My Dad drove a lorry, he knew all the best places to get a good dinner, in East London and far flung places like Luton or Watford. “The best coffee shop is in Fairfield road” he’d say, “the plain and syrup is the best.”
He often took me with him, I loved going in his lorry and the places we stopped at for our dinner in the middle of the day were all ‘coffee shops’. The one thing they had in common were big portions of home made food followed by a big mug of tea. If coffee was on the menu I never saw it served.
Another day out was getting a bus to the ‘other end’ we, my pals and I, got off at Oxford street and went into all the big stores to play on the escalators, I particularly liked Bourne & Hollingsworth but my favourite was Gamages, the poor mans Selfridges It was known as but the Sports department was full of stuff that I could only dream of, new football boots, shirts, punch balls, boxing gloves, table tennis bats and tables, cricket balls, games, none of which I could afford even if one had clothing coupons. Then down to the basement to look at the pedigree puppies, rabbits, kittens, parrots and even snakes.
Once a week I’d take the household bag wash to a laundry near Roman road, while by the market I’d get my Mum’s shopping, mainly potatoes and greens. It was all right taking the bag wash because it was dry but when I collected it was soaking wet and twice as heavy, to add to the misery the kitchen, as we called our main living room, was festooned with damp washing making the air damp to breathe.
At times like this I would escape to the library down Wick lane, this was my sanctuary; a blessed place nearly always empty, lots of dark wooden surfaces and brass fittings all highly polished and gleaming, always hushed a place where no one raised their voices above a whisper. For me it was treasure beyond compare; Percy Westerman and his adventure books, Capt. A.E. Johns and ‘Biggles’, R.M.Ballantyne and ‘Coral Island’ Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Treasure Island’ and ‘Kidnapped’ books about Public schools where the boys boarded and had midnight feasts out of hampers filled with plum cakes and potted tongue which I’d never had but longed to, these schools had heroic captains who were always hitting the winning six or scoring the victorious try and who ultimately triumphed over the vicious bully, how I longed for my lorry driver dad to send me to one of these schools. Best of all was ‘William’, William Brown. I couldn’t get enough; William the Outlaw, William the Good, William the Conqueror, Just William every week I’d find another one and when they finally ran out I would sneak into the adult section and take a book by Richmal Crompton only to be disappointed that it was a silly romance. But William meeting with his trusty outlaws Ginger, Henry and Douglas in the ‘Old Barn’ was who I wanted to be, it didn’t matter or I didn’t notice that all my heroes were upper or middle class and I was just a slum boy in a little tiny house in a little tiny street in Bow.
Comics were another love of mine, the Dandy, Beano and Film Fun all made me laugh when I was very little but as I got older I preferred ‘Boys books’ they had lots of text and fewer pictures than ordinary comics, the Hotspur, Wizard, Adventure, Rover, Champion all featuring heroes like Strang the Terrible, Morgan the Mighty, Rockfist Rogan, Wilson the greatest Athlete that ever lived, the Wolf of Kabul who slaughtered Pathan tribesmen by the dozen with his cricket bat, the boys of ‘Red Circle’ public school featuring school captain ’Cripple Dick Archer’ and a horrible house master Mr Smugg who suffered with corns and was always in a temper with his cane at the ready.
Similar hero to those boys books legends was the wireless’s Dick Barton whose unlikely adventures with his sidekicks Snowy and Jock were broadcast every evening, other unmissable programmes were ‘Happidrome’ on a Saturday night starring ‘Ramsbottom, Enoch and Mr Lovejoy’ or ‘Appointment with Fear’ starring Valentine Dyall as the ‘Man in Black’. Listening to that while your Mum and Dad was down the pub on a Saturday night could be an unnerving experience and could haunt your dreams until the next episode which would be even more frightening.
Saturday morning pictures was so anticipated, a serial, cartoons, a comedy short and a film. The serials were varied and the cliff-hanger always so exciting you daren’t miss the next episode, ‘Deadwood Dick’, the ‘Queen of the Jungle’, ‘Flash Gordon’, and most scary ‘The Clutching Hand’. But the joy, the sheer joy when to an almighty and thunderous cheering that has never been surpassed the ‘Three Stooges’ came on. Oh I used to think heaven would be a place that was spent watching “Larry’, ‘Curly’ & ‘Mo’ all day.
