Although as a child I was blissfully unaware of the fact, the hop gardens of Kent were always under threat from the air. When the annual picking season resumed again post World War Two, the menace did not come from a lone German bomber making his way home thankful and exhausted, but from flocks of local birds elated to witness the re-establishment of one of their favourite food sources. It wasn’t just people who suffered under the years of Adolf Hitler’s aerial bombardment.
The growers themselves were only too keen to return to hops and the thousands of willing pickers were overjoyed or as Old Nan said, Tickled Pink! Once the news filtered through to Uncle Harold who had for the latter part of the nineteen thirties been charged with making the annual booking at the farm in Mereworth, a celebratory drink was organised at The Jolly Farmers in Crayford, just a hop, skip and a jump from where most of the Constants then lived and a 480 bus ride for us. The general jubilation at the time makes today’s almost complete absence of the hops a more woeful situation than it possibly needs to be because change is in the nature of things.
Last time I was in Kent, several years ago now, there was not a hop to be seen though we made a determined search of all the places previously associated with that tall climbing perennial. In our hired Honda we drove through each of the villages I recalled from my childhood ending up at Old Nan’s much loved Mereworth fondly recalled from her own earliest years, but the hops and all that had been associated with them had gone. Even the local pubs, all heavily decorated with hops on the bine just a year or two previously, now behaved as if the plant whose seasonal workers had supported them readily and raucously over decades had barely existed.
A visit to Shepherd Neame Brewery in Faversham which dates back as far as 1698 revealed the astonishing fact that recently this most distinguished Kent beer maker has actually taken to importing its hops from New Zealand. We were then perplexed and stunned into silence. As far as we were aware no hops were being grown in the North Island where anywhere from Auckland to Kaitaia is considered semi-tropical. Later it was explained to us that they are grown in the Tasman area in the upper South Island where generally the climate is more like Southern England with cold winters sometimes leaning towards snow. Hops, apparently need the cold in order to best thrive and New Zealand hops an earnest young man revealed, were infinitely superior to anything that had ever been produced locally. I found that hard to believe as of course any true Kentish maid would, but decided not to challenge him.
It turned out to be quite correct that apparently notable hops, increasingly in demand from those describing themselves as Craft Beer makers emerge triumphantly from the Nelson region. Not without incident because at one time they were also under threat from the Yellow Crowned Parakeet, the Kakariki whose ongoing attacks upon them in the nineteenth century made serious inroads into their potential survival. Thankfully for Nelson Hop Growers and for the Shepherd Neame Brewery those days are well and truly in the past and it is now the Kakariki itself whose survival is threatened. I found myself wondering what reprisals were taken all those years ago by the South Island farmers. Did the thought of those predatory parakeets keep them awake at night? Was it slingshots at dawn throughout the growing season?
The county of Kent was for several centuries synonymous with the now almost non-existent hop plant, the pungently aromatic essential for beer making with the mysterious Latin name of humulus lupulus - or Wolf of the Woods. Pliny the Elder, famed as a naturalist, gives one of the very first references to the plant and describes it as the Willow Wolf because where hops were found among willows their twining growth proved as destructive as a wolf in a flock of sheep. Making their way up tall supporting wooden poles they grow to five metres, trained in Spring for the journey and reaching the summit in early July when the first of the iconic cones appear. The haunting and all-pervading aroma is unmistakable and never forgotten. They are harvested in September as every ex-picker knows, to be dried in an Oast House prior to being sent on to the breweries.
The very first English hop garden was created in the parish of Westbere near Canterbury in 1520 and so it was that the surrounding areas rapidly became central to the culture due to soil suitability, accessible wood supplies for the poles, charcoal for drying and an already well established and laid out field system. There was now no stopping the hop as traditional English Ale was knocked aside in favour of beer. It was necessary for the crop to be harvested rapidly and it involved a great deal of labour, eventually attracting pickers from far and wide and as time went on increasingly from the East End of London. By the mid sixteen hundreds local farm records were already making mention of the `strangers who come for the hopping’ indicating that the available local labour source was simply inadequate. As the years passed the greater part of this seasonal labour force came from London, supplemented by local Gypsies and at the peak of the industry more than ninety thousand people made their way into Kentish farms at the end of each summer. Working class Londoners now regarded the annual picking season as their country holiday with pay and very much looked forward to the six weeks of rural freedom for months in advance. We were amongst them!
My grandmother’s first memory of Going Hopping down at Mereworth went back to 1890 when she was a pre-schooler living in Stepney, East London during winter months and under a tarpaulin in the fields of Kent as soon as the pea picking season started in early June. She was never happier than in the hop gardens and the tradition was carried on by her daughters ensuring that my mother developed the same loving regard for the cultivation of hops. It was no surprise that along with our numerous cousins my brother and I also regarded Going Down Hopping as a holiday not easily surpassed by mere boarding houses in Ramsgate or camping grounds in Swalecliffe as I have described elsewhere. In my mother’s case her dedication to hops is not altogether surprising as she was actually born in the hop gardens of Mereworth in 1908 causing perpetually harassed Old Nan to pause in the day’s picking for at least an hour or two. What now seems hard to accept is that by the time of her birth the amount of local land reserved for the plant had fallen to approximately half of that involved twenty five years earlier. A little later during the First World War brewing was to be considerably reduced and to avoid a huge surplus government restrictions were put in place to further control the industry and they remained in place until the mid 1920s. Hard times for growers followed featuring not only the depression but surplus hops, low prices and a worrying disease called Hop Downy Mildew.
In 1932 the Hops Marketing Board was created with members elected annually and thereafter monopoly control ensured a sheltered market for producers. A further Golden Age was emerging for Hop Pickers, one that was eventually to propel me and my brother into our own cherished corner of it. Going Down Hopping was always the highlight of our year and during the last few days of August we gathered at the station in Gravesend early on the designated Sunday morning for the Hop Pickers’Special from London Bridge. It was always already crowded by the time it reached us because back then whole families linked together for the season, hundreds of men, women, children some with their pet dogs and caged canaries from the crowded slums of the East End.
From Maidstone we boarded lorries sent out from the farms, walking the last half mile of farm track to the huts with their primitive narrow bunks and piles of sacks and wheat straw to fill them with. Making the mattresses was the first job and allocated to the older children, in our case led by my cousins Margaret, Harold and Leslie. My grandmother, mother and aunts maintained that the huts were a giant step forward as far as comfort was concerned as their own memories were of camping under tarpaulins in the corner of a field where the Gypsies with their vans had far more exclusive and certainly much envied accommodation. Local villagers were naturally enough wary of us and their children were warned not to play with us. Shopkeepers were of the opinion that we were not to be trusted and some pubs even had signs outside advising: No Hoppers & No Gypsies. This was a situation we became accustomed to and after a while no longer cared very much about. We were Untouchables and that was good enough for us – we were happy Untouchables. The farmers themselves at least were pleased to see us and records show that particular families visited the same gardens through several generations. As a group we were reliable and we worked with enthusiasm.
