Clearing the bank

That weekend my world was one of bearded men with chainsaws and women in pinnies.  The men wielded their tools, the women replenished melamine trays with mugs of tea and home-made rock cakes.  The children, me included, looked on, wide-eyed, from a safe distance.

It all felt very communal.  Everyone getting on in this neighbourly effort to clear the bank, a steeply sloping strip of wild ground opposite our three houses.  Here the trees and brambles, cow parsley, dock and nettles taught us kids their own nature lessons, lessons learned through the experiences of itchy legs, scratched arms, and knees stained chlorophyll green.  It was here that I learned how to produce an impressive whistle through a broad blade of grass by making a split with my fingernail in the top to blow through, and where I learned the names of  birds who gorged on the blackberries amid the thorns.

But that weekend it was all about clearance – some roots had spread into the garden on the other side and were threatening the foundations of the adjacent house.  One of the trees would have to be cut down and The Men of the neighbourhood were going to do it.  Now, I’m not sure that I could truthfully describe any of the three males involved as being hurly-burly, hairy-arsed, lumberjack types – quite the opposite, because they were our Dads, and our Dads were all of scientific and mathematical persuasion and watched 'Tomorrow's World'.   But two out of three sported hairy chins (Dad from No. 3, and mine) so that was a start. 

Not my Dad

Old garments were donned and implements oiled whilst inside each kitchen, the aforementioned rock cakes were baked by The Women, and mixing spoons licked clean by The Kids, before the ominous revving of a chainsaw broke through conversation and work commenced.  Then, every couple of hours, out came the trays of tea and sugary sustenance, the noise of metal teeth on wood subsided and excited chatter resumed.  Wow, look at that huge branch!  How much more to do?  Another cake?

This memory stays with me, not because anything spectacular happened (all human limbs remained intact) but it seemed like an Event.  There was something about the mood, the camaraderie, the collective effort of three families, where all the members were of similar age and had the same aim, that puts me in mind of documentary films I’ve watched about communes and co-operatives around the same time. Although a bit different this was still just so... so early '70s.  I get a special feeling mixed in with these recollections and it’s a nice one.  Picture, if you will, bohemian stoneware mugs, fisherman’s sweaters, bold flowery aprons, macrame wall-hangings and eight children who were free to play and be a little wild outdoors.   As with most things in life, it didn’t last - the family from No. 3 moved away and mine fell apart - but I still bask in the warmth of childhood reminiscences like this.

My Mum planted a large strawberry patch on the newly open ground and that Summer the fruits were abundant.  We shared them with our neighbours, of course - and the blackbirds and robins helped themselves.

The Sweet: Chop Chop (1972)

Playing to learn

The problem with Jonny was that, no matter how much he practised, he was never going to master playing the cello.  And he practised a lot.  We knew this because we heard every screech and every scratch of his bow scraping slowly against those strings - our family dining room backed onto the converted garage where Jonny tortured his instrument for hours at a time on a daily basis.  I should add that he was only nine, two years younger than me, but he was as far from being a child prodigy in a string quartet as it was possible to be.

The neighbours' converted garage not only housed Jonny's cello but also a neglected upright piano.  I was friends with Jonny's sister Lindsay and it would be fair to say that she and I also shared his misplaced musical aspirations.  When 'Tubular Bells' had been around a little while and everyone was talking about it, we took it upon ourselves to compose a similar opus on said piano.  I mean, how hard could it be?  Neither of us had been taught to play any kind of keyboard but I knew my way around descant and tenor recorder, I had a pink and white plastic tambourine and, as for Lindsay's musical abilities... well, actually she didn't have any unfortunately, she was tone-deaf.  But she did have the piano.

We tinkered around on that thing in the cold garage room in the Winter of '74/'75, surrounded by boxes of apples from the tree in their unkempt garden, various unidentified electrical appliances and a permanently rolled-up rug in the corner.  The piano was, of course, untuned, but we put a couple of little themes together by remembering to press this key and that, the third black one along and those two white ones at the same time, etc. - convinced that at the end of it we would be as famous as Mike Oldfield - more so, in fact, because we were only 11 - and have a best-selling album in the charts.  'Cause it's that easy, isn't it.

Such is the naiveté of childhood - and how lovely it was really to have that.  We messed around on inadequate musical instruments without inhibition and taught ourselves to remember our made-up sequences, motivated simply by the joy of doing it and our daft fantasy ideas.  Isn't it a shame that at some point in life all that carefree attitude gets replaced with something more serious?  Music lessons demanded progression and perfection, there might even be exams.  Unrealistic personal expectations led to frustrations and frequent giving up.  I've started to wonder if I could go back to that childhood approach and learn to play an instrument without all the adult stress that might accompany it - have some fun, not be too hard on myself, see what happens - especially as they say that learning to play one later in life can boost your brain's health, help with cognitive function, improve your creativity and memory too.   It's just a shame perhaps (for the neighbours, anyway) that my ideal instrument of choice would be an accordion, and that I live in a terraced cottage with quite thin walls...

I keep thinking about it, though, because I just love the accordion - the way it sounds, the way it looks.  I'm wondering: maybe start with a cute concertina at least; it takes up less room too.  Does anyone reading this know how to play one?  If you could play any instrument (that you perhaps don't already), what would it be?  

Anyway, let me treat you now - here are three favourite songs with accordions:

Johnny Allen: Promised Land

The The: This Is The Day

Fairport Conventon: Si Tu Dois Partir

A voyage of rediscovery

The yellow label.  A plain white paper sleeve.  Black type in sans serif font and a little logo at the top…  names and numbers and things I didn’t understand.  Whilst I’ve often waxed lyrical about the hours spent poring over the 12” cardboard album sleeves of my youth, meticulously exploring the artwork and the unknown song titles, it’s easy to overlook the simple thrill of a first 7” single purchase.  Not just the music, not just the fact that you could bring a song you'd only previously heard on the radio or on Top Of The Pops directly into your living room and access it any time of your choosing – but that very specific, peculiar pleasure to be found in every detail of its physical form. 

