Walking in the countryside, when it has purpose and destination, feels like walking in the past. It reminds me Belgium, the country road between Hugo’s, my foreign language exchange partner, and Jean-Pierre’s, a friend’s language exchange. Or the walk along the river from my grandma’s house to my aunt’s smallholding in the village where they lived; and later too, when my aunt moved to a remote farm at the end of a long lane. My grandpa used the same paths to work in the paper mill, two miles there in the morning, two miles back at night. It can’t have been much fun in bad weather. And, when there was no work, it was three miles each way by fields and river bank to the next village to claim the dole, which was every day in the nineteen-thirties. People walked everywhere. No rush. No worry. Sun, wind, rain and birdsong, you got there in the end.
About a month ago, Sue My Quiet Life in Suffolk took her camera on A Walk to the Post Office. The walk to what is currently our nearest Post Office, provided it’s not too muddy, is two-miles of true joy. Last week, we had a parcel to send, so taking a lead from Sue, I took my camera...
across a playing field
up through the woods at the far side
across two fields to the secluded hamlet in the distance, this is the first field
and this is the second – all beginning to look very dry at this time of the year (this was before last week’s rain) – it was much more green and pleasant a few weeks ago before they cut the waist-high grass. Should have brought my camera then.
through the hamlet and along the drive
leaving by steps over the wall to cut diagonally across another field where the grass was also higher until recently
to walk a short way along a country road
which we leave by another stile to cross another field – uh uh! looks like trouble – Jersey calves. They run towards us – I think they want to play human football.
Phew! Not sure whether they are heifers or bullocks. Looking back, they think they have seen us off but with a bit of panicky shouting, clapping and arm waving we got through to where we wanted. That one in the front group on the right came running round from the back like Raheem Sterling
just one more field to cross
then up a steep hill
as we gain height we can take in the views
just a short way to go now along a busy road
and we’re there
Oops. Forgot to take a picture of the ice creams.
Went back by a different path to avoid the bullocks.
I heard shouting in the next street, the same few words repeated about once a minute. I couldn’t make out what they were.
It reminded me of when I was little, when the rag and bone man came round with his horse and cart. I could never make out what his sing-song voice was shouting, either. It sounded like “You owe me half a crown” but it was probably more like “Have you any rags and bones?” His fierce, rough look terrified me. I would hide until he had gone.
You could hear him going up and down the back lanes (or ‘ten-foots’) between the rows of terraced houses where we lived. Eventually he would come along ours where I played. Housewives went to their back gates to give him old pots and pans, buckets with holes in, pram wheels with broken spokes, threadbare kitchen curtains, and, yes, he really did collect bones. Once, his horse deposited a stinking pile of manure just outside our gate. It kept me in for weeks until it bleached pale, crumbled, and was gradually washed away by the rain.
Steptoe and Son
The life of Rag and Bone men was portrayed pretty well in the very popular B.B.C. comedy Steptoe and Son, in which the son’s, Harold’s, pretentious attempts to better himself are constantly thwarted by Albert, his wily father.
As with all successful comedy series, it quickly moved on from stories based on the situation to stories around the relationships between the characters. I particularly remember one 1972 episode, Men of Letters. It opens with them playing Scrabble. Harold wants it to be “… an erudite game calculated to increase one’s word power” but Albert is well in the lead with words like “pox”, “cock” and “bum”. Harold complains they are nothing but filth. “Yes, but they still count, don’t they,” Albert responds.
The shouting from the next street continued into ours. It was indeed some rag and bone men. I haven’t seen any for years. I don’t suppose they collect either rags or bones any more. Good job I hadn’t left my bike out. They drove slowly past in a small truck. No horse! Although, shouting like that all day must make them a little hoarse.
The new ‘Turing’ £50 note brings yet another change to our U.K. currency. There seem to have been so many in recent years.
They used to be rare. When my grandpa gave me this set of Queen Elizabeth II coins in 1953, their denominations and basic appearance had remained more or less unchanged for decades. In theory, some coins in circulation were over two-hundred years old. Their nicknames – tanner, bob, florin – were part of popular culture.
My dad put the Queen Elizabeth coins safe in his black metal box and took them out now and again to let me look. I liked the lady in armour with her fork and shield (“Britannia,” he told me), the elaborate sailing ship (“The Golden Hind”), the different lions of the English and Scottish shillings, and the young Queen on the ‘heads’ sides. The penny and half-crown were biggest, but my favourite was one of the smallest, the tiny farthing with a “robin” on the back [as pointed out in the comments, it is a wren, and a sixty-eight year old misconception].
They were shiny bronze and silver then, but, like me, they have tarnished. Those whose packaging has also failed to preserve them will tell you there were twelve pennies to the shilling and twenty shillings, 240 pennies, to the pound. We can still, in our heads (Weaver?), do things like add 14s 10d to 11s 8d to get £1 6s 6d (i.e. fourteen shillings and ten pence to eleven shillings and eight pence, often written 14/10 and 11/8). It was a great way to bamboozle foreigners.
The only recent change to the coinage had been the introduction of the twelve-sided yellow threepenny bit in 1937 in place of a smaller, round, silver coin that was discontinued in 1945. The last significant change before that had been almost a century earlier with the introduction of the two-shilling piece in 1849. As one-tenth of a pound, it had been created with decimalisation in mind – a rare example of a government planning well ahead.