All the things we used to do are not an option today, none of it exists,playing football, cricket and games like ‘high Jimmy Nacker’ in traffic free streets, climbing on the roofs of bombed and blasted houses, risking our lives walking along the narrow parapets of the roof tops, live cables coming out of the ground that would flash and emit a noise when hit with a stick, we had sense enough to make sure the stick was wood and not a metal railing; but it wasn’t all good there was kids that died while swimming in the cut and the locks, being told of whole families dying in the bomb wreckage of houses where we were busy looking for shrapnel for our collections; carrying bedding to the shelters night after night listening to the bombs raining down and later the doodlebugs and rockets, carrying the bedding back to the house soon after dawn and being relieved that the house was still there; holes in socks, brown paper and cardboard in shoes, patches on trousers,hankerchiefs made of rag, looking with longing at dummy bars of chocolate in empty sweetshop windows; sadistic teachers who caned so hard as if trying to break your fingers. Playing truant and then wishing one hadn’t after spending miserable weeks filling in time and hiding over Victoria Park, starting off from home as usual, dinner money in hand pretending to go to school and then killing time hoping to meet other kids that were playing truant but one never did.
Taking the accumul;ator to be recharged for the wireless, being careful not to spill the acid on fingers or clothes.
Getting older and working in a dead end job for thirty bob a week, giving Mum ten bob but she giving most of it back to help with fares on the buses going to Aldgate on a long nine hour, five and half day week, and for the shilling dinner in the canteen.
On long summer evenings there was consolations, going to the ‘Wilderness’ at Eton Manor Boys club practising cricket at the nets, diving into the ‘splash’ the tiny swimming pool where boys were not allowed to wear swimming costumes as they swam under the benign gaze of the Honourable Charles Villiers, the old Etonian who founded the club.
Going dancing at the bandstand in the park, completely free and with top dance bands. everyone dancing but some ‘jiving’ with American soldiers in the corner.
Laying in bed till late on a Sunday and then going ‘down the lane’ and meeting all your mates at ‘Solly’s’ record stall in Wentworth street before buying Beigels and pickled herring to take home for Sunday tea.
Every generation pines and looks longingly at their past but no generation has lost so much of the past so quickly and in the space of a lifetime all the traditions and pleasures of youth have disappeared. Like the trams and trolley buses we let things go too quickly, all that is good in the world is disappearing and no one knows what to do.
Future generations will have plenty of history to look at if the world continues to exist and I don’t think they will be very grateful for what we have preserved for them, I hope they can forgive us but I doubt it.
Friday, 16 May 2008
Thursday, 1 May 2008
Camera Shy
Nothing is so boring now as when people get their cameras or videos out (probably disguised as phones). This generation is the most photographed and filmed of any since the world began. There is in everybody's household a plethora, a Mount Everest of photos and film. Every biscuit tin or old shoe box is filled to the brim with photos.
Albums, those lovely thick leathery book like containers for pictures so lovingly compiled by a previous generation, all the family holidays and events tagged with witty, carefully crafted lines such as “Matthew and Andrew look for crabs” under a picture of the two children with fishing nets over their shoulders, the special nights at a restaurant celebrating a birthday, all holding drinks in the air imagining being so original like being in a night club in Hollywood. The big white wedding albums that the photographer would charge a fortune for and all the guest at the wedding would feel obliged to fork out for something they’d only look at once especially if it was only a distant cousin that had got married. All those pictures that one dreaded being brought out when one visited, those hard to suppress yawns while wondering how quickly it could be suggested that one went home. All these have been abandoned, just snap and look instantly at someone's phone, another reason to groan inwardly.
The class and area I was born into took very few photos. If someone in the family was lucky enough to own a Brownie, which was the only camera most of us had ever heard of, there was some taken but film was expensive and, in wartime, hard to come by. The weather had to be right, the sun shining on the photographers back, his hand had to be steady, the posers had to be still with fixed smiles on their faces, no such thing as action or natural photos but maybe just as natural as today's photos when everyone acts as though they are in a sitcom on television and poses accordingly.
