As Posh As Possible

There was absolutely no doubt that from the time I was three or four years old I was determined to sound as posh as was humanly possible. I now lie the blame for this uncommon youthful obsession entirely at the feet of the BBC and the fact that in the first part of the 1940s my mother spent a great deal of time listening to what was then called the Wireless and urging me to shush whilst she did so. Bored three year olds are not especially good at observing prolonged periods of silence, at least I wasn’t. The soothing tones of John Snagge and Alvar Liddell rapidly became as reassuring as the rather less attractive timbre of my closest relatives and if it had been possible I would have followed Snagge wherever he chose to lead me. Sadly he was totally unaware of my existence.

I did make some attempt to tone down what I fondly imagined was my totally authentic newfound Poshness when in conversation with close family and neighbours from the lower part of York Road but these attempts were not always consistent. When I started school and became dazzled by what seemed to me to be a veritable swathe of upper class teaching staff I reserved my very finest BBC accent for them and relaxed considerably with my fellow pupils. This resulted in the staff deciding that I was quite clearly an adopted child as it was obvious I had not been brought up by the woman who claimed to be my mother, and the children avoiding me as much as possible. My observant and much hated cousin George from the Waterdales Hendys told me I was a Big Head and his sister Connie said that wasn’t really true – I was just a bit Snooty. Their mother, Aunt Lou, an anxious woman on account of her many children advised that her formidable husband, Uncle Walter, had commented more than once that I was becoming High and Mighty and you had to wonder how my poor father who would soon return from fighting a war would think of that. We were all very much in awe of Uncle Walter and so this caused my mother to look at me nervously and later tell me to try to speak properly like everybody else. The last thing I intended was to sound like everybody else and so I was quite elated at my vocal success. Becoming Posh had turned out to be remarkably painless!

Once I learned to read and was able to delve into the lives of Enid Blyton’s unashamedly middle class families simply being possessed of acceptable and perhaps even correct vowel sounds was not good enough. I wanted to be the sort of person who exclaimed -Rather! on a regular basis and had Wizard Summer Hols. Of course the downside of all this role-play though theoretically harmless was that my St Botolph’s classmates maintained their distance. I didn’t mind too much as the urge to use words like Spiffing more than compensated. Molly from number 31 York Road remained my friend throughout these rather troubled times and simply told me in a very adult manner that Enid Blyton didn’t suit everybody but it was clear she was helping me to make a rod for my own back.

With the passage of time the desire to sound Posh got worse rather than better and I longed to be the kind of young person who referred to situations as either Jolly Good or Beastly. I dreamed of conversations that would include me being able to say someone was a Frightful Bore or that an event was Simply Thrilling. I desperately desired to attract a boyfriend who would describe me as Rather Ravishing or tell his friends that I was a Brick. The closest I came to reaching these lofty heights was meeting a duffle-coated young man who worked as a trainee reporter for the Kent Messenger and said things like Feeling Seedy after a night out drinking when he apparently got Pretty Tight. As our eyes met over cappuccinos in the newly opened coffee bar in Harmer Street I almost felt it might turn out to be love at first sight. His name was John and I still recall his exact tone when he said Bad Luck Old Thing and called me A Fearful Ass though why the comments were made is lost in the mists of time. It soon became apparent that apart from his oh so desirable way of expressing himself we actually had very little in common which he seemed to work out pretty quickly and when he was forced to introduce me to his mother shopping in Chiesemans one Saturday afternoon she apparently confirmed the very sensible assumption he had made. At the time I felt this was a shame because I would have been more than prepared to accept that we didn’t have to be the perfect couple as long as his conversation continued to be peppered with upmarket phrases. However it was clearly not to be.

I frequented Harmer Street less especially once John acquired a girlfriend called Felicity who had attended a boarding school. But the longing for a more elegant and genteel life did not leave me. However, mostly during those difficult teen years I confined myself to saying Gosh or Golly a lot which only caused minimal disgruntlement from others and the York Road neighbours who had known me all my life barely noticed. It took many years for the desire to join the upper classes diminished entirely and somewhat sadly I never managed to do so. However, I did receive one offer of marriage from a decidedly upper crust suiter called Edwin who told me he would be Frightfully Honoured if I would consent to being his wife. I vaguely considered him but admit to being put off by what he described as his Beastly sexual practices.

The Undeniable Glamour of Life Before the Virus .....

The Virus burst upon us without as much warning as we would have liked and immediately changed our thinking. There seems to be no argument about that.

