Belonging

The day after posting my last, I felt cleansed, as a Catholic might feel after a visit to the confessional. Burdens removed, joy restored. I had published only a small selection of what I’d drafted, but had never felt such catharsis from writing, if it is justifiable to link effect and cause in this way.

The day after that post---the Snowdrop Garden---I took off to Bledlow Ridge, a village on the spine of a hill, and zig-zagged its footpaths on the eastern slope. You can see a stile I climbed over, and a view from that slope---please click it to see the panorama full size, with a restored windmill on the horizon. There was hardly any breeze and the February sun actually warmed my face. Near the top of the ridge, my path took me down to a hollow where the tracks had been churned up by vehicles and logs were stacked at the side and there was something, I don’t know what---the lie of the land, the scent of the resin?---which gave me the sense of an earlier time, a Golden Age of my early childhood. I’d been taught to associate Golden Age with the pastoral idylls celebrated by Latin poets, but have observed that old men always look back sixty years to a time---good or bad---when they formed their ideas of how the world should be. Now I have reached that stage of life myself. I don’t want to condemn the world of now, but still I rejoice when I discover seeds and echoes of its heyday as imprinted in childhood.

Cocks crowed and dogs barked. Birdsong echoed across the clearing. “I have everything,” I reflected, as if in heaven. But humans are not made to be satisfied with singing “Alleluia” on a cloud, so I turned my reverie into a quest. I imagined some object lying about, not a burnished museum piece but some rusty relic, that I’d take home as souvenir of time past. Conventionally we may think it’s evidence of old age when the past fascinates more than the future, but what if it always did? When my mind is calm and reflective like a pond, its surface is rippled by odd memories or a sense of familiarity. Till I was four, I lived in Australia, and soon after that I spent time in post-war Holland, with horse-drawn milk-carts and a smithy where on my way from school I’d be drawn to watch the farrier making a horse-shoe and nailing it on a horse’s foot whilst still hot. There remains in my head---perhaps in everyone’s head---a library of smells from early childhood; and the same with the other senses. That doesn’t explain why I’m so glad to recognise these old friends now, and to relive the peculiar feeling that even as a child, I recognised from a yet earlier time, perhaps imprinted in my genes. I have always been interested in discovering old things. Relics! I can almost understand how it was for those medieval Christians who revered a holy relic: almost. I’d like to understand everyone. A novelist, or a film director and crew, can help us understand the fictional depiction of a person: sometimes. Even then the reader or viewer has to work at it. For I believe---no, I somehow feel---that we’re all one. Most of the time a merciful veil gives protection from the world of others. But in art that veil is rent and we glimpse.

Of late I’ve been reclusive, passing the time of day only with neighbours, many of whom hardly speak English; every day a perennial exile, a retired man pottering unnoticed in his tiny plot, venturing out only on trivial errands. So it was a big deal to go to a training workshop presented by the eminent British Standards Institution, on the topic “Business Continuity Management”. At a luxury hotel and golf complex in remotest Northamptonshire, I met the other thirty-five delegates, each with a background in rarefied forms of management consultancy. Yes, I have dipped into those waters too, though I have been more like the frog in the well who knows not the great ocean.

Being rusty in these matters, I’d planned to keep quiet throughout the day. But at one point I felt prompted to speak, to correct the impression conveyed by another delegate that running business continuity exercises might disrupt an entire organisation. I told a tale from my days of Eurotunnel, when we had conducted a literal “table-top exercise”. On a set of ping-pong tables, there had been constructed a Lego model of the shuttle railway. With just that plus telephones and the participation of external parties---the Fire and Ambulance Service representatives, and the Mayors of Folkestone and Calais---we had simulated an emergency in the tunnel, with a train broken down and passengers injured. Outcome: chaos. The exercise showed we were ignorant and uncoordinated. Injured passengers were taken out of the tunnel and left untended on a platform, whilst simultaneously paramedics went into the tunnel looking for them vainly.

