Biology Made Simple

(This is not a review. I wouldn’t want to say whether the book is any good or not. I simply picked it off the shelf where it has lodged unopened for half a century.)

A book to take you back to the third form (if only), year 9 as now known, two years before ‘O’ Level, the year you were 14. There you are again, head down, sketching and labelling diagrams of amoeba and the human heart, drawing flow charts of the carbon cycle and learning the names of digestive enzymes.

I loved it. I had the kind of dysfunctional, over-active memory that absorbed the names of anatomical structures and physiological processes like protozoan pseudopodia engulfing scraps of food. Two of us were way better than everyone else. There was, let’s called her Hermione, always first in class tests, and me, always one or two marks behind.

But I had a secret weapon. I must have been the only pupil with a tape recorder at home, or at least the only one devious enough to ask my mother to record a radio programme we were to hear in class in preparation for an essay. Mine was bloody brilliant – better than Hermione’s.

Then it became ‘Biology Made Difficult’. That year, Biology in the first term was not examined until the end of the third (terms 2 and 3 were Physics and Chemistry). That’s a long time to have to remember it. You know what happens. Too much messing about, thinking about the wrong things, lack of planning, lack of attention and in my case, well, let’s say poor mental health, meant I didn’t revise for the exam. My end of year report completes the tale. Biology: position in class 2nd; position in exam 25th; teacher’s comment “a disappointing exam result”. For the next two years, the ‘O’ Level years, I found myself in second-stream Biology where messing about and thinking about the wrong things were a way of life, especially if you wanted people to like you. Low grades for all of us. Idiot!

Still, I took Biology at ‘A’ Level and failed, and when I later chucked accountancy to train as a teacher, Biology was my main subject. That’s when I bought the book: a note inside records it was the 3rd July, 1973, about three months before starting at what was then called City of Leeds and Carnegie College, and six months before dropping out. It’s hard to believe you could once be accepted to train as a specialist Biology teacher without having passed it at ‘A’ Level; it was enough merely to have studied it.

No one has looked at the book since. It has been an absolute joy paying it the attention I should have paid then. Goodness, the things it tells you. It’s a bit like a Bill Bryson book without the exaggeration and contrived jokes. It doesn’t need them. It has its own miracles and wonder. Such as that we create and destroy an incredible 10 million* red blood cells every second. Ten million! Every second! That’s 864,000 million per day. Even at that rate it takes over 100 days to replace them all. And then there’s the horror. Such as hookworm. You really wouldn’t want to pick that up, the way it gets into the blood and burrows from the lungs to the windpipe to be coughed up and swallowed to grow in your gut.

And in Chapter 5: ‘Cycles of Life’, pp57-58, there is this. I am guilty of barefaced breach of copyright here, but Extinction Rebellion says it’s all right to break the law to draw attention to environmental issues.

That is what we knew then. In fact, there is a whole chapter expanding upon the preventative and curative measures listed. It was originally published in 1956 and revised in 1967. Despite not mentioning plastic or climate change or unlimited population growth, it lists so many other ways we upset the balance of nature through our “ignorance, carelessness or ruthlessness … in a given area”. Was it too much of a mental leap to understand that “given area” could mean the whole planet? We should all have been paying more attention.

So, an interesting trip down memory lane. It may be “biology made simple”, there were some things I wanted to read more about, it isn’t modern biology with all that nasty cell chemistry, but I enjoyed it. Best of all, I don’t have to learn it now.


*A bit of Googling suggests this may be an overestimate, the correct figure being a still very impressive 2.4 million red blood cells per second, about a quarter of the number given in the book.

Review - Barry Hines: A Kestrel For A Knave

Barry Hines
A Kestrel For A Knave (5***)

I have seen so many clips from Ken Loach’s film Kes, I felt I knew this book well. I didn’t.

I knew the outline well enough: “grubby little lad in Yorkshire … finds and trains a kestrel … bringing hope and meaning to a drab life crushed by bullying schoolmasters and a downbeat home life,” to quote the Daily Mirror (20th March, 1970). I even once co-wrote a parody called ‘Budge’, poking fun at a friend who kept animals, about a boy who found an escaped budgerigar in his coalhouse and trained it to sing rude songs in a Yorkshire accent. 

This entirely misses the poetry of the book: the vivid and lyrical descriptions of the streets and countryside around the coal mining community where it is set. It is an astonishing piece of writing. The story absorbs you completely. Every page shines with brilliance. The language mirrors the shifting emotions: the joy of escape from the dirt and poverty of the town into the natural beauty of the hills, woods and fields; the elation on seeing the kestrel wild and free in flight; the constricting terror in hiding from an inescapable beating; the dread when the bird is missing.

I can only give examples. The first has often been quoted before: 

A cushion of mist lay over the fields. Dew drenched the grass, and the occasional sparkling of individual drops made Billy glance down as he passed. One tuft was silver fire … and when it caught the sun it exploded, throwing out silver needles and crystal splinters. (p19)

There is despair at the end as Billy wanders the streets bereft through a scene familiar to anyone who has walked alone through an empty northern town at night:

A shadow rippling across a drawn curtain. A light going on. A light going off. A laugh. A shout. A name. A television on too loud, throwing the dialogue out into the garden. A record, a radio playing; occasional sounds on quiet streets.  (p157)

There is the language, the Barnsley dialect, such as in Billy’s words as he comes alive in describing the bird’s first free flight to his class during an English lesson: 

‘Come on, Kes! Come on then! Nowt happened at first, then, just when I wa’ going’ to walk back to her, she came. You ought to have seen her. Straight as a die, about a yard off t’floor. An’ t’speed!  … like lightnin’, head dead still, an’ her wings never made a sound, then wham! Straight up on t’glove, claws out grabbin’ for t’meat,’  (p66)
(clip of this scene from the film)

The accent would in truth be much stronger than rendered in the book (as in the film clip linked above). After the film was premiered at the Doncaster Odeon in March, 1970, some thought it would need sub-titles for audiences south of Sheffield. Like my mother-in-law, whose recurring nightmare, each time she heard the local accents when she travelled up on the train to see us and passed through Barnsley, was that her grandchildren might grow up to speak like that. (They did and they didn’t. Other kids at school said they talked posh but when they went out into the wider world their Yorkshire accents were obvious.)

The book took me back to my own Yorkshire town: the streets of terraced housing, the industrial grime, the local accent, but none of it quite as grim and hopeless as here.

Barry Hines grew up near Barnsley at Hoyland Common. He wrote other novels and also scripts for radio, film and television. Before becoming a full-time writer he was an inspirational teacher. He was enormously influential. He died in 2016 and funds are being raised for a bronze statue to be erected in Barnsley in his honour, showing young Billy Casper with his kestrel. The bronze has now been cast but funds are still needed for the plinth.

