Springing thoughts

Two days after the last snow left

I saw the tiny hint of life

in colour, purple, on the mud

which rain had flooded winter-long,

and thought of Spring.

Encouraged by the silent sun

the lack of wind, the sudden song

- a blackbird sitting on a pole -

in air so silent I could hear

the rush of wings above my head 

as pigeons - should I call them doves?

 - set off briskly over roofs 

and gardens, sodden mossy lawns

and foodless shrubs where dunnocks live

I stopped, for long enough to feel.

But what I felt was not the joy

that children feel when freedom calls

but rather that nostalgic pain

more keen with every passing year

that tells me each Spring takes us up

the path towards that distant peak

where only faith says flowers will bloom.

C.M.M 02/18

The men in the radio

We were listening to music on the radio the other night - hardly surprising; we do this every night in life - and for some reason discovered, Mr B and I, that we had both as children pictured tiny musicians inside the radio every time an orchestral concert came on. In these days, of course, there was considerably less music to listen to; the Third Programme didn't come on until after 6pm (heralded, I recall, by the wonderful theme used by Britten in his Young Person's Guide) and I went to bed shortly after (we're talking the 1950s here). Later, thanks to the acquisition of a more modern radio, I discovered Radio Luxembourg and pop music, though that was only audible after dark. (Don't ask me why; I suspect it may have something to do with Physics.) In the light evenings, you could barely hear Elvis through the static. The nostalgia trip was completed with the joy of finding a photo of the radio we had in the kitchen - can you not just see the tiny musicians, in their evening tails, ranged behind the golden cloth front?

We both hated, I discovered, the singing on "Listen with Mother" - on at 1.45 every weekday. I can still hear the voice of Daphne Oxenford in my mind's ear. The man who did the duets with Eileen Brown  ("Hob shoe hob ..." - aargh) was known as Uncle George. How sinister. You can see we had a fascinating ramble into our childhoods, separated by the width of the country but strangely similar in some ways.

Another moment of nostalgia, absolutely nothing to do with the above, came with the remembering of how I came to know what someone with a broken collar-bone might look. (If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter you'll know why I was speculating). There was this book, you see, a "Teach Yourself" book, on home nursing or some such terrifying area of self-improvement. It was blue, but apart from that looked like the book on the right. I think there were photos in it, but there were also the most terrifying line drawings, showing you how to bandage such injuries
as a fractured jaw, a fractured thigh (horror!) and - you've guessed it - a
broken collar bone. You would recognise the last injury by the forward
droop of the shoulder and limb, I recall, and the face of the victim would,
according to the illustration, bear a face of patient suffering. As I spent
quite a lot of time in the post-war years being ill with such things as measles and whooping cough (the first child caught everything. I was doomed) I tended to read anything that came to hand - and this book was one of the most gripping.

Another book I recall being horrified by was a collection of prints of work by war artists, the most worrying of which showed the aftermath of an air-raid. But my post-war traumas (not brought on by anything but my parents' conversations and the sight of the land-mine destruction along the road; I'm not that old) belong, I feel sure, to another post ...

An hour in the past

I spent a joyfully sinful hour this morning catching up, appropriately enough, on The Hour, on iPlayer. I don't know why it should have felt so wicked - Presbyterian upbringing to the fore again, I think - but the combination of wonderful sound (on my iMac) and increasing involvement with this new drama was indeed a joy. But after I'd put it all to sleep and headed downstairs, I found myself somehow still immersed in the sounds and sights of my childhood - for when men wore braces and waistcoats and hats as a matter of course and everyone smoked, I was becoming sentient and this was the world that left the lasting impression.

So what was so different? I can't describe it all, but what about a list? So ...
dingy wallpaper, tending to dark colours; green paint to shoulder-height on office/school corridors; stockings and suspenders (on women, I mean - and hideously uncomfortable this skinny 15 year old found them, before the advent of the truly stretchy nylon whose generic name I forget); dim lights; fog; Humbers and Rovers for the better-off drivers, with the rear door handle at the front of the door; tiny- screened TVs in huge wooden cases (and only one of these in our close in Hyndland for the Coronation); dubious paste in white sandwiches; dark tea with milk (ok - this is a personal shudder not shared by all) ...