It was customary for whole families to work around one bin together, adults had over time dexterously developed a technique to pluck each hop cone individually with middle finger and thumb at great speed. Old Nan, by far the best of the Constant’s pickers could strip the length of a bine in a single action and said that she had been even more adept in the days of the Old Pole System when the poles themselves were uprooted with the bines attached and laid across the bin. The new-fangled method of pulling down the bine with a binman’s hook was to her mind quite inferior and slowed progress. My youngest cousins, too small to reach the top of the bin squatted in the rows and picked into a shared, open umbrella. A large family of good pickers such as our own might do well each adult earning as much as three or four pounds a week by the dawn of the 1950s. Living expenses were low and some pay was kept back until the conclusion of the season ensuring that each picker would, as my mother put it, last the distance and not skidaddle. Some farms paid a proportion of earnings each week in tokens which could be spent in local shops and public houses. This system was popular with the children because it was infinitely easier to coax a token or two out of a nearby adult than actual hard cash.
In 1931 George Orwell and a friend, disguised as tramps, spent a week hop picking at a farm near Maidstone and managed to earn a mere nine shillings with which he was not impressed. A year or two later Whitbread’s largest garden at Beltring was described as providing ideal conditions for their workers. Hot and cold water was available adjacent to the huts, the sanitary arrangements were excellent and drunkenness and swearing was reported to the manager who kept a Black Book which effectively controlled the several thousand pickers each year. Nobody wanted a transgression recorded and perhaps become in danger of expulsion from the gardens!
The idyllic annual holiday in the country never lost its popularity regardless of those critics like Orwell who, as one of my cousins sensibly pointed out, could probably afford an alternative such as a week in Brighton in a fancy hotel any time he fancied it. The death knell came with mechanisation. The first picking machine was used in Worcestershire before the war, and they became steadily more popular as time went on. Some farmers were opposed to them saying machine picked hops were more difficult to dry, settling in the kiln unevenly. However, in the final years of hand picking in the 1950s pay was two shillings and sixpence a bushel as opposed to machine picked fourpence a bushel. Economics eventually justified the change.
By the time I left Wombwell Hall School in 1956 Going Down Hopping had become a thing of the past a fact that was greatly lamented. When I was last in the Kent countryside in the hired Honda it seemed that the Hop Farms themselves had also vanished. Once back in New Zealand I learned that perhaps my search had not been diligent enough and that near Faversham the Clinch Family of Syndale Farm have been growing hops for three hundred years, one of only seven growers left in the South East. Even more astonishingly they still employ hand pickers, although a mere fifteen or twenty of them at each harvest and usually they are locals. Lucky Locals my mother would undoubtedly say!
Only recently I learned that there were a number of differing plant varieties. Ella was both floral and spicy and mostly used in lagers and pilsners. Helga was more delicate with subtle herbal overtones, best for ales. Topaz was the most adaptable with pronounced grassy flavours. Cascade was described as having fruity characteristics. I think I might favour Enigma, a relative newcomer which is described as having raspberry and red currant tones, somewhat tropical. I now wonder which would have most attracted those flocks of plundering birds as they gathered each dawn for the day’s raiding and looting.
Saturday, 22 February 2020
Tuesday, 4 February 2020
A CONSPIRACY OF RAVENS
Our local Lunatic Asylum was called Stone House and was situated at Stone quite close to Dartford. It was built in the eighteen sixties specifically for the insane of the area. A menacing looking place, designed in what was described as a Tudor Revival style by James Bunstone Bunning it was rumoured that a pair of Ravens had lived there from the day it had opened. Old Mrs Giles said a pair was called an Unkindness of Ravens and claimed to have caught a glimpse of them when passing on the bus. I didn’t altogether believe her because she had once declared she had seen Satan disguised as a Rag & Bone man one Sunday afternoon in Tooley Street. In any case at that stage I had no understanding of collective nouns and didn’t know what was meant by the mysterious Unkindness she spoke of. Quite apart from all that as the only Ravens I was familiar with lived in the Tower of London I was nevertheless quite fascinated. Once I stumbled upon the pages of Edgar Allan Poe I was even more entranced.
Whenever we passed Stone House either on the bus or on foot my mother would shudder and, showing a modicum of compassion which was unusual for her, comment that it must be dreadful to end up there and she pitied those poor souls locked up inside. When I mentioned the Ravens she said they were probably crows and went back to shuddering. Aunt Mag said it was well known that Ravens were dodgy buggers and could certainly give rabbits a run for their money and during the Great War they had even been known to hunt down cats and kill then eat them. I wondered if there was a Stone House cat and if so, did it realise that it might be in danger of becoming bird prey. I was certainly more concerned about the possible fate of the cat than the well-being of the patients. To be fair, back then, there wasn’t a great deal of patience or understanding from anyone for those afflicted with mental illness let alone people as young as me.
In the totally modern 2020s we have developed a much more relaxed attitude that could even be said to border on blasé. We are decidedly Cool about psychiatric illness, and keen to accept all manner of unusual behaviour that years ago would have seen us definitely concerned. I’m old enough to remember the horrified whispers that followed Poor Pauline Prentice around Northfleet High Street simply because she had a tendency to remove items of clothing in public, particularly if she had to wait too long in the queue at Ripley’s the greengrocer. Even Aunt Queenie called it Shameful and as most of the other aunts agreed, Queenie had little to boast about herself as far as shame was concerned.
In Coronation Year tolerance was thin on the ground for those who couldn’t pull themselves together after having a baby or who claimed to feel so despondent about life that they took to their beds on a semi-permanent basis. Just imagine if we all did that! On the other hand there were times when something called a Nervous Breakdown, which people do not suffer from these days, was called for such as when the young husband of one of my older cousins simply went to pieces when she left him. His despair and the reasons for it were certainly recognised but there was no rush to his side to offer assistance or to counsel him. In fact there was a tacit acceptance that it was better by far to stay well away until he came to his senses. His behaviour was seen as unacceptable and it was better by far to ignore it because even more scandalous was the fact that the marriage had crumbled in the first place. After all that money had been spent on it and her poor father working those extra shifts down at Vickers even with that bad back of his. It didn’t bear thinking about.
Because I was what my mother called Fanciful it did not take long for me to firmly associate all variants of mental disturbance with Ravens and to this day I still do, pairs of them hovering on the fringes of every radio discussion or every informative magazine article. Of course back in the mid1950s there were no radio or television talk programmes advising the afflicted on how best to cope, no self-help groups where pressing problems might be discussed, simply the glaringly obvious social ignominy that announced to the world that the sufferer did not have sufficient backbone to deal with adversity. As a group of average working class citizens we definitely lacked empathy and I clearly recall one neighbour making the comment to another that she didn’t have much time for recently bereaved Lil Shrimpton who couldn’t even behave herself at her own sister’s funeral, and wept like a baby. What a way to behave! And following Uncle Paddy’s unfortunate fatal accident celebrating the end of the war, within a month Aunt Martha was reprimanded by her sisters for still being tearful for surely to goodness weeping day and night wasn’t going to change things was it?
