tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-73993079033452826052024-03-05T21:37:44.330-08:00Newington Green 50s and 60sOur time as yoofs in them times there thenRoj n Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595475606873802298noreply@blogger.comBlogger22125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7399307903345282605.post-978979309724097882015-11-21T08:45:00.001-08:002015-11-21T08:48:13.911-08:00Who Brought Them Furry Animals In?Near Dalston, between Southgate Road and Kingsland Road, was De Beauvoir Road. And still is, except that it's now called, by some people, something different.<br />
It used to be called De Beauvoir Road, pronounced d'bo-vwar. But then in the 1970's and early 80's these middle-class gentrified people started moving in, because some of the houses are quite spacious and sound, and suddenly, from nowhere, we had De Beaver Town.<br />
In vain I searched for little furry animals that were gnawing at the woodwork and building dams in the gutter when it rained, but sadly I never found any.<br />
Though I'm still looking.<br />
And funnily enough, when we referred to d'bo-vwar road, these gentrified folks laughed at us, as if we were saying something outrageously amusing.<br />
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In d'bo-vwar Road, and running along Downham Road, is a great big housing estate, the De Beauvoir Estate, which according to Wikipedia was completed in 1971, though people were moving in there well before that. It is high-density housing, in flats, all looks a bit municipal.<br />
Wikipedia also has this fascinating snippet: '<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px; widows: 1;">De Beauvoir Town was home to </span><a class="new" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=William_Lyttle&action=edit&redlink=1" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #a55858; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px; text-decoration: none; widows: 1;" title="William Lyttle (page does not exist)">William Lyttle</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px; widows: 1;"> (1931–2010), a retired electrical engineer known as the </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px; widows: 1;">Mole Man of Hackney</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px; widows: 1;">, who dug a series of </span><a class="mw-redirect" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnels" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px; text-decoration: none; widows: 1;" title="Tunnels">tunnels</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px; widows: 1;"> under his 20-room property on the corner of Mortimer Road and Stamford Road. In 2001, his tunnelling caused an 8 ft (2.4 m) hole to appear in the pavement on Stamford Road. Reports that the tunnelling had started again in 2006 were confirmed when </span><a class="mw-redirect" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackney_Council" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px; text-decoration: none; widows: 1;" title="Hackney Council">Hackney Council</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px; widows: 1;"> found a network of tunnels and caverns, some 8 m (26 ft) deep, spreading up to 20m in every direction from his house.'</span><br />
Could it be that he was the origin of this idea of the area being full of beavers? Sounds plausible.<br />
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DaveRoj n Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595475606873802298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7399307903345282605.post-17815010926348437672015-07-15T03:34:00.000-07:002016-11-21T04:22:39.540-08:00The Trams<br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Until April 1952, when I was still six-years-old, trams came along Mildmay Road then round the east side of Newington Green into Green Lanes and on up to Manor House, that was the end of the line, by the Manor House pub; they could go no further as the tramlines beyond that were taken up many years before. The driver then walked from the front to the rear of the tram, which now became the front, and then drove his number 33 tram back to West Norwood.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="font-size: x-small;">There's a photo of the number 33 at Manor House that you can see on <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/rw3-497alh/24259086259">Flickr</a>.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The driver stood to drive the tram. It was a standing-up job. It must have got cold in winter, as there was no door between him and the outside. Presumably the tram drivers muffled up well, perhaps they stamped their feet as they rode along, though I have no memory of travelling on the tram in winter, only summer, when occasionally my mother would take us to Manor House, for a short walk in Finsbury Park to see the ducks on the pond.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Seats on the tram were of slatted wood in an iron frame, and the back of the seat was on a pivot at the centre-base, so you could bring the seat back forward and over, to make the seats face forwards again for the return journey home. Great fun for a five-year-old, pulling the clattery seat-backs forward, though you had to be quick as the conductor mainly did this at the terminus, with a great banging clunking of a single movement down the tram.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The trams up to Manor House took their power from a conduit under the road, where a mechanism called a plough went from under the tram through a slot in the road, into the conduit where it touched the power source. I can remember no warnings to never poke bits of wire down the slot, and maybe that would have been difficult anyway, it sounds a bit hazardous now but maybe that is just a change of health and safety awareness.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Between the rails was not tarmac, it was tarry-blocks. These were blocks of wood that had been soaked in tar, these would presumably have allowed for easier maintenance than tarmac at the time. Occasionally a block would work loose, where it was much prized to be spirited away home, as it burned on the fire long and magnificently. There were usually a number of gaps to be seen in the tarry-blocks.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The tram stops were on the pavement, but the trams did not pull into the kerb, the rails ran straight along the centre of the road, so that in order to board the tram you walked out into the road, hoping and trusting, I suppose, that no boy racer in his motorbike and sidecar was going to try zipping along the inside. This system of walking out in front of the traffic to board a tram still exists in parts of eastern Europe. </span></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="font-size: x-small;">There were accidents with trams. My uncle John was killed in an accident before I was born, though I think this was something to do with him trying to jump on a moving one and missing his footing. Hard to find out the details now.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="font-size: x-small;">But the main treat with a number 33 tram was when my dad took me for a ride to the Embankment, for then the tram went through the Kingsway Tunnel, where it just fitted between the white-tiled walls that passed within inches of the sides, and in the tunnel the tram stopped at white-tiled stations. It was all a bit scary. At the Embankment it popped out of the tunnel underneath Waterloo Bridge and made a sharp screeching turn right, on towards Westminster Bridge.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="font-size: x-small;">In April 1952 the number 33 trams finished and the rails were taken up. The number 33 tram route was replaced by bus route 171, which rather than turning round at Manor House carried on up Green Lanes, then turned right at the Salisbury pub into St Anne’s Road and Philip Lane to Tottenham High Road ending its route at Bruce Grove. At the southern end of the route, initially, it continued to run to West Norwood following exactly the same route as the tram except that never went through the Kingsway Tunnel, instead it went down Kingsway to Aldwych, then across Fleet Street into a little road bringing it down by the Temple to the Embankment. The number 171 route has changed frequently over the years. </span></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">The trams were noisy and cranky and screechy and getting old and of a time gone by even in the 1950s, but instead of modernising the trams, the authorities replaced them with buses. In retrospect now this seems shortsighted, adding to traffic congestion rather than defeating it, but I suppose it all seemed to simple at the time, buses could overtake each other and their routes could be modified. It left London lagging behind a bit, in public transport though, dispensing with trams altogether. </span></span> </div>
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Dave</div>
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A number 35 tram comes out from the Kingsway Tunnel in 1933. The number 35 followed the same route as the 33 to the Angel and then went up Holloway Road to Archway. Nice lettering on the number of that 177 bus. Photo courtesy <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/31363949@N02/14878663083">Leonard Bentley on Flickr</a>.</div>
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<img alt="" onclick="RevertAll(50,null);Pop(this,50,"PopBoxImageLarge");" pbcaption="" pbshowpopbar="true" pbsrcnl="https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7188/6874219104_5373db5b0c_b.jpg" src="https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7188/6874219104_5373db5b0c.jpg" style="border: solid black 1px; cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; height: 375px; width: 500px;" title="Click to magnify/shrink" /> <br />
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In the old eastern Europe people still often walk into the road to get on a tram. This was Rostock in east Germany in July 2010.</div>
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<br />Roj n Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595475606873802298noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7399307903345282605.post-84857029605638207442015-04-07T03:11:00.003-07:002015-04-07T03:11:51.890-07:00The Weed<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">In the front garden of our basement flat at 26 Petherton Road there grew a weed. Every summer it came up, thick and tall and it blocked the light to the front room window.</span></span></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">My parents said it was a nuisance, made the room always dark, and cutting it back did little good, it quickly grew back again. My dad tried digging it out, but that did no good either, it still grew back. </span></span> </div><div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">It was a thick-stemmed plant with broad leaves, green stems flecked with red and there were knotty sections along each hollow stem. When you broke a stem it exuded a milky substance. Occasionally some of the plants produced a white flower. There was quite a lot of it in some gardens round and about, always were it grew it was to the exclusion of anything else.</span></span></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">My dad did not know what it was. He called it convolvulus though he was not entirely convinced about that. Uncle Denis said you’ll never get rid of that stuff, the only thing you can do is cover the garden with creosote, that’ll kill it, but it will poison the ground so nothing else will grow for a few years either. </span></span> </div><div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Dad was not keen on that idea, but eventually when all else had failed that was what he and Denis did, and it did kill the weed, and nothing else did grow for some years, until a few tufts of scratty grass began to poke their way through. </span></span> </div><div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The weed, that they called convolvulus, was Japanese Knotweed. Very pervasive, very difficult to kill, and with a white flower that looks a bit like that of convolvulus which will be why the confusion. No one knew about Japanese Knotweed in them parts in them days.</span></span></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">These days I assume it has all gone from the area, though I keep my eyes open. I think now if any comes up you are probably required to get it professionally dealt with.</span></span></div><br />
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">A weed is nothing but a flower in the wrong place. Not sure where the right place is for Japanese Knotweed. Japan? Horrible stuff.</span></span></div><div style="position:relative; width:500px; margin:auto"><img src="https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3102/2872341455_480d411471.jpg" style="width:500px; height:375px"/><div style="text-align:right; font-size:11px;">photo by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/andrew_j_w/2872341455" style=" color:#996600">Andrew Wilkinson on Flickr</a></div></div><div style="text-align:right:font-style:italic">Dave</div>Roj n Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595475606873802298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7399307903345282605.post-8061287406112903412015-03-24T13:13:00.002-07:002015-03-24T14:09:16.361-07:00Gestapo-Free Zone<div style="color:#009000">I wrote this in March 2014 after a visit to a friend’s birthday party in Newcastle. It could never happen in Newington Green, could it? I hope not. It could never have happened in Newington Green back there in the 50s and 60s, could it? No I don’t believe that it could. This is an illustration of Newington Green through what made it, and makes it, civilised in the nation, via a mechanism of comparison. </div><div style="color:#6666aa">Bet It Wouldn’t Happen Where the Journalists Live – Newcastle, 22 March 2014</div><br />