My tale was hardly longer than that, but it made a vivid impression, and at the next break, whilst queuing for coffee, a tall man introduced himself to me, an ex-cavalry officer who now advised the Royal Signals about communications. We were able to converse very easily. I mentioned the American armed forces who are so dependent on satellites for almost everything, and he smiled. The strength of the British Army, he said, was its poor communications which put local officers on their mettle and created heroes. Ah yes, I said, like the Light Brigade: we are famous for heroic cockups, or was it Lord Tennyson who made The Charge of the Light Brigade famous through his poem? Oh, he said, Tennyson wrote another poem, The Charge of the Heavy Brigade in which the British had done another insane charge and actually won; but that poem was not so famous, and we had sustained even heavier losses. We briefly touched on the misfortune of winning a war: losers seem to benefit more. I mentioned that Milton’s Paradise Lost was a better poem than Paradise Regained. He said he has Paradise Lost on an audio tape he listens to in the car. He reads Homer’s Odyssey whenever he can, little bits at a time (surely the only way!). He said his father had read to him when he was young and now he reads to his children: rare authors whose names I failed to note but when uttered by him seemed uniquely magical. I didn’t even get his name, this literary cavalry officer, but he was like a long-lost brother. He was what I might have been if brought up in a prosperous nurturing family. I told him of the tattered banners captured by my great-grandfather at the battle of Tel-El-Kebir, and being in the cadet force at school---he had too---and the true reason for my teenage pacifism. It wasn’t a hatred of killing but a hatred of arbitrary authority. I was astonished at my own words for I hadn’t till that moment realised this. He smiled and understood perfectly, as if he were no stranger to such thoughts. I think there was a subconscious connection between us that made me say it.

That this encounter made such an impression on me was, I now reflect, the truest snobbery: the urge to belong and be accepted. I have been so long out on a limb, adrift from the herd---every herd, that I have sought to belong to nothing but Nature herself. I have secretly claimed descent from the Australian aborigines, as an excuse for feeling alienated. But in the last few days I have found I belong to several fraternities: my street is one, the ranks of senior citizens is another---in the supermarket an old man told me his vividly tragic life-story whilst we waited at the checkout. So I must have changed somehow. Perhaps I no longer carry the scent of a Steppenwolf. Or maybe the officer was just humouring me? Perhaps his old-fashioned English manners charm everyone equally? I say no, it was special, but my subsequent dream tells me that unconsciously I’m still insecure.

I walk into the office chatting with a colleague, who looks very much like the model and actress Liz Hurley, once the girl-friend of Hugh Grant. If that cavalry officer were a woman, she’s the one he would be. She goes into a cupboard to hang up her coat, while I continue talking to her through the closed door, raising my voice. She doesn’t come back out. I look round and all my other team colleagues, who were sitting in our section, have disappeared too. A couple of staff from another project look up disdainfully across the open-plan office to see me talking to myself.

Next post I want to talk more about understanding others, and about the conditions for the highest creative work. Does it help to be mad? Or unhappy?

The Snowdrop Garden

St Peter’s Church, Stanton Lacey

I live in the poorest quarter of town, sandwiched between factories, some derelict and some still in use like the one directly across the road. Many of the Pakistani owners of houses like mine have let rooms to migrant workers: hundreds of them are engaged on building a new shopping/leisure complex in town. Their tiny backyards are usually piled with discarded appliances, broken furniture and decomposing garbage. Mine is neat of course, because I come from a class which likes to impose order on its surroundings. And this is my reason for two weeks’ blogging silence. Plumbing, carpentry, bricklaying and gardening have occupied my days. My more usual form of ecstasy and exercise is solo walking amongst birds, trees and clouds in all weathers, or just to be outside when everything is kissed by the sun.

Plumbing, carpentry, bricklaying and gardening are elemental ways to grapple with Nature, and I take great pride in learning their lore, discovering the secrets of materials, tools and techniques. When a weeping joint betrays my inexperience at plumbing, my pride is hurt and my energy deflates. Splits and warps in redwood planks are more readily fixed, with less primal panic. And as for the brickwork, ah, so many kinds of bricks, soft absorbent reds and Staffordshire Blues, impermeable, often called “engineering bricks” because the Victorians used them for bridges and railway cuttings. Different types of mortar: sand and cement or the more traditional sand, lime and cement: I’ve had to teach myself, make shameful mistakes. The easiest task was to plant a small cherry tree, next to the bird-table I’d constructed from pale wood, a little roofed tray where robins and sparrows and bluetits nervously peck at the seeds I leave for them. They can help themselves to the cherries if they get them first. I got the fruiting type of tree because I’ve always wanted one. My grandmother had a merely flowering cherry-tree in her garden and it disappointed me, despite her defence that it produced a more glorious blossom. “How can you call it a cherry-tree if it can’t bear fruit?” I complained as a child.