I could probably go on. So could you, if you're old enough - feel free to add more in the comments. But over all, and this is a memory reinforced by listening to Stephen Fry on the radio yesterday and to someone telling us how to bake scones as we hurtled up the M6 on Friday - over all these lie the accents of the near past, the cut-glass vowels of Received Pronunciation/BBC English. Even the Queen doesn't speak quite like that these days, though I'll bet there are still plenty of people around ready to judge you by the sounds that come out of your mouth. (Tip for today: try speaking with your molars firmly clenched together. Articulate as clearly as you can. You'll be amused by the instant resemblance to at least one member of the Windsor family).

The scones, by the way, were accompanied by a discussion on how to pronounce them. Skoanes, or skonns?  I always understood it was the truly posh who used the former, but the programme suggested otherwise. When it comes to forehead, however, I seem to be ... well, posh. Forred. And we used to talk about the drawing room, which I used to wonder about: did people draw there? (I was told - it's a withdrawing room). Again, I'd be fascinated by any contributions that you, gentle readers, might care to make to this conversation. It all seemed to matter, back then.

I wouldn't go back to the '50s. There is too much around now that I'd miss - for heaven's sake, I'd have to write letters to people. I don't even know that I'd want to be 12 again. But just today, as I imagine the men I know adorned by trilby hats and the odd fairisle pullover, I shall reminisce. And I realise I can recall, quite clearly, the Suez Crisis - though it all happened on the radio, natch. Smoke, anyone?

Climbing through the past

Familiar stair
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

Well, that was fun. Two hours spent in a building that seemed (predictably) to have shrunk and (less predictably) to have become an unfamiliar maze reduced me to giggling exhaustion - though the giggles didn't come on till after this photo was taken, as I hadn't met someone I used to know by then. The stair I'm on here actually looks much as it always did - worn, glossy stone treads, tiled walls - though in the 50s the paintwork was cream and there were no pupils' paintings on the walls. But elsewhere, dreadful things have happened in the name of safety, and whole staircases have been dismantled and moved to places that don't fit at all with the architecture. It was, as I said in my last post, always a challenging place to find your way round the central stairwell, but now it's impossible.

Upwards was the clue. If we kept climbing, we arrived first at the top landing under the glass cupola, a space now sadly diminished by a new partition wall and the addition of fluorescent lights round the Parthenon frieze (replica). Beyond that, I knew, was The Attic, where I used to go for sewing classes between 3 - 4pm Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. I saw a dingy stair heading up into the gloom and followed it - only to find that we seemed to be in a building site, linked to the rest of the school by a corrugated iron corridor with a wonky floor. We crept carefully along this, and emerged on the Attic landing: it was the fire escape. And of course we'd all have died hideously in the 50s if a fire had happened lower down in the school, as there was only the one exit, down the central stairwell. We never gave it a moment's thought - and neither, presumably, did our parents.

Because of the nature of Hillhead until the mid-70s, the returning FPs of my generation tended to share a pretty recognisable set of characteristics, including self-confidence and articulate self-expression. I was totally amused to meet up over a mass school photo with someone whom I remembered, with increasing clarity, from the 2nd violins of the school orchestra. She'd been in the year below me, along with Alison, and her hair had been very dark. I now realise I also knew her brother - even after we left school. Her pal I knew less well, but remembered her big sister - and their father had been a colleague of my own. She knew several people in my life, including one ABF who comments on this blog. It was all very incestuous and great fun.

I am grateful to the mother of a current pupil, who let me out into the shed apparently closed off because of an unsafe roof - her daughter assured me the pupils still go into it. And I was amused by the closed-in area under the school which used to be the boys' shed, open all down one side and used when it was just too wet for footie in the playground. I don't know how they got on playing footie round the pillars - I imagine it led to increased ball skills.

I was hugely impressed by the amount of work obviously done by the present teachers, and by the quality of the work on display. And I realised early on what a nightmare the building has become, with the cramped conditions imposed by the alterations and the leaking windows and unstable stonework in the attic. I had a vision of some of the classrooms as they had been - large, square, well-lit by tall windows, 40 pupils sitting in rows at desks with flap-down seats attached and the teacher at the front at the high desk - and realised I was in another world.