It was the Summer of ’76, I’d just turned 13.  With a pounding heart and my pocket money savings in my turquoise purse, I went into Boots the Chemist where there was a little space right at the back of the shop selling records, and I bought Dancing Queen by ABBA.  The yellow label and even the fact that it had a plain white paper sleeve, they're indelibly stamped on my mind… and then, ohh, the grooves of joy in that small shiny slab of black vinyl.   I was so excited!

I think my copy was very slightly warped – weirdly not badly enough to mar the song for me, but just giving it the merest hint of distortion which then became the norm to my ears.  When I hear it now, I rather miss that imperfection, that split second dip in speed in each revolution.   The sound was somewhat tinny too, but it didn’t matter one bit.  I loved Dancing Queen, it made me feel happy, uplifted.  I loved this band of exotic Swedes who had brought it to my TV screen on Thursday nights - they were grown-up and glamorous, but they had a special accessibility.  The song, alongside their image, their presence, just spoke to 13 year old girls like me. 

Just around the corner, punk was looming its head.  Punk found me when I was truly ready to rebel, pissed off with school, seeking refuge for my ever-present ‘outsider’ feelings, needing an outlet for my inner dissenter.   Stranglers, Generation X, Buzzcocks and more filled out my little 7” singles box, I studied their different labels, their exciting picture sleeves, I buzzed to their fuzz guitars.  But, before all that, before the drastic haircut, black eyeliner and a graffitied school tie, I was a double denim (or triple, if you count the waistcoat), Charlie perfume, blue eyeshadow,  ABBA fan - as so many of us were.  And still are?  Well, not the double denim, etc. – but their songs, their classiness, their story – it’s stayed with us somewhere deep down.  So it'll be strange and otherwordly, I'm sure, but I'm really looking forward to rediscovering my inner 13 year old in just under two weeks' time, when I go down to London to see the ABBA Voyage show.  And, hopefully, it'll be just as memorable as that very first single purchase 46 years ago…. 

I shall let you know!

Yes, I know it's so familiar, but, oh go on... 

Notes from a semi bohemian suburban childhood #3

I MUST get blogging again.  I must!  I must!  At last I've given myself a whole week completely away from work and routine to allow myself a recharge, and d'you know what? I think the writing cogs are just about starting to whirr again.  It may take me a while to get back to more frequent posting but I could try by revisiting some of the many mini-series I've had on the go here at one time or another.  At least that way there are old themes I can work with,  e.g. this one....

So yes, it’s on days like this that a certain "semi bohemian suburban childhood" memory comes to the fore.  Summer rain is pouring down as I type, distant thunder reverberates, and I suddenly find myself thinking about tortoises…

We were a family with animals.  As well as two tortoises we had cats, goldfish in the bathroom, a pond full of frogs and newts, a bat (albeit a dead one, but pickled in a jar following an unfortunate window incident) and a tankful of African aquatic toads (alive and well on a diet of earthworms) in my sister’s bedroom.  Let's not forget the guinea pigs nor, in the dark recesses of the larder, a house spider called Fred.  Of course Fred was not so much a pet as a squatter, perhaps several different squatters, but welcome anyway.  Occasionally we looked after the odd stray cat, and once fostered ducklings in an old metal bathtub.

But the tortoises… well, Twinkle and Toby roamed free in our long, hillside garden during the Summer months.  They were natural weedkillers, munching their way through the dandelions, and making the most of the shade cast by my mum’s small stone sculptures when the sun beat down on a clover and daisy-studded lawn.  And this is where I recall the rain and the storms, on humid holiday afternoons, when I rushed out to rescue the tortoises from the downpours and…   well, it was never as easy as it sounds.

I’d search everywhere.  I’d call their names.  Toby knew his (honestly!) and would often come when he heard it, suddenly appearing from within a flower bed with more haste than you might think possible, knowing that his reward would be a lovely sticky banana… and who doesn’t like a lovely sticky banana?   But on rainy, stormy days they were nowhere to be seen. 

The bedraggled cats would come into the kitchen and get pampered with a towel dry.  The guinea pigs would be safe in their hutch and the frogs and newts no doubt enjoyed the jacuzzi-like qualities of their rain-splashed pool.  But where on earth had the tortoises gone?

I would go on a desperate mission to find them.  Sift through the compost heap, check behind the stones in the rockery, peer through the screen of bamboo shoots… Then came the lengthy process of inspecting every single plant and flower – and there were a lot -  until finally I would be relieved to glimpse the back-end of a hard, shiny shell concealed in the undergrowth.   The tortoises had always burrowed face-first into the earth beneath something with thick stems and tight leaves, beautifully camouflaged like pebbles in the bedding.  Safe, asleep, oblivious to the weather and, unlike me, completely dry - of course.

So, the rain pours down and what am I doing, thinking back to around 50 years ago?  The only things with shells in my much smaller, flatter garden are the snails, and I rather miss having tortoises - but it’s funny how vivid the memories can be, prompted merely by the weather.  Time for a banana.

The Vagrants: Sunny Summer Rain

Through the past comically

I was given an unexpected early birthday present last week.  It had been tied up in a gold ribbon and tucked away in a corner in the local charity shop.  Honestly, when Mr SDS pulled it out of the tatty recycled Sainsbury’s bag and I laid eyes on its crumpled edges and yellow age spots (it happens to the best of us)… well, the neighbours would have been within their rights to complain about the noise.

Oohh! Ahh!

That was just at first sight.  Once I’d snipped off the ribbon and excitedly delved into the contents, things just got better and better.

See if you agree...

It was a bundle of familiar children's comics from the late '60s.

As if it wasn't about as good as it gets to include my favourite Pogles, there were The Herbs too...

...and things just carried on getting better with every turn of every page...  Oh Bizzy Lizzy, I wanted to be you.

Better and better!  I was in love with Joe.  I've only ever met one other person who remembers him, though.  Fab illustrations.  Ooh!

Ooh ahh...

Ahh!

And then there's this...  But, aged six, I liked him so much, he was an artist and an animal lover and he could have taught me to swim, I wanted him to be my Dad.  I know, I know.

Let's get back to real heroes!

The first singles you ever loved

It was just a little box of second-hand singles, but I reckon that’s where it all began, the moment that music took on a lifelong meaning.  I can’t even recall quite how they came into our possession - something to do with my teenage sister; she’d either bought them for a few pence, been given them or swapped them, I think.  But I do remember that there was much excitement about their addition to the family’s music collection.

