaurants, eating our meals in the car when we made a motorway service station stop in bad weather…

Some of the restraints, however, were specific to Betty. She was often aggressive with other dogs, so we couldn’t let her off the lead when walking unless we were pretty sure there were none around. She also walked very slowly, especially when we chose to walk from our back door – which made a mockery of one reason for getting a dog, getting exercise for ourselves. This might have been due to her age, if she was in fact old, but she could manage a respectable speed if we were exploring new territory, or if she was charging around after her Piggy.

But we knew much of this when we adopted her, so I had no right to resent the commitments which dog ownership entails, and now I feel a pang of emptiness when she no longer pesters me for her dinner, or when I go straight to make the coffee in the morning without first taking her out, or when I no longer leave the bedroom door ajar so she can nuzzle her way in to say good morning to her mum. How I would love to do those little chores again for her.

I’m embarrassed to be making so much of this. She was, after all, “just” a dog. Much worse things happen in every life. But animal lovers know that losing a pet is not trivial. She died just four days before Christmas, and for a week or so the practicalities of hosting the family and the rituals of the season provided welcome distractions.

But when the house went quiet, there were poignant reminders everywhere: a Betty-shaped hole in our lives. The Christmas presents she never received, like a squeaky burger she would have loved. Her favourite spot on the sofa, now empty, where I instinctively look as I go up to bed. Surplus gravy from our dinner, now poured down the sink. Crumbs dropped from the table, no longer magically cleared up. No little head watching from the window as we head out in the car for a couple of hours, or resting on my thigh as we sit together on the sofa.

It might have helped had we known Betty’s age. It was estimated as five years by Dogs Trust when we picked her up, although on our introductory visit the vet thought she was probably older: indeed, Betty often seemed to have the demeanour of a confused old lady. At the time of her diagnosis I gained some comfort when the vet said it would be very unusual to find such an aggressive growth in an eight year old dog. If I could somehow hear that she was sixteen, not eight when she died, I would feel much better, to know that she had lived to a ripe old age, and that we had provided her with a happy retirement home for her final three years.

As she wiggled on her back for the last time, on the surgery floor, she could not know that she would not wiggle again. Betty, we’re sorry for what we had to do. We miss you.

R.I.P. Betty, 20??-2022

Expectations

So I’ve never had a chip on my shoulder…

My grandmother could be brutal. In my first month at grammar school, I came home and proudly announced that I was second in the maths test. “Never mind” was her response. Of course she and my parents just wanted the best for me – but seven years later, when the post arrived I was feeling the pressure.

It was 10:30am on 21st December 1974 when the letter I had been waiting for from Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge arrived, as I was enjoying the Marx Brothers in Go West on BBC1. My mother brought it in, and I tore it open –

***************

Pause there. Let me put this into perspective. My father and his brother, headmaster’s sons from a small town in North Wales, both went to Cambridge. On my father’s first day at Pembroke College, the porter greeted him with “Morning Mr Edwards! You look very like your brother.”

My mother’s brother Philip Brockbank – illegitimate product of an adulterous affair, raised in poverty, the son of a ship’s carpenter – studied English at Cambridge, went on to set up and head the English department at the University of York, and later became Director of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon – a world-renowned authority on the Bard. That might explain my grandmother’s high expectations. Here is a section of the letter Philip wrote to my mother three days after I was born.

My brother was studying at Cambridge, having obtained a Scholarship two years earlier. My cousin had been offered a Scholarship to a Cambridge college two days earlier.

***************

– and I pulled out the letter. Before I could focus on it, the word “regret” had leapt off the page and hit me in the eye. I looked at Mum and shook my head. I sat down gloomily and tried to console myself with the Marx Brothers, but their antics had turned cold and juvenile. I got up and switched off the television.

I don’t mean to suggest that I had disappointed my parents, but seven years earlier, when the bedroom I shared with my brother had been refurbished by my grandfather, we had been given wooden stools upholstered in light blue for Cambridge and dark blue for Oxford.

Exam failure can be put down to lack of intelligence or to lack of effort. I chose to blame the latter, because it seemed fixable. But did I take the lesson to heart? Not especially. My academic career continued on its gentle downward drift, from frequently topping the class in first year at grammar school to an unimpressive 2:2 in my degree. Luckily the degree was at Warwick, whose reputation has grown over the years. “Warwick! That’s good isn’t it?” people say. “It is now” I reply.

Nor, a couple of years later, did I make the required effort to succeed in my accountancy exams. I put this mental laziness down to my fast start in education. I was bright: my mother had taught me to read before I started infant school, and most subjects came easily to me. I understood things without effort: I once scored 20/20 in a school comprehension test – although I rather spoiled the effect by asking my mother “what’s comprehension?”.

Easy progress made me complacent, so that when I encountered more difficult subjects – calculus springs to mind – I lacked the mental stamina to tackle them: I had never, if you will, learned how to learn.

But I was lucky, finding work in the City, where the relationship between hard work and success is tenuous. I enjoyed my career immensely, and things worked out well. So I’ve never had a chip on my shoulder about failing to get into Cambridge. No, hardly at all.

Trevor bloody Howard and the last mystery

There will be no more mysteries, ever.

Some time in 1981, Debbie rang home from her university accommodation. “Hello Mum!” she said. “Trevor bloody Howard!” replied Beryl.

You see, a few weeks earlier, they had been trying to remember the stars of Noel Coward’s classic film Brief Encounter. They had come up with Celia Johnson quickly enough, but they were stumped when it came to the actor playing the charming doctor who so carefully removed the grit from Laura’s eye. With no internet to settle the matter, and no Halliwell’s Film Guide to hand, the question remained unresolved for weeks until Beryl had her light bulb moment. Frustrating, for a while, but imagine the wave of relief and joy when the answer finally came in.

The internet age had still not arrived when Debbie and I, on holiday in the Lake District, found ourselves reaching for the name of, you know, That Woman who starred in all those swimming movies in the 1940s and 50s. Our reference books were out of reach. Phil will know, we thought, he’s a film expert. Nor had the mobile phone era arrived for us, so we paid hotel call charges (remember those?) to phone him. Unfortunately he couldn’t help us. When we got home to our books, we identified the lady as Esther (bloody) Williams. And later we discovered we should instead have called my Auntie Speff – she knew the answer straight away.

And how entertaining those pub arguments were: we could argue all evening about trivial facts, becoming more certain the more we drank, with no ready access to information to settle the matter. Phil (yes, it is he again) once rang me from a pub where he was in dispute with a fellow customer, and put me on the line to explain to this stranger why he was in the wrong about the Honeycombs or Wayne Fontana or something. Whether this persuaded him I cannot say, but it was an interesting diversion, which would not arise in the smartphone era.

The brain is a strange thing, but when it fails us we learn something about it. Those elusive names: Him, in that awful Cadfael. Her, Beattie in the BT adverts, married to Him, who wrote Bar Mitzvah Boy. Her, Room with a View and Bellatrix. Him with the luvvie voice in Never the Twain, mercilessly spoofed on Spitting Image, dropping hints for a knighthood. Him, the first artistic director and frequent actor at Shakespeare’s Globe.

These treacherous names flick on and off in my head like Christmas lights (and have done for many years, so I claim this is not a consequence of ageing), and when they elude me, I try to shun the internet, and discipline myself to locate the answer in my brain’s imperfect filing system. I get better results if I abandon my frenzied pursuit for a while and change the subject: a later approach, as if from a different angle, often brings the answer in as a new pathway is found inside my head.

When the internet arrived, and search engines became efficient, it became easier to find facts and answers, but also easier to spread lies and errors – so the truth is easy to find, but not always easy to identify or confirm. Nevertheless I assumed that these trivial teasers would die out. But at least two more exquisite, tantalising mysteries awaited me.

One had teased us for years, which even the internet had failed to resolve. It was a film we saw at the cinema, in our first year or two together. All we could remember was a gag where an overweight, greasy fellow with a quiff is asked “Have you ever been told you look like Elvis? He takes it as a compliment, and replies “Thank you very much.” But what was the film?

We never saw it on TV, and numerous attempts to Google the answer failed. I posted the question on film message boards without success. Finally in 2010 I grew so frustrated that I resorted to old-fashioned technology, and flipping through my old diaries found in the 1988 volume a scribbled entry naming a film which had left no other trace in my memory:

Armed with the title, Stars and Bars, I soon confirmed from the comments on the IMDb entry that there was indeed a late period Elvis lookalike in the plot. This had to be the one! Debbie had a birthday coming up, so I bought a VHS – the film hadn’t made it to DVD – wrapped it in multiple layers and presented it to her, labelled The last mystery.

When we watched it, two things became clear. Firstly it was indeed the film with the Elvis joke in it, and we duly celebrated solving this ancient riddle. Secondly it was a truly terrible film: no wonder we had forgotten it, no wonder it hadn’t made it to DVD. Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance in this “goofball” “comedy” as a British art expert in pursuit of a Renoir in the US southern states was so dreadful and embarrassing that Hollywood even withheld his customary Oscar.

The last mystery turned out to be the penultimate mystery. Many years ago, no doubt out of consideration for my biographer, I transferred all our old reel-to-reel tapes to cassette. Later Rob kindly digitised them, and among the readings and sketches of our teenaged years, and low quality recordings of One Road by Love Affair and Build Me Up Buttercup I found a song I didn’t recognise. What on earth was it? I thought it rather plodding and dreary. The lyric went:

I am the singer and I will sing a song
All about the people and you can sing along

At the end of the muddy recording was the unmistakable sound of Alan “Fluff” Freeman’s voice, tantalisingly cut off before he named the song. So it was presumably recorded from Pick of the Pops one Sunday afternoon: I couldn’t find a likely title which had charted, so most likely it was played as a new release.

Shazam, SoundHound and repeated Googling over a number of years failed to identify the song, until one time – more in hope than expectation – trying yet again, I landed on a lyric site which credited it to Cliff Richard. Well I know what Cliff sounds like, and this certainly wasn’t him, but at last I had a lead, and I soon identified the song and recording as Raymond Froggatt’s The Singer. Case solved. I remember Froggatt being heavily promoted: we used to laugh at his name, and wonder why he hadn’t chosen a new one, as Harry Webb and Reginald Dwight did. He did have some success, scoring top ten hits as a writer with The Dave Clark Five’s The Red Balloon, and Cliff Richard’s Big Ship. But this song never scratched the charts.

That our most teasing riddles were posed by Stars and Bars and The Singer suggests that the most satisfyingly difficult questions are likely to emerge from the mediocre and the downright awful. But I suspect that’s it. There will be no more mysteries, ever.

And yet…where did we have that Chinese meal?

Votes for Members

Imagine what the press would make of such behaviour in a trade union strike ballot.

Sir Nicholas Goodison

In early 1985, change was in the air for the London Stock Exchange (LSE). For decades stockbrokers had charged a fixed scale of minimum commission, and the distinction between stockjobbers, who traded stock on their own account, and stockbrokers, who could act only as agents, had been rigidly enforced.

This system had proved robust, and had certain advantages. It aligned the brokers’ and clients’ interests – as there was no discussion about commission rates, brokers were incentivised to provide the best research and negotiate the best dealing price for their clients. As for the jobbers, being constituted as partnerships or unlimited liability companies, if they failed the owners were personally liable. As a result, risk was very carefully managed, and failures were rare.

But this modest appetite for risk was consigning the City of London to the second division of world equity markets. The Thatcher government had ambitions for London as a global financial centre: also, and not unreasonably, saw the minimum commission scale as a cosy cartel.

Cecil Parkinson, the Trade and Industry Secretary, had Margaret Thatcher’s backing to shake up the LSE. In 1983 he negotiated rule changes with Chairman Nicholas Goodison: the carrot was the continued growth of the LSE, and of London as a financial centre. The stick was the threat of being taken to the Restrictive Practices Court over commission rules.

By 1985, the LSE was ready to put forward detailed proposals to its members. The most important was that Member Firms (whether brokers or jobbers) could now be owned by a single non-member (in practice, a limited company). This would pave the way for the partners who owned the broking and jobbing firms to sell their firms to the big banks – mostly American or British – who wanted a foothold in the growing London market. Other changes included permitting member firms to take positions in stock, and abolishing the fixed commission scale. These changes, which became known as “Big Bang” would also introduce computerised, screen based trading, and soon lead to the end of the Stock Exchange trading floor.

***************

By now, my career was starting to take off. I had been at Gilbert Eliott (a broking firm) for over three years: I had passed the four parts of the LSE membership examination, and was bringing in new business for the Preference desk. It was becoming clear that members would be offered shares in exchange for their ownership of the LSE, and that these shares would be valuable: besides the value of the Exchange as a business, the LSE owned the Stock Exchange Tower at 125 Old Broad Street, 26 floors of prime London property.

The Stock Exchange Tower pictured from the National Westminster Tower (1983) (Photo: Richard Hoare)

My boss in the Preference Department was Robert Wild, a shrewd and patient mentor. Spotting an opportunity to provide a benefit to employees at no cost to the firm, he put me and our market dealer Roger forward to become Members. I was quite flattered by this: three years was the minimum period of service in an LSE firm to obtain membership, and I had only been there a few months longer than that. I was still a lowly “Blue Button”, allowed to check prices but not officially to deal. I was now in line for the coveted “Silver Button” which denoted Membership, bypassing the intermediate Yellow. Our applications were successful, and on 11th April 1985 Roger and I celebrated becoming LSE members.

Numbered just 000030

But there was a fly in the ointment. Once it became known that members’ shares would become transferable and saleable, the LSE feared “speculative distortions in the pattern of application for membership”. So they had ruled that any applicants after 10th January could still be granted membership, but would not receive a share or vote.

“…you are not a shareholder, therefore not a Proprietor.”

Roger and I weren’t happy about this. Gilbert Eliott weren’t famously generous employees, and the rumoured value of the new members’ shares was substantial. We didn’t like the idea of the door being slammed in our faces. But what could we do about it? Only try to kick up a fuss. I asked Robert Wild if he objected to our launching a campaign. He did not, although he quite reasonably asked that we should keep Gilbert Eliott’s name out of it – the firm was in the midst of delicate negotiations with a potential buyer, an Austrian bank called Girozentrale. Any whiff of scandal or trouble could have derailed the whole deal.

We obtained a list of the people who, like us, had been admitted to membership after January 10th, and circulated them all via the pigeonholes at the Stock Exchange with a letter – so incendiary that no copies survive – drawing attention to the injustice of the situation, and calling them to action: a call which was largely answered. Some contributed by writing strongly worded letters to the press and to Sir Nicholas Goodison.

My effort was this letter to the Financial Times, which spawned a small news item in that newspaper, and soon afterwards the leading story in Financial Weekly:

Looking back, I feel some embarrassment about this campaign. An overpaid young man missing out on a bit of extra money was not the worst problem in the world. And my arguments are transparently self-serving: was I really concerned about having a say in the Stock Exchange’s future, or just annoyed to be missing out on a juicy payout? But we did feel a sense of injustice, and wanted to take some kind of action.

Our campaign had, I estimate, zero impact. As we had no votes, the Stock Exchange could happily ignore our opinion. If anything we might have persuaded some voting members to vote in favour of the Deed of Settlement before a bunch of new arrivals came in and diluted their shareholding.

But the LSE and Sir Nicholas had much bigger problems to grapple with. Many members, especially those who had not achieved partner status in their firms, and members of smaller and provincial firms, felt that the changes were being rushed through on disadvantageous terms so that the partners in large firms could cash in. The Deed of Settlement vote required a 75% vote to pass, a high hurdle. Sir Nicholas made a determined case for a yes vote:

Sir Nicholas tries to face down the rebels

Anecdotal evidence had it that some of the larger firms, where partners had a great deal to gain from the proposals passing, were ruthless in pressuring their employees to vote in favour. One firm allegedly demanded that voting forms should not be posted direct, but returned to their secretary’s office – presumably so that the partners could check that people had voted the “right” way, and could bully or discipline those who had not. Imagine what the press would make of such behaviour in a trade union strike ballot.

Despite his urbane and charming personality, Sir Nicholas had become something of a hate figure among sections of the membership in the course of his attempts to implement change: some years later, when he became chairman of TSB Group, one colourful character went to the trouble of buying shares in the company, just so he could continue to harangue and heckle Goodison at meetings.

On June 4th I nervously turned on Channel 4 evening news (yes, this was national news) to hear the result of the vote. The Deed of Settlement vote had failed. Good news.

“Shares will now be allotted to those who have been elected to Membership since 10th January”

So the shares issued in exchange for membership rights would not after all be transferable. But we new joiners celebrated because one share was issued to each of us, and we now enjoyed the same rights as long established members. Our campaign may have had little impact, but we had arrived at our destination by a different route, thanks to the rebellious streak in a large minority of the voting membership.

Though I didn’t give it much thought at the time, my willingness to get involved in a battle might have hindered my career if I became known as a troublemaker. In retrospect, that might be why I spent my career mostly in challenger firms. I wasn’t made of the right stuff for the bigger, established firms.

The shares did turn out to be valuable, eventually. In 2000, as part of the London Stock Exchange’s proposal to become a listed company, they were repaid at £10,000 each. That certainly felt like a victory – even if we hadn’t earned it ourselves.

And Big Bang. Was it worth it? The LSE certainly saw very strong growth in business, and it did my career no harm. But some argue that it was part of a process where market participants grew larger, more interconnected and more sophisticated. They were then better able to insulate themselves from the consequences of their own poor credit decisions, by packaging up and selling risk in opaque and poorly understood securities. And that was a major cause of the 2008 Financial Crisis.

Fun in the Pugwash Lounge

…a sandpit where you can practise for life

During my first week at the University of Warwick in October 1975, I noticed the secondhand bookshop, tucked in a corner of the Students’ Union shop. It was in the brand new Union Building, which had a quirky, angular design, with plenty of unexpected and interesting spaces where students could indulge their favourite passion, drinking. Naturally, within days the floors of this shiny new place were sticky with spilt beer.

The secondhand bookshop was a sad affair. There were a few tired old books in a wooden cupboard, and it was obvious that none of my economics course books were there. The shop operated as an agent: it didn’t buy books outright – that would be very risky without knowledge of the currently recommended textbooks for each course. Instead, the seller was given a numbered ticket, and its counterpart was placed inside the book. When the book sold, the ticket was filed in order, and when the student checked back, he or she would be paid out on the tickets in the sold box. They could reclaim their unsold books at any time.

We didn’t bother with the titles, just the price.

This was a sensible enough system: it would be asking a lot of the pleasant but rather undermotivated shop staff to put a price on every book which came in, when reading lists could change so suddenly. So a rigid pricing scheme was enforced: the books were offered at 60% of the original cover price, of which (if they sold) the seller would receive 5/6ths, i.e. 50% of the cover price, with the shop keeping the balance for administration.

There were problems with this structure. In 1975, UK inflation was running at 24% – an interesting time to be studying economics. So if a student had bought a textbook new for, say, £6 two years ago, that book could easily have a new cover price of £9 by the time they decided to sell it – often virtually pristine. Yet they would receive only £3. The problem was worse for older books, such as classic literature paperbacks, whose cover prices were by now absurdly low.

As a result, the textbooks which did change hands were mostly from handwritten lists on department noticeboards. This was a time consuming, hit or miss affair: the buyer would trek across the widely spread campus, often to find that the seller was out, or that the book had already been sold.

Although I noted the flaw in the pricing scheme, and the lack of energy in the presentation and promotion of the shop, I did nothing about it. It wasn’t my problem, and I had other things to do – like finding some friends in my first year, gorging on mediocre gigs in the lean years between glam-rock and punk, the odd bit of coursework, and a brief and unfortunate flirtation with Newcastle Brown.

At Warwick, 1977/78 (Photo: Surapongs Chaudakshetrin)

But when my final year began in October 1977, the university careers service got in touch to remind us that an unforgiving real world awaited us eleven months later. They pointed out that employers liked to see a full CV, packed with interesting activities and useful experience. I hadn’t joined many societies: seeing films, doing crosswords and getting drunk didn’t seem likely to cut it. That’s when I remembered the bookshop.

The shop seemed if anything to have contracted over the previous two years. I steeled myself to approach the Students’ Union with my pitch. I proposed to take over the running of the shop, allowing sellers to set their own prices – perhaps with my guidance as I gained experience – to which the shop would add 10%. In addition, I would publicise and promote the revived shop on campus noticeboards.

I was invited to the Management Committee of the Students’ Union, no less, to outline my proposal. It turned out that the Vice President (Academic Affairs) had come to the same conclusions just four weeks earlier. The main difference was his statement “I do not believe that a service such as this should be run with an ad hoc student staff.” A student I was, but didn’t see it as “ad hoc” – I saw it as my personal project. Otherwise, it seems I was pushing on an open door.

Although the members broadly welcomed somebody prepared to try to revitalise this feeble business, some raised potential legal, practical and financial problems. Only doing their job, no doubt, but I could feel my enthusiasm draining away – committees always have that effect on me. But I gritted my teeth and persisted, vowing to ignore much that was said and push on with it on my own as planned. If I could make some kind of success of it, no-one would complain.

The Union agreed to let me have a go at running the bookshop, and allocated the wonderfully named Pugwash Lounge each weekday between 12 and 2. The location wasn’t perfect – not exactly the main drag of the Union Building. I would need to turn it into a destination. The first task was to acquire some decent stock, so people wouldn’t turn up at the grand opening to find nothing of interest. So I advertised on the noticeboards that students should bring their unwanted books to sell on the opening day.

On Wednesday 9th November, I collected a cash float from the Union office, arrived at the Union Shop to take possession of the stock, and more importantly, the wooden cupboard which would initially display the books when the shop was open and keep them safe when it was closed.

The Union Shop was at ground level, the Pugwash Lounge was two levels up. Happily the building had a disabled friendly design, with plentiful ramps. But it was a large and heavy cupboard: I wouldn’t be able to get it there on my own. I trundled the cupboard to the bottom of the ramp, and approached a group of three lads at a table, perhaps waiting for the bar to open. Would they mind helping me get the cupboard up to the Pugwash Lounge?

They readily agreed and the job was soon done. In my relief and gratitude I set down a pound note – enough for a round for three at Union bar prices in those balmy days – suggesting they reward themselves with a pint. But one of them waved it away, saying it had only taken a minute. I noticed one of the others looking balefully at him as I retreated with my pound note.

Opening up the new shop was a predictable anticlimax. I set out the stock, got the desk ready with the cash box and books of tickets, opened the door on the stroke of 12, and then…nothing. After a while, a few students wandered in, had a desultory flick through the books and left. But then a fellow came in who had seen my publicity, with a bag of ten or twelve books to sell. They looked saleable. I got busy writing tickets, and put them on sale at about two thirds of the cover price. We were in business.

Determined publicity effort 1: The Advertisement in the Warwick Boar (illustrator unknown)
Determined publicity effort 2: The Flyer
Determined publicity effort 3: The Poster

He was the first of a steady stream of sellers bringing their books in. Within a few days there was a decent level of stock: we acquired critical mass, and word got around that it was worth visiting to save money on your textbooks. After a couple of weeks, some of the sellers checked back, and were surprised to be paid out on half or more of their books. A scary looking but good-natured punk with the surname Dembinski, on the fringes of Warwick’s resident (later charting) band the VIPs, was especially pleased with his payout: I like to think he put it towards an electric guitar.

Over the weeks and months of 1977/78 the shop became modestly successful, and a steady if modest earner for the Students’ Union. Of course, it had the advantage of free labour and rent. I often had help, frequently from one of my flatmates when things got busy. Others got in touch offering to help out: one girl only attended for a couple of days. Perhaps she found it boring, or she just wanted something to put on her CV.

