News of the fight soon reached the Queen

When I first moved to East Cowes in 1954 I found a friend, Peter Allwood. I have written up the story in the post Peter and Johnny. Johnny wasn’t the name of a friend, as you’ll discover, but a thing, which Peter was the first to tell me about. I also explain in that post how Peter and I swiftly became strangers again, when I realized he was two classes below me at school.

Amongst the places I wanted to look up on our four-day holiday to the Isle of Wight was Peter’s house. I remembered how the land lay, but I was looking for a landmark: the “shell house” next door. Peter had showed me round: every wall of the house and backyard was covered with designs made of seashells. It never occurred to me that the shells might have been removed.

On our last day, just before we had to catch the ferry home, I came across this sculpture set into the outer wall of the old barracks, with a plaque alongside:

The Shell House of East Cowes

One day in 1852, young Freddie Attrill was gathering shell-fish on Osborne beach when another boy came along, told him to clear off and kicked his bucket flying. Indignant, Freddie gave him a thump - only to be told by shocked attendants that he had just hit Albert Edward, Queen Victoria’s eldest son and heir to the throne. The Prince hurried home to Osborne House, and soon a nervous Fred was summoned there to answer to Queen Victoria in person.

The Queen said, however, that her son’s behaviour had been quite wrong. She praised Freddie for standing up for his rights and, some say, gave him several guineas in recognition.

Years later, Mr Attrill commemorated the incident by decorating his house on Cambridge Road (just off the East Cowes Esplanade) with sea shells. Until the 1970s, both house and garden were quite a tourist attraction. Most of the decoration has now gone, but even today one wall shows a sailing ship ploughing through the waves – all done in shells.

Sculptor: Glyn Roberts.

Only the bicycle shed still stands

It’s fifty-four years since I lived in East Cowes. It has the air of being past its best, but it had the same air in 1954, so you can say it has hardly changed. Fifty-four years before I lived there, Queen Victoria was still alive and she lived there too, in the house she had built with Albert, and had remained mourning for 40 years after her husband’s death in 1861. She was hardly seen by the local people but still, her presence changed the landscape.

A source on the Internet tells us this:

“During the reign of Queen Victoria who made her summer home at Osborne by acquiring and rebuilding Osborne House, East Cowes was the subject of planned estate of grand houses, groves and parks. The scheme, not finding the finances it needed was folded, but a few residences built in the early stages still survive to this day such as the former Albert Grove residences of Kent House and Powys House on York Avenue.”

Powys House was where I lived – see its photo in my previous post.

When the Queen-Empress went into mourning it is hardly surprising that speculative builders were unable to sell “grand houses” to the high society who would desire to be her courtiers, for she withdrew into her family and when she needed to attend to affairs of State would go to Windsor which was within reach of London. But she had a detachment of soldiers to guard her person and they were garrisoned in the town, in a barracks near the sea-front.

In 1954, my stepfather was working for Saunders-Roe whose Columbine works had been built in 1935, next to the barracks, which now housed the firm’s drawing offices, where he worked. I believe that, despite his lingering ambitions as engineer and inventor, he wasn’t much more than a technical clerk, responsible for managing the drawings. But Saunders-Roe was his pride and must have been something to hang on to after his wife left him, running off with a lodger to New Zealand, and taking the kids with her. He had my mother of course – and me. But I was no consolation. I called him Sep (though in this blog I always call him Blackett). His full name was Septimus Leslie Carr Blackett Charlton. His work colleagues called him Les. He called me “Boy”.

I feel his presence strongly in this town of great engineering achievement; which built warships for the First World War and whose giant hammerhead crane still stands, one of few left in the world (built 1911, see illustration at top); which built the Saro Princess, the largest flying boat in the world. How he loved that plane! He carved a model of it in clear Perspex and gave it to my mother as a kind of engagement present, as if it were the embodiment of his dreams.

But Saunders-Roe took Powys House back from us---Blackett had rented it from them---“to use as offices”. A couple of years they took away his job too. The Princess was permanently mothballed after 100 hours of test flights. Jetliners, not flying-boats, were the future now.

A few years later the company had a small renaissance, developing the world’s first hovercraft to the designs of its inventor Christopher Cockerell. Too late for Blackett. He’d had to move to the mainland to work for a company called Specto, printing and filing drawings, in a job so humble that my mother was employed in the same office, doing virtually the same job. She was hardly skilled. She had not done a day’s paid work since Singapore in the 1930s. Blackett’s humiliation was gradually the death of him. They went to live in the town of my mother’s birth. He became a driving instructor and secretly smoked (she had made him give up) till lung cancer got him and spread to his brain so he died within six months of his illness.

