The Waves

He, doing so, put forth to seas,
Where when men been, there's seldom ease;
For now the wind begins to blow;
Thunder above and deeps below
Make such unquiet, that the ship
Should house him safe is wreck'd and split;
And he, good prince, having all lost,
By waves from coast to coast is tost.
William Shakespeare (Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Act I, Scene IV)

AT WARWICK ACADEMY, from time to time, the recess or lunch break on the playing fields would be interrupted by loud shouts of “Fight! Fight!” and suddenly a knot of boys would form here or there, encircling something unseen but understood. One boy would have taken umbrage at something another lad had said or done, and would launch an attack of fists and feet. Sticks, stones or knives simply did not enter into it.

The spectators would continue to call out their encouragement until one (or both) of the boys was bloodied; and then the knot would unravel rapidly, the gladiatorial ended, and runny noses, split lips and blackened eyes would be dabbed at in the toilets.

I do not recall teachers, or even prefects, ever breaking up a fight.

I might add that I do not remember ever seeing girls fighting, except by way of words and distant gestures. The girls were as adept with a rude finger or two as their older brothers were.

There was not a great deal of bullying at Warwick Academy, bigger boys lording it over younger or smaller pupils. That said, in my day, some of our young tin Caesars felt it necessary to dictate hairstyles and the length of one’s hair. As this demand for short hair was the same as that dictated by the Headmaster, I never saw people punished for ganging up on boys with hair a little over the ears or collars. Our Headmaster could never be accused of being fair.

Only once was I threatened with a haircut by my classmates, and that was at a party one weekend night. I simply slipped out of the host’s door and walked a few miles home in the dark. I can still remember the walk home, 45 years later. Slipping out of the house, slipping along the roads, and taking a longer route than I need have done so that if anyone came after me they would expect me elsewhere, slipping into my home after midnight and never telling my mother I had walked home. One or two friends at the party did worry when I had vanished, knowing I had no transport and four or five miles to get home.

The Headmaster bullied me over my “long” hair. Many the times I was called up in morning Assembly, and told to report to the Headmaster after our little services were done. In his office, I would be shrieked at by a man twice my size, who would go so red in his rage that one expected something to pop. I can tell you he lived into his nineties, possibly because when he retired from his position at Warwick Academy he grew his hair longer than mine had ever been.

Last night, very late, I watched rioters, looters, and arsonists attempting to level part of London, starting in Tottenham’s High Road. Apparently, a small protest over the shooting death of a bloke two nights earlier got “out of hand”. It appeared more likely that a peaceful protest was hijacked by mini-gangsters who wanted to rumble. Soon I was watching people fleeing, while a few males pitched rocks and petrol bombs at vehicles and buildings, and there was a live view of the arsonists’ younger brothers wheeling shopping trolleys loaded with electronic goods from shattered storefronts.

A reporter from the BBC seemed to have taken a position in the centre of a street, with fires raging in the buildings behind him, and rock-throwing youths battling mounted police nearby. Two teenagers, in jeans and T-shirts, came up behind the reporter. First, Yellow Shirt gave the viewing audience a bit of a dance and hand gestures that were offensive even to someone as out of it as I am. Punching fists, rude fingers, and thrusts. Then Blue Shirt jumped in from the dark and shoved Yellow Shirt, who stumbled about.

I was waiting to hear “Fight! Fight!” However, the shirts decided to play for the cameras, smiling widely and looking anything but tough. The BBC reporter did not seem to know what was going on two feet behind him, or was simply not going to be bothered by it. The camera operator narrowed the shot so that only the reporter’s face and some flames behind his left ear filled the screen. The boys were out of the shot. That is when the reporter got the push and other rioters and yobs went for the camera and the BBC van. The presenter back in the studio told us that there appeared to be some confrontation between their team in Tottenham and protestors. "And here are some earlier pictures ..."

Today, it is all smouldering buildings, streets covered in rubbish and ash, and police walking about looking for “evidence”. Walls of now-roofless Victorian buildings are tottering in Tottenham. The locals are homeless and some even have no clothing but that they wore to flee the fires in the night. Somewhere, one supposes, boys and their slightly bigger brothers are setting up splendid stereo systems and HD television sets. How do young kids explain the new 42” telly with a surround-sound feature in the front room to their parents? Do they even have parents, or people who parent them?

From what I can gather watching the Beeb, at first only about 15 police officers were on duty when the protest started. One of the Police bigwigs tells us they misjudged the size of the crowd and the emotions of those taking part. Several riots this summer have also been poorly anticipated. Our Government is busy reducing the police services, and our military, despite protest marches and gatherings and the heartfelt anger that the population seems always to feel during Tory administrations.

Right now, our Government is off on holiday. No doubt Cabinet Ministers travel well on the taxpayer. The world’s economies are collapsing, and the world’s leaders (all in their holiday digs) simply do not have a clue and no end of photo-ops will calm the markets.

Our Government’s huge budget cuts have resulted in the closure of youth clubs. Notably in the parts of London with the ethnicity of Tottenham. Is it not time to weigh up the many millions lost in riots and arson and looting against the cost of providing boys and girls with somewhere half-decent to go on a Saturday night?

