It’s been a while. But there’s something in the air. An email from my friend the huntress, asking if I’m going to Zambia this year.
Who knows?
But in my head – now there’s a different matter.
Time for a journey. I’m stepping back to 2006, journeying to a natural wonder and archaeological site that might, one day soon, be a World Heritage site.
Kalambo Falls here we come.
Tired people sit in over-sized winged armchairs, faces blank, all vitality sapped as they wait in this state of limbo.
Some stare at the silhouette of a fireplace, a clock, a picture. But all these images are unreal. Like a 20th century vision of the human colonisation of space. Reminders of home, illuminated in greyness around a flaming electric ‘fire’.
In the library, few books have been taken from the shelves, most people are tapping on laptops or tablets, scrolling through phone messages.
A woman takes her seat at the concert piano. She begins with Mozart – or is it?
Never mind, it doesn’t matter.
Now she’s slipped into something I really can’t identify but which puts me in mind of Donnie Darko.
Appropriate for this surreal environment.
People walk by without even noticing. Most people. Not all. The ones who’ve noticed that she’s real, that the music is real, sit to listen, or stand and gaze in amazement.
She’s still playing as we tear ourselves away.
A small lift carries us up to a smoky glass box. Through the door (or is it behind the looking glass?) we pass into an art gallery in miniature, a micro-museum. The walls are hung with paintings. A white architectural model sits in this tiny twilit world like an apparition, the ghost of a building.
A feeling of timelessness and calm descends upon me. It’s utterly at odds with the bustling scene just metres away – let alone what’s going on outside the walls of the massive structure that surrounds us.
But fatigue soon washes over me, again. My body says it’s time for a cup of tea. A restorative chunk of Dutch apple pie.
We perch on huge wooden chairs at a gigantic table, swinging our dangling feet like children.
A vast cup and saucer dominates the corner, big enough to drown a host of dormice. But there’s no mad hatter. No tea party. No white rabbit with a watch, running late – though the occasional sprinting person with a trolley reminds us we are, after all, in an airport.
It’s a special place for me, Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam. Evokes all sorts of feelings. Happy and sad. Eager and reluctant. Anxious – and even reassuring.
An amazing place now, it’s always been that bit different. Tulip bulbs and smoked eel. Delft blue china and wooden clogs. Sweet or salty liquorice – you love it or loathe it. And in my case try not to eat too much.
Many years ago, when I left the UK, in the depth of winter, to live in Hilversum, I also left behind my partner in a new, exciting relationship. I’d written – ruthlessly, I suppose – to the longstanding man who’d gone to work in Saudi Arabia. The full force of his misery had yet to hit home, make me feel bad, I was too busy revelling in the new to be unduly concerned.
Oh, yes, I was wrapped up in a man who loved jazz.
Who had a car. A place in Chelsea. A well paid job. And who was, despite all that, an ‘ologist’.
A hydrologist who’d worked in Ethiopia, then he was working on the Thames Barrier.
I’d known him since university. We’d played hopeless tennis together at the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, gone to smoky gigs at a noisy London pub.
Then one night, sitting in another pub, a quiet pub, the magnetism overcame us both.
Soon we were doing more romantic things.
A picnic breakfast on one of the old wooden dockland piers that used to stick out into the Thames. Shades of Sherlock Holmes and opium dens, Oliver Twist and Dickens. A world now gone, brushed clean by the towers of avarice, by the desirable homes of the wealthy, hidden behind security fences.
So – I boarded the plane at Heathrow with much trepidation.
I’d taken the job by default, really. A job in Paris had fallen through and I’d become used to the idea of working abroad, so when the folk at Philips invited me to join them, I was both flattered and relieved.
But by the time it came to move, to cross that small expanse of water, I was head over heels – I thought – in love.
We talked about the future. One of us might move. But for the time being he would visit very soon.
It felt just about tolerable.
And then I was there, alone.
January in The Netherlands.
Cold. So very, very cold.
For weeks, before my belongings arrived, I wore the same two outfits. Walked to work through the snow in high-heeled cowboy-style boots that rubbed my ankles. My tights turned orange where the snow soaked through the leather.
But never mind my walk to work – where’s this going?
