A More Simple Time In Which To Live

Years ago it would be true to say that older family members were always totally prepared to throw themselves into all that was customary and went hand in hand with a relative’s passing. This wasn’t simply in our family, but also in those around us. Rather ungraciously I have in the past been wont to say that with us it was entirely because the end of life also went hand in hand with a great deal of alcohol but maybe that is not entirely correct. My grandmother and aunts on hearing of the latest death immediately busied themselves with the covering of mirrors and ensured that all photographs were laid face down. This was because they were in every respect superstitious and wanted to be on the Safe Side. My grandmother was so keen for us to be safe that when we walked at night she was apt to insist that we walk in the middle of the road so as not to disturb the spirits of the wayside even when that wayside consisted merely of the meagre little front gardens of Iron Mill Lane. They had some very odd ideas. Aunt Mag once told me that the stubs of funeral candles could be beneficial when laid on burns and at least one of the aunts warned us all to take care when walking in graveyards and not stumble close to new graves for to do so would ensure we would be dead within a year and so of course we walked very carefully indeed. Whether these beliefs had first and foremost come out of Ireland generations previously, or whether they were more recently acquired Kentish beliefs is hard to say. It’s possible that they were simply the false notions of their time and more widespread than immediately obvious. Along with these viewpoints they also held firm ideas about the cause of illness. Sitting in a draught would result in pneumonia especially if you had just washed your hair. Women should never wash their hair when menstruating for fear of something so disastrous it could not be openly discussed. Sitting on a cold step would certainly give you Piles.

My grandmother avoided the marshland so loved by my teenage cousins Harold and Leslie with their rabbiting rifles. The Crayford Marshes directly flanked the early estate housing where she lived and lay beyond The Jolly Farmers and The London Road, and it promised all manner of exciting activities but our grandmother asserted that it was the Ruin of the lungs and hers in particular. The Hearts of Oak roll ups she determinedly smoked, she assured us helped to counteract the deadly vapours that rose up from the damp terrain and gave you Marsh Fever. She was strangely unconcerned about the layers of cement dust that coated the roofs of Stone Village, a few miles further down the river and passed regularly on the 480 bus route to Gravesend. There was something slightly exotic about the riverside village of Stone that had grown so rapidly during the middle of the nineteenth century, sprouting row after row of Victorian terraced housing to accommodate the local cement factory workers. When I was six or seven years old I was convinced that the grey-white covering on rooftops and bushes was a kind of everlasting snow, unbending to the heat of summer and I had envied my cousin Little Doris, whose mother had died at her birth simply because she and her father Poor Arthur Steele had briefly lived there. My Grandmother would gaze fondly from the windows of the bus and comment that she had a lot of time for Stone, and that years ago she had spent many a happy hour with her Edgar at The Brown Bear that lay just beyond the Almshouses and that she had pitied the women forced to live in Them Places, crowded in together and never once allowed an evening out at The Bear even though it was right there on their doorstep. Even at the time I marveled at the fact that she and my father viewed the area quite differently, he telling me more about the local castle that was made completely of flint and built as long ago as the reign of King Stephen, whenever that might have been. Neither of them seemed unduly concerned about the effects of the cement snow upon the health of those living in the area.

In comparison, Northfleet and its surrounding environs seemed then a surprisingly healthy place in which to live considering the amount of industry that polluted Thameside settlements at that time. If you avoided renting those houses closest to the various cement works, you were unlikely to be overly bothered by the contamination they caused though conversely neither would you be so close to your probable place of employment. All this meant you simply had an important choice to make about your workplace and any repercussions would be nobody’s fault but your own. In many ways it was a more simple time in which to live and the widely held belief systems were equally simplistic and if not everyone actually believed in them wholeheartedly, they at least paid lip service to them.

I still wonder about the advisability of sitting too long on those cold stone steps!

A Death In The Family

There has never been any doubt whatsoever that when it comes to death, the Irish do it better than most. My grandmother, although not particularly attached to the country of her predecessors, having minimal allegiance to the Riordens and not especially bound to the Catholic Church, would generally come into her own on the occasion of a death in the family. She had an uplifting attitude to the conventions of a community. I clearly recall her determinedly putting out teacups on All Souls’ Day for the two aunts recently taken by tuberculosis, each one leaving a newborn girl. One of my older cousins said it was in the hope of the dead returning but in his opinion that was a load of baloney and it would be difficult if they did. This was because the one who still had a husband had just left him and both aunts had been sharing bedroom space in the ever more crowded house at the bottom of Iron Mill Lane. But he said all this softly and with hesitation fearing the clip around the ear it would earn him should he be overheard.

Despite their at times half hearted attitude to the One True Church my mother’s family was too intimidated by the thought of everlasting fire to completely ignore the rituals expected of them. Wakes were essential and held a day or two before a funeral Mass, usually at night. The women cried a lot into their white handkerchiefs newly ironed for the occasion and the men talked about how wonderful the deceased had been and then everyone got drunk and ignored the children who fell asleep under the nearest table. These affairs, looking back on them, were considerably more elaborate when the newly deceased were male. As we were a family overburdened with women the more emotionally charged gatherings were few. After the Mass there would be a gathering at The Jolly Farmers where everyone got drunk once again. Occasionally there might even be a Memorial Mass a month or so later.