I would’ve been about 8 or 9 I think.  My personal record collection at that point comprised a 7” EP of children’s songs on yellow vinyl (‘How Much Is That Doggy In The Window’ being my fave track), some Pinky & Perky, something from the Nutcracker Suite, and a concerto by Handel, or was it Mozart, on 45 in a shiny picture sleeve.  I wasn’t able to discern between Pinky & Perky and Mozart - but how free you are at that age, totally lacking any self-consciousness about genre; as far as I was concerned each had their own merits.

Downstairs in the very modern Danish style G Plan cabinet where the hi-fi, books and my mum's pottery were housed there were a few other records, but nothing that was of much interest to me: some jazz, opera and classical, one or two Reader’s Digest freebie flexi-discs, Glen Miller I think.   So this box of singles made quite a statement; they were pop records.

Childhood memories are funny – the things that can seem quite unremarkable to an adult can be so vibrantly sensual to a child and imbued with the most vivid associations and feelings.  Those old singles do just that to me.  I can clearly remember the ones I really liked, their B-sides too.  They were about more than just the tunes, they were about the weight and the shine of the vinyl, the touch of the creased paper sleeves, and about the room and the rugs and the cats and the curtains.   Their labels are indelibly imprinted in my psyche too - the colours, the logos, the type style.  My mind drifts now to the way this is so perfectly expressed in the words to 'Over The Border' by St Etienne: 

 “…. green and yellow harvests, pink pies, silver bells…”   

We know what they mean!

In this particular box the pies/Pyes were blue, and a faithful terrier listening to an old wind-up  gramophone was silver on black.

Within this small collection was one of my favourite songs of all-time – one of my bestest, most favouritest songs ever ever in fact - so it deserves a post of its own some day but I can’t write about the rest without mentioning it here.  I was totally hooked on this song and still am.  I could play it over and over and never tire of it (and I did, probably driving my parents and sister mad). I wonder what it is that makes it so special and enduring, and what was it about it that appealed to me so much, even as a child?

The Kinks: Days
(eternal perfection)

But the others in the box all had their own unique appeal, here's what they were:

I loved the catchy soulfulness of ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’ by the Foundations and was intrigued, and slightly unnerved by its contrasting B Side, ‘New Direction’ - a strangely doomy, jazzy/psychy number.

The Foundations: New Direction

'Do Wah Diddy Diddy' by Manfred Mann had obvious singalong appeal to a child of my age.  ‘What You Gonna Do?’ on the B-side was far less commercial – a classic example of raw ‘60s R’n’B.

Manfred Mann: What You Gonna Do?

'I’ll Be There' by the  Jackson Five - well,  a little later I had some pictures of the Jackson Five on my wall (next to the Osmonds), of course I liked it!

'Love Child' by Diana Ross & The Supremes - a song I still hear in my head with pops and crackles.  What a fine example of classy soul, not that I would have understood that word then.  

There were a couple of singles I was less keen on, one of them was '(If Paradise Is) Half As Nice' by  Amen Corner – I didn’t like the voice, I still don't.

And then there was also 'I Can’t Let Maggie Go' by the Honeybus – famous for its use in the Nimble advert and anyone as old as me will remember the girl in the balloon who "flew like a bird in the sky".  However, I much preferred the fabulous B side, ‘Tender Are The Ashes’ and I still really love this song with its uptempo groovy Northern Soul vibe.

The Honeybus: Tender Are The Ashes

Finally there was a record that always sounded a bit more grown-up to me.  I think it was because of the harmonica combined with the fact that it was an instrumental - it was 'Groovin’ With Mr Bloe' by Mr Bloe.  You know it, of course you do!

I don’t know what happened to them in the end - they weren't mine! -  but I continued to dig them out and play them in the interim years and even after I started buying my own brand new singles.  By the time Abba, then Buzzcocks, etc. each arrived on the scene for me, records from the previous 10 years seemed bloody ancient.  But there was something about this small selection that made them immune to my teenage prejudice against the past and all things out-of-date. The feelings, those first far-reaching feelings, endured.  I think it must simply be because that’s where my love of music all began.

How about you?

Pinky & Perky
(and a very scary duck)

Shout out to my unsung heroes #1

Late afternoon, high Summer, sunshine, warm water.   I was elated; I had just managed to propel myself across from one end to the other – only the shortest distance, but still -  my first width! With no armbands!

Do you remember that feeling when you learned to swim?  The moment of transition, I mean. Much like learning to ride a bike - the first time you manage it unaided comes as a big surprise.  There’s a sense of disbelief.  In your head:  Are you sure no-one's pushing me?  Are you sure there’s nobody helping? 

And then, it sinks in: there’s no turning back, you won’t lose it, you’ve got the knack, you’ve got it!  and you’re away.  There are still things to learn, but the biggest block of all – the lack of confidence to try – has been conquered.

Mine happened in Mrs E’s back garden.  There was a small group of us, we were about nine or ten years old.   The school trips to the local indoor pool had been awful for us.  We were the inferiors in this scenario; we couldn’t join the main activities because we hadn’t yet learned to swim.  So the teacher cordoned us off in a tiny secton of the shallow end, gave us armbands and (pretty useless) polystyrene floats, shouted out a few instructions which made us feel worse (it wasn’t instructions we needed, it was understanding) and treated us as a major inconvenience to their proceedings.  Fellow classmates dived and jumped in at the deep end and we just tiptoed about nervously, never daring to venture beyond where our feet could touch the floor, not believing our clumsy little bodies were ever designed to float.    I already hated Rounders, I dreaded Sports Day and now Swimming was another thing I couldn't do properly.  You know, it still irks me today that my school experience in general (both primary and secondary) didn’t place as much value in the ability to draw pictures as it did in running or hitting a ball.  How different things might have felt if it had.

However, Mrs E came to the rescue, and here I am writing about her because I started thinking about the unsung heroes in my life – nothing grand or dramatic, nobody saved me from sinking in quicksand or from falling down a well, but there are people I think of whose inspiration in one form or other made a huge personal difference.