By June 1978 I had graduated, and I left Warwick. The bookshop was my baby, and I wanted to leave it healthy and in good hands. With about one third of the students leaving for good – and taking their textbooks with them – it was time for one last campaign: to persuade the leavers to put their books into the shop before they left.

…stuck with the rotten things for life.

Nor did I leave it at that. I wrote letters to the Students’ Union officers outlining my concerns about the display facilities in the shop: I paid a flying visit from my London flat one Saturday morning in September to help put out the stock: I requested a progress report near the end of term. I just couldn’t let it go. I should have been directing this energy at my struggling early accountancy career – the Students’ Union guys must have thought I was a right pain. Nevertheless, the Treasurer took the time to reply, with what I thought were some decent numbers in 1978 money.

At last I moved on, and stopped pestering the staff of the place I had left six months ago. But what did I get out of all of this? Apart from my original motivation – something I could talk about at job interviews – there was also, believe it or not, an element of altruism. The shop helped sellers get a good price for their books, and helped buyers save money on their textbooks – saving a good deal of money for students and reducing waste. I also received a surprise £10 Christmas bonus in recognition of my efforts from the Management Committee.

And I found a way to make some profit for myself. My habit had been to regularly visit the junk shops of Coventry looking for discarded treasures among the albums and singles, and now, once or twice I also bought a cheap selection of paperback thrillers and Agatha Christie novels – probably from house clearances – to offer in the shop. They earned a tidy little margin, provided the ancient cover price was blocked out. If customers knew the book had once been for sale at 2/6d (12.5p) then they were reluctant to pay 25p, even if the new price was now 70p.

But the main benefit of managing the shop was experience running a business in a safe environment. I didn’t have to put up capital or take any personal financial risk. The customers were, by and large, friendly and educated. The Students Union managed all the tedious administration, and even provided some lockable metal cabinets when I mentioned that we were struggling to display our stock properly. I could run my little business, experiment with what worked and what didn’t work, all under the protection of the university campus bubble.

In some ways, it provided a template for my later career, managing the preference and fixed interest department under the administrative umbrella of Collins Stewart and later Canaccord. I’d even say that my experience running the bookshop was more helpful in my profession than all the economics I learned, or didn’t. University, I discovered, is not just a place of academic learning – it’s a sandpit where you can practise for your life.

Let Me Take You Down…

About March 1970, I heard a languid, dreamy song one Sunday morning on Kenny Everett’s radio show.

“Screams from adoring teenagers and a “mini-riot” made up the fantastic reception BBC Radio 1 DJ Tony Blackburn received when opening the new Strawberry Fields boutique in Rickmansworth on Saturday morning.

Traffic through the town centre was delayed as the DJ made his way to Penn Place. Several times the police cordon around the shop front was broken as frantic teenagers peered closer into the glass window. A small child trampled in the rush and the decorative flowerbeds outside the shop crushed.”

Tempers frayed as limited numbers of fans were allowed into the shop to receive autographed photographs of this quietly spoken doctor’s son from Bournemouth, who himself had to be rescued by police in the scramble.”

He left the premises by a back entrance to make his way to a football engagement.”

(Watford Observer, October 11, 1968)

Tony Blackburn, screams, frantic teenagers, really? Yes really, this was the 1960s.

************

Four years earlier, there had been a gala opening of fourteen shops in Penn Place. The event had even been broadcast in the USA, because William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, had lived and married in Rickmansworth.

I was eight, and my family had just moved to Chorleywood. Mum and Dad both worked, and we would do our weekly shop in Rickmansworth on Saturday morning. At some point, the local grocers Anthony Jackson, just along from Penn Place, was replaced by that brash newcomer Tesco, to my grandma Sallie’s disapproval. I was appointed custodian of the Green Shield Stamps: it was my task to stick the vast roll of stamps Mum acquired at the till into the booklets.

It was quite a relief when they introduced a stamp representing ten of the little blighters.

Then on Saturday 5th October 1968, Strawberry Fields threw open its doors, shamelessly exploiting the huge stock of goodwill accruing to that marvellous song. I wasn’t a cool twelve year old, but I knew straight away it was the best shop in town. When I had finished getting my Saturday morning haircut, I would wait in there soaking up the music, looking longingly at the records and studying the latest charts on the board, while Mum was getting her perm from Mr Louvère, two doors away. My older brother Rob might have done the same as me, although about this time he more or less abandoned barbers’ shops.

I don’t remember actually buying many records there. Rob and I still shared a bedroom, and I was usually also happy to share his records, so I was introduced to bands like Led Zeppelin and King Crimson while I was quite young. We also possessed a reel-to-reel tape machine, which we used to record our favourites, in the early days from pirate radio and Alan Freeman’s Pick of the Pops, and later from Radio 1.

But there’s one record I certainly did buy there. About March 1970, I heard a languid, dreamy song one Sunday morning on Kenny Everett’s radio show. It was called The Prettiest Star by David Bowie, who had made his chart debut the previous year with Space Oddity. (Not to be confused with the brittle, metallic glam-rock version later to appear on Aladdin Sane.). It had a beautiful, wailing guitar part, played – although I didn’t know at the time – by Marc Bolan, soon to break through to huge success with Ride a White Swan.

Next Saturday morning I was in Strawberry Fields asking for the record. Despite the plugs from Kenny Everett, it hadn’t done much, and they didn’t stock it. But they could order it for me, and it would be there by Thursday. So I broke my bus journey home from school in Watford, and stopped off in Rickmansworth to pick it up. When I got home I ran upstairs and put it straight on the record player, with the stacking arm up to make it repeat play indefinitely. According to Wikipedia, it reportedly sold fewer than 800 copies, but I still think it’s beautiful.

Another record I bought there was much less cool, certainly at the time. I had heard Let’s Hang On by the Four Seasons on that radio show where Jimmy Savile (yes, him) played the charts from five, ten and fifteen years ago. The song ambushed me with its cheesy falsetto pop drive and conviction. This was years before the band’s 1970s disco reinvention, decades before Jersey Boys. I found in their imported oldies box and bought it. Rob nearly disowned me.

My other clear memory of Strawberry Fields again relates to David Bowie. In April 1973, Rob, a passionate fan, had pre-ordered Aladdin Sane , illegally discounted, from an upstart mail order advertiser in Melody Maker called Virgin Records.

Release day arrived, but not the LP. Luckily our cousin Jonathan was visiting: we all went to Strawberry Fields to listen to the new album – I can’t remember whether it was in a booth, or sharing headphones. The verdict was positive, and Rob prevailed upon Jonathan to buy a copy there and then – enabling us to listen repeatedly to Bowie’s new masterpiece until our cousin returned home. After that I think there were just a couple of days of anguish until Rob’s own copy arrived.

In 1974 our family moved to Chipperfield, and soon afterwards I left for university. We didn’t visit Strawberry Fields again. The shop moved down to the High Street. Online comments suggest that it lost its cutting edge: also the collapse of Resale Price Maintenance in the 1990s caused fierce price competition in the record industry from chains like W H Smith and Our Price. This made life very difficult for small independent record shops, and at some point unknown to me, years after it opened with such a bang, Strawberry Fields, it turned out, was not forever, but closed its doors with barely a whimper. So ended a tiny but magical chapter of Rickmansworth’s history.

P.S. (Oct 2022) I thought Tony Blackburn might be interested in this story so I emailed it to him at the BBC. And bless him, he sent me this. Aw…

Cracker

‘e was a good buooy!

It started with Pauli. We had booked a villa near Pisa in the summer of 2000, and we drove up a narrow winding road and reached a remote house. As we got out of the car with our two young daughters, still unsure whether we had reached the right place, a large and scruffy Alsatian bounded towards us. We braced and stood in front of the girls, but the dog’s charge turned out to be no more than a friendly welcome.

Pauli

The owner explained that Pauli lived at the house, but that he would happily take her away if we preferred, otherwise could we feed and look after her? By this time, the girls were excited about having a dog about the house, so we agreed. She was very well behaved and no trouble at all.

When I took a run along the track which led up through the woods, she followed me. At first I wasn’t happy having to be responsible for her, but soon realised it was she who was looking after me, and was very pleased to have her company when we encountered large dogs some distance from their owners. Pauli kept in range, and we reached a clearing with wide views: there in the distance was the beautiful old city with its famous leaning tower. Only one city in the world looks like that. I called her back and we returned to the house together.

A year or so later I was walking with Rachel and Alice when we were greeted by a friendly dog. We chatted to the owner, and the girls told her that we didn’t have a dog because Mum and Dad didn’t think it was a good idea. Their wistful, uncomplaining tone made me feel slightly hard-hearted, as was no doubt intended. Our happy experience with Pauli encouraged us, and dog ownership entered the agenda.

Oil painting by Alice Edwards

Debbie had grown up with an elderly black Labrador called Snudge, and that became our choice of breed. By the autumn of 2002 we were the proud owners of Tasarla Cracker, puppy of Tasarla Black Jewel Ginty, sired by Hatchfield Feargal, a Field Trial Champion. When we visited the breeders to choose one of the litter, Cracker ran over to say hello, wagging his tail and licking our hands: he had been adopted by the breeders’ daughter, who had carried him about. As a result he was super friendly, both to people and to other dogs. In his playful enthusiasm he tugged at my shoelace and managed to untie it. This was the dog for us.

Puppy in a bucket!

While I was at work, Debbie worked hard on training and socialising him, and his friendliness made him an ideal family dog, tolerant of the abundance of attention he received from excitable girls of eight and six years old. He had known only love and care, and he was gentle and trusting. But we hadn’t foreseen what a calming influence he would be in the household. Not that our lives had been particularly turbulent, but like almost any household with children, there would be the occasional noisy argument or shouting match. Cracker would slink off and hide, looking guilty and distressed, under the impression that he was in disgrace. The sight of his innocent suffering would often lower the temperature – or at least the volume – of the argument.

He loved charging around with other dogs, and once or twice escaped into next door’s garden, where he and Snips trashed some plants in their exuberant play. Another time I was impressed by the ability of dogs to moderate their play: when he was newly full grown he was charging round the garden of our holiday cottage in Dorset with three other dogs. The game must have been too boisterous, as one of them suddenly let out a yelp. The dogs didn’t stop, but immediately dialled down their speed and intensity.

His friendliness with other dogs did have a downside. He was confident of his irresistibility, and this confidence was often justified. (Don’t worry, pregnancy was not a risk). But he wasn’t always a gentleman, and didn’t always understand that when a bitch (or a dog) says no, they mean no.

And there were one or two gaps in his socialisation: flappy raincoats could set him off, and sometimes he would be indignant about people who had the temerity to take a walk unaccompanied by a dog, or to come round a corner unexpectedly. He resented our neighbours moving about their own back garden. Also he gave our daughters the opportunity to add the word coprophagia to their vocabulary at an early age. And to our embarrassment, he could sometimes exhibit racist tendencies. He certainly wasn’t perfect.

Debbie’s brother and his wife out in Athens owned Nelson, also a soft-hearted black Labrador. This meeting, billed as the resistible force vs the moveable object, sadly never took place.

He was polite about the house. Having grown up with Tumbi being so badly behaved at dinner time, I was determined that Cracker should not be fed scraps at the table. He can’t have been happy about the delicious meat smell drifting down from our plates: he would march off and glug great quantities of water, as if to say “who needs meat when you can have water?” Then, as plates were emptied and cutlery laid down, his hopeful black nose would slowly appear over the table.

In his early years, Cracker often accompanied me on my runs, after one Saturday when his big brown eyes stared up hopefully as I tied my running shoes. Why not? I thought. He had trouble matching my running speed, by which I mean he preferred either a second gear trot or a fifth gear sprint. So when he was off lead – he would dawdle, then zoom past, then dawdle again. Some nuances of running etiquette did escape him, typically when we encountered a chocolate Labrador bitch.

But there was such joy in seeing him bounding along beside me, ears flapping. He would go off on detours but I could always trust him to come back to me soon. Sometimes he would nuzzle my hand as we ran along, as if to say “Thank you, Dad.” Only once, on a cold and very wet February day, did I sense him staring at me asking the question: “Why are we doing this?” I didn’t have an answer for him.

Once I took him on an absurdly ambitious run along the Cornish Coast Path from Boscastle to Widemouth Bay – over twelve miles. There were thunderstorms about. I wildly underestimated how long this fiercely undulating run would take, and among the worry about whether we would ever arrive, the girls had already planned the Cracker Memorial, a giant bronze statue with his noble features looking out to sea from a prominent headland. Meanwhile I would be remembered by a cross made of a couple of lollipop sticks secured by a rubber band.

One time he found a squirrel in the middle of a field, unable to take its usual escape route up a tree. Cracker was upon it in no time, but was then stumped as to what he should do next. His killer instinct lagged some way behind his speed.

I noticed that after we started running I seemed to get more respect from him on walks and around the house, as if he now accepted me as a pack leader. Once he was even allowed to take part in a charity 10k trail race in Chalfont St Giles.

At one point in the race we came to what seemed an impossible stile for him to pass through: while I was fretting and scratching my head about what to do next, he got bored with my dithering, took a run-up and leapt clean over, landing safely on the other side.

Cracker tries Canicross

We had a go at Canicross (“Where your dog takes you for a run”) and we finished 5.6km in a respectable 27 minutes 52 seconds, sixth out of ten in our class. I’m pretty sure he could have kept up with a faster partner. We even appeared in the background on The One Show: they had been there filming a piece in which ex-athlete Colin Jackson was partnered with a humorously unsuitable dog.

Keeping a pet is often recommended as a means of reducing stress. It doesn’t always work like that. But sometimes after a frustrating day at work I would pass through the lounge on the way upstairs to change out of my work clothes, and Cracker would roll over for a tummy rub. I could feel my mood lighten at the chance to give – and to receive – a little love, with no trace of the demands which people make on each other. Although he could be overenthusiastic: whenever some task required my head to be near floor level, he would regard it as a slobbering opportunity.

He could be obedient to the point of stupidity: Alice found that if he was lying at the edge of the sofa, he would still obey the “Roll over!” command, even if meant that he tumbled to the floor. Repeatedly.

He loved the childrens’ summer parties: he would lead the kids round and round the garden in a frantic game of chase. Sometimes the girls would set up an obstacle course using play equipment, and he became quite proficient. He won the agility competition (and a medal) at the Chorleywood Village Day, because we had trained him to run through the play tunnel – all the other dogs failed at this hurdle. He almost retained his title the following year – under Rachel’s expert guidance he completed a superb round, but in the tiebreaker the judges inexplicably awarded first prize to a dog with an adult handler. Being a Labrador, however, his performance in the obedience competition (i.e. not eating the sausage) was less impressive.

By the time he was twelve, his health was failing: the cancer which had visited him since he was eighteen months old became overpowering. He grew lethargic, and could no longer accompany us on walks. Reluctantly we took him on his last visit to the vet, where the woman gently injected him with a sinister blue fluid. He hardly reacted, passing imperceptibly from sleep to something deeper. I know that stuff’s not for humans, but it did its work very peacefully. “He was the perfect family dog” I told the vet as I looked on him for the last time.

We remember him for his patient, joyful and loving personality. If a hug was happening, he always wanted to be part of it. We unanimously voted him the nicest member of our family. Sometimes he seemed too good for us: as if we just didn’t deserve him. Bless him.

The worst thing about Debbie

Alice took the rap, wrongly I believe. It was 25th May 2005 – I know that because it was one of the most famous nights in Champions League history, the Miracle of Istanbul.

Unaware that the match was scheduled for that evening – or that Liverpool would be finalists – I had arranged for Mum and Dad to look after the girls, and bought us tickets for to see Jack Dee at the Wycombe Swan. He was very funny. I don’t think he had taken account of the Champions League calendar either, because after the interval he moaned (amusingly) about missing the match, and goaded the football fans in the audience by threatening to reveal the half-time score – which I now know was 3-0 to AC Milan.

Later, back in the car park, I overheard excited football talk coming from the next car. I turned on the radio and heard the story of Liverpool’s amazing comeback, and penalty shootout victory.

Dad regarded himself as Welsh, and I see myself as a Watford man, but we were both born in Liverpool, and would support them against anyone but Watford. So back at home, he had no doubt been looking forward to a night watching the footie while Mum fielded the kids. I imagine him getting steadily gloomier as AC Milan built up their three goal lead in the first half.

About seven minutes into the second half, there was a cry from the kitchen accompanied by the sound of breaking glass. Dad went straight to the kitchen, where he found Mum staring at a mess of glass shards and Marmite adorning the kitchen floor. Alice had picked up a jar by the lid, which hadn’t been properly screwed on, and a half spiral of contact coupled with the stickiness of the product had kept the jar and its contents attached just long enough to lift it over the hard tiled kitchen floor.

Mum and Dad set to work clearing up the dangerous, sticky mess while keeping Rachel and Alice at a safe distance. Finally, calm and order was restored, and Dad could return to the football. It was three all. In a six minute period, Gerrard, Šmicer and Alonso had all scored – the most amazing comeback in Champions League history.

And Dad had missed it all. AC Milan then steadied their ship, and there were no further goals in normal time or extra time, and Liverpool triumphed in the penalty shootout.

But who should take the blame for that Marmite disaster? Debbie is a wonderful cook. My contribution in the kitchen is to clear up afterwards, and in doing so I frequently find lids sat loosely atop ingredient jars. And just today I found the Ariel top not completely screwed on. Chaos and anarchy.

Of course, it’s never a good idea to pick up jars or bottles by the lid. But Alice was only eight, and entitled to believe that sensible adults wouldn’t have left it in a hazardous state. So I wonder if the Marmite had been put back in the cupboard after Debbie had left it unscrewed. Now I’m not comparing this to the Dreyfus affair or the Birmingham Six, but I do think there might have been a miscarriage of justice here.

I wouldn’t describe Debbie as Marmite – I don’t think anyone hates her, and I love her very much. But she does sometimes fail to screw caps and lids on properly. And d’you know what, that’s probably the worst thing about her.

Tumbi

When my grandparents Sallie and Jack came to live with us in Chorleywood in 1964, it was, I imagine, part of the deal that we would be getting a dachshund. They had owned one before, also called Tumbi.

Sallie with her first Tumbi and her niece Maureen, c. 1952

This dog was in turn named after a dog their son (my uncle) Philip had got to know in India during the war, named after a village in Gujarat.

Unaware of the adage that a dog is for life, Mum and Dad promised my brother Rob a dog and me a cat as presents, and soon after we took delivery of a black-and-tan dachshund puppy, and later a white kitten which I named Cleopatra, shortened to Cleo, later known as Puddha.

At eight years old, my early experience of dogs had not been positive. I remember being nipped by a poodle in a cafe when I had made an unwelcome approach. I had also been scared of a Labrador owned by my Mum’s friend, which no doubt sensed and reflected my fear, and barked at me for what seemed a full half hour. So it took some time before I achieved any rapport with Tumbi. At first I must have assumed she spoke English, otherwise why else would I have endlessly repeated “do your widdle” while walking her round the garden?

If Rob and I were under any illusion that Tumbi and Cleo belonged to us, it didn’t last long: Sallie fed them, and looked after them during the daytime. That was enough to earn Tumbi’s loyalty. The cat, of course, belonged to nobody.

Tumbi – whom we also called Wumpy, or Wumpy-Tump – was born, we were told, on 29th February 1964, so only had a true birthday every four years. She was fiercely loyal to friends and family, and would howl her greeting when familiar legs entered the house. She had a good memory, and even occasional visitors were assured of a warm welcome. The exception to this was my Auntie Sheila, who was always greeted with suspicion, even hostility. I assume this was because Tumbi detected essence of cat on her clothing. Also she must have had a bad experience with the milkman, as the clinking of milk bottles sent her into a fury.

We tried to get her to chase away the squirrels who were devouring the bird food, opening the back door with the instruction “Send ‘em off!” She followed the same path across the lawn every time, heedless of where the varmints might be. I’m pretty sure I remember seeing a couple of squirrels simply stepping back a few paces, as if from a railway track.

We didn’t train Tumbi well. Sallie was not a big eater, which was often the source of arguments with my mum, who worried that she wasn’t feeding herself properly. Sallie would surreptitiously feed the dog pieces of her teatime cake, or dinner from the table. This made Tumbi seriously overweight and gave her terrible habits: she came to expect food at the table, and would insistently howl for it – a problem which got worse as she grew older.

Sallie was 77 when she came to live with us, so she didn’t walk quickly. Perhaps she felt Tumbi needed more exercise, so as she walked along the flinty surface of Park Avenue, she would kick the stones with her boots for Tumbi to chase after. This created another bad habit: Tumbi started barking ceaselessly for us to throw stones for her. Not very safe – there’s a reason why dogs are usually encouraged to chase sticks instead. Also very annoying, to us and the neighbours. Once, just to get our own back, at a riverside picnic Rob and I threw such a barrage of ‘tonys for her that she just stood there standing in the stream barking furiously, too paralysed with choice to chase any of them.

Sallie died when Tumbi was seven. Our cleaning lady Mrs Galloway arrived to find her lifeless in her rocking chair, with Tumbi lying patiently at her feet.

Mum was houseproud, and wouldn’t have had a dog out of choice, but she dutifully took on responsibility. It wasn’t easy: with Mum and Dad both working, the dog was left alone for long periods, and as she got older some neighbours reported her howling in distress when left alone during the day. With hindsight we should have hired a dog walker, or at least a visitor to let her out in the middle of the day.

Encouraged by Mum, we spoke to Tumbi in her own language, a joint development I think by Mum and her cousin Mollie. Suddie wob mom doll meant “thought he was mother’s darling” and Ubble sings doin’ to los meant “awful things they’re doing to you”. I also gave her a full name, in keeping with what I felt was her (hem) aristocratic bearing: Fittipaldi J. Esterhazy J. Mustang-Goulash J. Los J. Sisyphus J. Tumbi. That requires explanation.

  • Fittipaldi – after Emerson Fittipaldi, the racing driver, obviously.
  • J’s – we once held a pencil to her paw in an attempt to get her to sign her name, and it came out looking vaguely like a “J”.
  • Esterhazy – after Charles Marie Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, the villain of the Dreyfus affair. Who apparently spent his last years writing anti-Semitic articles in Harpenden.
  • Mustang-Goulash – no idea, probably just added for extra length and comic effect
  • Los – from Tumbi language, meaning “you”.
  • Sisyphus – Tumbi’s habit of chasing stones, and particularly, pushing them up hills only to see them roll back down again, earned her this nickname from Dad,
  • Tumbi – her actual name.

In the second half of Tumbi’s life, Rob and I were sometimes a little mean to her. Back when Gary Glitter was thought of as nothing worse than an untalented prat (innocent times), we would sit Tumbi vertically – which can’t have been good for her long spine – and make her dance along to I’m the Leader of the Gang, her paws punch in time. And when Rob brought home his life partner, she was shocked at our cruelty, addressing the dog in her own language with phrases like “Are you dettin old an’ useless an’ dyin’, den?” “Are you big fat useless lump, den?”

The cat, of course, could easily outwit Tumbi. If the dog was occupying the basket, the cat, being fed on demand, would approach her food cupboard miaowing. We then put out some food, but she walked away immediately. Tumbi (definitely not fed on demand) would rush out of her basket hoping for the leftovers, only to find the food dish snatched away, and Puddha settled in her warm basket.

Tumbi always enjoyed her walkies, and in her last years at Chipperfield she still got excited when her lead was brought out. Once as I walked along our road, she followed at a snail’s pace on a gradually climbing bank and found herself on top of a steep slope, trapped by her short, arthritic limbs. So I walked her back to the start of her climb, and turned round. She went exactly the same way, and got stuck again. I didn’t try to walk her again. In her dotage she also walked into our garden pond, and got lost in our (pleasant but not huge) garden. Sometimes she would plod into her basket, quite unaware that the cat was already in residence. Puddha tolerated this intrusion with weary acceptance.