My father, always a more devout believer than my mother might well have been seduced into the family in the first place by all the apparent devotion to the religion he had been raised within. Sadly, in the case of his own death few of the possible traditions were observed. Nobody would have thought to put out a teacup for him at the next All Souls’Day and the Wake, if indeed there was one, would have been a subdued affair. This might have been simply because my mother was theoretically making all the necessary decisions and she had always harboured a certain amount of hostility towards the Church and in recent years a great deal towards her husband. Decades later my brother’s demise occasioned a similar disregard, for similar reasons. No matter how elaborate the memorial event held some months later might have been, the stylish venue, the champagne and smoked salmon canapes could never erase the indifference to what basic Catholicism demanded and what he would have expected had he been able to voice an opinion. The imperiling of his immortal soul by dispensing with such traditions was glaringly obvious to all family members, lapsed though they might be if not to his cheerfully atheistic wife and her relatives, creating little pools of discomfort here and there. My cousin Margaret courageously observed that she had now outlived two Bernards and added that neither death had elicited the Send Off she would have expected. Then she fell into silence when her daughter, my Second Cousin Jane-Marie, who once upon a time was simply called Jayne, pierced her confidence with the kind of gaze intended to do exactly that. But a moment or two later her mother added in a voice both daring and tremulous that our grandmother would never have allowed such a thing to happen and Jayne, stuck to her mother like glue for reasons best known to herself, looked confused because she had little direct knowledge of her notorious great-grandmother. Unfortunately having little knowledge does not always elicit the most sensible reactions to situations of course, particularly where family is concerned and the deaths of family members, particularly when they are unexpected, throw up unexpected emotions. These are the times when even the most progressive among us are found to embrace the comfort of traditions.

Armistice Day

We were determined today to attend the one hundred year commemoration of The Armistice today to be held appropriately outside the Auckland War Memorial Museum and indeed we did, arriving just in time to catch the beginning of the ritual. The Mayor looked splendid in his official regalia and when he spoke he did so well and was pleasingly brief. A schoolgirl called Fabiana spoke passionately about the actions of hands in war, the consequences of those actions and I began to think of Dylan Thomas - `The hand that signed the paper felled a city’.
An elderly man, standing straight and tall, spoke eloquently in Maori, the words so powerful that I wished I understood and later wished I had paid attention to his name because I failed to find it when searching through the Order of Service. The Master of Ceremonies, whose name I did find, spoke about the fact that many New Zealand families lost more than one son in the conflict with a notable few losing three or even four and this made it sound like the breathless countdown to destruction that sometimes happens with road deaths on statutory holidays. Later as we trod through the rows of twenty thousand crosses I bent to look at a photograph someone had placed in a plastic bag and entwined around the cross. Four handsome young men with half smiles stared up at me, proud in their uniforms and off on an adventure, off to see the world. I had found one of those special families!
It began to rain, not the usual harsh semi-tropical rain we are accustomed to in Auckland but gently, persistently, Dylan-Thomas-like - `hands have no tears to flow’.
As children we never really understood what marking Armistice Day was all about because by the time we had any perception of it they had changed the name to Remembrance Day which then became Remembrance Sunday and finally Poppy Day. Despite all this the Crayford aunts firmly continued to refer to it as Armistice Day with their voices slightly lowered and even my grandmother would halt momentarily when it was mentioned and stare into the middle distance for a second or two and perhaps mention Poor Violet Eves who lost her young husband in 1917 and their son in 1944. This undoubtedly made her special.
The first Armistice Day I remember was almost certainly 1945 when I stood with my mother at the War Memorial on The Hill and thrilled to the sound of The Last Post whilst men bared their heads and a nearby tall green bus became silent and still in reverence. The day was crisply cold and my fingers were numb even in my newly knitted green mittens. This might have even been the advent and re-establishment of church bells after the war because all at once there was a burst and discord of bells, a cacophony I was not accustomed to and momentarily terrifying.
Today, although we had been promised bells, for some reason we did not hear them from where we stood and we commented on it as we walked back down Parnell Road, stopping off at Non Solo Pizza for coffee and Amoretto, the latter because it was a special Sunday and the rain was still falling - raining a century of tears.

BROADCASTING CARRIES ON

For years we had an old copy of the Radio Times at our house, issued on 4th September 1939, price two-pence which we pronounced `tuppence’. The cover featured an impressive photograph of Broadcasting House in Portland Place under which was the assurance that Broadcasting Carried On! A banner of text was superimposed across the building proclaiming that this particular edition contained the Revised Programmes for September 4th to 10th. Some dramatic changes in programming had clearly taken place due to the emerging conflict. The Home Service had been somewhat abruptly created and a great many of the BBC staff had been evacuated, not that my mother was really aware of that of course. She only rarely purchased the weekly magazine but on this occasion must have decided that we needed to be fully informed of what the future might hold for us and most especially for me, newly procreated and to be born the following year. The only print connection with the air waves that I was regularly aware of as I grew up was my older cousins’ copy of Radio Fun which they fought over then usually passed on to us, supposedly for me but my mother devoured it eagerly. It featured Big Hearted Arthur and Dicky Murdoch on the front cover and Vic Oliver within its pages. These people became almost real to me and as I am sure I have said previously, I knew that they lived inside the wireless in a strange parallel world.