<div class="dc3">We went to Patricia’s birthday party. When we arrived at the Indian restaurant in smart West Jesmond in Newcastle shortly after 7 p.m. we found that in addition to our party of fifty-odd people the restaurant was full at its remaining tables on two floors and there was a constant milling around the bar-area of people ordering and collecting takeaways. It was busy. </div><div class="dc3">And coming and going through and among this multitude, eight or ten po-faced men and women in blue onesies and bovver boots with a label on their jacket saying ‘Immigration and Border Control’, repeatedly walking up and down the stairs and asking things at the bar, giving the evening a kind of Gestapo flavour. It turned out that this was not a wheeze organised by Patricia, this was the authorities seeking out illegal immigrants.</div><div class="dc3">Patricia found a moment to ask the owner of the restaurant, Ahmed, whom she knows quite well, about it. The heavies had been there since five o’clock, he said, opening every cupboard and fridge door, wanting to see into everything. It was difficult when the restaurant is so busy and he was having to apologise to everyone for slow service and what is more if they find anyone who is working there illegally he could be fined £10,000.</div><div>‘I do my best, but how can I know whether what someone tells me is true? How do I know if papers they show me are genuine or not?’ He seemed to be taking the stance that if you get caught then it’ll be a business expense of the type that is out of your control, a bit like something getting broken; and <span style="white-space:nowrap">er. . .</span> would he be able to claim tax relief on the expense? Looking this up it seems that he probably could if it came to it, though he may have to argue the case. And of course Ahmed the restaurant boss is right, if someone gives him a dodgy NI number he would not find out it was a made up one or one belonging to someone else for quite some time.</div><div class="dc3">Anyway the Gestapo all marched out around 9 p.m., having found no Bangladeshis hiding in the fridge, and Ahmed shrugged his shoulders, it seems these days to be one of the things that, if you are of Bangladeshi origin in a town like Newcastle and running a restaurant, you have to put up with periodically.</div><div class="dc3">I felt outraged. There is a French restaurant next door and an Italian one next door to that. Do they get raided? Admittedly French and Italian people can work here without needing anything more than an ID card, but the staff waiting on and in the kitchen – they could just as easily be Australian. Could it be the black faces that are the ones that get hassled?</div><div class="dc3">It may be that the immigration officers raid Indian restaurants because there is a greater chance of finding illegal immigrants than there would be in an Italian restaurant, but then Ahmed is well known in the area, people know that he is running a successful restaurant and wants to stay on the side of the law and get on with running his business.</div><div class="dc3">Patricia disagreed to some extent with my rantings, arguing that immigration needs to be controlled and by raiding a restaurant when it is busy they are more likely to find someone as all hands will be on deck. Which may well be so, but British policing has a tradition of of using low-key intelligence and focusing on identification of where the problems are, before charging in with metaphorical (or even real) truncheons flying. It all seems a bit too foreign for my liking.</div><div class="dc3">And there is the cost-effectiveness. Eight people for four hours on a Saturday night – to arrest at most a cook and a waiter. And in reality no one at all. Taxpayers’ money. There may be a problem of illegal immigration but this sort of behaviour by the authorities gives the distinct impression that whatever problem it is they think they are tackling, it isn’t that one. Or perhaps I am wrong in my basic premise, perhaps the reality is a sideline, perhaps the intention is to give the impression through visible presence that the problem is being dealt with, a sop to what the authorities believe the people want to see, a political gesture. But if it is that then these authorities have bollocksed it up again as usual, as follows:</div><div class="dc3">In Nazi Germany, when this sort of thing was more widespread, nastier and more extreme, one reads that the ordinary people mostly said: but what could we do? We did not see this most of the time! And tellingly this event was an example of that. Apart from Patricia and the staff of the restaurant, I did not find anyone who had seen any immigration officers. They just didn’t notice them! One man, a retired vet, when I pointed out who they were, said he had half registered them and guessed they might be VAT inspectors.</div><div class="dc3">Extraordinarily, though raids such as this must be going on all over the place they seldom if ever seem to get reported. Is there a conspiracy going on among the press? Or is it just that journalists these days all live in chattering Islington and cannot in their wildest imaginings ever contemplate travelling north of Brent Cross?</div><div style="text-align:right:font-style:italic">Dave</div>Roj n Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595475606873802298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7399307903345282605.post-23647061950924660622015-03-23T05:22:00.002-07:002015-03-23T06:35:24.090-07:00Crap Education<div>Every morning a few hundred teenage boys each put on a black blazer with a purple, white and black badge on its pocket, grey trousers, white(ish) shirt and a purple and black striped tie, and made their way on foot, on a bicycle, or by bus, to Highbury County Grammar School. I was one of them.</div><div>In the first two years there, boys were also expected to wear a cap. This was a round cap segmented into purple and black quarters, with a black peak. No one did. They kept their cap in their pocket until nearing the school, so as to be seen wearing it only while walking in the gates.</div><div>My parents were proud of me in my school uniform, and insisted I wear my cap when going by bus to visit Auntie Hilda and Uncle Bill on Sunday afternoons. I was cross about this, and shrunk so no one saw me.</div><div>The other aspect of the uniform for the first two years there was short trousers. That was expected, and expected by parents too, when boys first wore long trousers they were ribbed by grandparents and uncles for presuming to enter the realms of adulthood.</div><div>A Martian came by doing a study of the human race, all he said was, ‘Dese peepol, dere crazy’, got in his spaceship and went home again. I begged him to take me with him but he said, ‘Nah’.</div><div>On the way to school groups of black-blazered boys would collect to walk to the school together, chatting about this and that.</div><div>This was a selection of the country’s top 25 per cent at the 11-plus exam, who had found themselves in that quartile as a result of getting good grades at the age of eleven.</div><div>It was only a selection of the 25 per cent, because others locally who passed the 11-plus chose to go instead to the newly-opened comprehensive school, Woodberry Down. The reason a particular 11-plus-passer chose one school over the other will have varied from case to case. My mother preferred me to go to Highbury because it was nearer, she did not believe in people having to travel far to school when that was not necessary.</div><div>In my year-group at the grammar school, not one boy, not a single one, went on to university (or none that I am aware of). That’s disgraceful isn’t it? Not one of the country’s top achiever’s in that year at their 11-plus exam found their way to a university. Yes it is disgraceful. It was not true of those who went to Woodberry Down, but was Highbury County Grammar.</div><div>The reason for this outrage was partly because of the way the school saw itself, as a kind of pastiche English public school, with a focus on sport, Latin and English history as the main things you needed in order to succeed in life – that and a colour-segmented cap. Each year was also streamed into three streams, with the bottom stream regarding themselves as not in the top 25 per cent at all.</div><div>In a true English public school it probably didn’t matter much if all you did was play cricket and wear a cap, as you had the parental influence, accent, and cultural sneer to sort you out, but we had none of those things. </div><div>And neither were most of the boys the slightest bit interested in cricket, or Latin, or English history for that matter, though I have developed a keen interest in British and European history since, but not of the sort we learned about at school.</div><div>The one sporting benefit that the school did impart, though, was that almost all the boys learned how to swim. This was because the school had a swimming pool, and there were swimming lessons twice a week. The pool was filled with cold water first thing Monday, then emptied on Wednesday evening and refilled with cold water again. Monday-morning and Thursday-morning lessons were in clear but icy-cold water – good for the public-school spirit – and those with a lesson on Wednesday afternoon found themselves splashing about in a warm murky silver-green gloop. But at least it was warm, by then.</div><div>Nearly all the boys learned to swim – one or two never did – though some, such as Micky, were only barely confident at it, see <a href="http://newingtongreenthen.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/cricked-neck.html" style="text-decoration:underline">Cricked Neck</a>.</div><div>As regards the academic education, although none went on to university, a few went to teacher’s training college and three were accepted at art college, though Les’s dad refused to allow him to go. Engineering, said Les’s dad, that’s the only sensible occupation, none of this arty-farty learning stuff, and Les’s dad was quite a forceful character. Les ended up spending his working life as a middle-manager in the offices of a pharmaceuticals company (Roche). </div><div>Of the other two accepted for art college one was me, and I only lasted there a year, and the other Barry, who became a lecturer at Salisbury College of Art (and so another bloody teacher) and a leading light in the Bournemouth theosophists.</div><div>While none for our year went on to university that was not true of every year. Peter Gilks, who was in the year behind me, went on to Manchester University to do maths; and for his working life he <span style=”white-space:nowrap”>became . . .</span> another bloody teacher.</div><div>Of the boys in the school, most were from families where the parents – usually just the father – had a working-class job. Some were from those who owned a small business, usually a shop, and then there were the Jews, making up round about a quarter or a third of the total. The Jews were of two types, some were the sons of parents who had escaped the Nazis, and others from longer-standing Jewish families whose grandparents or great-grandparents had as likely as not escaped from the Russians. Some of the Jews’ parents were in working-class jobs but most were in business of one sort or another, especially the German-accented ones. There were a handful of other immigrant children, a few Greek Cypriots and one or two Indians.</div><div>All in all, I think I came out of it better than I might have, my strongest subjects by far at school were art and maths, I sometimes wish I had gone on to do more of the maths, though for what? To become a teacher? Instead I have used maths – albeit not wildly complex maths – quite a lot in my work as a computer programmer, and I still do. </div><div>Yes, all-in-all pretty well, though I am convinced that was more in spite of the schooling than because of it. </div><div>And when Tory (or UKIP) MPs say they believe that the grammar school system should be re-introduced, I wonder why they so want to destroy the life chances of others such as me. They must be nasty, nasty, people.</div><div style="text-align:right; font-style:italic">Dave</div>Roj n Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595475606873802298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7399307903345282605.post-22179704010812469742015-03-23T05:12:00.003-07:002015-03-23T05:15:31.052-07:00Cricked Neck<div style="color:#009000">This piece is related to <a href="">Crap Education</a>, it is about Micky as a less-than strong swimmer and how that led to me getting a cricked neck.</div><div class="dc3">Micky came to Lowestoft, he brought with him his oldest two children, Rupert and Kelly. They came to visit me in my house in Pakefield.</div><div class="dc3">Geoff was there. Geoff had been living there for some time, after I had suggested that he might begin a road to good fortune from my house in Pakefield, following his road to destitution from my flat in London.