Since 1953, the only thing not to have changed is the Queen. Changes were slow at first but since then most coins have changed twice. First to go was the farthing which became so insignificant that none were minted after 1956. They were removed from circulation in 1961. The halfpenny (‘aipny as we called it) followed in 1969, and the half-crown in 1970, although that was to prepare for decimalisation in 1971, fifty years ago.
Decimalisation put paid to most of the rest. Pennies (‘d’) were superseded by New Pence (‘p’). One New Pence was worth roughly two and a half old pennies. Five new coins came in (½p, 1p, 5p, 10p and 50p) and the old ones were gradually withdrawn. For six and a half months we used the old and the new side-by-side and became adept at switching between. That’s why we’re mentally nimble. One pound six shillings and sixpence? Easy! £1.32½. Some of the old coins had exact decimal equivalents, the lowest common factor being 6d which was worth 2½p, so provided you used the old coins in sixpenny clusters you were fine.
What came next? It’s nigh impossible to remember but I’m one of those sad people who look things up and make lists.
The old sixpence, shilling and two shilling coins remained in use after decimalisation as 2½p, 5p and 10p coins. In fact, the new 5p and 10p coins were identical in size and weight to their older counterparts and had been introduced in 1968 to get us used to the idea. The sixpence lasted until 1980, and the shilling and two shillings until the early 1990s.
Also in 1968, a seven-sided 50p coin had replaced the paper ‘ten-bob note’.
In 1982, the inscription ‘NEW PENCE’ was changed on all coins to show the denomination, e.g. ‘TEN PENCE’.
A seven-sided 20p coin was introduced 1982 and a round £1 coin in 1983.
The ½p coin was withdrawn in 1984 and the paper £1 note in 1988.
Three of the original decimal coins were replaced by smaller versions: the 5p in 1990, the 10p in 1992, and the 50p in 1997.
A £2 coin was introduced in 1998, the first bi-metallic coin in Britain since the 1692 tin farthing.
The original round £1 coin was replaced by a twelve-sided bi-metallic coin in 2017. It looks like the old threepenny bit and doesn’t seem to buy very much more.
There have also been several changes in the physical size and design of banknotes over these years, most recently between 2016 and 2021 when paper banknotes were replaced by polymer ones which slither and slide restlessly in your pocket and refuse to stay folded.
My grandfather probably thought the 1953 set of Elizabeth II coins would be a good investment. Not so. Even if the packaging had preserved them in mint uncirculated condition, which it hasn’t, despite not being opened in sixty-eight years, you would do well to get back the inflation adjusted equivalent of their face value: £9.50 for 7s 4¾d (seven shillings, four and three farthings).
Anyone would think it just a cynical ploy by the Royal Mint to make money from making money. I hang on to them only because they are things of beauty. They still live in my dad’s black metal box. These too:
1965 set issued on the death of Sir Winston Churchill, including a rarely-used five-shilling coin, the ‘Churchill Crown’. This was the first time an image of anyone other than a monarch had appeared on a British coin, showing the extreme high regard in which Churchill was held.
Another pre-decimalisation Queen Elizabeth II set dated 1966.
Crowns (five-shilling coins) commemorating the 1951 Festival of Britain, the 1953 Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, and the 1981 Royal Wedding of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer. (Obverse ‘heads’ sides above, reverse ‘tails’ sides below).
Bloggers are writers at heart. We paint patterns in words, feel their force and hear their harmonies.
A few have written for a living. At least one I follow, Brian Sibley, is an accomplished author and radio dramatist. He blogs but does not engage in comments. Another, Hameldaemepal, is, I believe, a retired journalist. He comments but does not engage in blogging. Others have enjoyed writing at work, say, as teachers or report writers. I even wrote computer manuals for a time.
Many of us have been writing all our lives. As a child, I tried to write stories and poetry, and intermittently kept an diary (“went trainspotting at monkey bridge”). I wrote a family newspaper to send to cousins (“Loch Ness Monster seen in River Humber”), forms for others to fill in at school (“Enter your name and address to join the Black Hand Gang” – so named because my John Bull Printing Outfit fortuitously contained a pointing hand symbol), and, as we did then, I liked writing letters.
It continued after school. I attended a writers’ workshop in Leeds where one session was led by a tall chap called Harry. I’m not certain but suspect he was Jack Higgins. I should have paid more attention. At work, it was more fun writing spoof newsletters than studying for accountancy exams (“Mr. Hawkwind mugged on way back from bank with firms’ wages for the month of June. Over twenty pounds stolen.”). It got me into some trouble. Then, when I went late to university, there were spoof information sheets on notice boards.
I still have some of the university ones. The first arose out of the way we received assignment marks: through lists pinned up in the Department. Instead of by name, we were identified by anonymous numbers: 1501 62%, 0007 68%, 2486 55%. Number 0007 always did well, and, being a memorable number, everyone noticed. This irritated me somewhat because it was me. Very soon, my marks were public knowledge.
I could not resist retaliating with an imaginary set of results for an assessment of lecturers’ competence (never imagining that some years later such an exercise might take place for real). It went something like: 9507 74%, 8872 65%, 8077 58% … 9037 24%. Underneath it added: “Please would lecturer 9037 report immediately to Head of Department, Professor Brener.”