The film Kes remains legendary in the area and many of those who were extras as children are still around. A fundraising screening at the Penistone Paramount a couple of years ago was a sell out. The folk ensemble I play in put on a fundraising ceilidh (barn dance) in Barnsley last year.

As Ian McMillan says in the introduction to the Penguin Decades edition I have, “Going back to the book with the film in my head is a revelation.” Indeed it is. I should have read it a long time ago. I’ll definitely read it again.


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.

Previous book reviews 

Donkey Stone

I seem to have gained quite a few new readers during the past year since starting to comment more on other blogs and discovering a lovely, friendly and supportive blogging community out there. I have therefore been thinking of instigating a regular feature “New Month Old Post” to revisit and perhaps improve earlier posts they won’t have seen, posted during the previous five years I spent blogging sometimes only to myself. Here, almost at random, is the first selection.

This has nothing at all to do with a recent accusation that I don’t post enough (YP Blog Awards Committee 2019). If anything, it’s a duplicitous way of being able to post less.

Donkey Stone

(first posted 27th May, 2016)

We were discussing door steps last week – I can’t remember why – and a very early memory came back.

“Did your mother ever colour your front door step with a block like a piece of house soap?”

My wife’s expression indicated she thought I was talking gibberish. It is a look I get quite a lot these days – the same expression she used for her mother before she went into a care home.

“I’m sure my mum used to rub our front door step with something called a dolly stone or something like that, which coloured it red,” I persisted. 

“What a stupid idea. It would get paddled all over the carpets on people’s shoes.”

“I think she did the window sills and round the boot scraper as well.”

My wife, who is from the South of England, still thinks some of our Northern ways are peculiar, even after twenty-five years in Yorkshire. She is particularly contemptuous of memories of the small West Riding town I grew up in. I tried to explain that the boot scraper was where you left the empty milk bottles, but it seemed inadvisable to go further and argue that, no, the colour would not have got paddled all over the carpets because we didn’t have any – we had lino and clip rugs – and the topic moved on.  

But there, last night on television, as clear as anything, was Dan Cruickshank in At Home with the British, scouring the door step of a Liverpool terraced house with a DONKEY stone. They were made from pulverised stone, cement and bleach, and originally used in textile mills to make greasy steps non-slip. Subsequently, house-proud housewives in terraced houses used them to clean their stone door steps and window sills. Like clean net curtains, it was a way of fooling the neighbours into thinking the rest of your house was just as spotless, even though it might have been a filthy pigsty inside. The practice died out in the nineteen-fifties and -sixties, especially after in some houses the worn soft Yorkshire stone steps were replaced by coarse concrete.

So I wasn’t talking gibberish. We left that house when I was six, but I have a clear memory of my mum, down on her hands and knees on the pavement one sunny summer’s day, dipping a rectangular block into a bucket of water, rubbing it into a paste all over the front door step and telling me to “keep off it while it dries” (as we would have said then). One of the most common colours was yellow-brown sandstone which I would see as red (explained in Colours I See With).

The only surprise is that I had forgotten about the donkey.


The Donkey Stone advertisement is from an out-of-print 1930s directory. Inclusion of the single frame from “At Home with the British” is believed to be fair use. The last picture is of the house where I first lived. Its doors and windows have changed (excluding the attic) but it still has the boot scraper recess beside the front door.

Young Thugs

Tuesday, 26th December, 1967. Boxing Day. Went with Neville and Gilbert to see Magical Mystery Tour on television at the Lowther. You won’t bump into any teachers there but it’s not rough like some of the other pubs down by the docks.

No one in except Bloddo as usual standing on his own at the bar, grimy gabardine mac riding tight round his stomach, bicycle clips riding tight round his ankles. Phil noticed that his purple socks matched his purple nose.

Sat waiting for it to start at 8:35. Changed channel to BBC1. Bloddo muttered something under his breath about “young thugs”.

Who was he, I wonder all these years later. Where was he on Christmas Day when the pubs were closed? It wouldn’t have hurt to have asked would it? Casual indifference. Young thugs.

That’s how Phil remembers it. My version is different. It wasn’t Bloddo who called us thugs. I don’t think we even needed to change channel because David Frost was on when we arrived and Bloddo ogled the Breakaways. The TV schedule bears that out.

I think it happened afterwards as we walked rowdily home with three pints of beer inside. We passed a middle-aged couple arm-in-arm. The woman whispered “young thugs” which I overheard and repeated to Phil who fell into helpless drunken laughter: a mixture of pride and disbelief because three more unlikely young thugs there could never have been. Three grammar school boys! We were under-age drinkers if that counts. And young thugs.

Whose version is right? Is anything on this blog right? Were we called thugs twice?

But back to the Beatles’ film. It was rubbish. No plot. No structure. Just surreal events and silly-joke characters on a tour bus. Like ‘Buster Bloodvessel’. It didn’t help it was in black and white. Even when repeated in colour on BBC2 a week and a half later, hardly anyone, or any pub, had a colour set.

I still don’t like the songs. They have a strange, directionless feel, like that last directionless year at school, waiting for the van to come to take me away, the fool on the hill, the Bloddo at the bar, now I’d lost myself instead. You say,“Why?” And I say, “I don't know.” You fail exams on nights like that. 

Lost Entitlements

They don’t want you driving these once you’re 70

In 2009, the BBC programme Watchdog reported that DVLA* were removing entitlements from driving licences reissued after a change of name or address. Drivers found they had lost the right to drive motorcycles or other categories of vehicle.

It may be conspiracy theory but the rumour is that many people who are qualified to ride motorcycles have not done so for years, and DVLA do not want them to start again because of the dangers. Some who do still ride motorcycles had to re-take their motorcycle driving test because they were unable to prove they had passed it years ago.

2-stroke Velocette

You can understand the outrage. My dad felt the same. He passed his motorcycle test in the nineteen-thirties and rode through the war on his 2-stroke Velocette as an Air Raid Patrol Messenger (childhood polio ruled out active service). Yet, around nineteen-seventy, he was dismayed to notice he no longer had the motorcycle entitlement on his licence. Not that he wanted to ride again – he wouldn’t have dared – it was the principle.

This is a page in his old licence. Until 1973, driving licences took the form of little red books issued by County Councils. They had to be renewed every three years or annually before 1959. West Riding residents sent their licences to 14 St. John’s North, Wakefield, where a new three-year (or one-year) sticker was pasted in.

