I have to admit that Keyboard Warriors for Justice have occasionally caused me more than a frisson of anxiety though full of bluff I have invariably loudly claimed that they didn’t bother ME – oh no indeed! And that bold daring had at one time been genuine back in the distant past of John Key as Prime Minister - right up until the moment I was foolhardy enough to defend him both as a politician and as an individual. Not that I knew him as an individual of course because the only time he and I were ever in the same space was out walking in St Stephen’s Avenue several years ago. And NO – he did not even nod to me! Anyhow to cut a long story short the facts of the matter were that I was firstly roundly admonished and then when I did not immediately backtrack and admit his deficiencies I was told in no uncertain terms by several KW4Js that I was (and here I paraphrase) misguided at best and an ugly right wing bigot at worst and possibly even of the same filthy religious persuasion of those who persecuted the Arabs in Palestine. Well that was me well and truly told and as reprimand after reprimand rolled in I was most definitely brought into line. Who wouldn’t be?
My knuckles had been rapped in no uncertain terms so I rethought my previous position rather rapidly and even wondered if I should issue an apology. I decided against it not only because I did not want to draw further attention to myself but also because secretly (and I wouldn’t want to admit this to everyone) I actually had not changed my mind! Fundamentally I was still, despite the public castigation – and some might even call it bullying - an ugly right wing bigot and in the current climate that is not desirable. Being essentially of a cowardly disposition there is nothing I would like more than being able to don the mantle and the loveliness of a freethinking left wing liberal. You could say that it just isn’t in me and that’s a fact so what on earth can be done about it?
It’s clear that people like me are sadly in need of re-education because there is no doubt at all that some of our ideas are out of kilter with the more virtuous beliefs of those among us who are Good Right Thinking People. This has been brought into sharp focus recently with the continuing debate regarding Israel Folau. I have to be honest because I am definitely among those few who feel that Israel is as entitled to freedom of speech as the KW4Js even though his belief system involves the burning in hell of drunks, gays and fornicators and quite honestly the drunks and the fornicators understand that too because they are not complaining are they?
And whilst we are discussing unacceptable ideas, I am not altogether convinced that children identifying as Transgender should be encouraged to proceed with the idea of too much alteration of their persons. I am not proud of these notions I hasten to assure all who might be interested, but then I’m not proud of wanting to bring back hanging either. I just don’t understand what can be done about such grubby, sickening and anti-social beliefs – except of course to utterly deny them. Is that the way to go? We bigots definitely need to be brought into line and it’s possible that the initiating of Show Trials might help. We might even learn something from Stalinist Russia. I remember my grandmother commenting that `there was never a problem with the Russians all the while old Joe Stalin was in charge.’ Who thinks it’s worth a whirl?
Monday 24 June 2019
Friday 21 June 2019
One For Sorrow
We suffered a plague of hostile Magpies for two or three years in Kohimarama when my children were growing up and at one stage my young daughter became distinctly uneasy at the thought of going outside. Sinead was not generally of a nervous disposition but at six and seven years old she was on the small side and the Magpies, as with everything else introduced to New Zealand by enthusiastic early settlers had taken full advantage of an environment that was at odds with itself being both quasi-tropical and temperate. It was those self-same Pacific conditions that had allowed English Gorse to achieve the gigantic proportions that rendered it unrecognizable to the average Englishman and meant that the standard house rat had to be seen to be believed. The positive aspect of the massive Magpies at least ensured that Sinead’s previous dislike of irritating Mynah birds was put into perspective. The latter were certainly aggressive at times but a dive bombing Mynah was simply not in the same ballpark as a dive bombing Magpie. Her older brother also wisely kept his distance from them but was not as voluble as to why.
Because we were actively engaged in home schooling at the time of this scourge, like my father before me who did not have a similarly valid excuse, I used the situation as a tool for education. With what can only be described as missionary zeal and modelling myself on the La Leche League who were at the time preaching breast feeding with the same kind of fervour, I threw myself into the business of making sure that all available information about the feathered delinquents stalking the flat roof of the house and planning assaults should be made available to my increasingly alarmed students.
They were encouraged to learn the verse that all English children were undoubtedly still aware of…..One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl and four for a boy. Five for silver, six for gold and seven for a secret never to be told….. which mildly amused them. And we listened to Rossini’s overture La Gazza Ladra endlessly over a week or more which they didn’t seem to mind too much. This was years before the advent of the internet but it did not take them too long to discover that Thieving Magpies probably number among the most detested birds in the avian world and have consequently become attached to a raft of extraordinary superstitions. I was solemnly informed that the bird was the only one not to sing as Jesus died on the cross and was therefore immediately seen as evil. At a more practical level their habit of stealing and eating the eggs and young of other birds to supplement their diet did not win much support either.
Discovering that they have a natural attraction to shiny objects, a wide range of items was placed outside for them to choose from – pieces of kitchen foil, metal screws, glass beads and a silver ring bought years before in Portobello Road market. Predictably perhaps the only piece they selected was the ring, cherry picked and seeming to decide upon after circling it for several minutes, flying away then one of them returning to suddenly claim it. Sinead promised she would retrieve it just as soon as she discovered where our thieving trio secreted their horde but of course she was never able to do so. Seamus, predictably perhaps by then decided that what he wanted more than anything else was a pet Magpie and we determined that should he be able to somehow trap a chick he might well be allowed to keep it. There was not of course much chance of this but even so it was much to his father’s horror. This opposition went back to when he was a child in Oamaru in the South Island and a neighbour had somehow or other come by a pet bird that he was now sure had been a Magpie but possibly might have been a Jackdaw and either way he was terrified of it because it had a habit of pecking his ankles. The children assured him that their bird, should it ever eventuate, would be trained not to peck. Their father, still recovering from a range of animals he thought he had forbidden including a lizard called Eliza, a rat called Grendel, two rabbits called Enid Blyton and Beatrix Potter, and an angora goat called Cindy, looked doubtful. It would be true to say that he had an aversion to all feathered companions and sadly, most furry ones unless they were cats – of which we had three. He had not been a typical New Zealand child, always refusing to go to the circus because he decided it was dirty, even unhealthy. There seemed little likelihood under the circumstances that a Magpie might be slipped past him but Sinead told her brother not to give up hope because he worked long hours and it might be several weeks before he even noticed.
Meanwhile I was recalling the antics of the belligerent bird kept by Old Mrs Yates who at one time lived next door to one of my Crayford aunts. It was said to have arrived on the scene when Cyril her husband died and to make ends meet she had taken in a lodger called Dan who worked at Vickers and was said to be a sober, church going bachelor. There was the standard confusion as to whether his feathered companion was a Magpie or a Jackdaw but what nobody argued about was that it was a Spiteful Blighter and somebody should wring its neck. It spent most of its time tethered by one scrawny leg to the chair Dan sat on at dinner time, poised to peck each passer-by. In the summer time Dan moved his chair outside onto the street so that the bird could exhaustively amuse itself with attacks on passing children heading for the shop that sold raspberry and lime Ice Suckers. He said its name was Mary and it meant no harm because it was merely playing a game.
Within a short space of time Old Mrs Yates together with Dan and Mary became even more unpopular than Flash the Alsatian who lived opposite my aunt and had an equally alarming habit of hurling himself at the gate each time someone dared to pass. His owner said it was because he was named after Flash Gordon and just couldn’t help himself and if you stood your ground he would do you no harm. Of the two aggressors I was possibly more intimidated by Mary. My Aunt told my mother that there was more to the house next door than met the eye and she was convinced there was Hanky Panky going on because apart from anything else you could hear it through the bedroom wall on Sunday afternoons and she thought it ought to be reported to the Council. My mother said that at her age, and she must be sixty if she was a day, Mrs Yates should be past all that but my Aunt said No, she wasn’t and they were at it like rabbits. The reference to rabbits was perplexing to a six year old so I mentioned it to my cousin Margaret who was thirteen – were Mrs Yates and Dan at it like rabbits? She looked horrified and said I shouldn’t say such things so I didn’t say it again but I still would have liked an answer.