Never underestimate your readers. Next to the note at the bottom someone had written: “It is Professor Brener”.
I have been playing with colourisation tools. No, not paints and crayons, but software that colours black and white photographs automatically. It uses “artificial intelligence” and “deep learning” through “electronic neural networks” “trained” on millions of colour photographs.
“Wow! Fantastic!” one might say, but having once worked on the periphery of a team of artificial intelligence researchers, I remain sceptical. I used to go from “Wow! Fantastic!” to “Is that all it is?” in the space of a forty-five minute seminar.
Carried out manually, colourisation is a skilled, time-consuming, labour-intensive process. As well as expertise in tools such as Photoshop and a level of colour-sense I simply do not possess, it can also involve historical research to indicate what colours the photographer actually saw. Experts can spend a month on just one picture.
So, it would be wonderful to be able to colour photographs automatically. I found these free resources (it may not be a complete list):
With four of them you upload a black and white photograph to the web site and then download the colourised version. Pixbim is different in that you download and install a trial version on your computer and carry out the colourisation locally.
Are they any good? I tried them out on black and white photographs from earlier blog posts.
Bridlington c1929 - colourised by MyHeritage
Uncle Jimmy’s Bullnose Morris c1929 - colourised by photomyne
Bridlington 1955 - colourised by MyHeritage
Grandma 1963 - colourised by playback.fm
In general, the different tools gave different results and no one was consistently better than the others. I tried to pick the best result in each case but you might have chosen otherwise as I possess a different distribution of cone cells from most people. My choices might be a bit green, or a bit pink, I don’t know, I wouldn’t be able to tell. However, there were some truly awful ones, one of which seems to think I was wearing pissy underpants.
Colourised by Pixbim
Colourised by Algorithmia
Colourised by photomyne
Colourised by Algorithmia
Of course, we do not know what the colours really were, although I do feel fairly confident that the Bullnose Morris was not brandy coloured, and know for a fact that the Pratts petrol can on the running board was spruce green (#2e4a41), which none of them got right.
One test of colour accuracy would be to re-colourise an existing colour image after first reducing it to monochrome. MyHeritage does not seem too bad to me on the Abbey Road cover (I wonder if this was one of the pictures it was trained on), but they all struggled with scenery.
The Beatles Abbey Road (left) recolourised from monochrome by MyHeritage (right)
Spring Polyanthus 2020 (left) recolourised from monochrome by MyHeritage (right)
Glacial deposits in Glen Roy 2020 (left) recolourised from monochrome by Pixbim (right)
Johnson and Trump (left) recolourised from monochrome by Pixbim (right)
It is pretty impressive that black and white photographs can be coloured automatically at all, even though the colours are by no means accurate and not a patch on the original.
Colourisation does seem to add something, particularly depth. Perhaps it works better with cine film, as in Peter Jackson‘s painstakingly restored First World War films (They Shall Not Grow Old) in which the moving faces of young soldiers, poignantly grinning amidst the mud of the trenches, become living people like us.
I am not as sceptical as I was, but find myself thinking that with photographs it is probably better to stick with the original black and
white.
It would be interesting to see your efforts (irrespective of whether you call it colourisation, colourization, colorization or colorisation).
FURTHER NOTES
I usually preferred MyHeritage, photomyne or playback.fm, but some reviews speak highly of Pixbim, possibly because it allows control over the colours (see below).
The colourised photographs are not always the same size as you started with.
There are other limitations too. MyHeritage permits a limited number of free colourisations (I’m not sure what it is, maybe 10, but me, Mickey Mouse and Billy Liar have all used our quotas) before asking for a minimum £50 subscription to its genealogy services. One should also be aware that the uploaded photographs are retained and may be visible to others, but can be deleted.
Pixbim (the one you download and install) allows you to adjust various processing parameters, such as colour intensity and colour temperature (from reddish to blueish), and provides a brush tool for correcting incorrect colours, whereas with all the others you get what you are given. However, the trial version of Pixbim comes with only a 7-day licence after which it costs £40. Also, unless you buy it, the colourised photographs have “Trial Version” printed all over them, but you can get round this using PrintScreen to capture a smaller version of the coloured image.
I also found mention of two other tools: Colourise SG which now appears to have been withdrawn, and Colorize Photo (www.colorizephoto.com) which assists you in carrying out the colourisation yourself, which I have not tried.
An extremely funny memoir, immensely enjoyable, but I had to overcome two obstacles.
The first was that Clive James was very learned. From the off he is throwing in references to far-flung writers like Rilke and Santanyana. At times I had no idea what he was on about. Take page 73, where he describes his first crush:
my obsession was as transforming and exalting as whatever passed through the heart of Augustine Meaulnes in the brief time he spent with Yvonne de Galais
He says the object of his "visione amorosa" remained so vivid that her image outlasted that of the pain of falling into stinging nettles while suffering from ear ache, when “Pelion was piled on Odessa Ossa”.
Does he expect his readers to be well-versed in these things or is he just showing off? I am afraid my knowledge of European poetry, Alain-Fournier and Greek mythology are not up to it. My own cultural references are more humble, such as Tony Hancock’s ‘The Bedsit’ in which he tries to read Bertrand Russell’s ‘Human Knowledge’ but never gets past the first page because he has to keep looking up words in the dictionary. That was so very nearly my own experience here, but with lack of background knowledge rather than vocabulary. Well, you live, you learn, you google. What would I have done in 1980 when it was first published?