The Columbine Works, the flying-boat hangar with its slipway down to the Medina estuary---all were disposed of to smaller companies, and Saunders-Roe vanished without trace: almost.

On my visit last week I found two poignant reminders of what was once, at the back of Queen Victoria’s guards’ barracks. One is a rusting bicycle shed with an official Saunders-Roe notice still fixed to the wall.




The other is a peeling sign marking the door in a wall, leading to “Personnel Dept.”: probably the last door Blackett walked out of, when he left the company.



Here you can see that Personnel sign from the other side, with Columbine works in the background, bearing the date 1935.

Coming back to East Cowes

Despite my new-found capacity to take hundreds of photos, this blog is not primarily a picture gallery or a travelogue. It consists, rather, of letters posted recklessly to the Universe: not to ask favours of it, more to give thanks. And when those letters have been published here, on this great wall of graffiti that we call the world-wide Web, they may be edited in “post-production”. Anything may end up on the “cutting-room floor”. Anything may be slightly tweaked, with new material added and the sequence of scenes shuffled to reveal a profounder sequence than the purely chronological. As a result, I hope to produce a book: one of those satisfying paper things with a hard binding, that sits on a shelf in all its physicality, and can be traded and preserved to Kingdom come. As for this Internet, this virtual reality which floats almost beyond time and space, no one knows what will happen with it.

It’s literature that interests me. Letters, memoirs and diaries are literary forms, and here they are combined in a spontaneous and interactive medium. I love literature for its ability to capture something of soul; preserve the past; give public presence to the shadowy phenomenon called memory, that richest of treasures, especially to the elders who have stopped living for the future, but bask in the present and dream of the past.

I have not given up hopes and dreams but they dwell in the realm of that which has already come to pass. I couldn’t seize the moment then. I was too young to savour youth. I hadn’t learned to play my hand, sniff out my luck, eat the fruit---allowed and forbidden, both kinds. Now, that realm is stretched out before me and all I have to do is recreate it in this wonderful medium, more plastic than clay, more durable than gold.

I’ve previously written here about my childhood in East Cowes:

Blackett and the Princess
The wooing of Blackett

but especially
Peter and Johnny
Machines and words
The wings of fate
Beach party

I lived in East Cowes less than a year. Coming back fifty-four years later, I understand more clearly its importance in my life. There will be more to say.

I used to live here, in Powys House. It looks just the same. In those days we took in lodgers. Today it’s a home for residents with learning difficulties.

I used to walk down the road to the Umbrella Tree to wait for the bus to school. It’s still there, ringed by the same circular wrought-iron bench, with the same bus-stop alongside. The tree has grown up, but then so have I.

Pilgrimage to Cowes

I've had my camera two years but only recently realized it can hold hundreds of photos if I put in a larger memory card. Just as well, because I was able to take some beautiful photos of a recent visit to the island where I spent my teenage years, the Isle of Wight. Here's a little gallery to start with, covering the ferry trip across the Solent, that busy waterway which separates the Island from the mainland whose ports include Southampton and Portsmouth.

Every photo can be enlarged by clicking on it.


This was our ferry.

A building near the ferry terminal.


This is a view from on board the ferry just after we set sail for the Island.


A view of the docks at Portsmouth, showing Nelson's ship HMS Victory and some other famous vessel of the same period.


Old and new vessels.


What are these flying things? I want to be up there!


More flying things. They must be kites. Yes, surely kites. I had optimistically thought they were hang gliders and wanted to be up there hanging from one.


Our ferry nears Fishbourne. The one you see in the photo is one coming the other way.


Our destination was the famous port of Cowes, shown here from the air. It's divided into two parts, East Cowes on the left. You need to go on a chain ferry to get from one part to the other.


We pitched our tent at East Cowes, near a park on the shore, just beyond the bottom left corner of the aerial photo. This picture taken from the tent next morning shows a view of West Cowes across the River Medina.

In my next I hope to provide an account mingling the memories of 54 years ago (when I lived in East Cowes) with the memories of our recent trip. It may take several posts, actually. One of them will be about Queen Victoria, who spent most of her widowhood in Osborne House, at East Cowes. Another will be to commemorate Septimus Leslie Blackett Carr Charlton, previously referred to in this blog as Blackett. I hope. If the Muse favours the enterprise.

In the industrial valley

I shall take you on a guided tour of my part of town. You can click on any photo to enlarge it.