There was of course the professionals. Our local one was someone called Griffin, they had a shop in Armagh Road in Bow and everyone I knew, not only my family but in the street or at school had their photos done at Griffins. I’m sitting with a big book called ‘Teddy Bear” dressed in my best clothes aged about six. Kenny my younger brother his hair all curly and long like a girls had a similar one but he was only about three. Many years later my sister, had a carefully crafted picture taken with her friend Joan in which they look like two carefully made up starlets from the J Arthur Rank film school of charm.
We are all blasé now. Fatigued by photos. We wave away in mock horror those that want to take our image, we know what we look like and, in some ways worse, what we sound like. There’s no illusions left, we can no longer imagine we look like Margaret Lockwood or Phyllis Calvert, James Mason or Stewart Granger, there’s no Clark Gables or Hedy Lamarrs hiding amongst us, our dreams have been shattered because we’ve all been caught ‘au naturel’ as we really look.
Its sad though, as we ever hurtle faster and faster into modernity everything we gain costs us. So many little pleasures gone. Looking at old photos of the past was something we took for granted and with close families it was always pleasant to be reminded of some of the good things that happened. We are so much richer materially than we have ever been but so much poorer for what we’ve lost, Sunday Dinner, the whole family enjoying a roast, going to the pub on a Sunday morning with your Dad and Uncles, the Joy of going to the library the sheer peace and tranquility of the libraries, the quiet discipline that everyone imposed on themselves, finding information not on the internet but searching for it and relying on memory. Listening to the news at 6pm on the wireless and the news really being new instead of the same stories over and over again every hour from 7 am till midnight.
Going to the seaside, even though if you chose the wrong week it could be raining how one looked forward to it with such excitement, whereas nowadays people tell you they’ve been to Dubai or Indonesia, or the Dominican republic with such insouciance and matter of factness that one yawns and longs to be deep in the highlands or the Lake district where nature still bears some resemblance to reality, as long as its off season.
It would be nice to go to a restaurant where it was not too expensive and that served food that was nicely cooked but wasn’t extraordinary in its description and where chips were chips and not hand carved or fat, I would like to buy a packet of crisps that didn't;t tell you who picked the potatoes and who sliced them up and who put them in the vat of fat and cooked them. Yes this information is on the back of many packets.
We all of us young and old look back on the past, me more than most, and much of it is illusory as LP. Hartley wrote: “The past is another country” and it certainly is but it still seemed a kinder, nicer place.
Albums, those lovely thick leathery book like containers for pictures so lovingly compiled by a previous generation, all the family holidays and events tagged with witty, carefully crafted lines such as “Matthew and Andrew look for crabs” under a picture of the two children with fishing nets over their shoulders, the special nights at a restaurant celebrating a birthday, all holding drinks in the air imagining being so original like being in a night club in Hollywood. The big white wedding albums that the photographer would charge a fortune for and all the guest at the wedding would feel obliged to fork out for something they’d only look at once especially if it was only a distant cousin that had got married. All those pictures that one dreaded being brought out when one visited, those hard to suppress yawns while wondering how quickly it could be suggested that one went home. All these have been abandoned, just snap and look instantly at someone's phone, another reason to groan inwardly.
The class and area I was born into took very few photos. If someone in the family was lucky enough to own a Brownie, which was the only camera most of us had ever heard of, there was some taken but film was expensive and, in wartime, hard to come by. The weather had to be right, the sun shining on the photographers back, his hand had to be steady, the posers had to be still with fixed smiles on their faces, no such thing as action or natural photos but maybe just as natural as today's photos when everyone acts as though they are in a sitcom on television and poses accordingly.
There was of course the professionals. Our local one was someone called Griffin, they had a shop in Armagh Road in Bow and everyone I knew, not only my family but in the street or at school had their photos done at Griffins. I’m sitting with a big book called ‘Teddy Bear” dressed in my best clothes aged about six. Kenny my younger brother his hair all curly and long like a girls had a similar one but he was only about three. Many years later my sister, had a carefully crafted picture taken with her friend Joan in which they look like two carefully made up starlets from the J Arthur Rank film school of charm.
We are all blasé now. Fatigued by photos. We wave away in mock horror those that want to take our image, we know what we look like and, in some ways worse, what we sound like. There’s no illusions left, we can no longer imagine we look like Margaret Lockwood or Phyllis Calvert, James Mason or Stewart Granger, there’s no Clark Gables or Hedy Lamarrs hiding amongst us, our dreams have been shattered because we’ve all been caught ‘au naturel’ as we really look.