They really knew how to stick things in those days but, as best he could, my dad peeled back through the thick wodge of renewals in his old licence book and discovered that what used to be Category III (later G) “Motor Bicycle (with or without side-car) …” was there in 1939 but not in 1940. I still have his licence with all its stickers and what appears to have happened is that his motorcycle entitlement was not carried forward when he passed his motor car driving test. Oversight or clerical error, he seems to have ridden his Velocette through the war illegally.

What annoyed him even more was that he worked with someone who started to drive before tests were introduced in 1935 and was licensed to drive just about everything you could imagine. Despite never having taken a test of any kind his colleague could drive both cars and motorbikes. My dad had passed to drive both but could now only drive cars. It was no consolation that somehow around 1950 he had bizarrely acquired the right to drive a road roller. 

Now, I feel hard done by too. Did you know they remove some of your entitlements when you get to seventy?

Most people currently in their fifties and sixties can drive 16-seater minibuses and medium-sized vans and trucks (up to 7.5 metric tons or tonnes: categories C1 and D1). They are there on my paper driving licence (many people now have plastic photocards but green paper licences issued before July 1998 remain valid up to your seventieth birthday unless updated due to a change of name or address, but at seventy you have to change to a photocard).

The rule is that you can drive 16-seater minibuses and 7.5 tonne vehicles if you passed your car driving test before 1997 (partly subject to Restriction 1: not for hire or reward). Those who passed after 1997 are restricted to 8-seater minibuses and smaller vans up to 3.5 metric tons. However, at 70, they take away the higher entitlements and restrict everyone to the lower limits. You can keep the higher ones by taking a test and asking a doctor and an optician to certify your fitness to drive, for which no doubt they charge, but that’s too much faff.

Even to continue driving ordinary cars and smaller vehicles, I have to send back my paper licence, self-certify I’m fit and can see, and get a photocard. It will have to be renewed every three years. I will no longer be able to hire 7.5-tonne trucks or drive minibuses. Not that I ever have. It’s the principle.

What I don’t get is this. If it’s all right to self-certify I’m fit to drive a car or a 3.5-tonne Transit, why can’t I self-certify for slightly bigger vehicles? Maybe we should all go out and hire flatbed trucks and big box vans while we still can, just for the fun of it.

I suppose it’s like with some people who own guns: restrictions should apply to everyone else but themselves.

Hire one while you still can - just for the fun of it.

*DVLA – the Driver and Vehicle Licencing Agency which until 1990 was called the DVLC for -Centre.

The Exorcist (reposted by beetleypete)

Pete Johnson (the prolific WordPress blogger beetleypete) generously offered space for guests on his blog. I jumped at the chance because he has almost 5,000 followers. I wondered whether there might be interest in my piece about the film The Exorcist originally posted over four years ago during my early blogging days. In all that time it had less than 200 views. Pleasingly, it turned out to be one of Pete’s most viewed posts this week with a cacophany of comments. [my spelling is corrected in the comments below]

beetleypete's guest post invitation is here

the reposted post on Pete's blog is here

The Exorcist

When my son was about eight, he wanted to know what was the scariest film I had ever seen.

“Well,” I said, “there are quite a few, but one of them is so scary that even its name is too frightening to say.”

No eight year-old would let me off that easily, and when it became obvious he was not going to give up I said that I would only tell him when he was eighteen. For now, all I was prepared to say was that it began with an ‘e’. “The rest is too terrifying to think about,” I repeated.

“Excalibur” he said without hesitation, trying to guess.

“I don’t think there is such a ....”

“Yes there is,” he said, “what about The Executioner?”

“Even if it was I wouldn’t tell you,” I said after again having been corrected about the existence of such a film.

“Excrement,” he guessed. I really doubted that one, but not wanting to risk being found ignorant a third time I simply repeated what I’d said already.

This continued on and off for the next few weeks ....
 
Read original post (~1200 words)

Teenage Mums

Fairy Liquid ads 1960s (3 in sequence)

My mum’s cousin who was born in 1928 said that for her thirteenth birthday she received a toy pram with a life-sized dolly. She paraded it proudly up and down the village high street.

Thirteen! I kid you not. In later life she couldn’t believe it herself. Nowadays, it’s more likely she would have a real one.

It reminds me of a joke about the much-parodied detergent ad:

         now hands that do dishes can feel as soft as your face 
         with mild green Fairy Liquid

         Mummy, why are your hands so soft?
         Because I’m only fifteen.

Where were you?

Sunday, 20th July 1969

To add to all the other bloggers today, I had just hitch-hiked back from Hornsea.

I had been at work almost a year but most of my friends were still in education, either at university or waiting for ‘A’ level results hoping to go. I envied them. One was spending summer at his family’s caravan in Hornsea (see Hornsea Pottery), so on Saturday seven of us set off on scooters to look for him.

We found him where we knew we would, in the Marine Hotel. Later we sat around talking with some lads from Liverpool until two in the morning. On Sunday we got up early and built a driftwood fire on the beach. Most of the others then went off to Bridlington but I had to go to work on Monday, so hitch-hiked back on my own. If the ride there on the back of a scooter had been uncomfortable, part of the ride back at high speed on the pillion of a motorbike was terrifying (no compulsory crash helmets in those days). I also remember walking between lifts through the snobby and exclusive village of Walkington shortly before a police car drew up to investigate reports of a vagrant in the village.

I then saw the BBC coverage of the landing which consisted of little more than James Burke and the ever-excitable Patrick Moore talking over the audio feed from mission control. I did not stay up into the small hours to see the moon walk because I had to be up for the early train to Leeds. In the morning there was just time to see a few images of Armstrong and Aldrin “jumping around on the moon” as my mother put it, before I had to leave. On Monday I was not back to my digs from work in time for blast off so only saw it later on the news. None of the images were very clear anyway, except in the imagination. 

As for other “Where were you?” questions my answers are: (i) watching Take Your Pick on Friday, 22nd November 1963, when a news flash caused me to rush to the kitchen to tell Mum; (ii) walking from Manchester Victoria to U.M.I.S.T. on the morning of Tuesday, 9th December 1980, when I saw a newsstand headline; and (iii) checking the Teletext news headlines on the morning of Sunday, 31st August 1997, when I rushed downstairs to tell my wife and son. Not that I cared much about that last one. Should I remember any others? 

The Morecambe and Wise IRA Sketch

It’s hard to believe what I saw on television last night: two Morecambe and Wise shows from 1968, believed lost, recovered from a forgotten film canister found in a cinema in Sierra Leone, and broadcast now for the first time in over fifty years.