We are in the valley bottom, where the factories were built at the end of the nineteenth century. I don't know what they replaced: perhaps smaller workshops. At any rate they didn't put the chair-bodgers out of business. I have just checked the Oxford English Dictionary:

In full chair bodger A local name in Buckinghamshire for a chair-leg turner. Hence (chair-)bodgering, the action or process of chair-leg turning.
1911 G. ELAND Chilterns & Vale vi. 136 The men who thus work in the woods are called ‘chair-bodgers’. Ibid. 137 The purchaser then employs the ‘bodger’ to turn it [sc. a ‘fall’ of beech] into chair-legs. 1921 K. S. WOODS Rural Industries round Oxford II. i. 102 Most village turners or ‘chair bodgers’ confine themselves to the making of legs which they sell to the factories, mainly at Wycombe. 1939 D. HARTLEY Made in England i. 23 The shed for bodgering jobs may be left standing the whole year.

In our guided tour, we'll end up at my house, in fact at the desk from which this is written.

Here's a nearby hill, southeast of my house. The lads at bottom left are Polish. They are easily distinguishable from their English counterparts by their short haircuts and general eagerness to find work: picking up litter, roadsweeping, anything.


This will be an enlarged supermarket to complement the new shopping centre. It is ten minutes walk east from my house.


However, the local shops are on this road.


Here's one of the local tyre depots seen from across a parking lot. But I was more interested in the clouds.


Another parking lot, again my head was in the clouds.


Yet another parking lot, made available from a demolition. St Birinus Church in the background, where all the big West Indian funerals take place, blocking the traffic on the local shopping street (see above).


I like the Bridge Street Sawmills. They don't waste money on smart frontage, but they are still in business.



The following photos are all taken within a few yards of my house. This one shows where the sawdust comes out from a local furniture factory. They don't make furniture "from scratch". There is only one factory in town which still does that, making solid wood tables, chairs and so forth.



The Saracen's Head, a pub built in 1895. Since the district is now 95% inhabited by Saracens (Muslims) who don't drink, its bars closed more than ten years ago.


The Saracen's Head from the rear, with a view of The Pastures. As you see there is no pasture land there now. Our house is down at the bottom of the valley.


This old factory has been extensively "done up" (renovated).


This is now the largest factory building left in town I think, after the Broomwade factory was demolished in the last few months. That one was used for a scene in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and I hear that Johnny Depp nearly caused fainting of female staff at the local supermarket when he went there to buy a snack in between filming.


This workshop stands opposite the derelict factory in the previous photo. In the foreground are things designed to sit on roofs, catch sunlight and take it down into illuminate interiors. They also make windcatchers, using an idea known for a thousand years to architects in the Middle East. They extract heat and stale air but unlike air-conditioning use no energy. The owner (pictured) is soon to retire. He doesn't think anyone will take over this business (making fibreglass & plastic components). He can't get any white person to work for him. They don't like the hard work and the fumes. I nearly offered him my own services. But then I reflected that I don't want to work in a factory and breathe acrid fumes either.


This is taken from a dead-end part of our street. It shows the old school, now a community centre, with the old school yard in foreground.


Here's another view of the old school, with Burt's Hill in the background.


The factory opposite our house. It produces doors and laminated worktops, e.g. for kitchens.


View from my backyard, showing the row of houses adjoining mine.


My backyard.



Just after I'd taken down the dry clothes from the washing line. I love the trees. In the corner are my tomato plants.



View of the Pastures and my next-door neighbour's backyard, from study window.



Where I wrote this post.

Just ordinary life

Back in the Sixties, I first came across some mysterious expressions from the other side of the Atlantic. I was working for a British company whose main rival was IBM. Both companies had built up a customer base selling punched-card equipment based on the nineteenth-century inventions of Herman Hollerith and his one-time colleague James Powers. The trick now was to persuade our customers that punched-card tabulating was out of date, and they should upgrade to computers. These still depended on punched cards for input and output (visual display units being not yet available), but stored their data on giant tape decks. Computers were hugely expensive and needed air-conditioned dust-proof rooms. There were no silicon-chip memories: what we had was magnetic cores hand-threaded by ladies with good eyesight and hairnets in clean-rooms. The municipal authority of Birmingham (England) could only afford 192kb of internal memory when it moved to digital computing in 1964. We thought this was a big machine, and so it was, in physical size.

Anyhow, I learned some mysterious expressions, for example one day I was asked to give a ballpark estimate. I knew how to do rough estimates, but nothing about ballparks. This put me on rather a sticky wicket, an expression I understood instinctively because it was derived from cricket.

