British Birds of Prey

There were two doctors in Northfleet, Dr Crawford and Dr Outred and you swore by whichever one of them you favoured and that very much depended on how much you considered they had done for your family and whether they had ever gone above and beyond the Call of Duty. They were invariably known simply by their surnames. We swore by Outred rather than Crawford because he was renowned for being able to do surgery if needs be and more importantly had saved my life when I was four. He didn’t actually perform surgery upon me but he drove at breakneck speed to Gravesend Hospital to access what he called a Wonder Drug when I had pneumonia. I was busy watching relays of dancing Dutch dolls climb the walls of my bedroom and by the time he returned was not aware enough to know how I felt about the size of the needle he used. According to my mother it was enormous! Needless to say with the aid of the Wonder Drug I quickly recovered and rather generously bore him no grudges about the needle. As for surgery, he had at one stage lanced a nasty throat abscess for my mother whilst bombs rained down on his consulting room in London Road, Northfleet at least that is how she described the occasion and at one time she described it a great deal.

Aunt Mag said that when all was said and done you could quite understand why Nell swore by him. However, she stopped all the swearing once she came to understand that he had been complicit in my father’s death by not realizing that he was suffering from Acute Hepatitis rather than some kind of fairly harmless seasonal influenza. It was my Grandmother and the combined efforts of the Aunts that finally convinced her that the once much revered Outred was undoubtedly responsible for the unexpected and most inconvenient sudden death. Even way back then there were those who were keen on a place to lay blame when faced with life’s slings and arrows. We had not got to the stage, however, where we demanded apologies; we simply seethed with indignation at the injustice of it all. My poor mother seethed a great deal because at the time of the death that by rights should never have happened she was not altogether on speaking terms with my father. This was because she could not forgive him for being a serial philanderer. Later she maintained that it was The War that was responsible for the philandering and the Eighth Army in particular because that was where his fascination for women in uniform began and had it not been for that he would never have looked twice at any of the conductresses on the 480 bus route.

As a child I spent a reasonable amount of time in Outred’s waiting room, most especially once the National Health System was up and running and we no longer had to pay for each visit. Prior to the NHS every consultation had to be paid for and I remember that for an adult this was a costly two shillings and sixpence because it was indignantly discussed frequently. I’m no longer sure what was charged for children. There was general dissatisfaction when a half crown had to be handed over despite no firm diagnosis being made and my mother was most satisfied when she was prescribed a Tonic, preferably a red one in an interesting glass bottle. The red Tonics did her a lot of good, of that she was certain.

Outred did not run an appointments system which was undoubtedly sensible as telephones were largely absent in working class households but he did run two surgeries per day, morning and afternoon. You simply turned up and sat on one of the hard wooden chairs and tried to be quiet if you were a child which was difficult if the wait was a particularly long one. If you were an adult you could speak to those around you if you so wished. There were no toys and books to amuse younger patients as would be usual these days. This would have been a forward thinking initiative had Outred been forward thinking enough to think of it but it was clear he regarded most of his child patients as future delinquents and was disinclined to provide benevolent diversions. Following the incident of the redistribution of pills I was involved in when I was too young to fully comprehend the consequences of what I was doing, he did not trust me one iota and I came to accept that. I can’t say I blame him and fortunately for me the said incident took place after he so valiantly saved my life and had it not done so I wonder about the outcome of that bout of pneumonia. I won’t go into all the unhappy details as the particular tale of woe has been fully documented elsewhere but it would never have happened had I not been left alone in the waiting room whilst my mother discussed something personal with him. As I had at the time an over developed sense of what was fair I simply wanted to make sure everyone got at least some of the brightly coloured pills that had been left for collection by the sick. It seemed grossly unjust to me that some people only got white ones. None of this reasoning went down well with our medical man.

In my defence, and although I don’t want to labour the point, things might not have progressed to the redistribution of medicines had our doctor gone in for providing one or two amusements for child patients. The only diversion he did have was a series of framed prints on the walls of the waiting room. British Birds of Prey! The Glorious Golden Eagle, Falcon in Flight, Common Buzzard Cruising, Descending Sparrowhawk and Hovering Kestrel. By the time I was seven years old I could confidently read the captions beneath each picture and my favourite was Falcon in Flight because the terrain below looked almost like local farmer, That Bastard Beaseley’s pea fields. According to my grandmother Farmer Beasely failed to pay the going rate when he hired pickers in early June and therefore could be viewed with disdain and spoken of with derision using any expletive you chose.