Its sad though, as we ever hurtle faster and faster into modernity everything we gain costs us. So many little pleasures gone. Looking at old photos of the past was something we took for granted and with close families it was always pleasant to be reminded of some of the good things that happened. We are so much richer materially than we have ever been but so much poorer for what we’ve lost, Sunday Dinner, the whole family enjoying a roast, going to the pub on a Sunday morning with your Dad and Uncles, the Joy of going to the library the sheer peace and tranquility of the libraries, the quiet discipline that everyone imposed on themselves, finding information not on the internet but searching for it and relying on memory. Listening to the news at 6pm on the wireless and the news really being new instead of the same stories over and over again every hour from 7 am till midnight.
Going to the seaside, even though if you chose the wrong week it could be raining how one looked forward to it with such excitement, whereas nowadays people tell you they’ve been to Dubai or Indonesia, or the Dominican republic with such insouciance and matter of factness that one yawns and longs to be deep in the highlands or the Lake district where nature still bears some resemblance to reality, as long as its off season.
It would be nice to go to a restaurant where it was not too expensive and that served food that was nicely cooked but wasn’t extraordinary in its description and where chips were chips and not hand carved or fat, I would like to buy a packet of crisps that didn't;t tell you who picked the potatoes and who sliced them up and who put them in the vat of fat and cooked them. Yes this information is on the back of many packets.
We all of us young and old look back on the past, me more than most, and much of it is illusory as LP. Hartley wrote: “The past is another country” and it certainly is but it still seemed a kinder, nicer place.
Saturday, 27 October 2007
COINCIDENCE?
COINCIDENCE?
A few years ago the Independent Newspaper published a letter I sent that was in response to an article about Gastro-pubs. The letter is reproduced below:
Letters to the Editor,
The Independent,
E.14.
15th October 2003.
Your feature about Gastro-pubs sparked off a few memories. When `I took my first pub in 1962, I inherited a cook who’d worked there during the war. Kit her name was. If only there were more like her in pubs today.
We only served food lunchtimes, we had an upstairs restaurant but served the same food in the bar. Everything was delivered daily from local tradesmen, butcher, baker, fish,monger, greengrocer all from the sadly missed Angel Lane market in Stratford, E.15. There was no freezers or micro waves in those days. No specialised frozen food companies with their pre-packed ready portioned meals, even the fridge we had was a huge wooden affair that just about kept the food cool.
But Kit made the loveliest pies and puddings, her fish and chips made with skate and plaice fresh from the market was the best I’ve tasted, better even that Whitby’s finest and her scotch eggs made you realise why they were once considered delicacies instead of something to be avoided at all costs.
Although I realised that my beer sales were subsidising the food side I stuck it out for about three years before pulling the plug on the restaurant. Customers then didn’t want to pay for the food, it was so cheap in the shops that they objected to realistic prices. Lots of patrons never looked at the menu just the prices, our most popular seller, especially with the reporters from the Stratford Express opposite the pub, was Shepherds pie which at 8d (eight old pennies) was a bargain so. sadly, I closed and earned a fortune out of the disco that replaced it.
Then, as now, money is all that seemed to count.
It’s sad how we lose that which we most love for the sake of a few pounds.
I generally welcome the Gastro-pubs as pubs, in general, have become unpleasant with their emphasis on events to promote heavy drinking amongst women as well as men, the sooner there’s no pubs the better.
But the food these new bar sell does, at the moment, depend a bit on novelty with the emphasis on fashion rather than flavour and tasteability, it has to be Mediterranean, Pacific rim, Californian, New European or have one of these ‘buzz’ words attached to it, it will soon pall and God forbid that we ever gp back to ‘Pub Grub’ like Scampi in the basket or frozen whitebait, there will be a demand for more ‘old fashioned’ food which will filter down from top restaurants like St Johns of Smithfield and I think the traditional Sunday roast is still everyone's’ favourite.
By the way I used to go into the ‘Crown’ you referred to with my Dad in the fifties. It was ultra respectable then, on the edge of Victoria Park, quite middle class for the area - to use an Americanism ‘what goes around comes around’.
Sincerely,
Eddie Johnson.
