Everyone should do something crazy during their life.
For me, it was persuading my best friend that we should buy a semi-derelict 17th-century house and restore it to life.
Whilst I was working full-time in a responsible job.
The house in question was undoubtedly if not magically calling to me, if not then somehow waiting just to be my nemesis.
I didn't want to live in the town in which I was working, perhaps because my job was concerned with its regeneration, and I wanted to live somewhere that didn't have the kind of problems that had drawn me to work in this fashion, using the creative arts as a means of contributing to significant changes, starting at the heart of the community, and in the process equipping some of its people with new skills.
And so the house. We found it one day when looking for somewhere within daily commuting distance, and at 20 miles away, it was just about ideal.
It was in a small and attractive town in the Waveney Valley, just a couple of miles from a mainline station which gave direct access to London by a fast train.
This was essential for my best friend, who was a freelance theatre and opera director. Thus her work could be anywhere in the country, and even in Scotland. In other words, abroad.
She was successful in what she did, although success was never really recognized financially. And that I suppose is the nature of working in the creative arts in Britain.
It doesn't necessarily bring financial reward, although in the course of her work, we both met and worked with some of the most incredibly skilled people both in theatre and opera.
Because of my work, I could occasionally take advantage of my best friends’ skills and contacts in fulfilling some of my priorities, and I suppose I was more of a producer and was able to achieve whatever I could raise the money for.
My job had the advantage of stability, and was relatively well paid, perhaps because it had lots of problems to overcome.
I would often not be home before nine or 10 o'clock, simply because I had things to do and people to see, and problems to sort out.
Which is perhaps why restoring a house without a roof was such a crazy idea. Although for the first several months we rented the house next door, behind it, a small cottage that we soon discovered had more problems than the house we were restoring, thanks to inappropriate repairs to a period building.
We did eventually buy this second house, and added it to the first, principally because it had a private garden, which our Town House on the street didn't.
This was half-way into the five-year restoration of our project, and really made sense of the overall scheme, adding two further bedrooms to our three-bedroom Townhouse, and that most important thing, a private garden.
My nemesis had been built in 1690, after a great fire that had destroyed most of the houses in the town because they were made of wood. It was in miniature like the Great Fire of London.
The street in which we lived had always been historically the commercial heart of the town, when the river that passed just 100 metres from us had been navigable to the sea by the shallow bottomed Norfolk Wherries.
Sluices had been introduced to the river in 1932, cutting off this river traffic, which accounted for the fact that our house was built from Dutch bricks, with Pantiles that would have been brought over from Holland as ballast, and that its rooms were divided using Baltic Pine timbers of the finest quality, which we discovered were still in place underneath plasterboard that had simply been tacked over it.
In places, we retained 300 years of wallpaper that had been preserved in this fashion. In other parts, there was evidence of the way in which these beautiful timbers had simply been limewashed, which had the side effect of preserving the timbers from insect infestation.
When we purchased the house next door, we didn't have too get planning permission to make them one, because we had doorways between them which had simply been bricked up, or downstairs almost simply papered over.
When we took down the bricks on our side of the door upstairs, we found a newspaper stuffed in the brickwork which we could date to 1851. The house next door had been built in about 1740, and probably replaced a wooden building that had perhaps been the warehouse for our building, in which we fancied a merchant trader might have lived. The bricks had been sourced locally, because of the recognizable imprint in the frog of the brick, and when we first reopened it we found a ledge and brace door which we kept and since it was 2001, it must have been almost exactly 150 years since anyone had passed through that door. Spooky.
The levels were different in the house behind, simply because the height of the ceilings was less than our own. Which also made us think that our house had been lived in by someone with ambitions.
Which perhaps accounted for the fine staircase in the front house, which must have been rescued from perhaps one of the other houses destroyed in the fire, but it was certainly a fine staircase.
In the second house we had a typical steep staircase accessed by what appeared to be a cupboard door, but this staircase rose three storeys to the attic, and it was a floating staircase, built so that the wide steps seemed to have no obvious support. And the fine balusters, datable almost precisely to 1690, were made from American Cedar.
This would have been an expensive luxury in its day, and as it had been virtually untouched, it was simply blackened with age, and worn in places by hands that had supported themselves on it.
I always said it was the staircase that had made me fall in love with the house, and want to rescue it.
And rescue it we did. Every hour we spent lovingly restoring this unique survival, unique because it had been abandoned by its owner, and therefore squatted and thereby saved from inappropriate restoration until we came along.
My best friend had been a member of The Society For The Protection Of Ancient Buildings since she had been 18 or so, and we certainly adopted their principles of sensitive repair and restoration, respecting each change that had been made over the course of the buildings’ life.
We both learned how to work with lime instead of cement, because a building of this age needed the flexibility of soft mortar. And we sourced the sharp sand needed from probably the same source that had been used in its construction. A local quarry which was a source of sand we could purchase by the bag.
Most of the work we undertook ourselves, but when necessary we brought in appropriate professional help. Such as the finest company of church restorers to help us replace a section of wall plate, 4 feet of oak beam 6 inches square supporting the roof, which needed replacing.
It became a fine house once again, and in the course of our restoration we soon got to know most of the people in our street, and those that we didn't know we got to meet when we arranged for the closure of the street one Easter, which coincided with the completion of a European tour on one of my best friends theatre productions that had brought Chaucer to the more cultural parts of the continent.