In the television coverage last night I was amazed at the many different types on the streets, though must admit there were 9 boys to every girl. But there were whites and blacks, Arabs and Hasidic Jews, and people in all sorts of clothes, from conservative to rather sluttish. Nearly all, when interviewed, seemed to speak with English accents. Imagine the fun they could have at youth group events!

Yesterday we saw a posed photograph of President Obama of the USA chatting on the phone with his military advisor, being told that over 30 US soldiers had been killed when a helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan. Obama’s hair looks grey, he looks weary, and that is how he had to look. It was a single still picture, not a film. Did he also swear? Shake a fist? Curse the Taliban and their Allah? Did he shed a tear, edited out?

Could the economies of the great western nations be up shit creek because we are fighting unwinnable wars? Not just unwinnable wars, but wars that nobody seems to understand (or want) back at home.

Why are we bombing Libya, but not Yemen or Syria or Bahrain? Why not North Korea or Burma? Do we even protest at Cabinet level when a Saudi woman is the victim of Sharia Law?

Why are we being asked to send tens of millions of pounds of food aid to starving Africans who are forbidden by their Muslim leaders to accept aid from Infidels? We have to borrow to get the money to send on its lost cause. Why cannot rich Islamic nations like Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states send aid to their Islamic brothers in Africa?

Over the last 30 years, we have been accompanied on life’s journey by no end of video games. We have shot down Space Invaders, blasted dragons, and outgunned dark-skinned forces in a desert town. At the end of the day, we have pressed the “reset” button and all returned to normal. For 30 years, death has been brief and life restored in a click. Magic! No wonder boys shoot their mates without a second thought. Press reset a thousand times to revive your dead, and pull a trigger twice. What is the harm?

Civil unrest, military disasters, monetary mayhem. It is as if natural disasters, those typhoons, tornados, tsunamis and great rumbling earthquakes just are not enough suffering for us.

I enjoyed my late night walk home from the party that threatened to cut my hair in 1965. The air was cool and the lights sparkled on the water. I just left the hassle behind and enjoyed the new moment.

Waves.

The Hungry Years Revisited

I stand upon the shore of a wide sea
Whose unknown depths profound I soon must cross
When the last sand of life runs out for me.
The clouds have fled. I look back on my life
And find it brighter than I was aware.
David H. Smith (The Parting)

THE SEA VENTURE was a greasy spoon on the Harbour Road in Warwick, Bermuda, next to the Darrell’s Wharf ferry stop, and within walking distance of Warwick Academy where I was taking my GCE “O” Levels.

I never really mastered the art of studying for examinations; if I attended a class and took notes, that was it. I would not reread my notes or do further research from other sources, even if requested and required. I did not take schoolwork home. What I heard and remembered, and what lodged in my mind during the short time it took to summarise the lesson’s points in a few words, was all that I took into the hall or gymnasium where we sat in rows to write about Biology, or History, or Physics, or Chemistry. In fact, I sat eight “O” Level examinations and passed six, and only just managed those by the smallest margin. A year later I picked up the two GCEs I had failed at first: French and English.

Looking back forty-five years, I recall very little about the subjects, the information I was tackling so badly then. I do manage to revisit the classrooms, the looks of my fellow pupils, the teachers, and the layout of the rooms, the dust and the boredom. Right now I can picture my situation in every one of the forms I spent a school year in, and I sometimes dream of what might be thought the best years of my life, spent in grey trousers and a blazer in the winter, and khaki shorts and knee-socks in the warmer weather months. I would be hard-pressed to tell you much about Pythagoras’s Theorem now. In a right-angled triangle the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Every schoolboy knows that, and that Henry VIII died in 1547. I must have been able to demonstrate that theorem in 1965, in a concise manner. One could not waffle about such things and get away with it.

I could tell anyone trapped by my words in 2010 (one would hope enthralled, dazzled by my genius) a fair bit about the Sea Venture restaurant on Harbour Road. Basically a hamburger joint, it began as a long, narrow room next to a shorter narrow room occupied by Betty’s Beauty Salon. The Sea Venture eventually nudged Betty out of the building and put a few tables where the accoutrements of the hairdressing business had been. The main room at the Sea Venture featured a long counter and one sat on uncomfortable stools there facing the Harbour. However, there were no windows, one looked around cake-stands at the grill and cupboards which housed the tools of the eatery business, and, I suppose, the comestibles that did not need refrigeration. There were three two-seater tables on the road side and one could look out at the passing traffic, but as I rarely went alone or with just one other person, we tended to sit at the counter or in the annexed room.

As a little boy, I’d been taken to the Sea Venture with my sisters on Sunday outings with my father. At home the only meats I recall having were chicken drumsticks, and minced beef made into a pie with onions and potatoes. We might have fish fingers on a Friday. My mother was a most unaccomplished cook. One of my sisters, to this day, tells me she believes our mother prepared nice food. That sister has inherited our mother’s and grandmother’s inabilities in the kitchen and I cannot eat the food she prepares. She can turn anything into sticks and sawdust. My father had not stayed with my mother longer than it took him to get residency status in Bermuda. Perhaps, if she had been able to prepare fine dinners he might have stayed longer. I imagine her bouts of insanity would have scared him off in time. My father never took us to the lodging house he might have been living in (I wonder if he was untidy, or ashamed at his situation) and, so, to the Sea Venture for a hamburger and a Coca Cola. We got to know the original owners of the restaurant, the DeCosta family, quite well.