Take it for all in all, I think I prefer where we are now..

Note: I've had to repost this, as it vanished during Blogger's recent sickness. Hence the wrong date - it belongs, like myself, to yesterday.

Time travelling today ...

Today I'm going to visit the school this grinning child attended: Hillhead Primary School in Glasgow. (And if you follow me on Twitter you'll recognise the young Mrs Blethers - the photo was taken when I was about six, I think, or maybe seven. My pigtails vanished when I was ten.) At the time, the uniform was strictly adhered to; the school was one of Glasgow Corporation's grant-aided selective schools for which an entrance exam had to be sat, a consequence of which being that you could be asked to leave it you were deemed unsuitable in any way. So there I was, in my navy gym-slip with the box pleats and the badge; the cream blouse (never, ever white for the girls); the navy tie with the gold and brown narrow stripes. My hair ribbons were navy blue and my knee-high socks an unpleasant brown.

But I loved school; I loved it wholeheartedly and was as sad to leave at 18 as any heroine of a girls' school story. I never even noticed that the outdoors toilets were a barbaric and chilly idea - and they froze solid in a cold winter and we were all sent home - nor cared that the arrangement of stairs in the Primary School was such that some classrooms could only be reached from the left-hand stair. (I did, however, quail at the idea of asking the fierce teachers in the middle landing for passage through their classrooms if I got it wrong - I preferred to sprint downstairs and start again.) We played all the traditional games in their proper seasons - skipping, ball-games against the wall, scrap-swapping (a winter pursuit, carried out in the shed) - and wildly dangerous ones, like first dreeping off a ten-foot wall and then learning to jump off it without breaking anything. I still remember the concussion of landing on the concrete - and I was a skinny wee thing.

I shall doubtless return to this topic after this evening. The school is to be moved to another site, amalgamating with two others, and I have yet to discover the future of the building in Cecil Street. I shall take my camera, and there is a chance that the visit might destroy some memories. But I doubt it.

Cleaning up the past

I've been indulging in a spot of heavy cleaning. Not, you understand, your regular housework, that being the preserve of Mr B, but the creative, nostalgic kind brought on by the need to clean up the chair in which one's granddaughter has been eating this past week. The chair in question is one of four kitchen chairs which belonged to my parents - and if you look carefully at the blue label in the second photo, you will see that they were made by Ercol. (I should admit now that the chalk scribbling on the label was done by me, aged, I imagine, about three.)

As my parents were married before the World War 2, I think of the chairs as being bought in the late '30s. I first remember them in the kitchen of a top flat in Novar Drive, Hyndland, where they sat round the square kitchen table next to the range. Until we left that flat in 1955 the range was in daily use - it heated the kitchen and the water, though I don't think my mother used it for cooking unless there was a power cut. In these days the coal lived in a bunker in the kitchen, so every time coal was delivered the dust would go everywhere. Notwithstanding this grime, it was on one of these chairs that a nurse sat to hold me as I was anaesthetised prior to having my tonsils removed; this operation took place on the kitchen table and I survived.

Because, presumably, both chairs and table were robust and not easily damaged, I played on and under them all through childhood. They were used as steps or climbing aids and stood in for the parts of an imaginary boat/spaceship/house. I don't think they were ever really cleaned other than by the swift removal of dust - unless the tonsil job brought on something more serious. The woodwork in the room was a deeply utilitarian green, and I found a small splodge of this paint on the seat today, along with a smear of the pale grey paint from its next home, also heated by solid fuel.

I keep going on about the coal because today's labours produced a soupy sludge of years of coal dust, soot and very, very old polish. If you look closely at the first photo, you can see the darker colour at the foot of the spars and on the legs - I really needed to be in a sunny garden with some sandpaper to do the best job. As it was, it took a great deal of effort with wood shampoo, an old pot scourer and some beeswax polish. Perhaps one day I'll take all four of them outside and give them a real going over.

It's funny how we can go into paroxysms if someone scratches a piece of furniture we've just bought, though - I realised today that I don't give a fig for the marks on these chairs. Maybe, of course, it's because I was originally responsible for them.

Try as I will, I cannot get this post to look right. That dangling "I've"... I give up. Life's too short.