The second obstacle was my memory of Clive James’s television persona. Throughout the nineteen-eighties and -nineties he sat behind a desk like a greased potato in a tight blue suit, smirking his unctuous antipodean baritone, leering at the model Elle MacPherson, ridiculing weird Japanese game shows and mocking the heavily-accented Cuban singer Margarita Pracatan. Later, I cringed as he made embarrassingly improper remarks to the host Christine Bleakley on the early evening magazine programme ‘The One Show’. It took quite a few pages to expel these images from mind.
It has been said that there were three Clive James: the accomplished poet and scholar, the television buffoon and the hilarious critic and memoir writer. Gradually, the wit and brilliance of this third Clive James won me over. It is in abundance here, such as at school when he became convinced he had an embarrassingly small penis:
Emerging from the shower with a towel draped casually around me, I had to put on my underpants before I took off the towel, but make it look as if I was taking off the towel before I put on my underpants. The result was a Gypsy Rose Lee routine of extraordinary subtlety. (p94)
Or in making model aeroplanes, not out of Airfix plastic but from parts cut out of sheets of balsa wood with a razor blade that sliced your thumb as readily as it carved the balsa:
If the result was recognizable as an aeroplane, you were an expert. If your thumb was recognisable as a thumb, you were a genius. (p69)
It goes on for page after page covering the misdemeanours of his unruly childhood, his sexual awakenings, his time at Sydney university and his move to England. Perhaps it just caught me in the right mood, but I would rate his account of military service amongst the funniest things I have ever seen in print.
This first of three volumes of memoir was published before he became widely-known. In self-justification he writes:
To wait until reminiscence is justified by achievement might mean to wait for ever.
It is tempting to pinch that as a blog by-line. I hope to read the other two volumes. On that basis it scores 5*, just.
Key
to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful,
4* enjoyed it a lot and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2*
didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.
Another book not picked up since I was a teenager at school, indeed, to be honest, the very same book in which roughness on the inside of the front cover betrays where the school label has been cunningly removed.
I was unable to finish it in those days. I went through several years of not being able to read anything much at all. I would begin earnestly enough but quickly find myself stepping mentally away and thinking good, I am now reading, really reading, which meant that I wasn’t, which is why I am having to catch up with all these books now.
That sounds almost like the kind of thing the protagonist, Holden Caulfield, would say. I can still, just about, identify with him. Holden has been kicked out of boarding school for failing in nearly everything. He wanders aimlessly around New York for a couple of days, avoiding home and parents and trying to pass for older than his sixteen years. He books into a hotel and goes out for drinks. The lift man fixes him up with a prostitute and then beats him up. He sees an old friend and falls out with a girl friend. He nearly freezes to death. Throughout, we hear his constant, drifting thoughts: hating everything, disliking everyone, moaning about all the superficiality and insincerity he sees; the original angst-filled teenager.
The thing he hates most is “phoneys”: the headmaster who will only talk with influential parents; his older brother for cashing in his talent to write for Hollywood; the lawyers in it for the money rather than to help people. Yet the biggest phoney of all is himself. He tells you the one thing he can’t stand is the movies and then a few pages later talks about going to see them. He pretends to like teachers who try to help him. He gets into conversation with the mother of a pupil he dislikes, and lies about what a popular and sensitive boy her son is, the complete opposite of what he really thinks. He then lies to her about why he is not in school:
‘No, everybody’s fine at home,’ I said. ‘It’s me. I have to have this operation.’
‘Oh! I’m so sorry,’ she said. She really was, too. I was right away sorry I’d said it, but it was too late.
‘It isn’t very serious. I have this tiny little tumour on the brain.’
‘Oh, no!’ She put her hand up to her mouth and all.
‘Oh, I’ll be all right and everything! It’s right near the outside. And it’s a very tiny one. They can take it out in about two minutes.’
Then I started reading this time-table I had in my pocket. Just to stop lying. Once I get started, I can go on for hours if I feel like it. No kidding. Hours. (p62)
The only person Holden genuinely respects is his young sister Phoebe, and when he sneaks home to see her she accuses him of liking nothing and of not wanting to be anything. He says the only thing he wants to be is the catcher in the rye:
You know that song “If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye”? … I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye … And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff … That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye. (p179)
which shows how adrift he is. “It’s if a body meet a body,” says Phoebe. “It’s a poem by Robert Burns.”
Many will hate this book and find Holden Caulfield repugnant. I loved both. Holden is real and vivid enough, I imagine, still to ring true with teenagers today. I laughed out loud at some of his overstatements, such as when he meets “... one of those guys that think they’re being a pansy if they don’t break around forty of your fingers when they shake hands with you” (p91). Most of what he tells you is a façade: he is yet another unreliable narrator with a distinctive first-person voice. Beneath the resentment he is intelligent, perceptive and generous: he reads a lot, lends his jacket to a school friend and writes an English essay for him – the one subject he is good at. Only when his sister Phoebe trusts him unreservedly in her readiness to run away do we glimpse hope as he starts to accept responsibility. He catches her from going over the edge of the cliff. Which takes us back to the start of the novel when he is recovering in an institution and telling us “... about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy.”