Tumbi had been part of my life from eight years old through grammar school and university to the beginning of my career. When I visited Mum and Dad from London one Sunday in early 1980, Tumbi looked confused and immobile – completely out of sorts. Dad said he would take her to the vet the next morning. I asked if he was expecting any treatment to be recommended for her, and he shook his head. I got to the floor, gave her a last cuddle, and said “Going to see Nana”. Mum was touched and amused to hear this from an avowed atheist.

Tumbi did have some bad habits, largely because Sallie had been more of an indulgent grandma than a mum to her. But Tumbi was loyal, affectionate and fun, and I loved to hear her charging upstairs to lie at the end of my bed on weekend mornings. She had lived to a ripe old age, and almost reached her fourth birthday (i.e. nearly sixteen years). I’m sure she went to doggie heaven. Well, probably.

Medal Going Home

When I was about eleven, I was an avid collector of coins, attracted by the romance of finding Victorian pennies, halfpennies and once, a silver Edwardian shilling in my change. A fondness for money itself may also have played a part. The announcement in 1966 of plans for decimalisation injected urgency into my hobby, and when I grew old enough to do a paper round, a large part of the proceeds went towards this solitary pastime.

Occasionally I bought a copy of Coins and Medals, before moving downmarket to the livelier upstart Coin Monthly. But it was probably as a reader of the former that I casually asked my father whether he had any medals from the war.

He replied that he had not, because he had never claimed them. Probably like many others, he had regarded these baubles as a poor reward for years of putting his life at risk in the service of His Majesty. But then he thought, why not? and decided to send off for them. Of course, he still remembered his Service Number. Before long, he had received – over twenty years after the war ended – four medals: the War Medal 1939-1945, the Defence Medal, the 1939-1945 Star, and specifically for his main theatre of service, the Burma Star.

I was impressed by the speed and efficiency with which they were delivered: less so by the medals themselves. “Silver” coins minted before 1947 still consisted of 50% actual silver. But the War Medal and the Defence Medal, although silver in colour, were made of cupro-nickel. More disappointingly, they carried no identification, suggesting medals stacked up in a warehouse, waiting to be claimed. There was nothing personal about them: I could not have expressed this at the time, but I was left with the impression that the government had regarded the recipients not as individuals but as a homogeneous, expendable mass.

My mother’s parents lived with us, and after my Dad’s medals arrived, my grandfather Jack Brockbank similarly decided to see if he could still claim his medals from the Great War – by now nearly fifty years previous.

Jack at right

To his surprise, after filling in a form, they arrived. He had been awarded the British War Medal and the Victory Medal.

I found these far more impressive. The British War Medal was struck in silver, and showed St George on horseback trampling a skull and cross-bones and a shield showing the Prussian eagle. The Victory Medal showed a winged figure of Victory, and was inscribed “The Great War For Civilisation 1914-1919”, dating the end of the war to the Treaty of Versailles. Perhaps from our perspective the Second World War more closely fits the description of a “war for civilisation”.

But it was the edge which fascinated me: both medals were inscribed “173612 DVR. J. BROCKBANK. RE.” Although the medal was still meagre recompense for the dangers he had faced, it was at least personal – something the recipient could be proud to own.

Relatively few of the British War Medals survive: when the Hunt brothers attempted to corner the silver market in 1979, the silver price went up eightfold, and their bullion value far exceeded their market value as medals: as a result, many were melted down.

In the 1920s the British War Medal and Victory Medal acquired the nickname Mutt and Jeff when worn together, inspired by the US newspaper comic strip. When accompanied by other commonly awarded medal, the 1914–15 Star (or the 1914 Star), the set of three were humorously known as Pip, Squeak and Wilfred, after three popular comic strip characters, a dog, a penguin and a rabbit.

My father and grandfather allowed me to be custodian of their medals, but as a collector, I didn’t want to leave it there. Some time around 1970 I bought a few of the other WW2 medals, where they were affordable from paper round pay.

I also acquired a 1914-15 Star, the one which Jack had not received. I noticed that it had an inscription on the back, but I didn’t pay it much attention, and my small medal collection spent half a century largely undisturbed on my bookshelf in its Coinval album. Just occasionally I’d glance at them, and feel gratitude, with a flicker of peacetime boomer guilt, that I’d never been called upon to fight in a war, as my grandfather and father were.

2022 began with a flurry of renewed work on my family tree, as the 1921 Census emerged. In the course of my researches, I read about a Facebook page called Medals Going Home, run by postman and genealogist Adam Simpson-York. He acquires named WW1 medals and other identifiable memorabilia on eBay, and reunites them with descendants or other family members. To do this he uses Ancestry.com to follow the family down to the present, and social media such as Facebook to locate living family members to receive the medal. His randomly scattered acts of altruism have been featured on the BBC’s One Show.

What a marvellous idea! To track down a missing medal belonging to a particular serviceman or woman is virtually impossible. But going the other way, pushing rather than pulling, as it were – starting from a named medal including a Service Number (especially one with a less common surname) – it is frequently possible to find their grandchildren, or great-nieces and great-nephews etc. And a medal which has been lost, forgotten, sold, stolen or cleared out of a house at some point over the last hundred years can again find a home where it is valued.

I remembered the 1914-15 Star I had bought, and went to look at it for the first time in years: it would mean so much more to the recipient’s family than to me.

225291. W. B. BOAST. A.B. R.N.

Using the Ancestry website I started building W. B. Boast’s family tree. I soon established that his full name was William Benjamin Boast, born in Lambeth, London in 1887. He got through the war, married and had a couple of children, and lived until 1956 – so there could be some living descendants.

I also found his naval record, which tells us that he joined the Navy in 1903 when he was 16 years old, and lists the ships he crewed. The record also tells us that he was 5 foot 6, with auburn hair, hazel eyes and a fresh complexion, that he had a scar on his lower lip, two scars on his right hand, and tattoos of a girl’s head in a star on his right arm, and a sword on his left arm. It shows his progress from Boy, 2nd Class to Able Seaman in three years.

He served on HMS Malaya from January 1916 to April 1919, fighting at the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916. The Malaya was hit eight times and took major damage as it was last in line of the squadron of fast battleships which had to turn right round, one after the other, in the face of the full German line. A total of 65 men died in the battle, or later of their injuries, and the Malaya got home with a serious list.

W.B. Boast was invalided out in 1919 following the amputation of the third finger of his right hand. Back in civilian life in 1921, he worked as an electrical fitter in Willesden, London, and was still doing so in 1939.

But I was no nearer to finding the next generation down after his daughter and son. So I enlisted Adam’s help at Medals Going Home. Within 48 hours, he emailed me to say that he had found Able Seaman Boast’s granddaughter: he included her telephone number and said she would be expecting my call.

I called her, a lovely lady living in Great Yarmouth. She was only three when her grandfather died, so she didn’t remember him, but she knew that he had served in the Navy, and was very pleased to know that the medal would be on its way to her house. And that, I think, is where it belongs.

Kath’s writing

My parents were members of the Watford U3A Creative Writing group in the 1990s and 2000s, and almost all of these pieces by my mother (Kathleen Edwards née Brockbank 1925-2007) were written during that period. Where they relate to specific memories, I have attempted to order them chronologically, and the others according to their estimated date of writing. The photographs and links are my additions.

Dad

14 Balfour Road, Wallasey
One two, three four, five six, seven eight, nine ten. 
He sat on the chair, looking lonely, unhappy
One two, three four, five six, seven eight, nine ten.
I clambered beside him, to comfort him counting
One two, three four, five six, seven eight, nine ten.

At home on the bookcase I have a small statue
and each time I see it I’m back home beside him
Happily counting while mother stands by.
Suddenly sensing that now its not playtime
I slip off his lap and floorbound sit watching
while mother unhappy, her face clouded, weary,
says softly, “It's alright Jack. Don't worry.
Go swiftly and safely. I know you'll do well".
Many years later, the rest of the story, 
familiar to many but still hard to tell.
That morning he left us to stand in a work pound
with a few dozen others as desperate as he.
All hoping to be the one that was chosen
to work for one day maybe two even three
He was counting because of an old superstition
Good luck would attend him by counting to ten.

That day was a good one, he came home delighted
He'd called at the fish shop to bring home our tea.
We had it with chips and some new bread and butter
It tasted so good I remember it still.

Depression recession, laid off, redundant.
Words often spoken by bland T.V. announcers
In how many places are such scenes re-enacted?
Have they all happy endings as happy as ours?
All we can do is to try to make certain
that no-one feels lonely or useless or hungry
as to how we can do this well thats a big question
If you know the answer please telephone me!

***************

Uncle Tom

Old age sharpens the memory of the past, so it has been said. Perhaps this is why some events and some people stay in the mind. Uncle Tom is as sharply defined as if we were in the same room, and yet it is nearly fifty years since I last saw him.

He lived in North Wales, across the road from the Aqueduct, a renowned local landmark. We lived about forty miles away, a mere nothing these days, but then the journey involved a ninety minute train journey on a slow, stop-at every-station train. We lived in a three-bedroomed house and there were four of us, my mother and father, my brother and myself. I don’t think he ever slept at our house, but I can clearly see him sitting in a rocking chair, feet stretched out towards the open fire, pipe in mouth (it was never alight and I doubt if it had any tobacco in it), elbows touching the arm of the chair, hands waving enthusiastically as he listened to his favourite operatic arias, often joining in, inventing his own librettos as he sang. It was my job to wind the gramophone if it began to flag. Uncle Tom did not need winding up. He would continue to hum until my efforts were rewarded and: “Mimi was once more in her garret sewing until the frost was over”, hitting the notes correctly. In retrospect it was Uncle Tom that fashioned my love of opera which has since informed my life.

Tom and Kath

He was a large man with a strong square-jawed face, gentle eyes and eloquent expressive hands. He hated violence of any kind, certain that the Great War, his war (he had fought with my father at Gallipoli) was a senseless criminal waste of lives which should never be repeated.

During the second world war I was evacuated to Wales and spent some time living with Uncle Tom’s brother and wife who lived nearby. We would meet over tea in his tiny kitchen. His wife Dora presided over the teapot. She had a large unfriendly dog who used to sit on a chair by the tea table, a napkin around his neck, lapping his tea from a china saucer. Uncle Tom was reluctant to allow me to share the table with the dog so the dog would be banished to lie on the floor where he would growl angrily and nip any feet within range.

We would go for walks by the River Dee, which ran under the aqueduct, or by the canal which ran over it. He would tell me that some day there might be a fair world where everyone would have an equal crack of the whip. I wasn’t too sure what the phrase meant, but he explained “fair shares and opportunities for all”. He hoped I would live to see it. So do I, but I doubt it.

He was adopted by a large female cat which wandered starving into the house, but was quickly banished to the back yard by the large unfriendly dog. He fed the cat secretly, and found an old wooden box for it to lie in, well hidden between the wall of the yard and a tree. The cat repaid him by producing litters of kittens at regular intervals. Uncle Tom would be dispatched to “drown them in the Dee” He would obediently take them away, return home, try to light his tobacco-less pipe, and all would be well until the next time.

Some time later, during a family crisis, my brother and I had to go to the brickworks where he was employed. It was beginning to get dark and as we waited in the large factory we could see many pairs of curious eyes shining through the gloom. “What are those?” we asked. “Tom’s cats” was the reply, “He says they keep the mice down, but we all wish he would get their mother seen to”.

Uncle Tom died the day my first son was born. A man of passionate beliefs, sensitive, empathetic, I still miss him, and hope he found the “presence that disturbed him” that he spoke of, misquoting Wordsworth as we walked beside the river Dee.

***************

Jane

It began in a lift, a very small lift, with just enough room to take a trolley, its occupant and me. It was the beginning of the most frightening moment of my life.

It had been a fairly routine day. It was 2 pm, nearly time to go off duty. The telephone rang; could we admit a little girl from casualty with more than 45% burns? She had been stretching up to reach a snapshot on a shelf near the fire when her clothing caught fire. I relayed the message to the ward sister. She took the phone from me. Her voice was curt and somewhat exasperated as she turned to me. “You’ll have to stay on late to take her to the theatre; I can’t spare anyone else.”

The lift was gloomy, dark and noisy. The little girl’s screams had been muted by morphia but she moaned quietly. I held her hand.

“Its all right, Mummy will be here soon. The doctor is going to make you better. You’ll go to sleep, and when you wake up Mummy will be there.”

“You promise, Mummy and Auntie Betty. They won’t be cross will they?”

“I promise. No, they won’t be cross.”

They’d better not be cross, I thought to myself. How could they be so careless? What was a six year old doing alone in the house?

“Can I have Jane? I want Jane”

“Soon. Very soon.”

“I can’t go to sleep without Jane”.

“I’ll find her for you if I can. If I can’t, I know she will be here when you wake up.”

Who or what was Jane? A doll or a teddy? Perhaps I could call my friend on the children’s ward. She might be able to find a discarded toy that would help if mummy and Aunty Betty were too distraught to bring it with them.

When we reached the theatre she refused to let go of my hand until the anaesthetic took effect. The surgeon pulled back the sheet. “This won’t take long. She’s far too shocked to take a prolonged anaesthetic. Wait there nurse, we will need you soon to take her back.”

Theatre Sister nodded reassuringly. “It will be good for her to have a familiar face with her when she wakes up.” Hospital gossip had told me that this particular theatre sister terrified all who came into contact with her including renowned surgeons. Not so this day though.

I must remember to ask her mother to bring Jane. I’ll ask casualty to ring up. I tried to think who was on duty in casualty. Was it someone I knew? My train of thought was interrupted,

“Its all right, nurse. You can go now”

“No I can’t go, I have to wait…”. My voice trailed away. The trolley was pushed past me, and I saw that Jane would not be needed.

The silence was absolute. Everyone seemed to be in suspended animation. Even now, 45 years later, I can describe the theatre ante-room in minute detail. The small figure was lifeless. Until that moment I had not realised what death meant. Now I knew, and I found it terrifying. It was the absence of life. I knew now why people believed in the soul. The child on the trolley had retained nothing of the little girl I had taken up in the lift. Something had gone, but where? Not to an all loving all caring God. Where was he when those little arms stretched up too far?

“I’ll take her down.” Nobody stopped me. Back to the lift, darker and colder. I held the hand again. But it wasn’t her hand. She wasn’t there.

Back in the ward in the side room reserved for visitors I saw two women, one carrying a small battered Teddy – Jane? The sun shone brightly lighting up every corner of the room. Why then did it feel so cold? They were silent. Staring into a blackness only they could see.

I like to think that the little girl found Jane.

***************

The Way We Were

Matron sat bolt upright behind a huge desk. I stood in front; I could not do otherwise – there was no other furniture in the room. “Is your family part of the Brocklebank Shipping Line?” she asked, but did not wait for an answer.

I answered questions on schooling, yes, I had matriculated. No, I had not completed my training at a local children’s hospital. “Why not?” I couldn’t tell her that I had left because one of the children had died. Sick adults die as well; if I wanted to be a nurse I would have to get used to it. So I lied.

“I left because I felt that I would get a better training here”.

“Why do you want to be a nurse?”

“I always thought I would like to be a doctor, but I think women are more useful as nurses; they are better at caring”.

I knew it was rubbish; I was, and still am ashamed. But she looked pleased. I was accepted, possibly because she thought there was an outside chance that I was connected to the Brocklebank Shipping Line.

Breakfast was at 7am. It was consumed at great haste. We were always anxious to know if authority had decided in the night that we would be needed on another ward.

Night Sister closed the meal by rapidly intoning grace, and where we to go. We had learned to accept our fate without a change of expression. We received a full report on our arrival on the ward. Sleeves rolled down, wrists trim in starched cuffs, hands clasped dutifully behind our backs; then to work!

The junior student nurses – or “pro’s” as we were called – were banished to the sluice room, scrubbing everything in sight so that when the Assistant Matron did her rounds she found “everything exactly as you would like to find it, Nurse”.

There was a mid-morning break. Half an hour maximum, often only ten minutes. Tidy your bedroom, change apron, grab a snack.

Make beds. We did this at a tremendous rate, and we enjoyed it. It was making people comfortable, and gossiping time. The patients would tell us their worries, and we would tell them ours.

Ward rounds followed. God-like consultants walked from bed to bed, trailing an army of silent acolytes in strict ranking order.

Professor C, the Consultant Physician, was short in stature, incisive and brilliant. It was said he had the Chinese ability to diagnose merely by taking a pulse. His bedside lectures were enthralling, but I always found myself hoping the patients didn’t understand all he was saying, although we did use jargon intended to mask reality. For instance, tuberculosis was described as pthisis, or acid-fast bacillus – anything but TB, which the patient would readily interpret as what in those days was a death sentence for him and probably for some of his family as well. Perhaps the Consultant occasionally made mistakes, but we were not aware of them. If any of us were taken ill, he is the doctor we would choose to treat us.

The Consultant Surgeon (always known as “Mr.R”) was noted for immediate decisions and radical surgery. He was handsome, and he knew it. Mopping his brow in the theatre made most of us go weak at the knees. His smile alone was said to cost his private patients fifty guineas. He operated fast, and most of his patients recovered. Everyone adored him.

After the consultants came first, the Registrar, slightly more approachable than the Consultant. One I remember in particular had the word “rat” as part of his name, and was called so by the nurses on account of his amorous propensities; we all knew it, so few were deceived by his charm.

And after the Registrar came the Housemen, still superior to the nurses, but easy to talk to given the right circumstances. We would exchange advice on how to cope with demanding seniors or difficult patients. The Housemen were immature, inexperienced and weary. We had much in common.

Carols at Liverpool Royal Infirmary. Kath middle column, third row.

During the day, Matron would do a ward round. She was 4 ft 10, and yet made a rule banning any trainee probationer under 5 ft 3. She wore a large starched hat rumoured to be a foot high, though no-one ever got near enough to her to check if this was true. We were all terrified of her, from the most senior consultants downwards. Before the war she ordered all her ward sisters to do the patriotic thing and join the PMRAF nursing service reserve, but in 1939, as soon as they were likely to be called up, she ordered all of them to resign – – she didn’t want to lose any of her staff!

She would sometimes refuse to enter a ward for a round, conducted with military precision, because as she glanced through the doors she had seen a bed castor that was not straight, or one of the embossed designs on the white counterpanes was upside down. When she retired, a select few of her ward sisters were commanded to take tea with her; they were served tea and biscuits in order of seniority.

Was she liked? No. Was she respected? Most certainly. I, for one, am grateful to have known her.

Dinner-time. Hand out those plates even if they are too hot to handle; most of us developed asbestos fingers.

Afternoon visiting. Two only to a bed. More bedpans, more bedmaking. Cuffs off when working, cuffs on when speaking to anyone above the rank of Charge Nurse.

Off duty at last, at six, six-thirty, or sometimes seven. Try to collapse into bed.

“Brocky, come on, you can’t go to sleep yet, come out with us for a meal”.

“Can’t, sorry, no money”.

“Jones has got a Welsh parcel”. That’s a different matter; all that Welsh butter oozing round the crusts of Bara brith.

10pm. Lights out.

10.05pm. Torches on. Whispered tales of horrors past and horrors yet to come.

11pm. Creep warily back to own room. To bed at last.

***************

Coming of Age

Casualty was very busy that night. We didn’t know why, but then we never did. Sometimes a ship would dock and the city would fill up with drunken sailors; that would make us busy. On Orangemen’s day we would be deluged with fighting Irishmen needing stitching and separating. Tonight was neither. Night Sister promised to send us down some extra staff, but so far hadn’t been able to do so.

I had just finished dressing a third degree burn on a child’s hand, and called in the next patient, when four policemen rushed in wheeling a lady who was screaming. She was obviously in great distress. The policemen heaved her on to the bed turned to me and shouted: “She’s all yours”, and disappeared. The casualty officer was nowhere to be seen – probably in the next room.

I looked at the lady. She was very young, about twenty maybe. She lay on her back, knees bent, screaming and pushing. She was giving birth. I knew nothing about childbirth. I had only just emerged from the age of innocence in which babies where flown in by a stork. In those days it was not the source of entertainment that it is considered to be now.

I could see the head emerging. I held it because it seemed the right thing to do. She was pushing and screaming as I shouted “Help”. By the time help arrived, in the person of the extremely efficient but terrifying night sister, I was supporting a very slippery baby boy still attached to the umbilical cord. Sister took over.

“You have a beautiful little boy”, I told the exhausted mum. She burst into tears.

“Don’t tell my mother, please, please.”

“It’s all right, don’t worry”, I tried to reassure her. Night Sister turned to me:

“Well done, nurse”, she said – the only time I had ever heard her praise anyone. “Go and get a cup of tea, you deserve it.”

On my way to obey her command, a very tired Casualty Officer grabbed my arm.

“Will you tell that good lady that her daughter has just given birth. She insists that her daughter has never known any men. I have told her that as far as I know there has only ever been one virgin birth, but her daughter may well be the second.”

Finally off duty, I rushed to see my friends to regale them of the night’s experience. When I opened the door of my room all of my friends were already there singing “Happy Birthday”. Believe it or not I had entirely forgotten that to-day I was twenty-one. I had come of age.

***************

Sallie’s Story

(Kath imagines a day in 1957 from her mother Sallie’s perspective)

It was a twenty minute bus ride from my house to my daughter’s, so I had plenty of time to think on the way there. Was it time to show her Philip’s letter? Was it necessary, even? The answer to the last question was easy – of course it wasn’t necessary. So why was I worrying about it at all? I couldn’t help it. The letter had lain at the back of a drawer and its contents had intruded into my thoughts for six years. The only way to silence its presence was to tell Kath. She wouldn’t mind. She would laugh. Yes, I will tell her. Today.

Kath met me at the bus stop with my 4 year old grandson Robin. He ran towards me.

“Nana. Nana, have you brought me my forprise?”.

“Robin!”, Kath shouted. “I told you not to do that. I hope you haven’t, Mum. He has a house full of toys.”

I picked Robin up and hugged him. “Wait until we get home dear. I know you will like it.”

Ten minutes later as Robin played happily with his forprise, a toy car, I opened my handbag and showed Kath the letter I had received from my son Philip.

Philip in Burma

It was written when he was out in Burma with the RAF, and began: “I have met the man that Kath will fall in love with” – the man in fact that she was now married to. Kath did as I had predicted: she burst out laughing.

“You did well not to tell me, Mum. You knew how I might react: Philip dictating my future!!! I am as strong willed as you are. How would you have felt if your brother had decided who you should marry?”

Aelwyn

I smiled but said nothing. In an instant I was back in a little cottage by the side of the River Dee in North Wales. I was packing a small bag (I had very few possessions). I was in a hurry. I had to be out of there before David returned. I wrote a note, very short: “I’m sorry. Goodbye.” That was all. The villagers would tell him the rest.

Soon I was crossing the fields to my brother’s house. To where Jack, who had fought in Gallipolli with my brother, was waiting for me. I was running away from my husband, my sister, my friends, my life. I had to be with Jack. I didn’t care how scandalised the village would be. I didn’t know how or where we would live. I only knew that we had to be together. We still are. Some day I might tell Kath the full story – but not yet.

***************

Moving House

We had to move down South, far away from the sea. The sea? Well, it was the estuary of the river Dee. Hoylake, our nearest beach, was not beautiful. It was almost sand-free, and the sea was often too dangerous to swim in, but we loved it. We could also walk to Thurstaston Hill, where Turner is reputed to have painted some of his sunsets. My parents lived just a bus ride away, and all our friends were nearby. We knew we would hate to move, but move we must; there was no alternative.

