The fifties - new house

Bryerswood, 3 Stourwood Road. 

I’m going to have to rebuild this home, chronologically.  My first impression was doors, lots of them.  You went in through the front door, down a short corridor into the hall, and there were these doors all around you.  How many, and where they led, was an exciting prospect, but it was the doors themselves that captivated me.  The only doors I’d ever seen before were the usual three-up-three-down panelled sort, painted white.  They were just things to be opened and closed.  But the Bryerswood doors were flush flat polished dark wood.  There were more doors than I’d ever seen on one floor. 

Then we went up the open stairs, with their half-landing that was big enough for a substantial cupboard, and yet more gorgeous doors.  That was enough for me.  I fell in love with this house’s doors.

Of course, that was only the beginning.   Apart from the living rooms and bedrooms, there were several toilets (though only one bathroom), an area behind the kitchen containing a walk-in larder (which had a section with a fine-gauze screen to keep flies out, so you could keep meat in there: never used for that purpose, we had a fridge by then) and a passage that led to another small room, previously the maid’s quarters, which immediately became The Den.  We’d been avid followers of Life With The Lyons, but this Den immediately became a kids-only province.  Grandpa’s old radiogram was installed in there, along with his huge record collection (78s of course), and we worked our way assiduously through them.  

Then there was an attic floor, which had two huge rooms and two little box rooms. The two rooms  were actually surplus to requirements, so the one to the right became my territory.  To be exact, it was where my father lovingly installed my model railway.  I could describe this in fine detail, including the sawdust I dyed green and glued on to represent grass on the hills and fields, the little trees I bought with hard-earned pocket money (polishing the silver and brass every Saturday, to be exact), but I took for granted the fact that my father had built this child-level shelf around two sides of this big room, just for me.  No, I was resentful that I’d been fobbed off with the three-rail Hornby Dublo track, with its unconvincing metal mounting with painted clinker, rather than the two-rail Triang.  I could go into a lot of detail about the technology involved – it’s much easier to have the live rail separate from the wheels – but I suspect cost was a factor.  I did love it, though, for at least two years.

As I’ve suggested, my father loved projects, and once they’d been completed he lost interest.  So the dismantling of the model railway, once I’d grown out of it, was fine by him.  I don’t think there was any resentment.  Though come to think of it, my brother might have inherited it for a few years – he’d have been about six when it was constructed. If that’s so, I’d have moved on far enough not to notice any emotions of any sort in my father, because I was starting to move on into adolescence, with all that carries.

The fifties - new school

The new school was supposed to be my actual education.  After the kindly, patrician prep school ambience of Southbourne Prep, Bournemouth School (not called ‘For Boys’, though it was) was a bit of what would now be called a culture shock, but was then just a kick in the head.

Bright lads from the north-west – Kinson, Moordown, Wallisdown, even parts of Poole – had passed their eleven-plus too, and so had to go to the grammar school.  They were mostly decent, but rougher elements inevitably made it in.  Their behaviour wasn’t their fault, but they’d been trained to make sure they came out on top, which meant someone had to be lower down: which translated to “find a victim and bully him.”  I walked into the role and they walked into me.

Just a couple of incidents will serve to illustrate this.  If intimate personal data embarrasses you, look away now.

Not long after I arrived at the school, I was induced to join the CCF – the Combined Cadet Force. I accepted this as just another of those things that had to happen, although there were aspects of it that I really enjoyed: the rifle shooting in the basement of the school (with live 303 ammo, would you believe); the drill (I was good at marching, and fairly quickly got promoted to point position); and the Field Days.  

This particular one was to Portsmouth (I was in the Navy section) including a visit to HMS Victory.  There’d been a ‘comfort stop’ on the way, but I’d been unable to pee then, so by the time we were lined up on the main deck or somewhere, I was bursting.  I may be the only twelve-year-old to have wet the deck of Nelson’s flagship, at any rate during the 1950s. Unfortunately it was noticed.  For months afterwards, my nickname was ‘springaleak’.

The second memory is of the Copse, a patch of waste land next to the school where we were allowed to play at lunchtime.  I might come back to the Copse later (here, I mean, not there – it’s probably flats by now) but the incident in question is that I fell over and landed in some dog do which stuck to my blazer.  Luckily the Bournemouth School blazer was already brown, but the smell lingered.  You can guess the rest, though how I failed to tell my parents (or for that matter how they failed to notice and get it cleaned) comes down, again, to my timidity.