The Wireless itself was still relatively new and innovative in 1939, the year my parents were married in Crayford. My mother was an early and enthusiastic listener on account of her brother Edgar actually building a Crystal Set in the 1920s which had elevated him to intellectual brilliance in the eyes of his numerous admiring sisters. Although the BBC had been launched as a private company as long ago as 1922 it had rapidly burgeoned in popularity and became a national corporation in 1926. By the first few months of 1938 more than six million receiving licenses had been issue and by the Autumn of that year, shortly after the Munich Crisis the British Broadcasting Corporation solemnly began preparations for what it saw as the inevitability of War. It was only natural that the company should see themselves as significant, even vital in the business of the struggles in Europe and those VIPs in government obviously felt similarly including Neville Chamberlain himself who was heard to say that the broadcasting of pure entertainment must surely cease once war began. This would have been devastating as far as my mother was concerned but oblivious to the feelings of minions like her, he had already decided that the airwaves should be a vehicle for government advice and instruction together with hourly news bulletins. In order that the corporation be most effective and to avoid the possibility of information dissemination being disrupted by bombing campaigns both National and Regional Programming were to be combined into a single channel called The Home Service which would broadcast throughout the country. Programming would still be produced in several different places to limit damage if one area was knocked out due to enemy activity. In fact Broadcasting House in Portland Place was to be hit twice but the BBC was never forced off air which they must have found gratifying at least in retrospect. Replacement provision had been made in Bristol from a disused funicular tunnel in Clifton gorge with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Sir Adrian Boult in mind but when the Music Department moved to Bedford, Bristol became the BBC nerve centre in the West of England eventually sending programmes in more than thirty languages all over the world. None of the Constant sisters were in the slightest bit interested in the kind of music Sir Adrian Boult might concern himself with but they mourned the temporary loss of dance bands and they were certainly more than a little on edge about what might happen next if the war actually came to pass.

Early on the morning of 1st September 1939 Poland was invaded and it was this defining act of aggression that finally pushed Britain into decision and the BBC found itself all at once on a most serious footing which meant that the much mooted merging of the channels took place at once and was announced to listeners on the midday news. My mother, standing at the shallow stone scullery sink in York Road felt a dull and ominous thud in her chest. It was a Friday and the fish for my moderately devout father’s midday dinner was already simmering in milk with a sprinkling of parsley, the potatoes bubbling alongside. Although she was always to be an indifferent cook she could manage boiled fish in what she described as Parsley Sauce though sadly never learned how to thicken the sauce.

When war was finally declared it startled those unfortunate broadcasters sitting in lonely soon to be abandoned studios playing tracks from LPs and every ten minutes informing a dwindling group of listeners, that their particular channel was now defunct. More than likely they like everyone else had confidently expected that the Start of War would herald an extraordinary bombing attack that would maim if not kill Britons in huge numbers. That did not of course happen. In fact nothing happened immediately and the housewives of Northfleet began to breathe easily again.

No official announcement was issued to the nation by Neville Chamberlain until the deadline for German troop withdrawal ran out on 3rd September. Hitler had perhaps wisely ignored those who expected a dramatic turnabout from him. In Northfleet my mother, her new pregnancy already suspected and undoubtedly half lamented, stayed close by the trusty wireless and wondered not for the first time about the prudence of the soon to be most unhappy marriage she had entered into. Bernard Joseph Hendy might well be a regular Mass attender, might never be heard to use bad language, might indeed not be a drinker BUT when all was said and done he was not her Fred. Fred her beloved fiancé was now five years in his grave, a victim of the greatly dreaded TB. It is fair to say my father had a number of pleasing attributes but in our house he was destined not to be loved.

She was not alone in her concentration on the Wireless that day because most of the neighbours and indeed all our relatives in Crayford were equally attentive and all were eventually rewarded with the iconic broadcast announcement that most of us have since become familiar with, after which the national anthem was played followed by a lot of information about how to conduct yourself during an air raid and reminders to be sure to carry your gas mask with you if you ventured outside. All this certainly promoted a feeling of unease in the community, particularly the focus upon gas masks. The protection device distributed to mothers for infants under three months was in the form of an alarming box operated via a foot pump. My mother had paid great attention to that issued to Totty Freeman from No 31 for her new baby Molly and was consumed with anxiety as to what might become of the vulnerable infant should the mother herself succumb to poison gas or indeed prove not to be particularly adept at pumping. She was to be more than relieved the following year when I reached the required age to be allocated the more acceptable diver’s helmet style mask that did not rely on maternal proficiency.

During these disquieting early days whilst mothers of the next generation anguished over what might lie ahead, the BBC came up trumps with regular tips on how to ensure the safety of the young and the only fault that could be found with the deluge of data was that the women delivering it were definitely of the Posh variety and most likely would not have any real worries themselves, at least not of the kind that preoccupied those living in the working class terraces of the south of England. Aunt Maud maintained you had to overlook the fact that they were undeniably more than middle class because there were times when you needed people like them, women who knew what was what. Anyhow they couldn’t help sounding posh if they belonged to the Women’s Institute because everybody knew you couldn’t join unless you were at least a little bit posh. Old Nan said that they were all looking up their own arses and you didn’t have to take their advice if you didn’t want to. My mother, on the other hand, always felt compelled to take the advice of those higher in status than herself and continued to feel doubtful. Interspersing the broadcasts were news bulletins and live music from Sandy MacPherson and his organ which everybody enjoyed even though he turned out to be a Canadian and not Scottish after all. Not that there was anything intrinsically bad about being Canadian of course.

So the British listening public continued to wait with bated breath for the onslaught of bombs from German aircraft and as the hours passed began to gradually relax when nothing untoward took place. By 6th September the BBC’s Variety Department took a deep breath themselves and broadcast the first live revue of the war – Songs From the Shows, from their new headquarters in Bristol. Within a week Children’s Hour had returned also and a week later Band Wagon was back complete with Arthur Askey at the helm. This was swiftly followed by ITMA which was hugely popular and had started months earlier. All the aunts were reassured, even delighted and Old Nan quickly decided that Chamberlain had got it wrong about the war in the first place although she was sure he’d done his best, adding generously that it couldn’t be easy doing his job.