The object of my bricklaying and carpentry---setting aside mending my neighbours’ front walls, and building an L-shaped spice shelf in our kitchen---is to make a bench at front, where I’ve planted pots with pansies and spring bulbs and lavender and hydrangeas. This is the only part which catches the sun in this season, for only in summer does the sun rise high enough for its rays to kiss the back yard. A handsome wooden seat is supported on three brickwork columns. Is? no, will be. After my first attempt, where the mortar wasn’t quite dry and came apart when I drilled holes in the top brick (oh the shame which devoured my innards!), I'm going to wait a while before putting the seat on top. There is no backrest--- the sitter will lean against the sill of the bay window, contemplating the timeless wonders of growing plants and passing neighbours. It’s essentially a pedestrian street. Vehicles can go one way, slowly, looking for a place to park.

Today I walked near the house where I lived for 16 years---that’s twelve years longer than I have lived anywhere else in my life. Most of that time I was crippled by a chronic illness and longed to walk the earth freely, so that area has a special poignancy, like the view from a prison cell. There’s a cemetery whose main gate is opposite the back of my old house. I found myself in its “Snowdrop Garden”, a walled section dedicated to neonatal casualties: some stillborn, others surviving a day or a month. Little plaques were screwed to the walls, mostly giving one date only, whether birth, death or both was not made clear. Some had not visited our planet long enough to acquire their own name. The snowdrops are now in flower, and push through the lawn between graves strewn with dead floral tributes. (My illustration is not from that cemetery.) Though there was no one to see me, I felt a fool for the tears that streamed down my cheeks. I remembered first moving into that house, and planning that we’d treat the cemetery as our own extended garden. Our children learned to ride bicycles on its paths which were rarely disturbed by other visitors. The main one is bordered with linden trees, pollarded annually and trained on wires. Just walking the same paths reminded me of vague yearnings which I never understood then. I still don’t know why those plaques, like “Baby Jones: 11-4-1998” made me weep. Perhaps it was that the parents yearned for what they never knew with a pure and primitive love that owed nothing to the ways of this world. Perhaps it was that the babies were spared the disappointments and compromises that hit the rest of us. Perhaps I was nostalgic for my own stillborn hopes.

Cherrydown (3)

A Messerschmitt bubble-car

There’s still a ragbag of memories to share with you about the time I spent in that house. If they have any common theme, I suppose it is wonders and miracles. I’m not saying there actually were any miracles: just incomprehensible things.

I mentioned in a previous post that my mother started to suffer from various medical complaints at this time, which I have lumped together unkindly as hypochondria. I should be the last person to accuse anyone of that, so perhaps I am mocking my past self in saying it. One of her complaints was what she called fibrositis which gave her a chronic pain in the shoulder. Anyhow, Blackett installed a “sun-ray lamp” in the front room, turning it into a small clinic, because certain friends were invited to take advantage of its reputed health-giving properties. You could set the device for ultra-violet or infra-red: the first was extremely bright and you had to wear an eye-mask and time your skin’s exposure to its rays. It always gave out a funny smell, which I thought of as mercury vapour, although that was supposed to be sealed in the bulb, and if we had inhaled it, the results might have been less than healthy. The infra-red was more tolerant and supposed to help painful shoulders amongst other things.