The fifties - we moved house1

We moved house! 

This was the biggest event in my life so far, bigger than starting school or even being born, because I was acutely aware of it and even had some influence over it, rather than it being done to me.  And it changed my life.

It was announced, probably over Sunday lunch.  We’re all going to live together in a great big new house!  Let’s go out and find it!  That’ll be fun!

Our parents had, I believe, come into some kind of inheritance.  My father had been doing well at work and had a significant promotion. His career had been built on scientific capability, but then, as now, the only way to reward someone was to promote them, and the only way to do that was to convert them from achievers into managers.  I don’t know how good a manager he became, but he was certainly happy to take the money.

 66 Watcombe was owned outright by my grandparents.  And the tenant in the Stamford Road house (which had been their first home that they’d somehow managed to retain and let) had become intolerable and had to be evicted, which meant that could be sold too.  So capital was available.

And there were practical reasons too, of course.  We kids would soon each need our own room. (That didn’t quite work out as planned, but that’s for later.)  Grandpa had had his stroke, whilst doing some decorating – it rendered him nearly blind, which we were told was due to him getting a chip of wood or something in his eye – and Granny wouldn’t be able to look after him on her own.  

The fifties, part 2: the bike,part 2

Customisation rapidly followed, of course.  The chain guard was the first to go.  I can’t remember the other tweaks I snuck in behind my parents’ backs.  I do remember the parentally approved water bottles, and I can still taste an aluminium-tinged warm sip through a paper straw.  We discussed the feasibility of taking a hacksaw to those clunky lugs to make them look like cutaways; even, I think, drawing fantasy designs, but it was never going to be the racing bike I craved.  But I can remember, quite vividly, the short and long expeditions it carried me on.  That was my first taste of real freedom, granted me, intentionally or not, I’ll never know, by my parents. 

I’d made a few friends at school by then, some of whom were also into bikes.  I think my most avid co-biker was called Mike Bone, but I’m sure there were others.  The furthest I can remember riding is Badbury Rings, which is about thirty miles from Southbourne.  We must have ridden along Castle Lane, then up past Wimborne Minster to reach this Iron Age hill fort, wandered around and marvelled at it, then ridden back home.  We also took our bikes across the Sandbanks ferry and hauled ourselves across as far as Kimmeridge and Worth Matravers, noticing the landscape and the coast.  These trips were to be a lasting component of my education.

The fifties, part 2: the bike, part 1

1952.  My father had started to become disappointed in me by then, because I wasn’t becoming him.  It took years for me to escape from that double bind and accept that actually, I was.  So when he tried to teach me something, I automatically refused to learn it, until I was left on my own, when I determinedly taught myself.  

I remember very clearly the afternoon – it must have been during the summer holidays when I was between schools – when I got the old bike out, worked out how to balance (don’t stop), and by the time he came home was proudly doing daring circuits of the back lawn at 3 Stourwood Road.  I don’t know where that bike came from – it was a very heavy black thing - but then, for my twelfth birthday, I was given a proper one, or at least my parents’ notion of proper. There was some subterfuge which somehow meant I had to go down to the garden shed, there to be unveiled this gorgeous Raleigh, in a colour I’d now call magenta but then saw as very displayable red.

It wasn’t, of course, my dreambike.  That would have entailed full drop bars, alloy rims, 10-speed Derailleur gears, many other features I can’t remember:  all mounted on a Claud Butler racing frame with, crucially, cutaway lugs.  These latter were supposedly designed to reduce weight, which was obviously ridiculous – they were an early manifestation of teenage designer bling, and hence heavenly. Ian Kitchen had all of that, but I didn’t.  My bike had semi-drops, chrome-plated rims which rusted if not oiled weekly, a sprung saddle, three-speed Sturmey-Archer, old lady mudguards and, most dreadfully, a chain guard, in matching colour trim!  But it was still near enough to the top of the local game, and I loved it.

Forties: elocution

I'd forgotten about my speech impediment, until I was obliquely reminded of it just now by Z.

Until I was six, I couldn't pronounce the 'th' sound.  This was a serious problem, apparently, because I was sent to elocution lessons at Cranleigh Road school, where I rapidly learnt the trick.  You just put the tip of your tongue behind your top teeth.  (A phonetician writes: there are different vocables or phonemes, nasal or otherwise, of this combined consonant, as in 'there' or 'anathema'.)  (An elocution pupil writes: thuck off!)