The Wireless went from strength to strength during those early war years, and by 1943 the Variety Centre had abandoned Bristol and was back in London but holding onto an audience with only one channel would have been far from simple. There was a compelling necessity for Popular broadcasting and at the time this meant music and comedy. ITMA remained undoubtedly the most popular wartime show. It starred Tommy Handley and Jack Train who posed as a range of characters including a German spy called Funf who in particular caused my grandmother great merriment Each generated their own catchphrase such as `I don’t mind if I do’, ‘This is Funf speaking’ and of course the iconic `Shall I do you now Sir?’. The people of York Road were regularly convulsed with laughter at the antics of The Minister of Aggravation and those in The Office of Twerps. Old Nan became eventually more addicted to the first new hit show of the war, Garrison Theatre, which featured the kind of revues that had entertained the troops of WW1. The slightly boisterous and disorderly audience definitely appealed to her.

The Bassants next door quickly became fans of Any Questions, which later became known as The Brains Trust and was described as a general knowledge programme, serious in intention but light in character. Five experts discussed questions from members of the forces concerning such unlikely topics as philosophy, science and art. It became a huge success, attracting a regular audience of millions. The BBC Repertory Company produced half a dozen plays each week and these promised to appeal to The Average Listener although my mother had her doubts about this assertion saying that in her experience plays could not always be relied upon and that films were better all round, even though you had to go out and catch a bus and on Saturday nights even queue up.

Children were definitely well catered for as time went on. MPs like Megan Lloyd George gave educational talks about how Parliament functioned and there were also talks on World Affairs. Infinitely more popular though was serialized drama which included The Water Babies, Ivanhoe, Little Women and Nicholas Nickleby. In October 1939, Princess Elizabeth made her first broadcast on Children’s Hour with a special message to Evacuated Children which later included messages from parents to those children who had been evacuated to North America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. This was of course most exciting not just to those directly involved but also those listening Ordinary people, not all of them posh, people with ordinary accents heard on the wireless! My aunts, however, maintained that those who had their children sent Overseas were not ordinary at all and could only be described as Nobs. Not everybody agreed with them.

By the end of 1940, when the Blitz was well under way and The Battle of Britain had come and gone, the population had adjusted reasonably well to the various onslaughts. London had become the seat of Governments In Exile for Norway, Belgium Holland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Greece and acted also as the headquarters of General de Gaulle. The services of the BBC were used to address people in all these countries with Holland having a regular slot called Radio Orange with Queen Wilhelmina giving the first broadcast. In January 1941 during the broadcasting slot allotted to the Belgiums, it was suggested that the letter V for Victory should be used to symbolize resistance in Europe and within a few weeks the idea was gaining traction in occupied countries. By the middle of the year the letter V in morse code became the signature tune of the programme and adopted the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The French, always thought to have a high opinion of themselves, became particularly adept at setting anti-Nazi words to traditional folk songs and in occupied France the tunes were whistled enthusiastically. It would be true to say that families like ours were remarkably insular and never over fond of foreigners of any description, not just the more actively despised Germans.

Meanwhile the Germans were busily broadcasting an English language News Programme with the aid of Lord Haw Haw, actually of course, William Joyce. He most definitely became a wartime radio star and millions tuned in to hear him, resulting in every British child of listening age becoming completely familiar with him and how he should be Strung Up, or Hung, Drawn & Quartered. I am not clear if we entirely understood why he was so universally reviled but to make an enquiry of this nature would have only resulted in further diatribes concerning the fate that must surely await him so generally we did not probe too deeply. However, over time even the youngest of us became comfortably acquainted with the names of those regular broadcasters of the years 1940 and 1945. This was unsurprising since these people were regular visitors into our homes day and night so that they were almost akin to family friends, in much the same way as that list of social media Friends infiltrate the outer reaches of our lives today. Not Real Friends in the sense by which we normally understand the word but nevertheless shadow people we almost consider we know well. By 1945 the list included Alvar Liddell, Freddy Grisewood, Wilfred Pickles, Elsie and Doris Waters, and Joyce Grenfell amongst others. My mother would have wanted to include Vera Lynn who with her regular fifteen minute singing spot kept the nation’s spirits up. And being a definite fan of vigorous piano playing for a time she would have very much wanted to add Charlie Kunz to the catalogue. By 1944, however, he had been abruptly tossed aside when a neighbour convinced her that Kunz was a close confidante of Goebbels, a definite German spy and thus sending messages to the enemy via the keyboard. This was on account of him having a German sounding name although later it appeared that he was more American than German but having lived in England for years definitely considered himself part of the British community. When he died in 1958 he was buried in Streatham Vale cemetery in London but Nellie Constant remained suspicious.

The part played by wartime broadcasting during the first half of the 1940s cannot be overvalued and radio fans like myself find it cheering that the technology, now more than a hundred years old, is still going strong, still invaluable during times of tension and trauma. Broadcasting has indeed carried on!