Only one scene has stayed with me from my attempted reading so long ago, which is when Holden looks out through the darkness from his hotel window into other illuminated, uncurtained rooms to see a couple at play and a man dressing up in women’s clothes. Funny what you remember.
Key
to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful,
4* enjoyed it a lot and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2*
didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.
“You can bowl, Hunt.” Mr. Ellis threw the ball at me, hard, his superior smirk turning into a contemptuous sneer.
He had mistaken me for Dave Hunt. It was easily done, we were both thin and feeble, but to correct him would have gained yet more of his unwanted attention. He was right though: I could bowl, except he didn’t know it yet.
We were in the school cricket nets. Mr. Ellis had decided to demonstrate some batting strokes and for once had invited one of the sport-averse, wimpy weaklings to participate: someone whose ineffectual bowling would be easy to deal with. What he was unaware of was that, coached by the Eagle Annual, I could put quite a spin on the ball.
It might have been an aunt or uncle who bought me Eagle Annual 7 for Christmas in 1958. It was far too ‘old’ for someone who had not been reading long, and the stories, adventure strips, factual articles and activities were mostly beyond me. I just looked at the pictures.
The original disappeared long ago, but I won this scruffy replacement on ebay for little more than the cost of the postage.
And there, on page 98, is ‘The Laker grip’, the drawing that fuelled my imagination all that time ago. It shows a hand with a cricket ball wedged between the first and second fingers, the way Jim Laker held it.
Jim Laker (1922-1986) was a Yorkshireman who played for Surrey and
England, but sadly, never Yorkshire. To cricket statisticians, he is
notable as the first bowler to take all ten wickets in a single test
match innings, playing against the Australians at Old Trafford in 1956.
Jim Laker after taking
19 for 90 in 1956
In that particular match he took nineteen wickets for the loss of only ninety runs, 9 for 37
in the first innings, and 10 for 53 in the second: an incredible
achievement. It says this in the text, although I
don’t remember reading anything of it in the nineteen-fifties. All I remember is the
illustration. It caught my attention because we had recently started playing cricket in the street.
I have a thing about objects in flight. Even now I scare my family by spinning knives in the air and catching them by their handles. The sharper the better, two revolutions rather than one, sometimes three, but never four: last time I tried four I caught the wrong end.
And so it was with a cricket ball. How satisfying to be able to bowl with a spin to make it bounce up at an angle. I practised for hours with a tennis ball, and by some semi-conscious combination of shoulder movement, wrist rotation and finger friction at the point of release I could choose to turn it quite viciously either to the right or to the left. When at a later point someone bought me a proper cricket ball, hard and heavy, with a seam to give traction, you could sometimes hear it buzz when I let it go.
I know nothing of technicalities such as off-spins and leg breaks, and it never occurred to me it might be possible to make a ball curve in flight. We only played across the street, with a lamp post for a wicket and occasional pauses to let the Council lorries go past on their way to and from the depot. After things became all homework and television we stopped playing cricket completely. I don’t think I bowled again until that day a year or so later when Mr. Ellis decided to show off his batting prowess.
It was a beauty. As it left my fingers it whistled clean as the wings of a Pontefract pigeon. It bounced in front of him and jumped aggressively off to the left, just clipping the edge of his bat as he came forward to meet it. Anyone behind in the slips position would have caught him out first ball. Mr. Ellis poked disparagingly at the ground with his bat as if to flatten some non-existent lump or divot, thinking unevenness must have caused the deviation.
He threw the ball at me a second time, a little more thoughtfully than before, and told me to bowl again. This time I turned it to the right and hit Mr. Ellis on the pads. In a real match he would have been out leg before wicket. He looked up almost in admiration.
“Well done, Hunt! Excellent! I wish I could move it like that. I bet you can’t do three in a row.”
So I surprised him with a straight one, as fast and accurate as I could send it, and this time it did seem to catch some irregularity in the ground, causing it to squeeze past his bat into the stumps.
And true to character, when a little bit of assertive self-promotion might have elevated me to the glory of a place in the school cricket team, I kept quiet about not being who Mr. Ellis thought I was, and when the names of the second eleven were revealed for our annual grudge match against Hemsworth, a bemused Dave Hunt was one of the bowlers.
Dad with my brother, Primrose Valley, Filey, around 1957
Filey, like Bridlington, is another Yorkshire seaside resort with a long family association. There are pictures of my dad there with his parents in the nineteen-thirties and then with his own family including me in the nineteen-fifties. Later I took my family in the noughties. We had some good times there, and some not so good ones.
Primrose Valley caravan site 1950s
My earliest memories are of Primrose Valley, the caravan site just south of Filey near the Butlins camp: not the modern fixed caravans there now but the old towable tin boxes with fold-away beds, sickly calor gas, a long walk to fetch water and cell-block toilets. We spent most days on the beach with proper metal buckets and spades, digging and building sand castles with paper flags and sea-water moats.
A fresh-water spring bubbles out of the sand near the cliffs and washes down the beach begging to be dammed before it flows away. No matter how much sand you pile up, the weight of water accumulates until it inevitably breaks through. You have to watch out nobody is sitting on a picnic rug lower down the beach.