Ronnie Carroll hands out the shillelaghs

The second of the two shows (first broadcast BBC2, Monday, 30th September, 1968) had a sketch in which the Northern Irish singer Ronnie Carroll played an IRA commander testing the Irish credentials of Eric, Ernie and writers Sid Green and Dick Hills by asking them to speak in an Irish accent and dance a jig. The running joke was that Eric Morecambe was unable to do these things (his accent was more Long John Silver) and therefore kept getting beaten with shillelaghs.*

The writing, the timing, the general silliness – it’s one of the funniest things I’ve seen for some time, but can you imagine anyone on television today daring to make fun of the Irish Republican Army and speak in a mock Irish accent? Admittedly, the show was originally broadcast before the riots in 1969 and subsequent deployment of British troops, but even so, would it not today be greeted by howling accusations of bad taste, political incorrectness and even xenophobia, and taken off air?

My children have applied for Irish nationality. They can because my wife’s father was born in Bray near Dublin. They are fearful of losing their right to work and travel freely throughout Europe after Brexit. The likely outcome is that all the family except me will be Europeans, and that I will have to pay for a permit to set foot across the Channel.

Their applications required extensive supporting documentation – identity documents, witness statements, ancestral birth, marriage and death certificates, and large cheques – which took quite some time to put together. If all you had to do was to be able say “Top of the morning” in a pantomime Irish accent, dance a jig and set out for Tipperary with me shillelagh under me arm and a twinkle in me eye, I might have had an outside chance of getting in. ‘Tis a shame, to be sure, bejabers!

The Morecambe and Wise Show: The Lost Tapes is available on BBC iPlayer for the next month:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bxc158 is the episode described above with guest Ronnie Carroll.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bx04tl is another episode introduced by Michael Aspel who appears as guest on the show.
[addendum: they were repeated on Christmas Eve 2019 and available again for another month]


* Shillelagh: an Irish word for a stout wooden cudgel, immortalised in a song by Bing Crosby who had an Irish grandmother and released L.P.s full of sentimental songs with Irish themes, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnVPXf2_ZGY 

Get Tret Better

English is a strange thing, especially in its regional forms.

Yesterday, BBC Television News had a report about how insurance companies ramp up premiums so that customers who renew their policies year after year end up paying far more than they should. One poor chap who had kept his home insurance with the same insurer for twenty-one years received a renewal bill of £1,930, but after shopping around he got the same cover for £469. 

They asked people at Doncaster Market what they thought about it, including two ladies behind a food stall:

“Well,” said one in comforting Yorkshire tones, “I think it's a disgrace, actually, because I think loyal customers should get tret better.”

“Tret better?” I wanted to rush straight to Doncaster Market, give her a big hug, and sit beside the stall listening to her all day. It’s what my mother would have said.

I’m no grammaticist, but I suppose it’s like met instead of meeted, sat instead of seated, or het instead of heated, as in I’m all het up. 

At one time I would have said “tret better” too, but, sadly, I’ve had it educated out of me.

Not The Best Policy

This year’s Christmas story is a tale of deception gone wrong, from the early nineteen-seventies.

“You idiots, you scoundrels, you rogues and vagabonds! Be sure thy sin will find thee out!”

Brendan’s impression was spot-on. It was as if Grimston Stewart was right there in the room with you spouting his pretentious, second-hand drivel. It was all there: the rhythms, the cadences, the clipped intonation, the rolled ‘r’, the arrogance.

“You riff-raff! You ne’er do wells! You scum of the earth!  ...”

Brendan could stretch and twist his face to look as silly and pompous as Grimston too, with all the quirks and mannerisms you didn’t notice until pointed out. You could imagine Grimston in his Noel Coward dressing gown, posturing like some vain intellectual exhibitionist: Oscar Wilde or Aubrey Beardsley, perhaps. The only thing missing was the long cigarette holder.

“I shall not dull my palm with felony. Honesty is the best policy.”

Grimston was a fake. He would have you believe his clever quips and jibes were his own invention, but we knew he got them from a dictionary of quotations hidden in his room. Nick, the other member of our shared house, had a theory he was really called Stuart Grimston but had changed it to Grimston Stewart to sound more impressive. I thought Grimston sounded like a dog’s name. At least it wasn’t hyphenated – not yet.

Whatever his name, we were making the most of his absence. Grimston had left for a winter holiday with wealthy friends, and the shared house was less censorious without him; and noisier. We could stay up late drinking and smoking, playing our guitars, singing vulgar songs, having beer-mat fights and shouting foul language at each other. We could leave the lights on, bottles all over the floor, bins overflowing, the toilet filthy, crumbs on the kitchen table and the sink full of dirty plates, like “the dunghill kind who delight in filth and foul incontinence.” House sharing works best when everyone is compatible, but Grimston, some kind of accountant, did not fit in, the wayward liberals we were. There is always one.

His absence was fortuitous because the scheme Nick had conceived would have sent him into a torrent of protest, with or without acknowledgement to the Bible, Shakespeare and other luminaries from his dictionary of quotations.

“We shall find ourselves dishonourable graves,” mimicked Brendan. 

“Hasn’t anyone thought of this before?” I wondered. “Three hundred quid each just for telling a few stories! It seems so easy.”

“It is,” Nick reassured us, “as long as we think it through properly and don’t say anything stupid ...”

“Les absents ont toujours tort.”

“... like that!”

It certainly seemed a fascinating idea. For Nick, it was a project – an intellectual exercise with a profitable conclusion. Brendan just liked the thought of the money.

Nick went through it again. We were to hide all our valuables in his lock-up garage, disarray the house to give the appearance of a break-in, go back home to our parents for Christmas, and on our return report the burglary to the police and make an ‘authentic’ insurance claim for the loss of our possessions. We congratulated ourselves on the ingenuity. It was so simple – the perfect crime.

We ransacked the house according to plan, broke open the cellar window, forced the locks on our room doors and decanted the contents of drawers and cupboards on to the floor. Late at night we discreetly packed our possessions into Nick’s car and transferred them to the seclusion of his garage: our guitars, my hi-fi, Nick’s bicycle and Brendan’s camera. No one saw us at all.

Back at the house, elated, phase one complete, a big bottle of Strongbow each, we rehearsed our interview with the police.

“Now tell me again,” said Brendan in his best Chief Inspector Barlow voice, “where did you say you were at the time of the break-in?”

“Er – staying with my parents,” I replied unconvincingly.

“I see. Do you have insurance?”

“Yes, thank goodness.”

“It’s an insurance fiddle isn’t it?”

“No, I was away visiting ...”

“Don’t lie to me you piece of filth.”

“Honest! It’s true. I really was ...”

Brendan switched into his Grimston Stewart voice.