Misinformation Regarding the Shipping Forecast

For many years I had only the haziest idea of where the various areas repeatedly referred to in the iconic Shipping Forecast might actually be in relation to us in the South of England. Although Thames, Dover and Plymouth were obvious enough, Viking, Forties and Dogger remained a mystery for decades and Faeroes, Hebrides, Cromarty and Malin only emerged with a reality that could be just half-imagined when my brother’s interest in birds of prey took him to the furthest reaches of Northern Scotland. Even as a young adult my knowledge was sketchy and embarrassingly I distinctly remember the excitement of applying for a job at a weather station on one of The Falkland Islands as a shorthand typist. I now feel certain that I had found the advertisement on the front page of The Times, at a time when The Times still had those front page advertisements. Upon investigation I found that it was a place where I would find stunning beaches, an abundance of wildlife and a town called Stanley. Perhaps also a great deal of bad weather, at least that’s what I was hoping for. How desperately I wanted that job, simply because I was certain it would take me somewhere between Faeroes and South East Iceland where undoubtedly I would feel an integral part of the Shipping Forecast for a year or two. A cautionary note sounded when I was told I would be entitled to paid annual leave in Argentina. Even I in my ignorance was completely aware that Argentina had never once featured in the much loved broadcasts over the years of my addiction. Extricating myself from the two year contract that I had been so keen to sign only minutes beforehand was awkward.
I blame The Wireless because it had been very much a part of my childhood and it was odd to walk into the house and find it not playing in the background. This did not apply only to us of course, but to most families around us. Even when television burst onto the scene it never entirely weakened our collective love of The Wireless. I don’t remember being a great fan of Children’s Hour during the war years but I was probably too young to appreciate Uncle Mac. On the other hand when The Shipping Forecast resumed some time in 1946 it took me no time at all to become completely captivated. I now realise I was not alone and even my mother was heard to comment favourably when the much loved segment reappeared and remark to the aunts that its absence had been on account of Hitler. We in the British Isles had no desire to be helpful to Hateful Hitler and his U-boats by handing out too much information regarding conditions at sea. Had we not promptly acted there might well have been an Invasion and where would we all be now if that had been the case? Speaking German no doubt! She had always been strangely confident that the entire population would have taken to German effortlessly and on command. Fortunately for us, none of this eventuated and once the ringing of church bells resumed, so did advice to shipping. Even my grandmother who had paid little attention to conditions on the high seas welcomed the return of the bells and to children of my age, having never heard them before, they were a novel enigma. My cousin Margaret importantly informed me that had they sounded in wartime it would have meant one thing – the dreaded Invasion. Then every village bell ringer would have hurried to sound them loud and clear to warn neighbouring settlements. She said nothing about The Shipping Forecast possibly because its return was to her not quite as dramatic as bell ringing. Nevertheless its strangely hypnotic rhythm soon became as much a part of childhood to me as the reassuring radio chime of Big Ben, the only church bell I had ever known, sounding the hour at various times throughout the day.
At some stage I became aware that the repetitive programming was produced by the Met Office and apparently broadcast four times daily. This may or may not have always been the case because I only reliably remember it late at night although what I was doing awake around midnight at the age of seven or eight is anybody’s guess. Nevertheless for years the Shipping Forecast was essential to me, surpassing even ITMA and Much Binding In the Marsh and definitely knocking Children’s Hour out of the running. I showed little interest in Malcolm Savile’s Gay Dolphin Adventure which was serialized shortly after the war and followed enthusiastically by my older cousins but somehow or other what was in store for fishing fleets became information I was unable to do without. I can distinctly recall giving a little shiver of delight as the soporific mantra began to intone …… Viking, Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger…… and I once again slipped into the curious late night ritual that preceded sleep.
When I was very young I have to admit that I was only vaguely aware that the strangely exotic words were names somehow connected to the seas that surrounded our island but as I grew a little older my mind would begin to sleepily explore the connected landscape, scanning the coastline and examining the water’s edge as the North Kent Marshland linked with the darkly ominous estuary. Then onward with courage into the more mysterious depths of the North Sea, spoken of at school by Mr Will Clark in his introduction to the history of our country when he assured us we had resisted the advances of Viking and Norman invasion. What harm could possibly come to us, nestling within our sceptered isle whilst violent forecasts for Fisher, German Bight, Humber and Thames impeded the progress of all would be marauders? It would be a hardy plunderer indeed that would consider breaching the darkly churning waters of Dover, Wight, and Portland .
Invariably as the three minute bulletin drew to a close, somehow I would have fallen asleep, safely tucked up in my bed and knowing very little of the perils involved in venturing out to sea. And possibly this ignorance can be forgiven as the only vessels I was familiar with were the Gravesend Bawleys that had the good sense to fish only for shrimps and largely avoid bad weather. Things might have been different had we lived in Hastings or Dover where perhaps the weather mattered more.
Regardless of how much the weather did or didn’t matter, however, clearly the iconic broadcast had a huge impact on me and countless others and it was with some surprise and much pleasure when many years later I heard it featured on Desert Island Discs. More recently I have come to realise that it is much admired by a host of modern poets such as Sean Street with his Shipping Forecast Donegal. One of my Auckland neighbours, hailing originally from The Midlands, is absolutely certain she heard a portion of it on an old late night episode of a re-run of Prime Suspect only a month ago. People of some note are even said to mention it in diary entries.
Despite years of firm fanship it has always been challenging to accept the terms used and what the jargon might actually mean. The weather terms are almost an argot no matter how patiently the Beaufort Scale is explained. Ordinary groups of words take on a meaning that sounds perverse such as rain later – good. Veering north-westerly five or six, decreasing four. Rain then showers moderate. I now know that wind direction generally is given first followed by strength on the Beaufort scale then precipitation followed by visibility. Wind direction is indicated by veering which simply means clockwise or backing – anti-clockwise. Strong winds above force 8 are described as Severe Gale 9, Storm 10, Violent Storm 11 and Hurricane 12. Visibility is described as good which means you can see about five nautical miles, moderate where you can see between two and five nautical miles and poor where you can see very little. Lastly when you can see nothing at all the conditions are described as fog.
This information ensures that it all becomes clearer and substantially less mysterious but then of course it is not always necessary to understand the language or even the reasons behind it much like not needing to have complete comprehension of the Mass in Latin. Nor is it necessary to examine why after all these years, the forecasts are still broadcast at all let alone four times daily in a time when even the most modest vessel could be presumed to have adequate technology on board to provide the safety net needed. Perhaps mariners like the rest of us simply have a need to hear the mantra, to be assured that all is well with the world, to feel safe.