Not very long after this exchange Mary the Magpie pecked my cousin Violet’s leg one Sunday morning as she passed on her way to the shop for two ounces of loose tea. Violet didn’t take kindly to the attack and rushed back to report the incident knowing very well that Old Nan wouldn’t take kindly to it either. This resulted in a great deal of what was generally termed Argy Bargy with threats and raised voices and Dan the lodger being told that he’d feel the back of Nan’s hand if her Violet, Poor Motherless Little Mite, ever had cause to complain again. Later it became common knowledge among first my aunts and then the rest of the street that although Dan was generally sober and sometimes went to church, a bachelor he was not because he had two wives, one in Wolverhampton and one in Norwich both of whom had thrown him out because they couldn’t abide Mary the Magpie.
Not long after that there must have been a complaint to the Council because Mrs Yates suffered the ignominy of an eviction notice which normally you only got if you didn’t pay your rent or if you punched holes in the wall when you were drunk and were unlucky enough to be found out. My mother said it was on account of the bird but that couldn’t have been correct because there was no regulation stipulating that you couldn’t keep pets and even antagonistic ones like Flash were tolerated. Either way Aunt Mag maintained that although she was glad to see the back of them, the eviction was nothing to do with her and she had better things to do with her time than report people to the Council.
Once they moved on and were replaced by a family with four girls and two canaries, my Grandmother found herself in a better frame of mind about neighbours who kept birds though she said that Magpies were said to have drunk the blood of Satan and were therefore best avoided. It was terrible bad luck, she said, to have one hover above your house because it meant a death was about to happen but on the other hand if you should be on your way to a wedding and happen to see three of them that meant the couple about to be wed would have a happy future. And if you suffered from fits and could bear to catch one and eat it, you would be cured of that affliction at once, nothing was surer. This is something I might have paid heed to myself when later in life I developed Epilepsy but by then it had slipped my mind.
Because we were actively engaged in home schooling at the time of this scourge, like my father before me who did not have a similarly valid excuse, I used the situation as a tool for education. With what can only be described as missionary zeal and modelling myself on the La Leche League who were at the time preaching breast feeding with the same kind of fervour, I threw myself into the business of making sure that all available information about the feathered delinquents stalking the flat roof of the house and planning assaults should be made available to my increasingly alarmed students.
They were encouraged to learn the verse that all English children were undoubtedly still aware of…..One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl and four for a boy. Five for silver, six for gold and seven for a secret never to be told….. which mildly amused them. And we listened to Rossini’s overture La Gazza Ladra endlessly over a week or more which they didn’t seem to mind too much. This was years before the advent of the internet but it did not take them too long to discover that Thieving Magpies probably number among the most detested birds in the avian world and have consequently become attached to a raft of extraordinary superstitions. I was solemnly informed that the bird was the only one not to sing as Jesus died on the cross and was therefore immediately seen as evil. At a more practical level their habit of stealing and eating the eggs and young of other birds to supplement their diet did not win much support either.
Discovering that they have a natural attraction to shiny objects, a wide range of items was placed outside for them to choose from – pieces of kitchen foil, metal screws, glass beads and a silver ring bought years before in Portobello Road market. Predictably perhaps the only piece they selected was the ring, cherry picked and seeming to decide upon after circling it for several minutes, flying away then one of them returning to suddenly claim it. Sinead promised she would retrieve it just as soon as she discovered where our thieving trio secreted their horde but of course she was never able to do so. Seamus, predictably perhaps by then decided that what he wanted more than anything else was a pet Magpie and we determined that should he be able to somehow trap a chick he might well be allowed to keep it. There was not of course much chance of this but even so it was much to his father’s horror. This opposition went back to when he was a child in Oamaru in the South Island and a neighbour had somehow or other come by a pet bird that he was now sure had been a Magpie but possibly might have been a Jackdaw and either way he was terrified of it because it had a habit of pecking his ankles. The children assured him that their bird, should it ever eventuate, would be trained not to peck. Their father, still recovering from a range of animals he thought he had forbidden including a lizard called Eliza, a rat called Grendel, two rabbits called Enid Blyton and Beatrix Potter, and an angora goat called Cindy, looked doubtful. It would be true to say that he had an aversion to all feathered companions and sadly, most furry ones unless they were cats – of which we had three. He had not been a typical New Zealand child, always refusing to go to the circus because he decided it was dirty, even unhealthy. There seemed little likelihood under the circumstances that a Magpie might be slipped past him but Sinead told her brother not to give up hope because he worked long hours and it might be several weeks before he even noticed.
Meanwhile I was recalling the antics of the belligerent bird kept by Old Mrs Yates who at one time lived next door to one of my Crayford aunts. It was said to have arrived on the scene when Cyril her husband died and to make ends meet she had taken in a lodger called Dan who worked at Vickers and was said to be a sober, church going bachelor. There was the standard confusion as to whether his feathered companion was a Magpie or a Jackdaw but what nobody argued about was that it was a Spiteful Blighter and somebody should wring its neck. It spent most of its time tethered by one scrawny leg to the chair Dan sat on at dinner time, poised to peck each passer-by. In the summer time Dan moved his chair outside onto the street so that the bird could exhaustively amuse itself with attacks on passing children heading for the shop that sold raspberry and lime Ice Suckers. He said its name was Mary and it meant no harm because it was merely playing a game.
Within a short space of time Old Mrs Yates together with Dan and Mary became even more unpopular than Flash the Alsatian who lived opposite my aunt and had an equally alarming habit of hurling himself at the gate each time someone dared to pass. His owner said it was because he was named after Flash Gordon and just couldn’t help himself and if you stood your ground he would do you no harm. Of the two aggressors I was possibly more intimidated by Mary. My Aunt told my mother that there was more to the house next door than met the eye and she was convinced there was Hanky Panky going on because apart from anything else you could hear it through the bedroom wall on Sunday afternoons and she thought it ought to be reported to the Council. My mother said that at her age, and she must be sixty if she was a day, Mrs Yates should be past all that but my Aunt said No, she wasn’t and they were at it like rabbits. The reference to rabbits was perplexing to a six year old so I mentioned it to my cousin Margaret who was thirteen – were Mrs Yates and Dan at it like rabbits? She looked horrified and said I shouldn’t say such things so I didn’t say it again but I still would have liked an answer.
Not very long after this exchange Mary the Magpie pecked my cousin Violet’s leg one Sunday morning as she passed on her way to the shop for two ounces of loose tea. Violet didn’t take kindly to the attack and rushed back to report the incident knowing very well that Old Nan wouldn’t take kindly to it either. This resulted in a great deal of what was generally termed Argy Bargy with threats and raised voices and Dan the lodger being told that he’d feel the back of Nan’s hand if her Violet, Poor Motherless Little Mite, ever had cause to complain again. Later it became common knowledge among first my aunts and then the rest of the street that although Dan was generally sober and sometimes went to church, a bachelor he was not because he had two wives, one in Wolverhampton and one in Norwich both of whom had thrown him out because they couldn’t abide Mary the Magpie.
Not long after that there must have been a complaint to the Council because Mrs Yates suffered the ignominy of an eviction notice which normally you only got if you didn’t pay your rent or if you punched holes in the wall when you were drunk and were unlucky enough to be found out. My mother said it was on account of the bird but that couldn’t have been correct because there was no regulation stipulating that you couldn’t keep pets and even antagonistic ones like Flash were tolerated. Either way Aunt Mag maintained that although she was glad to see the back of them, the eviction was nothing to do with her and she had better things to do with her time than report people to the Council.
Once they moved on and were replaced by a family with four girls and two canaries, my Grandmother found herself in a better frame of mind about neighbours who kept birds though she said that Magpies were said to have drunk the blood of Satan and were therefore best avoided. It was terrible bad luck, she said, to have one hover above your house because it meant a death was about to happen but on the other hand if you should be on your way to a wedding and happen to see three of them that meant the couple about to be wed would have a happy future. And if you suffered from fits and could bear to catch one and eat it, you would be cured of that affliction at once, nothing was surer. This is something I might have paid heed to myself when later in life I developed Epilepsy but by then it had slipped my mind.