She had this little pool in her back garden and had come to some arrangement with my school to start teaching the non-swimmers in small private groups each week.   No more trips to the local indoor baths with their stench of chlorine and fiddly lockers.  That Summer in her garden she nurtured my confidence with great patience, kindness and individual attention, until after a number of lessons everything just fell into place.  I'll never forget that moment, just as I'll never forget the cycling one either.  Anyway, it was just something she did and enjoyed, and once I’d learned there was no need to go back and I was off to secondary school and I hardly ever saw her again, nor had much reason to think of her.  But all these years on I realise what a simple difference she made - not that I do a lot of swimming these days but the point is:  I know I can.  Any time I’ve ever lowered myself into a pool, fooled around in a lake, or let the salty waves of the sea support me as they rise and fall and tangle seaweed round my feet, I  should thank Mrs E for teaching me to trust in myself.

Wire: Our Swimmer

The long hot Summers of childhood

It wasn’t just that one of 1976, I’m sure.  Perhaps we’re programmed to only remember sunny Summer days and the things we did on them, because I swear that all my childhood years were absolutely full of them.  No dull, rainy July mornings linger in my memory at all.

Instead the memories are characterised by the feeling of hot black tarmac under my bare feet when I ventured out onto the quiet bit of cul-de-sac out the front without my flipflops - footwear abandoned because the soles had already cracked and split like wafers.  Hard gritty lumps of road stuck to my naked heels like chocolate chips in cookie dough, is there something masochistic about that I wonder, a tactile pleasure bordering on pain? - and I loved the smell;  how do you describe the smell of hot tar?  Kind of oily, burnt-toasty, strangely satisfying.

We sucked on Ice Pops that melted so quickly you could drink the last few mouthfuls: undiluted fruity syrup so deliciously intense in flavour it almost made you wince.

There was the Summer gang - 1973 or ’74 perhaps.  Jill, Liz, Richard and me, rolling down grass hills, riding our bikes over home-made ramps of splintery planks, jarring our wrists on landing and carrying on regardless.  Bouncing psychedelic Super Balls against the back of the houses for as long as we could keep it up.  Thud thud thud; wall ground hand, over and over and over, getting the trajectory just right so you barely had to move.  I loved my Super Ball, me.

We didn’t want John to join our gang of Nerds-cum-Secret Agents.  We weren't sporty or tough in the least, we were normally pale, bookish children, but Summer meant being outdoors and uncharacteristically physical.  Liz's kid brother was too babyish, so we set a really hard initiation test.  It was dangerous, you had to jump off the high wall and land on Jill’s concrete patio, do some high-kick 'French Skipping' moves, other stuff too that we figured would test the limits of endurance for an average 9 year old.  All in a set order as well, ten or maybe twelve tricky manoeuvres which had to be remembered and successfully completed to join.  One of them might have been a spelling test - we were the kids who'd had first editions of Watership Down after all.  We met in Liz’s dad’s garage, sitting on old paint cans with dented lids or the faded deckchair sticky with abandoned spiderwebs and their previous inhabitants' dismembered legs.  It felt important and secret, even though we didn’t really have a clue what to do….  apart from setting difficult initiation tests for future members who didn’t exist.

John didn't get in, by the way.  We may have engineered that slightly.

It’s 32 degrees here today, I believe.  Just like it was every single day of every single school Summer holiday, the ones in the ‘70s that lasted for years and years.

Growing up fast

I mentioned in my last post how "it felt like I’d grown up fast" the night I first went to a gig without my friends.   I also mentioned that I had quite liberal parents, who had no issues with me seeing bands and getting into punk in my early teens.  I suspect they also knew that the smell of Polo mints on my breath whenever they picked me up from a night out was only there to hide the whiff of cigarettes and alcohol, but they never said anything.  So it was all pretty good, back in ’78 and ’79, and I have such fond, vivid memories of those exciting and undoubtedly pivotal years. 

Things changed just a couple of years later when my parents’ marriage finally fell apart.

It had been on its last legs for a long while, to be honest.  I’ve made no secret of it: my mum suffered from clinical depression throughout her adult life and had had some pretty horrendous episodes.  At the same time, she and my dad were becoming increasingly incompatible; the two things were somewhat intertwined.  To cut a long story short, my father left home when I was 17, after a weird and painful break-up.  He's never shown any interest in me or my life in all the years since, which feels more shitty now in retrospect than it did at the start,  but that's another story.  Going back to when they split, I witnessed a lot of shouting, tears, and even some broken crockery.  Oh and mum playing David Bowie’s ‘Aladdin Sane’ album in the early hours (I couldn’t fault her taste there – a great album - but I can’t disassociate it from that period!)

Anyway, when my father finally left, my older sister had just moved out too, and so there was a really odd and uncomfortable period in my life when it was just me and my mum living at home, and my mum was suffering from depression.  She'd been hospitalised for it before so I was familiar with the scenario.  Sometimes she would spend days on end in bed, and I’d have to go and get her prescriptions and take care of her, which - being a snotty, self-obsessed teenager - I resented.  It's kind of what makes you resilient, though - natural teenage selfishness!   At other times she’d be up and about but behaving strangely – her actions could be a bit over-the-top or misjudged.   Not that it was always easy then for me to discern between what was strange and what was normal, because she was my mother – she was all I knew.  However, I realise that this is the reason why I sometimes still feel a certain discomfort if life around me gets a bit chaotic, and why I also feel the need to steer clear of anyone or any situation which might be toxic in some way. Do you know what I mean?  Some people seem to get off on all that in a weird way, but there are so many toxic people - toxic relationships - that can bleed into your psyche if you let them.   I just can’t go there, I need to protect myself .  One whiff of toxicity (it’s just like that smell of Polo mints masking cigarettes and alcohol) and I’m out.

But at the same time, something very positive came out of it, because I learned that I simply couldn’t depend on either parent at that time and thus, ultimately, I only have myself.  It sounds harsh but it was as if there was no role model I could really lean on mentally because one was absent and the other could be a bit doolally.   It felt as if there was no big, strong, 100% reliable, parent figure who could make everything alright.  Whilst leaving me feeling a little cast adrift -  unsafe, even - it also quickly instilled in me a very deep and strong sense of self-reliance, self-sufficiency.   I'm a big believer in the notion that we all need to take responsibility for ourselves and our lives, so much so that it irks me when other people don't.   I read somewhere recently that this often happens when the parents of teenagers divorce (which may be a different effect to that on those who are very young); their children quickly learn to develop their independence.