So the cure worked, but the damage had been done.  Being told, before I was six, that I couldn't speak properly must have put me off the idea of speaking.  Once I'd got the hang of it, it probably took me quite a while to become brave enough to try it. 

(I also couldn't rrrroll my rrrrs, and still can't, but that's another tongue twister entirely.)

The Fifties, part 1

The Fifties started in 1953, when several things happened to my life.  I went to a new school, having passed the 11 plus when I must have been only just 11.  We moved house.  And I taught myself to ride a bike.  But before that, the Sea Scouts.

It was a law that boys had to join the scouts, so I did.  We were sea scouts, which meant that we had blue kerchiefs held round our necks by a toggle.  (I'm sure there was more uniform, but the toggle is the only bit I clearly remember.)

The scoutmaster was called Skip.  He was an old man, probably in his forties.  He made us boys strip to our underpants and do exercises.  Some time later I told my mother about this; she was quite sure that it was innocent, because she couldn’t imagine that a trusted person could be guilty of bad things.  Certainly he never made any physical advances, so perhaps she was right in her belief that Skip just liked watching small boys prancing around in their underpants.

My main scout memory, apart from that, is knots.  Skip certainly taught those well.  I can still, in my head, do a clove hitch, a reef knot and even a sheepshank.  But there wasn't much actual sea involved in being a Sea Scout.  We never went to sea, or particularly near it.  Most of the activity was in the All Saints church hall.

The assistant scoutmaster was an irresponsible thug in his early twenties.  One bonfire night, we were taken down to the meadow by the river at Tuckton, where a firework battle was orchestrated – we were issued with bangers and matches, and had to light the bangers and throw them at each other.  It was terrifyingly great fun. 

I was yanked out of the Sea Scouts not long after that.  But something must have rubbed off and stuck, because when i was enlisted into the CCF at Bournemouth School a year or two later, I didn't hesitate or even think - it had to be the Navy section.

Uncles and aunts

Uncles and aunts are yet another source of confusion.  There were no real ones (apart from Ruth and Douglas, whom I’ve already mentioned) but in the forties it was customary for any relative or close friend to be identified as aunty this and uncle that.

To get the relatives out of the way, there countless connections on my mother’s side.  Just a few – the Yeovil people, the Beverly people, and Aunty Phyllis (who used to come and spend some weeks with us most summers: presumably not at the same time as Grandma, I can’t imagine them getting on too well.)  When I went to Leeds for my University interview in 1959, I was lodged with the Wakefield people, who were very kind to this lad they probably didn’t know from Adam.  I know I went out to the local cinema and saw a lovely Norman Wisdom film.  Who were they?  I have no idea.

The close friends were Uncle Jack and Auntie Babs, Uncle Norman and Auntie Marjorie, and Uncle John and Auntie Gracie. 

Jack was probably my father’s only real friend.  They were thrown together by wartime work and the friendship endured for at least twenty-five years.  I loved him.  He told me the first dirty joke I ever heard, when I was about six.  (Here it is: little girl and little boy are peeing in the bushes..  Little girl to little boy: “Ooh, that’s a useful gadget, where can I get one of them?”)  He was a dedicated photographer, and I still have some of his landscape work in Pembrokeshire.  They went on holidays together into the sixties, and he died suddenly at the end of one of those, on the way back from Italy.  Babs was just there in the background, being kind.

Norman and Marjorie were just neighbours in Watcombe Road.  I remember virtually nothing about them, so I mention them purely because I had my first sexual experience with their daughter, Christine, in the sandpit in their back garden.  We showed each other our bits.  Her older brother Derek persisted in riding his bike round the lawn, which precluded any further progress.  We were six years old.

John and Gracie were probably acquired through my parents’ flirtation, in the twenties, with ballroom dancing.  They were rich, by our standards.  I remember Uncle John as a kind, unassuming man with a black toothbrush moustache.  They had three children, of about the same age as us, and we were obliged to be friends with them, but that didn’t work for me: I didn’t start to do friendship until well into my teens, and I’ve still not quite got the hang of it.  But we all rubbed along well enough, I think.  Certainly we went on holidays together, renting and staying in the two adjoining houses at Wisemans Bridge.  

A bit more family

My mother’s parents had more humble backgrounds than my father’s.  