Her production of the Canterbury Tales was performed by four actor-musicians, and was designed so that everything could be transported in a large van, and be set up quickly whatever the facilities available.
The completion of the tour coincided with Easter, and the players readily agreed to add a performance to their schedule, gratis, in return for accommodation and fine dining in our now almost presentable restoration project.
It was late April, and in spite of intermittent rain storms, the weather held off so that the performance could take place with the set built in the street closed for the performance, and with most of the audience bringing their own chairs to be seated in the entrance way to the pub car park directly opposite.
It was a Sunday, I remember, Easter Sunday, and about an hour into the performance I remember how the Catholics in the audience simply packed away their chairs to attend evening mass.
The contrast could not have been greater, from The Wife Of Bath's tale to mass at church.
But those that stayed loved the climax to the performance, which played outrageously as Chaucer himself might have approved.
The show had been written specially for its tour by a good friend of ours, with whom my best friend worked several times.
The entire day had been preceded by lots of Easter activities, including egg rolling, the pub providing about 100 hard boiled eggs for the purpose.
I suppose a theatre performance in the street was the highlight, although a close second would be a tug of war across the border between Norfolk and Suffolk, using a proper tug of war rope.
Everyone took part, young and old, although to be fair we did have a special event for the children as well.
Monday 25 June 2012
Tuesday 19 June 2012
Asking Extraordinary Things Of The Undertaker
I got to talking about death earlier today with one of my principal carers. Not in any morbid sense, but we talked about the rituals associated with death, and I suppose the extent to which we have become so much more separated from death and its associated rituals as we have become wealthier, and seemingly more sophisticated.
Death is left to the undertaker these days, whereas once upon a time the laying-out of a recently deceased person would have been something undertaken if not by the immediate family, then by someone in the local community cognizant of the appropriate sensitivities, and perhaps unafraid of the dead and confident of the right kind of dignity to give the deceased person.
My carer explained how when she had worked some years ago in a nursing home context how she had her first experience of the death of one of the residents, and the process that she and another member of the night staff, equally unfamiliar with what to do, had gone through.
It was a fascinating discussion. Perhaps like many people of my generation, the only person I have ever seen in death was my Father. For my carer, this was similarly the case, but when one of the residents died during her shift, the issue first of all was confirming that death had actually taken place.
Of course, a doctor was to be called to certify the death, but deciding that the doctor should be called because someone had died in itself presented the first difficulty. Was that person that had been someone for whom care had been the key relationship actually dead? How does one tell, unless one is familiar with checking the vital signs?
On this first occasion, somebody else was called first, a friend, someone that could show the two members of staff what to do in order to provide that last act of dignified preparation of the body, in the days before it was simply a case of calling in the undertaker.
‘Laying out’ is, I daresay, something that most families would have been familiar with only a couple of generations ago.
My carer soon had plenty of experience of providing those last moments of careful, dignified preparation. Soon after her first learning experience, a severe Winter and a pneumonia spate carried off about a dozen residents in the space of a few days.
The old man's friend, as it used to be referred to. And which these days has so often been banished by the use of interventions that lengthen the span of a life, but not necessarily its quality.
When my father died in 1998, after a long illness, during which my mother had cared for him with great disregard for her own failing health, the end came suddenly when he collapsed one night returning from using the bathroom.
My mother found him that morning, and punished herself for not having been there for him. Though nothing would have been possible to save him, and death had in any case been inevitable.
My mother requested of the undertaker that her husband of 59 years be brought home, rather than remain with the Funeral Director. At first the undertaker was astonished, in 1998 this was not a familiar request, but to the undertakers’ credit he acceded to my mothers’ request, and for the next week my father was laid out in an open coffin in the front room.
It was November, and the undertaker called daily to check that everything was alright. My Father looked resplendent in a good suit, and for every night of that week leading up to the funeral, my mother spent her evenings sitting close by her husband are so many years, no doubt speaking of many things that they had shared throughout their lifetimes.
I had traveled myself with my wife from Edinburgh to the South Coast, and spent that week with my Mother and the rest of my family.
It was my first experience of seeing someone dead, and in spite of the strangeness, that period of sharing that final week in such close proximity eased the pain of losing my Father.
The funeral itself impressed me by the dignified manner with which the coffin was removed to the hearse, which then proceeded for the first couple of hundred yards led at walking pace following an undertaker walking sombrely in a black silk hat.
Tears were shed at the funeral, presided over by my cousin, who is a Church of England Vicar. He has presided over so many family funerals, because my father was one of 12 brothers and sisters, and my mother one of six sisters and half sisters.
It was a week when the world stopped, when nothing but preparation for the funeral could enter any of our lives. But strange as my Mother's request had first seemed, it was fitting, and a reminder I shall never forget, of the importance of giving due ritual to the process of death, and coming to terms with the life that must continue.
Thursday 14 June 2012
Britain And The Phoenicians
My favorite antiquarian book is my oldest, dating to 1672.
It is a first edition, in fact the only edition. It is famous for several things, including the first ever pictorial representation of a Druid. Of course, this is an artists’ fancy, as nobody really knows what the Druids looked like, but the engraving is an engaging representation, and antiquarians thereafter used this first representation as the basis for their own.