That same front room became a sanctuary of spiritual healing. I mentioned in an earlier post that my mother used to attend a Spiritualist church when she was married to Kenneth, as a kind of refuge from the marriage and in hopes of contacting her first husband’s disembodied spirit. (If you are confused by this sentence, I remind you that Blackett was her third husband.) There was a Spiritualist church in Cowes, and even though we lived now in Newport, five miles away, she continued attending, with Blackett accompanying: but not me, if I could help it. The congregation tended to be elderly and the services were tedious. I suppose Blackett went along to indulge my mother at first but then he discovered he was a medium, I don’t know how. He made a planchette, a nice job in varnished plywood with neat rollers, and a Ouija board with letters of the alphabet in a circle. We started to hold seances, everyone putting a finger on the planchette and messages being spelt out. Spooky: I didn’t like it. Then Blackett had an inspiration to do “automatic writing”, a communication with spirits all by himself. He bought cheap rolls of wallpaper, plain white, and covered them with large handwriting whose peculiarity was that the words were all joined up because the pen never left the paper. He would go in a trance-like state and receive whatever was sent. I don’t know how many weeks, months or even years he did this: but the spirits told him he was a healer. This was pretty convenient for my mother, to have free spiritual healing on the premises. But he also let it be known in the Spiritualist church that he had been singled out for this special grace, and we started to receive clients. Maybe I have missed out a step, for there was a time when my mother corresponded with a healer called Harry Edwards, who charged no fee though he accepted donations. I think they went to see him once. Blackett after getting approval set himself up as an affiliate to Harry Edwards. I know this because he constructed a Perspex illuminated cross within a circle, which was the logo of Harry Edwards’ organization. It’s still going strong, though Edwards died in 1976, and it appears to have dropped the cross and circle logo.

Anyhow, one evening we received into our front room a blind girl, aged about 17; a wraithlike creature who hardly spoke, and was accompanied by her mother. I had to be there because an intrinsic part of healing is to sit in a circle holding hands and praying or allowing the divine vibes to activate. I found the whole event acutely embarrassing and felt sorry for the girl, having little faith in a miraculous outcome. My scepticism was unfortunately justified, and Blackett confined his healing thenceforth to members of the family. He continued this general line of interest for many years. When he wasn’t inventing and making, he was always fond of sitting still for long periods and staring into space. When my mother asked what he was doing, he’d reply, “Oh, just plottin’ ’n’ plannin’,” and my mother liked that, for she’d imagine he was plotting and planning some new ingenious feature for the house, to please her. But in his last years, his sitting became “astral travelling”, and she learned not to disturb him, because he’d gone somewhere else and left his body behind. They call it “distance viewing” these days, and I believe it is taken seriously by the American military.

These eccentricities were on the periphery of my life, and I suffered them with a certain resignation, not sure whether to be proud or ashamed that my parents were so different from others, and my life had already been so---chequered.

But I’ll tell you a few little things that happened to me alone. One day I was outside the house, perhaps coming home from school, when the sky went strangely dark and there seemed to be some distant explosion, and a mighty wind came from nowhere. I thought it was the Bomb and that we must have been plunged in World War III. There was a feeling in those days that it could happen just like that. It was exciting and tragic both at once. This was two years after the bomb Bravo was exploded on the Bikini Atoll and I remember reading in the newspaper about fishermen reporting a kind of snow which fell on to their boat, which we later understood to be nuclear fallout.

One evening in early December, I was walking up the hill after school in the gathering twilight and saw a tiny spaceship coming down. Down the hill, not down from the sky. It was shaped somewhat like a flying saucer at any rate. It couldn’t possibly be a car, it was too small. This was exciting. I told Blackett and he, being up to date with all things mechanical, told me it was a Messerschmitt, a name I had only heard in connection with German aircraft in World War II. It was a bubble-car.

Going up that same hill, on a summer evening, I was excited to hear some extraordinary music coming out of the Boys’ Brigade meeting hut. Various instruments were each playing their own tune, weaving in and out in a sort of jiving dance. The door was closed so I could see nothing, but distinguished a trumpet, clarinet, banjo and perhaps other instruments too. I had never heard “trad” jazz before, and had the privilege of first hearing it when played live by amateurs.

Have you ever read Émile, Rousseau’s famous book on education? It advocates a child discovering things personally, rather than being told them at second hand. Going back earlier in my life, to when I was four years old, I remember on different occasions my first taste of corn-on-the-cob, wild-gathered fried mushrooms, pancakes with sugar and lemon. I know many people never stop chasing new experiences, to keep alive that childhood sense of wonder. For this they have ambition, to earn significant money, to travel and see the Taj Mahal, to eat exotic or gourmet food, to indulge extreme sports. My own temperament and circumstances are different, and it seems that all my life I have been obedient to the dictum of William Blake:

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the wingèd life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sunrise.