Perhaps the stiffness of those upper lips in times past had something to do with the fear of ending up in dark and hostile places of care like Stone House even though some of those structures distinguished themselves by harbouring exotic birds of myth and legend. We children called them Loony Bins and jeered at others who had relatives incarcerated within although I stopped doing so when I discovered that my paternal grandmother had been a long term patient at Barming Heath near Maidstone. My father didn’t call it Barming Heath but instead referred to it as Oakwood Hospital but he did so in a low voice. My mother only discussed it with folded arms and tightly pursed lips and said it was the need to go into such a place that had led to my poor father being brought up in a children’s home from the age of four, dear innocent little soul. He on the other hand always maintained that the children’s home hadn’t given him an entirely bad childhood because there were always eager philanthropists in the community only too willing to pay for riding lessons and visits to the pantomime and sometimes outings to the British Museum, particularly for those boys who were seen as being well behaved. He tried hard to ensure he always came into that category. But there was no convincing my mother who thought that flighty good-for-nothing older sister of his, Connie, should have taken care of him even if she did turn out to be merely a half-sister in the end. Blood’s thicker than water after all – or it should be. The fact that Connie was only fifteen years old herself cut no ice at all because such a thing would never have happened among the Constants where abandoning a child no matter how tenuous its ties were to the family was unheard of.
For my grandmother it was not Stone House that meandered across restless dreams complete with fluttering Corvids, but Colney Hatch, once the biggest institution in Europe, housing almost three thousand patients. As a three year old I was already aware that at times my behaviour was in danger of driving her there because she told me so and although I had no idea where this place of horrors might be I was mindful that I should tread more carefully to avoid her ending up there. Later I learned it was just North of London, but near a crossroads which was always a bad sign for some reason and had at one time housed the wife of Aleister Crowley and also someone suspected of being Jack the Ripper. These facts were moderately interesting but once I became a student at Wombwell Hall and had fallen in love with Miss K Smith, certainly not as noteworthy as her announcing that our very own Stone House had been home for years to the famous war poet, Ivor Gurney. I didn’t like to ask her what category of unacceptable behaviours had led to his incarceration. Had he wept too copiously at a sibling’s funeral perhaps? Did he have a habit of removing items of clothing if forced to wait too long in queues? Eventually I read somewhere that he had suffered from something called Manic Depression but I had little idea what that entailed and certainly didn’t believe whoever it was who told me that it could be easily cured with electric currents through the brain.
As we grew older and attitudes towards mental health issues underwent a change, being incarcerated in places like Stone House became less of a reality and although our mother still shivered theatrically when the place was mentioned, my aunts showed no interest whatsoever and my brother’s only interest revolved around whether or not the Ravens I had told him about were still there. Had Britain’s most legendary bird actually returned to the South of England? There was a time, he told me, just a couple of hundred years previously, when they had been widespread across the British Isles but persecution by the gamekeepers of the Victorian era had all but destroyed their population. Bernard, by this time was ten, and had become ever more obsessed with ornithology. He informed me that these members of the crow family were uniquely intelligent, fantastic mimics and he would so much like to own one. When I mentioned that keeping one might be quite unkind he said that they loved, more than anything else, interacting with people so they would welcome being owned. I have no idea whether that assertion had any truth in it.
It was to be many years before we spoke again of Ravens, then via a long distance telephone conversation in the days of fax machines and direct dialling around the globe but before mobile phones, texts and emails. Our mother had begun to exhibit signs of dementia and was to be Assessed in the very place that had previously held so many fears for her, the greatly dreaded Stone House. We discussed those fears and wondered if she still had any memory and knowledge of them. Had her qualms ever in fact been entirely rational? Would the idea of an assessment carried out in that terrible place fill her with even greater trepidation and anxiety? Would it perhaps remain just a half-worry from a time that no longer had any reality or substance in the context of life in the frenzied 1980s. Had the Asylum, the Loony Bin become merely an insubstantial fragment of times past like the Workhouse or the Village Stocks or being Transported to Australia?
We spoke for a long time and although I doodled a procession of Ravens across the notepad beside the telephone, we reached no conclusion. Eventually Bernard said he hoped the birds were still there, not just one or two but perhaps three or even four. A Conspiracy of Ravens he added after a short silence, certainly not an Unkindness.
Monday, 27 January 2020
A Need For Plumed Horses
Places of burial places are of more significance to some people than to others. There was a time when you could definitely rely on having a designated location where the dead could be visited if you were one who leaned towards significance. Some families did not take advantage of this sensible custom and ours was one of them; where the dead rested in eternal peace simply did not seem to concern us terribly much. Not that they were forgotten altogether of course. Very far from it. Whenever we passed Dartford Cemetery on the 480 bus on our way to Northfleet my grandmother would comment that her Poor Arthur lay within and after a second or two, as if pausing to remember salient facts might add that her first Arthur was there with him too. Usually these remarks fell into the air, and were greeted with silence but once I ventured to ask how old her Arthurs were when they died. Then she straightened her shoulders a bit and said it was beyond her to remember and they were just wee mites. As she had given birth to a multitude of children it might not have been altogether odd that her memory for those who perished as infants was not as sharp as it might have been. Decades later when he was already in his sixties my brother said that in his opinion she harboured a great deal of guilt for the one, or maybe two, that were the victims of her drunkenness and thus found dead in the marital bed. He reminded me with an air of satisfaction that it was that very fact that led to our grandfather, Edgar Constant, giving up alcohol altogether. Sadly Old Nan never exhibited the same moral fortitude as her husband and continued to drink throughout her life.
I wondered if it was in fact her own culpability that prevented her from pausing by the infant gravesides from time to time but Bernard disagreed and said it was because we simply were not a family that set much store by graves. When I became an adult I began to understand that burial places are far more than places to conveniently house the dead. Within them we are exposed to a precise and accurate reflection of social, economic and ethnic history and so much of this information can be missed when they are bypassed because they allow us to step so effortlessly into the past. They also contain a treasury of fascinating personal stories where the pain of past families losing children to illness and lovers to war is brought abruptly into focus. Life’s injustices are exposed and the inequalities between rich and poor are forever evident. And even for those totally uninterested in these aspects of social history they at least offer quiet places in which to walk or sit and read a book or eat a lunchtime sandwich. And they are certainly permanent wildlife centres where an extraordinary range of fauna can be seen.
For me as I grew to adulthood they became places where I established a closer relationship with those I would have so much liked to have known in life – in Brompton Cemetery Emmeline Pankhurst and Richard Tauber, in Highgate Karl Marx, Radclyffe Hall and George Eliot, in Chiswick William Hogarth and James Whistler and in Bunhill Fields John Bunyan, William Blake and Daniel Defoe. Without the restraining influence of my disinterested family I so rapidly became a graveyard devotee.
The post year wars was a time when the majority of people in the community had a more intimate relationship with relatives no longer living than they might these days so our family was very different in that we rarely went in for regularly visiting memorials to relatives. I came to accept our catalogue of dissimilarities and decided it was because we were more common and vulgar than the decent poor around us. I don’t recall ever being taken to the last resting place of the Constant infants neither to those of their four or five sisters who succumbed to Tuberculosis as young adults. It seemed that although no expense was spared when it came to funerals and it was rumoured that Old Nan insisted on splashing out on plumed horses on one occasion, extending the relationship with top up visits to the departed was not deemed necessary. In fact our grandmother could be quite matter of fact about family deaths and busied herself with what she saw as essential rituals such as burning all the combustible possessions of the deceased that had not been claimed by the living. Items of value such as pieces of jewellery were passed on but generally bed linen, clothing, etc was burned. My mother was of the opinion that all this burning had something to do with the passing on of infection when it was a young person who had died but had little to offer on the topic when it was pointed out that fires took place regardless of age. I knew her mind was on the greatly feared spectre of TB. I wondered a little uneasily if books would also have also been tossed onto the pyres because she was of the opinion that library books might hold the kernel of the disease within their pages but I never found out as few of my relatives were inclined towards reading.