It was meant to be a short piece about an airport. About its pivotal place in my journeying – to my parents, to ‘my’ hydrologist, to Philips’ worldwide offices.
And perhaps I will write a bit more about that time in my life. Later.
But perhaps not. Maybe I’ll just let sleeping memories lie.
She’s still playing, the woman at the piano.
All around her prostrate forms lie slumbering. Waiting.
Passing time.
As if they have a choice.
Time will pass, whatever we do. But that’s not always a bad thing, is it?
It takes time to learn.
I’m lying in bed, before sunrise, looking at the trees. Not a tremor, not a shiver, not a flutter.
No wind.
No rain.
Amazing.
An hour later the sun’s shining, the sky’s blue, the world’s a happy place – and did I say, it’s Monday? Not my favourite day, but this one? So far the auguries are good.
I dress with a little more care than usual. Find an old velvet jacket in the cupboard. It’s the kind of event you don’t have to dress up for, but it’s special and the velvet makes me feel I’ve done my bit.
Southport, my destination, is a place of contrasts.
I suppose all once-grand British seaside resorts have suffered similar fates. But here, perhaps, the contrasts have more jagged edges.
The elegance of Lord Street, its shops and civic buildings, jarring with the bland, insipid boxes by the seafront – a cinema, fast food and big, bargain shops.
Napoleon (the third of that name) once lived in Southport. It was wide, leafy Lord Street that inspired him – we are told – to design the boulevards of Paris.
I doubt he’d recreate her seafront architecture in any place he cared about today. But it has a pretty pier, worth a walk, or a ride, to visit the penny arcade in the glassy new café.
Today, though, I’m on my way to Lord Street. Not the filigree-ironwork-shaded shop-side, but the grand, public building side.
The venue is The Atkinson, a newly refurbished council building housing a gallery, library and ‘performance spaces’.
I’m waiting in the café for my friend Norma. Not named after Bellini’s operatic heroine – though she does sing in a choir. And arrives resplendent in a dramatic shade of purple.
Hunger has flipped the sensible switch in my head. My knife’s just breached the crust of a rather beautiful pork pie, topped with apricots, when Ron, Becca, Tom and Dominic – the reason we’re here – arrive.
They’re the Abramski Trio – well, except for Dominic. He’s volunteered to turn the pages for Ron Abramski, the pianist of the group. (No, this isn’t the four-part trio, patience …)
It’s an unusual combination of instruments. At least I think it is. Becca – the other Abramski, is a bassoonist, Tom (a Verity, not an Abramski) plays the clarinet.
And Becca, I have discovered, has a hidden talent.
She’s a bit of an engineer.
A dedicated bassoonist’s ‘factory’
In her office, it looks as if gnomes have been at work. Bespoke engineering equipment, on a miniature scale, sits on most available surfaces. All designed to help her make the best ‘reeds’ for her bassoon.
From these…
Except – they’re not reeds.
They’re bits of bamboo.
Shelves line the wall, stacked with plastic boxes full of honey-coloured tubes waiting to be split, honed and turned inside out.
… to these
And it’s these little engineered components that enable her to create the sublime, chocolatey tones we’re hearing today. Rich, Swiss, milk chocolatey tones.
But the music’s not Swiss. We’re hearing a four-part trio (in G Minor) by a British man called Hurlstone, who died before he’d found enough fame to make it a familiar name.
One part of the work was lost. Hence the ‘trio’. Now it’s found, there’s a rumour that it vanished because the piano part was so difficult to play.
No kidding.
‘His hands!’ exclaims Norma.
It’s hard to take your eyes off them as they race across the keys.
But my eyes flit from musician to musician.
So much to watch.
It’s like French skipping – you know, where two people turn a rope in each hand and the skipper has to jump between them as they interact. Nothing happens without all of them working together, to time and in concert.
But what about the dumplings? That’s what you really want to know, isn’t it?
Well, that’s down to Mendelssohn.
Tom, in whose hands the clarinet brings forth notes that dance like a young tree in the wind, tells us how Mendelssohn’s love of dumplings inspired the piece we’re about to hear.
The composer knew two clarinettists, a father and son by the name of Baermann. Like Becca, they had a hidden talent. They were master dumpling makers.