So we put the house on the market. Potential buyers and others came round – it was difficult to tell which was which. After a while we were able to differentiate between them: the potential buyer was often fairly brusque and asked searching questions about plumbing, heating bills, and whether the field at the bottom of the garden was likely to be built on. The others, the merely curious, were talkative, flattering about the decor and furnishings etc.

Robin at 1 Heathbank Avenue

One potential buyer indicated a bookshelf fitted into a corner. “Is that a fixture?” he asked, “we could use the space”. “Yes” I answered tartly. It hadn’t occurred to me that anyone could manage without the bookshelf that my father had painstakingly built into the corner. It is possible that some potential buyers were put off because I didn’t really want to sell our first house, our honeymoon house, the house where my children were nearly born before I was rushed off to hospital with a police escort.

In the end, the house wasn’t sold until we left it entirely to the estate agents. When it was sold, our semi-detached house, I told our elder son, then aged four, that we were moving house, he exclaimed: “How can we move house when they’re joined to each nuvver?”. I would dearly have liked to have literally moved the house, if only to keep my father’s bookcase and the Claygate fireplace that we received as a wedding present.

As for being near the sea? I fear there will need to be an alarming degree of global warming before we could sun ourselves on the beach at Abbots Langley.

***************

The Pool Builder

The bricks had arrived at 6 pm. It was light enough to make a start but he was a quiet man and when the family insisted that it was time for tea and TV he sat in his favourite chair and planned the next day’s programme. Tom chased Jerry through walls and halls but Jack was mentally counting bricks. (Had he ordered enough?) Flipper’s diving and writhing made him concentrate on the cement needed to line the hole. Was it deep enough? It would have to be at least 6ft at one end. He was momentarily diverted from his planning when he news showed marchers in Hyde Park bearing banners “Ban the Bomb”. What use to ban it? Someone would use it sooner or later. Back to the mental drawing board.

Jack in Wallasey

The next day was cloudy, cold and miserable. No matter. At 8 30 am he was out by the holes edge lining up the bricks. He picked up each one, feeling its weight and examining it for cracks. One or two he discarded “More like Sally’s malt loaves than bricks” he smiled to himself, and wondered if the comparison had more to do with the delectable smells wafting through the kitchen window than the shape of the bricks. He began to build the wall, plastering the mortar between each brick with great precision. Not too little, the wall had to be strong – not too much the wall must be neat.

By lunch time he had built up one side. He checked it and it was good. His lunch was hurried. No urge to eat. He had to get on. It took him a week to finish the wall and then he had to wait an impatient two days for the concrete mixer to arrive to turn the dark brown stony hole into a neat rectangular grey shape.

The pool liner arrived, and was duly fitted. He watched others stretching it carefully so that it fitted perfectly and then began to lay the paving. He worked methodically and quietly. He was probably the only carpenter who seemed to be able to hammer in a nail with scarcely a sound. It was not surprising then that the stones were levelled silently or so it seemed to Sallie who dozed on a garden seat near where he worked.

Occasionally he consulted the plan. His plan drawn with a draughtsman’s skill with a few artistic embellishments at the side. The family had teased him when they realised that he had sketched in his two grandsons poised on the edge about to dive in. He smiled and continued. He didn’t tell them that it was only the thought of their pleasure that kept him going. It must be finished when they started the school holidays, he told his aching back as he straightened up. One more week and it would be completed. It was. It is there still. 35 years later. The things that Jack built were built to last.

***************

The Rocking Chair

In the bedroom crammed next to a computer and a wardrobe we have a rocking chair. As heave it out to hoover behind I sometimes think it’s time it was pensioned off. It never will be. Why? I’ll tell you…

Perhaps I should try to describe it first. It’s covered in green velvet, I think. A sort of drab indeterminate green, very fashionable at the time. My mother and I bought it. Its has worn wooden arms which are discoloured with age which have been unsuccessfully varnished and shine where they shouldn’t. So does the velvet, or maybe it’s called dralon, I can’t remember. It’s very comfortable though. It has a tendency to rock a bit too far back, hitting the wall which is all too close behind it, and shooting it’s occupant’s legs high in the air. Most of our guests were wary of it which is one of the reasons it has been relegated to the bedroom. I love it. Every time I sit in it I am Sallie, my mother. All her life or at least all that part of her life that I shared, she had a rocking chair. We chose this one together…

I can still see her rocking, quietly reading. It was usually George Eliot. A very well known and much loved writer. She could quote much of that good lady’s philosophising thoughts…however, back to the rocking chair. There isn’t much more to say about it. I have thought of having it recovered, and even got as far as the inside of a shop specialising in such work, but something stopped me. Covered in some bright new material with the wood french polished, it would lose its magic, not just for me but for my sons who have already told me, half jokingly, that they intend to quarrel about who will inherit it. They too can see their Nana, Sallie, my mother.

Aelwyn writes: When Kath referred to the arms of the chair as being “unsuccessfully varnished”, she was kind enough not to name the expert who succeeded in varnishing the arms unsuccessfully.

I, too had a special relationship with Sallie, my mother-in-law, and she was greatly missed. What Kath has also not mentioned is that, one day while she and I were out working, Sallie’s heart finally gave out on her while she was sitting in her favourite rocking chair.

***************

Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight

“Come for a walk.”

“Not now. I’m reading.”

“Shall I make a cake?”

“No need, I’ve made one.”

“But I wanted to.”

“Lets have a chat.”

“Not now no time we’re watching.”

Why didn’t I go walking, enjoy her baking – it was better than mine – chat instead of watching tripe on TV. Now there’s no time left. It’s too late.

If only time moved backwards. Then we could recreate the past. Instead she joins me whenever I walk on sand dunes, and we talk about her grandchildren and their children. Do you think she can hear me? Tell me she can.

***************

To you, my darling Ael

What are we doing, you and I,
Standing quietly in the Square?
Why are we there?
Tired, cold, old,
Together in love,
Clutching our hands -
Saving our land?

I see you standing,
Pale, silent,
Thinking perhaps of those now still,
And yet again the cry is "Kill!".

R and F and R and L,
R and D and R and A,
Our future,
The sun, the earth, the sea, the sky,
Our world might die.

That's why we're there,
In Trafalgar Square.

**************

Through a winter window

The trees are white with frost
leafless branches stroking the icy air
The birds move fast, chattering with the cold?
The patio pots, cracked, spill grey soil on white turf
Forlornly empty, cold and bare.
table and chair
Did we ever picnic there?
Yet through my winter window I can see
A Christmas tree - thereby hangs a tale

We planted it many years ago, after Christmas. It had served us well. Decorated with baubles and surrounded by presents, we felt that it deserved to prosper. It certainly did. It grew so much the first year that even if we had had the heart to uproot it, it would not have fitted into the house. We bought a new artificial one. At least it was man made. not a living reproach mutely asking, “Why am I here when I ought to be outside?”

Life continued. The family grew, loved, left home, bought houses. We grew older. My brother died. It was not unexpected, but cut short a brilliant academic career. Our sons and their partners came to the funeral. We were all in that state of wordless misery invoked by such occasions. Somehow it is possible to keep up a mindless flow of socialising chatter with relations and friends while eating the funereal food. There are even flashes of light in the gloom as you see familiar faces and recall old times. Afterwards, back home once more, the silent sadness returns.

“Anyone for tea?”

“If you like”, uncaring.

“Mum, we have something to tell you.”

“Uh huh?”

“I am pregnant.” The lilting Scottish voice of our daughter-in law. A feeling of such joy surged inside. We had wondered. We had hoped. We knew that there might be difficulties. We did not dare to ask.

I looked out of the window and saw our Christmas tree and made a silent vow. If all went well we would cover the tree with lights and give presents to every child staying in the court every Christmas. That was 14 years and three more grandchildren ago.

The tree is still there. The top blew off in a storm but it recovered. If you visit us at Christmas be sure to bring your grandchildren to see the lights.

***************

Alice

Eight years old 
But I could see
My Life

Grace and glamour
Early life's joys
I knew

Crooked and limping
Forgetful and Stupid
Old age

The Sun drops low
That trodden road
Twists out of sight

The Future
Mercifully hidden
Don't look dream
Live only for the day

***************

Emotion

I must be calm though this little girl is dying. 
Her eyes are beseeching, asking for help.
Talk to her, play with her, comfort her, help her.
Show no emotion but sympathy, no crying.

The colour is black. It's dark and despairing,
It's shape a relentless hard-balled fist.
“Here's your teddy. I've dressed him -
See his lovely red jersey
And hat at an angle”.
She's smiling, she hugs him.
For that moment she's happy.

The colour is red now, with streaks of bright sunlight.
The fist has now opened,
It's soft and appealing.
Hold her hand now, and whisper:
“It's all right, I'm with you.
Go to sleep. I will stay here,
I’ll stay till the morning”.
Her eyes close. For ever?

The black fist's returning.
Get up, you're off duty - pretend you don't care.

***************

Age cannot wither

We have a plant that refuses to die. 
We have moved it into dark corners,
(Surely plants need light?)
But it doesn't die.
It thrives, it grows,
It refuses to flower.
Is it too old?
In despair, we move it
To the top of the freezer;
It shudders in time to the engine.
It grows even bigger.
We will have to move house
To give it more space.
We can't put it out in the cold,
Because it's showing us
How to grow old,
Gracefully.

Breakfast with Goofy

I remember from my childhood a breakfast conversation with my dad. I liked my sums, and I said “I’ve been thinking, Dad, in the year 2000, I’ll be the same age as you are now.” He liked that – as an actuary, fond of number puzzles, he recognised a kindred spirit. He once thrilled Mum by pointing out the day when their combined ages added up to 100. So that would have been in April 1972. Similarly I can date my conversation with Dad. I turned 44 in 2000, and Dad turned 44 in 1963, so I would have been six or seven.

One of the most exciting things about being a parent – if you have the energy to appreciate it – is watching your child’s personality and sense of humour emerge and surprise you, first in physical play, then in language and dialogue, finally in jokes and banter. Naturally, every child seems like a genius to their doting parents, so these family tales should be read in that light.

***************

Rachel was an early, prolific and witty talker, while from very young Alice had a gift for physical comedy. I thought of them as our Groucho and Harpo.

Rachel has forensic reasoning, which she has carried into her career. I can fairly accurately fix the date we became aware of it: about the time Dad and I watched Michael Owen score and David Beckham get sent off against Argentina, so late June 1998, when Rachel and Alice had just turned four and two.

We were on Mull, doing our traditional walk from Tobermory to the lighthouse. As a party of eleven, aged from two to seventy-eight, progress was slow. Rachel observed:

“Alice is yer slowest person that can walk.” Uncle Rob indulgently engaged:

“What, slower than a snail?”

“No, yer slowest person that can walk!”

“What, slower than a baby?”

“No, yer slowest person that can walk!” Then the killer blow.

“You should listen!”

Rachel’s diction was still imperfect, and walk came out as wart. The combination of childish speech and ruthless logic was devastating, and Rob, his benign avuncular offerings rudely rejected, muttered something about her future career as a lawyer.

***************

A couple of years later, Part of Your World from The Little Mermaid came on the CD player in the car. The song reached the lines:

“Bet you on land they understand
Bet they don’t reprimand their daughters

“Oh yes they do!” piped up Rachel from the back.

***************

Alice had, and has, a delightful infectious chuckle. On a walk by the Thames, she put some rubbish in a bin, and the lid bounced back unexpectedly. She recoiled in comically exaggerated horror, and repeated the scene three times, I burst into laughter. She was very young. It’s a big moment, the first time your child intentionally makes you laugh.

***************

At the end of a long journey to the Yorkshire Dales, we were growing tired and impatient for the journey to be over, when Alice, about six, affected a convincing Chicago gangster accent, and greeted every church with “Look at da choich!” or “Da boys are hot on our tail Bugsy, we’re gonna hide in da choich.” Good times.

***************

On another trip, Bowie’s song The Man Who Sold The World had just played on the mix tape. As we passed through a rural area where pungent muck had recently been spread, and the odour seeped into the car, the traditional question went up: “OK, who did that?” This time it was Alice’s voice singing from the back:

“Oh no, not me
I never lost control”

It was all in the timing.

***************

One generation after my dad heard me make that arithmetical observation, it was my turn to discover more of my child’s personality. The girls had seen an advert for Disney World on TV, and Alice excitedly proposed a family trip there. “We can have breakfast with Goofy!” Rachel – who I reckon was about eight – shot back “But we already get to have breakfast with Goofy two days a week!”

I was ten per cent deeply offended. But really, the speed, the engineering, the lethal concealed barb. That’s my girl.

The Mint Juleps

In the 1980s, going to gigs was my default form of entertainment. Living in Kentish Town in north London, it was a short walk down to Camden, where I spent many happy nights in the Dublin Castle on Parkway, and other nearby venues.

But the Mint Juleps home patch was east London: they emerged from youth theatre at the Half Moon on the Mile End Road, where they had all worked as volunteers. So I don’t remember how I first found them – I don’t think it was round my way. But from the minute I saw and heard them, I was under their spell. Their personalities, their vivacity, their banter, but mostly their glorious voices and harmonies, were an irresistible wave of joy, “like a bolt of sunlight breaking through low hanging cloud” as one fan described it. Their gigs were simply the most enjoyable I’ve ever been to.

They were six girls: the four Charles sisters Debbie, Sandra, Lizzie and Marcia, and two of their school friends, Julie Isaac and Debbie Longworth. (“Four of us are sisters, but I bet you can’t tell which four.”) They had no musical training, and it seems they never set out to be stars: they started the journey to become professional singers when they agreed to a gig in a pub, after the owner had heard them singing at the Half Moon.

They sang unaccompanied, or a capella, and each took her turn in the spotlight, stepping across the stage to sing solo. They handled rhythm and blues, pop, soul, reggae and gospel from the fifties and sixties with complete assurance, style, and an infectious sense of fun.

Sandra would win a roar of appreciation for her astonishing extended “We-e-e-e-e-e-e-ll” at the beginning of Shout. Marcia’s resonant bass lines drove the songs along. And when super-cute, sweet-voiced Julie stepped out to sing One Bad Stud, every guy in the audience imagined she was singing just to him. Debbie Longworth and Lizzie were also great singers – Debbie playfully introduced herself as “the token white”. There were no weaknesses – every song was a delight, and you couldn’t keep the smile off your face.

For me the highlight came when Debbie C took a turn to sing gospel, with Jesus Gave Me Water – a number associated with Sam Cooke among others. Her vibrant, warm contralto, and especially her performance on this song was thrilling, and on the video there’s a lovely moment 56 seconds in when she shoots a look at the camera in annoyance after a slight fluff.

And it seemed to me, in my optimistic and naive twenties, to suggest – even in the midst of the Thatcher era – that we were on the dawn of an age where race would become irrelevant, where people would at last be judged on the “content of their character”, and this joyous music would lead the way. Perhaps it was the lager talking, but we seemed to be travelling so fast. How disappointing that thirty-five years later we are no closer to this destination. If I were black, disappointing wouldn’t cover it.

The group had a decent measure of success. They toured with Sister Sledge, Billy Bragg, Kool & the Gang, Lenny Henry, Shalamar, Fine Young Cannibals and provided backing vocals for Bob Geldof, the Belle Stars, Alison Moyet, Al Green, Gabriel and Dr. Feelgood. They worked with artists like Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and appeared in Spike Lee’s 1990 TV production, Do It Acapella.

They were signed by legendary new wave label Stiff Records, who implicitly acknowledged that they were at their best as a live act by recording them live at the Shaw Theatre in London for their 1985 debut album One Time. They broke into the lower end of the charts with a charming version of Neil Young’s Only Love Can Break Your Heart in 1986 and with Robert Palmer’s Every Kinda People in 1987. They provided the final release on Stiff Records before the label folded: the rap-styled Girl to the Power of 6, produced by the highly successful Trevor Horn – celebrating girl power nine years before the Spice Girls came on the scene.

But their single releases abandoned the joyful a capella style. Their production leant towards 1980s fashions, leaving behind the variety which had been the foundation of their shows. They wrote some good numbers – in particular Debbie Longworth’s Don’t Let Your Heart, which I thought of as their signature song – but their studio recordings weren’t distinctive enough to grab the imagination of the record-buying public.

Some of the records sounded like a natural solo number had been hastily rearranged into a group song, to give all the girls a role. The records never quite captured what made them so special live, and some group members sensed that. In a 2013 interview Debbie Charles recalled frustration at Trevor Horn’s approach to production: “We’ve got a sound already, why’s he trying to give us a new one?”

Arguably Stiff Records lacked confidence in the genre: although the Flying Pickets had shown a couple of years before that a capella groups could have big hits in the UK, they had quickly faded from the charts, being seen as a novelty act.

Listening to the vitality and sheer joy of their live performances decades on, it seems incomprehensible and plain wrong that they didn’t take the world by storm. It may be that the lack of a single focal point made the Mint Juleps difficult to promote, but for me that was one of the attractions – the girls clearly had a lot of fun together, and supported each other as a team. As their career progressed, Debbie Charles and Julie Isaac were increasingly assigned lead vocals, and who knows, perhaps they were offered solo contracts (update – see blog comment below, only from DEBBIE CHARLES herself, no less), but the group stayed together.

I should admit to a track record of championing acts which fail to hit the commercial heights their talent merits. I confidently backed The Panic Brothers (who?) for stardom. I saw a swingin’ soul band called Q-Tips, and concluded that they were a great band, but that their singer was the weak link. That’s right, the singer who went on to fame and fortune as Paul Young. So what do I know? Sorry if I jinxed it for you, ladies.

But happily they seem not to dwell on coming so tantalisingly close to stardom, and in this 2013 interview the two Debbies focus on the things they got to do and the fun they had. From Debbie L: “We were like kids, just messing about and having a good time, but we were getting paid for it as well.” From Debbie C: “Absolutely no regrets at all, I would not change anything. People ask me if I miss the Mint Juleps…I miss sitting in our minibus with those five other people, because we used to laugh till we cried.”

There are other fans who refuse to forget the Mint Juleps. Like Niall McMurray, who has written eloquently in praise of their single Docklands. And like American superfan Robert Doyle, who wrote an outstanding blog piece on them in 2014 (see Part 2: The Music), and started the excellent Mint Juleps tribute page on Facebook the following year. He’s done a great job of keeping the flame alive, finding lost video gems from the past and building a fan community. Mint Julep members sometimes make cameo appearances in the comments – as four are sisters, it’s not difficult for them to stay in touch.

I have no doubt they can all still sing beautifully. Unhappily the Half Moon Theatre is now a JD Wetherspoon pub. But if Debbie, Debbie, Julie, Lizzie, Marcia and Sandra ever feel like getting together for a reunion concert in their east London patch, I’ll be first in line for a ticket. Or perhaps second in line. Just after Robert Doyle.

Cecil Parkinson, Ken Livingstone, music and me

With no qualification besides being an obsessive fan, I was invited to give a sixth form lecture at Watford Grammar School for Boys – my alma mater – on 20th January 1984, on the subject of popular music. The invitation arrived due to the enthusiasm of my cousin Phil, who by coincidence was now teaching Classics at the school – and perhaps due to the credulity of John Holman, the teacher tasked with organising the sixth form lectures.

I was flattered, although initially hesitant. But I had given a best man’s speech the previous year which went down well, so I thought, why not? I prepared a lecture entitled “Songs and Stories”, consisting of ten songs, from the 1950s through to the 1970s, each accompanied by a brief introduction, and arrived at the school at lunchtime. I had left the school in December 1974: nine years later Mr L.K. Turner was still the headmaster. He had always seemed a remote figure, so it was a strange feeling, returning as an adult to sip sherry in his office with a couple of other teachers.

Off duty from enforcing discipline, Mr Turner – or Trog, as I will always think of him – was relaxed. Conversation turned to some CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) graffiti which had adorned the school wall all through my career there. He mused whether any contemporary issue would arouse the same strength of feeling – this was Margaret Thatcher’s fifth year in power – and I thought he sounded a little wistful that the youth had become apathetic. This surprised me, I remembered him as the embodiment of “The Man”. We concluded that CND at the time was probably still – or rather, again – the issue most likely to stir young people to protest.

I delivered my speech to a fairly passive audience, perhaps tired on a Friday afternoon, perhaps a little surprised and indignant that they were expected to pay attention to a 27-year old’s views on pop music – quite reasonably wary of this sacred youth territory being annexed by the curriculum. Or maybe they found the lecture dull. Certainly it proved a tougher audience than a good natured and slightly tipsy wedding gathering. The talk was enlivened when my final music selection suddenly came on at twice the volume of the previous nine: presumably this was a way for the boys tasked with the audio to show appreciation for their favourite – perhaps the only one they liked.

In the discussion afterwards one boy pointed out that I had omitted so many great artists – what about Hendrix, for instance? Of course, Hendrix was indeed mighty, but being limited to ten records, I couldn’t cover everything. A teacher posed the question: was pop music just a sop to keep youth from protesting or getting involved in politics? I had, and still have little sympathy with this view – the music is real. I responded tartly: “That sounds like the question of a conspiracy theorist who doesn’t like music.” That got a few sniggers at his expense, but I later regretted my sharpness – he had only been trying help me by breathing life into the flagging conversation.

Thirty-seven years later, I have stumbled on my notes. It doesn’t seem like my tastes have changed very much: if called upon now (and I’m not holding my breath) my music choice would be little changed from 1984, although I would phrase a few things differently. And I might omit the Rascals song, which though it still sounds great, doesn’t define a genre as the others do.

With my notes was the programme of sixth form lectures for the Spring Term. I had completely forgotten, if I ever knew, what august company I was keeping. Later that term one speaker was the Rt. Hon. Cecil Parkinson MP – previous holder of two cabinet jobs, later holder of two more – who also served two terms as Chairman of the Conservative Party. Another was Ken Livingstone, leader of the Greater London Council, which was to last just two more years before it was abolished by Thatcher’s government. Livingstone later bounced back to serve two terms as Mayor of London.

I don’t think I was aware of these political heavyweights being on the same bill that term, and just as well: I was nervous enough already. Thankfully I didn’t have to follow them on stage.

***************

SONGS AND STORIES (20 January 1984)

Good afternoon.

I want to talk to you about various aspects of popular music over the last thirty years. I should say right at the beginning that I won’t be attempting to give a full history of pop music – I couldn’t begin to do justice to the subject in the time available – nor will I attempt to draw a tidy conclusion at the end. All I want to do is to play some records which have been important in the development of pop music, and to talk about each in isolation. This is, I should emphasise, a purely subjective choice.

Some of you probably aren’t interested in pop music; others of you may enjoy it, but may not expect to see it reduced to being a compulsory subject in the school curriculum. To both, I apologise. But if some of you come to discover and enjoy the music played today, I’ll be well satisfied.

**********

The first record I want to play is by the Robins, later known as the Coasters, recorded in Los Angeles in 1954. America during the 1950s had hundreds of black vocal groups making records, often with very little to distinguish them. But what set the Coasters apart was their hugely talented songwriters and producers, Leiber and Stoller. The Coasters churned out a long string of records, each of which was a miniature opera – a perfectly formed piece of theatre in three minutes.

Their better known records include Charlie Brown and Yakety Yak which both have a flippant teenaged theme. But the song I’m going to play is Riot in Cell Block Number 9 which is possibly the most menacing and hard hitting drama on record. Full use is made of sound effects, while the singer’s voice is tinged with sufficient brutality to be convincing as a man doing time for armed robbery.