People have far worse situations to deal with when growing up so I've nothing to complain about, but the way our experiences shape us is something that fascinates me and I'm interested in the psychology of why we develop the way we do, and where some of our attitudes and characteristics come from.  I'm pretty sure the way I feel about self-reliance is as a result of my odd home life in those teenage years, and it developed in me an innate determination to achieve my personal goals and not to expect nor depend on help. Maybe it’s no bad thing sometimes to have to grow up a little fast.

A lighter post to follow next time!

Snow cake

With the yellow cake tin in one hand and my satchel on my shoulder I headed off to school with my friend in the morning snow.  It was a one and a half mile walk, down the hill, past the petrol station and the grocery shop where, in Summer on the way home, we’d buy Dalek ice lollies or Sherbet Dips.  The route took us through the outskirts of town until we got to the steep steps by the railway station. That was the mental ‘Nearly There’ signpost.   Next over the zebra crossing and finally the long, uphill avenue, joining fellow pupils straggling along in groups, like small flocks of sparrows in our drab beige and brown uniforms.

The yellow cake tin came with me for ‘Home Economics’ class.  We were going to be making a Victoria Sandwich.  Caster sugar, flour and margarine had been carefully measured out the night before and packed into the tin in plastic containers, alongside two large, loose white eggs.

We were quite stoical ‘70s children, perhaps because we had quite stoical parents who’d lived through the war and had eaten cakes made with grated potatoes and sand during the rationing.  I might be wrong about the sand.  Anyway - stoical - it’s just a bit of snow, maybe some ice, you walk to school as usual.   When you get to your classroom you thaw out against a radiator before Assembly, until a teacher tells you you’ll get piles if you stay there too long.  Whatever piles are.

But we skidded as we walked through town, landing on our bums and hands. Satchel straps slipped awkwardly off shoulders and my yellow cake tin landed and overturned on the frozen white pavement as I  tried to right myself.  Twice in succession my friend, my tin and I fell like skittles on the ice.

Oh - my eggs!  As I rubbed snow off my coat I had visions of a Victoria Sandwich making itself messily inside the tin.

Round the corner by the railway station, I slipped again.  Those eggs were never going to survive, but at least the steep steps were gritted and we were Nearly There.

We got to school and leaned on the radiator, getting the hotsies in our hands - the best bit about getting cold was that intense tingling when you warmed up; it was almost worth leaving your gloves off for.  I opened my yellow cake tin to find, inevitably, the two large eggs smashed to pieces, their sticky gloopy contents covering everything else inside....

........Only they weren’t!  Not even a hairline crack.  Dropped several times, they survived every skid and fall and thud.  What were the chances?

The Victoria Sandwich turned out nicely.  As with the snow, it only lasted two days, unlike the bruises on my bum.

One last reminder of the snow (I love this song and video) - it's thawing here now

The Study

In the house where I grew up my dad spent most of his free time in a room we called ‘The Study’.  If that sounds terribly middle-class, it must be because it was.  It was a spare bedroom really, but it had the airing cupboard in it -  and the central heating pipes and pumps  held noisy parties inside it every night, so you wouldn’t want to sleep there.

I’m wondering now if the room ever got vacuumed or dusted; it wasn’t easy to navigate. It was shelved from floor to ceiling on two sides and in the middle there was a 1950s kitchen table, with blue formica top and metal legs, not that you could tell.  Just like the other makeshift cupboards around the room, its surface was buried under ‘stuff’.   

By stuff I mean….well, for example, every single periodical that my dad had ever bought since 1959.  I can’t be certain but they had names like Practical Oscillator and Illustrated Semiconductor.  The sort with pictures of nude wires and semi-clad magnetic tape on their covers. 

Then there were

 bent coathangers (could come in handy one day)

a collection of used milk bottle tops (could come in handy one day)

dismantled plugs (could come in…. etc. etc. - I’m boring myself) 

ball valves, soldering irons, a lovely black and gold Singer sewing machine, a beer-making kit, a hostess trolley and a manual typewriter missing the E key.  

Empty chocolate boxes, the inner workings of old biros, a kettle without a lid.

Shall I carry on? 

A home-made – home-made!  by my dad! -  ‘tumbler’ device for polishing pebbles  - which was endlessly whirring, rotating and clattering like a washing machine full of stones (which it basically was)  yet not one pebble came out shiny, ever.   Why did people want shiny pebbles in the ‘70s anyway?  Just to be displayed in saucers on windowsills?

Broken radios, unidentified amplifying objects, spent matches, dried up Polyfilla, ping pong bats…. 

The irony is that I don’t think anything in that room ever actually came in useful apart from the noisy airing cupboard, and my lasting memory of its true worth was that it was where my mum once put a very weak newborn guinea pig  to keep it warm, wrapped in a towel in a box.  I came home from school to find this, much to my delight.  She (the baby guinea pig) happily survived and went on to live with us for several years, in a hutch in the shed.  Which is really where all the other above stuff should have been kept all along.

All I want for Christmas (aged four and a half)

I've been so excited about meeting him all day and now I'm with Father Christmas he doesn't seem very nice.  We've had to wait ages and Mummy had to ask a lady but now we're in his special room, behind a curtain where everything is bright red in a very big shop with stairs and everything, and he has a very loud voice.

"Have you been a good little girl?" he asks.  I nod, my eyes wide.  "Because only very good children get presents," he says.  I nod again.

"Well then, as you've been good - tell me, what do you want for Christmas?"

I look over at Mummy who is sitting in the corner in her fuzzy brown coat with the big buttons.  She smiles and I feel a bit less shy.  I do know what I want for Christmas and so does Mummy.  "Go on," she urges softly.

All I want for Christmas is.... big breath....

"A clockwork train set," I say quietly.

And this is why Father Christmas isn't very nice because he doesn't smile back, or laugh, or do anything that makes me believe he really is the best and that he is magic and loves children.  Instead he frowns and makes a funny hmmphing sound and I can smell his beard as he leans towards me.  "But little girls don't have train sets!" he says in his too loud voice.  He's not like I thought he would be and I think he's telling me off.  "That's a very funny thing for you to want.  Little boys have train sets, not little girls," he adds, as he reaches for one of the wrapped presents on the shelf by his side that is full of boxes of all shapes and sizes, although none of them are very big.  No train sets.