“Honest implies a lie. Isn’t that right Chief Inspector Barlow?”

I only hoped the investigator assigned to our case lacked the analytical aggression of television’s Detective Chief Inspector Barlow.

Suddenly I realised we had overlooked one important point, the one critical mistake.

“How do we explain why our rooms have been burgled, but not Grimston’s?”

Nick and Brendan were taken aback. How could we have forgotten that? Either we had really to break into Grimston’s room and steal his stuff, or we had to invite him to join in the scheme. The first seemed a whole level of dishonesty higher than insurance fraud. The second was out of the question, Grimston would never participate.

We stood outside Grimston’s door.

“I am no petty villain,” preached his voice. “You must reinstate the status quo and make good the damage, or I shall report you to Her Majesty’s Constabulary.”

“Shut up Brendan,” I said. “It’s not funny.”

I kicked at Grimston’s door in disgust and turned away, only to turn back on Nick’s gasp. It had not been locked. The door had swung open.

“That’s not like him,” said Brendan, for once using his own voice.

Nick disappeared into the room and quickly identified the reason for the lax security. Grimston had taken most of his things with him. Typical! He trusted no one. All we had to do was tip the remaining contents of his drawers and cupboards on to the floor to give the appearance of a search. There was nothing anyone would have wanted to pinch, but Grimston would believe we really had been burgled.

In one drawer we found the notorious dictionary of quotations. Nick picked it up.

“I think this will have to be stolen,” he said triumphantly.

The plan was exceeding expectations. Not only would Grimston be speechless when he found out about the burglary, he would not be able to look up anything to say about it either.

We could now put phase two into action. The three of us went home for Christmas to secure Barlow-proof alibis. Grimston, returning from holiday, was first back, and went to the phone box to report the crime to “Her Majesty’s Constabulary”. When I got back a bored, solitary policeman was wandering around. I passed off my anxiety as distress. We had to answer one or two simple questions, none of them unexpected. Next day a fingerprint man visited and went through the motions of dusting a powdery mess of graphite on doors, windows, mirrors and drawer handles, but left without finding anything sufficiently well-defined for evidence. We submitted our insurance claim. Grimston even claimed for the loss of his silly dictionary. Well, he had been the one to insist we took out insurance in the first place.

The total value was impressive. The insurance company wanted to see receipts for the most expensive things. We each had a stereo and records, and I had a tape-deck as well. Guitars, fan heaters, cameras, slide projectors, electric toasters, books, clothing, the house television set and Nick’s bicycle brought the total claim to nine hundred and thirteen pounds, over three hundred each after Grimston’s miniscule claim.

And there was a bonus. Within a week Grimston had left. The area was “a den of iniquity unfit for habitation by righteous souls”. There would be no one to ask awkward questions as to how we had recovered our possessions when the time came to move them back.

Luckily, we did not retrieve them immediately. A few days later a detective constable visited the crime scene.

“It’s a good job you were insured,” he said. “There have been a lot of break-ins in this area recently. I have to say that unfortunately there is very little chance of recovering your possessions.”

Afterwards, we judged it safe to go for our things.

Nick had not been to the garage since the day of the ‘crime’. There wasn’t room for his car and in any case, he was worried someone might see inside and become suspicious. So we were already a little apprehensive when we drove round under cover of darkness. Nick turned off his lights and opened the door. It was difficult to see but I knew something was wrong. Nick felt it too.

Nick returned to the car and flashed the lights, flashed them again, and then put them on full beam. The garage was empty. A broken panel at the rear told us what had happened.

Brendan spoke first, in his own voice.

“The world’s full of bloody criminals. We can’t even claim on insurance ’cos we already have.”

I could see Nick’s thoughtful face in the headlights, and then it was he, not Brendan, who began to speak in quotations.

“Our worldly goods are gone away,” he declared. “We are wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities.”

Things were worse than I thought. In that awful moment I realised what had happened to that ridiculous dictionary of quotations.

The Yellow Shed

Three views of the yellow shed – I don't have a complete photograph.

“Every man should have a shed” the saying goes. Well, I got a shed at the age of twelve when I took over the yellow one in the garden. Did that make me a man?

There I drank my first bottle of John Smith’s Magnet Pale Ale, brazenly bought from the corner shop with my own pocket money in the confidence they would assume I was on a parent’s errand. And there I tried one of my mother’s menthol flavoured Consulate cigarettes and well and truly wished I hadn’t.

Whether these experiments in manliness were as masculine as they seemed at the time I’m not sure. Magnet Pale Ale might have been copiously consumed by Tristan Farnon in the James Herriot books, but it was promoted by the image of a comely young woman with smooth bare legs and shoulders, long ear rings dangling evocatively below blonde Marilyn Monroe curls as she alluringly raises her stemmed glass to declare it “a magnet for me!” Consulate cigarettes, “cool as a mountain stream”, also employed a preponderance of girly social situations, not at all like the manly virility of the Player’s Navy Cut sailor or the Marlboro cowboy, or the self-assured independence of the raincoated, Sinatra-like, “never-alone” Strand character.*

The yellow shed became my own private space. It was my dark-room, games room, chemistry laboratory and music studio. I imagined myself carrying out investigations into original problems, creating new knowledge, an academic in the making. Apart from a few gardening tools, yard brushes and a stepladder, most of the clutter had moved to our new asbestos garage.

Among my old, self-developed 127-sized negatives were two photographs of the inside. Oh what memories!

 

We made a folding bench to go on the end wall. I painted the inside with clean white paint and hung curtains over the window and door. I constructed a cement ridge to stop water pooling under the door. It was icy cold in winter and swelteringly hot in summer. I arranged my great-uncle’s cigarette card collection in their packets along the ledge near the roof. The damp gummed them all together and my mother threw them out.

Pinned to the wall is a map of the East Riding from Flamborough to Spurn, Bridlington to Barnsley, and photographs of singers and pop groups. The large one is The Animals, and although the others are too small to make out, I think The Hollies and The Searchers are among them.  Beneath them, on the ledge above the white ‘meat safe’ cupboard, my half-sized cricket bat lies next to a wooden block drilled with holes to hold pens and pencils.

You can see my ‘new’ bicycle with its straight handlebars, white mudguards and three speed Sturmey Archer gears, and the Philips EL 3541 reel-to-reel tape recorder used to record pop-music from the radio, and to boost my homework grades by recording the series of science programmes we listened to at school.