A Remarkable Lack of Resilience

We who grew up with very little following the second world war were in many ways fortunate. You could say that our general misfortune concerning the troubled time in which we were conceived was in itself providential and paved the way for the resilience that accompanied it because no matter which way you viewed it, we were a remarkably robust bunch. For example, at a most basic level it was accepted during those times that only girls cried. Boys did a sterling job of controlling the urge to do so even under extreme circumstances. By the time boys were five years old most of them were in total control of such displays of emotion and tears were reserved for the home, witnessed primarily by mothers and siblings because crying in the presence of fathers did not earn a boy much kudos. The only boy I knew who was known to weep on a regular basis was Colin Bardoe and he was frequently reduced to tears if a game did not proceed to his liking. His twin, Alan, was not given to the same weakness but then Alan was a different sort of boy altogether.

On the other hand, many girls, and I was one of them, were prone to tears at the slightest provocation. This did not mean that we were inclined to a general weakness of spirit, however, because overall we were just as emotionally sturdy as our brothers. Possibly this was simply what was expected of us in order that we should be able to cope with the ups and downs of daily life, the first of which may well have been starting school. Few under-fives were able to adjust to the idea of starting school by cutting their teeth at supervised playgroups. There was no such thing as visiting a local classroom prior to the day we were due to start, for a more gentle introduction. Usually we were simply thrust into the education experience without much warning and expected to acclimatize. After a great deal of hysteria from many of us, acclimatize we did. Savage though it may appear to today’s parents, such expectation did at least begin the process of preparing us for the fact that life was likely to throw some nasty surprises our way. The future would undoubtedly involve setbacks infinitely worse than being plonked unceremoniously within a strange room, alongside a dozen or more other wailing five year olds safely in the charge of a responsible adult called The Teacher.

By the end of our first school year we had learned that some of us had a reasonable aptitude for education and others did not. Those who mastered the first Readers with ease and learned to write in sentences with capital letters and full stops placed correctly were told we were Clever. Pressure was placed upon those unfortunates who could not Keep Up and a few children stayed in the Infants’ Class for another year so by the time we were six years old we knew they were not Clever and often were even described as Slow. This was the fate of poor Alan Spooner who spent a great deal of time pretending to be a steam train in his second year of school in 1946. The unfortunate terminology that surrounded academic progress has long been abandoned of course and even by the 1960s the Clever children had become Antelopes and the Slow ones Tortoises. In 1972 my oldest son emerged from his first few months at a school in Auckland and proudly announced that he was a Bear and all the children who could not read the first Janet and John book were Monkeys; he was very glad not to be in the latter category and despite his tender years fully understood the implications.

At St Botolph’s in the late 1940s quite a lot of playground bullying took place, particularly between groups of boys and those exposed to it were expected to find coping strategies without resorting to involving adults. Fights between boys took place on a daily basis and winners were lauded whilst the teaching staff appeared not to notice the level of barbarity. It was definitely a time of Winners and Losers and it would have been unthinkable to institute games where this was not the case. When Alice In Wonderland was read to us in 1949 by our greatly loved class teacher Will Clarke, we all laughed heartily when the Dodo, after thinking long and hard about a race, decided, `Everyone has won and all must have prizes.’ Yet this is precisely what happened at a sports day in a local school in the late 1980s and I, to my chagrin, felt forced to issue participation certificates, if not prizes, to all attendees at my school holiday courses by the year 2000 in order that no-one should feel emotionally sidelined.

It is a fact that children all over the world have become vastly less hardy over the years and today’s seven year olds would find themselves quite unable to cope with the daily difficulties that plagued the lives of those of us who grew up in an earlier era. We in our turn saw our setbacks simply as part of Life because all around us the adults in both their conversation and attitudes made us mindful of the fact that there were other children who had greater problems and obstacles to contend with. The ten year old boy called Isaac with the odd way of speaking who had somehow or other lost his parents in a camp in Poland and was now visiting the most far flung members of his family, was one of them. Though watchful the boy was not slow to make friends, join in games and seemed not to be in need of therapy. He and others like him went on to lead successful lives and showed little evidence of character weakness. Even our own parents and grandparents whose early lives we knew to have been much harder than our own, grew to adulthood possessed of an inner strength and a great deal of fortitude.

Each decade that followed us has seen an inevitable progression of helplessness and vulnerability that has resulted in the astonishingly weak and dependent young adults we see around us today. These are the assemblies of youth who find themselves quite unable to cope with criticism, who see insults everywhere and are therefore affronted on a daily basis, who accuse all and sundry of racism, of sexism and any other ism you could possibly conjure up and who reach out for support at the slightest stumbling block. Counselling is required for moderate trauma, and in depth therapy for the kind of sexual assault we of an earlier generation might have regarded as a clumsy compliment. This lack of mental stamina has led to the inability of those under the age of fifty to take responsibility for their own life decisions and when things go wrong for them and there is no immediate and obvious prop there follows a feeling of growing panic. Often then, because the blame has to be apportioned somewhere, they lay it upon the shoulders of their ageing parents who somehow or other in the past made serious errors of parenting and failed to provide adequate emotional sustenance. This results in inescapable family rifts where grandparents are punished by being forbidden to see their grandchildren and perplexed seventy year olds are told that they have ruined lives with sins such as circumcision or the failure to observe talent that would have turned their middle aged offspring into stars.

It would be tempting to decide categorically that these frequently melting snowflakes are completely responsible for the lack of backbone they display but of course life is never that simple. What our generation is in fact responsible for is pandering to the inadequacies of the next generation, contributing to what made them weak and helpless in the face of the slightest adversity. It is a fact that the children who cannot deal with games featuring losers are likely to become the adults who dissolve at any hint of misfortune. They fail to handle the most minor of life’s impediments, can only see rampant racism and sexism in cartoon drawings and fail to understand the humour. They must be protected from the dangers of Freedom of Speech for fear that speech might expose them to dangerous concepts and somehow or other their sense of judgement regarding relationships with the opposite sex has been irrevocably tarnished by their fear of being taken advantage of sexually.