The hamburgers at the Sea Venture were very good, juicy and not over-cooked, if not very large. One could not get a double burger in one bun, it was not on the menu, and Manny DeCosta would happily sell you two burgers on two buns, but he’d not fool with nature. The French fries, as they were listed in the menu, being what at home we called chips, were delicious and one lathered them with tomato ketchup from a plastic squeeze bottle. One could squeeze mayonnaise and mustard on the burger or hot dog one might order. Coca Cola or a milkshake to drink. They had pies and cakes for dessert, which could be served à la mode. If my father could be persuaded to part with another shilling, I’d have blueberry pie with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream. That did not happen very often.

Curiously, I managed to be awfully thin into my teen years, despite the burgers and fries and milkshakes. In fact, I was concerned that I was too scrawny and rowed a boat to try and build myself up. The exercise made no difference. I was introduced to steak, pork and beans covered in brown sugar, asparagus, and yams covered in marshmallows, and lavish desserts in the bountiful kitchen of friends, in my last year at Warwick Academy. I started to gain a little weight. I gained something more important: access to books, wonderful books, many, many books. That triggered a passion for reading that has not relented to this day. I often find myself skipping meals because I’m deep into a book. I can write while eating, but I cannot read and manipulate a knife and fork.

Manny DeCosta had sold the Sea Venture during my last year at Warwick Academy; the new owner, Carlos, another Portuguese fellow (we called them Gees, which is probably offensive), hiked the prices. With schoolmates skipping classes or at the end of lesson time I’d pop into the restaurant for French fries and a Coke. Burgers were too costly. I did find another burger joint across the Harbour in Hamilton. The Hawaiian Room had fishnets pinned to the ceiling, and nautical decor. Pretty ghastly, come to think of it. But I could rustle up the price of their Hawaiian Burger (it had a pineapple ring atop the beef patty) and a butterscotch sundae.

During my teens I was mowing lawns and washing dishes for a few pounds a week. Out of those few blue notes I managed to buy a long-playing record album for 31/6 (just over one-and-a-half pounds) and the odd shirt or pair of trousers. Odd, indeed. I was attracted to shirts with floral prints, low-slung denim jeans, suede waistcoats and outrageous flowered ties. I was growing my hair and starting the moustache that I have to this day.

As a child, in England, I’d sometimes go to Wimpy Bars. The little Wimpy burgers were the size of those at the Sea Venture, but, I thought, tasteless by comparison. At the Sea Venture one could ask for all sorts of add-ons: lettuce, tomatoes, onions, pickles, and get French fries with endless reserves of ketchup. In Bermuda there is an expression: “Don’t get foolish with the mayonnaise!” which means, I think, don’t go overboard with it. But it was a joke as everyone wanted as much mayonnaise as possible, and on anything.

I spent the summer holidays of 1971 in London, sub-letting an apartment in Earl’s Court. The apartment had an unpleasant and very small kitchen with a meter than was coin-operated. I made only coffee there. In Earl’s Court, near the subway entrance, was a new eatery called The Hungry Years. The frontage was striking: Embedded in the window glass somehow was a life-size picture of a bread-line from the 1930s. The sort of thing one associates more with North America than the UK, The Grapes of Wrath. I was drawn inside and found wood-panelled walls, a dark and quite large room. The Hungry Years served hamburgers. One could order the burgers by quarter-pound increments. One might have a quarter-pound patty (before cooking) on a roll, or a half-pound of meat. If you wanted a pound of beef, you could have it. The burgers were delicious and one could specify cooking time. Behind the bread-line on the windows the clientele stuffed themselves to the gills with what was probably more beef than was healthy.

I’d discovered McDonald’s hamburgers in the USA in 1970, and they were good. I eventually became a fan of the “Quarter Pounder with Cheese”. The burgers at The Hungry Years were better.

And in 1971, at the age of 21, I had my first anxiety attacks while in London. I never knew when I might be rendered immobile, there seemed no logic to it. One day I’d be racing around the English countryside in a friend’s roadster, or I’d be partying happily at a club till all hours, and then I’d try to step out for a morning paper and find myself vomiting on the pavement in a state of collapse. A year later the bad days had taken over, I had no good days.

As I finished school and blundered about in the accounting world, I felt compelled to search for the real meaning in life. For some reason, I thought psychedelics were that door to understanding everything. I wanted to know. I had to know. God might be anywhere. After my panic disorder set in, I looked to religion. A missionary posed the questions: Why are we here? Where did we come from? Where are we going? And these are good questions. Looking back, I think I’d have done well to ask other questions less sweeping, and might have built up my knowledge a little here, a little there, like GCE subjects, rather than accepting something branded The Word of God. However, I had some hunger for knowledge; if not the good sense to figure out what constitutes knowledge at the end of the day. I went for the biggest burger on the menu.