When we get home Mummy says I can open the present because it's not the real one - the real one will be inside my pillowcase at the end of the bed on Christmas Day.  The present from Father Christmas with the smelly beard is a Snakes and Ladders board.  I like it very much but I really hope a different, better Father Christmas - the proper one who comes down through the roof and magically gets in by the gas fire - will bring me the thing I truly want.

So there are two Father Christmases it seems.  There's the one who lives inside a shop and makes me feel like I must've been naughty because I asked for a train.  And there's the other one who I never see who fills the stripey pillowcase on Christmas Eve with presents which I don't know how he gets because the pretty tags on them say they are from Mummy and Daddy and my sister and Nanny and Granddad and other people too.  But I suppose he is like a postman really.  And this Father Christmas brings me the best Christmas present ever.  Much better than Snakes and Ladders.  It's clockwork with a big key in the side which twirls round and it has lots of wheels and carriages, some with little windows and a wagon for carrying coal, also Lego, and it goes round and round on a track that you clip together.

When I grow up I'll look back and realise that meeting Father Christmas was probably the start of my feminist tendencies.  A bloody sexist Santa!

Reading matter

Books and toilets.  Do they go together?

I’m kind of thinking they do, judging by the amount of books I get to half-read while other parts of my body do different things.  If it’s not too much information, it’s through having a healthy digestive system that lately I’ve managed to cover whole chunks of the Morrissey Autobiography,  Bill Bryson’s ‘Little Dribbling’ and ‘Going To Sea In A Sieve’ by Danny Baker.  All out of sequence, though – ends before beginnings, forewords halfway through and simultaneous middle chapters – I’ll never be able to enter Mastermind with any of the above as a chosen specialist subject because I’d get all muddled up.  Fortunately Mastermind isn’t on my bucket list but I still fantasise about specialist subjects – don’t we all?  Anyway, like a disjointed dream, somewhere in the back of my mind Bill Bryson and Morrissey have morphed into one and are travelling around Britain writing a fanzine.  

Our books tend to migrate to the bathroom (where our only toilet is) in almost ghostly ways. I’m not sure quite how they end up there, on the windowsill, on the little wobbly stool or tucked in among the towels – some books that I hardly remember even owning in the first place.  I thought we’d got rid of the Doctor Who hardback ages ago; I’d forgotten all about Kraals and Mechonoids - now I’m up to speed.   

So visiting our loo is like visiting a library with random shuffle.  One week The Doctor, next week The Haynes Manual for the Fender Stratocaster.  That one didn’t hold my interest so much but for a while Mr SDS could regularly leave the smallest room with some new nugget of info about the floating tremolo or whatever.   I’m afraid I could only give a Gallic shrug in response, still, at least he was happy.

Anyway, I wonder how widespread the books and toilet combo is.  I grew up in a house full of books, although they weren’t upstairs in the bathroom where the pink suite was grounded by deep purple carpet tiles - deep purple! -  carpet tiles! - and we had goldfish to entertain us instead.   (The goldfish must’ve found us entertaining too - what a view they had from their thigh-level tank at the end of the bath.)  However, the downstairs loo (or 'cloakroom' as it was politely called)  - little more than a cupboard really - provided plenty of light reading including this:

and this:

and sometimes my Mum's John Noble mail order catalogue.  

That was a little too heavy and floppy to handle easily, especially when otherwise occupied, but my Mum’s logic could be questionable at the best of times.  (She once cast a replica of my Dad’s head in bronze,  actual size and complete with his short-lived beard, and displayed it on the sideboard.  All I can say is thank god it wasn't in the loo).

Not my Dad's head

When clearing out my Aunt and Uncle’s house last year I was happy just to browse the spines of the old paperbacks on their own designated shelf in the loo – poetry books, classics, Penguins – the tiny room had become a place of learning and escape, a tranquil retreat, even if the seating choice was limited. It was nice to think of them being avid loo-readers, and she a retired GP too.  Which leads me to wondering if there is ever a question of hygiene?  According to the Director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, there is what you might call a ‘theoretical’  risk but it’s not very big -  just don’t forget to wash your hands.  And so I've concluded: yes, it’s okay to read books in the loo. 

 But probably not okay to take a dump in the library.

Cheese and biscuits

There was this kitchen cupboard where my mum kept the biscuits.  I can picture it now, and opening it up to get to the old tins she kept for storing them in.  A particular lovely tin was the Cadbury’s Lucky Numbers one, and another was labelled Peek Freans (who used to make the Playbox selection, those classic biscuits which made your tongue sore through the customary licking-off of icing).  The Lucky Numbers container later became home for the collection of Betta Bilda blocks my sister and I played with (for some reason we never got into Lego, we just used to make lots of open plan white brick houses with green roofs, perfect in the ’60s and ‘70s).  Anyway,  I had so much love for those tins, more than they warranted really.   They were special, symbolic even - of the whiff of pink wafers and chocolate digestives, of biscuits which shouldn’t have been stored together (gingernuts and jammy dodgers, anyone?) whose flavours and smells rubbed off on one another due to the cross-contamination in space-saving storage solutions.  

 There was one other tin in the cupboard which preoccupied me, but for something other than its contents.  Barmouths or Gipsy Creams, Jaffa Cakes or even Betta Bilda - it wouldn’t have mattered, it was the picture on the side which captivated.  I think we'd been given this as a present originally, and that it was foreign; I remember the picture being of a woman holding a container and - this was the wondrous and fascinating thing about it – the tin that she was holding was also the one I was looking at!  And it was obvious that the woman shown on the tin that the woman on the tin was holding, was also holding a tin showing a woman holding a tin showing…… yes, one of those.   Although I couldn’t see it, I knew it went on forever - forever into infinity, too tiny to pick out with the human eye – but the thought alone just boggled my mind.  A bit like if you’ve ever thought too deeply about the vastness of the universe and you start to feel weird and dizzy and have to think about something mundane like hard boiled eggs instead -  in fact I have to stop myself going there now.

(Eggs, think about eggs!)