Esmond Lloyd Rea was a Yorkshireman, from Wakefield. I know nothing about his early history.  He was employed by the Inland Revenue, which entailed being sent to wherever the job demanded, which is probably why my mother was born in the Welsh borders and fetched up in Bournemouth to meet my father there. 

Grandpa must have been allowed to stop being peripatetic, or perhaps to retire, because by the late thirties he had settled down and bought 66 Watcombe Road, just down the road from us.  He was a jolly man, who enjoyed his beer and his music.  We’d be taken down the road for Sunday lunches and record sessions, and sometimes sleep over, presumably when my parents had other engagements (which doesn’t feel very likely) or more probably just wanted to be shot of us and have some time together alone (though that doesn’t seem very likely either).  It was presented to the children as a treat – you’re going to sleep at Granny and Grandpa’s tonight, won’t that be lovely? – and of course accepted without question. 

Ethel Jones, Granny, had roots in County Cork, but I don’t think she was Irish.  It’s impossible to find out anything more from the internet – the surname doesn’t help – and no family documents that I know of have survived.  How she met Esmond in the Welsh borders is yet another unanswered question.  I’ve explained what I know of how he got there, but how did she get there?  Anyhow, they were in Coleford, in the Forest of Dean, when my mother (their only child) was born in 1907.

Forties (part 4)

I wish I could remember anything about my Latin teacher. Not because I’m interested in him as a person, but because I’m interested in how he managed to make this dead, irrelevant language important to an eight-year-old.  

I think it wasn’t actually about Latin as such.  More likely, he inculcated an interest in ordered structures, which grew and has persisted ever since.  The notion that a chunk of language could be broken down into verbs, nouns and such, then rebuilt into phrases, clauses, sentences and such – all according to a set of rules (or at least conventions) that could be codified and obeyed – that must have been deeply comforting to that insecure ungrounded infant I was.  

Of course, that was all drummed out of me when I moved on to the grammar school. (We can’t have them teaching grammar, can we?)

Forties (part 3)

Southbourne Preparatory School was what would now be called my primary school.  

It was housed in a rambling building, probably a former grand residence of some sort, up on the north side of Southbourne Road, just opposite Stourwood Road (where I would be moved to a few years later).  The plan was that I’d stay there until I was fourteen, when I would go to a ‘public school’ (I put the term in quotes, because they hadn’t been public since the seventeenth century).  The choice was between Canford or Bryanstone.  If I’d gone to either, my future would have evolved very differently, but it wasn’t to be.  The reasons for that were never spelt out, but I like to think that it was due to my own timid willpower.  

I was terrified at the idea of being a boarder. I was actually taken to Bryanstone to be interviewed by the head, who was very kind and solicitous; but I made it quite clear afterwards that I was incapable of surviving that regime.  Canford was the runner-up option, which wasn’t seriously pursued, so I ended up going to the local grammar school, of which more later.

I have scattered memories of Southbourne Prep.  The headmaster, Mr Morgan, was too decent to be the disciplinarian the role demanded. When I and another boy were caught bullying Shaun Kilkoyne, we were given the choice of being caned or apologising to Shaun.  We chose the latter, much to everyone’s relief, especially Mr Morgan’s.  (Shaun and I later became friends, to the extent of trying to play chess.)  I remember the music lessons, which consisted of everyone being issued with a tambourine, some castanets or a triangle and having to bang along to the teacher’s piano accompaniment.  And we were required to do sports.  Throwing the cricket ball was the only one I was any good at – except when I was required to do it accurately in an actual cricket match, when I’d usually fail dismally.

I obviously learnt a lot more at Southbourne Prep – some vestiges still surface and will probably do so as this narrative proceeds – but the only enduring lesson is Latin.

A Bit of Family

My father was the middle child of a Gloucestershire farmer and a well-to-do Jersey lady.  These bare facts exist, but the substance –  how they met and married, how and where they lived, had and brought up their three children, what their life together was like – all that remains a mystery, which will never be resolved.  Grandfather Frank Large died before I was born, and just after my sister was.  There’s a 1939 photograph of her in his arms, but there is no other record of him that I know of.  He’s buried in St Brelade churchyard in Jersey, so he must have lived there; but my father used to talk in some detail about his childhood in Lechlade, so they must have lived there in the early years of the twentieth century. 