The London Road waiting room could only be described as functional, with a disparate collection of chairs jammed close together against three of the walls. There was a no longer wanted dining table in the middle of the room, highly polished but with only a vase of flowers in the centre and three ash trays around the edges. Mrs Outred was fond of flowers and grew a great many in her garden even in wartime when we all knew she should have switched to onions and carrots and she generally remembered to ring the changes with what was in the vase. Against the fourth wall was a tall, narrow side table and by late afternoon an array of jars and bottles sat on it carefully labelled for patients to collect. It was this table that had proved too enticing for me to ignore as a pre-school warrior for justice. So single minded had I been that I had to drag over an empty chair to climb on – a demanding task but the execution of it exhilarating.

There was no receptionist and as patients arrived they simply seated themselves where they felt comfortable and remembered who was in the queue before them. Mistakes were seldom made. As each consultation ended and the object of it hurried out into London Road with head down, a little brass bell on the wall above the tall, narrow side table tinkled and whoever was next in line headed along the short, dark corridor to the consulting room. If you were unsure of the direction or lost your way you could look on the wall where an arrow and a sign in what had once been gold lettering read – Consulting Room This Way.

The reason for the frequent seeking of medical attention for me once the NHS was well and truly up and running and there was no chance of money changing hands was because I had always been Delicate. I was also Highly Strung. I recall with clarity family and neighbours being advised that it was the doctor himself who had pronounced this which was in point of fact quite incorrect. It was apparently impossible to feed me which was at least partly true and had more to do with the end of strict wartime rationing than fragility of constitution. I had become happily accustomed to a plain fat-free wartime diet which by 1948 had morphed into a great many fried items and stews top heavy with mutton fat which was food that met with my father’s approval but was not entirely to my taste.

Usually sick children attended the morning surgery with their mothers or with their grandmothers if their mother was avant garde enough to still be working shifts at Henleys or Bowaters . Old Nan was definitely not the kind of grandparent who had ever been known to exhibit enough care and concern for a grandchild to accompany them on a doctor’s visit and in any case my own mother liked to be firmly in charge of health matters. She looked down on working women and called them Flighty because they were no better than they ought to have been and their minds were on silk stockings and lipsticks rather than their Poor Little Mites and some of them even Carried On with other women’s husbands down in Crete Hall Road after their shifts ended. It was their poor husbands she felt sorry for because they were likely to be working their fingers to the bone and might have bad backs to boot. And how were they being rewarded? That’s what she would like to know. She thanked the Lord that at least she had never been one known for Carrying On.

As for the late afternoon surgery, that was largely attended by sick adults such as Mary Newberry regularly bent over with abdominal pain that was the bane of her life every month as regular as clockwork and men with the kind of cough that never quite went away despite changing to Players’ Weights. At least half the patients smoked relentlessly to while away the lengthy waits for attention. From time to time a flurry of excitement would be caused when someone was brought in by a relative and clearly more in need of immediate medical help than those who waited patiently on the mismatched chairs. Then when the bell tinkled the person poised to rise from their place might virtuously announce in a voice intended for all to hear, that the sicker one should go ahead without delay on account of their need being greater. They were profusely thanked and the offer invariably taken up.

When this happened all the waiting women would sit up a little straighter and fold their arms and exchange glances one to another signaling disapproval. These pockets of malcontent were never directed towards he or she being rapidly ushered towards medical assistance, but rather they who had so charitably given up their place in the queue. General opinion dictated that the public spirited one should by rights take the turn of the sick newcomer and go to the end of the line. Nothing was actually said until the miscreant themselves headed towards the consulting room when a murmur of discontent would arise. It was all very well to give up your place, it was pointed out, but by rights you should then go right down the queue. When all was said and done there could be no argument. In fact there was no argument because one and all knew what was fair and those who did not perhaps entirely agree simply remained silent, sucked on the end of their Woodbines and stared into the middle distance.