Dumplings flipped the sensible switch in Mendelssohn’s head. He swapped Concert Piece No 2 in D Minor for a fine – we hope – batch of dumplings.
And possibly strudel.
And, how’s this for a coincidence?
Becca’s not the only Abramski with a hidden talent.
Ron’s chicken soup with dumplings is, or so he claims, the best.
He also makes strudel.
Appropriate for a lunchtime concert, all this talk of food.
But the music is what we’re here for, and it doesn’t disappoint.
Three unfamiliar (to me) enjoyable works.
Three lovely, talented artists.
An appreciative crowd of people – and still no rain.
One happy Monday.
It was a biscuit that did it. Reminded me, of my ‘gap’ year, Yorkshire style.
Anachronistic to call it a ‘gap’ year, really, the term hadn’t yet been coined. Most folks going to university went straight there – unless they were sitting entrance exams for Oxford and Cambridge. You could sit them in late autumn, when the final school exams were a painful memory, if you wanted. String out the ‘now turn over your papers’ torture.
I did.
So, from late December I had a ‘gap ten-months’. Free – to do what?
Fashion drove me. I wanted clothes – lots of clothes. Brown, with touches of cream and orange. And platform heels, of course.
But to fuel my fashion appetite I needed money. Which meant finding a job.
Where better than a department store?
Brown Muffs of Bradford. Smart, carpeted and calm. Except at Christmas. In the gift wrapping department.
My days were soon spent wrapping boxes in various qualities (and prices) of paper. Folding sticky tape to make it invisible. Creating complicated bows, each one colouring my tongue an unhealthy shade. (The ribbon stuck to itself when wet – so of course we licked it.)
The only gift I remember was a thermometer bought by an old lady. I felt sad. What would the recipient think? Why did she spend money having it wrapped?
Steep, narrow, staff stairs led up the back of the building to our café. In my Scholls wooden sandals I perfected the tip-toe clatter up, the toe-clutch down. I lost weight and gained an admirer. A shop-worker by day, he was a poet by night – a good one, I thought. But then, I was flattered.
It came to an end with Christmas.
So, new year, new job. ‘Relief assistant housemother’ in children’s homes.
I loved it.
Most homes were run by lone women, ‘aunties,’ all of us. I had no training. At one home where I was a frequent relief, so to speak, the housemother (top aunt) was a wrestling fan. One time she left me in charge all night.
I was a tad worried. After all we had a bed wetter, a fire starter and a habitual liar. But we survived. And my mum came round and sat with me till bedtime.
But underlying the many joys was a deep vein of sadness.
The dad who visited and brought his little boy cheap – horrible – sweets the boy pretended to like.
Three gypsy children – one prone to fits. Their parents left behind fleas behind when they came calling.
And worst of all, the people who came to ‘view’ children for possible adoption.
One girl had a cute little brother who sang popular songs and danced. She had a snotty nose and nits. Wore ugly National Health Service glasses. She was lovely, but people only wanted her cute little brother. I can still hear her sad voice:
‘Why doesn’t anyone want me, aunty?’
It was when that job came to an end that I resorted to blood, a memory revived by a tin of Fox’s biscuits.
Instantly I was skipping in the school playground.
‘Fox’s biscuits are the best,
they are easy … to … di … gest!’
The Fox’s factory was – is – in Batley, Yorkshire.
Batley was arguably rather grim in those days. An array of factories puffing out soot – and who knows what else.
Eartha Kitt reputedly loved Batley so much she bought a place there – I doubt that’s true. But they did show her on TV – along with the tripe and vinegar stall at the market.
Why was she in Batley? The famous Batley Variety Club, of course.
Somehow this back-of-beyond cabaret venue pulled in mega stars like Louis Armstrong and Shirley Bassey.
I saw the Supremes (OK, it was just after Diana Ross left). The Four Tops stood behind me, one of them leant on my chair – swoon!
But I’m digressing.
One of my school-friends who lived in Batley suggested I found a job in a factory.
Now, Fox’s was the crème de la custard cream of Batley factory world. But if you left it too late, as summer came around, you’d end up at Howard Lloyd’s. And I’m always late for everything.
You couldn’t be late for the factory.
I caught the bus to work, early, pink nylon overall in my bag, wearing old jeans and sensible shoes.