Grandma Emmeline Walker was certainly from old Jersey stock.  She was a figure of awe in my family, until she died at the age of ninety in 1960, when I was eighteen.  Emmeline is a good Victorian name that has been carried forward in the family.  Grandma was Victorian, and suitably formidable.  Her maiden surname is also my middle name, and I firmly believe (without a shred of evidence) that this naming protocol, which continues down the generations on the male side, may have been one of the conditions of my parents being permitted to marry.  The surname is still eminent in Jersey.  And now I come to remember, I had a work colleague called Arthur Walker who once mentioned a Jersey background.  The connection clearly didn’t register with me at the time (we were probably on about lunch pint four), but I now wonder whether we were related.  I’ll never know.

Grandma was evacuated to England before the invasion of Jersey, and she spent much of the rest of her life being shuttled between various relatives.  She was one of numerous siblings, which I guess is how the family fortune got dissipated.  Certainly there was an uncle called Oliver who absconded to the Argentine and lost a bundle on ill-advised railway investments.

She’d come to stay with us for some weeks during each summer, in the fifties.  This was a cause for domestic repositioning in our household.  My mother was stressed out for weeks beforehand.  And Grandma played to her strengths, more or less re-ordering things in her own image.  She was pretty good at that.

And yet, I remember her as mostly kind and wry.  You’d see that in her face.  Every late afternoon, she would retire for a while to her room; I later learned that this was for her gin.  She once criticised me for using too much toilet paper, making some joke about rationing. (How did she know?  Was she monitoring?)  And one year, it must have been about 1953, we kids had been allowed, on a hot summer day, to play in the garden with the hose.  This had to be stopped before Grandma came, but the evidence can’t have been fully concealed, because when she arrived she enquired what had been going on and elicited a confession.  I can hear her now, in her rich Victorian voice.  “Oh, don’t be silly, it’s very hot.  Of course they can play with the hose.  I almost wish I could join them.”

Her two sons – my father Ivan, and Douglas – had already lived in England all their lives, but their elder sister Ruth certainly ended her days in Jersey.  She didn’t spend the War there; she had married a Jersey man, Eric Hobson, who was in the RAF and died in 1941 I believe (but he’s not listed as a Battle of Britain casualty, at least not a decorated one).  But she returned after the liberation and moved back into the family home in St Brelade, a bungalow called Ipsilante, where she lived for many years until it became too much for her and she moved to a flat in St Helier.  Her only child, my cousin Rosemary, never left Jersey, except to travel, which she did a lot of in her later years.

Forties (part 2)

I seem to have been a sickly child, because my mother later kept telling me so.  In fact, I had croup when I was three, whooping cough a couple of years later, chickenpox at some point, and German measles twice (which wasn’t supposed to be possible).  My parents later told me that they’d shoved me into rooms with neighbouring kids who had mumps in the vain hope that I’d catch my immunity before it could do permanent harm, but mumps declined me (until I was in my forties).  The same ‘expose and immunise’ system was probably applied to other childhood ailments, like scarlet fever.

My body obstinately refused to comply.  I still haven’t had scarlet fever, as far as I know.  Again later in life (probably in my teens) I was reminded that my TB test – a ‘patch test’, it was called; it was conducted at Cranleigh Road school, and for some reason I had to go back and have it again because the first try hadn’t worked – had come out positive.  This meant that I was immune to TB.  Somehow this was presented as bad news.

But the by-product of that sickliness was reading.  Memory is a distorting mirror, but I do know – having been told so many times – that I was reading by the age of four.  How fluently I have no way of telling, but the breadth of my reading is fairly well established.  It was ‘Picture Post’ and ‘Illustrated’ magazines, and The Children’s Encyclopaedia.  

I was given the two magazines, unedited, to keep me occupied.  I was reading words I’d never actually heard or said.  I clearly remember wondering how that word ‘illustrated’ was pronounced.  I say unedited, because I have since looked back and there were some fairly challenging images in there; but I don’t recall being traumatised.  Perhaps the worst pages got torn out before the mags were dropped onto my bed, but I doubt it.

The Children’s Encyclopaedia, though, was another thing, and must have formed a large part of my early education.  I don’t intend to retrospectively flesh out my actual memories, but I will use the internet to check facts, so I am fairly sure that what I had was the 1920 ten volume blue-bound edition.  So I certainly learned about the solar system, and probably picked up some attitudes that may have taken a while to question and discard.  I wish I had those books now, because I’d love to revisit and revise that early education.