And there is Filey Brigg, a long, low neck of sandstone and limestone sticking half a mile out into the sea, covered in shells, fossils and rock-pools. It makes for a breathtaking walk on a warm day at low tide, with gentle waves, seaweed smells and lazy seals, all at one with the enormity of the earth, sea and sky. On other days, at other times, it would be foolish to defy the power of the wind and tide.
On Filey beach with the long, low neck of Filey Brigg piercing the sea to the right
Filey Brigg
On Filey Brigg
At the end of Filey Brigg
We had two family holidays at Filey in the noughties, staying in the rented cottages that nestle in the dunes beyond the caravans. It was a wonderful time: our children, born in my forties, were still under ten. That first year we found the fresh-water spring and dammed it, or tried to, and walked out along the Brigg searching for life in the rock pools. From the cottage windows, through binoculars, we watched the Regal Lady from Scarborough sail by in the evening sun on a coastal cruise.
It was so good we booked again the following year in a different cottage. That was one of the not so good times. We nearly went straight home. It was the most disgusting holiday cottage I’ve ever stayed in.
I still have a copy of the letter we sent to the agent. The cottage had not been cleaned. There were stains and spots of blood on the bed sheets and one of the children’s beds smelled of urine. The drawers and cupboards stank and were filled with the owners’ dirty clothing and other personal items such as half-used bottles of mouthwash. There was very little room for our own things.
In the bathroom there were soiled footmats, hairs around the wash basin, the bath needed cleaning, and the lavatory smelled appalling and had a broken seat. There was a note from the cleaner to say the shower was not working and would be repaired during the week, but it wasn’t. Other things in the cottage were also broken.
In the kitchen was a vase of dead flowers, the bin had not been emptied, there was rotting food in the fridge, a smelly dishcloth on the draining board and a grill pan full of dirty fat that tainted the oven. There were crumbs everywhere.
The sitting room stank of stale cigarette smoke and prominent in the book case were Alex Comfort’s ‘The Joy of Sex’ and other visually explicit sex books, hardly appropriate in a seaside holiday cottage where young children such as ours would be staying. We encouraged our children to read and take an interest in books, but not those at that age.
The cleaner and owners could not be contacted, nor, it being Saturday evening, could the agent. Fortunately we found clean bedding to make the beds usable, did some cleaning ourselves, and survived the week by eating out more than planned.
It took two weeks to get an apology. The cottage had been unbooked the week before ours but someone had been there without booking. It had been cleaned after the previous legitimate occupants, and the cleaner had then gone away on holiday. The owners, a couple from Sheffield, were also on holiday.
We got a refund eventually. The owners sent flowers, which seemed patronising, and offered a further week’s stay for free, but, frankly, at the thought of them enjoying the joy of sex in their pissy underwear, we politely declined.
We have been back to Filey for days out, but have not stayed.
What a delightful book this is, both funny and sad, a story of an obsessively fastidious butler and unrequited love. I saw the 1993 Anthony Hopkins / Emma Thompson film when it came out but suspect the book will leave a much stronger impression.
Mr. James Stevens, an ageing, nineteen-fifties, top class, old fashioned English butler, embarks on a solitary motoring trip to the West Country, giving space to reflect upon his role in personal and public events during his lifetime. He recalls gatherings of naïve Nazi sympathisers and anecdotes of “great” butlers who could deal with tigers in the dining room without alarming the guests.
The first-person narrative is highly formal in keeping with the
character, but it flows easily with both hilarious and heartbreaking effect. In thinking about the question of ‘what is a “great”
butler?’, it occurs
to him there is a dimension he has not fully considered. The way he says it is typical of his
voice throughout the novel:
“I have never
in all these years thought of the matter in quite this way; but then it
is perhaps in the nature of coming away on a trip such as this that one
is prompted towards such surprising new perspectives on topics one
imagined one had long ago thought through thoroughly. I have also, no
doubt, been prompted to think along such lines by the small event that
occurred an hour or so ago – which has, I admit, unsettled me somewhat.”
(p123)
which leads to quirky diversions about the surprising new perspective and the recent and significant “small event” which begins when he runs out of petrol on a remote road.
Stevens is the most unreliable of unreliable narrators, unable to
see he has spent a lifetime turning himself into a robot: stiff, formal, handling unexpected events with aplomb but taking
little notice of personal social cues. One thinks of Sheldon Cooper in the The Big
Bang Theory. You want to hand him an Asperger questionnaire.
Gradually, the mask peels away. Woven into the fabric of his
reminiscences is a touching story of unrequited love. Memories of Miss
Kenton, a former housekeeper, flood back during the journey, the real
purpose of which is to visit her in the unspoken hope she will return.
It becomes clear she would have married him had he only been able to set aside his mechanistic self-deception. Instead she
had married someone else and moved away over two decades earlier. He begins to see the different path his life might have taken.
At the end, after leaving Miss Kenton, he meets a jovial man on the seafront at Weymouth and tells him about his career.
“… look mate, … if you ask me, your attitude’s all wrong, see? Don’t keep looking back all the time, you’re bound to get depressed … you’ve got to keep looking forward. … You’ve got to enjoy yourself. The evening’s the best part of the day. You’ve done your day’s work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it.” (p256)
One hopes he can take the advice to be more positive and make the best of what remains of the day.