Such as Richard Stukeley, who first surveyed Avebury in the 1700s, and attributed it and Stonehenge to the Druids, and his pictorial representation bears a remarkable resemblance to that in my volume.
As indeed it bears a remarkable resemblance to Gandalf the Grey from Lord of the Rings, but that I suppose is the nature of history, it is built layer upon layer that precedes it.
The book is typical of its time in that it has a descriptive subtitle that reveals much of its intention, so that it is a history of the Britons from the Phoenicians to the present day, but what is one of the most remarkable things about the book is the fact that it is one of the least accurate histories of this nation ever to have been published.
The author was an Oxford Don, but he is regarded to have been a charlatan, and the book is all the more interesting for the lack of truth within it.
There are some really fabulous engravings, including one of the Wicker Man, and numerous others that are extremely well produced.
One of its other claims to fame is the fact that it contains genealogies of the English Kings, many of whom are shown to be descended from Noah, and interesting engravings of Coats of Arms.
Given the time that the book was published, when Arthur is mentioned, he is not given anything approaching a special mention, as the mythology of the Arthur that we all know about was of course a Victorian invention.
My interest in the book lies very much with its inaccuracy, since I plan to use it as a means of telling a story that is in itself entirely a work of fiction.
But woven sufficiently around facts as they perhaps were once considered to be so that there is a thread of truth to substantiate my fiction. Intentionally in the mould of a Dan Brown conspiracy thriller, but in my story, the major difference is that the story that is woven from this and other supporting texts proves entirely to be proven false, and this is the central factor in my story.
That something might seem to be the case, and to have been the lifetime's work of one man, which he leaves to be completed by his son.
So that it is a quest of sorts, but in my story a quest by the son to understand the father that he never knew.
But whose fascination with stories that he believed to be true, leading the son to discover something far more important about himself.
I have published the first four chapters of Sacred Places in my book of short stories, available to view online free of charge through completelynovel.com.
The collection is entitled Mother And Child with other stories, and my research to complete the book may take me years.
As it should. It is my third attempt at a novel, the first two of course unpublished.
Perhaps this one might be the pageturner I intend it to be, just like a Dan Brown novel.
It is a first edition, in fact the only edition. It is famous for several things, including the first ever pictorial representation of a Druid. Of course, this is an artists’ fancy, as nobody really knows what the Druids looked like, but the engraving is an engaging representation, and antiquarians thereafter used this first representation as the basis for their own.
Such as Richard Stukeley, who first surveyed Avebury in the 1700s, and attributed it and Stonehenge to the Druids, and his pictorial representation bears a remarkable resemblance to that in my volume.
As indeed it bears a remarkable resemblance to Gandalf the Grey from Lord of the Rings, but that I suppose is the nature of history, it is built layer upon layer that precedes it.
The book is typical of its time in that it has a descriptive subtitle that reveals much of its intention, so that it is a history of the Britons from the Phoenicians to the present day, but what is one of the most remarkable things about the book is the fact that it is one of the least accurate histories of this nation ever to have been published.
The author was an Oxford Don, but he is regarded to have been a charlatan, and the book is all the more interesting for the lack of truth within it.
There are some really fabulous engravings, including one of the Wicker Man, and numerous others that are extremely well produced.
One of its other claims to fame is the fact that it contains genealogies of the English Kings, many of whom are shown to be descended from Noah, and interesting engravings of Coats of Arms.
Given the time that the book was published, when Arthur is mentioned, he is not given anything approaching a special mention, as the mythology of the Arthur that we all know about was of course a Victorian invention.
My interest in the book lies very much with its inaccuracy, since I plan to use it as a means of telling a story that is in itself entirely a work of fiction.
But woven sufficiently around facts as they perhaps were once considered to be so that there is a thread of truth to substantiate my fiction. Intentionally in the mould of a Dan Brown conspiracy thriller, but in my story, the major difference is that the story that is woven from this and other supporting texts proves entirely to be proven false, and this is the central factor in my story.
That something might seem to be the case, and to have been the lifetime's work of one man, which he leaves to be completed by his son.
So that it is a quest of sorts, but in my story a quest by the son to understand the father that he never knew.
But whose fascination with stories that he believed to be true, leading the son to discover something far more important about himself.
I have published the first four chapters of Sacred Places in my book of short stories, available to view online free of charge through completelynovel.com.
The collection is entitled Mother And Child with other stories, and my research to complete the book may take me years.
As it should. It is my third attempt at a novel, the first two of course unpublished.
Perhaps this one might be the pageturner I intend it to be, just like a Dan Brown novel.
Monday 11 June 2012
Stop All The Clocks
Just Memories
now that Harry Patch is dead
Harry Patch is dead. Just a man
who lived his time, and then some.
His kind will never die, along with
solemn memories. The young to come,
we hope, will never cease at times
to think how he survived,
to live across three centuries
untarnished by the carnage
he did not speak of for 80 years,
until just ghosts inhabited his world.
Then people came to listen.
Never again, he said. Never again.
I just caught on the news the other day that a memorial has just been unveiled in Wells Cathedral to honor the last soldier to have survived fighting in the trenches of the First World War.
Harry Patch was 101 when he died, just a couple of years ago. What is remarkable about this old soldier is that he never spoke about the horrors that he lived through, until he reached the age of 100.