</div><div class="dc3">On the first evening that Micky and the children were there I went to bed early; tomorrow was going to be another day. Geoff meanwhile had other ideas. Geoff is an insomniac and he foresaw a beautiful evening, listening to music, smoking and drinking with his old friend Micky, everything would be so cool, so beautiful.</div><div class="dc3">Geoff put on his best orange Japanese kimono and wooden sandals on his feet, sandals that consisted of a flat plane to place your foot on, and two high wooden blocks between that and the floor. They were so beautiful, so comfortable, so spiritual! He had bought them in Japan.</div><div class="dc3">On the CD player he put some weird Japanese whistling and creaking music, and then settled down for a night of it, so far as Geoff was concerned that would be a real night, finishing at dawn or not finishing at all.</div><div class="dc3">Micky was worried. He had his children to take care of. But he felt it would sound too weak, too pathetic, to do what I had just done and say: I’m off to bed. He did not have my advantage – if that’s what it can be called – of spending some months sharing a dwelling with Geoff.</div><div class="dc3">Micky stuck with it until about 3 a.m. and then could keep up his cool-guy pretence no longer. He went to bed. Geoff stayed drinking and playing Japanese wailing sounds too loud all night through. I periodically woke up and heard them.</div><div class="dc3">The following day Micky was more tired than he would have liked. He took his children to the beach while I tidied the house.</div><div class="dc3">Shortly after they had gone to the beach Micky rushed in to the house, in the lumbering sort of way he did, and said in an urgent tone, ‘You’re a strong swimmer, can you come down to the beach, the children are drifting out to sea in the rubber dinghy and I am not confident enough at to go out and rescue them.’</div><div>I jumped out of my trousers and put on some swimming shorts and sandals and a T-shirt so as not to get too cold in the sea while Micky explained, ‘I’ve asked some people on the beach to keep and eye while I fetch help and they’ve said they’ll raise the alarm if anything happens, I’m just not confident enough as a swimmer to go in and bring them back, I could end up in more trouble’.</div><div class="dc3">We ran down to the beach. I waded into the water and swam out to the dinghy where the children were happily paddling about with a small oar each.</div><div class="dc3">‘We’re all right, you don’t need to rescue us, you can swim back to the beach’, they insisted cheerily and breezily.</div><div class="dc3">But they were not all right because had that cheap plastic dinghy deflated, they would have been way, way out of their depth in a cool grey swirling sea.</div><div class="dc3">Swimming with my legs and pushing gently with the palms of my hands, I nudged the boat back to the shore.</div><div class="dc3">As we got to within child-wading depth, a wave tumbled in and threw the boat and the children onto the shore in a bundle, to their shrieks of laughter. It turned me head over heels in the melee and I twisted my neck as my head hit the shingle, with what seemed to me like a wrenching sound.</div><div class="dc3">The neck was going to be alright, it was just a bit noticeable whenever I moved too jerkily and I needed to hold it to one side for much of the time.</div><div class="dc3">In the conservatory of the <i>Jolly Sailors</i> that evening the atmosphere was not relaxed, Micky was exhausted and kept apologising to me for the neck, which I assured him was nothing, Geoff had been drinking too much and was becoming angrily overbearing as he tended to after a few drinks, and I was trying to hold it all together with my head on one side.</div><div class="dc3">‘You’re too stressed’, Geoff announced with a serious and staring look, ‘Too intense, you need to cool it more.’ </div><div class="dc3">‘Yeah, Geoff, too stressed, you’re right. Too bloody right!’</div>Roj n Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595475606873802298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7399307903345282605.post-68369829191973585262015-03-21T10:51:00.000-07:002015-03-21T03:13:56.935-07:00A Shot of ’64<div >We’d been to a pub for the evening, in Seven Sisters Road, a big pub, we sat as a group in the back room and chatted. That’s the sort of thing we did.</div><div class="dc3">We walked back towards home. At the corner of Green Lanes and Church Street Andrew and Geoff were to go along Church Street and Micky, Brian and I straight on towards Petherton Road. Partings took a while in those days, there was still such a lot to say. What was there to say? Rubbish. But lots of it.</div><div >Chatting on the corner, a car came round quite wide and fast, there was a bang from an open rear window. Micky sat down on the wall, looking white, saying, ‘I’ve been shot in the leg’.</div><div >The bang was a shotgun, we all got sprayed a bit, I had a few small holes in my jeans, but the side of Micky’s leg through his jeans was a bloody mess.</div><div class="dc3">Geoff and Brian ran over to the Robinson Crusoe pub, banged on the door. A voice from inside: ‘We’re closed!’</div><div >‘No, no, we need to call an ambulance, someone’s been shot.’</div><div>‘I said we’re closed. Can’t you hear? Piss off!’</div><div>But someone must have called one, for in a short time an ambulance arrived.</div><div class="dc3">I went with Micky in the ambulance to the hospital. Micky’s parents arrived. I think Brian must have gone round and informed them, he’d already checked with the ambulance crew which hospital they were going to. Good old Brian – always steady.</div><div>Remember we love you, said his mum, We’ll do all we can to look after you. I choked up. I can’t cope with kindness. Micky’s mum always was a little bit more middle-class.</div><div class="dc3">At the hospital the police arrived and the press saying they were police. We couldn’t work out who was which. We definitely had our suspicions about some of them.</div><div class="dc3">The following morning the shooting was on the front page of the national press. My mum came into my bedroom. ‘What’s this?’ She looked frightened and horrified.</div><div class="dc3">Two policemen came round while I was brushing my teeth. I could tell them nothing. As regards motives or possible motives I knew nothing. The police seemed doubtful about that, my mother even more doubtful, the policemen went away.</div><div class="dc3">I honestly think that it was just a group of youths having what they probably called fun. Once they found the results of the actions on the front page of the Daily Mirror, they’ll have kept their heads well down.</div><div class="dc3">In the pubs, we heard people say they’d heard, they knew someone who knew someone who did it. But it was all brag.</div><div class="dc3">These days a shooting on a street corner at night wouldn’t make the front page of the Daily Mirror, but it did then, in 1964.</div><div style="text-align:right; font-style:italic">Dave</div><div style="color:#009900">The story continues with <a href="http://newingtongreenthen.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-patch-up-and-celebrity-voyeurs.html">Patched Up and Celebrity Voyeurs</a>.</div>Roj n Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595475606873802298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7399307903345282605.post-59765985846315244312015-03-21T10:00:00.000-07:002015-03-21T03:14:45.061-07:00Patched Up and Celebrity Voyeurs<div style="color:#009900">This follows on from <a href="http://newingtongreenthen.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/a-shot-of.html">A Shot of ’64</a> where Micky got shot in the leg in 1964.</div><div >The ambulance took Micky to St Leonard’s Hospital on Kingsland Road where he lay on a bed for a few weeks while the pieces of shot got picked out of his leg and his wound healed. He recovered well enough. A few nightmares afterwards now and again.</div><div class="dc3">Friends visited Micky in hospital. I went most days. We stood or sat by his bed and smoked cigarettes. It was a ward of perhaps thirty beds in rows of fifteen along the walls on both sides of the room. During the prescribed hour for visiting, visitors would smoke cigarettes while they chatted among themselves or to the person they had come to see. Seems incredible now.</div><div class="dc3">After Micky came out of hospital our group of friends were in the pub, The Edinburgh, where we went most Sunday lunchtimes. The Edinburgh at Sunday midday was busy, always busy. ‘Hello Micky, how are you, doing all right?’ People stopped by to make contact.</div><div class="dc3">‘And what’s the old bill doing here trying to look inconspicuous? Must be checking up on you Micky!’ A man in a grubby white trenchcoat, standing by the wall holding a half pint to his chest. So archetypically a caricature of a policeman that he couldn’t have been really could he? Could he?</div><div class="dc3">He could have been, but he might have been just a bloke, or equally likely he was a celebrity voyeur. He periodically glanced our way.</div><div class="dc3">Celebrity voyeurs. Micky received a letter from the USA, addressed simply to Michael Dadd, London. It had found his home – that must have been as a result of the publicity in the newspapers. A girl saying she had seen his picture in the paper and thought he looked lovely and could they make contact. His picture had at that point never been in the paper, but he wrote back anyway, intrigued.</div><div class="dc3">The exchange of letters became increasingly suggestive and obscene; expletives and sexual innuendo, from innuendo to outright invitation, until Micky stopped the correspondence. I think it was his dad, Lenny, who gently but firmly suggested that it was not wise to continue. And was it really a girl? Could have been. Though probably not, probably the pre-social-media version of a troll, stalker, or groomer.</div><div>You have to be so careful, when your name gets in the papers. And at the time we were so much less clued up to this than many would be now. But good old Lenny. Always had his head screwed on, did Lenny, and still does, in 2015 still alert in his nineties.</div><div>Dave</div>Roj n Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595475606873802298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7399307903345282605.post-29378247712435545792015-03-15T05:28:00.000-07:002015-03-16T04:30:23.185-07:00“Let’s ‘Ave a Ride On Yer Bi-sickle?”<br />
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</div><b>Lots of kids in the area had bikes of all shapes and sizes: new, secondhand, borrowed, handed down, made up or nicked. We had a go of each other’s bikes and we often fell off or rode into things.</b><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">Around 1959 my Dad bought me a brand new <span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Raleigh </span>Blue Streak racing bike. It had <span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Huret derailleurs, a Brooks saddle and it looked beautiful.</span> <a href="http://classiccycleus.com/home/1959-blue-streak/"><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">http://classiccycleus.com/home/1959-blue-streak/</span></a> <span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span>We went to a shop in Stoke Newington High Street, that my Dad knew, and got it. (I found out many years later that the shop was probably around in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s, one of a parade of shops, and he spent his formative years with his parents in the flats above that parade). <span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal">It was quite safe for a young teenager to cycle the streets in those days before many people had cars. Nevertheless there were no cycle helmets to buy then and so, like many I suppose, I practised in quieter places near where I lived until I felt safe enough to join a small group of cycling buddies. </div><div class="MsoNormal">If you had a push bike in your early teens (or before) you knew how much it changed your life. The sense of adventure was strong when you realised you could get virtually anywhere on a bike. Cycling to and from school or using a bike to do a paper round (like Highbury New Park, that was a bit further away from the Green), was quite commonplace. Also Clissold Park, Highbury Fields and Dalston were all within easy reach. Further afield were places like Hampstead Heath and Alexander Palace, which you could get there by avoiding busy main roads and using the ‘back doubles’. </div><div class="MsoNormal">A group of us used to regularly cycle all the way to Whipps Cross and back. It was great fun there as you could cycle up and down tracks made by other bikes along what seemed like ‘valleys’ and ‘mountains.’ </div><div class="MsoNormal">One day in the summer holidays a few of us decided to take on a huge challenge: cycle to Southend and back. So with little forward planning, like not taking much water, no suntan lotion and little money, I put on my shorts, short-sleeved shirt and plimsolls and set off on Blue Streak early one morning on the great expedition. We made our way along Lea Bridge Road, eventually joined the A12 and at Harolds Hill took the A127 along the parallel, purpose built cycle lane to Southend. To say it was a very hot day would be an understatement and by the time we’d reached our destination I had drunk all my water, spent all my money - and I was definitely spit roasted! </div><div class="MsoNormal">Having spent most of our time on the beach, by 4pm we were thinking about getting home before dark. Back on the road we pedalled away with me dawdling behind as the rest of the group were turning into dots on the horizon. By the time I reached Lea Bridge Road I was parched and panting, so I stopped at a pub and asked for a glass of water. That barmaid probably saved me from hospitalisation. </div><div class="MsoNormal">Just as the street lights came on I arrived back at Newington Green. I could just about put my bike away and stagger up to the front door of my home. I was burned red and severely dehydrated and so camomile lotion and what seemed like buckets of water to drink was the order of the day. I have a vague recollection of staying in bed for several days until I recovered. Some things in life you learn the hard way! <br />
<div style="text-align:right; font-style:italic">Roj</div></div><blockquote><span style="font-style:italic">John</span> says: ‘We moved to Ferntower road on my 6th birthday. My best friend at that time was Chris Duffy. I remember thinking it would be great for Chris to see where I used to live - Sutton Dwellings just by Old Street. So we go on our bikes and had a journey that at that time didn’t seem a big deal - we rode down to my old home by Old Street and then on to Finsbury Square before coming back home. Looking back it seems amazing that a couple of 6-year-olds would be allowed to do such a journey although I suppose I never thought to tell my mum. <br />
We {the Ferntower Road gang) would on occasion cycle to Hampstead Heath on our strange selection of bikes. The thing that sticks in my mind was when we would give the bike in front "the violin treatment". Typically coming back along holloway road if you drove close enough to the bike in front your front wheel would rub against the mudguard of the next and make a noise a bit like a violin. Very satisfying. Other additions to the bike included lollipop sticks in the wheels to give a nice pop pop sound , a propeller and an elastic band stretched from the top to the handlebars down to the wheel nut - it made a nice humming sound. Most of our bikes had rubbing brakes, buckled wheels or rubbing mudguards but we all thought our one was the best - my one was a hercules with Sturmey Archer gears (how on earth did they work?’</blockquote>Roj n Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595475606873802298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7399307903345282605.post-64294491964512550802015-03-11T03:41:00.001-07:002015-03-11T03:47:51.637-07:00Carts and Sundays<div style="color:#009900">On <a href="http://newingtongreenthen.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/mr-haircut.html" style="text-decoration:underline">Mr Haircut</a> Roj says: ‘There was a barber I used to go when I was a teenage spotty git. I think he was a Turkish Cypriot and his tiny shop was on the corner of Poets and Ferntower Roads. He would cut me hair then, after asking me, he would meticulously squeeze out all the spots on my neck. Yeah, yuk, I hear you say “I don’t wish to know that – kindly leave the stage!” Nice bloke though.’</div>
<div>Yes I remember that one. We used to go down cats alley just a few houses along to push our carts. I think the barber’s became a betting shop for a while. The synagogue further along on the next corner of Poets Road always had an air of mystery about it.</div>
<div>Just thinking about carts. It wasn’t unusual to push them along in the road with no fear about traffic. Bob Carter’s dad helped him so he actually had a brake and a sort of box to sit in! It was mainly the summer holidays when we constructed them and it wasn’t unusual for them to be held together with nails. Old pram wheels were the best but you needed the axle with the wheels attached either side, otherwise it was impossible to mount them. It was quite normal for the rear wheels to come off at some point. I can’t remember or imagine how we fitted the front wheels so that the cart could be steered!</div><div>
We could also play football in the road either up by Bob and Dave’s house or else the beginning of Leconfield where it meets Ferntower.</div><div>
Another completely separate point is Sundays. They really were peaceful days with all shops closed except ‘the Jewboys’ – that wasn’t considered an insult – just a description. Sometimes you could hear the sound of a military or was it Boys Brigade band in the distance which to me was very exciting and the bells from the church on Green Lanes before Clissold Park were very clear. Sundays were generally boring specially the radio with <i>Sing Something Simple</i> being my pet hate. I could never understand the strange locations of the song requests on <i>Family Favourites</i> e.g. BFPO or similar, no doubt British forces but confusing at that time. The songs – <i>How Much is that Doggie in the Window</i>, <i>Sparky and the Magic Piano</i>, <i>Tubby the Tuba</i>, <i>Pink Toothbrush</i> actually I really liked those ones it was the slow crooner ones that I used to hate. But mum and dad would sing along with the radio and thinking back they were pretty good singers. Once my dad had got a car we would go on trips to Epping forest and other “distant” locations.</div>
<div style="text-align:right; font-style:italic">John</div>Roj n Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595475606873802298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7399307903345282605.post-59001498555424564532015-03-10T02:48:00.001-07:002015-03-11T03:30:16.728-07:00Mr HaircutIn them days, men and boys went to the barber’s about once a fortnight, to get a trim on the short back and sides.<br />
There were a number of barbers around Newington Green, there was Mr Eckert, opposite Newington Green Primary School on Matthias Road, and Jack’s at the Newington Green end of Green Lanes. There was another one up towards the Petherton Road junction with Green Lanes, on the east side. And more that I don’t remember.<br />
Mr Eckert, known of course as Mr Haircut, was a refugee from Nazi Germany, still with a strong accent. A small, balding man, serious and precise. In the back of his shop, when he was not trimming men’s hair, he made dolls houses. Only specially-empathetic customers such as my dad were allowed to be shown the results of his work, my dad was astonished when Eckert first took him through to see them, so detailed and carefully crafted were they.<br />
In the late 50s, Mr Eckert retired, and his shop was taken over by Joe Tomassi, who was in character the exact opposite: voluble, expansive, and effusive, and Italian, he became very popular.<br />
Joe and his wife Babs (Barbara) lived in Ferntower Road and had a much doted-on daughter, who when she was in her late teens she was killed in a car crash when out with friends – no seat belts in them days. Joe went to pieces, lost all interest in his shop, became seriously depressed, and died no more than two years later. Babs bought a two-storey house in Leconfield Road and had a lodger living on the first floor to help her find the money for bills, a loner who kept himself very much to himself. Babs lived on until her late eighties, sad, slight and silent, you never saw her smile.<br />
Meanwhile, back in the 50s, my uncle Albert returned home from Germany where he had been serving in the army. He didn’t bother much with haircuts for a while, until his parents with whom he was staying, and various relatives, said very firmly, ‘It’s time you got a haircut, Albert, go and see old Eckert, he’ll soon sort you out’.<br />
But old Eckert didn’t, he refused, he said I’m not cutting your hair, I don’t cut long hair.<br />
Albert returned home. ‘I have been to the barber who says he will not cut my hair unless it does not need cutting’, he intoned.<br />
How they all laughed, not at Eckert but at Albert, they thought the joke was on him for trying to upset the prescribed ways, and failing.<br />
At length Albert went to Jack’s, and Jack cut his hair without a murmur, though the family thought he wasn’t going to. Jack was a large and rough-looking man, his shop always seemed to be full of cigarette smoke from customers waiting on the line of chairs for their turn. By contrast, if I remember correctly, smoking was forbidden in Mr Eckert’s salon.<br />
To the barber’s once a fortnight, and wait on the chairs that lined the wall for your turn. That’s maybe half an hour every other week. Thirteen hours per year, it’s like losing a day of your life every year, just dealing with your short back and sides. But people didn’t do such sums, in them days, or if they did, they’d have been like Albert – a troublemaker! <br />
<div style="text-align:right; font-style:italic">Dave</div>
<blockquote style="font-style:normal; text-align:left">Comment from <span style="font-style:italic"">Roj</span>: ‘There was a barber I used to go when I was a teenage spotty git. I think he was a Turkish Cypriot and his tiny shop was on the corner of Poets and Ferntower Roads. He would cut me hair then, after asking me, he would meticulously squeeze out all the spots on my neck. Yeah, yuk, I hear you say “I don’t wish to know that – kindly leave the stage!” Nice bloke though.’</blockquote> Roj n Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595475606873802298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7399307903345282605.post-9790291144431435912015-03-09T01:25:00.004-07:002015-03-09T03:57:42.923-07:00Once It Was the Land of SmilesDown the road from us, just three or for doors away, lived two sisters, Brenda and Pamela, more-or-less the same as ages as me and my brother respectively. We were never especially close to Brenda and Pamela, but we knew them from a very young age, and they were also cousins of my friend Roger Renvoize, who lived further down the street on the other side of the road.<br />
So though we never socialised with Brenda and Pamela as teenagers, we would always say hello if we saw them in the street.<br />
I don’t know what happened to Brenda, but Pamela married a Turkish Cypriot, Ismet. She had a son who was called Osram, or Oblong, or something Turkish, I cannot remember exactly what her son’s name was. Pamela stayed in the area, in a flat in the same street, a few doors along from where she grew up.<br />
That was all very fine, and I still said hello to Pamela whenever I happened to see her pushing the pram on her way to the shops, <span style="white-space:nowrap">until . . .</span><br />
Until I was told that I mustn’t. No, I mustn’t, it would be to her detriment for me to do so, for Ismet had told her that whenever she had to speak to a man she must lower her eyes, she must never speak to a man socially, and if she went to a friend’s house she must never go inside if that friend’s husband was at home. For Ismet was a Muslim.<br />
And it was even stricter than that, Pamela was not to tell me herself that she could no longer even acknowledge me in the street, she must tell my wife who would pass the message on. Which she duly did.<br />
This led to something of a pantomime whenever I happened to see Pamela, with both of us acting out a part like the dame and the crocodile who had fallen out over a triviality and march past each other in a kind of exaggerated huff, while the audience falls about laughing, except that there was no audience, and with Ismet being a Muslim, it was no laughing matter.<br />
Aside: In Denmark one of the first sizeable immigrant groups of modern times was Greenlanders, who by introducing a different culture were the subject of criticism for the perceived erosion of the Danish way of life. I heard a Danish man on the radio listing some of the effects of this, and he said in a deadpan and monochrome voice: ‘The Greenlanders laugh a lot, while we Danes do not laugh a lot’. In other words there was prejudice against the Greenlanders because they were too jolly! Bringing it up to current-day time and place, for Greenlanders read Brits, and for Danes read Muslims (oh, and reverse the host-guest positions – why did I ever start on this?) :end of aside.<br />
Now you would think that this strict regulation, whereby the wife of a Muslim man is forbidden from looking at a man other than himself for more a split second, would be seriously counter-productive, for if you are going to get a smack in the mouth for as much as a glance, you might as well go for the whole works, since the outcome would be the same. But who am I to know? And anyway, religion and logic – different planets.<br />
And you can see poor old Ismet’s point. His mates in the café would have said, ‘I saw your misses waving at some geezer the other day, and going into his house a couple of hours after he went in himself’, and Ismet would be overcome with cultural Muslim embarrassment and shame. It’s very likely that that was exactly what happened. Logic doesn’t come into it.<br />
I don’t know what eventually happened to Pamela, whether she stayed with Ismet and if so whether she managed to stay out of marital trouble. She was not a highly educated girl, she was a nice, down-to-earth, ordinary person. Trying to do her best, she had made her bed and now she knew she must lie on it.<br />
Pamela’s wish for her son, Osram or Oblong or whatever his name was, was that he should work in an office. ‘I don’t mind what he ends up doing’, Pamela would say (in the days when I was still allowed to talk to her), ‘But I just hope he gets a good enough education that he can work in an office. That’s what I want. If Osram works in an office, I shall be happy’.
I, too, do so hope that Osram ended up working in an office. Osram, are you out there?<br />
Dave<br />Roj n Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595475606873802298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7399307903345282605.post-15981668102279189872015-03-08T04:35:00.004-07:002015-03-08T05:02:10.824-07:00First Catch Your Fish – by Tone<div style="color:#009900">Fish-and-chip shops were everywhere in the 50s and 60s and I refer to them on <a href="http://newingtongreenthen.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/upper-class-onions.html" style="text-decoration:none">Upper-Class Onions</a>. I wrote the following some years ago, it talks about how the fish got to (and for all I know still does get to) the shops.</div>
<div >
Having spent the latter part of 1972 travelling longitudinally across Africa in a Land Rover I was in a frame of mind to do a mundane job. Who needs pressure when you’re feeling chilled?</div>
<div >
I saw a job advertised for drivers on night work, and this seemed suitably non-demanding, so I phoned and was asked to appear at around 11pm at a depot in Camden Town.</div>
<div >
I did not have with me any papers, for example proof of who I was or tax records or anything, I said I’d bring these later and this was seen as no problem.</div>
<div >
The job consisted of arriving at the depot five evenings a week, Monday to Friday, at about 11pm. In the depot were a number of flat-backed 7-ton trucks, and each of these was assigned to a driver. There was one extra driver who covered for absences.</div>
<div >
The drivers took it in turns to start the evening going to the London railway stations, St Pancras, Euston, Paddington, and Liverpool Street where boxes of fish had been unloaded from recently-arrived trains and labelled for their recipients, one such being this company in Camden Town. (At all of those stations, at the time, there was a roadway between two platforms, where the vans and lorries could pull up to pick up stuff unloaded from trains.)</div>
<div >
On the station run the driver picked up his boxes of fish, and if he could nicked a few extras from other peoples’ orders. Some of the drivers were quite nifty at doing this without being seen.</div>
<div >
Back at the depot, lorries had arrived also laden with boxes of fish, and the other drivers, together with the depot staff, were assembling these for distribution among the 7-tonners. The boxes of fish that came from the stations added to this collection.</div>
<div style="position:relative; float:right; text-align:center; padding:12px; width:524px; margin-right:-180px">
<img src="https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8738/16565775509_4b5d461e5a.jpg" />
<div style="margin-left:36px; margin-right:36px; color:#3366aa">The Paradise Fish Bar, Newington Green, photographed on 11 February 2015. The Paradise Fish Bar is the second-oldest remaining shop on Newington Green I think. The oldest is Jesshops baker’s. If I remember correctly the Paradise Fish Bar started up some time in the 1960s. I like the typeface – don’t know whether that dates from when it opened, it may do – stylish,curly, narrow.</div>
</div>
<div >
At about 1am, each of the flat-backs headed off to a segment of greater London, to deliver the fish to fish-and-chip shops.</div>
<div >
To know your round, you needed to know where to leave the fish, for of course the shops were pretty-well universally closed when you arrived at anything from 2am to six in the morning.</div>
<div >
But you had to know something else too. You had to know which shop owners were diligent about weighing their fish, which were more trusting and relaxed, and which had left money out for extra fish that had been nicked from other people’s boxes, or from the station, or from their own boxes sometimes, if the chip shop owners were known to be not too pernickety about weighing what they got. The driver left the extra fish and the money went in the driver’s pocket.</div>
<div >
The first job of the run, then, was to stop the truck in a quiet street and do some shuffling of the contents of the boxes, by slipping the hand in and extracting a few likely-looking fillets, for the driver’s bunce.</div>
<div >
As it was my first night, I was shown my round by the cover driver, Sid. For whom I felt really, really sorry.</div>
<div >
Sid explained why there was the job vacancy; the previous incumbent, who was very experienced and had the round completely under control, had been caught doing the fish nicking and had got six months in prison.</div>
<div >
Sid was in an uncomfortable position, for he was expected to continue the previous driver’s routine so far as he could, and he could because he knew the job inside out, but as he explained to me, he was 72-years-old and really didn’t need a spell in gaol at his time of life. But as he said, rather unconvincingly I thought, ‘You have to do it, well you can’t live on the money they pay you now, can you?’</div>
<div >
‘Are you married, Tony?’, he asked me. For some reason Sid had got it into his head that my name was Tony. I’d tried correcting him a couple of times but he still insisted on calling me Tony, or Tone.</div>
<div >
‘Yes, I am.’</div><div> ‘Yeah, me too, I’ve been married four times. This one is better than the other three though as she pushes me into doing things, like.’ Not sure what these things were, or how much she knew about his precarious position vis-à-vis Pentonville.</div>
<div >
My round took me down through south London, ending up at Merstham in Surrey. Then I had to drive the wagon back to Camden Town with the early-morning traffic on its way to work, arriving back at the depot at about seven. Refill the wagon with diesel and give it a bit of a hose down, and then off to Camden Road station for the train back home.</div>
<div >
Everyone on the morning rush-hour train smelled to me of soap. As Geoff said when I told him this, they probably thought that I’d been on the job all night.</div>
<div >
The following night I agonised with myself whether or not to go back. At about midnight, I phoned the depot manager and told him I thought the job was not for me, mate. That’s OK, he said. Some months later I looked out of the north-London line train window, from where you could see the depot, and saw that it had closed down. It had been going for years, I think that Sid had spent pretty-well all his working life there.</div>
<div>Dave</div>Roj n Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595475606873802298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7399307903345282605.post-4495104825620674642015-03-07T03:27:00.001-08:002015-03-14T03:46:56.811-07:00Upper-Class OnionsJane Fearnley-Whittingstall – mother of the celebrity chef Hugh of the same surname set – has written a book about what the people ate in wartime Britain.<br />
The book <i>The The Ministry Of Food: Thrifty Wartime Ways To Feed Your Family</i>, had a publicity piece in the Daily Mail on 20 February 2010: <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-1252240/The-food-won-war-The-weird-wonderful-ration-book-dishes-helped-Britain-victory.html
" target="weblink" style="text-decoration:underline">The Food That Won Us the War</a> (wonderful classic Daily Mail headline). Bearing in mind the reputation the Mail has for creative journalism when it comes to quotes, and until such time as I feel strong enough to read the book myself, I shall treat this as accurate since it rings true. According to the article Jane F-W says:<br />
<blockquote style="font-style:italic">Nowadays, it’s almost impossible to imagine cooking without onions, but during the war, they disappeared from the shops. This was a serious blow to housewives struggling to make cheaper cuts of meat palatable, or to create tasty vegetarian dishes. </blockquote><br />
What! Vegetarian dishes? Onions with the meat! Where was she? Well, not Newington Green obviously, she’d have had to dye that name of hers for a start.<br />
I am trying to remember whether my mother ever bought an onion, before or after they disappeared from the shops. Working-class people didn’t cook with onions. Possibly sometimes in a cottage pie, though equally as often not.<br />
A quote that appears on <a href="http://www.cooksinfo.com/british-wartime-food" target="weblink" style="text-decoration:underline">Cook’s Info: British Wartime Food</a> tells a more convincing story:
<blockquote style="font-style:italic">Served as a side dish at our luncheon of the regular three-course meal, which Englishmen religiously impose upon themselves in conformity with ration regulations, was a medium-size boiled Spanish onion. “You’ve been robbing a bank or playing with the black market”, exclaimed the astonished husband. “Neither”, explained his proud wife. “Michael (her son and an officer on a destroyer guarding trans-Atlantic convoys) brought these from Bermuda on his last trip and I’ve been saving them for just such an occasion.” -- Albin E. Johnson. Europe: Where the Cupboard is Almost Bare. Rotary International: The Rotarian. September 1943. Vol. 63, No. 3. Page 16.</blockquote><br />
Boiled onion, lubbly! Hmm. And for how long can you save a Spanish onion? Anyway that definitely makes some historic sense, though I don’t think we ever had even a boiled onion. Just possibly some boiled up with the mince in a cottage pie. Vegetables (and fruit) aside from potatoes were only ever boiled or stewed. Except salads, and except bananas and oranges – it was all this foreign stuff you ate raw. Salads consisted of lettuce, tomato and celery. Surprising, that the celery was eaten raw, because braised celery was quite common I think in Victorian times, though that might have been just among the Jane F-W classes. Celery has a stronger flavour when it’s cooked.<br />
There was one notable exception to the shunning of onions, and that was pickled onions, onions pickled in malt vinegar with ‘pickling spices’ – peppercorns, mustard seeds, coriander seeds predominantly, though if people made their own they would have bought the spices ready-mixed. Mostly you bought pickled onions in a fish-and-chip shop, with fried fish, or chips. Fish-and-chip shops kept going throughout both world wars as fish was never on ration, presumably because of the devastating effect it would have had on towns like Aberdeen or Grimsby if it had been – and also no doubt because monitoring fishing quotas before the fish was landed would have been nigh-on impossible, and throwing it back in the sea more than a bit of an own-goal.<br />
So the fish-and-chip shops stayed stocked and open, and what I cannot find out is whether the jars of pickled onions stayed on the shelves during the time that fresh onions were unavailable in the shops, I’ll bet they did. Anyone know?<br />
When in the sixties Wimpy Bars and Chinese restaurants began to appear they were popular and the food seemed tasty and all rather exciting. I’m sure it was the onion that was doing that. I can still recall the taste now. That was before the days of obligatory sugary red gunge in your burger, when you could actually taste it.<br />
The first Chinese restaurant in the area was on Stoke Newington High Street, just round the corner from Church Street if you turn left past the Three Crowns. That opened in 1962 or 63, and one morning I shall wake up remembering what its name was. <br />
<div style="font-style:italic; text-align:right">Dave</div>
<div style="margin-left:60px; margin-right:60px; margin-top:16px;text-align:center">Incidentally the only fish and chip show I know in the UK that advertises ‘Fresh Salads’ is one called <i>Full Bellies</i>, in Crewe:
<div style="text-align:center"><img style='width:500px; height: 375px;' src='https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7408/10539877403_7be1cd9aee.jpg' title='Full Bellies Crewe' alt='' /> <blockquote style="font-size:11px">Picture from <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/casamatita/10539877403">Dave Collier on Flickr</a></blockquote></div></div><blockquote><span style="font-style:italic">Menna</span> says: ‘Dave where were <span style="white-space:nowrap">u . . .</span> Onions were the first thing u bought for flavour, my mum started with the gravy before anything else, she put onions in saucepan with flour n water, forget jus!, boiled it til tender then added gravy browning n more flour for the best gravy/brown Windsor soup ever, forget granules this was the first step to every meal’</blockquote>Roj n Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595475606873802298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7399307903345282605.post-46117431535453274512015-03-06T01:41:00.002-08:002015-03-06T01:46:51.263-08:00The Carol CallerOn the odd-number side of Ferntower Road, one of the sixties, round about number 65, there lived in the top floor flat a woman and her daughter by the name of Carol.<br />
We know the daughter’s name was Carol because, as soon as Carol was old enough to play out, her mum would let her know when lunch or tea was ready and she should come back in, by leaning out of the window and shouting, ‘CAROL’.<br />
This was OK at first, but as Carol got older she tended to stray further, and so be out of sight of her mum, and she also sometimes chose not to hear, when everyone else in the neighbourhood could.<br />
‘CAROL! CAROL! CAAA-RUL! CA-ROOOOOOL!’ On and on it went. If Carol couldn’t hear it, then she was the only person that side of Newington Green who couldn’t.<br />
‘Shut up will yer misses, some of us are trying to get a bit of peace round here!’ Eventually some people in the street began to shout back, especially one bloke who worked nights:<br />
‘I bin trying to get some bloody sleep and all I can hear is you bellowing your head off. All that shahtin, I bin on nights and I need to get a little bit of kip without all that racket going on.’ Shouting up to her as she leaned out of the window, until she looked a bit shocked and ducked back inside.<br />
The Carol-calling stopped. And shortly afterwards Carol and her mum moved away, to somewhere where the neighbours gave her less grief, or she hoped they would. But times had changed, Carol-calling probably wasn’t going to be accepted anywhere any more. Carol’s mum must have found it hard, coming to terms with these modern ways.<br />
The mark of encroaching gentrification.<br />
Dave<br />Roj n Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595475606873802298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7399307903345282605.post-25523292740814502332015-03-02T02:14:00.002-08:002015-03-03T01:10:50.620-08:00Jim and Harry: Milkmen<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Roj
and me, when we were about fifteen or sixteen, we each did a Saturday milkround.
On Saturdays the milkman was quite busy, because not only had he to
deliver the milk, he also had to collect the weekly bill payments
from customers, and this personal contact meant that with certain
customers he was expected to go indoors for a cup of tea, so
lengthening his day even further.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Most
milkmen employed a lad on Saturday, to help get the round finished on
time, paid for, I guess it must have been, from their own pocket.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The
milkmen that Roj and I worked for were called, respectively, Jim and
Harry, and both had been milkmen for the Express Dairy for decades.
Both were professional milkmen.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The
milk was delivered to the depot very early in the
morning, something like four or five a.m., in metal crates to the Express Dairy depot
on the dog-leg of Newington Green Road, where there is now a block of
flats. Someone – and it may have been the milkmen themselves – then
loaded the milk they required for their round onto their milk float.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The
milk float was like a box on wheels, a box with right- and left-sides
open. The box sat on a bank of batteries, and the whole arrangement
on pneumatic-tyred wheels at each corner. At the front centre of the
float was a handle that came up from the base of batteries
to about shoulder-height, and when you pulled this handle down and
forwards the batteries drove the wheels at walking pace. To stop the
machine again you let go of the handle which then sprung back
upright. To steer the float you moved the handle to the left or the right. (See links at the foot of this page for a pic of a ‘pedestrian controlled milk float’.)</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Crates of milk
were loaded into the cavity on either side of the float, crates of milk but also
bottles of yogurt – plain and strawberry – single and double cream in small, medium and pint bottles, boxes of eggs and
bottles of orange juice, for the milkman sold all of those things.
Anyone could buy a bottle of milk from the milkman on the spot, but
most of the contents of his float were pre-ordered and delivered to
people’s doorsteps.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Overnight
in the depot all the floats were plugged into the mains, to recharge
the batteries. Little blue floats in a silent, chilly, refrigerated row.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The
older milkmen such as Jim and Harry saw these floats as quite a
marvel, for in the 1930s when they first started work they had to
push their cart, with no mechanical help at all, and this meant
taking a smaller load with more frequent walks back to base to
reload.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Milkmen
were still expected to shout their wares, and the traditional call
was Milko-oo-wow-oo-wow, with a kind of high-pitched yodel at the
end. Harry was very good at the yodel but Jim’s lungs were not what
they had been so his call came out more like, Milk-ooh-aah-oh as he
struggled with his breath to get to the end of the catchphrase. An
early form of marketing, though focused on the product rather than
the brand.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The
Express Dairy had competition on the streets for milk delivery, from
the Co-op, but the Co-op milkman’s round was longer as his
customers were more sparsely distributed, so people at the end of the
round tended to get their milk rather warm in summer. The Express
Dairy milkman returned to the depot mid-day to top up the float to
finish off the afternoon deliveries. But some women used the Co-op by
preference, for the ‘divi’.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">And
surely on his return to the depot on Saturday midday for a top-up of
milk, the milkman would have offloaded some of the cash he was
carrying, which must have amounted to rather a lot, all in a leather
shoulder-bag that hung at his hip. I never heard of a milkman being robbed, though it must
have happened. Nearly everyone paid in cash, one or two with a cheque
though that was considered a bit unwarrantedly posy.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Few
people had fridges in those days, and milk was not available from the
supermarket, since there weren’t any supermarkets. Possibly the
dairies had in any case a kind of monopoly on the stuff.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">An
experienced lad, such as Roj and I became, was trusted to collect
money from customers too, and we were even allowed to lead the milk
float, especially when the milkman went into a house for a cup of tea
and we were left with instructions on what to deliver where while he
was gone, all done by memory.</span></span></div>
<div>At the same time as putting the bottles of milk on a doorstep, we collected up the empties that had been left outside the house. We threw the empties back into the crates on the float. Kerchunk, Kerchunk!</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The
only disaster I can remember was dropping a jar of strawberry yogurt
on someone’s step, unfortunately for my personal cred the house of
the mother of Bernard, who was one of the paperboys on the paper
round. The pink sludge and broken glass did make an unsightly
mess in the sunshine. But aside from that all went swimmingly, I
don’t know why I ever stopped doing the round really. There must
have been some reason. Possibly the pressure of social life as I got
older.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">And
you got to see things, I remember delivering milk to some filthy
corners. The rear yard along a dark alleyway of a small greengrocer’s
shop on Newington Green itself, just a few doors along from where
William Hill is now (in 2015) especially sticks in the memory for the
stinking squalor, though it looked pretty grubby inside that shop
too. Not sure if they ever sold anything as there were at least two
more greengrocers within about fifty paces. This shop was the
greengrocer of the Goon Show sketch where Neddy Seagoon asks, ‘Are you the greengrocer?’
and Spike Milligan replies, ‘Well, not so much green, mate, more a sort of
dirty yellow colour’. No, it probably wasn’t, but could have
been.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">And
then of course there was the <a href="http://newingtongreenthen.blogspot.com/2015/02/by-time-of-maos-assumption-of-power-in.html" style="text-decoration:underline">China Inland Mission</a> and the <a href="http://newingtongreenthen.blogspot.com/2015/02/baby-can-you-light-my-fire.html" style="text-decoration:underline">Jews</a>. </span></span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">My
memory is that when I started the milkround all the customers were
British, almost entirely London-accented, and that during the short
time I did the round the ethnic mix of the area began to change,
initially with Nigerians and Turkish Cypriots, known by the milkman as
Greeks. The Nigerians of course spoke English, but Harry and me, we
got to learn to speak a few works of Turkish – that we thought was Greek.
Soochoo – for a many years I thought that was the Greek work for milk, it’s actually Turkish (sütçü) for
milkman – and yarın (tomorrow). ‘No, not yarin’, Harry would
shout, ‘Shoomdee! (şimdi) Now!’ Though he did it all with laughter and great good
humour. </span></span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">And
every morning the milkmen would march off in a line from the depot, a
fair lick at the head of their battery-driven floats, and disperse to
the respective directions to deliver the milk to the people. Jim and
Harry in tandem as far as Newington Green, for their rounds were on
opposite sides if the Green. They walked all day, did the milkmen,
even Jim with his lungs.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Never
did get to find out what happened to Harry and Jim. They probably
retired and life carried on for them according to plan. The dairy
depot closed. People bought their milk from a shop like they bought
everything else from a shop. Why single out milk?</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align:right; font-style:italic">Dave</div>
<blockquote>articles on a similar topic: <div><a href="http://www.globalgranary.org/2013/02/24/milkmen-a-british-door-step-dlivery-service-sadly-declining/" target="weblink" style="text-decoration:underline">Milkmen – a British door step delivery service – sadly declining (Nostalgic Reminiscence)</a></div><div><a href="http://www.milkfloats.org.uk/random4.html" target="weblink" style="text-decoration:underline">Pedestrian Controlled Floats</a> including a picture of both an Express Dairy float and a Co-op float.</div>
<div>From <a href="http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1962/dec/05/pedestrian-operated-milk-floats" target="weblink" style="text-decoration:underline">Hansard, 1962</a>, seems that a milkman, in order to pull the float, was required to have a driving licence. On a request from Barbara Castle on behalf of a constituent, the Minister of Transport, Ernest Marples, said that regulation would be changed. Come to think of it, I am almost certain the milk floats had a tax disc in a holder hanging from the side of the float – a vehicle road licence – too.</div></blockquote>Roj n Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595475606873802298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7399307903345282605.post-79559026289760697892015-02-27T06:51:00.002-08:002015-03-09T01:29:36.410-07:00Baby Can You Light My Fire<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 0.49cm;">If
you are the milkman’s Saturday helper you are seen as a
responsible young person and therefore a prime candidate for being
asked to help light someone’s fire.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Why
would someone need help with lighting a gas fire? Ah, you see, it is
because it is Saturday and they are a pious Jew. </span></span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">I
never knew this until in my teens I did the Saturday milkround, some
Jewish people considered it sinful to do any work on the Sabbath, and
work in this context included lighting a fire, extending even to putting a match to the gas.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Many
religions don’t travel well. It’s one thing decreeing that
someone who lights a fire to keep warm on a Saturday will descend
into purgatory when you are sitting on the sunny thirty-first
parallel, quite another when your followers find themselves in the
middle of winter in 1950s Newington Green, are getting old, and quite
conceivably, without any heat all day, could freeze to death.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">So
the scripture-abiding elderly couple bear the chill until about nine
or half-past in the morning, then when the milkman comes round they
catch him and ask pitiably for help. </span></span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">For
me at age fifteen this all seemed very strange. I would go with the
man into his dark flat – presumably dark because work also included
turning on the light – and be led to the gas fire where he would
hand me a box of matches with one match already removed from it, one he had taken out of the box the day before in case taking matches out of a box is also a form of work, he
would turn on the gas at the inlet pipe, for there’s nothing in the
scriptures about gas taps presumably, and then I would light the
match and put it to the gas jets and the fire would spring into life
with a gerroomph!</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Would
never happen now, the Health and Safety Inspector would be round in
no time, and whack the bloke over the wrist with a rolled up copy of
the Daily Mail.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Once
the fire was alight I would leave the couple to their darkened rooms
that smelled of cheap lino and go back to placing pints of milk on
peoples’ doorsteps.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">What
I was never sure about, and I’m still not, is whether the type of
work that included lighting a fire, also included turning if off
again at the end of the day. Possibly not, because if you are pious
enough not to light one, you need no regulations about putting one
out – could be.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">These
days I imagine a pious Jew will take care to find themselves a flat
that has central heating, then the problem is solved because the
heating is turned on and off by a machine. Or is it? Whether that is actually
within the bounds of the <span style="white-space:nowrap">scriptures . . .</span> probably is as the
technology would not have existed when the rules were laid down.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Though
by the same token it is not clear to me, and was not at the time,
whether asking a small boy to do the job for you constitutes work,
just as much as doing it yourself does. For if it doesn’t, then by
implication managers don’t work, which means that a pious Jew could
get a managerial job on a Saturday, stay pious while being somewhere
warm, and as a bonus make a few quid.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">But
of course, the moment you start treating religion rationally, it
never quite stacks up, and it’s all really a matter of people’s
faith, of what they believe in, and they believe because they
believe, though I must say, I did get the impression at the time,
that the old blokes I was lighting a fire for never did look quite
convinced that they were staying on the straight and narrow, they
seemed by their look and behaviour to be engaged in an amount of personal
moral struggle, which came down in the end on the side that
stopped him and his wife from all that awful shivering.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div >If those old geezers are still alive they can take comfort from the Muslims who now live in the north of Norway, who have a problem because during Ramadan they are not supposed to eat between dawn and dusk. Ramadan falls at different times each year, and in the north of Norway in mid-summer there is no dusk, and in mid-winter no dawn, so when it falls in mid-summer or mid-winter you shouldn’t have to fast at all, but of course that’s no good, that isn’t following the spirit of the Prophet at all, so they have invented a virtual dawn and dusk, and some years live in a kind of religious virtual reality. (Article in <a style="text-decoration:underline" href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/challenges-of-celebrating-ramadan-in-places-where-sun-never-sets-a-982101.html" target="weblink">Der Spiegel English language edition</a>).</div><div>I should have said that to the old Jewish blokes at the time: remember, virtual reality is cool, er, no, er – warm, man. </div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Dave</span></div></div>Roj n Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595475606873802298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7399307903345282605.post-5287742513185576932015-02-25T06:16:00.000-08:002015-03-05T02:38:40.774-08:00Bike Lamps and BusesLiving at Newington Green I remember there were several power cuts during the ‘50s and ‘60s. There was also smog (or pea souper) caused by an evil mixture of fog and coal burning fires. These were the days long before central heating for most houses. When the two came together there was total darkness and a horrible feeling of claustrophobia. The combination of dense smog and no electric lighting caused pandemonium everywhere in London and especially along Newington Green Road.<br />
<br />
It was particularly bad one night in the winter of 1962 during the rush hour that a group of us decided to get our battery torches and bike lamps and stand along mainly the west side of the road and help guide the slow moving traffic coming from the West End up towards the Green. It was quite eerie as you could hear a vehicle sluggishly approaching but it could not be seen until the very last moment. Moreover if a car or bus seemed to be heading for the pavement we would group together, call out to the driver and guide the vehicle away from the kerb.<br />
<br />
Around 8pm as the traffic seemed to be dying down we left our posts and retreated to our warm coal burning or paraffin stove homes with some satisfaction that we at least helped to prevent any accidents along Newington Green Road.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align:right; font-style:italic">Roj</div>
<blockquote>More about fogs and a picture of a London bus in the fog on <a href="http://www.1900s.org.uk/fogs.htm" target="weblink" style="text-decoration:underline">Join me in the 1900s</a>.</blockquote>Roj n Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595475606873802298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7399307903345282605.post-5537443905653774562015-02-20T13:50:00.001-08:002015-02-23T01:14:16.387-08:00The Edinburgh<br />
<b>Live Music at the Edinburgh in the ‘60s</b><br />
<br />
<br />
Built in the mid 19th century as part of a terrace The Edinburgh in the ‘60s was one of several pubs and clubs in the area where live music was performed and enjoyed. Nearby pubs included the “Weavers Arms” (still going), the “Mildmay Tavern” (gone), “The Clarendon” (renamed), Mildmay Park, “The Pegasus”, (now a social club in Green Lanes) and “The Albion” (now flats), Albion Road. It was possible to do a musical pub crawl between each of them - and that’s what a ‘gang’ of us used to do! <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
I especially liked the Edinburgh. Now known as The Cellars, this was the place for me to meet people, and listen to, watch, learn and play music. It was quite dingy looking at the time. One small bar leading in to a large oblong room. A low stage with a well-used grand piano. A tinny, echoey PA. The smell of urine from the gents’ toilet at the side, that would waft across the audience from time to time. Like most pubs the atmosphere was smoky. The pub was managed by John, an Irishman, who, at the end of the evening, having called an end to the session several times, would eventually shout almost pleadingly in his thin voice “Come on lads, it’s well passed time.” <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
When I first started going there in the early ‘60s there were two slightly different music sessions: Saturday night and Sunday lunchtime, both run by Phil. A huge cardboard sign hung in the corner window advertising Phil King of the Pops. I never knew whether it was Phil, King of the Pops or Phil King of the Pops. Phil was a large blue suited, bald man who led the band, MC’d and sang. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The Saturday band consisted of rock’n’roller Charlie on the keys, basic but steady Terry on drums and Stan, a diminutive string bass player with a goatee beard who occasionally raised his instrument high into the air during the climax of a song. Phil repertoire was a mixture of 50s-60s pop and Frank Sinatra-type swingers and ballads, which pleased the predominantly white working class audience. Particular songs that have stayed in my memory including: ‘The Turkey Trot’ (gobble, gobble, oo-be, shoo-be, doo-be‘) I Got You Babe’ and a rock version of Galway Bay. There was often a risqué element to some of the songs and that got a laugh from the crowd. The musical diet didn’t appear to change much. You could almost set your watch as to when Phil would perform individual songs. If you asked Phil he would let you sit in or sing a song and as an MC encourage the packed crowd to applaud. A number of acts, including Peters and Lee, usually performed one or two songs. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
A jazz session started up Sunday lunchtimes. Unlike many pub jazz sessions at the time the music veered towards modern rather than Trad. There was John on piano, Stan on bass and Martin Guy on drums. Tony, a vibraphone player, and Terry, a guitarist, were amongst others would sit in. The afternoon was again led by Phil who would sing and call up individual players and singers. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Initially, at both sessions, I asked to sit in on drums and as long as I kept time and didn’t muck up the song I could stay for several numbers. As I got into blues singing and harmonica playing, I was invited up to perform songs that most of the crowd had probably never heard of. ‘I Got My Mojo Working’ by Muddy Waters was just one of those songs and it went down a storm – probably because of it’s double meaning! <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
On reflection the Edinburgh music sessions provided a good grounding at the time for how to play in a group, learning from older more experienced musicians, and how to perform in front of an audience. It was an excellent experience I could not have done without. It was ideal for youngsters like myself wanting to perform – a little like today’s open mic nights.<br />
RojRoj n Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595475606873802298noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7399307903345282605.post-69139094393324861172015-02-20T09:03:00.001-08:002015-02-22T09:07:59.994-08:00Maurice and the Papers<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">In
a dark little narrow shop, squeezed between the Ferntower Fruiterer’s
and the Midland Bank (now in 2015 the Acoustic Café and William Hill
bookmakers), every day sat Maurice Sugarman, or Zuckerman, probably Zuckerman and the Anglicised version was what he told people. </span></span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">It
was not Maurice’s shop, it was owned by Lee’s, their main shop
was a confectioners and tobacconist in Ferntower Road in the row of shops. Maurice worked for Lee’s, he did the newspapers.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Maurice
arrived at the shop round about 5 a.m. and began sorting the papers that had been dropped in bundles outside by the newspaper
delivery vans. The papers needed to be sorted into rounds for the
paperboys, each newspaper had to have the number of the house it was
for, written in thick pencil in one corner, together
with an abbreviated street name: Peth for Petherton, Lecon for
Leconfield. Sometimes, when the round was being done by experienced
paperboy, Maurice would just write P, or L, or even just the number
standing alone, and he would point out to the paperboy at length
that that was what he had done, to save time you see.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Maurice
spent much of the morning folding and sorting newspapers, and writing
numbers in one corner.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">At
about 6 or 6.30, the paperboys turned up. You were supposed to be 14
to be a paperboy, but Maurice would sometimes accept a 13-year-old,
as he did with me.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The
paperboys (there were no girls) picked up a wide natural-coloured
canvas bag, with a strap that fitted over the opposing shoulder, the
bag could therefore be carried while riding a bike, and the boys
filled it with the bundle of newspapers from their pile on the
counter, sometimes, in fact nearly always, having to wait while
Maurice finished marking them up. A bike was not necessary as none of
the rounds was all that far, but most boys used one. The paperboys
did their round, stuffing newspapers into the letterboxes of houses
and flats. Pretty-well every dwelling had a newspaper.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Daily
Mirror, Daily Express, Daily Herald, News Chronicle, less commonly
the Daily Telegraph, The Times, or the Daily Mail.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Each
paperboy did the same round every day, sometimes following that with
someone else’s round, when another boy had not turned up.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">And
then, the rounds finished and the empty bag delivered back to
Maurice, the boy cycled home for breakfast and then off to school.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">After
school, the same thing again, down by bicycle to see Maurice for the
evening paper deliveries, Star, News and Standard. Some boys only did
the morning round, some only the evening, and some, like me, did
both.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">I
am fairly sure that I did the paper round seven days a week, though
there were no evening papers on Sundays. Sunday mornings were
different too as the morning papers were different: News of the
World, The People, Sunday Pictorial, and the fatter ones, the Sunday
Times and The Observer. Start time was also a bit later on Sundays.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Maurice
was there seven days a week, the only time he had off was Sunday from
mid-morning. He presumably must have had a couple of weeks holiday
every year, though I have no memory of this. I can remember him being
ill on occasion, for he was not young, and when he was not there Mr
Lee did the papers.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Maurice
was Jewish by background, though almost certainly no longer in
practice. He had no wife, possibly she had died, and he lived with a
teenage daughter. I have in my mind that Maurice closed the shop
mid-morning and went home to make his daughter some lunch, returning
in the evening for the evening papers. He probably did do that, for
he surely didn’t work a fourteen or fifteen-hour day. Did he? No,
I’m sure he didn’t. The little shop was closed midday.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">On
Christmas Day there were no papers, Maurice took his daughter to
Lyons Corner House at the Angel for Christmas lunch – buses ran on
Christmas Day in those days until mid-afternoon.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
‘<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Lovely
lunch’, Maurice would say, ‘Couldn’t fault it’. And we who
were with our families for the family Christmas festivities felt
rather sorry for him.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">If
I remember correctly, Maurice died, and the Lees closed the little
corner shop and brought the papers into their main shop. This
coincided with the rapid spread of televisions and consequent rapid
decline in the number of people taking two daily papers, or even one,
though there were still plenty who did.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">By
that time, though, I was no longer doing a paper round, by the age of
fifteen or so it all seemed a bit juvenile.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">And
why do one at all? A certain amount of pocket money was nice. Was it
ten shillings a week for mornings and five for evenings? That sounds
familiar. Maurice did not pay the money, for that you had to call in
the main shop and see Mr Lee, who wasn’t always there. Mrs Lee or
the Lees’ daughter would pay the money though if they felt like it.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">At
school, the teachers were against boys doing morning paper rounds
where there was no especial family hardship, they felt that it got in
the way of school work, boys not being as wide awake when they came
to school as they might be and time that could be more productively
spent. They were probably right.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">But
it was work, and every male member of the family worked, dads and
granddads and uncles and neighbours and relatives of friends. They
all worked, so it was a kind of becoming an adult. Very important,
that.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Lee’s
stayed operating until the early 1970s when Mr and Mrs Lee sold the
business and retired. The shop including the paper deliveries was
taken over by two young men named Fred and Dave, who fairly soon were
to be seen driving around in rather elaborate cars, one had a Rolls
Royce. On the basis of a paper shop? </span></span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Who
knows? They had their respective parents for support in the shop, but
even so. </span></span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Fred
and Dave were very popular, always cheerful and friendly, but then
something caught up with them. Was it the taxman? Or something less
straightforward? Anyway the cars went and so did Fred and Dave, Dave
I know did a spell in prison, though you would see him after he came
out and he was still ever cheerful, working as a minicab driver.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The
shop was sold to Turkish Cypriots, and that was the end of the
confectioners, tobacconist and newsagents in Ferntower Road. </span></span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Dave</span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
Roj n Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595475606873802298noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7399307903345282605.post-70811071405049755852015-02-19T02:40:00.001-08:002015-02-23T02:28:55.567-08:00The Grumpy Park Keeper<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Newington
Green Gardens used to have, in them there 1950s, a path round the
outside with seats, that is park benches, spaced frequently. Not quite round the outside, for between the path and the fence were plane trees.
Were they all plane trees? How could I remember, at that age? Some of
them were.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">There
was also a path through the centre of the Gardens from east to west,
and when we, that is those who lived to the west side of the
Green – ere, hold on a minute, who called it ‘Gardens’? That’s
a recent, middle-class, posy affectation, start again:</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">There
was a path through the Green west-east, and those of us who lived on
the west side of the Green and went to primary school at Newington
Green School would walk it four times a day, morning on the way to
school, back again and back again at lunchtime, for at that time few children stayed for school lunches, even if any did; were there school lunches
at primary school? I suppose there must have been, though I have no
memory of it, most children went home for lunch, in their younger
years their mothers were there to collect them at lunchtime and again to take them back home in the afternoon.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">That
was for the younger children. At some point in my primary school
years I was trusted to make the journey to and from school myself. I
cannot remember at what age.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">At
first, to cross the roads to and from the Green, your mother or you
as a big boy or girl waited for a lull in the traffic. I think I was
about eight or nine when the lollipop ladies appeared. This was a bit
of a learning experience, because mothers as well as free-standing
children were required to wait until the lollipop lady said go. Took
a bit of practice.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Sometimes,
instead of a lollipop lady to see the children across the road, there
was a policeman in a peaked cap. Never a helmet, a cap, and to us at
those times this looked especially senior and when he strode into the
road an held out his arms we ran across in great awe and deference.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">In
the centre of the Green, on each side of the central path, was a
sunken oval flower garden, you got to it down some steps. And at the
south perimeter of the Green was a hut, where the park keeper sat.
The Green was seldom if ever without its park keeper.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">I
was about five-years-old, it was a hot day, and my mother took my
brother and me – he was a baby in a pram at the time – to the
Green, and she found a space on a park bench, where she sat in her
stockings and periodically <i>ooved</i> and <i>phewed</i> with those around her
about how hot it was, while she rocked the pram.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">I
tottered down the steps into the oval garden, and a voice bellowed,
‘Hoi’. It was the park keeper. I ran back to my mother in tears.
I guess the park keeper must have shouted more than Hoi, or maybe it
was just the menace in his voice, but whatever it was I bawled for
ages, attempts by the park keeper to tousle my hair did no good at
all, and my mum was indignant that he had behaved so excessively,
to an innocent five-year-old who had no intention of demolishing the
flowers – actually I cannot remember what it was I thought I might
do with the flowers.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">I
can still remember how upset I was in the Green. I’m fairly sure we
never went and sat in the Green as a family, on a bench in the
sunshine for the afternoon, ever again.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: 14.6666669845581px;">At length the Council could no longer afford a park keeper and the hut was left empty. People sucked between their teeth: the kids will wreck the place, they tutted. They were probably right.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: 14.6666669845581px;">Dave</span></span></div>
Roj n Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595475606873802298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7399307903345282605.post-68664128478107470692015-02-15T04:43:00.001-08:002015-03-09T01:29:15.482-07:00No Matter How IllogicalBy the time of Mao’s assumption of power in China in 1949, there were so many missionaries of the China Inland Mission, located in so many areas of China, that it took the Communist authorities until 1953 to get them all out. Many of them had no home to go back to and ended up living in the headquarters of the China Inland Mission at Newington Green.<br />
They each had a little room at Newington Green, a cell almost, and ate communally at a long, heavily-scrubbed, wooden table in the area onto which their rooms opened. They drank tea that was very milky, and when I was a teenage Saturday-helper to Harry the Express Dairy milkman, we would be expected to sit for a while after having delivered the crate of milk, and to take a cup of tea with the ex-missionaries, quite a number had elephantiasis of the legs, and this tea was extremely milky. Whether they were good caring Christians, simply trying to be appropriate as they saw it to the milkman, with all this milk, or whether they always drank tea like that I cannot say, but I didn’t like it much.<br />
The China Inland Mission was formed by JAMES HUDSON TAYLOR. James was a man with a mission. In 1850, he had made up his mind that it was his desire to spread the Christian message to China, and was moved to write:
<div style="margin-left:24px; font-style:Italic">Think of it – 360 million souls, without God or hope in the world! Think of more than twelve million of our fellow creatures dying every year without any of the consolations of the Gospel. Barnsley including the Common has only 15,000 inhabitants. Imagine what it would be if all these were to die in twelve months! Yet in China every year hundreds are dying, for every man, woman and child in Barnsley. Poor, neglected China! Scarcely anyone cares about it.</div><br />
So strong was James Hudson Taylor’s concern about his observed imbalance in the world between Barnsley, including the Common, and China, that he prayed many times a day that the Lord would give him the power to do something to redress this. And the Lord did come up trumps, in a way. By the end of his life Hudson Taylor led an organisation of over six hundred missionaries working in China with headquarters in Newington Green and Shanghai comprising what would now be considered highly valuable real estate. He never asked for donations to his cause, yet the entire organisation was supported by donations. He prayed, he lectured, he gave speeches and presentations, and the money was given.<br />
Not that his was an easy passage, in fact it was a constant battle with hardship for both him and his missionaries. His early years in China were so arduous that they effectively killed his wife. He prayed hard to the Lord, though, and received the advice that it would be the right thing to do to marry one of his secretaries pretty quick.<br />
The trials of James and of the missionaries in China ranged from being beaten with sticks by chauvinistic Chinese in remote inland regions to more psychologically taxing dilemmas. For example, the first time Hudson Taylor visited the USA on a lecture tour, money came pouring in faster than he could spend it. This gave him cause for great deliberations. It is all very well asking the Lord to provide and having one’s wishes granted, but what are you to make of it when the Lord provides before you have even asked? Do you just say, ‘Trust those bloody Americans to wreck the system?’ Not James Hudson Taylor. He prayed to the Lord for guidance and received the reply that he should use this money to broaden the international make-up of his missionary force which up to that time had been almost exclusively British and Chinese. The problem then arose, that the American volunteers kept getting subsidised by their local church and families, so the donations would still not diminish. It is enough to give you a headache, and James Hudson Taylor appears to have had more than his share of pains in the head and various other parts of his body as a result of all this loot coming in when he hadn’t asked the Lord for it.<br />
To us now, it may seem a strange Lord to believe in, who selects Barnsley, including the Common, for special privilege and leaves the great majority of the world’s population out of the equation, but the Victorian evangelisers had no such doubts. They had faith. They had a mission. And it produced results. That the substance of the mission was not one resilient to logical argument, and actually not a sustainable one over the long term, are not the point, a mission believed in strongly enough can succeed, however essentially bonkers.<br />
The China Inland Mission had blossomed, boomed, and then begun to fade within a period of about 100 years. Not many poor unfortunates to evangelise to, in Newington Green, not many who would listen, anyway.<br />
James Hudson Taylor’s organisation was in the right place at the right time. The language of the time spoke of, ‘devoting yourself to God’. Hudson Taylor’s biographers described how his parents made love:
<div style="margin-left:24px; font-style:Italic">Long and earnest was the talk that followed in view of the happiness to which they were looking forward. Then together they knelt to fulfil as literally as possible an obligation they could not relegate to Hebrew parents of old. Just as definitely the Lord responded, giving them faith to realise that He had accepted their gift: that henceforth the life so dear to them must be held at the disposal of a higher claim, a deeper love, than theirs.</div><br />
Had James Hudson Taylor been a young man in 1950, instead of 1850, the language of his biographer would have been blunter, less elitist, more understandable by those used to scanning the lines rather than reading between them, more understandable to more people overall, and with a greater sense of personal responsibility – his parents would have been more likely to make love because they felt it was a good thing to do, rather than devising some justification for it not being their fault really, since the Hebrew rulers were no longer of much practical benefit. And did they really do it kneeling?<br />
It is also most unlikely in the latter half of the 20th century that James’ crazy life-plan would have worked. He would have had to follow a different crazy life-plan instead. Perhaps, he would have felt moved, with or without all his fervent prayer, to start a restaurant business.<br />
But whatever he might have done, he would no doubt find the need to be in considerable depths of prayer these days, for his grandiose centre at Newington Green is now accommodation for students at one of the London universities, though the facade is still there. That’s something to be thankful for. <br />
Dave</br />
<blockquote style="font-size:10px;">Extracts are from <span style="font-style:italic">Biography of James Hudson Taylor</span> by Dr and Mrs Howard Taylor, which is out of print I believe.</blockquote>Roj n Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595475606873802298noreply@blogger.com0