The Coasters – Riot in Cell Block Number 9

**********

Elvis Presley is these days most often recalled as a grossly fat 40-year old crooning ballads to to blue-rinsed matrons in Las Vegas. This image does no justice to the fiery and controversial figure he once was. During the 1950s Presley became a huge star by the violence of his music, his moody good looks and his lithe and suggestive dancing. American television found his stage act so profoundly shocking that they would only show his performances from the waist up.

Presley was born into a very poor family in Mississippi where he grew up surrounded by and enjoying black music. His success came about because he combined in his music the rhythm and mood of black rhythm and blues music with the sharp lyrics and energy of white country music. To understand the impact Presley made in the 1950s it’s important to realise what went before him. The music scene was dominated by soft ballad singers like Frank Sinatra, Johnny Ray and Rosemary Clooney; there was no appreciable teenaged audience. This was partly because teenagers had very little money to spend, and partly because the music scene was too middle aged and sedate to be of interest. But the emergence of rock’n’roll, epitomised by Presley, and the growing affluence of the fifties was to change that. The record which best demonstrates the violence and youthful energy of rock’n’roll is

Hound Dog – Elvis Presley

**********

Doo-wop is the slightly comical term applied to a very popular ballad style of the 1950s. It is so called because nonsense phrases like doo-wop would often be used as harmony against the lead vocal.

Literally hundreds of black American vocal groups used the style, and would actually sing on the street corners of their neighbourhood. They would often sing unaccompanied, sometimes to avoid detracting from their intricate vocal harmonies, but more often for reasons of economy. Recently the unaccompanied, or a capella style has made an unexpected come back with The Flying Pickets.

The proliferation of groups singing in this style meant that thousands of records were made, usually very cheaply and mostly of indifferent quality. Sharp-eyed producers would pull a local group into the studio, set up some beers, press a few dollars into their hands, and ask them to sing. The results were often appalling.

The Five Satins would have been forgotten with the rest of them, had it not been for the extraordinary quality of one of their records, In the Still of the Night.

The first reaction on hearing this song is probably one of amusement at the weird arrangement and the deliberately dumb backing vocals. But if you listen closer you might hear the simplicity and understated power which makes this, in many enthusiasts’ view, the finest record ever made. They say the song hangs in the air over New York City on summer nights. I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean but it’s probably true.

The Five Satins – In the Still of the Night

**********

Elvis Presley may have had a shattering effect on the calm of Eisenhower’s America, but he was ultimately assimilable. For all his raucous shouting and obscene gyrations, he loved his mum, he ate mashed banana sandwiches, and he was proud to do his bit for Uncle Sam when he was called up in 1958. He was, in spite of everything, an all-American boy. Little Richard made no such concessions, and no one has ever understood him.

Little Richard would sing and play piano with demonic energy, standing and bashing at the piano as if he was trying to smash it. He had a powerful voice, always on the edge of hysteria; he would sing with a passion and commitment which belied the fact that the lyrics were usually quite meaningless.

From 1956 to 1958 Little Richard had a string of million-selling records. His manager found himself without any new material to promote, and with a typical disregard for commercial considerations, Little Richard refused to go back into the studio. Instead, with casual genius, he sent in a rough demo tape lasting less than a minute, called Keep A-Knockin’. This was dressed up in the studio to a respectable length and became another million seller.

If rock’n’roll was marvellous drivel, Keep A-Knockin’ is a fine example. It is so brash and confrontational that you have to take sides – you either love it or hate it. This was very much the stuff that helped create the generation gap.

Predictably, no performer could keep up this level of energy and commitment for long. While touring Australia in 1957, a fire had broken out in the plane he was travelling in. Convinced that he would die, he got down on his knees and promised that if he was spared he would give up “the devil’s music” and devote himself to the gospel. The plane landed safely, and Little Richard was as good as his word – since when God has never looked back.

Little Richard – Keep A-Knockin’

**********

In complete contrast to Little Richard, Sam Cooke was the very model of urbane sophistication. Well-groomed, polite and clever, he had frequently sung in American night-clubs, and sang in a smooth, sweet style that owed much to his training as a gospel singer.

From 1960 to 1965 he made many fine soul records. Unfortunately he had to fight a running battle with his record company, who wanted to turn him into a second Sammy Davis Jr. But Cooke’s voice was distinctive and beautiful enough to transform the slightest song or the most sickly arrangement into something worth hearing.

But his finest record is Bring it on Home to Me from 1962, in a straightforward gospel style, making much use of close harmony and call and response with a second vocalist.

Cooke was never popular with the white American establishment; he was too clever, too successful for their taste. Incidentally, he was a close friend of Muhammad Ali (then Cassius Clay) and was among the first into the ring to congratulate him after beating Sonny Liston.

Sam Cooke died in a shooting incident in a hotel in 1964. Some have speculated that this was a CIA set-up.

Listening closely to the slightly hoarse quality of Cooke’s voice, it’s easy to see why Rod Stewart claims Cooke as a major influence. However, it is debatable whether Stewart has ever conveyed such powerful emotion in his singing.

Sam Cooke – Bring it on Home to Me

**********

The only record producer ever to acquire the status of legend in his own right is Phil Spector.

After singing, writing and producing a few fairly ordinary hits in the early 60s, Spector slowly developed the production style that was to make his name. Where other producers used a four or five piece rhythm section, Spector used overdubbing to create a multi layered, symphonic effect which he called the “wall of sound”. He took pride in the craftsmanship he lavished on what critics described as trash; he was fond of referring to his “Wagnerian approach to rock’n’roll – little symphonies for the kids”.

By the age of 23 he was a multi-millionaire. Then the problems set in. He put six months work into recording a Christmas album which was released on 22nd of November 1963, the date of president Kennedy’s assassination. Suddenly nobody wanted to hear his version of Frosty the Snowman. Three months later the Beatles arrived in America, crushing all opposition before them. Finally, the enemies he had made by his idiosyncratic behaviour conspired to bring about the failure of what he regarded as his greatest record – Ike and Tina Turner’s River Deep Mountain High.

Humiliated, he went into virtual retirement, an increasingly enigmatic figure in dark glasses surrounded by bodyguards. Always image conscious, he enjoyed this reputation; he was quoted as saying “It isn’t funny when you see your father’s head blown apart by a shotgun.” We have no evidence that anything like this ever happened to him. Either way we can only agree: it isn’t funny to see your father blown apart by a shotgun.

Be My Baby by the Ronettes is probably not Spector’s best recording but it is the one that best illustrates his dictum: symphonies for the kids. A little girl’s voice, singing a lyric of unashamed banality, is surrounded by great waves of sound; one girl and a thousand-piece orchestra. Like it or not you have to agree: it’s way over the top.

The Ronettes – Be My Baby

**********

John Lennon claimed in 1971 that the Beatles made their best music before they ever signed a recording contract. This remark was probably made to shock rather than to inform. But what he meant was that before the Beatles ever reached the studio, they had a raw pace and excitement which was never quite captured in their more polished studio recordings.

From 1960 to 1963, hundreds of beat groups sprang up in Liverpool, and many of these make the trip to Hamburg, where their rough and ready music was very much in demand at the local night clubs.

Conditions in these night clubs were appalling. The groups had to play for stints up to eight hours; they would consume vast countries of alcohol and drugs, and more than once their performances were interrupted by violence between rival gangs.

The track which I’m about to play comes from the Live at the Star Club album. This was not released until 1976; it was taken from an amateur recording of the Beatles performance. This explains the poor sound quality. But it is difficult to listen to this recording without getting some feeling of how exciting those early performances must have been, and without an intimation of the huge talent that was to take the world by storm in 1963 and 1964.

The Beatles – Shimmy Shimmy

Listening to this today, it is hard to believe that the man playing bass guitar and singing backing vocals is currently at number one with Pipes of Peace.

**********

Aretha Franklin with the daughter of a black preacher in Detroit, the Reverend CL Franklin. This man was a wealthy and by all accounts devastating Baptist preacher, who held sway over a huge and devoted congregation, and commanded large fees for his appearances.

The influence of gospel music and the church was the foundation of Aretha’s success, but this success took a long time in coming. From 1960 until 1966, she made scores of records with CBS; but while everyone agreed she was very talented, none of the records were artistically or commercially successful.

1966 saw her move to Atlantic Records. and November of that year saw the historic recording session with Atlantic’s top producer, Jerry Wexler. With the rest of the American music business looking on with interest, Wexler decided to set Aretha loose. Where before she had recorded in a clipped, polished style, Wexler encouraged her to sing her heart out, over a taut, understated backing. The result was definitive soul music; pure, uninhibited and powerful.

Aretha Franklin – I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You

**********

The Rascals didn’t just play soul music – they understood it. What made this unusual was that they were white, at a time when for white people to play soul music was virtually unheard of. Blue-eyed soul they called it.

Besides that I have to admit that their story is not particularly interesting. But they left us one monumentally exciting record. The frenetic Good Lovin’ which was a US number one in 1966. In Britain it never did a thing.

The Rascals – Good Lovin’

**********

They wouldn’t agree, but in many ways the Sex Pistols can be seen as the true successors to Little Richard. Both rely on uncompromising attack; both produce a violent confrontational sound. Significantly, both produced their finest records in a period of less than 12 months; it was simply not possible to maintain the intensity of feeling – in the Sex Pistols case hatred – which inspired their most powerful work.

Their manager Malcolm McLaren has always claimed that he created the group from nothing, that they were totally untalented and owed all their success to his promotion and publicity stunts. This is simply not true; for despite the Sex Pistols indifferent musicianship and unpleasant behaviour, they make uniquely powerful records, which again like Little Richard, forced the listener to take sides.

Sadly, Sid Vicious started to believe his own publicity; he stabbed his girlfriend to death and later killed himself – a born victim carrying on his shoulders the accumulated hang-ups and neuroses of his generation.

The Sex Pistols – Anarchy in the UK

That just about concludes the talk. I hope you found something to enjoy. Thank you.

Aelwyn’s writing

My parents were members of the Watford U3A Creative Writing group in the 1990s and 2000s, and almost all of these pieces by my father (Aelwyn Edwards 1919-2015) were written during that period. Where they relate to specific memories, I have attempted to order them chronologically, and the others according to their estimated date of writing. The photographs and links are my additions.

My Writing

This piece should really be preceded by another piece entitled “My Reading”, because we learn to read stories before we even dream of writing them, and some of the stories we read will have made a greater impact on our young minds than others. What have I remembered from those days? The stories by Frank Richards in “The Magnet” every week about Greyfriars School, with Harry Wharton, Bob Cherry, Billy Bunter and Hurree Jamset Ram Singh. Lorna Doone, Treasure Island, Alice in Wonderland, Sherlock Holmes, Northwest Passage, and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”, these made an impact on me. And, of course, I keenly devoured the county cricket batting and bowling averages. The books we were obliged to read at school for our exams made little or no impact on me. Our English teacher at school despaired of my unimaginative weekly essays; my first loves were always Maths and Chemistry –not much opportunity for creative writing there! Yes – “unimaginative”, that’s the word.

When I came home from abroad after the war, I was surprised to learn how much my letters home had been appreciated; after my parents had read them, they were passed around our friends. “What wonderful letters”, one particularly effusive friend said to me, “you could have a great future as a writer”. But that was all very well; from abroad I had been writing about new countries, new experiences; no imagination was required of me, it was all happening. I suppose I have always had some talent for description, but there was never much call then for metaphors or similes; there was little or no poetry, it was mostly factual.

During my business career, I was quite good at writing long reports on difficult technical matters in language that could be understood and appreciated by non-technical readers. All very commendable, but there was still no call for metaphors or similes, just plain unimaginative facts. I have from time to time written some so called poems when something has moved me, but are they poetry? I doubt it.

Then along comes U3A. Here was a challenge to indulge in some creative writing. I believe I have shown some flashes of imagination along the way, but they are only flashes. I enjoy writing, sitting in front of a word processor, letting the thoughts come along, but I envy much of the writing read out by my U3A colleagues, especially the imaginative bits. No, my English master was right – too many facts, not enough imagination. The metaphors and similes continue to elude me.

***************

Early Childhood Memory

I believe I have become a mature adult without my nature being particularly acquisitive, and with a tendency to think well of my fellow human beings. Yet my first conscious memory is of myself as a person with obsessive desires and a fierce capacity for resentment.

I was being wheeled along in a pushchair by my mother; I suppose my father and my brother were there as well, but I have no recollection of them. We were walking home along Allerton Road in Liverpool, where the No.8 trams ran in a grassed area in the middle of the road, and the pavements were also edged with grass. My mother was in a tearing hurry to get home, after we had been out to tea with friends. She seemed tense or worried about something, as if the outing had ended disastrously in some way – perhaps someone had said something that annoyed her, or she had some pressing physical desire to get home at the earliest possible moment.

Relaxed and comfortable in my pushchair, I surveyed the world outside, and rejoiced in the beauty of the daisies growing in the grass. I expressed a desire for our progress to be delayed so that I could pick some of these lovely daisies to take home. My mother, however, was implacable in her refusal of my very reasonable request, and I spent the remainder of the journey home complaining over and over again:”I wish I could get out and pick flowers”. My constant reiteration of this phrase can hardly have improved my mother’s state of mind, and I remember feeling quite bitter towards her at the time.

I take comfort from the thought that, if I had not remembered this episode of obsessional desire and resentment, it would have remained hidden deep in my subconscious mind, ready to emerge in some terrible form later in life. That it has not so far done so, is something for which we must all be eternally grateful.

***************

Full Circle

From time to time, the Church of Saint Lawrence in Abbots Langley plays host to a gypsy funeral. These funerals are an amazing sight, the hearse being drawn by a team of magnificent, beautifully groomed black horses, proudly sporting brilliant white cockades. My reaction to this sight borders on that of a child seeing something wonderful – an exclamation of “Wow!”.

And I remember how one day, many years ago, when I was aged six, living in the suburbs of Liverpool, a friend ran up to me in the street, and breathlessly panted: “Come down to the end of the street, quick, or we’ll miss it”. Not knowing what to expect, I followed his bidding, and ran down to the main road that crossed at the end of the street… and then it came, round a curve in the road, a magnificent funeral procession. But instead of the usual boring old horse-drawn carriages, there was this wonderful sight, never seen before. No horses, no carriages, but a glorious cavalcade of beautiful gleaming motor cars. For that six-year-old boy, there was only one word to describe it – “Wow!”

***************

The Gold Watch

By Easter 1926, my father had been teaching at Granby Street School in Liverpool for nearly 20 years. When he left to take up a headship in Wales, he was presented by staff and pupils with a gold watch inscribed “A mark of affection and esteem”.

He wore it every day for the rest of his life, tucked into his waistcoat pocket at the end of a gold chain. Every night before going to bed he would wind it up, slowly and carefully. After he died, the watch passed to my elder brother, who kept it at the bottom of a cardboard box. When my brother died, it came to me; it looked very sad, lying in this box, so, encouraged by the rest of my family, I took it out and tried to coax it into life. After it had made a few spasmodic attempts to get going, I took it to the watch man in Abbots Langley. He peered at it, then announced that it was a bit out of his class, but, if I wished, he could take it to a friend of his in London, but it might be a bit expensive.

I agreed to have it done, and in due course, he returned it, saying: “It’s a nice little piece”. Now, I wind it slowly and carefully every morning, and on those rare occasions when I forget to wind it, a strange feeling of guilt comes over me like a distant echo from the past.

***************

“Evening the Wild Woods Among”

When I was six years old, my father was promoted to a head teacher’s post, with the requirement that he should reside in the head teacher’s house a hundred yards or so from the school. This meant that he sold the house that he was in the process of buying, leaving him with some cash in hand, which he used in part to furnish the new house. Among his acquisitions at the time I remember a small billiard table, and a large picture which hung over the fireplace in the living room.

The picture was of a leafy path winding through an autumn-tinted wood; in the centre of the picture were two rabbits, sitting on the path, contemplating the scenery. The title of the picture, written in script, was “Evening the Wild Woods Among”. Some years later, as I approached my years of discrimination, it dawned on me that this title was rather comical, and outrageously twee. Imagine my delight to find that my mother’s opinion on the matter coincided with mine. Her sense of humour ran exactly parallel with mine, but I’m afraid that my father sometimes found our amusement not always in the best of taste.

As a postscript to this tale, it was a matter of great satisfaction to discover that when I took my intended bride home to meet my parents, she read the title beneath the picture, and could scarcely control her mirth.

***************

Uncle Cadwaladr

He was a strong, stocky man with red hair and an unruly red beard. He was, in fact, my father’s uncle, and he farmed a mountain in a high Welsh valley. He spoke no word of English. I was about six years old when, during a visit to the farm, he decided to teach me my numbers in Welsh. He sat by his roaring fireplace, with a huge kettle hanging from a hook directly over the fire. On the hob, a large pot of tea sat permanently, ready to be poured out when required. In the oven by the fire, large sheets of oatcake were baking, and would in due course be turned out by Auntie Kate, to cool on the hob.

Cadwaladr and Kate

He had the hoarse sing-song voice which cropped up in our family from time to time. He put his arm round my shoulder and started on the numbers: “Un, dau, tri”. I struggled ywith the unfamiliar vowels, but he seemed pleased with the result. We worked up through the numbers, until we reached eight, nine, ten: “Wyth, naw, deg”. When he was satisfied with my progress, he gave a great hoarse crow of delight, and I was rewarded with a piece of newly baked oatcake, spread with newly churned butter.

Cadwaladr lives again in my nephew David, who is currently creating a home by renovating a derelict silkworm farm in the south of France.

We have a photograph of David, seated on a low wall, nursing a chain-saw in his lap. His unruly red hair and beard take me straight back almost eighty years, learning my numbers by the roaring fire.

***************

The Taste and Smell of Aelwyn

What does my name taste like? What does it smell like? My name recalls the memories of my childhood, like the crisp apples in my father’s garden, the scent of the white lilac outside my bedroom window, the wonderful rice pudding my mother made, the damp following the rain that comes sweeping down the mountain, linseed oil on a cricket bat, and the scent of new-mown hay.

***************

Water Under The Bridge

There was a favourite game in my youth in which I would stand with a friend on one side of a bridge that passed over a stream. We would each choose a small twig, and together we would drop our twigs into the water, and then rush to the other side of the bridge to see whose twig emerged first from under the arch. There were numerous theories applied to determine the size and shape of a winning stick. If a twig was too big, it was more likely to hit some obstacle lurking in the water; if it was too small, it could be stopped altogether by an obstacle, so there was clearly an optimum medium size. A refinement in this process was to choose a twig that had at one end the prongs of a fork, so that if it hit an object, the fork would initiate a turning movement to enable the twig to progress beyond the obstruction.

There comes a time in all our lives, probably on more than one occasion, when we are about to embark on a path where the outcome is uncertain. We cast ourselves into a stream on one side of the bridge, not knowing what is in store; whether we will be stopped, or delayed, by some hidden obstruction, or whether we will emerge successfully on the other side, preferably ahead of our competitors. All we can do is to prepare as best we can, remembering the lesson of the medium-sized twig with a fork at one end.

***************

The Compleat Angler or Dedication

I was brought up in a land of tumbling Welsh streams, with rocky pools where trout would lurk, swimming lazily in the sunny waters, waiting for the next flood that would bring fresh food down from the hills. In our small town there was a breed of wiry old men who spoke little English, who, after a spell of rain, would emerge purposefully from their cottage doors, clutching fishing rods and with satchels over their backs. They knew that the rain would have been enough to flood the streams, and the trout would be feeding. They would return two or three hours later with bulging satchels, happy with the prospect of a few tasty suppers to come.

Aelwyn and Glyn with their parents

Occasionally I tried my luck at fishing, and sometimes I would have a little modest success, enough for one small supper. I sometimes wondered whether I was doing the right thing, killing fish for my own gratification, but at least I was supplying the household with food. In any case, I ate meat, and was prepared to pay other people to kill animals on my behalf, so my conscience was not seriously troubled. But on the many occasions when I caught nothing, I had still spent the afternoon in the glorious countryside, scrambling up and down the banks of rushing streams, with rewarding glimpses of the surrounding hills.

It is all so different here, in this flat English country where I now live. Fishing is a totally different occupation from what I once knew. Here, the anglers sit for hours by the side of a canal, their rods propped up on the bank, surrounded by expensive-looking gear and a bucket of squirming maggots, gazing at nothing. What do they think about? Do they think at all? Are they just escaping from some even less exciting activity at home? And even when they catch a fish they throw it back in again. Are their consciences troubled by the thought of inflicting pain on the fish for their own gratification, with not even the excuse of procuring food? They huddle against the most severe of weathers, which leads one to suppose that they are fiercely dedicated to something, but to what? And if they have caught nothing at the end of the day, what have they to remember? A view of the opposite bank, a few barges passing by to interrupt their reverie, and walkers on the towpath behind them cursing gently as they take evasive action past the ends of the rods.

No; I prefer the old way.

***************

Exposure

He had dreaded this moment from early morning. As soon as he woke up he had sat on the edge of the bed, and the feeling of foreboding hit him in the pit of his stomach. Before the end of the day he would have to undergo an ordeal which would expose him to the critical gaze of hundreds of people. He was sure to make a complete ass of himself; and worse – what if his mission failed? His shame would be known to everyone, and he would never be able to live it down.

He hardly noticed what he ate for breakfast; somehow, he got through the morning, and his lunch tasted of sawdust.

And now his time had come. After much fumbling, he finally managed to secure his protective clothing; his comrades wished him well. He almost stumbled as he went down the steps, and set off on the long, long walk. For the first time as a member of the school cricket team, he was going out to bat.

***************

The Cricket Bat

Willow growing by the water, 
Branches polled to make it stronger. 
This will make the wood grow harder. 
Then maturing, ripe for cutting. 
Comes the axeman, fells the willow, 
Cuts it into chunky slices, 
Measures length and breadth and thickness. 
Skilful hands then shape and polish. 
Add the handle, glue it tightly. 
Proudly taken to the wicket, 
Scoring runs in ones and twos, 
Boundaries, too, in fours and sixes. 
Till the day comes for retirement, 
Abandoned sadly in the attic, 
Gathering dust for evermore.

***************

The Six Senses

It was a blazing summer day. The grass was green and still retained the scent of a recent mowing.. A rook cawed from one of the trees that stood tall, shading one corner of the cricket ground. The game had not been particularly exciting, but I was enjoying myself, just being there, and taking part.

I was fielding in the slips. The bowler – he was the local postman – trundled up to the wicket to make his delivery, and I remember seeing the ball hit the edge of the bat. The next thing that I was aware of was discovering that, for some inexplicable reason, I was lying on the floor, with my elbow grazing the grass, and I thought what a fool I must look, falling over in front of all these people. In the next instant, to my surprise, I discovered that the ball had become firmly lodged in my outstretched right hand; I had made a brilliant diving catch.

Now, how did this all happen? My conscious mind knew nothing at all about what was going on – it had merely told me not to do something so stupid as to fall over in public. So who, or what, told me to dive for the ball? Was it a sixth sense, providing me with the impetus to dive? After all, that is why I was there, to catch the ball if it came my way, but surely my conscious mind should have been aware of what was happening. I understand that our brains has two halves; do these two halves operate independently of each other without any mutual intercommunication? Does one half control our normal activities, while the other half acts secretly and mysteriously, controlling our dreams, and providing us with a sixth sense that comes to our rescue when needed?