Some years later I was unwell to the point of being homeless. Not exactly without a roof over my head, except when I lost the plot completely, but in sheltered accommodation. That can be worse than sleeping on the beach or in a park or graveyard. I know. Some days and nights I just walked till I dropped. I ate mainly at a Salvation Army soup kitchen. The meals were nearly always spaghetti with three meatballs, and a reconstituted fruit drink. Only one meal a day. On Friday nights a wagon might bring soup and bread around the back streets. Always pea soup. On a Sunday night the Salvation Army kitchen was closed and a meal could be had at the Seventh-Day Adventist church hall. Always vegetables, no meat, sometimes a little pasta. I lost so much weight (over 50 lbs) that people did not recognise me. At the Seventh-Day Adventist hall the volunteers called me “Pops”. I was the only white person there, and must have looked beyond my years. I was not happy with my nickname.

I could afford to lose some weight, and I’m not sure that my hungry year did me much physical harm. Perhaps everyone should have a gap year like that? Looking back, I appreciate that my mind was well-stimulated by my difficult days.

Today I bring to the table experiences that I believe most of us have not enjoyed, or suffered. The big man cannot understand the hunger of the small man, though he might know the hunger of pure greed. To get bigger. Not just in matters of diet and physical size, but in philosophical matters, in business, in politics, in religion.

Happens I no longer eat meat. I won’t be looking for a better burger. I don’t smoke, haven’t for 30 years, but still dream I’m smoking and do crave a cigarette. And when I smell beef pies fresh from the oven at the Amble Butcher, or when the fragrance (the perfume!) of a bacon butty comes from Jasper’s Cafe, I find myself drooling. Like Pavlov’s dog. We all remember Pavlov’s dog, don’t we? Every schoolboy.

Desert Island Dreams

PROSPERO: By Providence divine.
Some food we had and some fresh water that
A noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo,
Out of his charity, being then appointed
Master of this design, did give us, with
Rich garments, linens, stuffs and necessaries,
Which since have steaded much; so, of his gentleness,
Knowing I loved my books, he furnish’d me
From mine own library with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom.
William Shakespeare (The Tempest. Act I, Scene II)

I HAVE PLAYED DESERT ISLAND DISCS often enough. One shares with friends one’s taste in music, particular music, for examples. And the game grows: What few books would one want in one’s exile? What artwork? What dwelling? What scenic view? What brief visitor? What long-time companion? What weather? What clothing? What foodstuffs?

The desert island must be far away. My front room can be ever so far away when I set my mind to it. I’m not sure how the term ‘desert island’ came about. Is it, perhaps, that island within a desert, an oasis, a place where one might survive? The spot where fresh water bubbles to the surface and a few trees give shade to a lush and green lawn. The spot where Asian food might be delivered in silence and secret, to be discovered newly arrived just when one has a craving for crispy king prawns in a Hong Kong style sweet and sour sauce. The spot where one could wear corduroys and tweeds and sturdy shoes, and a long scarf: Desert islands need not be on the Equator, need not be hot and humid outposts, they might be in the Orkneys (and mine might be).

If I was permitted my iPod, and could only have music by four or five artists, I believe I would take along Joni Mitchell as my first choice. Followed by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, in both cases just their music from the 1960s. I would also enjoy easy access to the Mozart "Requiem". I like just about any kind of music, though I’m wary of show tunes in case I should earn a reputation; I might request a recording of Tchaikovsky’s "Eugene Onegin".

I’d hang pictures on my island, given the walls. Anything by Vincent van Gogh. Really, that could be all and I’d be happy as a Sandboy. I love the landscapes with golden wheat fields, and that’s the outlook I’d choose if I was permitted a distant view from my oasis.

I’m not sure who I’d most like to have stop by to visit me. I suppose the other person I’m playing Desert Island Discs with would be polite and prudent. And, to be honest, anyone I was intimate enough to play the game with would be welcome.

A long-time companion: This would have to be a dog. Cailean. My little dog sleeps on his back, stretched across my chest (he’s very small) when I’m reclining while reading a book, and there’s nothing more one could want except having a dog pounce on one first thing in the morning and stab one’s eye socket with his cold, wet nose. Cailean fits the bill. The nose. We’d live, in our oasis, in a small shelter that is more bookcases than walls and windows.


It’s the books that would be most important in my hideaway. I’m truly hard-pressed to think what, say, ten books I’d settle for, if no others could magically appear on the desert island in boxes from Amazon.

I’ve been almost a compulsive reader all my life. I was nine years old when we got our first television set. The cinematic films I did see usually were represented on my bookshelves. When I was about eleven our English mistress, Mrs Lorna Harriott, bless her, did not attempt to bore our classes with the rules of grammar and punctuation. We did not have to write essays. We did not have spelling lists to learn. We did not have set books to read. Rather, Mrs Harriott read to us. Every day we’d have an English class lasting about 40 minutes, and, in her pleasant Canadian accent, Mrs Harriott read us everything from the poems of Robert Frost to novellas by John Steinbeck. We had “Jane Eyre” and “Lorna Doone”. Mrs Harriott created the atmosphere of Sherlock Holmes’s case of “The Hound of the Baskervilles” on Dartmoor, and the visitors from “Out of the Silent Planet” on the planet Malacandra, by CS Lewis. We had Thomas Hardy’s “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” and “King Solomon’s Mines” by Rider Haggard. Looking back, Mrs Harriott had the good sense to be reading us adventure stories with murder and madness mixed in with the love stories. I liked best, at the time, HG Wells’s “The Time Machine” and John Buchan’s “The 39 Steps”, and still like the films made in the years we were listening to Mrs Harriott; I think the books sent me off to those two movies.