Nevertheless I could not help but notice that other families did not seem to go in for ritual fires, more items were passed on and once the grieving period was over a distinctive relationship developed between the dead and their still living relatives, an association that nowadays barely seems to exist in quite the same way. York Road children regularly accompanied parents or grandparents to Northfleet cemetery and viewed the pursuit as an activity they largely looked forward to or at the very least did not mind too much. Molly from No 31 once said it was a pity that she and I did not seem to have any dead relatives and that she for one envied Rita Jenkins. Rita was invariably in a smart Sunday outfit complete with Dutch bonnet sporting appliqued felt flowers, when she and her grandmother made the weekly trip to visit her grandfather. In Molly’s opinion it was because she was an only child and everyone knew they became Spoilt Rotten.
When I ventured to ask if we could go visiting at the cemetery my mother shuddered and said she didn’t hold with it, that the dead should be left in peace and managed to make it sound as if she thought they were better left to their own devices and that intruding was ill mannered. However, I knew that she was in fact particularly alarmed by the idea of death, especially when contemplating her own and according to her sisters, who had always taken delight in taunting her, had always felt the same.
It was Mrs Bassant next door who finally said that if we liked to do so Molly and I could accompany her and her granddaughter Evelyn to visit her older sister, Poor Ada who had become a victim to the Great Flu that followed the Great War. Although neither of us felt particularly friendly towards Evelyn who was an unfortunately overweight girl and easily bullied we enthusiastically agreed. Evelyn was not quite as keen on the idea as her grandmother as it had not been long since the incident of the cricket bat that she had found on the Old Green and that I had deftly removed from her possession by falsely claiming that the finder was actually me. However as the Sunday of the visit approached and as I had been friendly towards her for several days in a row her fears abated and she seemed to almost be looking forward to the event. She importantly explained to both Molly and me that she would be in charge of getting the water for the flowers but that we could help and she would show us how it was done and where the best tap was. She warned us that we might have to queue. She also told us that Granny always took shortbread and sugared almonds along for a mid-afternoon snack and we would be able to share in the treat. We were most definitely looking forward to it.
On Sunday morning Evelyn and I were detailed to pick a large bunch of gladioli from the startling array planted by Mr Bassant in the back yard adjacent to the old Anderson shelter. These were to be placed on Poor Ada’s grave directly after Sunday dinner which Evelyn said was always a cold one on cemetery days to save time and energy. We walked to the cemetery, down the steep hill over the railway bridge and past Gemmel’s Farm and the little farm cottages on the right, then past the allotments on the left where Mr Bassant was a tenant and grew vegetables very successfully as he had done throughout the war years. Molly’s mother always maintained that we would never have got by without starving if it hadn’t been for Mr Bassant’s horticultural expertise and generosity. She didn’t say it quite like that but that is what she meant because his prize marrows were astonishing and lasted for days.
Evelyn was wearing a smart polka dot dress with a matching sunhat that had been made for her recent birthday. Molly and I were especially nice to her and in fact felt quite shabby as we walked beside her and Molly even told her that she wasn’t nearly as fat as some people said she was; she was just a little on the stout side. Evelyn said thank you and in any case she wasn’t really fat because it was a glandular problem.
When we got to the cemetery it was almost but not quite a veritable hive of activity. Along each row of graves women of mostly grandmotherly age knelt, some on cushions like the ones you find in church, and dug with miniature tools or pulled up weeds. Some were accompanied by men who seemed to be quite uncharacteristically, doing their bidding and many had children of various ages with them who seemed to be doing the same. It was the children who staggered back and forth from the taps set around the building in the central area that looked just a little like a fairy tale cottage but wasn’t because Evelyn said it was a Records Office. The children each with a watering can queued patiently at the taps for their quota of water, the boys always overfilling their cans. There was a great deal of noise but very little quarreling except from pre-schoolers arguing that there were not too young to help. Evelyn meticulously filled the first can very nearly to the brim and Molly had to help her carry it back to pour on Poor Ada. Then she generously said it was my turn so I smiled and thanked her politely and even for a fleeting moment thought of returning the cricket bat to her.
As they worked, these industrious visitors conversed effortlessly with each other, directing a comment or two to the dead and a great many to the child helpers. Mrs. Giles whose house was between ours and Molly’s said she only wished she had a willing kiddy to help her and she certainly would have had by now if any of her girls had married which none of them had. Molly whispered to me that it was unclear which girl now lay peacefully at her feet but she had a feeling it had been the dreaded TB that had made off with her. Old Mrs Mannering from Tooley Street arrived later than us, hurrying and wheezing as she did so, complaining that her Sidney always wanted a roast of a Sunday, cemetery or no cemetery. Mrs Bassant said she should simply provide something cold on visiting days and let him get on with it but Mrs Mannering said that would simply cause him to get the Hump and he got the Hump easily enough as it was.
When the gladioli had been arranged in their glass pot and all the weeds on Poor Ada’s grave had been deftly removed we three girls were given shortbread and sugared almonds to share just as Evelyn had promised. We sat on the steps of the fairy tale cottage to eat them and then helped the biggest boys to stack the watering cans tidily against what Evelyn told us was the North wall. It had been a most satisfactory outing and when we got home I immediately broached the subject of a Sunday in the cemetery once again with my mother but she was unresponsive and said a lot of time could be wasted in such places and she had better things to do which wasn’t what I wanted to hear at all.
Little more than a year later my father’s sudden death was to bring us face to face with the very place she had so determinedly tried to avoid. For several months we at last became part of that group of weekend visitors I had so desired to join and my brother and I were able to carry cans of water back and forth from the taps and arrange flowers in a jar just as I had hoped and I was even able to talk importantly about the visits at school. The gloss seemed to wear off remarkably rapidly however and perhaps that was because community attitudes were changing fast and a dedication to the dead was losing its attraction in our corner of North Kent. The tide was definitely turning for routine grave visiting and over the following years the rows of memorial plots that had once been regularly tended with such dedication, became unkempt and uncared for. The local population now emulated those sentiments that had long been present in the Constant Family and no longer felt it necessary to commune so frequently with those who had passed. It was as if a tsunami of Constant rejection for reverence had now spilled out into the lives of ordinary and more decent people, those who had never had to live in fear of being called Diddicais. Along with the trend a whole raft of human experience was being discarded and those family members who no longer lived among us lost a great deal of the importance they had once had in our lives. They were spoken of less frequently and only emerged in old photographs in dusty albums when someone might point out that Little Vera had her Great Aunt Edna’s eyes.
Long decades later my brother told me that when he was a child he had often wondered why our father’s grave seemed to mean so little to us and had decided that the lack of attention to it was ruled by an ingrown acceptance of tribal neglect exacerbated by poverty. That might of course have been true. Bernard had spent a great deal of time in Northfleet Cemetery when he was growing up simply because he said it was an excellent place to see birds and owls in particular. He had glimpsed not only Tawny Owls but once a Barn Owl not to mention the less frequently seen Little Owl, just six inches high, yellow eyed with an immediately recognisable bobbing head. In later years groups of Feral Parakeets made these now neglected environs their home and caused a flurry of excitement among local ornithologists.