I learnt to stick my card in the clocking-in machine. Learnt to rush from my seat the instant the claxon sounded. Learnt not to answer-back the charge hand, Betty.
‘Pack yer tubes!’ she’d yell, her head clustered with small rollers under a dark brown hairnet.
In those days ladies’ lavs had incinerators for ‘sanitary towels’. One day it was struck by lightning. Left smouldering more than usual. Overflowing as usual.
Every break-time a trolley came out laden with white bread spread with dripping – not a taste I acquired, for reasons you’ll soon understand.
Because it was the ‘blood days’ that did for me.
Ox blood.
Condensed.
Pouring from the ceiling in a pipe.
The blood went into a barrel, then into bottles. The tops were put on by hand and tightened by a machine. They broke if they went on askew – and then the belt would stop.
‘Cath!’ (aka ‘Smelly Cath’) ‘Wipe the belt.’
Betty had a voice like an angry bull, when she wanted.
If we didn’t do the bottles quickly enough the blood barrel would overflow and whoever was fitting caps would end up standing in it.
In a frothy pool of congealing blood. Dark, sticky, unhealthy-looking Dr Hommel’s Haematogen.
It smelt disgusting. People took it by the spoonful, if you believed the label.
On the bus home I imagined people were staring at me. Not because they knew the dark stains on my Hush Puppies (standing all day) were blood, but because I smelt of it.
It wasn’t my imagination. A (punctual) friend working in Fox’s told me that on our ‘blood days’ the fans would be turned off to keep the taste of the smell out of the biscuits.
Fox’s biscuits.
Very easy to digest.
Especially the jammy dodgers.
A jammy dodger
Mmm.
Just don’t think about the frothy, dark-red blood congealed in a pool on the floor.
You may not have seen them, the boils.
It began – or feels like it did – with a mild rash of urban acne. The march of the bookies down our high streets and low streets.
Gambling dens, breeding like rabbits. One of Tony Blair’s finer achievements. Up there with 24 hour drinking and the war in Iraq.
Yes, it grieves me to say it, but hard-working and hard-shirking men (mostly men) have a Labour government to thank for the fact that they can spend more time on a Sunday betting than shopping for food in a big supermarket.
I’m sure the wives and kids at home are grateful. Gets him out the house, even if he does spend all their money.
But – hey – what’s this – a payday loan shop? Great – that’s the cash flow sorted then, no need to worry.
He can keep on betting till he wins it back.
And mum can shop in Poundland till that ship comes in.
But what if it doesn’t?
Friday night she goes through their clothes, weighing them up.
Which are heaviest? She’ll get more for those. Never mind that it’s winter, she’ll find a way to top up the meter.
They can wrap up in the duvet while they watch TV. Or she can send the kids round their nan’s, or that friend of theirs whose dad has a job on the rigs. They’re always flush.
But, back to the clothes. Bring in a bin-bag full of cast-offs, get five quid from shops like Cash 4 Clothes (which helps prevent waste and save the planet, their website says).
Boils.
Big, bold excrescences on our streets.
Handy, though.
But what happens when mum – or nan, or granddad – runs out of clothes? Runs out of food?
Well, there are food banks, aren’t there? But woe-betide if your bloke drives you there – how can he afford a car? And petrol?
Scrounging scum!
Never mind he has a night job doing security, in an industrial wasteland, so he has to drive, can’t get there by bus after seven.
Now, I may be exaggerating. I may not know what I’m talking about, but it doesn’t really matter. I’m not paid for this, I don’t have to fact-check and I’m not slandering or libelling as far as I can see.
But I have to write this and I have to write it now.
Because what’s really bugging me is that I’ve started becoming used to things.
To Cash 4 clothes and their ilk.
To cars parked entirely on the footpath while old folks with walking frames and mums with prams struggle past.
Used to the idea that we have food banks.
To the idea that a Labour government brought us those great, wonderful, improving opportunities of drinking all night and gambling all week.
And worst of all, even more worrying, because it means there’s no Utopia, no get-out clause, no rosy future down the lane, I’m becoming used to there being no party I want to vote for, any more.
Labour’s sold its soul, the Tories are still at Eton, debating whether there are such things – and the Lib Dems, well, it depends what you mean by soul.