Our next English master read us quite a few plays by George Bernard Shaw which I enjoyed at the time. I’ve tried to revisit them and find them awfully dated and not at all funny or interesting. We read poetry with this master, Frank “Buck” Rogers, and I liked only Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (it’s hard not to). Our set book for GCE “O” Level was CS Forester’s “The Gun” which I hated. (I still dislike CS Forester, who was one of my father’s favourite writers with the Hornblower novels. My father had, in his bookcase, EM Forster’s “Abinger Harvest” which is a collection of essays. I cannot imagine my father liking Forster, and have wondered if he got the book thinking it was by Forester.) Our Shakespeare play was “Henry V” which I rather enjoyed, having covered that period in history classes.

What books from my schooldays would I conjure up for my desert island? Shakespeare: as much as I might be permitted, a complete works would be super. I’d like, too, the writings of William Blake (we sang his words to “Jerusalem” often enough at grammar school). I would request the collected letters of Virginia Woolf, and also of Lytton Strachey, for my fix of “Bloomsbury”. DH Lawrence’s “Women in Love” is my favourite book of fiction of all time.

Most recent books (should I call them “modern”?) don’t draw me back, no matter how much I enjoy reading them the one time. I’m presently reading a cracking biography of TE Lawrence (“The Golden Warrior” by Lawrence James) which makes the film I liked a great deal 45 years ago pale by comparison. Much as I’m enjoying this read, I’d not want to tackle it again. However, I’ve got TE Lawrence’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” ready to read, and we did read (censored, I’d imagine) excerpts of Seven Pillars in school.

I have done in, happily, Bill Bryson’s “At Home” this summer. What a fun book, and educational too, I think. I count on Bryson to produce another, new, brilliant read every year or so. I would reread Bryson on language and grammar and Shakespeare.

One living British writer who I do revisit is Alan Bennett. Bennett writes wonderful plays and short stories, and funny essays. His screenplays are terrific. I enjoy Bennett’s diaries and potted memories, and he’s at his best when delivering eulogies. I’d like to have Alan Bennett’s “Writing Home” and “Untold Stories” which are, together, his autobiography up until a few years ago sent to my oasis. I could dip in those from time to time.

Some desert islanders would take along a Holy Bible. I’d hope the Gideon Society had left one under a stone for an emergency, and that it would be the original KJV. None of this jive talk I hear preached nowadays. It’s jive talk that would drive me to a life far, far away.

Still Green and Pleasant

A peace is the nature of a conquest; for then both parties nobly are subdued, and neither party loser.
William Shakespeare


CAN HISTORY BE TAUGHT, or must it be lived? I believe the first history lessons I had at school, at Warwick Academy, some years before I reached my teens, were outlined in a book describing the discovery of the Bermuda Islands in the 1500s (this was poorly documented) and the settlement of the archipelago by the English in 1609. This was something of an adventure story, it being easier to amuse schoolchildren with tales not unlike “Treasure Island” and “Robinson Crusoe” which we read in English classes. We were white children, privileged in that regard in the society of Bermuda in the 1950s. Our teachers were white and British. We did not approach the subject of slavery in the Bermudas, the story of the ancestors of the boys and girls who took the other buses, attended the other schools, sat in the other seats at church and in the cinema. The only picture of a black face I recall from a text book I studied in those days was that of “Bombo” from the Congo, in our geography lessons. If memory serves, Bombo was a pygmy and lived in a jungle with monkeys and elephants. It was a small picture and a short chapter. In 1959, the coloured people in Bermuda forced legal integration on the community with boycotts; only ten years later the first blacks came to the school I’d attended as a right. Had those books featuring Bombo from the Congo been boxed up and hidden in a basement by then?

In the Senior School we had a little world history, as far back as Ancient Greece, Alexander the Great, the Romans, and then the Europeans during the Dark and Middle Ages, but in condensed form. Our later GCE courses covered British history from the arrival of James I and the Stuarts in 1603 through the Civil War, the Restoration and the Hanoverians. Then we switched to the Americas for the War of American Independence, and, finally, back to Britain for the accession of Queen Victoria. We did not have a text book to follow during these years; our History Master, Colin Benbow, would write the day’s lesson on the blackboard (I recall he was left-handed) from his memory, and we’d copy it in our exercise books.

Colin Benbow was a favourite teacher of mine. I loved history lessons and was fairly good at remembering it all, and connecting events. Happened that my step-mother was the History Mistress at another school and I had the run of her large collection of books at home, which I read for pleasure as much as learning. She eventually joined the staff at the school I had attended.