In 2020 our lives have been on display more blatantly than any other time in history. Not simply rites of passage such as weddings and christenings and 21st birthday parties, but casual catch-ups with school friends, new shoes and holidays diligently documented, snapped and photo’d relentlessly so that all and sundry might be made aware how over-flowingly bounteous our lives were! Possibly not surprising since it would appear that the young at least are blessed with more disposable income than those of previous generations. Where their parents might have rewarded themselves with a regular Friday evening curry or pizza, their sons and daughters add breakfast out on Sunday mornings into the mix without a thought. As a result today’s four and five year olds have become totally familiar with Eggs Benedict served with a side of Prosciutto. What culinary progress has been made – and there was I back in the 1960s congratulating myself for exposing my first born to a very occasional Sunday lunch at Isows in Brewer Street. The tots breakfasting in style in Parnell Road, Auckland, New Zealand would undoubtedly look askance at such a meagre treat. Predictable since we oh so easily become accustomed to extravagance.

We know all this because it seems that every meal taken outside of the family home is almost guaranteed to end up on Facebook or similar social media sites together with a cryptic comment ensuring that friends and family can be reassured that the consumer and their offspring are still enjoying a life of ease and abundance. Even the stalwart few still given to throwing occasional lunch parties have been seen to furtively photograph the food before calling guests to the table.

When I was a child the most fortunate among us took holidays at Butlins or a rented chalet in Sheerness whilst our less prosperous neighbours were glad to spend a few days stripping raspberries or picking cherries and small black and white snaps of any of such eventualities would invariably appear at some later stage to be passed around and admired. We more sophisticated enthusiasts of the swinging sixties opted for weekends in Paris or Amsterdam and made sure Kodak in Colour recorded every detail with easily identified landmarks in the background. Meanwhile those we hoped were green with envy stayed at home and took shots of each other posing languidly against recently acquired second hand family cars. Although we now apprehensively ate out occasionally we were disinclined to ensure there was photographic evidence of the event no matter how much we would have enjoyed the final result to display to the world.

We undeniably expected to be envied for our fast lane lifestyles, keenly evidenced by the advent of Slide Evenings thrown by those who had invested in the kind of photographic equipment that now lies abandoned under the stairs of ever second newly converted terrace house from Bristol to Brighton. Newly married cousin Margaret who had recently discovered Continental travel was an early fan of the Slide Soiree and those invited were treated not only with undeniable proof of her exploration of the sights of Paris and Brussels but also cubes of cheese and pineapple on toothpicks together with glasses of sweet sherry. My mother was never known to turn down an invitation to the smart new house in Vicarage Drive but at the same time commented that these days Margaret seemed to have more money than sense and that was a fact. At the same time the Slide Shower remained her favourite niece and her dedicated aunt became the family baby sitter with enormous enthusiasm.

In New Zealand in the 1970s Fast Lives went to a different level as I witnessed the young families who thought nothing of flying off to Pacific Islands for Winter Breaks or perhaps unencumbered by small fry, jetted to Sydney to shop and take in a show. The realization that these lavish lifestyles deserved to be on display was rapidly apparent somewhat later when all and sundry acquired video cameras with which to document their children’s progress through ballet school or violin classes.
The advent of the internet together with phones equipped with cameras brought a leap forward of unprecedented proportion, allowing every morning coffee and croissant to be recorded for posterity.

Oh what untroubled lives we led before the Coming of the Virus!

The Truth Behind Plagues of Parakeets

A great deal of quite colourful language has been lost over the years and I suppose we have to accept this fact because we all know that over time language changes – if it did not reliably do so we would all still be speaking Chaucer’s English. Unlike my grandmother, few women of her ilk these days are regularly about to be Struck Pink or Knocked Down by a Feather. Her only son, my ever jovial Uncle Edgar always became Ticketty Boo when he’d had a couple of pints at the Jolly Farmers and he mystifyingly went off to See a Man About a Dog several times each week despite the fact that the canine never eventuated. His daughter Daphne confided that he had never been known to harbour any true fondness for dogs and the closest she got to any family pet was the Ring Necked Parakeet he brought home from the pub one Friday evening. She even wondered if it had been exchanged for the much discussed dog and for a while made a decision not to like it as a protest. Aunt Mag sensibly commented that at least it had come complete with cage which had saved a lot of trouble because a bird without a cage amounted to a bloody nuisance. Parakeets were still something of a novelty and buyers were warned they could be dangerous. There might have been something in that as we now know they are said to terrorise whole neighbourhoods descending in flocks to alarm small children in local parks.

My mother was eventually to blame the Great Storm of 1987 for the aerial bombardment of Wallis Park, and said Northfleet had become a Dead and Alive Place and that was a fact. She did not subscribe to the idea that a number of pop stars might be to blame for the problem. However, this was all to come and back in 1949 she was still talking about old Mr Bassant next door knowing his onions when it came to mending a door frame or changing a fuse. Somehow or other I realized that the onions under discussion were not those very same ones he grew on his allotment.