Tuesday 18 June 2019
The Foibles of Families
It’s never easy to honestly discuss the quirks and shortcomings of your own family and the Constants were invariably tribal in this regard with an oddly ambivalent outlook on anything that even vaguely hinted of insider criticism or disloyalty. One moment they would appear to be stuck one to another like an advertisement for epoxy resin and in the next they would be slandering all and sundry with reckless abandon. Never knowing exactly what the current mood of any close kin might be, it paid to be hypervigilant at all times. This meant always agreeing, or appearing to agree, with the views and opinions of the person you happened to be talking to at any one moment, however distasteful you might find them, and waiting until an opportunity presented itself to tear them safely to shreds – behind their back!
My mother, always affable in conversation with her older sister, Mag on our regular visits to the house in Iron Mill Lane, Crayford, would express her true opinion on the bus ride home to Northfleet, acquainting me at the age of five or six, with what she really thought of `Mag’s tomfool ideas as far as her Ann is concerned’, that she was `spoiling her rotten and making a rod for her own back.’ An inevitable side issue, she believed, where babies born in wartime were concerned and Mag would have plenty to regret when her Ann got a bit older. Furthermore she felt the practice of allowing Young Harold and Young Leslie to play with guns and shoot rabbits down by Crayford Creek was courting disaster when they were barely teenagers. What’s more she was convinced they had both taken up smoking and that couldn’t be good for them when there’d been so much TB in the family. The mention of TB was made in a lower, conspiratorial voice because it didn’t do to broadcast health facts such as this too far and wide and most especially on a crowded 480 bus. She may well have been correct in all her observations but she would never have made any derogatory comments directly to my aunt. This was particularly so when assessing Mag’s housekeeping skills, noting to my six year old self that it wouldn’t hurt to pour a bit of bleach into the Khazi once in a while but that didn’t suit Mag, who could be a slovenly cow at times.
Similar about turns of opinion happened between the many Constant sisters on a regular basis and of course their mother in the background, endlessly knitting like a latter day Madame Defarge held a great deal of emotional control over them all and effortlessly pitted them one against another until she finally died on Christmas Eve 1965. By that time the family habit was well ingrained and most unlikely to undergo any dramatic change.
In the intervening years the next generation, whilst striving to do better in life than their predecessors, and mostly succeeding – some more dramatically than others, carried the flag for deception, defamation and deceit into the latter decades of the twentieth century. Misrepresentations, inaccuracies and dishonesty marched forward together with the better educated collective of Constant cousins and flourished though it would be true to say that here and there you could find the occasional fearless Truth Teller. For that reason it is never totally easy for those investigating family history to actually uncover what are completely reliable facts. True parentage of some family members cannot be altogether trusted because dates of marriages and births can appear variable depending on who is issuing the information. A number of nine pound infants were unsurprisingly perhaps, apparently very premature.
Possibly more emotionally draining than anything else is the drip feeding of certainty and accuracy in pockets here and there so that all are forever wary as to what might be said to who and what must never be revealed. Ours has always been a family where a mere handful of members know everything, a few more know something, and most know very little on whatever sensitive topic is under discussion at any particular time. Therefore normal conversation can become like navigating a minefield. None of us want to be the one who is later pinpointed as revealing part of a secret to someone else who was never, ever supposed to know. Such a precipitous fall from grace will not be easily forgotten by the irritatingly high principled majority. This keeping of family secrets has become such a trial of memory over the years that more ordinary slander and character assassination seems like light relief.
Fortunately, a number of the family descendants are possessed of a certain amount of charm and appeal together with not inconsiderable intelligence and this combination of attributes renders the regular about-turns of face completely unanticipated. It can take quite some time for their unhappy targets to actually come to terms with what has taken place and even then they can be loath to accept the reality of the betrayal. A charismatic and outwardly amiable individual might use a cutting wit in criticism of those engaged in determined pursuance of their approval and friendship because he who has a habit of picking up entire bar and restaurant bills will never be short of disciples. Acolytes will never be completely cognizant of the pleasure that is taken in systematically denigrating them one by one to other. A manipulative miscreant can always be sure of nudging general disapproval to the surface of those who are usually censured only in whispers - the uncle with a back injury that has ensured he has never been able to work is universally disapproved of – the talkative cousin who simply cannot help name dropping and advising the world at large that she is allowed to Christmas shop for the rich and famous is ridiculed by all and sundry.
It is a fact, however, that those who seek to step aside from whatever the accepted traits within a family might be, choose to walk a risky path. Those who tell the truth will never be thanked for it and are far more likely to be labelled as Liars ….. Troublemakers …… Stirrers. But only in undertones of course or in more recent years via brave messages on social media, Never face to face!
My mother, always affable in conversation with her older sister, Mag on our regular visits to the house in Iron Mill Lane, Crayford, would express her true opinion on the bus ride home to Northfleet, acquainting me at the age of five or six, with what she really thought of `Mag’s tomfool ideas as far as her Ann is concerned’, that she was `spoiling her rotten and making a rod for her own back.’ An inevitable side issue, she believed, where babies born in wartime were concerned and Mag would have plenty to regret when her Ann got a bit older. Furthermore she felt the practice of allowing Young Harold and Young Leslie to play with guns and shoot rabbits down by Crayford Creek was courting disaster when they were barely teenagers. What’s more she was convinced they had both taken up smoking and that couldn’t be good for them when there’d been so much TB in the family. The mention of TB was made in a lower, conspiratorial voice because it didn’t do to broadcast health facts such as this too far and wide and most especially on a crowded 480 bus. She may well have been correct in all her observations but she would never have made any derogatory comments directly to my aunt. This was particularly so when assessing Mag’s housekeeping skills, noting to my six year old self that it wouldn’t hurt to pour a bit of bleach into the Khazi once in a while but that didn’t suit Mag, who could be a slovenly cow at times.
Similar about turns of opinion happened between the many Constant sisters on a regular basis and of course their mother in the background, endlessly knitting like a latter day Madame Defarge held a great deal of emotional control over them all and effortlessly pitted them one against another until she finally died on Christmas Eve 1965. By that time the family habit was well ingrained and most unlikely to undergo any dramatic change.
In the intervening years the next generation, whilst striving to do better in life than their predecessors, and mostly succeeding – some more dramatically than others, carried the flag for deception, defamation and deceit into the latter decades of the twentieth century. Misrepresentations, inaccuracies and dishonesty marched forward together with the better educated collective of Constant cousins and flourished though it would be true to say that here and there you could find the occasional fearless Truth Teller. For that reason it is never totally easy for those investigating family history to actually uncover what are completely reliable facts. True parentage of some family members cannot be altogether trusted because dates of marriages and births can appear variable depending on who is issuing the information. A number of nine pound infants were unsurprisingly perhaps, apparently very premature.
Possibly more emotionally draining than anything else is the drip feeding of certainty and accuracy in pockets here and there so that all are forever wary as to what might be said to who and what must never be revealed. Ours has always been a family where a mere handful of members know everything, a few more know something, and most know very little on whatever sensitive topic is under discussion at any particular time. Therefore normal conversation can become like navigating a minefield. None of us want to be the one who is later pinpointed as revealing part of a secret to someone else who was never, ever supposed to know. Such a precipitous fall from grace will not be easily forgotten by the irritatingly high principled majority. This keeping of family secrets has become such a trial of memory over the years that more ordinary slander and character assassination seems like light relief.