Having English parents, and then going to the UK to complete my schooling, and having visited, in person, many of the famous places in Britain, from the henges to the Norman fortresses and Tower Green, to St Paul’s and royal palaces, and baronial homes built by industrialists, I have always felt a closeness to the history of these Isles. I have sensed, in some way, old spirits in Westminster Abbey and Canterbury Cathedral. A friend once told me that he had a theory that the great cathedrals of Britain and Europe were way stations on the routes between this lifetime and the hereafter. Spirits would gather in these grand places, waiting for the transport to eternal life. As I walked on steps worn down by centuries of use where I was a mere tourist clutching some postcards and a guidebook, and I felt that I was not alone, no matter I could see no others, might I have been sharing space with our (my) ancestors?

I have voted on every occasion possible, in Bermuda for some years, now in the UK, because, it seems to me, to not take part is to not only ignore history, but to belittle the contributions of all those people - politicians and citizens - who have built Britain – a little here, a little there – into the society we have today. I have been aware that all types, all faiths and beliefs, all political doctrines, have moved us along. Perhaps I have been taught a little, but I can finally appreciate that I have lived a fair bit of history.

As a child, a very young child, I was trotted down to Front Street in Bermuda - it would have been just before Christmas 1954 - to set eyes on Prime Minister Winston Churchill. My Latin Master at Warwick Academy, Reginald Frewin, was Winston Churchill’s cousin. Not long after the great man’s death in 1965 (which I recall vividly) I visited Churchill’s home, Chartwell, in Kent with my Nan Eldridge and my mother. I have stood by the memorial to Churchill in Westminster Abbey several times, as recently as 2006. One returns to history, in my case with my heart beating a little stronger for the trip.

Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.
Mark Twain.

We have just had a General Election in Great Britain. I cannot say that I enjoyed this campaign which became more of a Presidential and American effort, with style valued over substance. I am not an American and I don’t subscribe to their kind of politicking. It seems that the British have spent over a century making political leadership possible for any man, any woman, with the desire to take part in the evolving process. We’ve had some unpleasant types in Downing Street in my parents’ lifetime. Even in my half-century-plus we’ve had gods and monsters. At times we’ve been governed by, I think, fools. However, we have had the ability to vote out those who do us harm within, at the most, five years.

I’ve been disappointed, in 2010, with the many people who have said, within earshot, that they weren’t going to bother to vote because “the politicians are all the same, nothing changes, nothing will change.” I don’t believe that. Apathy by the voter breeds apathy in Government. Passion begins with the ballot paper you mark.

So the politicians are all the same? Now we have an election result that splits the country basically three ways looking at percentages of votes cast: a little over a third is “Conservative” and a little under is “Labour” and about a quarter is “Liberal-Democrat”. I read Twitter comments. A great many seem to be from supporters of the Liberal-Democrats, a party I’m not too wild about. My maternal grandparents’ families, back in Burnley, had been staunch Liberals, supporters of H.H. Asquith. Of course, the women did not have the vote, and I don’t know if they were as enthusiastic as my male ancestors. Asquith lived long enough to witness the (apparent) relegation of the Liberal Party to a minor player in British politics. In 2010, the Liberal-Democrats are attempting to claw their way back, which will only succeed if major reforms to the voting system come about. As partners in the new Government (with the Conservatives’ David Cameron as Prime Minister) the Lib-Dems could well force changes.

The day of the absolute is over, and we’re in for the strange gods once more.
D.H. Lawrence

The British people are probably in for minority and coalition governments from now on, unless one party in itself can be so inclusive that the voters simply cannot resist giving it a clear majority. Unlikely, we are a fractured people when we are not at war with outsiders. I don’t like to see the prejudice spouted on Twitter. Dismissing over a third of the electorate as toffs, as upper-class twits, because some of the Tory leaders have had educations in schools thought to be elitist (ignoring the fact that they might have benefitted from whatever education they had and might use that to help us all) is offensive to me. I would also be most annoyed to hear the socialists amongst us put down because of their parentage or education, or because they wear flat caps and speak with an Oop North accent. I can slightly adjust a line some wit wrote and get: “There are Conservatives and Socialists in British politics, and the Socialists have made it possible for the Working Man to be corrupt as well.” That is to look down on all politicians, and there are many decent people who will stand up for us.

If we get truly-proportional representation, we may well have more of a muddle than we have right now, with UKIP and Green and BNP members taking seats in Parliament. If the BNP are denied seats because their beliefs are offensive and dangerous, then a fairly sizable section of the electorate is to be ignored. Where does one draw the line?

I like the idea of a strong coalition. Wouldn’t it have been remarkable if Conservative, Labour and Liberal-Democrat MPs in this new parliament could think for a moment and realise that a government of National Unity might be appropriate with Britain in dire straits? A government by the best of all.

What we have is a government representing about 60% of the voters that bothered to go to the polls. Because only about two-thirds of the electorate actually cast a vote, less than half of us have a connection to a voice in Westminster. This is hardly proportional representation, but if so few bother to vote, no proportional representation will be true, even if we change the way we vote.

Personally, I think it’s time to make the House of Lords an elected chamber. How much freedom the new Lords will have will be interesting. In the USA the Senate and House are always at odds, so much time is wasted, and so much legislation is watered down. I’d like to see our Upper House have limited powers, perhaps the ability to delay legislation a little, to send it back to the Commons, but not to mangle everything.