And none of the others count, IMHO. Except maybe the Greens – there’s a real Utopian vision, but my vote for them wouldn’t make any kind of difference, not in this constituency.
You know, I’d like to think there was a time when politics was about strongly held beliefs. That the men – and the few women – who governed us wanted to make things better.
But now, if it’s unpopular with a focus group no-one will touch it with a barge pole.
Need more money in the health service? Crikey, don’t suggest we pay more! Especially not people who can afford it. They’ve got enough on their plate what with private healthcare and private education and digging out the basements of their London terraces for that extra room they need.
Not enough money in the public purse? What’s that? Tax big businesses? Splutter! They’re the last folk you should target. Mustn’t upset the global cash machines that hold the City to ransom. Keep London unaffordable.
But we do need to save money, so why don’t we shut the libraries? Target people who can’t fight back, like immigrants (not the ones who clean those cramped London terraces, naturally). Tax folk who have a spare bedroom. Get cancer sufferers off benefits – they’ll be dead before they get the paperwork sorted anyway.
Talking of dying, let’s dig the dirt on anything NHS. Find enough horror stories so everyone will just shrug and let us get on with ruining it – selling it off to AnythingforMoney Corporation so we can pay them ever more to use what once was ours.
And while we’re at it, let’s make the NHS run itself ragged trying to compete in the ‘marketplace’. We know they’re mired in the ditch of higher standards, can’t begin to compete on the playing fields where commercial firms kick around our public services.
Aargh!
There’s no way out, as far as I can see, unless some great disaster strikes the world and we come to our senses, re-find some principles.
Unless all the rich, greedy people are found out, do something so disastrous that we recognise our folly in letting them take our money and run.
Whip them to within an inch of their lives.
Not really, that last thing. But fine them, send them to jail, reform the banking system.
Oops, did I say banking? Sorry.
We haven’t done any of that.
So I’m feeling a little bit hopeless.
But – one more thing before I take my tranquilisers.
Those clothes. The cash-4 ones. Do you know where they end up?
Well, if it’s anything like the charity shops, the clothes that are left after the moderately good ones are sold here, the ones no self-respecting, poor British person would buy second-hand might end up in places like Zambia. Squalid heaps of cheap tops, worn trousers and crumpled shirts in nasty synthetic fabrics where once there was a neat row of distinctively African cotton fabrics and a sewing machine.
Their native cotton industry has been decimated by our cheap cast off trash. I mean decimated. Ruined.
Oh boy, I hope it’s a nice, calm, sunny day tomorrow. I can’t take much more of this.
[*See my last post for a link to the Stephen Collins cartoon that introduced me to Liam. I hope to return to normal soon.]
You’d never think it was winter. Windy, yes, but not exactly freezing. And so many golfers out today. Wearing black. Littering the landscape like crows on a field.
And here, inside our tree-house, our weekend-golfer-viewing gallery, it’s cosy, warm and toasty.
Still a revelation, in so many ways, being warm.
The bath ‘crème’ (from an upmarket chain’s basic range, hence the correct French accent, making that spelling just about bearable) pours. No really. It never used to in our old house. You had to squeeze it till blobs plopped out and then whisk the soapy gobbets with your hands till they dissolved.
All sorts of things are easier here.
It’s quiet.
Despite the ebb and flow of hundreds of schoolboys each weekday, it’s leaves that accumulate in our front garden – not the crisp packets and sweet wrappers of yester-house.
My office doesn’t look out over aesthetically challenging metal flues poking out of sad Victorian roofs.
Saturday morning no longer begins with a survey of polystyrene chip-trays dumped overnight.
And there are no kids at the back kicking industrial quantities of footballs over the fence.
But.
Today I have been startled out of my comfortable chair.
I saw myself in a cartoon in a national paper. By Stephen Collins. He’s changed my appearance to protect my identity – but I know it’s me.
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/cartoon/2014/jan/25/2
Last week I wrote a very angry post. You didn’t see it? Well, that’s because I didn’t post it. I lost my enthusiasm for it. Not in a good way, in a – meh – so what – can’t be bothered – kind of way.
So, I thought, best ask Liam to have a go at it.
I have a feeling it will be popping up here, really, quite soon …
MEMOIRS OF A HUSK 