The discontent triggered by this scenario was so predictable that it became uninteresting and I would rapidly turn my attention back to Birds of Prey and wonder if Hovering Kestrel was in fact preferable to Falcon in Flight. Years later my brother who was so drawn to all birds of prey whether or not they were British, said that he always enjoyed his visits to Outred’s waiting room even when suffering severe ear ache and revealed to me that his love affair with the Kestrel that had begun with the stuffed bird in a glass dome in Great Aunt Martha’s Station Road Parlour, was firmly established by the local doctor’s choice of waiting room wall decoration. Later still when I found myself charged with the care of the aggressive bird temporarily housed in the spare bedroom of his Chatham semi-detached, my mind strayed back to those Birds of Prey prints. I took comfort from the fact that had it been The Glorious Golden Eagle rather than Hovering Kestrel that ultimately met with the overall approval of my ever more fanatical sibling this period of guardianship might have been a great deal more challenging. But that of course is another story.

Eating Posh .......

Once I felt I had cracked the perennial problem of speaking as posh as possible, I was very keen on exploring any avenue that offered an opportunity to Eat Posh. As a child the only time I came anywhere close to upmarket food was at family weddings where cold ham or chicken was generally served with salads followed by pink blancmange and every flavor imaginable of jellies. Although this might seem remarkably mundane from where I now stand in the year 2020, back in 1949 it was fare that provoked a great deal of excitement in anyone under the age of fourteen hailing from the less salubrious streets of working class Northfleet and Gravesend. Family weddings were something we all looked forward to.

The only restaurant I had ever been taken to was very occasionally a branch of British Restaurants set up in WW2, where spam was served with mashed potatoes and split peas and also, most excitingly, dumplings with golden syrup. I remember one in Maidstone close to the cattle market with particular affection because we went there on two occasions. What we were doing at the cattle market remains a mystery but in the early 1940s Maidstone was a most desirable destination on the local green buses.

Years later as a pupil at Wombwell Hall my classmate Valerie Goldsack boasted of a trip to Cliftonville where her entire family lunched at The Lido and she had egg and chips for two shillings and ninepence. Even more excitingly her father had ham, egg and chips for four shillings and sixpence. When I told my mother she said it sounded like daylight robbery to her and that them seaside places were known for it. As our own seaside trips only ever occasioned bowls of cockles or whelks and fish and chips to eat on the beach I was very envious and urged Valerie to tell me what else was available on the Lido menu. She said something called scampi was being served also with chips but at seven shillings it was unlikely there were many takers. I wondered what scampi might be and was quite certain that she was as uninformed as myself so did not pursue the matter further but determined that at some future date I would try this clearly upmarket menu item. It was to be several years before this became possible.

By the time I left school early in 1956 Gravesend definitely had at least one Indian restaurant, a Chinese Takeaway, and what’s more either a Berni Inn or an Angus Steak House that flourished from within the Royal Clarendon Hotel. The latter was a destination I developed a great desire to visit. Both Vic and Peggy Troke who ran the corner shop in Shepherd Street, Northfleet and my ever more worldly cousin Margaret who was already considering abandoning her young husband in favour of an attractive alternative keen on dining out, had stories to tell about the various steaks available. There was Filet Mignon she told me, together with Prime Rump or T-bone and delicious saute potatoes that were available if you didn’t quite fancy chips. If you were seriously hungry you could opt for a starter such as soup or melon with Parma ham or even something called a prawn cocktail which sounded suspiciously like a drink. There were desserts such as apple pie, sorbets and meringues. Really sophisticated diners ordered half bottles of wine – Spanish Burgundy or Mateus Rose. This latter fact was detailed to me by Peggy Troke, who was only marginally surprised at my interest and was responsible for fanning the flames of my increasing desire. To make matters worse my cousin began to talk to me about an exorbitantly expensive dessert called Crepes Suzette upon which was apparently poured large quantities of brandy. Although I had no experience whatsoever of brandy it became ever harder to imagine never being in a position to at least try something made with copious quantities of it.