In the electoral contests for MPs in the Commons, and the Lords, I think the top two candidates after an initial poll should then have a run-off a few weeks later. I cannot say that I’m interested in very minor parties taking up space simply because they are Green or Christian or Nationalist. However, a politician from any party background, no matter how small in the big picture, who can persuade his district’s voters that he belongs in Westminster should get the chance to go there if he can win a majority for himself. Better a vivacious and desirable candidate win a seat than any old party member just because the Tories or Labour or the Lib-Dems had him stand as a matter of routine, or as a favour.

The more I see of Democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else.
D.H. Lawrence

I’m personally in favour of the sort of term limits that will clear out the old-timers. I’m not impressed that a man or woman has sat in the House for thirty years, in or out of Government, when many newcomers to the system have had to be ignored for decades. We had the expenses scandal in 2009 and this did force out a lot of (I’ll say corrupt) old fools from all of the parties. That was good.

No presidential style politics in my ideal Britain. I’d like to feel comfortable with a candidate in my district first and foremost. That is who I’d support, and hope that he or she will support the right leaders and policies in Government.

For those who didn’t bother to vote, I am disappointed. If you liked not a single one of the candidates in your district you could have spoiled your ballot, which is a vote for “none of these” which says a great deal. In America one could write in “Mickey Rat” and make an “X” by it.

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
Plato

I worry that our form of government might be a victim of history in the making, rather than a growing thing that evolves forward, carrying the best of everything we’ve created over the centuries here on this small island. Let’s keep it green and pleasant.

Warwick Camp

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness ... So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth ... And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
Genesis 1: 26-28, 31

Well, we all shine on,

Everyone, c'mon.

Instant Karma's gonna get you.

John Lennon (Instant Karma)

ONE REMEMBERS THE ODDEST THINGS. I cannot recall the obvious things. If I go to the minimart without a shopping list thinking to get Fairy original, chances are I’ll come home with Strawberry Ribena and will rediscover I am out of dishwashing liquid when it comes time to rinse out my glass. As I did just yesterday.

When I was almost fourteen, September 1963, all the boys in my form, the Lower Fifth, were drafted into the school’s Cadet Corps. I was a bit younger than most of my male classmates as I’d skipped a few forms during years of some brilliance. The bright lights had dimmed in my head, and there I was with lads of fourteen and even fifteen hearing that we had to gather on the next Wednesday afternoon, when regular classes had finished for the day, to go up to Warwick Camp to be outfitted in our military uniforms.

Next Wednesday came, and an open truck with wooden benches in its bed was waiting below the Assembly Hall. The new recruits and the boys who had been co-opted the year before (they were in their uniforms distributed in September 1962, and had nearly all grown out of those khaki shirts, shorts, knee-socks and puttees, and boots, and were to be given new clothing that would fit for a while) piled into the back of the truck, and sat wherever we could. There must have been nearly thirty of us. Health & Safety would not permit such transport in 2010.

I remember the truck passing Warwick Pond and an elderly woman walking on the side of the road. A number of the boys in our truck yelled obscenities at the poor creature. Vile obscenities, things I may have been hearing for the first time. Rough lot, the military.

At Warwick Camp, the headquarters of the Bermuda Regiment, Bermuda’s real soldiery made up of young males drafted as they finished normal schooling (it is still maintained under those conditions, females need not serve their country), the thirty or so boys from Warwick Academy queued outside a building with a hatch in the wall. As each boy reached the window, a full-time soldier took quick measurements of the boy’s chest, waist and inside leg. Asked what their shoe size might be, I imagine few of us could have answered truthfully. (In 2010 I still do not have an exact shoe size: style, material and comfort dictate anything from 7½ to 8½.) We were given boots to try on over our ordinary school uniform socks, which would prove to be thinner than the military issue we’d wear with the boots when on parade.

After a time, each boy had a bag loaded up with not just the summer's khaki gear, but the Cadet Corps’ winter uniform. Itchy, solid-green shirt with long sleeves, matching solid-green trousers. We had a beret with a badge, and a leather belt with peculiar silvery fastening devices, beret and belt to be used in summer and winter.

It was almost 1964: I was just getting turned on to British rock and roll. I had seen a few lads with long hair and had thought: That’s for me! I was discovering clothes that were not at all like my school uniform, and, God knows, light years removed from the Cadet Corps’ hideous outfits.

The Warwick Academy School Cadet Corps was abandoned a year later. I do not know why exactly, but I was certainly a happy camper when I heard that September 1964 would not entail another truck-ride to Warwick Camp for larger uniforms.

I could sit back, now, and wave an arm about, and dismiss my year in the military in a few sentences. At the time, however, it was dreary and I hated it, and rarely tired of saying so. I never managed to figure out how to march, parade or look as if I had a clue as to what I was supposed to be doing. As I was particularly awkward on the parade ground, I appreciated (and prayed for) rainy days. When we were unable to stand outside, we gathered on the balcony in the Assembly Hall and had lectures of a sort. These I did find interesting. We had a little map-reading (I recall plotting an invasion of Weston-super-Mare) and one lesson on how to survive in the Malaysian jungles (clearly something I needed to know aged thirteen).