On the other hand, we who had the good fortune to grow up in an earlier age, did not have to face the alarming myriad of choices that so beset those growing up today. Most of us were confident in the gender we were assigned at birth and the disturbing thought that we might select an alternative did not cross our consciousness. By the time we were eleven years old we were completely aware of our ability, academic and otherwise and knew that if we were Clever we might pass the eleven plus examination and if we were Average we were unlikely to do so and if we featured among the Slow children we would be afforded the safety and comfort of the D Stream. There was little confusion and no Suzuki Music Schools to lead us to believe that we might become concert violinists. Our parents were most unlikely to lead us to believe that we were good at something if we were not because by the time we reached school age we were expected to cope with the idea that talent was capricious. Along the way we came to the conclusion that moments of happiness could be sporadic and life was not always fair. And so little by little we were able to separate good luck from bad, sense from nonsense and truth from fiction. Sadly, somehow or other a great many of us have failed spectacularly to pass the simplicity of these notions on to our children and their resulting lack of resilience is quite remarkable.

WORDS & MUSIC

Those of us growing up during the second world war and the years that followed were exposed to a range of words and music that today have largely vanished. We were encircled by music in those fragile years but it was a collective experience rather than that which today’s child might be more accustomed to, where a background of popular song is conveyed via earphones or savoured for minutes at a time on mobile phones and Ipads. The melodies that preoccupied us came from The Wireless and even the poorest home possessed one and so our music was also the music of our friends and neighbours.

Reigning supreme was Music While You Work a half hour programme featuring non-stop popular tunes, twice daily, mid-morning and mid-afternoon and every household in Northfleet tuned in. Those with more upmarket tastes and a yen to become socially upwardly mobile , whose ranks I aimed to join, were able to sample the delights of such programmes as Desert Island Discs presented by the legendary Roy Plomley and thus occasionally listen to Chopin waltzes and light opera sung by Richard Tauber. For the highbrow or lowbrow and all in-between, The Wireless inevitably became The Radio at some stage in the nineteen fifties when it was only referred to as The Wireless by people of our parent’s age who were decidedly old fashioned and vaguely embarrassing. Our particular set was very similar to that in the houses on either side of us, a large polished wooden box that might almost have been classed as a piece of furniture if only a little bigger. It evidenced its own importance with its stylish design, contoured and rounded and highly polished with an important looking speaker dominating its face. A number of knobs and a dial sat smugly below the speaker. One knob simply turned the set on and off and twisting to the right adjusted the volume. Another, used much less frequently searched for stations, listed temptingly and mysteriously and sounding like destinations on some long distance European train trip. A smaller knob of different shape adjusted the tone and another selected long, medium or short wave. I think it was a Murphy Model 674 and it had cost an astonishing nine guineas when purchased in a sale in 1939, a joint wedding gift to my parents from a group of aunts. Later I learned that my youngest aunt, the much derided Freda, had managed to get her name included on the card but had failed to contribute to the purchase which apparently was Just Like Her! Despite this sad confusion concerning a most significant wedding gift The Wireless immediately became a prized possession and was given its own specially built shelf in the corner of our kitchen, high enough to ensure that I wasn’t able to fiddle with its knobs, which I longed to do. And to ensure the continuity of on-call news and music all that was henceforth needed was the broadcasting license which cost a not inconsiderable ten shillings a year until it doubled in 1946 and became one pound! According to Old Nan who had suggested the set as a suitable wedding present in the first place, this development was nothing short of Daylight Bleeding Robbery. Rightly or wrongly we wireless owners could not take our daily dose of news and music completely for granted in those days.

During the war more modestly designed radio receivers were available for hurriedly wed young couples with knobs only for volume, tuning and on/off. Presumably these were made to government specifications and were unable to receive long wave which ensured that we British would be unable to be influenced by German propaganda. As I grew older I became increasingly fascinated by the wide range of European radio stations that could apparently be sampled and more than a little peeved that my mother seemed disinclined to avail herself of the opportunity to do so. This had not been the case during the war when we regularly listened to Radio Hamburg becoming more and more infuriated by what the dastardly Germans were telling us. Not, I hasten to explain, that I understood any of these developments but I was more than aware of what I should think and believe. Not a day went by without a relative or neighbour reinforcing the fact that Adolf Hitler needed to be Strung Up and that generally speaking all things German would contaminate normal people like us if we got too close to them. That was why breathing the same air as POWs was particularly dangerous and so we must cross the road if we saw a group of them heading towards us bent upon some community work project. These were facts and the BBC confirmed our prejudices on a daily basis, there being in those days no local radio where alternative views from the man in the street might be heard. Some time after the war when a new channel was launched called The Third Programme I would have liked to investigate it properly but my mother maintained that it gave her the creeps.

When my mother and aunts were children, before the advent of regular broadcasting, music for the working classes was that which they produced for themselves via sing-songs in the pub on Friday and Saturday nights starting with Two Lovely Black Eyes and ending with Roll Out The Barrel. Everyone knew the words and prescribed order and as the decades passed the ritual changed little so that the youngest of us listening from our beds in the late 1940s were comforted by the sounds radiating from locals like The Volley.