It was Mr Frank Blackburn whose filing and minor typing I was responsible for at Francis, Day & Hunter, 138 Charing Cross Road, who ultimately was to provide my very first experience of what I at any rate considered to be Fine Dining. I can no longer remember what actioned the momentous occasion but he was to take his secretary, Pat who was eighteen years old, typed all the really important letters and was engaged to someone called Lionel, and me out to lunch at Lyon’s Corner House at Tottenham Court Road. Pat told me this one Monday morning using her most important voice. With seating for two thousand the first Corner House had opened in nearby Coventry Street in 1909. It proved an enormous success providing a wide range of eating choices over four floors together with the opportunity to book theatre tickets, buy flowers and chocolates and make telephone calls. A mere hop, skip and a jump from Piccadilly Circus the exciting new venture certainly attracted large numbers of theatre goers and decades later was a magnet for young office workers such as myself except I had not as yet gathered together enough courage to enter such a place. I don’t know when the Tottenham Court Road Corner House had opened and until the point of the proposed lunchtime visit had of course only admired the building from the outside. However, Pat was certainly knowledgeable about it because on the occasion of their engagement Lionel had taken her there as a very special treat and had presented her with the all important Ring over coffee and after dinner mints. Disappointingly when I asked her what eating choices had preceded the mints she said she couldn’t remember.

Mr Blackburn booked a table for one o`clock on the top floor at the most prestigious restaurant choice, the one with a rather exotic name that I no longer remember, and a string quartet on Fridays and Saturdays though not at lunchtime. I had been in a state of some excitement for three days and wore my best black felt skirt adorned with applique butterflies and a pale blue orlon twinset. I sat in excited anticipation at what was to come, admiring the lines of white linen napkins and heavy silver. This was most definitely taking part in the High Life! We were given glossy white menu cards imprinted with gold and red lettering offering a range of breathtakingly exciting fare. Most of the dishes were a complete mystery to me and so considering Pat to be an expert I waited to see what she would choose.

After a great deal of consideration she finally said she would have melon with Parma ham followed by a Filet Mignon with saute potatoes and a garden salad so after a regretful glance at other items on offer that might have been quite delicious had I been courageous enough to order them I decided to have the same. Mr Blackburn chose soup followed by a chicken dish of some kind. Rather disappointingly we were not offered wine but were able to have pineapple juice whilst Mr Blackburn drank beer. I was of course still extremely nervous but the only hiccup came when I mistook granules of ginger for brown sugar rather spoiling the melon because I had sprinkled it liberally over the plate. I then had no alternative but to pretend that I always liked to eat melon that way and in fact I think I said that when my mother served it that’s what we always did. It was disgusting and definitely difficult to consume. I noticed our employer giving me sympathetic looks as I determinedly swallowed one adulterated spoonful after another. However, the only thing that was daunting about the steak that followed was that I was asked how I wanted it cooked and whilst I was contemplating this odd question Pat said she wanted hers medium so I said I would have mine the same.

Apart from the shaky start with the melon it turned out to be quite the most exciting meal of my teenage life and I had quite decided that before we reached the stage of ordering sherry trifle from the very impressive dessert trolley. It had not been totally without anxiety though and I was most definitely still completely over-awed by my surroundings and impressed with the ease with which other diners seemed to order items from the menu, clearly without any underlying fear of being unmasked as working class aspirants. If only I could reach those dizzy heights myself! Just imagine how it would feel to be completely confident in such a situation.

That Friday lunchtime visit to the top floor of Lyons Corner House was a culinary watershed moment for me and I became ever more determined to Eat Posh as frequently as was humanly possible in the future hopefully starting with the Grill Room at the Clarendon Hotel close to home in Gravesend where neighbours might hear about it and be impressed at my rise through the lower classes. It was to be some time before that ideal was realized and in the interim I discovered to my horror that a large number of restaurants describing themselves as offering High Class Dining , tendered their menus only in French which made me wish that I had paid a great deal more attention to Miss S Smith’s classes at Wombwell Hall. In some despair I eventually resorted to the local library to try to discover how to recognize the more frequently appearing staples of French dining and commit them to memory. The librarian wanted to issue me with a book called French Cooking for Beginners and gave me an odd look when I tried in some discomfiture to explain my actual dilemma. She used a slow pace when she spoke to me. So I wanted a book about menus in French offered by restaurants I had not as yet been invited to dine at? She would like to help but it appeared I would need to be much more specific.