By then, however, we had both well and truly emerged from our poverty stricken childhood and I had married a New Zealand doctor to my mother’s great satisfaction and my brother was on the brink of becoming extremely rich. Our father’s grave had by the year 2000 long welcomed our mother and lay as abandoned and uncared for as ever it threatened to be back in 1953. When Bernard died himself in April 2016 quite strangely his wife although she had no Constant blood whatsoever, decided not to go in for either a funeral or a grave. This bizarre decision ricocheted through family and friends who all knew he would have expected and very much liked to have had the former. Briefly I could even see why it was that when she could afford them plumed horses had been important to Old Nan. A funeral procession like those that are still occasionally seen in the East End of London when an infamous felon or a notable Romany takes his leave from the community would have had enormous appeal to Bernard as a valediction of his significance to those he loved and loved him but it was not to be. He would not have set nearly as much store by a grave though. There was a long line of Constants in him after all.
I wondered if it was in fact her own culpability that prevented her from pausing by the infant gravesides from time to time but Bernard disagreed and said it was because we simply were not a family that set much store by graves. When I became an adult I began to understand that burial places are far more than places to conveniently house the dead. Within them we are exposed to a precise and accurate reflection of social, economic and ethnic history and so much of this information can be missed when they are bypassed because they allow us to step so effortlessly into the past. They also contain a treasury of fascinating personal stories where the pain of past families losing children to illness and lovers to war is brought abruptly into focus. Life’s injustices are exposed and the inequalities between rich and poor are forever evident. And even for those totally uninterested in these aspects of social history they at least offer quiet places in which to walk or sit and read a book or eat a lunchtime sandwich. And they are certainly permanent wildlife centres where an extraordinary range of fauna can be seen.
For me as I grew to adulthood they became places where I established a closer relationship with those I would have so much liked to have known in life – in Brompton Cemetery Emmeline Pankhurst and Richard Tauber, in Highgate Karl Marx, Radclyffe Hall and George Eliot, in Chiswick William Hogarth and James Whistler and in Bunhill Fields John Bunyan, William Blake and Daniel Defoe. Without the restraining influence of my disinterested family I so rapidly became a graveyard devotee.
The post year wars was a time when the majority of people in the community had a more intimate relationship with relatives no longer living than they might these days so our family was very different in that we rarely went in for regularly visiting memorials to relatives. I came to accept our catalogue of dissimilarities and decided it was because we were more common and vulgar than the decent poor around us. I don’t recall ever being taken to the last resting place of the Constant infants neither to those of their four or five sisters who succumbed to Tuberculosis as young adults. It seemed that although no expense was spared when it came to funerals and it was rumoured that Old Nan insisted on splashing out on plumed horses on one occasion, extending the relationship with top up visits to the departed was not deemed necessary. In fact our grandmother could be quite matter of fact about family deaths and busied herself with what she saw as essential rituals such as burning all the combustible possessions of the deceased that had not been claimed by the living. Items of value such as pieces of jewellery were passed on but generally bed linen, clothing, etc was burned. My mother was of the opinion that all this burning had something to do with the passing on of infection when it was a young person who had died but had little to offer on the topic when it was pointed out that fires took place regardless of age. I knew her mind was on the greatly feared spectre of TB. I wondered a little uneasily if books would also have also been tossed onto the pyres because she was of the opinion that library books might hold the kernel of the disease within their pages but I never found out as few of my relatives were inclined towards reading.
Nevertheless I could not help but notice that other families did not seem to go in for ritual fires, more items were passed on and once the grieving period was over a distinctive relationship developed between the dead and their still living relatives, an association that nowadays barely seems to exist in quite the same way. York Road children regularly accompanied parents or grandparents to Northfleet cemetery and viewed the pursuit as an activity they largely looked forward to or at the very least did not mind too much. Molly from No 31 once said it was a pity that she and I did not seem to have any dead relatives and that she for one envied Rita Jenkins. Rita was invariably in a smart Sunday outfit complete with Dutch bonnet sporting appliqued felt flowers, when she and her grandmother made the weekly trip to visit her grandfather. In Molly’s opinion it was because she was an only child and everyone knew they became Spoilt Rotten.
When I ventured to ask if we could go visiting at the cemetery my mother shuddered and said she didn’t hold with it, that the dead should be left in peace and managed to make it sound as if she thought they were better left to their own devices and that intruding was ill mannered. However, I knew that she was in fact particularly alarmed by the idea of death, especially when contemplating her own and according to her sisters, who had always taken delight in taunting her, had always felt the same.
It was Mrs Bassant next door who finally said that if we liked to do so Molly and I could accompany her and her granddaughter Evelyn to visit her older sister, Poor Ada who had become a victim to the Great Flu that followed the Great War. Although neither of us felt particularly friendly towards Evelyn who was an unfortunately overweight girl and easily bullied we enthusiastically agreed. Evelyn was not quite as keen on the idea as her grandmother as it had not been long since the incident of the cricket bat that she had found on the Old Green and that I had deftly removed from her possession by falsely claiming that the finder was actually me. However as the Sunday of the visit approached and as I had been friendly towards her for several days in a row her fears abated and she seemed to almost be looking forward to the event. She importantly explained to both Molly and me that she would be in charge of getting the water for the flowers but that we could help and she would show us how it was done and where the best tap was. She warned us that we might have to queue. She also told us that Granny always took shortbread and sugared almonds along for a mid-afternoon snack and we would be able to share in the treat. We were most definitely looking forward to it.
On Sunday morning Evelyn and I were detailed to pick a large bunch of gladioli from the startling array planted by Mr Bassant in the back yard adjacent to the old Anderson shelter. These were to be placed on Poor Ada’s grave directly after Sunday dinner which Evelyn said was always a cold one on cemetery days to save time and energy. We walked to the cemetery, down the steep hill over the railway bridge and past Gemmel’s Farm and the little farm cottages on the right, then past the allotments on the left where Mr Bassant was a tenant and grew vegetables very successfully as he had done throughout the war years. Molly’s mother always maintained that we would never have got by without starving if it hadn’t been for Mr Bassant’s horticultural expertise and generosity. She didn’t say it quite like that but that is what she meant because his prize marrows were astonishing and lasted for days.
Evelyn was wearing a smart polka dot dress with a matching sunhat that had been made for her recent birthday. Molly and I were especially nice to her and in fact felt quite shabby as we walked beside her and Molly even told her that she wasn’t nearly as fat as some people said she was; she was just a little on the stout side. Evelyn said thank you and in any case she wasn’t really fat because it was a glandular problem.
When we got to the cemetery it was almost but not quite a veritable hive of activity. Along each row of graves women of mostly grandmotherly age knelt, some on cushions like the ones you find in church, and dug with miniature tools or pulled up weeds. Some were accompanied by men who seemed to be quite uncharacteristically, doing their bidding and many had children of various ages with them who seemed to be doing the same. It was the children who staggered back and forth from the taps set around the building in the central area that looked just a little like a fairy tale cottage but wasn’t because Evelyn said it was a Records Office. The children each with a watering can queued patiently at the taps for their quota of water, the boys always overfilling their cans. There was a great deal of noise but very little quarreling except from pre-schoolers arguing that there were not too young to help. Evelyn meticulously filled the first can very nearly to the brim and Molly had to help her carry it back to pour on Poor Ada. Then she generously said it was my turn so I smiled and thanked her politely and even for a fleeting moment thought of returning the cricket bat to her.