And then, during his last decade, in effect just the last year or so of his life, he spoke about the terrible memories that he still carried with him.
And that had in effect accompanied him throughout his life.
His story is a moving one, and one worth finding out about. For when he began to speak publicly about his memories and his experiences, he spoke with extraordinary humanity about the horror of war, and against the pursuance of it.
One phrase in particular sticks in my mind from what I heard about the unveiling of his memorial in Wells Cathedral, and that was how all it took to end it were a group of men around a table in a railway carriage.
And the countless millions of wasted lives, lost to the world in which they were born.
now that Harry Patch is dead
Harry Patch is dead. Just a man
who lived his time, and then some.
His kind will never die, along with
solemn memories. The young to come,
we hope, will never cease at times
to think how he survived,
to live across three centuries
untarnished by the carnage
he did not speak of for 80 years,
until just ghosts inhabited his world.
Then people came to listen.
Never again, he said. Never again.
I just caught on the news the other day that a memorial has just been unveiled in Wells Cathedral to honor the last soldier to have survived fighting in the trenches of the First World War.
Harry Patch was 101 when he died, just a couple of years ago. What is remarkable about this old soldier is that he never spoke about the horrors that he lived through, until he reached the age of 100.
And then, during his last decade, in effect just the last year or so of his life, he spoke about the terrible memories that he still carried with him.
And that had in effect accompanied him throughout his life.
His story is a moving one, and one worth finding out about. For when he began to speak publicly about his memories and his experiences, he spoke with extraordinary humanity about the horror of war, and against the pursuance of it.
One phrase in particular sticks in my mind from what I heard about the unveiling of his memorial in Wells Cathedral, and that was how all it took to end it were a group of men around a table in a railway carriage.
And the countless millions of wasted lives, lost to the world in which they were born.
Saturday 9 June 2012
Am I Descended From Neanderthals?
I have bought a book Today.
Nothing perhaps new in this. Although I have always been an avid reader and a collector of books, these days my disability means that I cannot hold nor turn the pages of a book, and my limited sight makes substantive reading problematic.
It is ironic to me that I can read more easily using my computer. Ironic because I suppose I am rather old-fashioned when it comes to books, I prefer the touch and smell of paper, over and above the simple fact of their content.
But the book that I bought this morning online is what I would consider a special book. I once owned a copy of it, but I think it was one of those occasions when I lent it enthusiastically to someone, and never received it back.
The copy I have purchased is a signed first edition, not terribly expensive, and in any case I believe there was only one edition originally printed and published.
It is a book that I have already read, in effect. I will probably scan many of the pages, so that I can read them more easily at my leisure.
New technology does have its advantages when it comes to assistive technology, as indeed I have found for some time with the use of voice-activated software, so that I am able to type faster and more accurately than ever I could.
The book is entitled Cities Of Dreams, the author Stan Gooch. When it was first published in 1989, it would have been considered both radical and highly contentious, in that it proposes that Neanderthals,more than simply close humans, are in fact more than simply close relatives, but have in fact shared some of their genetic material with modern humans.
The title of the book is an important insight into some of what the author proposes, in that Neanderthal culture has not survived through artefacts and objects, simply because their development, quite different to that of modern humans, who it is often supposed helped in their extinction, was through means that we would consider to have been not physical, but through an oral or ritual culture, one that has not survived in any physical form.
What is known, from archaeological evidence, is that they buried their dead, and that they constructed or collected objects that had no practical utility for them.
Skulls have been found with evidence of vegetables constituting part of their diet, contrary to early suppositions that they were carnivorous and principally bestial in lifestyle.
Graves have been found with evidence of flowers being an accompaniment for the dead, and the use of red ochre seems to have been a symbolic means of connecting life and death, birth and death.
One of the suggestions that Stan Gooch makes in the book is that there are some physical characteristics which can be identified as revealing Neanderthal ancestry, and since I have identified in myself one of these characteristics, it seems likely that I might be a candidate for someone that does in fact exhibit what I have inherited in my genetic makeup.
According to Wikipedia, between one and 4% of the population share some genetic inheritance from the ancient intermingling of modern human with Neanderthal.
Further, it seems that the mitochondrial DNA, communicated through the female line, does not contain any of this shared genetic material.
The implication of which is that female Neanderthals that were impregnated by modern humans did not bear children, and perhaps it is only female Neanderthals that were fertile on sexual contact with modern humans.
From my limited understanding of genetic inheritance, it seems that through the mitochondrial DNA, it can be elicited that we all share the DNA of six ancient females, six Eves if you like.
It seems that little will come of my supposed ancestry.
But I am certainly not embarrassed at the idea that I might contain some tiny inheritance from this source.
Quite the contrary. Everything I know about modern humans tells me that what we think of as being civilized, often leaves out something of great significance, those things which cannot be created from a material culture.
The characteristic that I have talked about but not mentioned is simply that in my feet, my big toe and the toe next to it, whereas in a typical modern human the big toe will be longer than its neighbour, in my feet it is the reverse, my second toe is longer than my big toe.
Whenever I have asked friends or carers to remove their socks and examine their feet, this characteristic of mine has not been present.
Clearly, not conclusive, but at least perhaps indicative.