This vast array of now almost forgotten expressions was part of an accepted web of communication that all children growing up in the Thameside towns of North Kent were totally familiar and comfortable with. We all knew that Bob was our Uncle and Fanny was our Aunt. We accepted that Brass Monkeys had a lot to do with low temperatures. Cock Ups were not in any way lewd and we didn’t whine for attention when we knew the adults around us were Knackered. A Nod was always as good as a Wink and some people could be As Keen as Mustard. Little Birds often informed my mother and aunts on vital information and there was a lot of excitement locally if someone decided to Have a Do. In fact with neighbourly help general preparations could be carried out in Two Shakes of a Gnat’s Whisker.

Along with this disappearing argot a lively collection of ethnic slurs that would today horrify were apt to effortlessly trip off the tongue and we were largely unaware of the racist connotations. Those racial groups being maligned also seemed mostly oblivious to insult and cheerfully accepted being known as Jocks and Micks and Krauts. It was some time before I fully understood the latter term because it seemed to spring out of nowhere following the war years, completely sweeping away Hun, its fully comprehended predecessor.

Old Nan, always at the forefront where offensive conduct was concerned, was unembarrassed to refer to the local jeweler as a Kike and to the new Jamaican immigrants as Coons which looking back was a line her daughters seemed reluctant to cross. To my grandmother this lexicon was merely useful descriptive language and she might well have expressed considerable surprise to be reprimanded for it. Throughout my childhood when faced with an uncooperative grandchild she would dole out a hefty clip around the ear and tell us we were being Proper Tartars or Right Bleeding Brahmans! She would have been quite unaware that the former are an ethnic group still living in the Volga-Ural region and that the vast majority of them are Muslim. Nor would she have cared. As for the latter, where she acquired the term Brahman remains a mystery but she certainly would have been unaware of the fact that they are considered the highest Hindu caste and responsible for teaching and maintaining sacred knowledge. To her a Brahman was simply an uppity child in need of stern rebuke coupled with a thick ear. My brother, once he had become fully involved in the dissection of family history, decided that her frequent use of the term had something to do with the fact that her own mother had been born in India and thus would have brushed against the caste system at one time or another. How much validity this supposition had is debatable but it would be interesting to know where some of the more extravagant terms and phrases used by Old Nan Constant actually came from.

In these more progressive times when the morbidly obese object to being described as Overweight and those lacking vision can no longer safely be called Blind, one can only view with amazement what the average man/woman/person in the street once got away with. In primary school playgrounds Asian children had long been immune to being described as Chinks, Nips or Japs and would have been unlikely to be affronted. Even the youngest among us understood such terms and for most of us they simply indicated an acceptance that a particular group might differ from the majority but were still safely part of the larger community.

There was surprisingly little confusion although I can recall asking my father what the difference was between a Wop and a Wog at the age of about seven and him explaining that a Wop was simply another word for an Italian and a Wog was a more general term for someone with a dark skin. There was no sharp intake of breath coupled with a look over the shoulder, no speaking in a hushed whisper. He died in late 1951 and would have been perplexed if told that within a relatively short space of time the word Eskimo would have developed unpleasant connotations and that the Englishmen who had served alongside him in the Eighth Army most of whom had grown quite fond of being called Limeys were beginning to feel slighted when described as Poms. He would have been bewildered to be told that Cretins and Cripples no longer existed along with Imbeciles and that referring to those from Pakistan as Pakkis was a definite No-No!

There is nothing very surprising about any of this but losing language that was once fully integrated within a functioning society can surprise and startle and leave the speaker groping for alternatives. Who could have anticipated that the expression No Can Do would become clearly contemptuous of the manner in which the immigrant Chinese once used English? And could men like my father have possibly foreseen that Long Time No See holds the Native Americans’ traditional greeting up to scorn and ridicule? Could my mother have taken seriously the fact that by using one of her most favoured invectives – Bugger, she was actually referring to Bulgarian sodomites? And how would she have reacted if called upon to explain herself for describing Little Old Maudie from a few doors along as Feeble Minded? After all everyone knew Little Old Maudie was Feeble Minded and that’s precisely why her neighbours looked out for her and made sure she wasn’t exploited by Them Buggers involved in doorstep selling.

A great deal has been lost along with swathes of now unacceptable terminology but the campaigners for its demise are clearly more absorbed with the possible suffering of those who might find parts of it offensive for an increasing number of reasons. Customs and traditions linked to a disappearing way of life are of minor importance and in the overall scheme of things who can argue about that?

What in the first place might have instigated this now rampant aversion to once acceptable language is already lost to legend and when it is discussed a range of outlandish theories are offered. Perhaps there is some similarity in the origin of Britain’s Plagues of Parakeets – was it Jimi Hendrix releasing a breeding pair called Adam & Eve? Or George Michael? Or was the real culprit Humphrey Bogart? Did the birds simply escape from the set of The African Queen? New research, however, reveals that Parakeet sightings actually date back to the 1880s and one study reports that it was actually 1855!
I daresay we will never know the truth.

Going Down Hopping

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.

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.

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.

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.