As they worked, these industrious visitors conversed effortlessly with each other, directing a comment or two to the dead and a great many to the child helpers. Mrs. Giles whose house was between ours and Molly’s said she only wished she had a willing kiddy to help her and she certainly would have had by now if any of her girls had married which none of them had. Molly whispered to me that it was unclear which girl now lay peacefully at her feet but she had a feeling it had been the dreaded TB that had made off with her. Old Mrs Mannering from Tooley Street arrived later than us, hurrying and wheezing as she did so, complaining that her Sidney always wanted a roast of a Sunday, cemetery or no cemetery. Mrs Bassant said she should simply provide something cold on visiting days and let him get on with it but Mrs Mannering said that would simply cause him to get the Hump and he got the Hump easily enough as it was.
When the gladioli had been arranged in their glass pot and all the weeds on Poor Ada’s grave had been deftly removed we three girls were given shortbread and sugared almonds to share just as Evelyn had promised. We sat on the steps of the fairy tale cottage to eat them and then helped the biggest boys to stack the watering cans tidily against what Evelyn told us was the North wall. It had been a most satisfactory outing and when we got home I immediately broached the subject of a Sunday in the cemetery once again with my mother but she was unresponsive and said a lot of time could be wasted in such places and she had better things to do which wasn’t what I wanted to hear at all.
Little more than a year later my father’s sudden death was to bring us face to face with the very place she had so determinedly tried to avoid. For several months we at last became part of that group of weekend visitors I had so desired to join and my brother and I were able to carry cans of water back and forth from the taps and arrange flowers in a jar just as I had hoped and I was even able to talk importantly about the visits at school. The gloss seemed to wear off remarkably rapidly however and perhaps that was because community attitudes were changing fast and a dedication to the dead was losing its attraction in our corner of North Kent. The tide was definitely turning for routine grave visiting and over the following years the rows of memorial plots that had once been regularly tended with such dedication, became unkempt and uncared for. The local population now emulated those sentiments that had long been present in the Constant Family and no longer felt it necessary to commune so frequently with those who had passed. It was as if a tsunami of Constant rejection for reverence had now spilled out into the lives of ordinary and more decent people, those who had never had to live in fear of being called Diddicais. Along with the trend a whole raft of human experience was being discarded and those family members who no longer lived among us lost a great deal of the importance they had once had in our lives. They were spoken of less frequently and only emerged in old photographs in dusty albums when someone might point out that Little Vera had her Great Aunt Edna’s eyes.
Long decades later my brother told me that when he was a child he had often wondered why our father’s grave seemed to mean so little to us and had decided that the lack of attention to it was ruled by an ingrown acceptance of tribal neglect exacerbated by poverty. That might of course have been true. Bernard had spent a great deal of time in Northfleet Cemetery when he was growing up simply because he said it was an excellent place to see birds and owls in particular. He had glimpsed not only Tawny Owls but once a Barn Owl not to mention the less frequently seen Little Owl, just six inches high, yellow eyed with an immediately recognisable bobbing head. In later years groups of Feral Parakeets made these now neglected environs their home and caused a flurry of excitement among local ornithologists.
By then, however, we had both well and truly emerged from our poverty stricken childhood and I had married a New Zealand doctor to my mother’s great satisfaction and my brother was on the brink of becoming extremely rich. Our father’s grave had by the year 2000 long welcomed our mother and lay as abandoned and uncared for as ever it threatened to be back in 1953. When Bernard died himself in April 2016 quite strangely his wife although she had no Constant blood whatsoever, decided not to go in for either a funeral or a grave. This bizarre decision ricocheted through family and friends who all knew he would have expected and very much liked to have had the former. Briefly I could even see why it was that when she could afford them plumed horses had been important to Old Nan. A funeral procession like those that are still occasionally seen in the East End of London when an infamous felon or a notable Romany takes his leave from the community would have had enormous appeal to Bernard as a valediction of his significance to those he loved and loved him but it was not to be. He would not have set nearly as much store by a grave though. There was a long line of Constants in him after all.
Friday, 24 January 2020
The Ending
It would be safe to say that we were not overly informed regarding North Kent Writers in the schools of Northfleet and Gravesend, with of course the notable exception of Mr Charles Dickens, of whom the local members of the teaching profession seemed inordinately fond. As a group they were perhaps not particularly adventurous when recommending reading matter and from the age of eleven or twelve we progressed somewhat conventionally through those Dickens volumes thought to be Suitable to the Bronte sisters and Jane Austin followed by John Buchan as we reached the great age of fourteen. None of this was particularly exciting even for those of us who definitely leaned towards literary pursuits but on the other hand our particular corner of the teaching profession would not have considered trying to persuade us that Enid Blyton and Noel Streatfield were particularly unacceptable. To put this attitude into better perspective this was back in the days when our younger siblings were still allowed to be fond of Big Ears & Noddy and even Little Black Sambo and our Grandmas still knitted gollwogs along with bootees for new babies.
I spent two years at the Girls’Secondary Modern in Colyer Road and very few memories remain with me except how much I hated mathematics and team games. I remember little about the teachers as individuals though we must have had an English teacher because it was there that our year group was introduced to Jane Eyre. I had already devoured Wuthering Heights and fallen deeply in love with Heathcliff so I was not averse to a better acquaintance with his creator. I think I had been great influenced by the film version, loved by my mother who definitely regarded the literary epic as `the book of the film’. For years I associated Heathcliff with Laurence Olivier and Cathy with Merle Oberon and the only believable Ellen Dean for me was Flora Robson.
When I went on to Wombwell Hall my most preferred subject remained English and what delights were in store with the wonderful Miss K Smith as the prominent English teacher in of memory. It was she who spoke passionately of John Steinbeck and thought we might read The Grapes of Wrath and even more enthusiastically of George Orwell and The Road to Wigan Pier. She was perhaps mindful of the poverty that existed still in the lives of her students in those post war years. None of us were keen to tackle Orwell but a little group embarked upon Steinbeck and even stuck with him for a while. It might have been that ever present poverty that confined us as a group of working class teenagers largely to escapist literature. A sizeable number of us had become seriously addicted to love stories of the Mills & Boon variety which were exchanged between devotees rapidly and rapaciously. Invariably the tales featured teenage girls not much older than ourselves, being wickedly Led Astray and forfeiting our virginity but still Good Girls at heart and for whom there was a predictable happy ending complete with handsome and bronzed hero. Jill Butler’s mother who had herself been a teenage bride thus awarding her daughters with an enviably slender, youthful parent, disapproved of such reading and so Jill was forbidden to read them. I was never as enthusiastic about them as my classmates but fortunately for me by that time my own mother was in awe of my reading determination and ability, did not prohibit anything at all and therefore the literary world was my oyster. Considering that fact I did not make a particularly good job of taking advantage of the situation and was inclined to revert to favourite authors of my earlier childhood as comfort reading whenever I felt under stress. I was also particularly attracted to poetry and quite delighted when Miss K Smith spent one Spring term examining the major poets of the First World War. It was then I fell in love with Siegfried Sassoon and a little later with Wilfred Owen.
It was in the very first English class of my very last term of Wombwell Hall that the delightful Miss Smith launched the idea of a School Magazine and said that those of us who had a mind to do so might write a contribution. As the class poetry aficionados Julia Hill, Valerie Goldsack and I might even consider writing a suitable verse. And that was how I came to write my very first poem.