The Independent I’m pleased to say published the letter in full. My sister, who still lives in Wanstead, East London, asked me to drop the newspaper in to her, which I did. After I left her house to drive back to Long Melford she had a delivery of Calor Gas, she was chatting to the delivery man about how the area had changed and he mentioned that he used to go into the ‘Two Puddings’ some years previous. He was a man in his forties, ‘as a matter of fact’ he went on to say ‘my Nan worked there during the war. right up till the mid sixties’. Doreen was astonished and so was he when she showed him the letter in the newspaper, Kit was his grandmother! To read about her from 40 years ago. Sadly his Nan, or Kit as I knew her had died some years previous but his Grandfather was still alive and was pleased to see the recognition of Kit as a great cook so many years later.
Remarkable what?
Eddie Johnson.
A few years ago the Independent Newspaper published a letter I sent that was in response to an article about Gastro-pubs. The letter is reproduced below:
Letters to the Editor,
The Independent,
E.14.
15th October 2003.
Your feature about Gastro-pubs sparked off a few memories. When `I took my first pub in 1962, I inherited a cook who’d worked there during the war. Kit her name was. If only there were more like her in pubs today.
We only served food lunchtimes, we had an upstairs restaurant but served the same food in the bar. Everything was delivered daily from local tradesmen, butcher, baker, fish,monger, greengrocer all from the sadly missed Angel Lane market in Stratford, E.15. There was no freezers or micro waves in those days. No specialised frozen food companies with their pre-packed ready portioned meals, even the fridge we had was a huge wooden affair that just about kept the food cool.
But Kit made the loveliest pies and puddings, her fish and chips made with skate and plaice fresh from the market was the best I’ve tasted, better even that Whitby’s finest and her scotch eggs made you realise why they were once considered delicacies instead of something to be avoided at all costs.
Although I realised that my beer sales were subsidising the food side I stuck it out for about three years before pulling the plug on the restaurant. Customers then didn’t want to pay for the food, it was so cheap in the shops that they objected to realistic prices. Lots of patrons never looked at the menu just the prices, our most popular seller, especially with the reporters from the Stratford Express opposite the pub, was Shepherds pie which at 8d (eight old pennies) was a bargain so. sadly, I closed and earned a fortune out of the disco that replaced it.
Then, as now, money is all that seemed to count.
It’s sad how we lose that which we most love for the sake of a few pounds.
I generally welcome the Gastro-pubs as pubs, in general, have become unpleasant with their emphasis on events to promote heavy drinking amongst women as well as men, the sooner there’s no pubs the better.
But the food these new bar sell does, at the moment, depend a bit on novelty with the emphasis on fashion rather than flavour and tasteability, it has to be Mediterranean, Pacific rim, Californian, New European or have one of these ‘buzz’ words attached to it, it will soon pall and God forbid that we ever gp back to ‘Pub Grub’ like Scampi in the basket or frozen whitebait, there will be a demand for more ‘old fashioned’ food which will filter down from top restaurants like St Johns of Smithfield and I think the traditional Sunday roast is still everyone's’ favourite.
By the way I used to go into the ‘Crown’ you referred to with my Dad in the fifties. It was ultra respectable then, on the edge of Victoria Park, quite middle class for the area - to use an Americanism ‘what goes around comes around’.
Sincerely,
Eddie Johnson.
The Independent I’m pleased to say published the letter in full. My sister, who still lives in Wanstead, East London, asked me to drop the newspaper in to her, which I did. After I left her house to drive back to Long Melford she had a delivery of Calor Gas, she was chatting to the delivery man about how the area had changed and he mentioned that he used to go into the ‘Two Puddings’ some years previous. He was a man in his forties, ‘as a matter of fact’ he went on to say ‘my Nan worked there during the war. right up till the mid sixties’. Doreen was astonished and so was he when she showed him the letter in the newspaper, Kit was his grandmother! To read about her from 40 years ago. Sadly his Nan, or Kit as I knew her had died some years previous but his Grandfather was still alive and was pleased to see the recognition of Kit as a great cook so many years later.
Remarkable what?
Eddie Johnson.
Thursday, 25 October 2007
MEANING(LESS).