Cherrydown (2)

Image Copyright Dorling-Kindersley

Anno 1956 Aetat. 14

If you have been following the halting progress of my childhood memoirs on this direct and intimate medium---where it is possible to publish worldwide before the ink has dried on one’s words though ink is not actually used---you might not be aware of just how halting the progress actually is. You might think that Vincent is a busy man who dashes off a new instalment as fast as his other obligations permit, and posts them on Blogger just as a housewife would peg out her washing to dry in the breeze. Well, I’m the housewife round here and the weather hasn’t been favourable for pegging out clothes. In the same manner, my second instalment of the Cherrydown era has been lying damp and half-drafted for days like washing that might go spotty with mildew if it’s not soon not hung out for all to see. But please understand that there are difficulties. I’d love to do a thousand words each day, but the subject-matter is often delicate.

In this instance, the memories are vivid, resonating strangely with my present life. It was at Cherrydown that I discovered an interest in crafts and engineering. My stepfather Blackett was an engineer himself, a failed one from his point of view, so till the end of his life he tried to redeem himself by inventing things in his shed, sending prototypes to manufacturers, or installing them around the house. I seem to have inherited similar traits. I’d just as soon pit my wits in some minor design-and-build project, as write this thousand words. The same kind of creativity is involved but the physical activity of bricklaying (which I was doing today) seems more primitively human than tapping away at a computer, and therefore preferable. But now I worry that my rendering mixture had too much sand and too little cement. (I always push myself to the point of worry.)

I remember where I was---in the kitchen of Cherrydown---when Blackett said I should go into electronics: “It’s going to be the big thing soon!” He was so right. It was in 1956 that I discovered the germanium diode, which made crystal wireless sets so much easier to construct. Yes, I discovered the germanium diode. I didn’t of course invent it. I mean that I went to a shop in town which sold radio components and discovered that they had this magical transistor thing in stock. Before that I had used a galena crystal with a phosphor-bronze “cat’s whisker”. They had to be positioned so that the wire touched the crystal on a good sensitive spot. Replacing these components in the circuit by a factory-made diode---two wires sticking out of a little glass thing half-an-inch long---made one less thing to be obsessive about. There were still the other components: the variable condenser to tune to the different stations, the coils for capturing the long, medium or short wave ranges; the aerial which needed to be long and high; the earth connection for which I used a copper rod of cruciform cross-section hammered into the earth itself, rather than attach it to the cold-water pipes or earth-wires of the house electrical circuits. Crystal sets are magical because they work entirely without electricity.

Blackett gave me a little diesel engine, similar to the one in my illustration. I never got as far as putting it in a model aircraft, never mind the reasons for now. I clamped it to the work-bench in the shed. Blackett could not have functioned without a work-bench in a shed or cellar. It was where he connected to his soul and coincidentally, when my mother instructed him to give up smoking, it was the place where he secretly lit up his menthol cigarettes, till he died of lung cancer. For two entire weekends, I wrestled with the diesel engine, adjusting throttle, compression and fuel mix: all so that it would come to ear-splitting life. That was the longed-for goal, but then it would splutter and die. So I would have to adjust it again and spin-start the propellor till my finger bled.

My obsessions have always been fired by the intoxication of success and driven by the humiliating sting of failure. Buying Christmas presents was another example. It was a matter of pride to obtain some suitable token from Woolworths for each person on my list. I’ve hated shopping ever since. With the constraints of the shop’s range and my budget it was almost impossible, so one year I resolved to make things instead. I remember making Christmas cards, using a technique Mr Bell had taught us in art class: cut out positive or negative stencils (e.g. candle, stars, holly), position them on the card, dip an old toothbrush in paint and then pull back the bristles with finger, so that they spray dots of paint around the stencil outline. It wasn’t that I couldn’t afford to buy Christmas cards in a shop: I wanted something superior. The most elaborate thing I remember making was for my sister. I had a man’s wrist-watch with no strap, so I cut a square piece of perspex and using a fretsaw made a hole in it for the watch. With two more squares of perspex, I hinged them all together, to make a miniature travelling-clock which stood in an equilateral triangle, or could be snapped shut like a powder compact. The biggest job with Perspex is to file and then polish the sawn parts to a smooth shine using Brasso, which contains a fine abrasive like jeweller’s rouge.

I haven’t mentioned my drawings and paintings, hand-weaving and chemical experiments---not with a “chemistry set” but with various household chemicals like sodium bicarbonate, vinegar, bleach, permanganate of potash, borax, hydrogen peroxide. Later I made gunpowder and a rocket fuel from two liquids. I’m not intending to boast of my skills: quite the reverse, for it’s more of a confession that my home life was lonely.