Chalked around the half-sized dartboard are the words “TRY TO HIT THE BOARD NOT THE WALL”. Impressively, there seem to be no tell-tale dart holes in the woodwork, even on my high resolution image. However, I hope I moved the tape recorder and bare-bulbed table lamp out of harm’s way before throwing any darts. I especially hope I remembered to protect the bottle in the corner just behind the watering can, because this is the hexagonal emerald-green bottle of hydrochloric acid, still three quarters full, mentioned in a previous post.

One can only be appalled by the electrical wiring. It’s a wonder I didn’t electrocute myself or burn the place down. The power supply enters the shed through a hole in the wall above the stepladder – you can just make it out running along the wall outside from the house, above the coal house door in the first picture. At the same end of the shed, a very old fashioned electric fire stands on a couple of wooden blocks nailed to the ledge, its mains cable hanging by a hook. The supply to the tape recorder and table lamp at the other end runs along the roof. There seem to be rather a lot of joins wound round with insulating tape, or perhaps, horrifyingly, sellotape. However, the twisted pair cable along the rear wall, running through a home-made switch box, is merely the lead to the extension loudspeaker fixed above the electric fire – the very same speaker on which my dad listened to Hancock’s Half Hour in the front room in the nineteen fifties.

One warm summer afternoon, the shed door wide open and the extension speaker full on, I switched on the tape recorder, plugged in the microphone, and began to broadcast my own music programme complete with jokes and witty repartee. The Animals, Searchers and Hollies could clearly be heard a dozen or so houses in all directions, up and down the street, across the road, and at the back. Between records came the jokes. “Did you hear about the constipated mathematician?” I was heard to ask, and before my mother could come running out of the house to put a stop to it I provided the answer. “He worked it out with a pencil.” Outrageous in the polite company of the early nineteen-sixties.



* One could write a whole piece about cigarette advertising. One amusing fact is that Marlboro cigarettes were originally marketed for women with slogans such as “Red beauty tips to match your lips and fingertips”, but Philip Morris gave the brand a sex change in 1954 when they began to advertise it as a filter cigarette for men, and introduced the ‘Marlboro Man’ who exuded masculine virility.
 

This Hi-de-Hi Government

So Theresa May has appointed Dominic Raab as Brexit Secretary following David Davis’s resignation.

Does anyone else think he looks like Simon Cadell?

Simon Cadell (1950-1996) was best known for his portrayal of Jeffrey Fairbrother in the BBC situation comedy Hi-de-Hi, which Wikipedia describes as being set in a fictional holiday camp, revolving around the lives of the camp’s entertainers, most of them struggling actors or has-beens.

More than just a visual resemblance then. Just perfect for this Hi-de-Hi government.

Hi-de-Ho!

Back In Time For Tea

Our Messy Kitchen, 1974

The BBC Back In Time series is having another outing, this time as Back In Time For Tea – that’s tea in the sense of evening meal from the days of breakfast, dinner and tea. If your evening meal was called dinner and your mid-day meal was lunch, you were either posh or a Southerner. The new series does take place in working class Bradford after all.

Episode 3, set in the nineteen-sixties, saw the Ellis children having to get their own tea: Fray Bentos Steak and Kidney Pie, Angel Delight and Mr. Kipling fruit cake.

Oh yes, steak and kidney pie in a tin! I remember it well! It’s what we ate in the shared house. Those steak and kidney pies were delicious – succulent pieces of steak and kidney in juicy gravy. The pudding version was good too with suet instead of puff pastry. You can still get them, although internet commentators tend to imply they might not be as good as they once were. Is anything?

For the first time, the arrival of ready meals in the late nineteen-sixties made it possible for single lads living in flats, bed-sits and house shares to eat well without the needless mental and physical exertion of planning, shopping and cooking. Deciphering a recipe, patronising butchers and grocers, and assembling a steak and kidney pie from scratch would have been well beyond the ingenuity of spoiled brats brought up by their mothers to expect everything done for them, but wielding a tin opener and turning on an oven was just about within their capabilities. This was especially true of the five social misfits, connected through schools and workplaces, who in 1970 moved into a strange back-to-front house off Monk Bridge Road, with its rear to the road and front to a narrow path beside Meanwood Beck.

My previous year in Leeds had been spent in Monday-to-Thursday lodgings where meals were provided. It was good home-cooking to keep hunger at bay but the snooty husband of the elderly couple I lodged with charged in guineas rather than pounds: five guineas a week, that’s five pounds five shillings, £5.25 in new money, equivalent to around £75 now in terms of price inflation, and £150 in terms of earnings inflation. Perhaps that sounds reasonable compared with housing costs today, but it was nearly all I earned as a trainee accountant. My contribution to the shared house rent was less than half as much.

At first we ate together, taking turns to serve unimaginatively greasy concoctions of sausage or fried eggs, with chips and baked beans. One lad’s weekly pièce de résistance was spaghetti Bolognese with so much liquid it would slop over the edge of your plate when anyone knocked the table – “as if we haven’t enough on our plates already,” someone said. The local fish and chip shop was a regular beneficiary of our largesse too.

But convenience foods were just beginning to appear and our diet quickly changed. Why go to all that inconvenience of peeling, boiling and mashing potatoes when you could get Cadbury’s Smash? It wasn’t too bad if you put plenty of butter in. Instant mashed potato with a Fray Bentos pie and a tin of peas or carrots really filled you up. Finish with strawberry or banana Angel Delight (a powder mixed with milk to make an instant mousse-like desert) and it was heaven. You were living like a king.

Probably butterscotch Angel Delight: I preferred banana or strawberry

Individuals came and went and the sharing arrangement moved to a new address off Brudenell Road in the Hyde Park area. Mostly, we now ate individually at different times. I still had an unhealthy reliance on the “Up-Steps Fish Shop”, but as there were as yet no Chinese or Indian takeaways, pizza or kebab shops nearby, fish and chips was the only bought in meal. For other days, Vesta dehydrated packet meals were now available: food for bachelors from Batchelors.

“Come on a Vesta Package Tour” read the advert, to India for beef curry (“not too hot”), Italy for beef risotto (“the real taste of the Continent”) or China for chow mein with crispy noodles (“You like, yes?” – would they dare say that now, or wish you “bon appétit” with the chicken supreme from France, or claim that the Spanish paella had “a touch of Olé”).

The noodles looked like translucent strips of plastic until tipped into hot oil upon which, spitting and sizzling, they crisped up like expanding polystyrene into gnarled and crunchy yellow whorls. Except that there always seemed to be one or two that didn’t work, and stayed hard and sticky enough to pull your fillings out. The curry looked like a packet of something you might collect from a crematorium until you added boiling water and it reconstituted itself into peculiarly light and watery chunks that were supposed to be beef. The risotto seemed best, especially when you fried the rice in butter (with extra Uncle Ben’s rice to bulk it up) and then added the meat and vegetable powder with a bottle of Newcastle Brown instead of water. The only time I’d had rice at home was as rice pudding, and other than spaghetti, it was my first experience of exotic food. It was mouthwatering if you overlooked all the monosodium glutamate, although you usually had to fire up the toaster before bed time, even when you had eaten a ‘serves two’ sized packet.