***************

A Telephone Call to Remember

I had been in India for over two years with, of course, no home leave, when I was offered the chance of attending a Staff Navigation course in Shropshire. This involved sitting an exam in Delhi, which I passed, and shortly afterwards I was on my way. This involved hopping from airfield to airfield across India from East Bengal to Karachi, where I boarded an Imperial Airways Sunderland flying-boat which, after some delays, eventually landed in Poole Harbour. Wonderful! I could pick up a telephone and call home! When I did, the the astonishment and disbelief in my mother’s voice was wonderful to hear, and in two days I was home, with three weeks leave before the course started, a mere sixty miles away with more snatched weekends at home. Amazing!

***************

Cockroaches and Litter

There is nothing quite like the train journey from Bombay to Calcutta, unless it is the journey from Calcutta to Bombay which, fortunately, I have not had to experience. I undertook this journey as part of my service to King and Country, being, like so much in service life, something to be endured, especially so in India.

The train pulled out of Bombay in mid-afternoon and soon started its climb up to the Deccan, the central plateau in that part of the country, and as we travelled, the heat of the day gradually diminished. I had supplied myself with reading matter for the journey, including that day’s copy of the Bombay Times. The first-class accommodation was a space, perhaps ten feet square, containing a bed that folded down from the wall of the compartment; it was reasonably comfortable.

There are lessons to be learnt on this type of journey. One is never to leave any food, especially fruit, in an open position where it can be seen. When you stop at a station, there are many things that strike you, such as the heat, the milling, loudly chattering hordes of people, and the monkeys squatting and chattering on the roof above the platform. If there is any food exposed in your compartment, before you realise what is happening one of the monkeys will have invaded your space and carried off his booty back on to the roof, where he proceeds to demolish it, telling his friends about his exploit, while his beady eye defies you to seek a remedy. The next lesson, learnt during the first night on the train, related to living conditions in that noisy, litter-strewn country. Sleeping comfortably enough on the bed, if for any reason you wish to switch on the light, you are immediately aware of a scuttling sound, and there you see dozens of cockroaches on the floor scurrying for shelter, some of them under your bed. It is a sickening experience, but like so many things, you get used to it, and accept it as a way of life.

At the first stop the next day, newspaper boys came along the platform selling the Bombay Times. Very efficient, you thought, as you started to read it, then you realise, that althought the date of the paper was correct for that day, it contained no news at all, merely articles and political comment. You then realised that these papers had in fact been printed in Bombay on the previous day, and had travelled with you on the train, to be produced for your delectation the following morning. Lunch that day was taken at Allahabad, with the temperature at 120F in the shade.

Another night on the train, remembering to avert your eyes when you switched on the light to reach for a drink of water, then finally, arrival in Calcutta, where you are expected, and transported to the relative heaven of an RAF airfield.

***************

The 1948 Olympics

I was fortunate to have been present for two days of the 1948 Olympic Games at Wembley, and I have a very clear memory of some of the events. Before the Games began, the identity of the runner who would bring the Olympic Torch into the stadium was a closely guarded secret. It was widely assumed that it would be Sydney Wooderson, holder of the world record for the mile, and a great favourite with the British public. In the event, the runner who emerged from the tunnel was totally unrecognised by the crowd. He was a young, athletic, fair-haired man, presumably chosen because he was the organisers’ idea of a Greek god. A great opportunity to honour a much respected British runner had been missed.

My clearest memory of my first visit, a Saturday, is of the 4 x 100 metre relay race. The American team were widely expected to win, and sure enough they came racing in yards ahead of the British runners. But no sooner was the race over than it was announced that at one of the hand-over points, the Americans had handed over the baton outside the prescribed limits, and were accordingly disqualified. The announcement was received in silence, and as the Americans trudged disconsolately out of the stadium they were given a great round of applause from the crowd. As far as we were concerned, they were the clear winners. However, when the film of the event was developed – there were no instant replays in those days – it was realised that the hand-over had in fact been done correctly, and on the following Monday it was announced that the American team had been reinstated as winners.

On the final day of the Games the crowd in the stadium were eagerly awaiting the arrival of the leading marathon runners. In came a Belgian, Etienne Gailly, but no sooner had he started his final lap of the track than he collapsed. It was a pitiful sight. He was desperately trying to reach the finishing line but was overtaken, first by an Argentinian, Delfro Cabrera and then, to the delight of the crowd, the British Tom Richards.

My seat on this final day was near the middle of the back straight of the circuit, from which point I had a splendid view of Fanny Blankers-Koen on the far side of the stadium, streaking to the finishing line with her fair hair streaming behind her. She was a great competitor, and a favourite with the crowd, due in part, I believe, to sympathy felt for the Dutch people over their terrible experience so recently endured under German occupation.

From my seat I had a close up view of the unfortunate ending to the efforts of the Jamaican 4 by 400 relay team. They were a very impressive quartet of runners including Arthur Wint, who had already won gold in the 400 metres event. In the relay, the Jamaicans were well ahead when, I think it was in the third leg, Wint was steaming along the back straight when he was suddenly seized by cramp. He fell to the ground at the side of the track. beating his baton on the ground in a frenzy of rage and frustration.

One of my sons has acquired tickets for this year’s Games, and has offered me one. Regretfully, I have declined his offer, as I think the occasion would be too much for my old bones. A pity, really, as I would have loved to have been able to say I had been at both events, separated by 64 years.

***************

What Goes Around, Comes Around

Kath and I were at the stage when we were getting to know one another. We were staying at my parents’ home, and we had borrowed my father’s car so that I could show Kath some of the delights of my home territory. We drove, only a few miles, to a lake hidden among the mountains and we parked by the roadside on the grass verge. Ahead of us was a strip of land projecting into the water, which concealed from us a small bay further along the lake.

We sat there, enjoying the scenery, holding hands and otherwise minding our own business, when, from around the bend ahead of us came an agitated young man. He came up to us and exclaimed excitedly through the open car window: “I say, did you see that? Extraordinary!”. We had seen nothing out of the ordinary, so he went on: “A swan swam out from behind that bit of land” (indicating the strip of land ahead of us) “with an enormous eel struggling in its beak. It swam on and disappeared over to the other side of the lake”. We expressed our wonderment, but the young man was disappointed that we were unable to share in his excitement, and he went on his way.

About fifteen minutes later, a swan swam out from behind the bit of land, with an enormous eel struggling in its beak. It swam on and disappeared over to the other side of the lake. For a while we were shocked into silence. The young man hadn’t seemed like the sort of person who could foretell what we were about to see; a real prophet would have been a much calmer person. So, the only possible explanation was that we had witnessed a loop in time, but for all our insistence, nobody else seemed to have noticed it.

***************

Boxing Day 1963

My mother died on Boxing Day. We were sitting up in bed having our morning cup of tea, when my brother rang to tell us. It was a shock, of course, but not really a surprise; we had had a feeling, when we saw her in the little cottage hospital in Wales, that we would not see her again. Perhaps we should have gone to see her more often, but it was a long way, and it is not as if we could have done anything. They had looked after her very well in the hospital, and so they should, for she was one of a handful of women who had fought to keep it going thirty years before.

One thing that did surprise us was the reaction of our younger, seven-year-old son. The ten year-old took the news calmly and sadly, but the younger one, usually so capable of controlling his feelings, exploded in a fury of tears and rage; he hadn’t wanted her to die, he said.

Kath’s parents had been staying with us over Christmas, and they immediately insisted that we should have our breakfast, pack a bag and go. They would look after the boys, and that was that. I am not sure at what time we drove off, but it must have been quite early, because it was still light when we arrived, and that was in the days before motorways speeded things up. We shared the driving, but Kath hated the narrow Welsh roads, twisting and turning between dry-stone walls, with no pavements. As we arrived at the familiar little gate above the house, our friends Glanmor and Jean came out, Glanmor in his iron leg supports having hauled himself up the steep steps of slate from the courtyard below. They had been to sit with my father; your cousin Margaret is with him now, they said.

Margaret was my father’s favourite niece; almost fifty years earlier, she used to visit my parents regularly at their home in Liverpool as a welcome relief from the rigours of a nurse’s training. Now, having retired, she was known throughout this part of the country simply as “Matron”. We went down the steps and into the house. Margaret and my father were talking together softly in Welsh, their first language; they were both more comfortable in Welsh, rather than in the English learnt later in the schoolroom. village; later, my brother and his wife arrived Margaret soon went home to her village; later, my brother and his wife arrived – their child-minding had taken a little longer to arrange than ours had. My father wound up the grandfather clock, and that was the end of Boxing Day.

***************

Sense of Smell

The sense of smell is a strange thing. It can be very evocative, in the perfume of a woman’s hair, the scent of new-mown grass, or, in my case, a reminder of one of the most miserable few days of my life.

In 1943 we had been obliged to spend about three weeks in Cairo during our flight from England to India while we waited for some spare aircraft parts to arrive from the U.K. I hated Cairo; it was, literally, a stinking city, full of persistent flies and pestering beggars, and above all, unbearably hot under the July sun. How I hated it! On this particular day I was walking along one of its streets, fending off the flies and thieving ragamuffins, when I suddenly felt sick and faint, and would have fallen had not some soldiers come to help me. They escorted me to a nearby Forces’ canteen, from where I later made my way back to base. The doctor diagnosed heat-stroke caused by a deficiency of salt, and prescribed a few days rest, with strict instructions to drink as much salt water as I could manage during the next few hours, and to make sure I kept up my salt intake thereafter.

Many years later, I was digging a very large hole in the corner of our garden; we had decided to create a swimming pool, and the first requirement was, inevitably, a very large hole. The digging went on happily for a week or two, then one warm Sunday evening, down in the hole, I suddenly felt faint and sick. At the same time, my nostrils picked up a scent that I instantly recognised — it was the stench of Cairo. I had no hesitation in making an instant diagnosis of my ailment — it was heat-stroke. So I clambered out of the hole, drank a couple of pints of salt water, and put my feet up for the rest of the evening.

The cure was effective, and the swimming pool was duly completed and much enjoyed by all the family.

***************

On My Father’s Funeral

Slow Welsh voices, 
Half forgotten cousins, dimly remembered friendships. 
My two sons a part, but yet apart. 
I look towards the sky, beyond the pale autumn hills, 
Reaching for infinity, 
Wanting to touch his hand just once again. 
A little dust to his frail dust;
Then we go down through the trees, to begin life again.

***************

Retirement

What will it be like, being retired? It is an experience most of us go through only once in a lifetime, so that when it happens it is for the first time, and for the last time.

We all know what a weekend is like: two days when you can do more or less what you like. We all know what a holiday is like: two weeks or so when you can almost forget all about the office. But retirement? Well, to start with, it was rather like a long weekend. Then it seemed rather like a long holiday. And eventually you come to realise that this is it! The stress of your job – that black cloud that has followed you around for so long – is no longer there; no more travelling in the rush hour; and as you lie back in bed at eight o’clock in the morning, the sounds you can hear are those of other people going to work. Good luck to them!

A little while after I retired, Kath took early retirement from her stressful job, and suddenly we were able to spend more time together than at any time in the previous thirty years of our married life. But what shall we do with all this lovely, hard-earned free time? To start with, you can catch up with the decorating, sort out that corner of the garden which you never quite got round to, and give yourselves a special holiday. Then what? We took the view that if we were to preserve our sanity, we should keep our minds active, so we decided to become volunteer workers for the Citizens Advice Bureau if they would have us.

Twelve months later, after an exhaustive and exhausting course of lectures and in-house training, we were let loose on an unsuspecting public. Now, nine years on, I suppose we are old hands, but every day brings new problems. Inevitably, a high proportion of the work relates to that ten per cent of the population who are getting progressively poorer while the rest get richer. And every day the questions pour in:

“My business has failed; I owe my suppliers £5,000, I have borrowed €4,000 on my credit cards, and I have a mortgage of £100,000 on my house which is now worth £90,000. What do I do?”

“I’ve had this form in the post. I can’t read or write – could you please tell me what it says, and fill it in for me?”

“My husband died last night. What should I be doing?”

“I’ve had this poll tax demand. What am I supposed to pay it with?”

“I am 16 years old. I have become pregnant, and my parents have thrown me out on the street. Where can I go?”

And so it goes on; it certainly keeps our minds active!

***************

Holidays and Travel

If you are energetic and own a pair of stout walking shoes, then there is no more satisfying walking holiday than following the South-west Coastal Path. This runs for 500 miles west from Minehead in Somerset, round Land’s End, and back eastwards to Poole in Dorset. To my mind, the most rewarding section of the Path is along the north Cornish coast from Hartland Point (which is actually in Devon) to Land’s End. If you stand by the lighthouse at Trevose Head, near Padstow, on a clear day you can see almost the whole of north Cornwall in two great sweeping bays, from Hartland Point to the north-east, and south-west to St. Ives.

A good starting point is the pub at Hartland Quay, which is right on the water’s edge by a beautiful stretch of jagged rock outcrops which are constantly battered by the sea. On the wall in the bar of the pub is a chart showing the position of all the shipwrecks on that part of the coast over the last two hundred years; the landlord sits morosely in the corner behind the bar, no doubt recalling the days of the wreckers who lured ships on to the rocks in order to raid their cargoes. Walking south-west, you are soon out of Devon, and into a world never seen by most travellers, a world of hidden coves and headlands, high cliffs, abandoned tin mines, rusting breeches buoy equipment used to rescue sailors from wrecks long since forgotten, a variety of seabirds, and always lovely views. Some of the walking is decidedly strenuous, involving steep climbs and descents, but always rewarding.

If you intend to spend more than one day on the coastal path, a certain amount of advance planning is essential, as public transport away from the main towns is non-existent. You can, of course, carry a tent on your back, or walk back to your starting point each day, but the best way to make progress along the path (although environmentally unfriendly) is to use two cars; take both cars to the end of the proposed walk, abandon one there, and drive (with all members of the party) to the starting point. At the end of the walk, pile into the waiting car and drive back to the starting point to pick up the other car; and make sure that the right car keys are in the right place at the right time.

Excellent booklets are available giving details of the route and pointing out items of interest along the way.

***************

The Rainbow

Remember, dear, when we were young, 
Our hearts were gay, our days were long. 
You loved me then, I love you still. 
Gone are those days, say what you will. 
But when a rainbow fills the sky, 
I pause to think and wonder why 
Vows we made have passed us by.

***************

A Holiday Trophy

We were on holiday in Northumberland with our family in the days when we were young and active. We climbed mountains, walked by the side of tumbling streams, and embarked on a boat to the Farne Islands, where, apart from grey seals, we saw puffins feeding their young, ceaselessly flying to and fro carrying cargoes of sandworms in their beaks, and diving with them into the tunnels where they had made their nests. Inevitably, of course, the Farne Islands lighthouse reminded us of the time when we had first read of the heroic deeds of Grace Darling, the lighthouse-keeper’s daughter as she rowed her boat to the rescue in stormy seas.

But in our hotel there was an object which delighted us each day as we left in the morning and returned in the evening. It was a terrestrial globe about two feet in diameter, sea-green in colour and showing the sea and all the Earth’s land masses moulded to show the contours of the mountains; whether or not the mouldings were to scale we never discovered but they were very effective. The globe was mounted on an elegant wooden frame which enabled one to rotate it through 360 degrees of longitude at will. It was a navigator’s delight.

The globe stood in a corner of the hotel foyer, accompanied by a notice stating that similar globes were available for sale at an address a few miles away. I became possessed of a gnawing envy of anyone who could own such a delightful object, until, just before the end of the holiday, it dawned on me that I had a birthday coming up with no idea of what main present I would like. Brilliant! We drove off to the small factory where the globes were made, paid out an amount that significantly increased the cost of the holiday, and returned home with a globe and its stand securely jammed into the rear seat of the car. So now my lovely globe resides in our living-room, where it can be turned through 360 degrees of longitude at will and for ever.

***************

Stratford-upon-Avon

Stratford has been part of my life from about the age of eight. When I was young we used to spend part of our summer holidays at various places on the south coast; which in those days meant two or three days driving from our home. My mother, being starved of culture in our small town, always insisted that the first overnight stop on our journey would be Stratford, the first task when we arrived there being to race round to the theatre to book seats for that evening’s performance in what was then a magnificent new theatre. Although I probably did not make much of Shakespeare’s plays to begin with, I was always aware of the buzz of excitement and anticipation in the audience. One thing I do remember from those early days was peering over the balcony, and seeing Bernard Shaw sitting in the stalls.

Afterwards, during the war, I met Philip in the RAF, and later married his young sister. After the war he had a brilliant academic career, his last appointment being as Shakespearian Professor of English at Birmingham University, based in Stratford, where a duty he delighted in was to coach actors performing at the theatre to help them interpret some of Shakespeare’s more abstruse texts. And so it was that we visited Stratford quite regularly and got to know the ins and outs of the town. Being there with Philip was an education in itself. One of the recurring highlights was eating out after the theatre at “The Black Swan”, also known as “The Dirty Duck”, where the actors used to foregather, many of whom had a cheery word or a wave to greet Philip. But it could not last, and, after a distressing period of illness, emphysema carried him off at much too early an age.

Now, at the start of each year when the theatre programme has been published, our next door neighbour chivvies us with: “What shall we see in Stratford this year?”, and this is becoming an annual routine. So once again we are walking around the streets of Stratford, but we avoid the road where Philip lived and died – it has too many memories.

***************

A Christmas Story

The lights of the church were dimmed. By flickering candle-light, I listened as the congregation around me sang “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht”. It was a lovely sound, and I felt so much at ease with these people.

How different, I thought, from the wartime years when hatred of Germans was a way of life, a hatred fuelled by the terrible wailing of air raid sirens, the ruthless advance of the German armies and the grimness of the gas chambers. In the years after the war, it had been a long time before I could meet a German man or woman without being aware of a great gulf between us, as if I was meeting some alien beings with whom I had so little in common.

And now, for three years, my two young granddaughters had lived with their parents in a village in Southern Germany, being brought up in this alien environment among these alien people.

Then, one Christmas, I was persuaded to attend the Nativity Play at their village church. The scene was suddenly familiar; the hall was filled with adoring parents and grandparents, children forgetting their lines, teachers trying desperately to get the little actors and actresses into their correct positions, angels with crooked wings, boys reluctantly playing shepherds, wise men and kings. It was all so familiar, only the language was different. How could one have hated these people? They were just like us. Yet these were still the race of people who had done those terrible things, or had allowed them to happen, not so many years ago. So, if they are just like us, how could we be so sure that we could not have done such things, or allowed them to happen, in our own country? This thought burned in my mind, while, by flickering candle-light, the congregation sang “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht”.

***************

Summer

Summer is a state of mind. If winter is for discontent, then summer shall be for contentment and happiness. All our lives, from infancy through to old age, we have collected treasured memories of the long happy days of summer.

Childhood days spent on the beach, digging holes, building castles, splashing in and out of the sea. We remember those times, the sun was always shining: already we had started building up that heap of memories that was to become our mature perception that summer equals happiness. After childhood, happy days followed on the cricket field, chasing round the boundary, holding catches, even scoring a few runs; it was all happiness. Walking up and around the hills near my home, – it didn’t matter whether I was on my own or in company, it was enjoyment experienced to the full.

From 1940 to 1946 I was deprived of five successive summers, but in the following years, summer thrived again, in my remaining bachelor days, and with my partner, and then it was back to the beaches with children, and, in almost no time at all, with grandchildren. There is something within us, a happy facility to remember the best of times more clearly than other times. And so it is that we remember our summers, full of glowing memories. It is a state of mind.

***************

Love (Alice)

I like throwing my breakfast on the floor. Sometimes when I’ve eaten all I want to – it doesn’t matter whether it’s porridge or Coco Pops – I think to myself, if I just move the plate to the edge of the tray on my high-chair, and tip it up a bit, with a bit of luck the plate will topple and spill the rest of my breakfast all over the floor. And there it sits, a soggy mess of porridge (or Coco Pops) on the floor by the legs of my high-chair. Mummy gets very, very cross, and shouts at me in a loud voice, and carries on muttering to herself as she cleans up the mess and takes it away.

Then, the next time she walks past my chair, she stops, bends down, and gives me a great big kiss on the top of my head. That’s why I like throwing my breakfast on the floor.

***************

Loch Frisa

The wind catches in my hearing aid; 
My head is full of sound, 
Trapped, with the music of Hiawatha: 
“Pemmican and buffalo - -".
The buzzard soars back over the hill: 
"First he danced a solemn measure - -". 
Kath and Speff stroll on ahead: 
“Then they said to Chibiabos, 
The friend of Hiawatha - -".

The path turns out of the wind: 
My head is free, 
And I am free, to return to the world.

***************

Serendipity

When the Globe Theatre was being built, we subscribed for a paving stone to be laid bearing the name of Kath’s brother, Philip. He had been closely associated with Sam Wanamaker in the initial stages of the Globe project, until ill-health, followed by his death in 1989, meant, that like Sam, he did not live to see the successful completion of the task. The paving stone seemed a fitting memorial to him and to his work.

Kath’s cousin, who had always been very fond of Philip, wanted to come down from North Wales to see the Globe and Philip’s stone, so she came down for the weekend, and on the Saturday we arrived at the theatre. However, because there was to be a matinee of Hamlet that afternoon, the only people allowed on to the paved area were those currently going round on the last guided tour of the morning, and those with tickets for the afternoon performance. This also meant that we could not get to see the inside of the theatre. A young steward (he was black) was guarding the door; Kath moved closer to him, and explained that her cousin Mollie had come all the way from North Wales to see her cousin’s stone, and could he please make an exception. He opened the barrier, and asked us to return as quickly as possible.

We found the stone, and stood by it in silence for a few moments. Then a nearby door into the theatre opened, and we could see that there was something going on in there. Quick as a flash, we were through the door and into the ground area of the theatre. There were quite a few other people there, so we weren’t conspicuous. And there, on the stage was Mark Rylance, Hamlet himself, wearing a T-shirt and shorts, reciting the first Act soliloquy that begins: “O! that this too too solid flesh would melt”. He moved about the stage as he spoke, listened to in total silence. At the end, the makeshift audience applauded, and he took a bow. Only then did we realise that he had in fact been making a sound recording, with microphones at each corner of the stage. This was indeed serendipity; we had moved from the position of seeing nothing, to seeing the stone, and by chance getting entry to the theatre and seeing the master himself performing a scene from Hamlet.

And then, strangest of all, Mark Rylance squatted centre stage, near the front; before him was a small dish of burning incense, while he rocked gently to and fro, uttering a low humming sound. Is he a Buddhist, or is this some strange ritual which he undergoes before each performance? While we were pondering this question, our friendly steward appeared and quickly ushered all the stragglers out of the theatre and back through the barrier. He had done us proud.

***************

At Torre del Lago

At Torre del Lago I stood in the sea;
See 
How the waves came tumbling by. 
Buy
A new surf board?
Bored
Is what I will become.
Be com-
-forted by the sand and the sun. 
Son
And his daughters jump in the water,
What a
Lovely life.

***************

Torrent Walk

We made our way down the slippery track beneath the trees, picking our path cautiously between the boulders. The wet ground was covered with an incandescent carpet of red-brown beech leaves, together with a few leaves of oak. Below us was a raging torrent of clear brown water, swollen by the rain of the previous night.

A short time before, we had stood on a bleak hillside by the grave of my parents. With no-one living near enough to tend the grave, the edges had been invaded by grass, but an overall covering of moss, although a sign of neglect, did lend it an air of tidiness. We stood together for a while, in a mood of helpless silence. Our Scottish granddaughters, having made an inspection of the grave of great grandparents they had never known, wandered among the headstones, attempting to decipher and pronounce the strange Welsh placenames.

The rain started again as we continued down the track, but we were protected by the great canopy of leaves overhead. The river beneath us plunged down and down; at times the tumult of the turbulent water drowned out our talk, but in that great sound we could hear the voices of those who had passed this way before.