Forties (part 1)

I was born on Bastille Day in 1942, although I didn’t know that at the time.  I was later constantly reminded of this fact by my mother, Gwyneth, who needed her children to be important in some way.  Much later, she told me – this may have been after she discovered the loosening effects of alcohol – that I hadn’t been particularly noticed as being bright, until Miss Wade, my kindergarten teacher, did.  This came as a surprise to my parents.

In the early 1970s, I was involved in various different ways with three girls who in their various different ways contrived to draw me into the irrational sphere of astrology, which required very precise information about the minute, if not second, that one emerged from one’s mother’s womb, so I asked mummy exactly when I was born. She couldn’t remember.

I do know where, though.  Tuckton Nursing Home.  I can quite clearly picture Tuckton, a kind of nowhere zone between Southbourne and Christchurch, with some useful shops, alternatives to Southbourne Grove – but I don’t remember the Nursing Home.  Today, I have to wonder what one of those was, and how it could have a maternity ward; but this was 1942.

I remember Miss Wade, and where her kindergarten was.  It was on the corner of Paisley Road and Irving Road.  You walked a little way up Watcombe Road, turned right and then you were there.  Those streets (I use the word generically – Bournemouth is famous for being one of the few towns in England not to contain a single named street) were amongst the first things I ever learnt.

Another thing I learnt from Miss Wade was the technique of prevarication.  This came about when I asked her why you had to be married to have a baby.  It was probably when my brother was expected, in 1947; I certainly knew by then that babies came out of their mummy, and was just naturally curious about how this worked.  Miss Wade responded by referring me to Jesus.  That was probably part of the start of my wondering why people seemed unable to give simple answers to even simpler questions, a wondering that has only grown since.  But the few children I’ve known haven’t asked me awkward questions like that, so I’ve yet to be put to that particular test.

It Was Sixty Years Ago Today

Well, yesterday actually.

I’d wanted to mark the anniversary in some way – not because anniversaries matter particularly in themselves, but more because it was an excuse to recall some Young Emotions (that was Ricky Nelson, btw) and share some superb music.

But it had to wait until today; I would gladly have shared Buddy with everyone, but it doesn’t work that way unless you’re prepared to selfishly hijack a family get-together, which I wasn’t.  

So here are the five tracks I chose for us to share this evening (you’ll have to find your own spotilinks):

1. True Love Ways
2. Rave On
3. Learning The Game
4. Everyday
5. and of course That’ll Be The Day (That intro was the first thing I ever learnt to play, after skiffle chords).

Team Spirit

We all learnt that at school, didn’t we?

In my case, and probably in yours (assuming no millenniums read this blog), team meant sport.  Which meant competition.  Our team, because it was a team, had to develop spirit, which was what would enable us to beat the other team.  (The fact that the other team was usually a random Wednesday afternoon selection of one’s classmates, and so didn’t really have time to do that, wasn’t important.  The concept was the lesson.)  Team spirit enables the team to compete and win.

(It didn’t work that way in practice for me, because competing in a sporting team turned out to mean competing mainly against one’s teammates in order to improve one’s chances of being noticed and so advancing one’s social status, something I could do much more easily indoors.  Although one couldn’t totally duck, I generally managed to avoid contact sports, because I didn’t like getting hurt, of which there was a more than fifty-fifty risk because, although I wasn’t physically weak or small, I resisted acquiring the skills needed to avoid getting hurt without running the risk of getting hurt, which I didn’t like.  And cricket was for privileged boys.  So I never properly learnt team spirit.)

I now, I think, see the fallacy in all this.  Out here in the real grown-up world, most teams aren’t, or shouldn’t be trying to beat another team, never mind their own.  They are, or should be, trying to get the job done.  But that bloody competitive sporting team spirit they learnt at school does nothing but get in the way.

Leeds (4)

I half-promised the other day to write about a certain breed of small vehicle (now thankfully extinct), and as I’ve resolved to blog more often, in the hope of doing my bit towards revitalising this dying art, here goes.

The car in question was an anagram of Brian Retail – although I’m sure they’re no longer made, I’m also sure there are still owners, whom I wouldn’t want to upset should they goggle their enthusiasm and light upon this post.  You know what I mean.

Anyway, this particular one was owned by one of my first digsmates in Brookfield Avenue, Leeds, whose name, as it happens, was Brian.  Brian (who was a dental student and as far as I know never went into the retail trade, but never mind) was quite challengingly mischievous, in a good if dangerous way.  Having ferried me around for a while in this contraption, one day he asked me if I’d like to have a drive.  I’d recently passed my test, and any such opportunity wasn’t to be passed by, so I naturally accepted.