I never prepared anything from scratch. Vegetables, spaghetti hoops, even potatoes, came out of tins. Frozen foods such as fish fingers, beef burgers or the delicious boil-in-the-bag cod in butter sauce were all bought on the day as we had no fridge. Everything was heated by hob, grill or oven, as microwaves would not be common for another decade. I bought a ‘cooking for one’ cookbook which made out that everything was so simple, no one need end up dipping grilled fish fingers into a jar of tartar sauce, which was the only recipe I took from the book, although they were better with piccalilli. And much to the bewilderment of my family, I retain a weakness for tinned oranges with Carnation evaporated milk.

Nearly all of these convenience foods remain available, but as a vegetarian convert I wouldn’t eat them now. However, we did try banana Angel Delight with our tea the other night. Surprisingly, it was just as good as I remember.

Inclusion of the clips from the BBC Back In Time For Tea programme and the Alamy Vesta image are believed to be fair use. The stills are clipped from single frames and linked to the programme web site. The Alamy image is linked to its source. The Vesta image is also available at The Advertising Archives.

See also:

  Strange Brew (Back In Time For The Weekend 3)

Top of the Pops 1983

I am getting myself up to date with the current pop scene by watching the Thursday and Friday evening re-runs of Top of the Pops 1983 on BBC Four. Spandau Ballet, The Police, Culture Club, and others, shine like gemstones out of the mud. Clearly, I still have a long way still to go. I need to start with everything I missed during the nineteen-eighties while immersed in university postgraduate work to the exclusion of just about everything else. 

But I have begun to realise they are not showing all the programs. They are missing some out. Now and again they jump a week, and sometimes you notice a ham-fisted cut near the end just before the presenters announce who will be on the following program.

For example:

• On Thursday, 16th March, 2017, they showed the edition from Thursday, 19th May, 1983.
• On Friday, 17th March, it was from Thursday, 26th May, 1983.
• Then on Thursday, 23rd March, they showed the edition from Wednesday, 8th June (it was broadcast on Wednesday that week).
• And today, Friday, 24th March, it is from Thursday, 23rd June.   

So what happened to the 2nd and 16th June 1983? You might be ahead of me here.

Another one they omitted was the 50 minute long programme of Thursday 5th May, 1983, celebrating 1000 editions of Top of the Pops since it was first transmitted on 1st January, 1964, presented by a collection of then Radio 1 DJs.

The answers are to be found in the Radio Times Archive, also known as the Genome Project. On Thursday 2nd June, 1983, Top of the Pops was presented by Tony Blackburn and Jimmy Savile. On the 16th June it was Mike Read and Dave Lee Travis. Savile and Travis would also have been in the 1000th edition. The BBC are no longer showing programs presented by either of them.

Now, I don’t doubt that Savile was a monster, and that to see him again on our screens would be disturbing, but surely, couldn’t they just edit him out? They could always slot in one of the short Sounds of the Sixties programmes to make up the time.

As regards Dave Lee Travis (and some may take issue with me here), why are his appearances being treated as harshly as Savile’s? Although Travis was accused of multiple indiscretions, he was only convicted on one count of indecent assault for which he received a three-months suspended sentence. Appalling as that is, even the Judge described his offence as of a “different order” to other high profile convictions.

Travis claimed he was simply a “tactile” person. “Tactile” behaviour was rife in the mileau of the nineteen seventies and -eighties, as anyone with experience of office life at that time will testify. Every week, Top of the Pops showed (mainly) male presenters sandwiched between apparently adoring, (mainly) female fans. It seems unsurprising that things sometimes got overly “tactile”, and that unchecked, some individuals continued it for years. It doesn’t mean it was right, or that the (mainly) female recipients of the (mainly) male attention sought it. But does Travis really warrant the same restrictions as Savile? Convicted offenders of all kinds appear elsewhere on our screens.

We being prevented from seeing an important archive of popular music. As Harriet Walker wrote in the Independent, “it is part of the fabric of our slightly moth-eaten national quilt”.

Sheffield band The Human League are just one significant act to suffer collateral censorship and have retaliated by releasing a DVD of their Top of the Pops appearances with Savile and Travis chopped out. Wouldn’t it be better to be able to watch their performances in the context in which they were originally shown. If The Human League can make the edits, why can’t the BBC?

Dad’s 1950s Films

After posting recently about Nevil Shute and the R100, I found myself dreaming about the film of his book On the Beach which I saw around the age of ten. If you know it, you might wonder how a ten year old in 1959 got to see something so pessimistically awful and depressing. It was because my dad took me. We went once or twice a year from perhaps as young as four. It was always to see what he wanted to see. I had no idea what was on.

Over the next couple of weeks the names of other films came back. I am surprised to be able to recall twelve titles, all from before the age of twelve. They were mostly nautical, or about the war, or both, and are listed below with links to trailers or clips, together with my own vague, idiosyncratic, reconstructed childhood impressions.

What an unsuitable catalogue of horror they are: casual violence; cold blooded killing; wartime death and destruction; the stuff of nightmares. Although most had ‘U’ certificates meaning Universal or suitable for children, that does not mean they really were. Films tended to be restricted more often because of sexual content than violence. The films I saw would now be considered highly inappropriate for children. But fear not. I think I emerged undamaged. For most of the time I was completely mystified as to what was going on: a feeling not experienced again until I sat through films in French during foreign exchange trips to Belgium.

Just as with everything else, children have to learn how to make sense of the special language of film and moving images, and those of us born before every home had a television would have came late to this kind of literacy. It was especially true for me. We did not get a set until I was around twelve, and as I went to my grandma’s on Saturdays I never went to Saturday morning children’s cinema. It is no surprise I did not understand the films I saw. Sometimes I don’t even now.

We can now easily look up film release dates and work out my age at the time, although they may have taken a few months to reach our small Yorkshire town. 

Shane (Certificate A, released April 1953, aged 3)

Shane had lots of shooting and fighting in magnificent landscapes. It also had an ‘A’ certificate which meant children were allowed to see it only if accompanied by an adult. It is pretty violent. Did my dad really take me to see this aged four at best?