***************

John Cooper

His picture shows a man in uniform, 
He stares with steady gaze beneath his cap; 
But he was not a military man, 
He played the cornet in a famous band, 
None other than the Besses o' the Barn.
But in Kath's family he's better known 
For grandparental deeds which led him on 
To bed two sisters - no, not both at once! 
But first he married Alice, Sallie's mum, 
Sal had a sister Bel, and brothers two. 
Now Sallie, she was Kathleen's mum, and she 
Had also borne a clever son as well.
Alas, it came to pass that Alice died, 
But John, desiring comfort, cast his eye 
Upon her sister Edie; but the law 
Decreed to him: “In no wise shalt thou wed 
Thy dead wife's sister”. John, quite undeterred, 
Lived with her anyway, and once again 
He fathered four, again two girls, two boys. 
Now one of these was Doris, who survives, 
A very hale and hearty ninety-four.
If we consider the relationship
That Doris bears to Sallie, it's a hoot!
They share a father, but by different mums,
So they're half-sisters, that is very clear.
But their two mums are sisters, which in turn,
Means they are cousins, so it's plain to see,
That they're first cousins and half-sisters too.
Now you'll be glad to hear there is no more;
John Cooper has a lot to answer for!

***************

Thoughts on Millennium Eve

The birth of a New Year always gives rise to thoughts of the past, of those we have known who are no longer with us, and of the future, wondering what it may hold for us, and for our children.

I have never taken much notice of the significance of particular anniversaries. Certainly, birthdays and other annual events are there to be celebrated, but I am not one of those people who dread the approach of a 60th, 70th or 80th birthday; one day follows another in much the same fashion, no matter how many times the Earth has rotated on its axis or revolved around the Sun since the day of one’s birth. But, of course, there are exceptions; I fancy the fiftieth anniversary of my marriage will not go unnoticed, and the advent of a new Millennium is a bit special.

The celebration of a New Year always seems to be a dreary affair in southern England; I have always found it to be a more significant event in the north, and on the Celtic fringes, while the Scots go quite mad. I have clear memories of some of these occasions.

On the first New Year’s Eve that I can remember, I was aged 7 or 8, and we had come from Wales to stay with relatives in Liverpool. Shortly before midnight I was roused from my sleep to come downstairs and out into the street to hear the sound of a great tradition. On the stroke of midnight came a glorious cacophony; every ship on the River Mersey and in the docks blew its siren, from the toot-toot-toot of the tugboats to the bleating of the ferry-boats and the deep-throated boom of the ocean going liners. There were many more ships then than there are now; it was a memorable sound.

For the New Year of 1950/1951 I was invited to stay with Kath and her family in Wallasey. We were not yet officially engaged, but we knew that it would happen. There was a very real and deeply-felt knowledge that we would shortly be taking a step that would shape the rest of our lives. That alone made it a memorable New Year.

In the early 1960’s we were living in Brookdene Avenue in Oxhey. On this particular New Year’s Eve, we had spent the evening with some Scottish neighbours. We emerged from their house shortly after midnight, ready to share our conviviality with whoever might be around, but the place was totally quiet and deserted. We expressed our opinions of the miserable southern English who lived all around us, but all was not lost. There had been a significant fall of snow during the evening, so a sledge was produced, and we spent a hilarious hour or so pulling each other in turns along the silent length of Brookdene Avenue. Crazy, but memorable.

And now to the Millennium Eve. Our thoughts of the past, of those we have known who are no longer with us, extend, not only to the previous twelve months, but to the whole of our lives. Our thoughts of the future extend for a further period than just the next year. We are aware that the Millennium is a unique event in our lives, and for that reason it has given rise to a greater solemnity and a greater degree of celebration than is accorded to a normal New Year. Why, even the southern English condescended to notice it!

***************

Waste Not Want Not

Sixteen Christmases ago, soon after we first moved into our present home, we bought a tiny Christmas tree, about eighteen inches high. At Twelfth Night, we removed the tinsel and baubles, and realised that the tree had some roots, so, ever optimistic, we planted the tree by the fence where we could see it from our kitchen and bedroom windows.

This magnificent tree is now two storeys high, and, this year, for the first time, it has provided a home for a pair of magpies. The magpies were very busy, building their nest with some very unwieldy-looking pieces of wood and some lesser twigs. In no time at all, both parents were flying around furiously, fetching food for their voracious young. Then, alas, disaster struck! While both parents were away foraging for food, a crow raided the nest and removed one of the chicks, which lay at the foot of the tree for a while, a pathetic little bundle of black and white feathers. The crow then removed it a few yards over the fence into the paddock, and started to attack the bundle with its vicious beak. After a brief shower of black and white feathers, the crow began its meal. The distraught parents tried to attack the crow, but the crow defended itself by a series of brief counter-attacks. The two magpies were no match for the much larger crow, and all they achieved was the slowing down of the meal.

Eventually, the crow flew away. One of the magpies, however, stayed behind, and finished off the meal.

***************

A Peak of Happiness

We started planning our Golden Wedding celebration more than twelve months ahead – our friends had been telling us that we needed to do this before all the best places got booked up. So, after some research, and on the recommendation of a friend, we decided on St Michael’s Manor in St Albans as the venue. It had a “special event” menu comprising a mouth watering buffet lunch, a large dining area holding up to sixty people, with the freedom of the gardens and lake, should the weather be fine. When we told our sons what we were planning, they said “What about music? You two cannot have a celebration without music”. So they said they would organise something.

So we started compiling the guest list, a process which over the next few months was punctuated by such exclamations as “What on earth do you want to invite them for?” Eventually the list, including some last minute additions, totalled seventy-eight for a venue that held sixty, but fortunately, twenty were unable to come for various reasons, including, alas, two who died. The last minute additions included two drivers for guests who couldn’t face the prospect of driving themselves to St Albans.

The day dawned fine and bright, and by midday was getting warm. The invitations had said “12 noon for 1pm: informal dress” and they started rolling in, and were all present and correct by one o’clock, chatting on the patio clutching glasses of champagne and orange juice. The guests had come from far and wide, not only from the four corners of England, but from Scotland, Wales, France and Switzerland. Apart from Kath and myself, there were six survivors of the wedding day, of whom four were present, including my nephew David, who during the whole wedding service fifty years ago was fast asleep in his carry-cot at the back of the church. A very special guest was Kath’s ninety-eight-year-old Auntie Doris.

The buffet lunch was every bit as mouth-watering as had been promised. At the point when everyone was finishing their coffee, and we were thinking about speeches, suddenly the most wonderful thing happened. A man came in and sat at the grand piano that had been lurking in the corner, followed by a troop of seven people in costume, who turned out to be real live opera singers.

And for the next hour we were regaled with solos, duets and quartets from all our favourite operas, and other music that reflected our fifty years together. It was absolutely amazing, a most wonderful surprise addition to our celebration.

Meanwhile, the sun had continued to shine, and, after the speeches, during which our sons said very nice things about us, as well as letting out some family secrets, everyone dispersed to wander about the grounds, and the grandchildren sat and dangled their feet in the cool waters of the lake.

And the cost? I can tell you – – it was worth every penny.

***************

In the Supermarket

Harry wished he had paid more attention to what his wife actually did when she was shopping. He stood miserably, with the wire basket in his hand, gazing at the shelves, wondering where to start. Mildred would have gone briskly to the nearest shelf, picked what she wanted, consulted her list, and gone on to the next purchase. He hadn’t even made a list. He looked bleakly at the cabbages, the cauliflower, the broccoli; even if he bought them he had very little idea what to do with them. He turned away, and as he did so his basket hit a trolley coming up on his right-hand side, being pushed by a young woman with a toddler perched on the front of the trolley. “You stupid man”, she shouted, “you could have brained my boy with your carelessness. Do look what you are doing”, and she swept on her way. Harry, already miserable enough, was stunned and embarrassed by this outburst, which he thought was quite undeserved. Slowly, he moved on, and was cheered to discover a shelf full of ready-made meals; he read the instructions, and knew that at last here was something he could cope with. He chose a few, and, with a new-found confidence, set off for the cereal shelves; here, again, there was something he knew what to do with. He made his choice, but as he reached up for the packet, somehow he dislodged a whole pile of cereal packets on to the floor. He felt his misery returning as he slowly bent to deal with this latest disaster, when he heard a cheerful voice saying “Let me help you”, and he was surprised to find that it was the same young woman who had shouted at him only a few minutes earlier. In no time at all she had retrieved all the packets and put them back on the shelves. He stammered a “thank you” as she sped on her way. Later, as he was queueing at the checkout, he saw her and the toddler, still perched on the trolley, heading for the car-park. Their eyes met, and he caught a brief smile before she disappeared out of sight. He gave a sigh, and supposed that he would eventually get used to this new way of life.

***************

A Weekend in Paris

I have recently returned from a weekend in Paris. My son Rik was running in the Paris Marathon on the Sunday, so the whole family went over in support. We found time to visit the picture gallery at La Musee d’Orsay, which contains a wide variety of works by all the major artists. It was, incidentally, the first time I remember seeing paintings by Monet that were not either water-lilies or the face of Rouen Cathedral. The front of the Musee building has two large clocks; at one point we found ourselves standing behind one of them, looking through the clock face, over the Seine to a splendid view of Montmartre and the Cathedral of Sacre Coeur.

As we stood there, I became aware of the huge second hand progressing across the face of the clock, but because we were behind the clock face, the hand was moving backwards – it was moving anticlockwise. I had a sudden vision of time itself moving backwards, and there came into my mind the words of the poem by Elizabeth Akers Allen:

“Backward, turn backward, O Time, in thy flight,

Make me a child again just for tonight”.

Why would the poet wish to do this? Was she weary of being an adult, seeing things through a glass darkly, and now wished to see them once more face to face, and to speak as a child, to understand as a child, to think as a child? Did she wish to abandon, just for one night, the burdens and responsibilities of adulthood? I can understand the poet having a fleeting wish of this nature, but I feel that she would find the experience a great disappointment, a travesty of a dream. Would I wish to turn back my own clock? No, I would not wish to go back twelve months, to live that time again, knowing as I do now the dark cloud that was looming. Far better to remember those times as they were, not knowing what Fate had in store.

And the Marathon? It was an exciting, involving event. Rik was content with his time, not his best, but then it was the hottest April day ever recorded in Paris.

***************

Waiting?

You went away from me 
Away from me 
And yet you expect me 
To still be 
Waiting here for you 
Waiting here.

Knock on my door tonight 
All you like 
Ring my bell tonight 
Go to hell tonight.
I'm not waiting here for you
Waiting here. 
I've gone away from you
Gone for good from you 
Gone away

***************

Green Leaves

The trees are weeping;
All summer through 
They bore the green canopy of leaves 
That gave shade on sunny days, 
And joy to the beholder. 
Now the colder days have come, 
With wind and rain; 
The colours of the leaves have changed 
To yellow, brown and rusty red. 
And when the change is done 
The leaves begin to fall 
Like tears, 
Bidding a sad farewell
To oak and ash and sycamore
Who gave them birth,
And now see them depart.
The trees, now gaunt and bare, 
Will stand like silhouettes 
Against the winter sky. 
But in the dawn of spring, 
New life will come, 
The trees will once again 
Give birth to their green leaves.
When men and women weep, 
And bid a sad farewell 
For loved ones who have gone, 
Their lives, too, are gaunt and bare, 
Lonely against the wintry sky. 
But in the dawn of their new spring, 
Those green leaves will never come again.

***************

Winter

For forty years my love and I
Would watch the seasons passing by.
The nodding daffodils of spring
Gave notice of the summoning 
Of joyous summer, kind and warm. 
Then came the autumn with its storm 
And wind to blow the leaves away. 
The winter came, but not to stay. 
Together we would face the cold 
Until the frost released its hold. 
In the midst of winter's reign 
We knew that spring would come again.
But now my love has left me all alone. 
I thought that she and I would never part. 
My grief is heavy as the hardest stone. 
The icy hand of winter grips my heart, 
The green of spring will never come again. 
The leaves of summer will not now unfold. 
The autumn colours I will seek in vain. 
Now all my life is winter, bleak and cold.

***************

Summer Time Winter Time

Why is it that, twice a year, we go through the ridiculous charade of changing the time on all the clocks in the house by one hour? This used to be a relatively simple task, when we had perhaps one or two clocks in the house, and one or two watches. Now the process is an absolute nightmare, apart from wall clocks and bedside clocks and watches, we have to perform fiddling operations on computers, radios, video recorders, hi-fi’s, ovens, microwaves, central heating systems, telephone answering machines and the one we always forget, the clock in the car.

And six months later, we put them all back again to where they were. It is as if, twice a year, the whole population of the country, together with the entire population across half the world, link arms and perform a grotesque dance, chanting all together: “Put the clock forward, put the clock back” which is very little different from: “You put your left leg out, you put your left leg in, you put your right leg out, you put your right leg in”. And it makes about as much sense. And it’s not just in our homes – the whole of industry is caught up in it, while timetables for all forms of public transport have to be readjusted in some detail.

Why do we do it? Who benefits from it? There are groups of people who complain regularly: the farmers complain about cows being confused at milking time; the whole population of Western Scotland complain that they are condemned to going to work in the dark, at one end of the scale it is dangerous for children to go to school in the dark, and at the other end it is dangerous for them to go home in the dark.

It all started with The Daylight Saving Act during the First World War, to allow factory workers and agricultural workers extra hours of daylight for recreation during the summer. The idea seems to persist that the process actually creates longer hours of daylight in the summer, which, is, of course, ridiculous nonsense. So why do we do it? Will someone please tell me!

***************

The Seven Ages of Christmas. (One man in his time plays many parts)

First the small child, believing implicitly and with simplicity in the person that is Father Christmas or Santa Claus. He it is who fills the eagerly awaited stocking at the end of the bed, lending an air of magic to the whole affair.

Then the schoolboy, still creeping like snail unwillingly to school; he has long since discarded the myth of Father Christmas, and knows full well that it his parents who will provide, whether the gift is a yoyo, a cricket bat or a laptop.

And now the lover, scared to death when he approaches the object of his affections, – how could such a gorgeous creature possibly have any interest in the gangling youth that he has now become? What can he possibly give her for Christmas that would not arouse great howls of derision from his beloved and her friends?

He then becomes the parent, with his own child, proudly playing out the myth, tip-toeing softly into the bedroom to place sundry goodies into the waiting stocking.

When the boy has grown, the father will find fellow-feeling in his son’s reaction to Christmas, whether the gift is a yoyo, a cricket bat or a laptop, and will anxiously wait to be invited to join in the enjoyment. He can still keep pace with advancing technology, but for how long?

Now he is a grandfather, older and wiser in many respects, he is nevertheless beginning to lose touch with technology as each year brings out more complex and incomprehensible objects to be manipulated freely by the younger generations. He becomes painfully aware that the great new waves of technology are leaving him high and dry. But the granddaughters, for that is what the generation has produced, are lovely creatures, bringing old grandad into their lives with their fun and their music.

The seventh age eventually comes when, sans eyes, sans teeth and sans hearing but not yet sans everything, he sits in a corner, ever more bewildered by the things around him. When someone speaks to him, he smiles happily in agreement, without having heard a word that was said to him, but it’s Christmas, his children and his grandchildren are happy. What more can he ask?

***************

Geiranger

The clouds are low and mist enshrouds the hills,
A myriad streams fall down into the fjords.
Great giants stride unseen across the land.
They walk so tall.

Amid the grey, grim grandeur of the scene
I hear the sound of great Wagnerian chords 
That crown it with an awesome majesty. 
We are so small.

***************

The G.O.P.P.

Friends –

It is a great privilege for me to stand in front of you today, in front of this great gathering. This day will go down in history, and in years to come we shall look back and remember with pride that we were here when it all began. You see on the wall behind me our new logo comprising the letters that will soon be on everyone’s lips, the G.O.P.P. Our party, this great party, will from now on contest every by-election in every part of the country, we will contest seats in local government, and muster as many candidates as possible in order to storm into the next general election with the confidence that breeds success.

The rest of the world will want to know what we, the G.O.P.P., stand for, so we, the executive committee that you see up here on this platform, have drafted a manifesto that we intend to publish at the earliest date possible, and I will now read out to you the main points from this document, a document whose contents will shortly reverberate around this great country of ours, and indeed, around the whole civilised world. These are the changes, the radical changes, that we will bring about immediately, from that great day when we assume power, and take on the responsibility of government.

First, it will become mandatory for any organisation on receiving a telephome call to ensure that it is answered by a real human. It will be illegal to arrange for the call to be answered by a recorded voice, and especially severe penalties will be incurred if the voice is that of a person whose accent is incomprehensible.

Secondly, we will abolish the tedious practice, which we are at present forced to undergo, of changing our clocks twice a year. This serves no real purpose, and benefits no-one.

Next, we will not tolerate any unnecessary changes in the English language that we learnt in our childhood, and have used all our lives. Examples of this are references to “train stations”, when the proper term we have used all our lives is “railway stations”. Again, when we were at school we learnt about “kilometres”. Any other pronunciation, such as “kilometres” will be banned, and subject to severe penalties.

We will put a stop to the rapid proliferation and complexity associated with modern electronic devices. There are already in existence far more electronic gadgets than we need, and far more than the world, and in particular, our membership, can ever cope with. This ban will be extended to the motor industry. They have imposed upon us the use of computers and other electronic gadgetry under the bonnets of our cars making repairs ever more incomprehensible and more expensive. We all remember the days when a little trouble under the bonnet could be readily dealt with by the use of a spanner and a screwdriver; that is the sort of world in which we want to live. There will, of course, be exemptions to the law restricting the unnecessary march of electronic devices; this will relate to electronic aids for the those of our fellow-citizens who are suffering some kind of disability; I refer particularly to the deaf and the blind.

I have outlined to you a few items from our manifesto; there will be many more, all designed to usher in the new world that we are all craving for. Thank you all for coming here to give your invaluable support to our great movement. Our future will be guided by your dedication and support for the G.O.P.P., the Grumpy Old Peoples’ Party.

***************

Parallel Memories

Following a recent episode, I recognised a sensation of something akin to “déjà vu”. So far as I can recall, this was the third time that I had had this type of experience.

The first occasion was when I was digging a large hole in the garden of 57 Chestnut Avenue for a swimming pool. On this particular day, which was very warm, I was deep in the hole and suddenly felt dizzy and sick. Accompanying these sensations was a smell which I immediately recognised and which took me back to a previous time when I had felt these symptons. It was in Cairo in the year 1943. The doctor diagnosed heat stroke on that occasion, so now, in my large hole, I knew that I had heat stroke again. I knew the cure – to drink salt water, which I did, and it worked.

The second occasion was when Robyn, after she had been accepted for Lester Pearson College in Canada, was going through a series of meetings organised to familiarise students with what they might expect to find in their new colleges. She came back from one of these events all excited, because she had suddenly realised that, in her own words, “It’s all really happening”. I was immediately transported back to June 1941. Having been in the army for six or seven months, and hating everything about it, I was offered the chance of transferring to the RAF for aircrew duties. I wanted to be a pilot, of course, but settled for the role of navigator, having been persuaded that I was better suited for that job. About a month or six weeks passed, during which time I came to the conclusion that nothing was going to happen, and that I was doomed to stay in the army, but eventually I received my transfer papers. I was to report to Lords cricket ground. On the appointed day, I arrived to find the Eton v Harrow match in progress, but, more amazingly, I became part of a throng of khaki-clad figures, all eager, as I was, to exchange khaki for blue. And then I knew that “it was all really happening”.

And the third, more recent, episode? On the last morning of our stay at Sainte Cécile, I narrowly escaped falling down the long flight of stone steps leading down to the basement. Fortunately, I was saved by prompt action from Rik, who clawed me back from potential disaster. My reaction (apart, that is, from expressing gratitude) I can only describe as cool, which I found surprising. I suppose it was a case of “It’s all over, there’s no need to panic”. This was precisely matched by my experience in 1944, when flying over the Japanese front line in Burma I perceived a line of bullet holes erupting from the upper side of the wing, and heading straight for me. That they did not reach me was, again, clearly an occasion for gratitude, but to whom? Fate? God?, or some anonymous Japanese machine-gunner? Anyway, my reaction was, again, cool, attributable to some extent to the fact that I had a job to get on with, tipping supplies out of the aircraft to our troops below. In both cases, panic came later, in the small hours of the night, recalling what might have been.

***************

Old Age

It appears inevitable that, as I have grown older, my ability to absorb new information has diminished almost to zero. There is only that much more that I can take in. My brain has accumulated as much knowledge as it can carry. My memory bank of accumulated wisdom now carries a sign: “House Full”. I am only too well aware that there is a vast amount of new information and new technology that would dearly love to be admitted to my over-stuffed cranium. Some of it has, with great difficulty, managed to penetrate the apparently impenetrable, but, I believe, only at the expense of other items of knowledge (which includes people’s names) that have, due the intense pressure of all this jostling and elbowing for space, been released to wander in some outer region where lost souls gather.

But do I care? Well, not really. I could count my blessings if I had a mind to – my lovely family, for one thing, and there is much still to look forward to. Love, sunshine, another performance of Wagner’s Ring – you name it, I’m ready for it.

My one great sadness is being deaf. It does exclude me from so much. Here is a poem:

The Devil came up to my side. “Can I help you, sir?” he said. “Restore my hearing” I replied, “My soul is yours when I am dead”.

And I would do it, like a shot, without a hint of hesitation. But then I don’t believe in an after-life. I would have to take a chance on being mistaken and ending up in Purgatory.

Never mind. As I said, you name it, I’m ready for it.

***************

Music

On most mornings, after I wake up, a tune comes into my head, and stays with me for at least part of the day. It can be anything from something simple, like ‘baa-baa black sheep’ or a Bing Crosby oldie, to an operatic aria, or to the opening bars of Beethoven’s fifth symphony. Sometimes I sing along with the tune of the day, which gets a bit tricky when trying to sing all four parts of the quartet from Rigoletto. But in general I just let the music flow through me for as long as it wants to.

I remember when I first realised that music could be fulfilling. This was at a Christmas concert in our chapel when I was about ten or eleven. A young girl of eighteen sang a solo, a Christmas hymn, and it was beautiful; I met her again many years later, and she too remembered the occasion. A few years later I joined the local male voice choir, and then a large mixed choir singing magnificent works like Verdi’s Requiem. And ultimately I wound down my choral activities with the Chipperfield choir, still singing great religious works. Singing in these choirs was a great joy to me, surrounded as I was by all this lovely sound.

After a married life in which attending operatic performances played a crucial role, I have now turned more to orchestral music. It was a great delight recently to see a TV programme about Sibelius and his symphonies, which I had never heard before. I just sat and let the music pour over me. Long may it continue to be so.

**********

Libya – February 2009

This was a brilliantly successful venture, well organised in all respects. There were 22 people on the tour, four singles and nine couples, a very nice bunch, with no doubt a high proportion of Guardian readers. Word seemed to have gone round that one member of the party was a deaf old man, who might need a bit of support. True enough, when it came to steep scrambling, or climbing out of an amphitheatre, there always seemed to be someone on hand in case I needed help. Not that I ever did, but it was nice to know. Also, when any announcement had been made, there was usually someone making sure I had heard it properly.

The hotels were good, but the food was very ordinary. We learnt to avoid lamb and camel, and stick to chicken or fish. Their meat, especially camel, is really tough. I was quite impressed with Libya. For all his alleged faults, Gaddafi seems to run a happy country. The people are, I think, the most courteous locals I have ever met, often coming forward to help us to cross a road carrying four lanes of traffic. It is noticeable that maintenance of roads and pavements does not come high on their list of priorities. After heavy rain the whole place is awash with puddles, rather like Abbots Langley High Street, only more so.