The Ending
The Hollow In the forest is lonely now and bare. Now nothing can recapture the joy I once found there.
The joy of scaling hornbeams, of eeling in the fen are only two of many I’ll never know again.
Even the forest creatures have now forgotten me. They who were my only friends when all was wild and free.
And as along the footpaths my wearying footsteps trend, a mocking voice reminds me – all pleasures have their end.
It should be pointed out that I would not have recognised a Hornbeam had I come across one and it was clear that I harboured some confusion regarding where it would be most likely to happen upon a fen. Nevertheless I was reasonably satisfied with this poetic effort and handed it in promptly before forgetting about it.
I said goodbye to Wombwell Hall, eager to become a wage earner, before the magazine emerged and gave the project no more thought as life as a London commuter took over. It came as a surprise when someone sent me a copy of the magazine some months later and I was delighted to see my name In Print for the very first time. It was then that I realised the verse was not about the Kentish woodland flora and fauna at all. It was more about saying goodbye to childhood.
I spent two years at the Girls’Secondary Modern in Colyer Road and very few memories remain with me except how much I hated mathematics and team games. I remember little about the teachers as individuals though we must have had an English teacher because it was there that our year group was introduced to Jane Eyre. I had already devoured Wuthering Heights and fallen deeply in love with Heathcliff so I was not averse to a better acquaintance with his creator. I think I had been great influenced by the film version, loved by my mother who definitely regarded the literary epic as `the book of the film’. For years I associated Heathcliff with Laurence Olivier and Cathy with Merle Oberon and the only believable Ellen Dean for me was Flora Robson.
When I went on to Wombwell Hall my most preferred subject remained English and what delights were in store with the wonderful Miss K Smith as the prominent English teacher in of memory. It was she who spoke passionately of John Steinbeck and thought we might read The Grapes of Wrath and even more enthusiastically of George Orwell and The Road to Wigan Pier. She was perhaps mindful of the poverty that existed still in the lives of her students in those post war years. None of us were keen to tackle Orwell but a little group embarked upon Steinbeck and even stuck with him for a while. It might have been that ever present poverty that confined us as a group of working class teenagers largely to escapist literature. A sizeable number of us had become seriously addicted to love stories of the Mills & Boon variety which were exchanged between devotees rapidly and rapaciously. Invariably the tales featured teenage girls not much older than ourselves, being wickedly Led Astray and forfeiting our virginity but still Good Girls at heart and for whom there was a predictable happy ending complete with handsome and bronzed hero. Jill Butler’s mother who had herself been a teenage bride thus awarding her daughters with an enviably slender, youthful parent, disapproved of such reading and so Jill was forbidden to read them. I was never as enthusiastic about them as my classmates but fortunately for me by that time my own mother was in awe of my reading determination and ability, did not prohibit anything at all and therefore the literary world was my oyster. Considering that fact I did not make a particularly good job of taking advantage of the situation and was inclined to revert to favourite authors of my earlier childhood as comfort reading whenever I felt under stress. I was also particularly attracted to poetry and quite delighted when Miss K Smith spent one Spring term examining the major poets of the First World War. It was then I fell in love with Siegfried Sassoon and a little later with Wilfred Owen.
It was in the very first English class of my very last term of Wombwell Hall that the delightful Miss Smith launched the idea of a School Magazine and said that those of us who had a mind to do so might write a contribution. As the class poetry aficionados Julia Hill, Valerie Goldsack and I might even consider writing a suitable verse. And that was how I came to write my very first poem.
The Ending
The Hollow In the forest is lonely now and bare. Now nothing can recapture the joy I once found there.
The joy of scaling hornbeams, of eeling in the fen are only two of many I’ll never know again.
Even the forest creatures have now forgotten me. They who were my only friends when all was wild and free.
And as along the footpaths my wearying footsteps trend, a mocking voice reminds me – all pleasures have their end.
It should be pointed out that I would not have recognised a Hornbeam had I come across one and it was clear that I harboured some confusion regarding where it would be most likely to happen upon a fen. Nevertheless I was reasonably satisfied with this poetic effort and handed it in promptly before forgetting about it.
I said goodbye to Wombwell Hall, eager to become a wage earner, before the magazine emerged and gave the project no more thought as life as a London commuter took over. It came as a surprise when someone sent me a copy of the magazine some months later and I was delighted to see my name In Print for the very first time. It was then that I realised the verse was not about the Kentish woodland flora and fauna at all. It was more about saying goodbye to childhood.
Saturday, 18 January 2020
A Dearth of Gravesend Writers
It seems that these days I spend a great deal of time searching for books that either feature the area where I grew up or, better still, are by local writers. Unhappily not a great many of those with a creative bent and hailing from the environs of Gravesend are inclined to writing. What is more infuriating, a number of promising volumes with Gravesend in their titles seem to emerge from a totally alien place somewhere in suburban New York. And to add insult to injury our own town suffers somewhat from the huge success of the inspired and prolific Charles Dickens. His name is the very first that is likely to emerge from a determined search.
In the 1950s all local schools seemed intent upon fully informing their students about the life and work of our best known home grown writer. This wasn’t altogether surprising as the redoubtable Mr Dickens’ fame had certainly spread further by far than the area in which he had been born and raised and once we fully realised that, most of us could see the logic in spending time on him. Despite all that, Dickens was hard work for nine and ten year olds, even those who regularly read for entertainment as some of us did in those days before ipads and mobile phones. We could manage the Christmas stories well enough and even a few chapters featuring children of similar age suffering greater hardship than ourselves but a great deal of Dickens’ literary genius was wasted on us.
We knew absolutely nothing of Joseph Conrad who, by stretching a point or two, could also be considered a Local Writer. I am reliably informed that he wrote most of `Heart of Darkness’ whilst living in Gravesend and in fact the book begins there. Conrad was not a true local lad of course and apparently hailed from The Ukraine which was still a place most of us had never heard of.
By the time we were eleven or twelve we had even heard of Chaucer and knew he was responsible for `The Canterbury Tales’ and that the band of colourful pilgrims he spoke of must have at least brushed past our riverside town on their journey. We couldn’t have claimed him as a Local, however. For one thing he came from London and his focus town of Canterbury was about forty miles distant and a very tedious bus ride. But lack of Gravesend literature simply means casting the net a little wider.
When the overall dearth of North Kent writing is considered you can imagine the excitement generated in the last day or two when I stumbled across Brian Dillon’s `The Great Explosion’ telling the story of the catastrophe that ended the lives of over a hundred people in the early years of the twentieth century. Sinead discovered it in her local Islington library in North London. A book, set on the North Kent Marshes and practically on our doorstep. Dillon is a brilliant story teller and recreates the disaster in excruciatingly compelling detail. And as a lover of the area he evokes with clarity the remarkable landscape. To read it brings back childhood memories with a jolt so unexpected that the marshland smells are once again astonishingly real.
This ancient marshland is a special place and a childhood acquaintance with it leaves an impression that is never erased. Writer friend Jennifer Barraclough, now living in Auckland, whose own childhood was spent in Gravesend, fervently agrees. Her 2019 novel `You Yet Shall Die’ is set in the area and family secrets are revealed against a background all Gravesenders would immediately recognise and respond to. Jennifer and I are in complete agreement that considering the compelling allure of the area it is surprising that it does not attract more enduring links with literature. Perhaps she and I simply have to concentrate on writing more ourselves!