“After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?” (p256)
A warning for a memoir writer if ever there was one, although I believe my own motivation is celebration rather than regret.
Key
to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful,
4* enjoyed it a lot and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2*
didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.
The death this week of Ennio Morricone prompted us to watch Cinema Paradiso again for the seventh or eighth time. Some dismiss it as sentimental claptrap but it isn’t, even though it makes me both laugh and cry. It is so good you hardly notice it is in Italian with subtitles.
It has been described as a love letter to the cinema. The plot is deceptively straightforward: Salvatore Di Vita, a wealthy, successful, middle aged film director, hears that Alfredo, a father-figure from his childhood, has died. His thoughts drift back to growing up just after the Second World War in Giancaldo, a small Sicilian town where Alfredo is the projectionist at the local cinema. Alfredo allows eight-year-old Salvatore to watch films from the projection booth and teaches him to operate the projector. Their roles then are partly reversed when Alfredo is blinded in an accident. Later, as a teenager, Salvatore falls in love with the classy Elena but they lose touch when he goes off for military service. Afterwards, Alfredo tells him to get away to follow his dreams, never to come back and not to write. Salvatore leaves to become a filmmaker.
It is far more than a simple coming-of-age story. It is as if Salvatore’s memories become our own. It parallels the lives of the boomer generation. For me, post-war Sicily has echoes in the ‘bomb buildings’, the piles of rubble that lined the streets of nineteen-fifties urban England. Giancaldo is like Catholic Belgium in 1965, glimpsed through faces attending church and cinema where, with language taken away, I had to watch and understand gestures and expressions. In fact, in both looks and passions, the teenage Salvatore is uncannily like my Belgian language-exchange pen-friend. You feel the passage of time, not just from child to young adult but at the end where forgotten faces, older and wiser, reappear at Alfredo’s funeral. In real life we now even call them Cinema Paradiso moments.
One of the characters in the audience at the Paradiso cinema knows the films so well he mouths along with the dialogue. That is me with Cinema Paradiso. I am Alfredo, a true sage, a man without pretension, entirely at home in his own skin. “I choose my friends for their looks, my enemies for their intelligence”. Except I can’t do it in Italian.
Alfredo: You have to go away for a long time... many years... before you can come back and find your people. … Right now you're blinder than I am.
Salvatore: Who said that? Gary Cooper? James Stewart? Henry Fonda? Eh?
Alfredo: No, Toto. Nobody said it. This time it’s all me. Life isn’t like in the movies. Life... is much harder. … Get out of here! Go back to Rome. You’re young and the world is yours. I don’t want to hear you talk any more. I want to hear others talking about you. Don’t come back. Don’t think about us. Don’t look back. Don’t write. Don’t give in to nostalgia. Forget us all. If you do and you come back, don’t come see me. I won’t let you in my house. Understand? … Whatever you end up doing, love it. The way you loved the projection booth when you were a little squirt.
And underlying it all is Ennio and Andrea Morricone’s haunting, lilting score. Beautiful.
I watched the international version which runs for 124 minutes. There is also a fifty minutes longer “director’s cut” in which the middle-aged Salvatore goes in search of and finds Elena. Reviews say it is not as good but I’d still like to see it. The director is Guiseppe Tornatore.
There are several other versions of the trailer on YouTube, some with an irritating voiceover giving the false impression that it is indeed sentimental claptrap.
Children can be very fussy eaters. I was. As was my brother: for years and years, the only vegetable he would eat was peas. It might be genetic. One of our cousins would only eat one cornflake at a time.
Well, you reap what you sow, as they say, and in due course I experienced the joy of being a parent of fussy eaters myself. “I’m not eating that,” they would complain, “I don’t like it. It’s revolting.” Or “Yuk! It’s covered in nasty stuff”, or “Errrgghh! What are all these black bits in it?” and in the end you run out of patience and snap back at them: “They’re snail bogeys”.
It does not help.
But I had coined a phrase and in due course it became a family saying:
“What’s this?” “What’s for tea?”
“Snail bogeys!”
The kids tell me, should the blood line survive, that in two hundred years time there will be some exasperated descendant yelling at their infant offspring to eat up their food and “stop being so faddy because there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s only snail bogeys,” without either of them having any idea that one of their ancestors was the brilliant wordsmith who coined the expression.
Talking of snails, here is a still from the infra-red night camera mentioned in last month’s posts (it will take a day or two to compile another video of selected clips). You can see a hedgehog biscuit placed in the middle of a suspended wooden ruler, and a snail that has crawled along to consume it. This is one of the jumping and climbing tricks we have been dreaming up for the field mice that live under the shed, except the snail got there first.
Being cold blooded, it is not the snail that has activated the camera; it has been set off by Mummy Mouse on the ground. She bravely scales the bricks, nimbly tiptoes along the ruler and snatches the hedgehog biscuit right out of the jaws of the snail, from under its very nose. She dashes back down the bricks with it and darts under the shed to feed her mouse babies who are waiting for their tea. Because they are ours – i.e. they live in our garden – they too are fussy eaters.
“I’m not eating that,” they say, “It’s disgusting.”
“There’s nothing wrong with it,” she yells at them, “Get it eaten.”