Sticky, adj.
c. Racing and Cricket. Of a course, a wicket: Having a yielding surface owing to wet. Also fig., esp. in phr. to bat (or be) on a sticky wicket: to contend with great difficulties (colloq.)
[Oxford English Dictionary]

But it was a different expression which aroused me with a start from an ale-induced stupor during one afternoon meeting of the sales team. Someone mentioned “motherhood and apple pie”. Had I missed something? It was no use asking for explanations. It was years later that I understood it was a reference to an American proverb: “No one ever speaks against motherhood and apple pie”---symbols of intrinsic goodness. If you could attach these symbols to your sales activities, then you could successfully deal in landmines, napalm, or a data processing upgrade that left the user worse than before. (There was another American proverb: “Nobody gets fired for buying IBM”, but it was never uttered in our office, since we were IBM’s biggest competitor in the UK.)

It’s less proverbial but generally true that no one speaks against spirituality, for it too seems to exude intrinsic goodness, even to those who deal in landmines and napalm. At any rate such persons hastened to donate to the saintly Mother Theresa, or so I gather from Christopher Hitchens’ book on Mother Theresa, The Missionary Position which commences thus:

“Who would be so base as to pick on a wizened, shrivelled old lady, well stricken in years, who has consecrated her entire life to the needy and destitute?”

The answer to this rhetorical question is of course Hitchens himself, a brave speaker-out against spirituality, who labelled the late Mother Theresa a menace to Calcutta and the entire world. And he’s written a book called God Is Not Great.

There are those who make a distinction between religion and spirituality: the one being more problematic than the other. Spirituality is the pure essence, they seem to imply, while religion is the uncut diamond, or the unrefined ore.

I may have been one of those who make the distinction, whether or not I can claim to have thought clearly on the subject, which seems to have vast ramifications. I have never been happy with the word “Spirituality”, handling it only with quotation marks as if it were hot and the inverted commas were tongs. Though not fond of the word, I remained in favour of the thing it signified; or at least had more in common with spiritual persons than with simple egotists and materialists. So we must be birds of a feather! In any case, one of my recent blog posts was selected for Network: a journal for all women interested in spirituality, theology, ministry and liturgy, a Catholic periodical. Admittedly, it was put in the “Other Perspectives” section of an issue devoted to Spirituality. Perhaps that was their quarantine section for dubious heresies.

I’d been a spiritual seeker since the age of fifteen: at least that is what my maths teacher called me one day in the street. I had just emerged from the public library. He demanded to see my books and it was deeply embarrassing, for I was carrying the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the Analects of Confucius, and a commentary on St John’s Gospel. It's only the memory of blushing shame that preserves this vignette in such detail. Perhaps I was a seeker already without being conscious of it: just went to the library and picked three books that looked interesting, without any sense that they might have a common classification “Spirituality”.

Later I took up sitting-meditation and actually did it for thirty years, an hour a day. Did it do any good? I must have thought so at the time, or at any rate feared the consequences if I stopped. Ah, but did it do any good? How do I know? I Would not recommend it to anyone. All I know is that it felt wonderful when I finally stopped. But that's what the madman said, when he stopped banging his head against the wall.

But here is the funny thing. In the last few days, just as it felt good to stop meditation several years ago, now it feels good to drop spirituality altogether. I suddenly feel the air fresher and purer, the colours brighter, my own self more in tune with the All. I could break into poetry, not my own, but Browning’s:

“The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in his Heaven -
All's right with the world!”

Yes, I can still say “God’s in his Heaven”. That’s not preaching, that’s an expression of joy. I renounce preaching: to others and especially to myself. I might read someone’s sermons. I will probably continue my habitual fantasy-reverence for cloistered nuns who spend their days praying for the world and their nights in spiritual embrace with the Son of God.

I’m not spiritual. I dwell in my body. My joy is inspired by nothing more holy than ordinary life. To hang washing on the line is my worship. I compare the blues of the damp garments with the blue of the sky; the clear dewdrops hanging from the line with the translucence of the line’s plastic coating; the row of brick chimney-pots with the glowing sky; the freshness of the outside air with the bland atmosphere indoors; the feeling of my own body---and here I don’t know what words can convey the exquisiteness of being alive.

It seems to me you don’t need spirituality to appreciate the simple things in life. No theory, no practice is required, just living. Perhaps spirituality is a desired ladder to reach a height, higher than things of the world. Perhaps it is a sense of impatience to get closer to what we already know.

What if I were well-born, well-bred, endowed with land and horses, young and handsome in features and physique; admired by all; skilled in hawking, archery, poesy; magnanimous and devout? Would that have been enough to stop me setting out on a spiritual adventure? Or would I, like Prince Gautama, feel something missing, and become a spiritual seeker at the age of fifteen anyway?

“Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it’s just that I see mountains once again as mountains and waters once again as waters.” (Ch’ing-yüan Wei-hsin)