In the 1950s all local schools seemed intent upon fully informing their students about the life and work of our best known home grown writer. This wasn’t altogether surprising as the redoubtable Mr Dickens’ fame had certainly spread further by far than the area in which he had been born and raised and once we fully realised that, most of us could see the logic in spending time on him. Despite all that, Dickens was hard work for nine and ten year olds, even those who regularly read for entertainment as some of us did in those days before ipads and mobile phones. We could manage the Christmas stories well enough and even a few chapters featuring children of similar age suffering greater hardship than ourselves but a great deal of Dickens’ literary genius was wasted on us.
We knew absolutely nothing of Joseph Conrad who, by stretching a point or two, could also be considered a Local Writer. I am reliably informed that he wrote most of `Heart of Darkness’ whilst living in Gravesend and in fact the book begins there. Conrad was not a true local lad of course and apparently hailed from The Ukraine which was still a place most of us had never heard of.
By the time we were eleven or twelve we had even heard of Chaucer and knew he was responsible for `The Canterbury Tales’ and that the band of colourful pilgrims he spoke of must have at least brushed past our riverside town on their journey. We couldn’t have claimed him as a Local, however. For one thing he came from London and his focus town of Canterbury was about forty miles distant and a very tedious bus ride. But lack of Gravesend literature simply means casting the net a little wider.
When the overall dearth of North Kent writing is considered you can imagine the excitement generated in the last day or two when I stumbled across Brian Dillon’s `The Great Explosion’ telling the story of the catastrophe that ended the lives of over a hundred people in the early years of the twentieth century. Sinead discovered it in her local Islington library in North London. A book, set on the North Kent Marshes and practically on our doorstep. Dillon is a brilliant story teller and recreates the disaster in excruciatingly compelling detail. And as a lover of the area he evokes with clarity the remarkable landscape. To read it brings back childhood memories with a jolt so unexpected that the marshland smells are once again astonishingly real.
This ancient marshland is a special place and a childhood acquaintance with it leaves an impression that is never erased. Writer friend Jennifer Barraclough, now living in Auckland, whose own childhood was spent in Gravesend, fervently agrees. Her 2019 novel `You Yet Shall Die’ is set in the area and family secrets are revealed against a background all Gravesenders would immediately recognise and respond to. Jennifer and I are in complete agreement that considering the compelling allure of the area it is surprising that it does not attract more enduring links with literature. Perhaps she and I simply have to concentrate on writing more ourselves!
Saturday, 21 December 2019
The Long Shadow of Mr Scrooge
Maria said that when she considered Christmases Past she was usually plunged into family times she would rather forget – grand gala meals in frankly forgettable restaurants where the bill invariably fell to her long suffering husband. That was because he had his own small export business and was seen as being better off than the rest of them, not to mention being the Senior family member. Her brothers and their partners were all almost a decade younger and being a decade younger let you off the hook for a great many things – at least that was Maria’s opinion.
I had to admit she had something there, having regularly been poised and hopeful in downmarket Pizza Palaces, vainly optimistic that the cousin with the BMW parked outside would for once think of paying the bill or even a portion of it. He never did of course, not even when it was quite evident that payment was going to fall to the same long suffering one who had shelled out on several previous festive occasions. Judith says that maybe the BMW owner had quite forgotten who paid last year and the year before. But these are facts most unlikely to have been lost to memory no matter how vague the perpetual offenders might seem to be.
In fact such money conscious miscreants are usually quick to calculate and although unlikely to fork out for an actual meal might occasionally score points within a group by leaping to their feet suddenly anxious to foot the bill for coffee, over-riding everyone else in tones that are ever loud and clear - `this one’s on me!’. And that’s them off the hook for the next five years!
But as Tom says, some people are simply more innately generous than others whether they are rich or poor. My brother was one such and throughout his life, through times of hardship and wealth, always wanting to be the bill payer at any celebratory event, firmly brushing aside the one or two half-hearted protests. In his latter years it hardly mattered because he could definitely afford to do so. Even-so he once mentioned to me the names of one or two who had repeatedly over years taken care to avoid paying even for lime and soda water if it was possible to do so.
We agreed that meanness is a most unlikeable trait. It’s even more unpleasant when it emerges in those closest to you. Maria says it's harder to bear at Christmastime and maybe it's something to do with the long shadow of Mr Scrooge.
I had to admit she had something there, having regularly been poised and hopeful in downmarket Pizza Palaces, vainly optimistic that the cousin with the BMW parked outside would for once think of paying the bill or even a portion of it. He never did of course, not even when it was quite evident that payment was going to fall to the same long suffering one who had shelled out on several previous festive occasions. Judith says that maybe the BMW owner had quite forgotten who paid last year and the year before. But these are facts most unlikely to have been lost to memory no matter how vague the perpetual offenders might seem to be.
In fact such money conscious miscreants are usually quick to calculate and although unlikely to fork out for an actual meal might occasionally score points within a group by leaping to their feet suddenly anxious to foot the bill for coffee, over-riding everyone else in tones that are ever loud and clear - `this one’s on me!’. And that’s them off the hook for the next five years!
But as Tom says, some people are simply more innately generous than others whether they are rich or poor. My brother was one such and throughout his life, through times of hardship and wealth, always wanting to be the bill payer at any celebratory event, firmly brushing aside the one or two half-hearted protests. In his latter years it hardly mattered because he could definitely afford to do so. Even-so he once mentioned to me the names of one or two who had repeatedly over years taken care to avoid paying even for lime and soda water if it was possible to do so.
We agreed that meanness is a most unlikeable trait. It’s even more unpleasant when it emerges in those closest to you. Maria says it's harder to bear at Christmastime and maybe it's something to do with the long shadow of Mr Scrooge.
Friday, 13 December 2019
The Threshold of Forgiveness
We were discussing the pain caused when those who once were Loved Ones let you down, who studiously ignore the very people who should by rights count as Nearest & Dearest for over a decade, when they fail to acknowledge important dates and even ignore a sick and ageing parent for months on end. Sonya said that abandonment is invariably distressing, most especially when it emanates from a much loved son or daughter. Maria was more in agreement with me and felt that with the passing of time the anguish diminishes and then she added that so indeed did the anger. But there I disagreed with her.
Tom was more pragmatic and his view encompassed forgiveness but then Tom is a very Good Person and forgiveness comes easily to him. He thought that in the end a mother’s love would always prevail and reminded us that even the Yorkshire Ripper’s mother loved him when the rest of the world was filled with odium because that’s the way mothers are emotionally configured. Sonya thought he might be right. Later as we sipped gin and tonics together I told her that some of us were simply not built that way. She thought I should work on my forgiveness threshold but I quite like the level at which it is currently pitched.
Tom was more pragmatic and his view encompassed forgiveness but then Tom is a very Good Person and forgiveness comes easily to him. He thought that in the end a mother’s love would always prevail and reminded us that even the Yorkshire Ripper’s mother loved him when the rest of the world was filled with odium because that’s the way mothers are emotionally configured. Sonya thought he might be right. Later as we sipped gin and tonics together I told her that some of us were simply not built that way. She thought I should work on my forgiveness threshold but I quite like the level at which it is currently pitched.
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