It would be interesting if anyone reading this blog might undertake the same simple examination, and let me know what the outcome is, particularly if they share the same genetic characteristic.
For perhaps it means that we are more closely related than might have seemed to be the case.
Another strange statistic that I discovered by listening to an episode of QI on BBC recently was that Neanderthals have spent at least four times as long in Europe as modern humans.
So it follows that Europe belongs to us, assuming that I discover anyone else that shares this same genetic characteristic.
Nothing perhaps new in this. Although I have always been an avid reader and a collector of books, these days my disability means that I cannot hold nor turn the pages of a book, and my limited sight makes substantive reading problematic.
It is ironic to me that I can read more easily using my computer. Ironic because I suppose I am rather old-fashioned when it comes to books, I prefer the touch and smell of paper, over and above the simple fact of their content.
But the book that I bought this morning online is what I would consider a special book. I once owned a copy of it, but I think it was one of those occasions when I lent it enthusiastically to someone, and never received it back.
The copy I have purchased is a signed first edition, not terribly expensive, and in any case I believe there was only one edition originally printed and published.
It is a book that I have already read, in effect. I will probably scan many of the pages, so that I can read them more easily at my leisure.
New technology does have its advantages when it comes to assistive technology, as indeed I have found for some time with the use of voice-activated software, so that I am able to type faster and more accurately than ever I could.
The book is entitled Cities Of Dreams, the author Stan Gooch. When it was first published in 1989, it would have been considered both radical and highly contentious, in that it proposes that Neanderthals,more than simply close humans, are in fact more than simply close relatives, but have in fact shared some of their genetic material with modern humans.
The title of the book is an important insight into some of what the author proposes, in that Neanderthal culture has not survived through artefacts and objects, simply because their development, quite different to that of modern humans, who it is often supposed helped in their extinction, was through means that we would consider to have been not physical, but through an oral or ritual culture, one that has not survived in any physical form.
What is known, from archaeological evidence, is that they buried their dead, and that they constructed or collected objects that had no practical utility for them.
Skulls have been found with evidence of vegetables constituting part of their diet, contrary to early suppositions that they were carnivorous and principally bestial in lifestyle.
Graves have been found with evidence of flowers being an accompaniment for the dead, and the use of red ochre seems to have been a symbolic means of connecting life and death, birth and death.
One of the suggestions that Stan Gooch makes in the book is that there are some physical characteristics which can be identified as revealing Neanderthal ancestry, and since I have identified in myself one of these characteristics, it seems likely that I might be a candidate for someone that does in fact exhibit what I have inherited in my genetic makeup.
According to Wikipedia, between one and 4% of the population share some genetic inheritance from the ancient intermingling of modern human with Neanderthal.
Further, it seems that the mitochondrial DNA, communicated through the female line, does not contain any of this shared genetic material.
The implication of which is that female Neanderthals that were impregnated by modern humans did not bear children, and perhaps it is only female Neanderthals that were fertile on sexual contact with modern humans.
From my limited understanding of genetic inheritance, it seems that through the mitochondrial DNA, it can be elicited that we all share the DNA of six ancient females, six Eves if you like.
It seems that little will come of my supposed ancestry.
But I am certainly not embarrassed at the idea that I might contain some tiny inheritance from this source.
Quite the contrary. Everything I know about modern humans tells me that what we think of as being civilized, often leaves out something of great significance, those things which cannot be created from a material culture.
The characteristic that I have talked about but not mentioned is simply that in my feet, my big toe and the toe next to it, whereas in a typical modern human the big toe will be longer than its neighbour, in my feet it is the reverse, my second toe is longer than my big toe.
Whenever I have asked friends or carers to remove their socks and examine their feet, this characteristic of mine has not been present.
Clearly, not conclusive, but at least perhaps indicative.
It would be interesting if anyone reading this blog might undertake the same simple examination, and let me know what the outcome is, particularly if they share the same genetic characteristic.
For perhaps it means that we are more closely related than might have seemed to be the case.
Another strange statistic that I discovered by listening to an episode of QI on BBC recently was that Neanderthals have spent at least four times as long in Europe as modern humans.
So it follows that Europe belongs to us, assuming that I discover anyone else that shares this same genetic characteristic.
Thursday 7 June 2012
The Last V2 Rocket To Fall On West Ham
It takes time to get to know your Father. In my case, perhaps sadly like so many, I feel I have only begun to get to know him in the years after his death. When it was too late to speak to the man to whom I owe so much.
My father came from another world, so to speak. He was born in 1916, into a world that was so different from the world that I have come to know as mine.
His Father was a Merchant Seaman, and by all accounts a Victorian, who lived his life in ways that we can only dream of or read about today.
My Father was one of 12 children, and his mother, Beatrice, lived until she was 95. Quite an astonishing achievement for a woman that had lived through the times that she had to live.
It was said within the family that she had never quite understood why she had fallen with child whenever her husband, Shadrach Abraham Page, had returned home from a voyage. Straight out of Moby Dick
Such innocence seems extraordinary from the viewpoint of the present.
From the 60s through to the 80s there were numerous funerals as brothers and sisters in turn reached the end of their lives. As a child, growing up from 1960, I was always sheltered from such events, although I have strong memories of most of my uncles and aunts, until the time in about 1971 when my Mother and Father moved away from what had been a close family in London to begin a new life on the South Coast.