Fortunately, a number of the family descendants are possessed of a certain amount of charm and appeal together with not inconsiderable intelligence and this combination of attributes renders the regular about-turns of face completely unanticipated. It can take quite some time for their unhappy targets to actually come to terms with what has taken place and even then they can be loath to accept the reality of the betrayal. A charismatic and outwardly amiable individual might use a cutting wit in criticism of those engaged in determined pursuance of their approval and friendship because he who has a habit of picking up entire bar and restaurant bills will never be short of disciples. Acolytes will never be completely cognizant of the pleasure that is taken in systematically denigrating them one by one to other. A manipulative miscreant can always be sure of nudging general disapproval to the surface of those who are usually censured only in whispers - the uncle with a back injury that has ensured he has never been able to work is universally disapproved of – the talkative cousin who simply cannot help name dropping and advising the world at large that she is allowed to Christmas shop for the rich and famous is ridiculed by all and sundry.
It is a fact, however, that those who seek to step aside from whatever the accepted traits within a family might be, choose to walk a risky path. Those who tell the truth will never be thanked for it and are far more likely to be labelled as Liars ….. Troublemakers …… Stirrers. But only in undertones of course or in more recent years via brave messages on social media, Never face to face!
Friday 14 June 2019
Different Strokes for Different Folks
It seems that the principal characteristic of the Constant family so aptly described a number of years ago by my brother * remained alive and well through the generations. When I was growing up there always seemed to be an extraordinary amount of distrust operating within the family and layer after layer of lies and fabrications. Attitudes have hopefully changed but what is glaringly obvious is that we each appear to have quite conflicting experiences of some family members. Old Nan’s oldest child, my Aunt Mag who was born in 1906 or 1907 always seemed to me to be a much gentler and more accepting person than my mother and I clearly remember her remonstrations, advising my mother that she was `much too hard’ on her kids and warning `they don’t forget those things Nell’. This advice fell on very deaf ears which was predictable. When, as a teenager I got fed up with running away from home and sleeping rough it was my Aunt Mag I appealed to, felt safest with, and unsurprisingly she took me in, did not ask awkward questions and rather than lecture me on the topic of returning to my own home, waited for me to make the suggestion myself. Recently, realizing that further down the line of time there are family members who had astonishingly dissimilar experiences of her came as a shock.
I was a contrary child and at times I was treated harshly, beaten as a toddler so frequently that when my father came home on leave the neighbours asked him to intervene on my behalf. Given that those were the days when small children were routinely thrashed this was perhaps significant. I was willful and under the stress of wartime it could not have been easy for Nellie Constant to deal with my behaviour on top of the daily problems involved in living in what became known as Bomb Alley. As I grew older I did not improve and when my father returned from the war he too resorted to beating me. Horrifyingly I recall relief at his sudden death, hopeful that life might improve but of course it didn’t. Little wonder that I firmly believed I would have been better off within the more benevolent folds of my aunt’s family.
My younger brother was treated less harshly than me, at least that’s how I remember it, and later on he was infinitely more forgiving. When, long after my mother had died I discussed our childhood with his son, he was astonished and quite unable to visualize the loving grandmother he had known as the more savage individual I was describing. Clearly my mother was able to love him unreservedly.
In April 2016 when my brother died I wrote a blog post describing the deprivation of our early lives and in it made criticism of my mother. It educed an immediate response from a second cousin, Aunt Mag’s grandchild, who had grown up to some extent under the care of my mother. Her reaction was astonishingly venomous, bitter and very hurtful – her experience of my mother did not match my own. She had found her to be attentively caring, sensitive and loving. She told me how ashamed my dead brother would be of me that I described her so ruthlessly. As C.S. Lewis once observed, `What you see and what you hear depends a great deal upon where you are standing.’
Although I have no doubt that her brutal comments were also served by a basic dislike and distrust of me, they also demonstrated the time honoured attitudes that fester within a deeply dysfunctional family, traits that I recognize and if only I had been able to stand in a different position might almost have viewed as comforting and familiar. Furthermore they made me realise that we are imprisoned to some extent by our own experiences and often condemned to see the world through only one lens. As humans we will always be affected by our surroundings, previous experiences, social influences and we can behave vastly differently when an imperceptible change occurs. Yes, I was astonished to read that my Aunt Mag could be that self-same person seen as a `real bitch’ by more than one family member because it is hard for me to imagine her that way. I have always been standing in the wrong place for that.
I think we have to remember that those women born in the first years of the twentieth century experienced life on a vastly different level to ourselves. They grew up in a world where the degree of misery and deprivation that surrounded them was all encompassing. No surprise that some of them resorted to relentlessly beating recalcitrant offspring or mutated into Real Bitches in their old age. What is perhaps surprising is that there still remained a part of them ready to emerge as the sympathetic Aunt to a runaway teenager or the loving grandmother and carer to a new generation of pre-schoolers.
*published on my blog from 7th to 11th September 2016 (see: A Constant Economy of Truth, A Decidedly Constant Narrative, The Constant Family, Further Considerations and Constant Reflections)
Wednesday 12 June 2019
Bird Whistles
Young Harold was my oldest cousin and he and Young Leslie had often been mistaken for twins when they were small according to my mother. Well she should know because according to her she had all but brought them up when she went to live with her sister Mag after being thrown out of home for fighting with her sister, Maud. She always believed that it was Maud who should by rights have been thrown out because when all was said and done, it had been Maud who started the argument about who had used the last of the Amami Shampoo. But on that particular Saturday evening Old Nan had ordered her Edgar to throw Nellie out of the house without even a coat over her shoulders because she’d had enough and she was fed up with the neighbours complaining that those Constant girls were always fighting. She had to walk every step of the way to Iron Mill Lane, because she didn’t have a penny to her name. But far be it from her to complain and in the end the new living arrangements, because that’s what they turned out to be, benefitted everyone. Mag was now free to take a job at Vickers which she had been champing at the bit to do because Nellie was only too happy to stay home and look after those dear little boys. Returning to the family home to resume working for their father delivering meat and fish was out of the question in any case. To be honest she was only too glad not to because she’d never really got on with Toby the pony. Mag was going to give her a pound a week and that was good enough for her. There was good money to be made down at Vickers and no mistake.
This new arrangement was going to give her more time to give attention to Poor Fred and nobody could say he didn’t deserve attention. She would now be able to visit twice a week if she so desired even if it did mean an inconvenient change of trains. Crayford to Waterloo then a half hour wait for the fast train to Godalming. Just a brisk walk then to the Sanitorium where Fred enjoyed the best rest and fresh air that Surrey could provide. Once he was well again they would re-schedule their wedding date. She would wear Mag’s wedding dress and real orange blossom in her hair and the two of them would get as far away from Crayford and all the in-fighting as was possible – perhaps even to Gravesend. 1930 was going to be the best year of her life.
So that’s how my mother came to be what would now be termed the Prime Carer to Harold and Leslie Linyard, both still under two years old and often dressed alike and as I’ve said, mistaken for twins, although of course in reality there was just over a year between them. In time the rift created by being thrown out of home was healed enough for conversation to take place between the main players which was a good thing. After a shaky start when Young Harold screamed persistently for his mother when she left the house with her hair tied up in a smart red turban telling him she would be back in the shake of a gnat’s whisker, he settled down and accepted Aunt Nell as a substitute.
So it was my mother who pushed the boys all the way up Iron Mill Lane to the High Street shops and bought Harold a magic bird whistle made of bakelite that had to be filled with water. The young assistant was very obliging and went out to the back of the shop and came back with it filled and in working order for him. It was yellow and she told him it was a Canary and showed him how to blow it hard to make it work. Once he worked it out he was delighted and made full use of it although his mother said that the noise drove her barmy. When Leslie got a little older my mother bought him one as well, a red one and said it was a Robin Redbreast. This did not please their mother either. It pleased their Aunt though and when the children began to appeal directly to her to mend their bumps and scrapes rather than Mag, it pleased her even more. And so Aunt Nell became much loved and remained at the house in Iron Mill Lane over a number of years and was still there when baby Margaret was born in 1933 and within a short space of time when Mag decided it was time she returned to Vickers, she duly took over the care of the new baby. She was there when Poor Fred died instead of getting better despite all the rest and fresh air and it was Mag who sat up at night with her when the sleeping pills gave her nightmares, and it was the children who made life bearable during daylight hours.