Watching birds in the garden you soon come to realise that all their frantic activity, all their comings and goings, to-ing and fro-ing all fits to a pattern. A pattern repeated year in and year out forever, its all nature. The trees have leaves that the caterpillars feed on, the birds catch the caterpillars to feed their young; if the leaves, because of warm weather, come out too early the caterpillars have a feast day because later in the season the leaves develop a protective sheen that makes them unpalatable to allow their blossom to develop so that the fruits, nuts or acorns grow so that the trees will eventually perpetuate themselves, but if the caterpillars cant feed properly they die and the birds don’t have them and their offspring doesn’t get fed and so it goes, watching these creatures and plants there comes the realisation that all is like clockwork preordained.
Humans are the same. We go to work to get money to buy food to feed our offspring, all our fevered activity from the tycoons and businessmen who are forever striving to make more and more money, why? Because like all of us they are programmed. Each and everyone one of us has to engage in activity that, however it seems, painting pictures, writing books, curing people, collecting rubbish, making millions is all part of nature’s programme.
We are all part of Mother Earth, no matter how intelligent or how stupid we are pre conditioned to do what we can.
Take football. Is this part of the system. Do birds or squirrels play? Some would argue that when all beings are young they play, I assume puppies and kittens are playing when they chase after a ball; or a piece of string. Is this to train them to cope with the exigencies of life. Surely football and cricket and boxing is only an extension of the training for living that primitive man did when he had to hunt for food and fight for his life.
If everything is so programmed and we know it why bother? Because if we don't bother we sink into a state known as depression which makes one ill and lack lustre and no fun to be with and eventually so apathetic that there is no point. But that is the reason one gets depressed because there is no point. But knowing there’s no point and knowing you will get depressed it is best to act as if there is a point and to go about daily life with a sense of immense purpose and therefore feel cheerful and good about oneself and make all around you happy.
And so it goes. The eternal question. There isn’t really a question and there is certainly no answer.
Humans are the same. We go to work to get money to buy food to feed our offspring, all our fevered activity from the tycoons and businessmen who are forever striving to make more and more money, why? Because like all of us they are programmed. Each and everyone one of us has to engage in activity that, however it seems, painting pictures, writing books, curing people, collecting rubbish, making millions is all part of nature’s programme.
We are all part of Mother Earth, no matter how intelligent or how stupid we are pre conditioned to do what we can.
Take football. Is this part of the system. Do birds or squirrels play? Some would argue that when all beings are young they play, I assume puppies and kittens are playing when they chase after a ball; or a piece of string. Is this to train them to cope with the exigencies of life. Surely football and cricket and boxing is only an extension of the training for living that primitive man did when he had to hunt for food and fight for his life.
If everything is so programmed and we know it why bother? Because if we don't bother we sink into a state known as depression which makes one ill and lack lustre and no fun to be with and eventually so apathetic that there is no point. But that is the reason one gets depressed because there is no point. But knowing there’s no point and knowing you will get depressed it is best to act as if there is a point and to go about daily life with a sense of immense purpose and therefore feel cheerful and good about oneself and make all around you happy.
And so it goes. The eternal question. There isn’t really a question and there is certainly no answer.
Eddie Johnson
Long Melford. 21.10.2007.I rarely read the colour supplement but as an admirer of Studs Terkel I had to read the Robert Chalmers interview which I enjoyed, however to refer to Paul Robeson as ‘the black opera singer’ is almost dismissive of one of the great Americans of the 20th century. Robeson certainly sang in opera, he also acted in many films but it was his singing of ‘negro spirituals’ that most people remember him for that and his singing of the ‘Showboat’ hit ‘Old man River” whose lyrics he gradually altered over the years so that they reflected the plight of the black man in American society.
Chalmers also writes of James T Farrell’s crime novels. Studs Lonigan was a story of a young Irish American’s upbringing and life in Chicago, it is considered to be a classic of the depression years, the article gives the impression that Lonigan was some private eye from the pen of pulp crime writer.. A bit more care and attention and maybe research please.
Yours faithfully,
Eddie Johnson
Long Melford. 21.10.2007.
Long Melford. 21.10.2007.I rarely read the colour supplement but as an admirer of Studs Terkel I had to read the Robert Chalmers interview which I enjoyed, however to refer to Paul Robeson as ‘the black opera singer’ is almost dismissive of one of the great Americans of the 20th century. Robeson certainly sang in opera, he also acted in many films but it was his singing of ‘negro spirituals’ that most people remember him for that and his singing of the ‘Showboat’ hit ‘Old man River” whose lyrics he gradually altered over the years so that they reflected the plight of the black man in American society.