Perhaps it was necessary for my Mother to have escaped the close village atmosphere of East End London, where I can remember family events almost every weekend, when inevitably the Brothers would drink heavily, and probably play cards, whilst the women brought up their children and gained most comfort from their sisters and sisters-in-law.
It wasn't an easy life, to be married to one of the men this close clan. Those were difficult years through which to live, and many of the Brothers spent time away from home during the war years, and though my father was a Stevedore in the London Docks, which would have been a Reserved Occupation, he joined up in 1940 along with numerous of his dock labouring pals, and in my Father's case, after being married in 1938, he was away at war until he returned in 1948.
I am sure this was not a unique experience among the women of my Mother's generation. My Mother spent most of the Blitz in the East End of London, living with my father's Mother, close by the docks, which must have been a terrible experience to have lived through.
In my Mother's case, she escaped after the Blitz by taking war work on the outskirts of London, in an armaments factory until she trained to be a Capstan Lathe Turner.
She was then sent to work in a factory close to Blackpool in Lancashire, a world away from her life in the East End of London.
She was childless until my sister’s birth in 1955, and I was born in 1960.
The work of a dock labourer was a hard one, long hours and backbreaking work. Compounded by the early separation in their marriage, it can’t have been easy, and I don’t believe my Mother ever knew the contents of my Father’s wage packets, although the priority for any expenditure that she did make from housekeeping was for us children.
My Father’s life after the war was spent mainly with his pigeons, and I can’t help but feel that this was an escape from the memories that he must have carried around since the end of his war service.
Although I remember occasional trips as a family to local pubs, I only remember one occasion when we had a family holiday at the seaside, where we visited a resort in which my Mother’s sister had worked for years as a chambermaid.
Holidays were not something that my father was good at, and he would much more likely spend a week off work building a new pigeon loft for his beloved birds.
To be fair, perhaps the one social occasion in the year was the Pigeon Fanciers’ Ball, which my father only really attended so that he could receive the cups and prize money that he regularly received.
He was an excellent pigeon fancier, but this was a fairly solitary hobby.
I would spend time with my Father at the regular Friday meetings of the local pigeon club, were the birds would have their rubber rings attached to their legs, and the clocks would be struck and tested for their accuracy as timing instruments for race days.
I still have my father’s time-worn pigeon clock, a beautiful French clock. a Toulet, in a small wooden box. Pigeon clocks are like ships’ chronometers, extremely accurate instruments into which the rubber race ring would be inserted inside a metal thimle, the timing of the birds arrival back at the Loft enabling the speed of the pigeon to be calculated in yards per minute, so that longer races could be run between clubs that were miles apart, and sometimes prize money from betting in the inexpensive pool might accumulate to significant sums.
I remember that one year my father had a pigeon that came third in what was the London Combine from Thurso in Scotland, third out of 30,000 birds to fly the 600 miles from the race point at the most northerly point on the British mainland.
He was offered a significant sum for that pigeon, which he refused, because the money meant nothing. Pigeon racing was the closest my father came to the companionship of other men, where they could talk about the things that their women would forbid to be spoken of in front of the children.
There were several stories that were suitable for women and children to hear, but so few that he would be forbidden from talking about his war experiences because everybody had heard everything that could be spoken of too many times.
No doubt there were many things that my father would have never wished to ever recall, from service that took him through the desert under Montgomery, El Alamein and the second front from North Africa to invade Italy, fighting up the leg of Italy. What in one song referred to the D-Day Dodgers. Only in the last verse did some mention get made of the comrades that were buried in places like Monte Cassino.
When he was demobilised in 1948, he was in Palestine, and no wonder he always talked about how he had done enough traveling never to want to have to ever go abroad for a holiday.
Love kept them together, but it was the kind of love that dared not be spoken of, the acceptance that there was nothing else to contemplate beyond providing for the children, and putting up with the way in which the men drank too much whenever they got together.
Emotion lay buried deep beneath the surface, and I only lately discovered that one of my Fathers closest Brothers, a fellow pigeon fancier, had lost his first wife and his young daughter to the last V2 rocket to fall on West Ham.
He remarried, but never had any more children. Pigeons, once again, seemed to be the way in which life was made bearable. Hours spent alone waiting for the birds to find their way home, that and in Harry’s case, a wicked brew of rice wine, such as I have never tasted since.
My father came from another world, so to speak. He was born in 1916, into a world that was so different from the world that I have come to know as mine.
His Father was a Merchant Seaman, and by all accounts a Victorian, who lived his life in ways that we can only dream of or read about today.
My Father was one of 12 children, and his mother, Beatrice, lived until she was 95. Quite an astonishing achievement for a woman that had lived through the times that she had to live.
It was said within the family that she had never quite understood why she had fallen with child whenever her husband, Shadrach Abraham Page, had returned home from a voyage. Straight out of Moby Dick
Such innocence seems extraordinary from the viewpoint of the present.
From the 60s through to the 80s there were numerous funerals as brothers and sisters in turn reached the end of their lives. As a child, growing up from 1960, I was always sheltered from such events, although I have strong memories of most of my uncles and aunts, until the time in about 1971 when my Mother and Father moved away from what had been a close family in London to begin a new life on the South Coast.