When Blackett mentioned electronic engineering as a career, I pitied his ignorance, because I saw myself as a scholar, and him as a poorly-educated man who couldn’t easily express himself. I must at some point have told him I wanted to write books because he said “Odhams Press is a good publisher”. Quietly I looked down on his ignorance. Oxford University Press was closer to my ambition. Odhams was a publisher of popular science, mechanics and encyclopedias. These were the kinds of books he liked to read, as well as war memoirs in Pan paperbacks (e.g. Reach for the Sky, The Latter Days at Colditz). I see now how much he influenced me, even though for most of my adult life I looked back and thought that we never got on. My recollection was that he resented me, glowering silently or muttering to himself, or sometimes he would protest bitterly at “the way yer treat yer moother” in his Tyneside accent that to me sounded so tortured and incoherent. When he addressed me by name, it was usually to deliver a reproach, but when he called me “boy” it brought tears to my eyes for those were the times when he approved of me. It’s only now I realize how much I must have felt to him like a threat: it was I who felt superior to him, with his lack of education and working-class ways. We must have each seen the other as the cuckoo in the nest. He who had spent all his life trying to acquire skills and be recognized for them, must have resented my easy ways of learning, my voracious and scholarly reading of books he would never understand: my perfect spelling and grammar. I discovered by trial and error that only with my exaggerated humility and deference, a kind of tiptoeing so as not to challenge his absolute supremacy, could we get along. Our conversations would be about tools and metals and wood and perspex; or any other topic in which I would ask him about his knowledge or skill. I don't blame him for his fierce pride. I wish I could have done more to please him.

Cherrydown (1)

Anno 1956 Aetat. 14

This post picks up my childhood memoirs from where Norfolk House (4): Fog on the Solent left off.

We moved to a 1930s semi-detached house, “Cherrydown”, 8 Parkhurst Road, Newport (photographed August 2008---it hasn't changed at all). For the first few days, my bed was in the dining room, which my parents had wallpapered in maroon with gold fleurs-de-lys. My bed was covered with a striped African cloth, with threads of orange, green, maroon and gold. On the mantelpiece and windowsill were African carvings from family contacts in Kenya: a tortoise and a lion, in pale polished wood; also a conch and a giant cowrie shell. I was pleased with the exotic formality of the room. It had a spiritual feel. I was reading The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis at that time. Each night instead of doing prayer or meditation I performed a little ritual somersault on the springy bed. At a certain point it gave me a delightful dizziness in the head, which I suppose in a later era of psychedelics would be called an “altered state”. My sense of spirituality was physical. I felt good in my body and started to be more aware of it. I suppose this was a phase of puberty.

I was 14 and my mother was 46. It was the first time either of us had lived in a little suburban house with a nuclear family: just her, me and my stepfather. Perhaps it was a first for Blackett too, for in his first marriage, he and E had run a lodging house (Powys House, East Cowes). But soon after we moved in, my mother’s “hypochondria” started. She went into hospital for a gynaecological operation (D&C---perhaps it was an abortion?) and after that she would often complain of “fibrositis”---a pain in the shoulder. So Blackett would look after her, do much of the cooking and shopping, though he had a full-time job. My main chores were firelighting and cat care. Each morning in the winter months I had to rake out the ashes and sweep the front-room hearth clean. There was a way of keeping the fire “in” all night, by covering it with ashes to make it burn slowly. When that didn’t work I had to crumple newspaper, lay on sticks, place nuggets of coal carefully on top and make sure it lit successfully, before going to school. I always remembered Baden-Powell’s Boy Scout challenge: to light a fire with not more than two matches, but often failed.

The cat had to be shut up in the coal-store each night. It emerged gratefully when let out in the morning, its white paws and nose blackened by coaldust, which isn’t a good form of cat-litter, for it reacts chemically with urine to produce strong ammonia vapour. Furthermore, cat excrement isn’t fun to discover when you are shovelling coal in the dark. Then the cat had to be fed. Sometimes we bought Kit-E-Kat in tins, but we had a frugal budget and the usual expedient was to buy the cheapest cuts from the fishmonger: coley side-fins from behind the gills. These had to be boiled with stale white bread for about half an hour, stinking the house out and driving the cat frantic with anticipation. When cold it congealed into a jelly and lasted several days.