The first site visited was at Sabrarta, to the west of Tripoli. There was an immediate sense of history as the site unfolded. Sabrarta was a port used by the Romans for trading with Central Africa, and was built on a site gradually sloping down to the sea. I was enchanted by the deep blue sky and dark blue sea (wine-dark?), and seeing the waves breaking over the remains of the harbour wall out to sea. It was beautiful, and a great start to the tour.

After a flight to Benghazi we went east to Tocra (Tukra or Teucheira), which was disappointing, partly because the local guide was inarticulate. There was an impressive necropolis and some glorious surf pounding on the beach. We went on to Ptolemais, with the same inarticulate guide.

The next day was spent at Cyrene, the oldest and most important of five Greek cities in the region of Cyrenaica. This was my favourite site on the tour. It was built on several levels, starting quite high among towering cliffs, and descending by a series of steep tracks down to the sea. I think I liked it particularly for its dramatic setting. The next day we walked from our hotel in Appolonia (which was the port for Cyrene) to explore the local ruins, but this bit was cut short by a howling, freezing rainstorm, after which we flew back to Tripoli.

The next two days were occupied at Leptis Magna. It’s immense, breathtakingly so, both in sheer size, but also in the majesty of so many of the buildings. Wow! about sums it up. Apparently the Palace of Versailles was largely built with looted material from Leptis Magna. The guide went on to say: “And the French weren’t the only ones”, as our thoughts strayed to Virginia Water.

On the final day, we had a tour of Tripoli, including the impressive museum, presided over by an immense portrait of Gaddafi.

***************

The Green Thing

In the queue at the supermarket, the cashier told an older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment.

The woman apologised and explained, “We didn’t have the green thing back in my day.”

The clerk responded, “That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment.”

She was right — our generation didn’t have the green thing in its day.

Back then, we returned milk bottles to the milkman, jam jars to the shop. They were sent back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so we could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled. But we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.

We walked up stairs, because we didn’t have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the shops and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we went out. But she was right. We didn’t have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby’s nappies because we didn’t have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts — wind and solar power really did dry the clothes. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. Worn for years and lovely still: Rose’s jumpers go to Jill.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio in the house – not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief, not a screen the size of the Isle of Wight. In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn’t have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the post, we used a wadded up old newspaper to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. We used a push mower that ran on human power and exercised by working so we didn’t need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she’s right; we didn’t have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the bus and children rode their bikes to school or walked. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn’t need a computerised gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find what was on at the pictures or book a holiday abroad using a gas guzzling aeroplane.

But isn’t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn’t have the green thing back then?

So because we are not as green as you think we should be:

Remember: Don’t make old people mad. We don’t like being old in the first place, and it doesn’t take much to annoy us.

***************

Sunday Morning

We sit in the Meeting, silent, 
Waiting for God. 
I met Him once,
When, as a boy, I stood by a stile, 
Where the path dips down into the trees.
I gazed across the valley, and saw, high in the clear blue air, 
The long mountain ridge, etched against the infinite sky.
I marvelled at its beauty, 
And for a while I was at one with Nature, 
And with the glory of God's creation. 
The moment passed. 
I went down the path into the wood, 
And home to tea.
Then I was young and innocent, 
But now I am grown old, 
He and I may not meet so easily again. 
Perhaps I may yet find Him 
At the heart of a great chord of music, 
In the clasp of a tiny hand, 
In the texture of a rose.

***************

Emblems

I have split my life into four compartments:

First, the period of education and the accumulation of knowledge.. But much more than that it was about learning to integrate with other members of the human race. But that’s the same for everyone – what was different for me? What was special? All I know is that I came away from that time with a passion for cricket, rugby and music. What is emblematic from these? I think I would settle for my recording of the Verdi Requiem. This was, and still is, an amazing experience, whether from within the performance, or just listening to it.

The second phase was military service, which had the effect of broadening the mind, with travel to places that I had never dreamt of visiting, and exposure to danger that reinforces one’s delight in just being alive. There is no doubt what is emblematic of this period – my RAF Flying Logbook, which I still have.

It is actually a red South African Air Force Logbook, since that is where I started flying training. It is a potted history in itself, from the first tentative entries to the final flurry of innumerable flights to remote areas of Burma, where the army on the ground would be waiting for their supplies. Part of the cover of the book is stained a pale yellow colour by the mildew that accumulated on it during the abominally hot, steamy monsoon.

The third phase was my bachelor existence in London, learning my trade in the years between the war and my marriage. This was not particularly memorable, and I regard it as having been a period of preparation for the fourth phase, which was my fifty-five years of married life. What is emblematic of that period? I cannot do better than nominate for that honour my two sons and my four granddaughters. What more could one ask?

***************

Aelwyn’s War

“I paused to look out of the window, and saw a line of bullet-holes erupting on the upper side of the wing, heading straight for me.”

Aelwyn in 1943

“It would be difficult to rate too highly the part played in the (Burma) campaign by the air…Under the direction of Sir Guy Garrod, and later under that of Sir Keith Park, air supply in Burma had reached a summit. It was done by imaginative planning and by resource, energy and courage in execution. The administrative staffs, the ground staffs and the allied air crews determined that whatever happened no failing of theirs should ever let the fighting troops down; the supply pilots doubled their hours of flying and staffs worked through the night. The result was a revolution in supply and in combat as profound as that created by the arrival of the internal combustion engine on the battlefield. Park wrote, “The armies advanced on the wings of the Air Force.””. (The Campaign in Burma, Frank Owen)

Like many veterans, my father Aelwyn didn’t often talk about his experiences during the war. But in 1999, as a project for a creative writing group, he wrote down these recollections from his time in the army and the RAF in WW2. When writing, he was looking at the events, large and small, which shaped the course of his life. The photographs, and their captions, are my additions.

380 Battery

We were a motley collection of recruits, melded in the space of a few weeks into a tolerably efficient set of four crews proudly manning a row of gleaming 3.7 inch anti-aircraft guns on the outskirts of London, together with the support teams, operating the predictor, the heightfinder and the spotter’s telescope. My job was to link all these with the command centre; this was a responsible job, which I enjoyed, and for which I carried one stripe and the exalted rank of unpaid acting Lance-Bombardier. Our one hour of glory came one night when we were operating a somewhat hit-and-miss method of firing. By day, we could see the target and make a fairly good shot at aiming for it using our instruments (not that there was much call for this at that time). At night, we would be told by a tracking unit at HQ where the enemy aircraft was expected to be, placing it somewhere inside a half-mile cube of air at a height of anything up to 20,000 feet. We would then aim for the centre of that cube, usually with no effect whatsoever. On this particular night, all four guns fired together, and we paused to search the sky. Suddenly there was a collective gasp from the fifty or so assembled men, as all four shell-bursts lit up the outlines of the German bomber, identified as a Heinkel by Smithy, our spotter, by the curve of the leading edge of its wing. The throbbing sound of the plane droned on, and I shouted to the crews to wait for the sound to reach us. Several seconds later, we heard the spatter of the four bursts; the sound of the aircraft faltered briefly, but then carried on. We told HQ our exciting news, but they were sceptical; later, however, we learnt that on that night a night-fighter had shot down a limping Heinkel, and 380 Battery was duly credited with a “half”.

I found army life, when we were not in action, a most depressing experience, largely due to the sharp distinction made between officers and other ranks. This came to a head when, one wet day, our section was ordered to move a large pile of wet sandbags from one part of a field to another. This was called “keeping them occupied”. When I asked the officer in charge what the point was of this particular exercise, I was blasted with the reply that I was not paid to think. The opportunity to transfer to the RAF shortly afterwards came as a blessed relief.

The Transfer

It was one of those occasions when my parents would drive from Dolgellau to Shrewsbury to meet me, usually on a Sunday, when there were no local trains, or in the evening, when my main line train ran too late to connect with the last “local”. I was on leave from my anti-aircraft unit in outer London. On the way home, my mother turned round from the front seat to ask how my application for an army commission was proceeding – a project close to her heart. Now was the time for me to break the news that I had recently applied for transfer to RAF flying duties, and I was due to attend an interview with the RAF the following week. The silence from the front seat seemed to go on for a long time; I think my parents had visualised me spending the rest of the war in comparative comfort and safety as an artillery officer, and here I was, throwing this away for the thrill (and danger) of flying Hurricanes or Spitfires. “Why?”, asked my mother. I explained that I wasn’t happy in the army, and thought I was capable of doing something more worthwhile.

So, the following week, I went to Bush House, sat a brief exam in English and Maths, and was interviewed by a Squadron-Leader. “So you want to be a pilot?” “Yes” I replied. “Do you know what an observer is?” he asked, and continued: “He’s the chap who gives the orders to the pilot, tells him where he is, and what course to fly. You scored full marks in your Maths test, so I think you’d be ideally suited to train as an observer. What do you think?” There was something in his tone of voice that suggested that I either became an observer or stayed in the army, so after a brief moment of hesitation, I agreed. This was one of those moments when I was aware that my life had been diverted on to a new course.

Ted

In June 1941, a throng of khaki-clad figures, eager to exchange their uniforms for blue, assembled one summer day at Lord’s Cricket Ground; Eton were playing Harrow that day, but neither group took any notice of the other. Eventually, we were marched down to a half completed block of flats in St. John’s Wood, facing Regents Park. Six of us were crammed into a ground floor room, sleeping on mattresses on the concrete floor. One of these was Ted. He was an unassuming chap, short, with black curly hair. He had been in searchlights, an activity then falling out of favour due to the development of radar. He and I became friendly, and on one occasion about three of us were invited to his parents’ house at Ealing for tea; he was obviously the apple of their eye.

We were posted together to Torquay where we were all drilled on the quayside, and where we were inducted into the arcane mysteries of the triangle of velocities, the basis of all air navigation. Ted developed a crush for a teenage girl who played the violin with her parents in a trio playing at teatime in a Torquay café. He drank his way through gallons of tea listening to her, and actually got to speak to her once before the trio packed up and moved away.

We became separated after my guardroom misdemeanour (below), but strangely met again at the Port Elizabeth flying school in South Africa, where he was two courses behind me; I forget how he came to be behind me in training, having left Torquay ahead of me. He had a special chum on his course, named Gregory; he seemed very defensive about this friendship, and it is only as I write that I realise why this might have been. After Port Elizabeth, I came home to the UK, while Ted went round Africa the other way to the Middle East; we didn’t keep in touch. Two years later, while in India, I received a letter from his parents, which they had sent to my home in Dolgellau. Ted had been killed in a horrendous road accident near Cairo, in which fourteen airmen had died. Such a waste; much worse, somehow, than being killed in action, which, in the situation we were in, was expected to happen to some of us.

The Guardroom Fire

Towards the end of my time at Torquay, I was on guard at the front door of the hotel by the harbour which served as our billet. It was two o’clock in the morning on a freezing December night, and ten paces behind me, in the front room of the hotel, roared a blazing coal fire. The temptation was too much; I had darted back to the fire to thaw out for no more than twenty seconds, when I heard the sound of boots approaching up the street. I scampered to the door, only to find that the Orderly Sergeant had arrived before me. The next day, I received the punishment of seven days confinement to barracks. Four days later, we were given two weeks embarkation leave, so my companions went off, leaving me to finish my period of punishment before being allowed to go. In the meantime, I had been selected to play rugby against a navy team at Devonport, in the course of which my collar-bone was fractured. So, instead of going on embarkation leave, I went home on sick leave with my arm in a sling. My misdemeanour, which had caused me to miss my original posting, had thus brought about a strange twist in my fortunes.

Training in South Africa

The war brought me into direct contact with a large number of new experiences. Extensive travel at Government expense was certainly one of them, including enduring the rigours of life sleeping in a hammock in the hold of a ship lumbering through stormy winter seas to South Africa.

Aelwyn in South Africa, 1942, while training as a navigator

I returned six months later in cabin accommodation as an RAF officer with my navigator’s wings; the hold of the ship on this occasion was occupied by Italian prisoners who, on warm nights, would gather on the lower deck and sing as only Italians (or perhaps Welsh) can.

In the meantime I had learnt the joy of flying, and the skill of navigating over the sea out of sight of land; it was later an exciting experience to navigate our own aircraft from Cornwall to North Africa and on to Egypt and India, all without any modern navigational aids – just with maps and instruments.

The Beaufort crew, 1943. Back: Aelwyn, Jim. Front: Bob, Johnny.

31 Squadron

It was not until February 1944 that I eventually arrived on an operational squadron. I flew in to the airfield at Agartala in East Bengal, and was made welcome by Squadron-Leader Bray, B-Flight Commander. He took me on a tour of the station; the camp was quiet – half the squadron were on the afternoon operation, and the other half were resting after the early morning shift. The officers’ quarters consisted of a long, low bamboo building, known as a basha, divided into ten or twelve sections, each furnished with a pair of rough Indian beds wreathed in mosquito netting. in front of one of these sat a scowling figure, his face half shaved, razor in hand, with a brush sitting in an enamel mug full of soapy water. Behind him, inside the basha, a wind-up gramophone was playing. “This”, said Peter Bray, “is Flying Officer Brockbank, the Squadron Navigation Officer”.

Flying Officer Philip Brockbank in Agartala, 1944

The half-shaved figure looked up; I broke the silence with: “It’s good to hear a spot of Beethoven out here”. He put down his razor, and said: “At last! Someone on the Squadron who recognises Beethoven when he hears him”.

The next time we changed camp, I moved in to share a basha with him. Within a few months we were joint owners of all Beethoven’s symphonies on 78 rpm recordings. Seven years later, his sister and I were married.

Supplying the Chindits

In 1942 Japanese troops had forced their way northwards into Burma. At the end of that year Brigadier Orde Wingate, who had joined the staff of General Wavell in India, was given permission to form the Chindits, a group of soldiers who were to be trained in jungle raiding and guerrilla tactics. In February 1943, Wingate and 3,000 Chindits entered Burma. Their task was to disrupt Japanese communications, attack outposts and destroy bridges. The operation was very costly, and of the 2,000 who returned, 600 never recovered to fight again. However, before leaving Burma they had created clearings in the jungle between 100 and 200 miles behind the Japanese lines for use in any future operation.

In August 1943, Wingate met Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt and persuaded them to agree to expand the role of the Chindits. Wingate, now a major general, was given command of six brigades forming the 3rd Indian Division, and he returned to India to plan the next operation.

One day the pilots and navigators crowded into the briefing room. There was an expectant hush. We knew that some new operation was being planned, but what was it to be? Captain Smith, the Army Liaison Officer, came in accompanied by the Wing Commander and the two flight commanders. He silently unrolled a large map of Northern Burma and pinned it up on the board. “First of all”, he said, “I cannot emphasise too strongly that this is a top secret operation, and its very existence must not be breathed to anyone, however senior they may be.” An excited buzz swept around the room; what was it all about?

Smithy launched into his spiel: “Quiet, please! Last year, as you all know, General Wingate and his Chindits penetrated deep into Burma, behind the Japanese lines. One of their main objectives was to identify and prepare as far as possible, airstrips to be used in future operations. Three of these airstrips are shown in red on this map. In the last few days, troop-carrying gliders have been flown in carrying men and materials to prepare the airstrips to enable our Dakotas to land on them; and that is what you will be doing tonight. This Squadron will be flying to these two sites (pointing to the map) which have been christened Aberdeen and Broadway. We will be ferrying in a variety of cargoes, men, supplies, jeeps, light artillery, and ammunition. And, believe it or not, mules. Some of you may find yourself bringing back casualties. So far as we know, there has been no sign of Japanese activity near the airstrips, but some of the gliders had crashed on landing, and there were some casualties among the glider crews and their cargoes.”

About to release a glider over the Chin Hills. Many did not survive the dangerous descent into the jungle behind Japanese lines.

“Operation Thursday” was launched on 5th March 1944 (actually a Sunday). In the 1943 operation the Chindits had been on their own, but this time they were supported by the RAF. The first wave of troops was flown in by troop-carrying gliders which landed in the jungle clearings prepared the previous year. This was a very hazardous procedure, and there were many casualties as a result of crash landings. This process was not helped by the fact that the Japanese had discovered one of the clearings and scattered logs over its surface. These troops then cleared these areas to make them into landing strips fit to take the DC3 aircraft, And so the operation went on night after night, landing on these strips lit up only by a few oil flares, pouring in troops, weapons, ammunition.and food. We also brought out casualties. Over the next few months the Chindits destroyed Japanese roads, railways, bridges and convoys, and once again they suffered heavy losses.

It was an exhilarating time for the RAF crews being part of this ambitious and top secret operation, flying at night and landing behind the Japanese lines on dimly lit airstrips, unloading our cargo and haring back to our beds in India. It was also very hard work.

Aelwyn’s protractor and parallel rule

Carrying mules was an interesting experience. The aircraft would be fitted with bamboo stalls for four mules, and a ramp was laid up to the door of the aircraft. The efforts of the muleteers to persuade their mules to go up the ramp and into the dark interior of the aircraft were hilarious to the onlookers, although the fierce bucking of the animals and their flailing hooves were no joke to those within range.

A reluctant mule is led onto a plane

At the other end we kept well out of the way until the mules were unloaded and the stalls dismantled, before going home to our beds. I can assure you that there is no more noxious, pungent aroma than that of a mule’s urine, which would swill about the floor of the aircraft before disappearing into the fuselage below. On one occasion, when one of the aircraft was diverted on to the daily passenger and mail run to the forward areas and Calcutta, a senior army officer announced “You know, I swear I can smell mules in here”. We looked at him pityingly – it was still a very hush-hush operation – and said “Why on earth would we carry mules in this aircraft? You must be mistaken. Sir”. He shook his head in sad disbelief.

Aelwyn in Kashmir, 1944

And so it started. Night after night, for several weeks, flying deep into the heart of Japanese controlled territory, landing in the dark on the airstrips, unloading the cargo, having a brief chat to the army lads on the ground, then getting the hell out of it back to our beds, back in India. Then, for several months more, dropping supplies to the army from the air as they spread out over the whole territory, disrupting Japanese communications to hinder their invasion of India further north and diverting their troops in the process.

At about this time, I had a letter from my mother, saying how comforting it was to know that everything was quiet in our theatre of operations. Well, I suppose in 1944 a little matter like the invasion of Europe seemed more important to the English newspapers than our spot of trouble thousands of miles away.

During my active service there were some unpleasant experiences, such as learning that some old friends and some present Air Force mates would not be seen again; enduring the steamy sweaty heat of the monsoon and its accompanying mosquitoes; or having Japanese machine-gunners popping off at me. Much better, though, was the good humour that pervaded most situations, and the sheer thrill of taking part in meaningful operational flights, mainly involved with flying army troops into Burma and keeping them supplied from the air.

Kohima

I imagine very few people now remember the battle for Kohima. To be truthful, very few people except those who were involved even knew of it at the time that it happened, from April to June 1944. But at the time, it was somewhat overshadowed, at least to those at home, by the Normandy invasion. Yet it was, in stragetic terms, as momentous an event as the battles at El Alamein and Stalingrad, if on a somewhat smaller scale.. In each case, the outcome was a reversal of the fortunes of war, turning back the tide of the hitherto victorious German and Japanese armies, initiating their retreat, and their ultimate defeat.

The RAF delivered food, water and ammunition by parachute to the Kohima garrison. Orde Wingate said “Bring in the goods, like Father Christmas, down the chimney.”

The Japanese had surged northwards through Burma heading for the roads and railways that led directly into India, and they had caught the British and Commomwealth forces unprepared. They captured the hill town of Kohima, the local capital of Nagaland, in the most north-easterly region of India. Nothing now lay between the Japanese and the plains of India – except, that is, for the small British garrison based in Kohima, who had been forced to retreat beyond the town. This contingent of the army, comprising 2,500 men of the 2nd Infantry Division received its orders – Kohima must be retaken at all costs – against a Japanese force of 15,000. It was a battle of bloody artillery duels, hand to hand skirmishes and bayonet attacks. And mud. And rats. The British fought almost to a standstill, with heavy casualties, until reinforcements arrived from India, from which point .the Japanese were driven slowly back, and forced to retreat back the way they had come.

From “The Campaign in Burma” by Frank Owen

One of the contributing factors to the success of the British soldiers was the constant supply of food and and ammunition dropped to them by the RAF, whereas the Japanese were running out of both ammunition and food. It was, frankly, gut wrenching to fly over the area, seeing whole hillsides with their trees totally denuded of leaves, knowing of all the mayhem that was going on on the ground beneath.

A monument was later raised to the men of the 2nd Infantry Division, bearing the words: “When you go home, tell them of us and say ‘For their tomorrow we gave our today””.

Routine

There was no time for fear; if fear was to come, it would come later.

Our routine had become established over many months. Early in the morning we would wake up, emerge from our mosquito netting, have breakfast and attend the briefing. We would be told the location of the morning’s target, a jungle clearing somewhere in Northern Burma where we would drop supplies of food and ammunition to units of the 14th Army on the ground. After drawing a few straight lines on the map, we would take off, head for a convenient gap in the high ridge of the Chin Hills, and descend to the DZ, the dropping zone. The pilot would make a quick decision on the best way to fly the four or five low-level circuits it took to drop our one-ton load. We would start our circuits, with the crew taking off the door, and piling up the heavy packages in the doorway, attaching any parachute lines to the inside of the aircraft. When the pilot rang the bell, we would all give a great heave, and the load would topple out into space, and with a bit of luck, land within the DZ.

Unloading over the drop zone

While the pilot made each subsequent circuit the rest of the crew ran up and down the fuselage, lugging the packages down to the door and stacking them in time for the next bell. After the last drop, we would permit ourselves the luxury of looking out of the open door and waving to the army lads on the ground; we didn’t envy them.

One fine morning in 1944 we flew off into the high clear air of East Bengal, over the Chin Hills and down to a new DZ that we had not visited before. where a section of our army was dug in facing a similarly entrenched unit of the Japanese army. The open space for the DZ was immediately to the rear of our front line, but close behind that was a ring of sharply rising hills which ruled out any possibility of making low-level circuits in that direction. There was nothing for it but to make our circuits over the Japanese front line. This decision was inevitably accompanied by the silent prayer that if we should crash-land, please let it be on our side of the line. Routine took over as we piled up our load. What we had not bargained for was that, as our large, slow, lumbering Douglas DC3 passed low over the Japanese line, some enterprising machine gunners would turn their weapons skyward and let fly. On the second circuit, while we were scampering up and down the fuselage, we heard a series of metallic clanging sounds. I paused to look out of the window, and saw a line of bullet-holes erupting on the upper side of the wing, heading straight for me. It all happened so quickly, yet I seemed to be watching it in slow motion. The line of holes stopped before they reached me; I made a mental note to worry about it later, and returned to my packages.

We had landed back at base, and were taxiing along the runway to our dispersal point, when we became aware of the smell of petrol. The pilot immediately stopped and switched off the engines, as he had had a mental vision of sparks from the exhaust meeting catastrophically with petrol vapour. We piled out in something of a hurry, to find high-grade octane pouring on to the runway from a bullet-hole in the underside of the fuselage. You couldn’t really blame the Japanese, they had only been doing their job.

Fear? The immediate experience of fear had been thwarted by the demands of an urgent routine, and by not knowing, until the danger had passed, of the hole in our petrol tank. Fear did return, briefly, under the mosquito netting that night, but it was softened by having been a shared experience. Tomorrow, the routine would take over once more.

Aelwyn’s WW2 medals

Acknowledgements to “The Campaign in Burma”, Frank Owen, 1946 and “Wings of the Phoenix”, HMSO, 1949