Perhaps it was necessary for my Mother to have escaped the close village atmosphere of East End London, where I can remember family events almost every weekend, when inevitably the Brothers would drink heavily, and probably play cards, whilst the women brought up their children and gained most comfort from their sisters and sisters-in-law.
It wasn't an easy life, to be married to one of the men this close clan. Those were difficult years through which to live, and many of the Brothers spent time away from home during the war years, and though my father was a Stevedore in the London Docks, which would have been a Reserved Occupation, he joined up in 1940 along with numerous of his dock labouring pals, and in my Father's case, after being married in 1938, he was away at war until he returned in 1948.
I am sure this was not a unique experience among the women of my Mother's generation. My Mother spent most of the Blitz in the East End of London, living with my father's Mother, close by the docks, which must have been a terrible experience to have lived through.
In my Mother's case, she escaped after the Blitz by taking war work on the outskirts of London, in an armaments factory until she trained to be a Capstan Lathe Turner.
She was then sent to work in a factory close to Blackpool in Lancashire, a world away from her life in the East End of London.
She was childless until my sister’s birth in 1955, and I was born in 1960.
The work of a dock labourer was a hard one, long hours and backbreaking work. Compounded by the early separation in their marriage, it can’t have been easy, and I don’t believe my Mother ever knew the contents of my Father’s wage packets, although the priority for any expenditure that she did make from housekeeping was for us children.
My Father’s life after the war was spent mainly with his pigeons, and I can’t help but feel that this was an escape from the memories that he must have carried around since the end of his war service.
Although I remember occasional trips as a family to local pubs, I only remember one occasion when we had a family holiday at the seaside, where we visited a resort in which my Mother’s sister had worked for years as a chambermaid.
Holidays were not something that my father was good at, and he would much more likely spend a week off work building a new pigeon loft for his beloved birds.
To be fair, perhaps the one social occasion in the year was the Pigeon Fanciers’ Ball, which my father only really attended so that he could receive the cups and prize money that he regularly received.
He was an excellent pigeon fancier, but this was a fairly solitary hobby.
I would spend time with my Father at the regular Friday meetings of the local pigeon club, were the birds would have their rubber rings attached to their legs, and the clocks would be struck and tested for their accuracy as timing instruments for race days.
I still have my father’s time-worn pigeon clock, a beautiful French clock. a Toulet, in a small wooden box. Pigeon clocks are like ships’ chronometers, extremely accurate instruments into which the rubber race ring would be inserted inside a metal thimle, the timing of the birds arrival back at the Loft enabling the speed of the pigeon to be calculated in yards per minute, so that longer races could be run between clubs that were miles apart, and sometimes prize money from betting in the inexpensive pool might accumulate to significant sums.
I remember that one year my father had a pigeon that came third in what was the London Combine from Thurso in Scotland, third out of 30,000 birds to fly the 600 miles from the race point at the most northerly point on the British mainland.
He was offered a significant sum for that pigeon, which he refused, because the money meant nothing. Pigeon racing was the closest my father came to the companionship of other men, where they could talk about the things that their women would forbid to be spoken of in front of the children.
There were several stories that were suitable for women and children to hear, but so few that he would be forbidden from talking about his war experiences because everybody had heard everything that could be spoken of too many times.
No doubt there were many things that my father would have never wished to ever recall, from service that took him through the desert under Montgomery, El Alamein and the second front from North Africa to invade Italy, fighting up the leg of Italy. What in one song referred to the D-Day Dodgers. Only in the last verse did some mention get made of the comrades that were buried in places like Monte Cassino.
When he was demobilised in 1948, he was in Palestine, and no wonder he always talked about how he had done enough traveling never to want to have to ever go abroad for a holiday.
Love kept them together, but it was the kind of love that dared not be spoken of, the acceptance that there was nothing else to contemplate beyond providing for the children, and putting up with the way in which the men drank too much whenever they got together.
Emotion lay buried deep beneath the surface, and I only lately discovered that one of my Fathers closest Brothers, a fellow pigeon fancier, had lost his first wife and his young daughter to the last V2 rocket to fall on West Ham.
He remarried, but never had any more children. Pigeons, once again, seemed to be the way in which life was made bearable. Hours spent alone waiting for the birds to find their way home, that and in Harry’s case, a wicked brew of rice wine, such as I have never tasted since.
Monday 4 June 2012
Closing Our Street For Play On The Jubilee
Playing out. It is something that perhaps people of my generation have taken for granted.
That when we were young, we were allowed to play in the street, because the streets were so much less dangerous, and there was so much less traffic.
Much has changed in the name of progress.
These days, the car takes precedence over so many things.
In some respects, of course, this is a measure of the extent to which we have progressed, and become able to travel more widely and more easily.
But there are negatives, perhaps many of them less visible than we imagine.
Something as simple as the way in which, as a child. I can remember playing in the street, and all of those childhood memories, which perhaps have been lost to the current generation of children.
But yesterday, just for a short time, we were given permission by the local Council to close our street to through traffic, and for a brief period, the children of residents and neighbours were free to play safely in the street, and the 30 or so houses within the zone to which the closure applied, got to meet neighbours they had in so many cases never even seen.