He always enjoyed a good ‘cowboy’, as he called Westerns, and I remember his infatuation with Alan Ladd’s quick draw, but how can I be sure it was this particular Alan Ladd Western we saw? On seeing the trailer again now on YouTube, I feel sure it was indeed Shane. Not even a four year old could forget nasty Jack Palance’s flat nose, deep-set eyes and wide cheekbones. 

The Student Prince (U certificate, released June 1954, aged 4) 

The only film not to have guns, ships or aeroplanes. Not at all what you would think my dad would see. Despite being only four or five I retain some faint impressions. It was in colour and there was lots of singing, most memorably the Drinking Song, “Drink, Drink, Drink”. My dad believed he could sing as well as Mario Lanza whose voice was used in the film.

The Dam Busters (U certificate, released May 1955, aged 5)

Some of my dad’s school friends had flown in bombers, and many had died in them. He talked about having a drink one wartime Thursday evening with a lad who flew as a navigator and had to return to his squadron on the Monday. He was terrified. He was lost over Germany a week later.

The Dam Busters might have given my dad some idea as to what it was like but all I saw was lots of aeroplanes flying. The only incident I specifically remember is the black dog belonging to one of the pilots being run over and killed. It was most distressing. Today people only get upset at its unfortunate name.

Thanks to Uncle Mac and Children’s Favourites we can all still hum the iconic theme tune (‘Derrr der der der de de der der’). I also subsequently learned that some of the aerial sequences were filmed over the River Don at Goole, otherwise known as the Dutch River, a dead ringer for the Dutch canals.

Reach for the Sky (U certificate, released July 1956, aged 6)

Another war film. Kenneth More walks about with a stiff upper lip and even stiffer legs playing Douglas Bader, the amputee wartime fighter ace. Again there were lots of aeroplanes but More’s delivery was far too fast and clipped for my Yorkshire ears.

Around the World in 80 Days (U certificate, released October 1956, aged 7)

Another display of British stiff upper lip, this time with David Niven playing Phileas Fogg who bets he can circumnavigate the world in 80 days. He arrives back five minutes late, losing £20,000. The twist is that because he travelled eastwards he gained a day, so wins the bet after all. That was useful in school Geography, years later.

Afterwards I always recognised David Niven and remembered the odd name of his character from before it became a brand of crisps, and also that of his sidekick Passepartout. The film now seems like an attempt to get the most stars possible into one production, but I knew none of them at the time.

The Battle of the River Plate (U certificate, released October 1956, aged 7)

My dad especially liked films about the sea because his grandpa had been a captain and his cousin was in the merchant navy, so he knew all about it. Three Royal Navy cruisers chase the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee around the Atlantic Ocean. There was lots of naval shelling and one of ours, the Exeter, was hit and caught fire. The main thing I remember though, was wondering what on earth was a “pocket” battleship.

Dunkirk (U certificate, released March 1958, aged 8)
 

I remember this quite well, especially the terrifying Stuka dive-bombers with their wailing sirens, and men queuing chest deep out into the cold sea to be picked up by small civilian boats. I wonder whether the new film to be released this summer will be anywhere near as good.

I was fascinated by my dad's personal acquaintance with small boat owners on the Yorkshire Ouse who had sailed down to Ramsgate to take part in the evacuation. 
 

The Vikings (A certificate, released June 1958 , aged 8)

Did my mum really know what my dad had taken me to see – a violent certificate ‘A’ Norse saga?

Kirk Douglas with his ridiculous dimpled chin has his eye pecked out by a falcon and leaps about with a disgusting blind eye for the rest of the film. When he dies at the end his body is cast out to sea in a burning Viking longship with dragon heads at the ends and a big square sail.

I recognised other actors who later became familiar as having been in the film, most notably the tousled head of Tony Curtis and the lined face and wide toothy grin of Ernest Borgnine. The most memorable thing however was the theme tune played over a backdrop of animated Viking scrolls. I can still hum it after nearly sixty years.

A Night To Remember (Certificate U, released July 1958, aged 8)

A film about the sinking of the Titanic, said to be the most historically accurate of them all. Kenneth More’s stiff upper lip made another appearance but with working legs this time. I remember thinking I would not want to be a stoker down in the boiler room, and also asking what was wrong with the wobbly guy who drank the best part of a bottle of whisky which later supposedly protected him from the cold, but don’t think I followed much else at all. Events take place calmly and without panic so as not to frighten the passengers – or the audience.

On The Beach (Certificate A, released December 1959, aged 10)

A film about the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. Only the Southern Hemisphere remains inhabitable. To the strains of Waltzing Matilda, men spend interminable boring hours in a submarine sailing from Australia to America to investigate the source of telegraph signals which they discover are caused by a bottle suspended as much as your disbelief from a fluttering window blind so that it rests upon a Morse key which happens still to be powered and switched on. They then go back to Australia where everybody either kills themselves or dies of radiation sickness. It is so boring that the trailer has to focus on telling you how good it is rather than showing you excerpts from the film. Oh well, Nevil, at least it would have put an end to those brutish and uncouth Yorkshire women, as you describe my grandmother’s social group in your autobiography.

Sink the Bismarck (Certificate U, released February 1960, aged 10)

The fifties have ended but my dad is still taking me to see yet more rousingly patriotic films about the war at sea. Again we see Kenneth More and his unintelligible stiff upper lip. H.M.S. Hood explodes when hit in the magazine (armoury) by a German shell but we begin to get our own back when we attack with torpedoes delivered by Fairey Swordfish biplanes. I still know the names of all the English and German battleships.

The Alamo (Certificate U, released October 1960, aged 11)

At last I get to see something I had asked to see: Davy Crockett in his bizarre hat – basically a dead raccoon on his head with its tail hanging down the back. There were lots of people fighting, riding horses and shooting each other. It was just as boring as my dad’s films.

I had only wanted to see it because of the Davy Crockett song (thanks to Children’s Favourites again):

Born on a mountain top in Tennessee,
Greenest state in the land of the free.
Raised in the woods so's he knew every tree,
Killed him a bear when he was only three.

Davy, Davy Crockett King of the Wild Frontier.

But the song wasn’t in the film. I didn’t like John Wayne’s sanctimonious voice either. 

Davy Crockett was the last one. Soon afterwards we got a television which put paid to our joint cinema outings for a decade.

I may have forgotten one or two. I definitely remember going to see Bambi at some point, but it wasn’t with my dad and certainly not in 1942 when it came out.

I think we only went to the pictures together twice again, for The Battle of Britain in 1969 and Murder on the Orient Express in 1974 which we saw in Leeds. That was another film with a lot of stars. My dad wanted to see it because of Lauren Bacall.

Now I wish we’d gone more of course.

The links to the trailers on YouTube may cease to work if blocked by the copyright owners.