Mag and Big Harold did the best they could for her state of mind and introduced her to Big Harold’s brother from Wolverhampton, Big Leslie who rode a motor bike and was in the market for a wife. She found his habit of surreptitiously wiping his nose on his shirt sleeve offensive even though he only did it at the end of the working week when the shirt was imminently due to be washed. It would be true to say that there was not much love lost between her and Big Harold who she thought was for a number of reasons, a silly bugger. She disliked him for having a distasteful brother, for insisting on calling her sister Croosh rather than Mag or Maggie, for disciplining poor Young Leslie, a sensitive child, too harshly and for calling him John rather than Leslie. Maud, who had by that time married her George, moved to a house in Mayplace Avenue and given birth to Young Desmond, was wont to point out that my mother could be a mischief maker when she wanted to be. However, it was more important to Mag to have an on the spot carer for her three children than to spend too much time worrying about those who might make mischief, and so my mother remained in the small bedroom.
The children were more than happy with the arrangement although try as she might, my mother was unable to find a bird whistle for Margaret when she grew old enough to want one. Instead she knitted a full set of clothes for the doll called Pola that Margaret had been given for her third birthday. She was rather beginning to feel, however, that she should move away and would have done so already had it not been for Poor Fred’s death. With this in mind perhaps she gave more of an appraisal than she would have ordinarily done to the fellow motor cyclist introduced by Big Leslie one Sunday afternoon – his friend Bern. Bern, brought up in a Chatham orphanage, 30 years old and also on the lookout for a wife.
Not a patch on her Fred of course but then she couldn’t expect that could she? Not a man she was likely to grow to love with all her heart but then where had that got her in the past? Devotion and hope for the future had only tied her to grief and sorrow. He seemed a sober man, a man who did not use bad language, a man who had a library ticket and regularly went to Mass. She could do worse and it would do her no harm at all to go to Mass from time to time and there was nothing wrong with joining a library. She’d always enjoyed reading.
It was Young Harold who missed her most when she left and he kept the bakelite bird whistle for years. She in her turn always had a soft spot for him even when he grew up and worried about doing his National Service because Malaya seemed too foreign and too far away. He promised to bring her back a Love Bird, perhaps even a pair but somehow or other he wasn’t able to. She was always suspicious of that Joan he got engaged to who was a Silly Cow and later threw him over for some reason. More fool her! She was happy when he met Sylvie from Hemel Hempstead and swiftly married her. You had to hand it to Sylvie because she was a very good cook and that suited Harold and she spent ten pounds a week on food. Ten pounds – no exaggeration! The first of their kiddies was little Wayne who looked so much like his Daddy. They had five in the end and went to live over Slade Green way so she didn’t see much of them.
They did come down to Gravesend Market one Saturday afternoon though and it was Young Harold who spotted the bird whistles, made of yellow plastic. My mother bought one for little Wayne and was inordinately pleased when Young Harold told him Aunt Nell had given him one just the same when he was a little lad, and showed him how it worked.
Thursday 6 June 2019
A Parrot in West Street
There has never been any doubt that parrots are exotic, having more than a hint of mystery and glamour about them without even having to try. Parrots carry the promise beneath their showy plumage of pirate ships and tattoo parlours, marine treasure and bottles of rum. To catch sight of one is to instantly perceive a flash of an alien land, a fast flourish of the ocean or even just a whiff of the murky estuary waters as they meet the shoreline at the conclusion of a long journey. Parrots are pushy, more assertive than they need to be and invariably extravagantly gaudy. For those in the process of acquiring a bird companion they suggest bargain basement economy but will, as my grandmother warned, cost you an arm and a leg not to mention the fact that they could be fussy eaters and definitely need sturdy cages.
The only parrot I came across when growing up belonged to an elderly man who wore an ancient navy Guernsey and a cap and carried a khaki knapsack. I called him The Old Policeman and later learned that he had never been allied in any way to the Kent County Police Force but had spent most of his working life as a Thames Fisherman with a leaning towards eels and bass. It was rumoured to have been his brother who had left him the parrot when he died of the Pox and my mother hoped that the original owner had at least travelled further afield than the waters around Gravesend, perhaps even to China. There was nothing exceptional apparently about eels and bass but plenty to get excited about when it came to China because the people that lived there were well and truly foreign and had funny habits. At the age of four I knew nothing about foreign places except that they were a very long way away which was fortunate because foreigners seemed more than anxious at the time to deluge the people of North Kent with bombs. Their latest nasty visitations were coming in the form of Doodlebugs that made even the grown-ups nervous. It was a long time before I met anyone from China and was in a position to judge the funny habits.
The parrot lived in a heavy looking cage that swung gently in the window of a boarding house in West Street. The window was bigger than you might expect and hung with grimy grey net curtains. The unusual dimensions were because the house had been a shop and once upon a time had sold brown shrimps at threepence a pint, fresh from the Bawley boats. You could also at times get herring and haddock to take home for tea which they smoked in a yard out the back. There were still a few West Street shops left in those latter years of the war, one of them sold parts for bicycles and torch batteries and cans of oil and seemed to attract male customers only like my Uncle Harold. In fact it was he who told me that the bird in the window was a Macaw and so likely to live for a hundred years. He had just purchased what he said was an inner tube that he had been unable to come across in Crayford or Erith no matter how hard he’d looked and that was because of the war causing shortages. The bird came from South America he said which was most likely quite close to China I suggested and he agreed. His wife, Aunt Mag looked proud of him and observed that Harold knew most things and if she ever wanted to find out something she always asked him first. Uncle Harold would smile at her then and squeeze her shoulders and instead of calling her Mag, which was her name when she wasn’t being Margaret, he called her Croosh because she was crucial to him. My mother always said later that Harold was a Dopey Sod if ever she knew one and didn’t know his arse from his elbow and as for his Mag being crucial to anyone well that was up for debate. In this case, however, I thought he was probably quite correct about the parrot. It was an astonishingly and intensely blue and gold bird and looked for all the world as if it had been exposed to bright dyes such as the ones Aunt Maud got from Woolworths and used when she did a makeover of her shoes. In fact it was so colourful it was hard to take your eyes off it and the harder you looked at it the more it seemed to preen and straighten itself and look as important as it could possibly manage within the confines of the cage that had more than likely cost the arm and the leg my grandmother spoke of.
West Street in those days differed substantially from later when the demolitions that were necessary to widen it so as to accommodate the one way system had taken place. In the 1940s it was still narrow and infused with an air of architectural antiquity though most of the old shops had already turned themselves into what my mother said was slum housing where a number of families had to share the lavatory in the yard which just wasn’t right. Old Nan thought she’d not say that if she’d seen the state of the area when Suttis Alley and Mermaid Court were still standing quite close to the baker where we now bought our custard tarts. In her opinion to call the West Street houses slums meant she didn’t know what a slum was. After this kind of exchange there would follow a few minutes of hostile muttering between them about who was correct.
On the North side of the street where the parrot lived there were, unlike later, still plenty of pubs a number of which advertised Whitebait Suppers and sometimes if several of my aunts had come to town together for a Saturday afternoon shopping expedition they would go inside for a quick one, leaving me and my cousins in the charge of Margaret who as I have said before, had a responsible nature. If one of the uncles was with them he might stay behind for a second quick one when they proceeded to the market. Either way once we children had demolished the packets of crisps we were given to share we progressed further along the street towards what I now inside my head called The Chinese Parrot House and stared at the bird who stared back curiously, doing nothing very much even when Pat banged on the window to try to startle it into some kind of action. Margaret said that well trained parrots went out with you and sat obediently on your shoulder. You could even take them on the 480 bus she said and she had seen people getting off with them at the stop outside Dartford market. I somewhat doubted that because although I had often seen dogs on buses I had never at any stage seen a parrot nor indeed any other kind of bird. Despite Margaret’s insistence that seemed to imply that parrots were happiest when sitting on the shoulders of their owners, the elderly man I called The Old Policeman was never to be witnessed with the Macaw in that position which was disappointing.