“That’s wrong” said Geoffrey Bullard, with his thick ape-neck and menacing stare. “It should be M Dunham is crap”. His fat finger stabbed at the offending word.
He thought he knew everything, and everyone else was stupid. It was too risky to explain. Football teams are plural: Rawcliffe United are great this year; Howden Town are terrible; M Dunham are crap. You can chant it:
M Dunham are crap, M Dunham are crap, Ee aye addio, M Dunham are crap.
A league match between M Dunham and T Dunham c1960
It was my dad who first pretended we were football teams
in a league. He was B Dunham, I was T
Dunham, my brother Martin was M Dunham, and M Dunham were crap. It said so in red wax crayon on the back of the asbestos garage where Geoffrey Bullard had spotted it.
I didn’t realise that wax crayon on asbestos panelling is like permanent marker: waterproof, indelible, not-fade-away. There it was, and there it must have stayed for decades. Imagine the disapproving faces that pitied the ignorant child responsible, and wondered who was M Dunham, and why was he crap.
So, Geoffrey Bullard remained oblivious of the imaginary football teams, and, when he wasn’t round at our house bullying me, I could play imaginary football games in the garden. I had a full league of teams and fixtures, and played out each match on my own on the pitch of dried mud we optimistically called “the back grass”. This differed from “the front grass” only by being slightly bigger and by not actually having any grass, except that is for a few odd blades that struggled out of the earth before being unceremoniously stamped back in again by the boots of make-believe footballers.
I ran up and down with the ball, puffing and panting between one goal defined by chalk marks on the wall of the house and the other by the clothes posts near the back hedge, while providing the roars and boos of the crowd, and an excitable commentary. In my head they were all there: two complete teams of players, spectators, a commentator, the referee, the linesmen and the trainer with his ‘magic sponge’.
I drew up team sheets, match day programmes, fixture lists and league tables. I was everyone and did everything. These days, kids do the same with electronic games like ‘Top European Football Manager III’, but my fantasy was played in the back garden, much healthier for all the running around in the fresh air, with better transferrable skills from the manual record keeping, and no less unsociable than games consoles.
T Dunham were of course the best team by far. They always won and hardly ever conceded a goal. They usually beat M Dunham (who really were crap) by several goals to nil, and “The” B Dunham by a similar margin (my dad had once been to watch “The” Arsenal while on holiday in London).
It was not long before T Dunham were promoted out of the league containing the other Dunham teams into the local district league, where they played against proper teams such as the colliery, the dockers and the railwaymen, and teams from pubs and local villages. I picked my players for each match and posted their names on the wall inside our team hut, in other words the yellow shed.
The team was always set out in traditional 1-2-3-5 formation, with a goalkeeper, two full backs, three half-backs and five forwards. In those days we always had a centre forward, inside forwards and wingers; no one had yet heard of modern formations involving sweepers, overlapping midfielders and offensive 4-3-3 game plans.
One day, Geoffrey Bullard noticed a team sheet on the wall of the shed. “What’s that?” he asked, looking carefully. My team was laid out for all to see, ready for the West Riding Cup Final between T Dunham and Norton Woodseats. The captain, ‘Dunham’, in other words me, was on the left wing, my position the only time I had ever been selected for the school team. Some of the other imaginary players were also names from school. ‘Gelder’ was inside-left, ‘Longthwaite’ was centre-forward, and, as I realised to my consternation the same moment he spotted it, ‘Bullard’ was centre-half.
“Why am I only centre-half?” he demanded to know.
I cringed inwardly while he thought about it. He considered himself one of the best footballers in the school and naturally assumed his rightful role was top scorer in the forward line.
“Actually,” he then said weighing it up, “I would make quite a good centre-half,” and let me off the hook by showing no further interest.
But the wax crayon was still on the garage, and in due course my mother saw it.
“It won’t come off,” she sounded annoyed. “And anyway, what does it mean?”
It dawned on me that I didn’t really know what ‘crap’ meant either. I’d heard people say it, and thought it a satisfyingly grown up word to use. It just seemed to mean someone or something wasn’t very good. You could snarl it in real disgust, curling your upper lip, emphasising the ‘r’ and spitting out the final ‘p’. “C-RAP!” I had been saying it as much as I could.
“What’s this word, ‘crap’?” my dad asked. My mother had obviously been talking to him.
It was my dad’s sister, Aunty Dorothy, a hospital nurse, who gently enlightened us as to what it meant. She took me aside and asked in her quiet way: “Was it you who wrote in wax crayon on the back of the garage? You wrote, ‘M Dunham are crap’, didn’t you?”
I nodded.
“Well, you do know what it means, don’t you?”
I shook my head.
“It’s very very rude,” she said looking serious. “It means babba.” *
I wanted to giggle, but tried hard to look horrified and apologetic.
“It’s not a word we should be using at all,” she warned sternly. “And in any case, it’s very wrong to say that. It should be M Dunham is crap.”
* It seems that using the word ‘babba’ to mean poo is not as universal as I once thought. An internet search reveals very few examples. Similarly, ‘trump’ meaning an emission of wind, also seems to be mainly a northern expression. Both were common in the part of Yorkshire where I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. The word ‘crap’, on the other hand, was beyond vulgarity and never heard. It goes to show how much things have changed.