Chalmers also writes of James T Farrell’s crime novels. Studs Lonigan was a story of a young Irish American’s upbringing and life in Chicago, it is considered to be a classic of the depression years, the article gives the impression that Lonigan was some private eye from the pen of pulp crime writer.. A bit more care and attention and maybe research please.
Yours faithfully,
Eddie Johnson
Long Melford. 21.10.2007.
Wednesday, 17 October 2007
A tender farewell to John Davies.
Funerals vary so much. Its odd really; grief one would suppose is a universal feeling. Of course it depends on the age, the circumstances, the closeness of the deceased. If they are very young or struck down in their prime, their parents and siblings, wives and children are overwhelmed with unutterable sadness and a feeling of such desolation and misery that one’s very limbs will not function properly. The grievers gait is slow and they are bent as if in very old age.
There are cultural differences too. The traditional Irish wake where the recently departed is stood upright in his coffin and all around him the mourners celebrate his life with song, dance and drink. West Indians also treat death less reverentially as a celebration of past life; deeply held religious beliefs where death is believed to be a bridge to another world helps mourners stay cheerful.
Forty two years ago I went to the first funeral of my life when I was thirty three years old. I haven’t stopped going to them since.
The early events I went to were sombre, sometimes heart breaking events where the chief mourners were dumb with misery and tears.
As I’ve got older many of my friends have died as have my Mum and Dad and all my Uncles and Aunts. When a friend dies if one hasn’t seem them for some time their is a feeling of detachment. After the usual expressions of regret to the family and children there is acquaintance and friendship to be renewed with fellow mourners who haven’t seen each other for years.
I went recently to the funeral of John Davies, one of my oldest and best friends. He wasn’t particularly old by the standards of today, he was seventy, but he’d been ill and bedridden for some months and though not in great pain he slept most of the day and seemed to gradually waste away and descend into everlasting sleep.
He was a popular man very well known in the East end and there was five or six hundred people at the crematorium to see him off. The reception was at a hotel where his family had seen to it that there was lots of good food and plenty to drink.
It all seemed so unreal to me. I was surrounded by friends and family and we were all laughing, joking, eating and drinking and telling each other what a wonderful send off it was and how John would have loved it; I guess he would have. Apart from tears from some grandchildren and a few muffled sobs in the chapel there seemed no evidence of overwhelming grief. I felt a loss within me. A sadness that I’d lost a great friend but is as if a stoic acceptance has come with age that its a natural and normal process as if only at the last stages of life this awareness becomes fact. All through young and middle age one regards death as unlikely so its not contemplated and is so shocking when it comes; but in the elderly it is embraced not eagerly but with equanimity and a sense of the inevitable.
I decided when I got home from the funeral that I wanted a small one. A muted affair for immediate family and close friends. My life has been a sad one in recent years and I don't want jokes and celebration round my grave..I would like some tears falling on the new turned earth.
The Independent Newspaper,
London.
17 Oct 2007.
Dear Sir,
Vince Cable is right about the ‘cult of youth’; it’s all around us reflected in our awful culture, dumbed down vulgar television. celebration of violence and morbid fascination with pathology on our tvs’; childrern being denied their childhood pitchforked into grown up fashion clothes, make up and adult violent video games before their time; binge drinking and raucous behaviour on the streets, lack of respect for anyone but theirselvess. Old people are shamelessly, unforgiveably treated in all walks of English society. Its sad because we have so much to offer, we don’t want to be in charge but we’d like a voice. If old voices had prevailed in 2003 I doubt if there’d been a war in Iraq.
.
London.
17 Oct 2007.
Dear Sir,
Vince Cable is right about the ‘cult of youth’; it’s all around us reflected in our awful culture, dumbed down vulgar television. celebration of violence and morbid fascination with pathology on our tvs’; childrern being denied their childhood pitchforked into grown up fashion clothes, make up and adult violent video games before their time; binge drinking and raucous behaviour on the streets, lack of respect for anyone but theirselvess. Old people are shamelessly, unforgiveably treated in all walks of English society. Its sad because we have so much to offer, we don’t want to be in charge but we’d like a voice. If old voices had prevailed in 2003 I doubt if there’d been a war in Iraq.
.
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