Those Northfleet families aspiring towards the lower middle classes and perhaps living in Springhead Road rather than Shepherd Street had at some stage wisely invested in pianos for their parlours and held more genteel sing-songs without the aid of beer and gin. Their repertoires were also more refined featuring such numbers as Come Into The Garden Maud and I’ll Walk Beside You. My grandmother who was completely familiar with most popular music hall numbers viewed these parlour songs with more than a little suspicion regularly noting that they were more for the Toffs than the likes of us. It was undoubtedly due to her background of singing for the amusement of theatre queues that I became word perfect in such numbers as Waiting At The Church, Boiled Beef and Carrots and Oh, Oh Antonio by the time I was three. Because of the amusement this caused among adults not completely familiar with the depth of deprivation that existed in our family background, I was prone to burst into song at the slightest encouragement and bask in the attention that followed. It was perhaps this attraction for the music of the masses that years later caused equal surprise and merriment when my pre-school son entertained the unwary on trains and buses with She Was Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage neatly demonstrating that he had the same desire to draw attention to himself as his mother at a similar age.

Just as our experience of music differed substantially from that of those that followed us, so did our experience of words. We may not have been educated to a level that might ordinarily be described as equipping us with an elevated vocabulary but it is true to say that there was a depth and richness to the language we were familiar with. Although by the nineteen sixties and seventies daily life in North Kent had gone through enormous changes, three decades earlier it was not particularly unusual for the smallest child to ingest and assimilate ideas and knowledge unconsciously and so large tracts of verse were learned seemingly by osmosis and no-one considered this to be unusual. By the time local children were five years old they not only knew the words of the songs their parents and grandparents routinely sang, but also their prayers and a wide range of rhymes and jingles. The more determinedly religious had also absorbed and could quote a variety of Bible verses. The very first nursery rhyme I could repeat on command was when I was eighteen months old – Hark, hark the dogs do bark, the beggars are coming to town, some in rags and some in jags and one in a golden gown. Six months later my repertoire had grown to include such ditties as Bye Baby Bunting, Ride a Cock Horse to Banbury Cross, Lucy Locket Lost Her Pocket, and Goosey, Goosey Gander. By two and a half I knew all routine nursery rhymes including a reasonably full rendition of Who Killed Cock Robin. This was not surprising because even those women sadly lacking a depth of maternal instinct and with a weakness for alcohol such as my grandmother, were somehow or other familiar enough with the oral tradition of England to be in a position to pass it on to their own children, who did likewise. And so those of my generation inherited an oral folklore and became totally aware of nonsense jingles, lullabies, counting formulas, puzzles and riddles, rhyming alphabets, tongue twisters, nursery prayers and singing games. Under the circumstances it was not all that surprising that a selection of more impudent music hall melodies, though less suitable for infant consumption, were effortlessly added.

It would be accurate to say that back then more people were expected to know songs and hymns than are these days where the tradition seems to have remained only in the villages of Wales. This was not so in the 1940s when women sang on factory assembly lines whether they were regarded as having Good singing voices or not. There was then less self-consciousness as far as performing was concerned. My mother had a very good voice, inherited no doubt from my grandmother and when she sang people listened and complimented her. And so she became in the habit of doing so regularly and her singing formed part of my very first memories so frequently did I wake up to Sonny Boy, Always, It Had To Be You, April Showers, After You’ve Gone, As Time Goes By and Night and Day. So with complete ease the lyrics of popular song were also absorbed into my sub-conscious so that they too became part of my words and music frame of reference.

And The Wireless continued to ensure that we became acquainted with all the numbers that rose to the top of the popularity polls so that Peg O My Heart and Now Is The Hour remained firm favourites with me and my friend Molly before she went on to diversify and become Doris Day’s No 1 fan, in the process becoming word perfect in yet another raft of lyrics. Not surprising perhaps, because this was still at a time when children could reliably sing the National Anthem and were familiar with the hymns loved by The Anglican Church. Abide With Me, Rock of Ages, Jerusalem, He Who Would Valiant Be, also became so ingrained in memory that I would be able to recall them decades later during more intermittent Church visits. Undoubtedly there was something valuable to be gained from contact with our Christian mythology by way of occasional Church attendance with our school class because most of us, underprivileged though we were, and whether we came from a rock solid or decidedly shaky Christian background, came to have a firm knowledge of edifying moral tales. This provided us with a basis on which to judge our own behaviour and that of others whether we chose to do Right or Wrong. By contrast today’s child would only barely comprehend righteousness and would have only a hazy idea of what might be meant by the words of the 23rd Psalm. My own family was one wherein the members indulged in a great deal of behaviour that was decidedly Wrong but at least I was completely aware of this fact.

It’s tempting to believe that the working class children of our particular part of North Kent were possessed of an undoubted educational edge over those that followed us, an edge that displayed itself in an ability to harvest language and use it productively and to react to the many and varied dimensions of music. And it is sobering to realise that if this is so it emerged from a combination of diverse influences. The sometimes bawdy lyrics of the Music Hall and the poetry of the King James Bible. The catchy melodies of Musical Theatre and the stirring strains of Anglican hymns with perhaps an added sprinkling of operatic arias courtesy of Roy Plomley. And for those of us who were never completely won over by early television, it is hard to dismiss the unique sound of that late night radio favourite, The Shipping Forecast. The disconnected, hypnotic voice intoning weather conditions in strange, faraway places – Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger, Fisher, German Bight, Humber ….. names that were only ever encountered in The Shipping Forecast but which seemed to somehow define us as part of an island nation. An odd mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar, deftly twisting the common landscape into a dreamworld peopled by communities we were somehow connected to yet knew little about. An important facet of the entire Word experience that would ultimately define us, The Shipping Forecast provided yet another essential dimension to a childhood devoid of 3D Printing, TV on Demand, Iphones and Ipads, but at the same time hardly deprived.