The next snag I was to encounter was not the actual language of Posh Eating but hunting down those who might be persuaded to indulge what I hoped was to become my key hobby for the foreseeable future. Eating Posh did not come cheaply. Clearly young men of my own age and background were quite out of the question for obvious reasons and so I gravitated to the atypical and anomalous. This meant that much coveted restaurant meals were not always a comfortable experience. I had moved on from Francis, Day & Hunter via Lawrence Wright Music, David Toff Music, and a recording studio in Bond Street where I was hoping to meet the rich and famous but it wasn’t until I found myself typing in the basement of Pye Records for a man with a vicious tongue called Bernie that an actual employer was cajoled into using his expense account to lunch out with me. Bernie said that if he did so this should be at his favourite little restaurant in Frith Street, Soho where he was well known and where the food was divine and where a sommelier advised on the choice of wine. No, he said, he most definitely did not want to go to the grill at the top of Lyons Corner House either in Tottenham Court Road or Coventry Street – only the gastronomically challenged would consider such a thing . Wary of his underlying spitefulness I hesitated only for a fraction of a second before of course enthusiastically agreeing.

Bernie was of course a gourmet of the most exasperating kind and he took a great deal of pleasure in humiliating me as much as possible and referring to me as the rather gauche little girl who did his typing. Even the over attentive waiter began to look rather disapprovingly at him and gave me a wink. I won’t go into all the humiliating details but later Bernie accused me of having a steak and chips mentality which although I realized was part of his particular brand of sadism I did not completely understand. It all had to do with the fact that he ordered something called Coquille Saint-Jacques and urged me to do the same. I was reluctant only because I had no idea what the dish comprised of and was too embarrassed to say so and so instead I opted for Steak Frites. As I was still at the stage where I viewed a piece of steak as an enormous treat it was a shock to realise that there were those who saw my choice rather as I might view chicken nuggets today. Bernie lost no time at all in commenting disparagingly on my unfortunate lunch choice with the waiter but also an hour or two later with all and sundry keen to listen at Pye Records. Fortunately only an elderly woman from the Copyright Department paused by his desk to agree with him because his favourite restaurant was also one she favoured. The positive aspect of all this was that I learned not only how to order and eat scallops but later how to cook them which might have pleased the Northfleet librarian.
Over several years of sharpening and honing all the attributes necessary for Posh Eating and of necessity dealing with the needs and expectations of a great many unusual dining companions, I gained a degree of valuable experience. Elderly American tourists recently widowed who were on the Trip of a Lifetime were often to be found wandering The Strand and Fleet Street and always eager for conversation and a break from dinner at The Savoy. The recently bereaved were never in any way sexual predators and merely grateful for a dinner companion I came to realise and therefore only too keen to be directed to Rules in Maiden Lane or Kettners in Soho or whichever establishment happened to be my current obsession. Dating men in their sixties and seventies meant that I was exposed to a decidedly different style of conversation and learned how to listen attentively. Asking questions about their grandchildren and the career they had recently retired from meant that generally they did most of the talking.

I did not of course confine myself to the geriatric because the inhabitants of bedsitter land in South Kensington also provided a hunting ground. Young men from the Middle East who all seemed to be studying at the London School of Economics were definitely not hard up in the sense that other Londoners were at that time, and luckily for me they were bored and anxious to find English girl friends. Although their eating habits were largely confined to that which they found familiar, some of them were also keen to try pastures new and accompany me to various of my favourite haunts in the West End. Of course they had a keener interest in sex than the elderly tourists and that was something I had to develop tactics for dealing with when I found their attentions overwhelming.

It would be true to say that with a certain amount of grim determination, over a five year period I was indeed able to achieve the aspiration of getting to grips with Posh Eating first anticipated whilst still a child. Of course there were hazards and pitfalls along the way and a great many mistakes made. Progressing to working in a series of nightclubs during my twenties then helped a great deal particularly when it came to assessing the qualities of various champagne houses and the joys of oysters and caviar. Nightclubs at that time leaned towards the most expensive gastronomic treats. And all the experience gained meant that once I had children and of necessity turned my full attention to cooking I became a most enthusiastic cook and consequently their diet was not nearly as mundane as my own had been at a similar age. I am not sure, however, that they were ever completely aware of this fact.

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.