Anyway, this image fascinated me so much, I asked my big sister, who knew about mysterious things like formaldehyde and quicksand, what it might be called.  Was there a name for such a thing, a picture within a picture within a picture?  She didn’t know.  So, after much thought we made up our very own special word for it, and felt very chuffed.  I wish I could remember the word we decided on, I’m sure it was something that sounded suitably grown-up, like pictomath or propagraph – something sort of technical.

I hadn’t thought about this in ages, and then I just happened to fancy some cheese spread today, went to the fridge and took out the little box of Laughing Cow triangles when I noticed something that had simply passed me by until now – that the Laughing Cow is wearing a rather fancy pair of earrings...

Look closely at those earrings and what do you see?  Laughing cows wearing laughing cows wearing laughing cows wearing....

(Eggs!  Think about eggs!) 

Wish I could remember that made-up word!  A parapod?  A hypertype?

I've had to go and look it up of course… turns out there isn't one distinct technical word for the picture within a picture (or what's described as a ‘recursive’ image, I discovered) but the principle itself is called the Droste Effect.  What’s that all about?  Well, apparently it was named after the Dutch chocolate company Droste, who made a tin with a picture of a woman holding a tin with a picture of (etc. etc).   The very same picture as the one that was on the tin that was in the cupboard where my mum kept the biscuits.

Notes from a semi bohemian suburban childhood #2

I've mentioned my small local venue 'Triad' before - it was where I attended my first ever gig in January 1978: Siouxsie & the Banshees.  For a while this really was the place to hang out locally if you were into music, particularly punk.  I saw dozens of bands there in the space of a couple of years, sometimes two or three times a week; it was also where my sister's ears nearly bled after she'd had the pleasure of a Motorhead set; where I first met Mr SDS, and where his band cut their teeth.  It was the regular haunt of the Newtown Neurotics; I watched Wayne County there before he became Jayne, Adam & the Ants pre-Dirk Wears White Sox, plus the Passions, Crass, the Jolt, UK Subs, the Automatics, Purple Hearts, Disco Zombies, ... mod bands, heavy metal bands, crappy bands, bands with one-legged singers, many many bands.  I feel very lucky.

It was also where I saw my first full frontal male nude.  Perhaps I should explain...

Prior to it being primarily a music venue, it was an Arts Centre, started up in the early '70s.  My mum was a keen supporter so, long before I was going there as a teenage ligger getting tipsy on cider, I was exposed to its cultural delights in the form of poetry readings, puppet shows, sitar performances, macramé exhibitions, yoghurt-knitting contests, that kind of thing.

When was it, some time in the mid-70s, about 1973/'74?  Children's TV programme 'Vision On' was compulsive viewing after school, oh how I loved Tony Hart (he'd have been one of my 'fantasy dads') and Pat Keysell seemed really kind. The Burbles... the Prof ... and then, do you remember there was also a very bendy, beardy man who only appeared on there for a short while?  I liked him. I just looked his name up: Ben Benison.  (Bendy, beardy Ben Benison, I won't forget that now)  Always dressed in black - ring any bells?  Anyway, Mum came home with tickets for an event being held one evening at 'Triad' and the blurb said that the small improvisational theatre group who'd be performing included Ben Benison from 'Vision On'.  Ooh, I was very excited at the thought of seeing him in the flesh.  We had front row seats too!

Now I can't remember that much about the show in general but yes it was all about improvisation and it was packed with an appreciative audience which was mostly adults but included several kids like me (no doubt also fans of  the 'Vision On' Gallery, animated plasticine and bendy men).  All was going so well, until those wacky thespians on stage asked the audience to suggest some themes around which to develop an improvised comedy piece, and someone called out,

"A desert island!"

Ok, so whose bright idea was it to take all their clothes off  in the rather questionable character of an 'uncivilised desert island native'?  Actually, no, it wasn't Ben Benison.  But it was one of the other actors, and he came right out onto that stage in the nude without even some well-placed genital cupping.

Right out onto that stage, and right in front of me.

As a naive young girl I actually found myself, well, so embarrassed that I couldn't move my head, which meant I couldn't look away.  It was like I was paralysed, staring straight at a man who was completely naked and fully grown (no, not that kind of fully grown, but still...) and seeing things I hadn't seen before.

This is the point in the story where I'd like you to imagine an eerie whistling sound, like the wind on the moors, and a ball of tumbleweed rolling past....

Awkward silence.  Or maybe a few choked coughs.  And a few families hurriedly getting out of their seats and leaving (although for some reason not mine).  The show finished soon after...

...but what has been seen cannot be unseen.

As you might imagine, there was some furore afterwards and I vaguely remember my mum telling her friends and there being a lot of angry letters in the local newspaper, there may even have been calls to get the venue closed down.  Would it create more? - or less? - or the same amount? - of controversy now, I wonder? It was just a naked man, nothing sexual, but these lines are so blurred.

Still, I'm so glad that the venue stayed open, as my life would not have been the same without it once all the bands came to play there (fully clothed).

Notes from a semi bohemian suburban childhood #1

I didn't like it.  Perhaps as a younger child it felt slightly threatening, having to share my space with a stranger and, more to the point, having to share my mum with one too.  Car doors would open and after a brief exchange a heavy-looking haversack (and sometimes dirty boots, plastic bags, cardboard signs with 'Wigan' or 'M1' written on them in marker pen) would be loaded onto the back seat beside me.  Then we made the next leg of whatever journey we were undertaking in Mum's green and white Triumph Herald with a new passenger on board.   For however many minutes and miles required, the attention would be focused on them - more often than not a young man, occasionally a young woman too - whose back of the head was all I could see, until we dropped them off at a junction or a lay-by some way closer to their final destination.  Mum could rarely drive past a hitchhiker without stopping to at least check if she could be of any help.

So, as a child, I didn't like having to give lifts to strangers, but my mum was a warm, gregarious woman who enjoyed engaging with people of diverse backgrounds - especially young people - and as I reflect on this with the benefit of these extra years, I now envy her.  I wish I had her ability to chat with ease to anyone, the same openness of her heart and the generosity of her gestures.