The driving position, as I recall, meant that a tallish person like me had to scrunch himself up like a used tissue just to fit in there, never mind drive the thing.  Having been instructed in the peculiarities of the pedals and the column shift, we set off. 

Brian gave me directions – “left here, straight on a bit, right” – and I was getting quite into it, feeling my way into the car’s unusual responsiveness to instructions, until he said “OK, go left here.  Best you change down to first.”

I did say he was mischievous.  He’d taken me to the top of the steepest hill in, if not all Leeds, then certainly the Harehills district.  It was about one in eight, a good hundred yards down. There was a set of traffic lights at the bottom.  Giggling, Brian told me how to proceed.

“What you do now, you put both your feet on the footbrake, you pull the handbrake up as hard as you can with both hands, and you stand up.  Oh, and pray for green.”

Job Done

Right, I've finished writing it.  Well, it's only taken about five years - not full time, but at least a day a month on average.


It's called "This Obscure Group", subtitle "Dave Anthony's Moods - a personal memoir of the best unheard band of the Sixties."  I've put a few edited extracts on this blog before, but this is the final product.  Or at least as final as it's going to be.  I could go on tinkering for ever.


So I'd like it to be read, or at least available.  Does anyone know anything about publishing (vanity or otherwise)?  It's long enough - about 42,000 words - to form a slim volume, especially if padded out with a few photos. 

A very interesting number, 73

I was musing about memory, and memories, and it’s occurred to me that celebrating the day of your actual physical birth, which you probably can’t remember, is pretty meaningless.  What counts is when you first became aware, which you can only construe as your earliest memory.  I was nearly three when I helped my father to hang out the huge Union Jack over the front garden to celebrate the end of the War.  (He couldn’t have done it without me.)  So I’ll be just over seventy next week!

There may be a flaw in this approach.  If there is, please don’t tell me.

More Days in a Life

Ages ago, I wrote this, and through some quirk of consciousness (see tomorrow’s post, maybe) the idea jumped out at me again, from wherever ideas lurk.  So here are five more.


It Won’t Be Long. Almost any of Lennon’s songs on ‘With the Beatles’ or ‘Hard Day’s Night’ would do for this slot.  I was a wannabe songwriter bound tightly by the musical conventions of the previous fifty years. Lennon threw a disdainful pot of musical paint at all that: wrong chords, missed or truncated bars, irony-laden Glenn Miller quotes harshly, gleefully out of context …  I wrote dozens of pastiche imitations –  all thankfully lost, but I’ll never forget the exhilaration of discovering that A major to F# major and then back to A, or B flat, or wherever, was okay: rules could be broken.  This discovery soaked through from mere music to real life over those few churning years.


Rain.  I’m basking in the garden of 17 Hutchings Walk, one weekday afternoon in June 1966, early in that coruscating summer.  I’m not at all focussed on music, my mind and my body are elsewhere entirely, wafting around various situations and one particular girl.  But then this sound drifts through the French windows, and sucks me indoors. Somebody’s got the new Beatles single, and has put the B side on first.  Something opens.


And Your Bird Can Sing.  We’d done our usual set at the Piper in Milan, and I’d struck up a conversation with the Indonesian lead guitarist of the new all-girl support band, the Honeys.  She had a genuine Gibson Les Paul, which meant I was in love with her.  We sat knee to knee while she proved to me that the jangly two-line guitar part could be played at one go, not double-tracked, if you were good enough, which she was.  Complications grew from nowhere over the next few stretched-out weeks.  She had a husband and a child back in Holland, it seemed.  In the end she fled the country.  I don’t think it was because of me, but I’ll never know, will I?  I wish I could remember her name.


Hey Jude.  This one is a sitcom moment.  Andy walks in to the pensione with a 45 in his hand.  “Rubbish new Beatles record,” he announces.  Maybe he’d only heard the B side.


I Just Don’t Understand.  Lastly, a teaser.  This was never a ‘proper’ Beatles track: it’s on the Live at the BBC compilation, recorded for Pop Go The Beatles in July 1963.  I’ve included it because I love the song (original 1961 record by Ann Margret, you can find it on YouTube), love John’s performance of it, and love how it reminds me precisely what it was like to be a teenager in love.