One exciting day when my mother and I were on our way back from the West Street baker with freshly baked huffkins in the shopping basket, we happened upon the next door Bassants’ adopted daughter Ena who was emerging from The Chinese Parrot House with a key in her hand and a determined to ignore us look on her face. But my mother wasn’t to be ignored that day. After some discussion it turned out that Ena was currently employed on a part time basis by the elderly landlady who was in need of help to clean the rooms and brush down the stairs every second week because of her rheumatism. There were five lodgers in the house, all of them men so the lavatory arrangement, which of course my mother brought up immediately as a topic for discussion, did not pose a lot of problems. There was no food provided so no meals to cook and clean up after and the sheets on the beds were only changed every third week because when all was said and done men generally were not fussy and didn’t notice things like grimy sheets nor clean ones for that matter. All things considered Ena felt it wasn’t too bad a little wartime job and a lot better than the factories where you had to clock in and out. There my mother agreed and told the story of her own sister who had nearly had the nasty accident at Vickers and was lucky she wasn’t killed. Within reason Ena could choose her own hours and there was a lot to be said for that and not a chance of nearly having a finger blown off or worse.
Their conversation became more and more tedious so I started hopping on one leg and saying how much I liked the parrot in the window. With some encouragement the Bassants’ Ena then agreed to take me into Old Reg Cogger’s room for a closer look at it because her Evelyn had loved it too when she went to work with her one day last week. My mother was doubtful and wondered if he would mind but Ena said with any luck he would be in The Shades until dinner time anyway and would never know. In actual fact he returned before expected with several bottles of beer in his khaki knapsack which seemed to confuse Ena who hastily explained that she had just brought the kiddy in for a few minutes to have a look at the bird. My mother added that in any case I was always as Good as Gold.
And that’s how I came to learn that the bird’s name was Caesar and he was only rarely let out of his cage on account of him having a Bugger of a beak on him and a temper to go with it. Rolling up the sleeve of his navy Guernsey Reg Cogger invited me to look at some of the damage Caesar had done when using the rogue beak to steady himself as he got around. Sometimes, he said, with the best will in the world Caesar would accidentally slip and be forced to use his beak to hold on which always resulted in something that looked very much like an intentional attack. I stood several respectful feet away from the cage and listened and tried as hard as I could to look as Good as Gold.
Ena and my mother melted back into the narrow entrance passage of the West Street house and Old Reg sat down in a wicker armchair and prepared himself a roll-up. When I asked if Caesar could speak he told me he could not only speak but swear like a trooper in four languages and sing God Save the King. So I took a small and cautious step or two back towards the cage again through the crowded little room waiting for the bird to do so but disappointingly he said nothing at all and neither did he sing. So I asked Old Reg if he ever took him on his shoulder onto the 480 bus and he said he didn’t because of fear he might fly away and then he might never get him back though he wouldn’t entirely discount the idea because you could in fact buy a special harness for taking birds out and about. Parrots like Caesar were worth a bob or two he told me and were splendid pets, in fact much better than dogs because they didn’t need the walking. After the war, once goods were in the shops again he might get one of them there harnesses. That sounded like an excellent idea to me and I instantly decided that in the future, when I had a parrot of my own which I was definitely going to call Caesar, I would make sure that it never flew away when on the 480 bus by buying it a harness.
In the years that would intervene before I ever became in a position to fulfil that promise of a parrot pet, I made it a priority to give attention to these birds both factual and fictional. Not that many were to be found in the pet shops of Gravesend and Northfleet. When I was nine I only struggled through Treasure Island because of Long John Silver being a fellow fancier. Information was thin on the ground but my childhood world became suffused with justice when I stumbled upon Enid Blyton’s Adventure series of improbable novels featuring Jack, Philip, Dinah, Lucy-Anne and…..yes, Kiki the parrot! My future avian companion’s name was rapidly changed from Caesar to – yes, of course – Kiki!
The only parrot I came across when growing up belonged to an elderly man who wore an ancient navy Guernsey and a cap and carried a khaki knapsack. I called him The Old Policeman and later learned that he had never been allied in any way to the Kent County Police Force but had spent most of his working life as a Thames Fisherman with a leaning towards eels and bass. It was rumoured to have been his brother who had left him the parrot when he died of the Pox and my mother hoped that the original owner had at least travelled further afield than the waters around Gravesend, perhaps even to China. There was nothing exceptional apparently about eels and bass but plenty to get excited about when it came to China because the people that lived there were well and truly foreign and had funny habits. At the age of four I knew nothing about foreign places except that they were a very long way away which was fortunate because foreigners seemed more than anxious at the time to deluge the people of North Kent with bombs. Their latest nasty visitations were coming in the form of Doodlebugs that made even the grown-ups nervous. It was a long time before I met anyone from China and was in a position to judge the funny habits.
The parrot lived in a heavy looking cage that swung gently in the window of a boarding house in West Street. The window was bigger than you might expect and hung with grimy grey net curtains. The unusual dimensions were because the house had been a shop and once upon a time had sold brown shrimps at threepence a pint, fresh from the Bawley boats. You could also at times get herring and haddock to take home for tea which they smoked in a yard out the back. There were still a few West Street shops left in those latter years of the war, one of them sold parts for bicycles and torch batteries and cans of oil and seemed to attract male customers only like my Uncle Harold. In fact it was he who told me that the bird in the window was a Macaw and so likely to live for a hundred years. He had just purchased what he said was an inner tube that he had been unable to come across in Crayford or Erith no matter how hard he’d looked and that was because of the war causing shortages. The bird came from South America he said which was most likely quite close to China I suggested and he agreed. His wife, Aunt Mag looked proud of him and observed that Harold knew most things and if she ever wanted to find out something she always asked him first. Uncle Harold would smile at her then and squeeze her shoulders and instead of calling her Mag, which was her name when she wasn’t being Margaret, he called her Croosh because she was crucial to him. My mother always said later that Harold was a Dopey Sod if ever she knew one and didn’t know his arse from his elbow and as for his Mag being crucial to anyone well that was up for debate. In this case, however, I thought he was probably quite correct about the parrot. It was an astonishingly and intensely blue and gold bird and looked for all the world as if it had been exposed to bright dyes such as the ones Aunt Maud got from Woolworths and used when she did a makeover of her shoes. In fact it was so colourful it was hard to take your eyes off it and the harder you looked at it the more it seemed to preen and straighten itself and look as important as it could possibly manage within the confines of the cage that had more than likely cost the arm and the leg my grandmother spoke of.
West Street in those days differed substantially from later when the demolitions that were necessary to widen it so as to accommodate the one way system had taken place. In the 1940s it was still narrow and infused with an air of architectural antiquity though most of the old shops had already turned themselves into what my mother said was slum housing where a number of families had to share the lavatory in the yard which just wasn’t right. Old Nan thought she’d not say that if she’d seen the state of the area when Suttis Alley and Mermaid Court were still standing quite close to the baker where we now bought our custard tarts. In her opinion to call the West Street houses slums meant she didn’t know what a slum was. After this kind of exchange there would follow a few minutes of hostile muttering between them about who was correct.
On the North side of the street where the parrot lived there were, unlike later, still plenty of pubs a number of which advertised Whitebait Suppers and sometimes if several of my aunts had come to town together for a Saturday afternoon shopping expedition they would go inside for a quick one, leaving me and my cousins in the charge of Margaret who as I have said before, had a responsible nature. If one of the uncles was with them he might stay behind for a second quick one when they proceeded to the market. Either way once we children had demolished the packets of crisps we were given to share we progressed further along the street towards what I now inside my head called The Chinese Parrot House and stared at the bird who stared back curiously, doing nothing very much even when Pat banged on the window to try to startle it into some kind of action. Margaret said that well trained parrots went out with you and sat obediently on your shoulder. You could even take them on the 480 bus she said and she had seen people getting off with them at the stop outside Dartford market. I somewhat doubted that because although I had often seen dogs on buses I had never at any stage seen a parrot nor indeed any other kind of bird. Despite Margaret’s insistence that seemed to imply that parrots were happiest when sitting on the shoulders of their owners, the elderly man I called The Old Policeman was never to be witnessed with the Macaw in that position which was disappointing.
One exciting day when my mother and I were on our way back from the West Street baker with freshly baked huffkins in the shopping basket, we happened upon the next door Bassants’ adopted daughter Ena who was emerging from The Chinese Parrot House with a key in her hand and a determined to ignore us look on her face. But my mother wasn’t to be ignored that day. After some discussion it turned out that Ena was currently employed on a part time basis by the elderly landlady who was in need of help to clean the rooms and brush down the stairs every second week because of her rheumatism. There were five lodgers in the house, all of them men so the lavatory arrangement, which of course my mother brought up immediately as a topic for discussion, did not pose a lot of problems. There was no food provided so no meals to cook and clean up after and the sheets on the beds were only changed every third week because when all was said and done men generally were not fussy and didn’t notice things like grimy sheets nor clean ones for that matter. All things considered Ena felt it wasn’t too bad a little wartime job and a lot better than the factories where you had to clock in and out. There my mother agreed and told the story of her own sister who had nearly had the nasty accident at Vickers and was lucky she wasn’t killed. Within reason Ena could choose her own hours and there was a lot to be said for that and not a chance of nearly having a finger blown off or worse.
Their conversation became more and more tedious so I started hopping on one leg and saying how much I liked the parrot in the window. With some encouragement the Bassants’ Ena then agreed to take me into Old Reg Cogger’s room for a closer look at it because her Evelyn had loved it too when she went to work with her one day last week. My mother was doubtful and wondered if he would mind but Ena said with any luck he would be in The Shades until dinner time anyway and would never know. In actual fact he returned before expected with several bottles of beer in his khaki knapsack which seemed to confuse Ena who hastily explained that she had just brought the kiddy in for a few minutes to have a look at the bird. My mother added that in any case I was always as Good as Gold.
And that’s how I came to learn that the bird’s name was Caesar and he was only rarely let out of his cage on account of him having a Bugger of a beak on him and a temper to go with it. Rolling up the sleeve of his navy Guernsey Reg Cogger invited me to look at some of the damage Caesar had done when using the rogue beak to steady himself as he got around. Sometimes, he said, with the best will in the world Caesar would accidentally slip and be forced to use his beak to hold on which always resulted in something that looked very much like an intentional attack. I stood several respectful feet away from the cage and listened and tried as hard as I could to look as Good as Gold.
Ena and my mother melted back into the narrow entrance passage of the West Street house and Old Reg sat down in a wicker armchair and prepared himself a roll-up. When I asked if Caesar could speak he told me he could not only speak but swear like a trooper in four languages and sing God Save the King. So I took a small and cautious step or two back towards the cage again through the crowded little room waiting for the bird to do so but disappointingly he said nothing at all and neither did he sing. So I asked Old Reg if he ever took him on his shoulder onto the 480 bus and he said he didn’t because of fear he might fly away and then he might never get him back though he wouldn’t entirely discount the idea because you could in fact buy a special harness for taking birds out and about. Parrots like Caesar were worth a bob or two he told me and were splendid pets, in fact much better than dogs because they didn’t need the walking. After the war, once goods were in the shops again he might get one of them there harnesses. That sounded like an excellent idea to me and I instantly decided that in the future, when I had a parrot of my own which I was definitely going to call Caesar, I would make sure that it never flew away when on the 480 bus by buying it a harness.
In the years that would intervene before I ever became in a position to fulfil that promise of a parrot pet, I made it a priority to give attention to these birds both factual and fictional. Not that many were to be found in the pet shops of Gravesend and Northfleet. When I was nine I only struggled through Treasure Island because of Long John Silver being a fellow fancier. Information was thin on the ground but my childhood world became suffused with justice when I stumbled upon Enid Blyton’s Adventure series of improbable novels featuring Jack, Philip, Dinah, Lucy-Anne and…..yes, Kiki the parrot! My future avian companion’s name was rapidly changed from Caesar to – yes, of course – Kiki!
Saturday 1 June 2019
A Parliament of Show-Off Rooks
Bernard first spoke to me of the spectacle of roosting birds when he was still quite a small boy, perhaps five or six years old. He had been observed by an elderly neighbour sitting on the front doorstep as quiet and still as was possible in order to best monitor the comings and goings of sparrows and starlings and pigeons. He liked the starlings best of all with their brash certainty and their glossy and sometimes iridescent plumage, each struggling to be noticed as perhaps he longed to be himself. He wondered why they sometimes developed speckles of white about their feathers and why their bills were black in winter and yellow in summer but of course I couldn’t tell him and neither could the neighbour. He enjoyed their noisy squabbling and told me that somewhere he had heard that they could learn to speak which was something I had never heard myself so I told him that was unlikely. What he liked most about them was their determination to be gregarious and their habit of flocking together as they headed for their communal roost. Before he totally changed his mind about egg collecting, one of their pale blue eggs was his first ornithological acquisition. He placed it gently into a fake nest he had made on the table beside his bed.
He learned from a library book called Our Feathered Friends for Young Folk that mid-winter was probably the best time for spotting an undulating flock just before the sun went down. He told me that this was known as a Murmuration and our closest one was probably along the line of poplars down by Gemmel’s Farm adjacent to Springhead. If we were lucky, he said, we might see ten thousand or more at any one time.
My mother had long since decided that he was far too young to what she called Traipse around the countryside after Bloody Birds and so she detailed me to go with him if he was to go at all. So that is how we came to be sitting on the side of a frozen ditch one early December evening on the edge of one of Mr Gemmel’s newly ploughed fields. It was what my grandmother would have termed as cold as charity and although I was aware of every last degree of it, my brother was totally oblivious, hugging his pink knees and whispering that the concentration of birds we were about to see was because that habit served as a defence against falcons and hawks that would slaughter them in a blink of an eye. After a long silence within which I wondered how soon I would be able to persuade him that we needed to go home, he looked at me and asked if I thought it was exciting. I said Yes, I did because to say anything else would have seemed unnecessarily unkind.
And then it began. Slowly at first a tight sphere-like formation in the sky above us, expanding and contracting like an amorphous troupe of dancers then changing shape as if choreographed, each bird following the movement of its closest neighbours. The swarm was creating one complex shape after another, every one silhouetted against the rapidly darkening sky and each process of change astonishingly elegant.
Next day Mr Hammond, the shoe-mender of Shepherd Street said when he was a boy some people kept starlings in cages and they could be trained if you caught them young enough not only to do tricks but to talk. One he came across could mimic the human voice so well that folk turned around to see who was speaking. When Bernard went home to acquaint my mother with this piece of information, Old Nan who was on her third cup of Wednesday afternoon tea said she wouldn’t give them house room because they were dirty buggers and inclined to shit all over the place. That seemed a bit odd to Bernard because if they were being kept in a cage there would be a natural limit to the extent of this annoying habit. But in any case he didn’t want to keep one in a cage so he did not think it worthwhile arguing about it.
I felt obliged to discuss with him a few days later that the Roost of starlings had been more interesting than I would have thought possible and following this admission over the next several months we wandered far and wide to witness similar winter evening exhibitions. Bernard even talked about the phenomena at school one morning at one of the inaugural Show & Tell demonstrations that were seeing their introduction into English primary schools in the 1950s. St Joseph’s prided itself on being much more progressive than other local schools, particularly those with no religious affinity and therefore considered next to heathen. He was so enthusiastic that it was difficult for Sister Camilla to actually stop him talking which infuriated Anne Murphy who was detailed to follow him and was to talk about her pet rabbit which she had brought with her in a cage.
The following autumn Bernard stopped talking about Murmurations of starlings and began instead to discuss Rooks. He very much wanted to go to Cooling to witness a Roost. He told me that the flock would not be called a Murmuration and would be called a Parliament instead and furthermore although it was easy to confuse the Rook with the Crow the former was distinguished by greyish skin around the base of the bill in front of the eyes and that in any case their feathered legs looked shaggier than those of the Crow. I bore all this in mind and promised never to confuse them.
Rashly I undertook to take him to the Rook Roost at Cooling at the first opportunity and did so only because I recalled the walks I had done with my father whilst he was still alive, walks that seemed interminably long at the time, along the Thames and Medway Canal to the marshes at Cliffe where I was told we trod in the very footsteps of Charles Dickens when he was a boy. When Bernard next went to the library the children’s librarian gave him permission to borrow from the Ornithology section in the adult library where they had seven or eight volumes by various authors that told you all you could possibly want to know about birds, including Rooks. He learned that they were highly gregarious and that males and females bond for life, that to farmers they were a nuisance because of their habit of decimating crops and most exciting of all, their spectacular aerial displays in autumn had to be seen to be believed. So he became intent upon observing this for himself and spoke non- stop about how exciting it was going to be when we finally found ourselves in the village of Cooling with the Roost itself, as our grandmother would say, within spitting distance! In the meantime he offered several times to share his newest information at Show & Tell time at school but was told that the subject matter he suggested wasn’t appropriate. Poor Bernard was only seven years old and therefore extremely hurt.
The journey plan was finally made in the first term of the school year in September when an outbreak of Measles locally ensured that being absent would mean he wasn’t noticed. I was recovering from a rather nasty attack of Chicken Pox and had not been at school for three weeks and our mother was conveniently detailed to be at Old Nan’s place in Crayford by eight am to look after Little Violet while Nan’s feet were attended to at the local hospital. She might be late back and we were therefore to get our own tea of fish and chips with the shiny half-crown left on the kitchen table. She was temporarily feeling flush because of an extra day or two worked the previous week for Mrs Lovell of Darnley Road. In addition she undoubtedly felt a certain amount of working class guilt at not being home to make sure we ate two slices of bread and what was always called Butter followed by a home-made rock cake or two. We took the rock cakes with us, wrapped in newspaper.
Purloining odd coins from the Toby jug above the kitchen stove provided a further cash injection for the bus fare into Gravesend but after that we would have to walk if we wanted to be sure of fish and chips later. In any case it was generally unwise to ask clippies to give change for half-crown pieces because they were almost honour bound to be rude simply because we were children which would only draw the attention of other passengers towards us. I felt a slight unease in any case about being a child because in those days as far as bus fares were concerned you stopped being one at the age of fourteen unless you were on your way to school preferably in school uniform. I had recently celebrated my fourteenth birthday.
As fate would have it, when we got to the bus stop opposite the Catholic church nosy Mrs Newberry was already in the queue poised ready to cross examine us with what passed as a look of polite interest on her face. Mrs Newberry had replaced The Bassants Next Door when they went to live in Burch Road Rosherville with their adopted daughter Ena. She was very keen on hand washing and stayed up late at night making sure that her family had the cleanest shirts, frocks and socks in the neighbourhood. My mother said that it wasn’t natural and to mark her words because her hands would suffer something terrible in the long run. I found myself staring at her hands as she predictably wanted to know where we were off to so early on a Wednesday morning. I said I was taking my brother to the new Ear Clinic at the hospital and wanted to get there before the rush. My mother had discussed over the fence with her as she pegged out endless lines of newly washed garments that my brother suffered dreadfully with his ears which was true because he did. So Nosy Mrs Newberry made sympathetic noises and said she understood bad ears only too well as her hubby, Charlie had been a sufferer in his childhood and had ended up deaf on one side because back in those days there was no new Ear Clinic to attend, no matter how early you got up to go there.
Then, as we boarded the bus and seated ourselves, Bernard couldn’t help himself and announced that we were also going to Cooling for the Rook Roost. I added that we might do but only if time permitted and his ears were not too bad and I kicked his shin violently. In a smaller voice he began to explain to her that rooks were very interesting and had surprisingly powerful beaks and that sometimes they walked around the fields in huge steps and sometimes they hopped just like sparrows but of course she wasn’t listening. When we arrived in the town, however, she was still aware of us enough to prompt us to get off the bus at the stop closest to the hospital which we didn’t really want to do but did anyway and thanked her for the reminder. As we headed south towards the canal, past the shops on the main road, still not open, my brother observed that possibly pretending to be on a hospital visit had not been very good idea. It quite quickly began to seem like a very long walk and we had to ask directions on a number of occasions from people out with their dogs. The men were generally taciturn but when we approached the occasional woman she was invariably helpful though curious and wanted to know where we were heading and why.
The winter sun grew higher in the sky and once we managed, after what seemed a very long time, to get into the marshland environs of Cliffe and Cooling I began to feel more positive. I was again remembering the many walks I had done with my father in previous years before he was so suddenly snatched from life when Bernard was still a pre-schooler. Importantly I said I was completely familiar with the marshland route and why, and Bernard was impressed and even said he wished he’d been old enough to come with us back then. Further enthused I began to recite the history lesson I had been subjected to on one such perambulation and told him that Cooling, where we were now heading, got its name from a Saxon word which meant Cow and that the Romans had once occupied the area which was a fact because in 1922 on a nearby farm a Roman kiln had been found and it contained a great deal of Roman pottery.
We sat by the roadside to eat the rock cakes which were not the best that my mother, who was by no means much of a baker, had ever produced. Bernard did not seem to mind and neither did he object when I pointed out that the construction of Cooling Castle was started in the thirteen hundreds and that the church featured in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. He did ask who Charles Dickens was though but I decided not to subject him to a trip to the churchyard to see the little tombstones that were supposed to be Pip’s brothers and sisters as it was rather depressing.
The walk became interminable and when we came across a shop beside some newly built houses we decided to buy lemonade and Smith’s Crisps to sustain us with some of the money that had been reserved for fish and chips. After all, Bernard said, we could always simply buy chips when we got back to Gravesend because as far as he was concerned, chips were the best part of fish and chips. I agreed because there seemed to be no earthly reason why we needed fish. The woman behind the counter said she thought we looked Done In and Bernard said we were going to the Rook Roost and had walked all the way from Gravesend. She said we should have taken the bus to High Halstow and we should be sure to catch the bus on the way back.
It was becoming late in the afternoon by the time we reached Northward Hill and found the Saxon Shore Way where my brother insisted we needed to be to get the best view. A dog walker told us we were now in a good place to observe the Roost and so we sat exhausted on the edge of a coppice, Bernard complaining that his legs were hurting quite badly. I nodded, wondering where the bus stop was and how I might recognise which was the best bus to catch back to Gravesend. It would not be a very satisfactory end to the day to find ourselves in Rochester or Chatham for instance. And while I was contemplating the possible minor calamities that might yet be in store for us Bernard clutched my arm and whispered that it was about to begin. So in the early winter dusk all thought of bus timetables and routes were forgotten and we sat mesmerised as the red and grey sky that stretched endlessly over the marshland became inky with a myriad of birds wheeling and gliding in groups. As one but in their thousands they played to the gallery, distracting us, demanding our attention and performing a series of spectacular synchronised movements, diving, rolling and tumbling unrestrained against the clouds just as the Springhead Starlings had done only with more abandon, as if taking part in some strange and dazzlingly accomplished avian ballet.
On the way back towards the road through the rapidly descending darkness Bernard said that the Rooks were much better than the Starlings and I asked him why. He thought it was because they were better at letting us see what they could do. Doing what Sister Camilla at school had warned his class against – showing off, because it was her firm opinion that nobody admires a show off.
Somehow or other we found the bus that went to Gravesend and then we only had to walk to Northfleet. We bought chips and doused them liberally with salt and vinegar and Bernard told me that he greatly admired the Show-Off Rooks and that the day had been the very best day of his life.
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