One day, by which time I was a young teenager and my mum now separated from my dad, she came home from a long journey and spoke enthusiastically of a hitchhiker whose company she'd enjoyed for several miles.  It seemed as if a special kind of friendship had been formed even in that short time and in spite of them being disparate characters - she a middle-aged mother and he a young, long-haired hippie type by all accounts, but with the added exotic credentials of being French and also (or so he told her) having some Native American ancestry.  From what I remember her telling my sister and me, it didn't matter that they were ostensibly so different as they talked about philosophy and art, about spiritual and cultural beliefs - deep and stimulating conversation from the sound of it, and as far away from the usual bland small talk as you can get.  Mum was most enamoured of him, her eyes flashing with excitement as she described him and shared his stories and insights with us, just as her passenger had  with her earlier.  "And I told him to come and visit us any time, if he's ever in this area," she concluded.

 "Mum!" my big sister and I exclaimed, in a manner more suited to that of a parent admonishing their child, "You mean you gave him our address?!"  We were not impressed.

"Well, yes of course," she confirmed, unperturbed by our reaction.

This was Mum all over.  Trusting.  Maybe too trusting?  But she had helped out waifs and strays before (and perhaps I'll write about those too in another post); it was just in her nature.

It was about a year or two later I guess, hard to say as the passage of time seems to move at a different speed when you're younger, nevertheless it had been many months after Mum's encounter that I came home from school and she said we had a visitor.  He had turned up out of the blue, having walked some distance through the town (and perhaps the county), carrying a piece of paper with our address on and eventually finding his way to our front door.  And he was welcomed warmly, sleeping on the camp bed in our living room for just one night before continuing on his wanders, the perfect house-guest, grateful, kind and honest, no money went missing, no privacy was breached (mutually!):  a hitchhiking French hippie with Native American ancestry.  It was a sweet, simple reminder of what it is to truly trust a stranger.  Proof, I believe, that most people are good.

And on that cheery note - Happy New Year!

Not mum's actual car

The First Nowell

Well, I couldn't resist one more post for this year...

It's just that we were watching Coronation Street the other night and the subject of Christmas carols came up; the lads at Webster's Autocentre were discussing which was their favourite. “So what's yours?” I asked Mr SDS (turns out his is that melancholy-sounding one O Come O Come Emmanuel) and from thereon we tried to remember the tunes we'd learned as kids and got them all mixed up. I mean, can you tell the difference between Hark The Herald Angels Sing and Once In Royal David's City, or are they the same melody? They seem interchangeable...  But as we mumbled our way through the first bars of Away In A Manger, strong memories were evoked.  These songs have endured since early childhood, learned in my first year at school and forever with me in spite of a lack of religious belief.  I wish I could say they conjured up cosy festive scenes and perhaps the taste of mulled wine, presents round the tree, the smell of woodsmoke – any nostalgic Christmas cliché you care to choose – but my associations are, unfortunately, quite unpleasant. Silent Night, O Little Town of Bethlehem... name any carol... and they evoke just three things (not kings): fluorescent striplights, a nervous knot in my stomach and a big puddle of vomit. And the vomit has pinky-purple chunks in it like diced beetroot, eww!

It was only one night but it sticks. The fluorescent striplights: being inside my primary school after hours in Winter. It was wrong, somehow - wrong to be in the school hall when I'd normally be at home watching Nationwide and Z Cars but it was my first Christmas concert and I had an important role playing my recorder. Being at school during the evening was surreal too: the smell of floor polish, the coolness of the plastic chairs, the big patterned curtains at the side of the assembly hall stage – all so familiar between 9am and 3pm, yet it was as if they took on a different importance and somehow seemed less friendly when exposed under a new night-time role. Harsh lights seemed harsher.

The nervous knot in my stomach: ugh, performing! In front of parents and teachers – an audience! This was major stuff for my nine-year-old self. Major. The sort of thing that would worry me so much I'd have sleepless nights.

I think Ben must've felt the same because, the afternoon of the concert, just before home-time, we were sitting opposite each other in the classroom, only a couple of feet of floor between us, when suddenly –absolutely no warning – he threw up violently and copiously right in front of me. I mean, it landed at my feet. And all I could see (and still can) were those peculiarly coloured lumps of whatever the hell it was. That smell of sick, followed swiftly by the smell of Dettol, lodged itself in my nostrils. Then I had to go home and eat my tea (but I couldn't, because all I could think about was Ben's vomit, such was my trauma), as the nervous knot in my stomach grew larger by the second, before going out again to perform God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen on my recorder to scary grown-ups under harsh fluorescent striplights.

That's what Christmas carols evoke for me (it was a long while before I could eat beetroot again too - and I will never ever dice it.)

Happy Christmas!

In the deserts of Sudan and the gardens of Japan...

I'm not quite sure how it started, but from the age of about nine or ten I had this real 'thing' about people from other countries. I was fascinated – obsessed, even. I loved the way everyone could look so different, with their unusual sounding names and exotic clothes and customs. On my bedroom wall, amid the cut-out sellotaped pictures of kittens and seahorses, was a huge world map I'd been given as a present. I wanted to visit all those faraway lands, see feather head-dresses and funny shaped buildings, and meet people with names like Olayemi and Natsuki.

This advert from 1971 may have had something to do with it.

Originally recorded by the Hillside Singers for the 'Buy The World A Coke' campaign, the New Seekers took their adaptation of it to No 1 in the UK charts later that year...

I had a bit of a crush on Marty Kristian, of course.

...not to be confused with this:

The verse was originally so similar that it led to Oasis being

successfully sued by the New Seekers, reportedly for $500,000

I found national costumes especially interesting and had a favourite book which I loved to look through

and which frequently inspired ideas and drawings of my own

When my Dad came back from European work trips he sometimes gave my sister and me a traditional doll from his travels like this one (although more often than not we just got bars of fancily-wrapped foreign chocolate. I'm not complaining).

I kept them - the dolls, that is, not bars of chocolate - lined up on my window-sill where the bright colours of their dresses quickly faded in the sunlight.

And in true geek style, my interest in the wider world outside my window also extended to stamp-collecting.  Most of the stamps I enthusiastically saved and stuck down on those pages came from the 1970s. Some of these British ones might be familiar, if you remember that far back.

 I rather like these stark looking German ones with their stern Health & Safety warnings.

You may have read elsewhere on this blog that the first album I ever bought was the Clash... but actually, now I come to think of it, it was this one: