Pots on a ferry

Posted on 27th August 2021 by 192.168.1.1

On Monday, I crossed the Irish Sea on a Stena Line Ferry. The water was as still as could be imagined and the crossing was so punctual that the deck doors opened at exactly six o’clock. Stena Line ferry trips are always a reminder of “Pots.”

“Pots” came from a town in the deep south of Ireland. His soft brogue was often difficult to pick up by after becoming attuned to the strong consonants of the east coast of Ulster. He lived by himself in a flat at the centre of the town. Always turned out in his grey suit and tie with a distinctive Columbo type overcoat, he was a familiar sight along the streets.

Pots lived a self-contained life; he stewarded carefully his old age pension and was always attracted by the idea of a bargain. There were times when our ideas of what was a bargain might have differed. Sitting one day amongst some of his purchases, I asked why he had bought a Kylie Minogue mirror. The answer should have been easily anticipated, “Because it was cheap”.

Pots never learned to drive. He could get everywhere he wanted by public transport and travelled wide and far by bus. It was travelling by bus that brought me nearest to having words with Pots.

One July day, there was a parish outing to the Butlin’s holiday centre at Ayr in Scotland. It meant getting the party organised for a P&O ferry crossing from Larne to Cairnryan in Scotland and, on arrival at the camp, giving everyone strict instructions about where to meet for the return journey.

There were dozens of buses identical to ours making the journey that day and to catch the wrong one would mean catching the wrong ferry and ending up in the wrong port.

As Pots stepped from the bus, there were stern words to him from the driver, “Don’t you miss this bus.” The warning had an ominous tone; had the driver had previous experience of Pots?

5.30 pm came and everyone was on the bus except Pots. The bus driver was philosophical, “I’ve lost him before”. Frantic inquiries at the security lodge of the holiday centre told us that a man in a grey overcoat had been seen getting on the wrong bus. Later a phone call to the port at Stranraer confirmed that Pots had bought a ticket and was going to board a Stena ferry to Belfast.

“What shall I do with him?” asked the helpful girl at the port. “Leave him be,” I said, “at least he will be on the right side of the sea.”

Pots’ boat was delayed and it was 1.30 am before I managed to collect him from Belfast port. The distinctive overcoat and smile came out through the doorway.

“How did he ever end up in our town?” I asked a companion.

He shook his head and smiled. “Maybe he went on a day trip to Dublin.”

Pots’ name had come from his work in the kitchens of hotels in the town. He had always worked for his living, no matter what the work might be.

Some months after I had left the North and moved to Dublin, a telephone call came from my former parish. Pots was going to hospital for minor surgery and there was nothing to worry about, but the call was just to advise me that I was listed as next of kin. It was a humbling moment.

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Strange and unexpected

Posted on 26th August 2021 by 192.168.1.1

The three houses have all changed now, of course. Perhaps they are no longer even separate houses, perhaps they are all part of a single dwelling. The high stone wall that has appeared prevents inquisitive minds from knowing the answer.

The only clear memory is passing the window of the house that adjoined the road. It was a warm summer’s evening in late August and the theme tune of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected floated into the night air.

It seemed a tune that matched the mood of the time, that captured a sense of a village in which there were plenty of stories of the strange and unexpected.

Villagers had for years  heard stories about hippies and all the weird stuff that went with them and no-one believed a word of it. The hippy stuff seemed mostly about men getting what they wanted. A man was caught growing cannabis and was fined for his efforts, a prosecution that confirmed villagers’ views of hippies. Even at the time, it seemed a small infringement of the law compared to the hundreds of gallons of scrumpy cider that were made and sold each year without a single penny of duty ever being paid.

There was more strangeness among the local people than among outsiders. Superstitions, beliefs in ghosts and spirits, the supernatural was taken for granted. Even stranger were some of the people who lived in isolated spots and who regarded the entire world with suspicion and hostility.

The unexpected came often in the stories of those who seemed outwardly plain and conventional. Those who were in their twenties in the 1940s were still only in their fifties in the 1970s. There were ordinary people who had seen and done extraordinary things. A quiet pensioner would talk of being in Normandy in June 1944. Another man would recall wartime missions as a gunner in an RAF bomber.  A softly spoken silver haired man on the village green would tell of his days as a housemaster in a public school; decades later in another country he would be remembered with affection.

Perhaps the unexpected manifested itself most in the years that would follow that summer evening. While life unfolded unexpected changes, there would be times when a year would pass between visits to the village, the cost of travel and the limited time off making more frequent trips impossible. On each return, there might be some incremental change in the place, but these were scarcely noticeable if one had been there throughout the year.

Perhaps the unexpected, though, is not the change, but the continuity: houses, farms, roads that would match their 1970s selves. If the strains of the opening sequences of Tales of the Unexpected was to be audible in the night air, it would be no surprise.

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Holding back the start of term

Posted on 25th August 2021 by 192.168.1.1

While I have spent the past two days attending meetings and preparing classes at my new school in Dublin, my nephews are still enjoying the penultimate week of the summer holidays. The new term at Huish Episcopi does not begin until 6th September.

The penultimate week of the school summer holidays had always a feeling of security, there was still a full week as a buffer between the present moment and the dreaded return to school with its loss of the freedom to do whatever we chose with the time. As long as the bank holiday weekend still lay ahead, there were still plenty of days to be enjoyed.

Sometimes, there was a wish that time might be stopped, that there might be a moment which would remain unchanged. Always, the question of stopping time prompts the recall of a single scene.

It was harvest time on my Grandad’s farm at Pibsbury, between Huish Episcopi and Langport, and my cousin Steve’s orange Triumph Toledo was parked in a field; its passenger door was open and the Rolling Stones’ song Angie was being played on the car radio, presumably on BBC Radio 1 for there were no other stations that would have been likely to have been playing such music. It was one of the hot summers, maybe 1975 or 1976, probably the latter, and there was nothing to burst the bubble of buoyant optimism.

Looking back the forty-five years to that summer’s day, there is no particular reason why it should have retained such a place in the memory.

To be out in the fields during such a time of activity was unremarkable, that was where the work was. At fourteen or fifteen years old, it was hardly a moment that offered the chance to make a significant contribution to the harvest effort, or to earn very much. A field in the heart of deeply rural Somerset was not going to be a place where anyone important or famous would be met. The only thing with which the moment was suffused was a sense of there being time.

Time seems not to move in a linear and consistent way, rather it comes in peaks and troughs, in sound and in silence, in presence and in absence, in pulses punctuated by inactivity. Time on that Somerset summer day was somehow different, somehow static, somehow like a day in the penultimate week of the school holidays.

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Many days in a life

Posted on 24th August 2021 by 192.168.1.1

It is forty years ago today, on 24th August 1981, that Mark Chapman was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment for the murder of John Lennon.

By the time I began buying records in the mid-1970s, John Lennon was in his thirties and The Beatles had become a phenomenon remembered and sadly missed by their many millions of fans. To many of us who had been too young to remember the band in its years of unprecedented fame, The Beatles seemed a missed opportunity.

A moment to recapture the past came in 1976: The Beatles released twenty-three singles simultaneously.

To someone who was fifteen years old at the time and was away at school in Devon and who had 50 pence a week pocket money, it seemed an odd thing to do.  Even if the entire pocket money were spent on buying records, it would have taken months to buy all of them. It was important, though, to buy some of them; it was important not to miss this second opportunity.  Twenty-two of the singles had been released before, but for the twenty-third, Yesterday, it was the first time it had been released in the UK.

I remember buying four or five of them in their distinctive green paper sleeves.  There were some I would not have bought. I never liked some of the songs, Lady Madonna and The Ballad of John and Yoko never seemed the sort of records I would have wanted to have played. It is now impossible to remember which ones I did buy, they have long since disappeared from my pile of 7″ vinyl singles.

Looking back more than fifty years to the time of The Beatles, it is odd which of the songs has held the strongest place in my memory.

Eleanor Rigby must have been played many, many times after its first release in 1966. I can still remember how it seemed an overwhelmingly sad song, even to a primary school child like myself.  Father McKenzie seemed the saddest figure of all. We knew no Catholics in our corner of England and I had no idea of what life might have been for one of their priests, but the song was haunting.

The later songs always seemed overshadowed in retrospect by the knowledge that the band was in the process of disintegration. Listening to them brought the sort of thoughts that I associated with the last day of holidays, that sense that a special time was past.

Forty years after the conviction of John Lennon’s murderer, it is hard to recapture a sense of how much The Beatles impinged upon the consciousness of even those who were too young to buy their records, even those like myself who would have struggled to understand their words.

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An unpleasant uncle

Posted on 23rd August 2021 by 192.168.1.1

All that remains of the souvenir postcard is the top right-hand corner showing the stamp, postmarks and addressee on one side and the statistical dimensions of the Eiffel Tower on the other. Had it reached my grandfather intact, it would have remained intact, and might have found its way into one of his stamp albums, interesting for is postmarks, if nothing else. As it was, it was just a snippet of a postcard with a stamp that was not a postage stamp and was tucked inside an album, probably as a book marker, and slipped out and fell to the floor yesterday.

“Uncle Alec” to whom the card was sent was not really an uncle, but some sort of cousin of my grandmother. He was a man who would write to me sending me press cuttings, the contents of which did not interest me, or which I disbelieved.

On one occasion he wrote to my grandmother complaining about my rudeness in not sending him a postcard to acknowledge receipt of a large envelope of cuttings he had sent. Not having wished to receive any correspondence from him, and knowing a letter would only elicit yet more press comment, I delayed my response even further. He then accused me of having a mind that was “poisoned” by studying at the London School of Economics.

I knew little about him. I assumed that having been born into a London suburban Edwardian home, and growing up in a genteel family, he just reflected the spirit of his times. It was only in much more recent times that I heard the word “conchie” used about him. Uncle Alec, it seemed, had come from a Quaker family and had avoided military service during the Second World War on the grounds of being a conscientious objector.

Oddly, his conscientious objection to participation in a war for the survival of civilized society seemed almost an explanation for his attitudes in latter years. It seemed seemed almost to explain his desire to present himself as a traditionalist and a patriot; his final years seemed a disowning of his younger years.

When the postcard from the Eiffel Tower had arrived in his west London home on a July day in 1945, in that time between the end of the war in Europe and the  end of the war against Japan, what thoughts had passed through his mind? When he saw the Field Post Office postmark, and had realized that, despite there being peace in France, the censor’s stamp still appeared on mail, did he feel that history had passed him by? Were those letters with their cuttings expressing trenchant right-wing views no more than an attempt to wrap the flag around him and pretend to be something he was not?

Even more recently, the questions answered. When he died, his nephews cleared his house and discovered a collection of Nazi publications from the pre-war era. His true self was revealed.

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