I got my own room before too long, the smallest bedroom with a window that looked out on flat fields with the Medina estuary in the distance. The house had three bedrooms but my mother insisted on her own, on the grounds that Blackett snored. Being a light sleeper was one of her hypochondrias. If some distant dog had barked in the night, she’d endlessly complain at breakfast about not having slept at all. I reckoned all this was to ensure Blackett made her the centre of his attention, and I wished he would resist, for all our sakes; but he indulged her devotedly, whilst muttering to himself.

My room was my domain and my retreat. I painted my bookcase in white gloss, also a wooden chest in red and white like a magic mushroom. Apart from books, my best companion was my own radio, for out of school I was a loner. It needed coaxing to pick up the various BBC stations. I had an aerial strung out over the back garden like a clothes line. In 1956 there wasn’t any teenage pop music, not that I knew of anyhow. But I knew songs like “Sixteen Tons”: “I was born one morning when the sun didn’t shine; I picked up my shovel and walked to the mine. I loaded sixteen tons of number 9 coal . . . sixteen tons and whadda you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.” These were songs for the whole family, not just rebellious teenagers. Next door was a family who each Sunday would listen to 3-way Family Favourites on the Light Programme, loud enough for me to hear in our garden. Servicemen stationed in Germany or India would send messages and song requests to their families back home, and vice versa; so that’s how I learned pop music: “Love and marriage”, “Buttons and Bows”, “Bell Bottom Blues”, “Never do a tango with an Eskimo” and so on.

But one summer evening I chanced upon a radio performance of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!. I see now that a movie version had been released the year before, but I’d never heard of it. I had hardly heard of Gilbert and Sullivan either, till I found a gramophone record (an EP) with overtures: the Yeomen of the Guard on one side and Patience on the other. Such songs and tunes were to keep me going for months and years.

When I did discover pop, my favourites were Buddy Holly, Brenda Lee, Eddie Cochran, Fats Domino, the Everly Brothers: but I heard about Buddy in 1959, when he had already died, and Eddie in 1960 when he had also died. Their respective songs “It Doesn’t Matter Any More” and “Three Steps to Heaven” had become posthumous hits.

These days, it’s commonplace to link one’s childhood with children’s TV programmes and pop songs. But we didn’t have TV and my radio was a secret connection with a wider world. Pop was something I picked up second-hand, hearing imitations sung in the school playground, such as Presley’s “Hound Dog” or Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-A-Lula”. It was not part of my inner world and I had no curiosity as to where it came from. I do recall that there was some damage in a local cinema when Blackboard Jungle was shown, with Bill Haley’s “Rock around the Clock” being blamed for the hysteria. Till I checked just now, I thought the film itself was called “Rock around the Clock”; for I never went to see it being, I suppose, a head-in-the-clouds snob.

Unwritten rules

When this blog started, its title was “An Ongoing Experiment”. The original idea remains in its url: - perpetual-lab. I didn’t know where it was going, but it has followed its nose like an unleashed dog on a trail of adventure.

Any person or thing which has continuity in time acquires defining characteristics, and these are the same as unwritten rules for behaviour. Deviate from them and someone will say “That’s not like you!” A blog is not the face of its author, who remains shadowy and unknowable. This one follows a set of unwritten rules, which if they were written down might appear somewhat like this:

To write under the inspiration of the sky, the shape of clouds, the fresh air of outdoors (that realm without frontiers which keeps us all alive) and the new-distilled rain
- To reflect and propagate joy
- To write good English reflecting respect for the education I’ve received throughout life, and the value of deep-rooted ancient things
- To produce practice-pieces exploring content and style
- To create respectful spaces for readers and visitors
- Not to create a platform to preach opinions or beliefs

It has broken all these rules at one time or another, if not in this post. If you don’t break a rule you don’t know its boundary. After I had written out the above, I came across a passage of Nietzsche, which as you will see above is the blog’s new subtitle:

“Sit as little as possible; credit no thought not born in the open air and while moving freely about---in which the muscles too do not hold a festival.” --- Friedrich Nietszche, Ecce Homo

It’s what I meant by my first rule above.

My illustration today takes a text from Brad4d’s blog.