Suddenly, neighbours sat drinking tea with strangers they had so much in common with, perhaps many of them all of the time keeping a wary eye on their children playing happily and safely in the street. For once devoid of traffic, the Sound of play piercing suddenly the constant veil of traffic noise. I had heard birdsong that morning, because coincidentally it was the last day of term, and there were no longer thousands of parents driving their children to school. It was to get better, as our ears adjusted.
The road became quickly covered in chalk markings for games that so many of us would remember and recognize from our own childhood.
Perhaps because I had seen the benefits of street closures before, when I lived on the Norfolk/Suffolk border, I jumped at the chance of getting involved in this one. I offered my resources to the resourceful person prepared to lead the way, glad to have been involved in a small way in making arrangements for this closure. I have available to me a large format printer. From the days when I last worked. as a graphic designer from home, when I purchased a printer that can print in full colour up to A1 in size.
With this, I was able to print the paper necessary to make the signs for the closure, as well as the logo of the new breed of not-for-profit companies with social intent, Playing Out. That exists to promote this simple act of Playing Out.
There is no doubt in my mind that this brief period in which everybody's ordinary isolation was shattered will have a lasting effect, and perhaps the ripples of this transformation will last for as long as the friendships made in this brief moment of peace will consolidate and bloom.
It is as if Pandora's Box has been opened, but with positive outcomes that no one can predict.
It is perhaps significant that this has happened on the Friday before the Jubilee, when we have two Bank Holidays during which we will celebrate and honour the Queen that has reigned over us for 60 years, and perhaps this has made it easier for local Politicians to have allowed this simple, innocent act of transgression to take place.
It has been thoroughly well organised, with local residents taking on responsibility for stewarding the closure, and advising drivers of ways in which they can gain access safely, complete their journey, and perhaps communicating politely exactly what is going on.
The costs have been minimal, perhaps mainly because local people had given their time to help with preparations and assuring the smooth transformation of our street to a temporary playground.
But now it has happened, and people have seen that what they have taken for granted need not always have its impact on us.
A local Councillor was present, to observe how quickly the traffic returned to this brief haven. He shared with us the surprise that comes with a realisation of something that has grown so insidiously that we have failed to see it.
That our lives have been ruled by traffic, though for the briefest of moments, it is as if the tide has been turned, by act of will, and what has been revealed is a treasure whose value will only be realised over time.
That when we were young, we were allowed to play in the street, because the streets were so much less dangerous, and there was so much less traffic.
Much has changed in the name of progress.
These days, the car takes precedence over so many things.
In some respects, of course, this is a measure of the extent to which we have progressed, and become able to travel more widely and more easily.
But there are negatives, perhaps many of them less visible than we imagine.
Something as simple as the way in which, as a child. I can remember playing in the street, and all of those childhood memories, which perhaps have been lost to the current generation of children.
But yesterday, just for a short time, we were given permission by the local Council to close our street to through traffic, and for a brief period, the children of residents and neighbours were free to play safely in the street, and the 30 or so houses within the zone to which the closure applied, got to meet neighbours they had in so many cases never even seen.
Suddenly, neighbours sat drinking tea with strangers they had so much in common with, perhaps many of them all of the time keeping a wary eye on their children playing happily and safely in the street. For once devoid of traffic, the Sound of play piercing suddenly the constant veil of traffic noise. I had heard birdsong that morning, because coincidentally it was the last day of term, and there were no longer thousands of parents driving their children to school. It was to get better, as our ears adjusted.
The road became quickly covered in chalk markings for games that so many of us would remember and recognize from our own childhood.
Perhaps because I had seen the benefits of street closures before, when I lived on the Norfolk/Suffolk border, I jumped at the chance of getting involved in this one. I offered my resources to the resourceful person prepared to lead the way, glad to have been involved in a small way in making arrangements for this closure. I have available to me a large format printer. From the days when I last worked. as a graphic designer from home, when I purchased a printer that can print in full colour up to A1 in size.
With this, I was able to print the paper necessary to make the signs for the closure, as well as the logo of the new breed of not-for-profit companies with social intent, Playing Out. That exists to promote this simple act of Playing Out.
There is no doubt in my mind that this brief period in which everybody's ordinary isolation was shattered will have a lasting effect, and perhaps the ripples of this transformation will last for as long as the friendships made in this brief moment of peace will consolidate and bloom.
It is as if Pandora's Box has been opened, but with positive outcomes that no one can predict.
It is perhaps significant that this has happened on the Friday before the Jubilee, when we have two Bank Holidays during which we will celebrate and honour the Queen that has reigned over us for 60 years, and perhaps this has made it easier for local Politicians to have allowed this simple, innocent act of transgression to take place.
It has been thoroughly well organised, with local residents taking on responsibility for stewarding the closure, and advising drivers of ways in which they can gain access safely, complete their journey, and perhaps communicating politely exactly what is going on.
The costs have been minimal, perhaps mainly because local people had given their time to help with preparations and assuring the smooth transformation of our street to a temporary playground.
But now it has happened, and people have seen that what they have taken for granted need not always have its impact on us.
A local Councillor was present, to observe how quickly the traffic returned to this brief haven. He shared with us the surprise that comes with a realisation of something that has grown so insidiously that we have failed to see it.
That our lives have been ruled by traffic, though for the briefest of moments, it is as if the tide has been turned, by act of will, and what has been revealed is a treasure whose value will only be realised over time.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)