One afternoon we were each given a Bren light machine gun, with an empty ammunition clip. We had to dismantle the gun, and then put it back together, at speed. I could not do that. (I was never any good at building models from kits, and they came with a step-by-step picture guide.) Fortunately, in 1964, I never had to assemble a Bren gun and march on an English seaside resort.

What particularly curious thing do I remember from my year serving with Her Majesty’s forces (I had left Bermuda when it came time for me to be drafted into the Regiment for three years)? It was something that took place the week following our outfitting with our first uniforms. We were being instructed on how to wear our uniforms. How to wind the puttees, how to polish the black boots and belt (never, ever, use liquid polish ... and I always did and caught hell for it), how to polish the brass cap badge and belt fastening device. (The really cool lads with girlfriends simply had the girls busy with the Brasso at lunchtime, in the Quadrangle, on the days the Cadet Corps was embodied. I wasn’t exactly cool at the time.)

The schoolteacher in charge of the Cadets, Mervyn White, who was a few years later to die of some rare and peculiar disease contracted in the Amazon jungle, held up a belt. One end had a pointy-out bit, the other end a slit.

“This is the male. The piece that sticks out. This is the female. The slot. And the male fits into the female. Like this.”

Mervyn jiggled the bits of brass together, and then pulled the belt out tight. It was securely fastened so long as the pressure was applied. If the belt had not been adjusted and was too loose around one’s waist, the male might slip out of the female, and that would be a problem. The forces on the belt buckle, acting to wrench the ends apart, would not break it open so long as the male piece was in the female correctly.

We did not have sex education classes at Warwick Academy. Our biology textbook had drawings of male and female rabbits' genitals, but not a great deal of information as to what the bunnies do with them. We had no lessons in psychology. We learnt nothing about family happiness, security or mores. For that matter, we heard nothing about contraception, abortion or STDs.

We did have Religious Knowledge classes. The master for that subject was our Cadet Corps commandant, Mervyn White. We spent most of our lesson time following Saint Paul. I disliked Paul from the start, he was too bossy. Of course, our classes covered the Ten Commandments (we had to memorize them, stand by our desks and recite one or more as the teacher demanded). Stephen Fry points out that the Ten Commandments are the hysterical work of desert tribes, and that those people have done nothing but make life (and death) a misery ever since, and to this day. We wandered in Genesis, avoiding Chapter 38 which was a bit much for teenagers. The Creation of Adam and Eve (or was it Lilith?) was, I suppose, another brush with sex education.

Male and female, created he them. Like himself. In his/her very own image. Well, that seemed odd even when I first heard it as a young boy. We knew (having seen the pictures) that God was a man. Where was the female part? Under the long robe? One may, after fifty years, think that the writer of Genesis (Moses?) understood that human males and females each have hormones that are “male” and “female”. God knows, hormones were not to be discussed in Religious Knowledge, or at our uptight school at all.

So, sex education from the Bible, by way of Mervyn White. And from the School Cadet Corps, by way of Mervyn White.

At my age, I still cannot polish brass without thinking of sex. Candlesticks, bowls and knobs. That said, I do like a brass band playing Jerusalem. Freud might like that.

Just Another Spatial Twist Continuum

Balk logic with acquaintance that you have
And practise rhetoric in your common talk;
Music and poesy use to quicken you;
The mathematics and the metaphysics,
Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you;
No profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en:
In brief, sir, study what you most affect.
William Shakespeare (The Taming of the Shrew. Act I, Scene I)

AFTER SEVERAL DAYS OF HEAVY RAIN, without let-up, we had a break yesterday. The day began with clear skies, a pale, frightened blue. However, one could see mists forming over the North Sea (by evening we were fogged in) and swirling around the keep at Warkworth Castle.

Warkworth Castle is awfully old, and tumbled-down, but still substantial. Shakespeare set a scene in Henry IV (Part 1) in the Castle. Warkworth was hardly new in the 14th Century in the days of Harry Hotspur (Sir Henry Percy) who may have been born there in the 1360s. (He may have been born in Alnwick Castle, a few miles inland, the other Percy homestead in this part of the world.)

With the break in the weather yesterday morning, I hitched up Cailean and we headed across town and sat out on the Amble Pier.

A full-bodied lady, not a young woman, in a sweat suit and scarf with a woolly hat under her hoodie approached us as we sat looking out at the Sea through the Harbour entrance.

“Is he friendly?”

“Well, yes. Just ignore the yapping, he feels it is his duty to protect me.”

Cailean is a talkative little fellow; miniature dachshunds tend to be chatty. He also likes to hop and put his front paws on one’s shin. A kindly reply (Aren’t you a lovely dog?) gets his tail wagging. A scratch around the ears gets his whole body wagging.

“Not as cold as it has been.”

“No, this is rather pleasant. Even with the breeze off the water.”

And I mentioned the days of rain. The English like to form queues and talk about the weather.

“This has been a brutal winter. Still, mustn’t complain.”

For some reason we mustn’t.

And I watched two ruddy-faced women packing up their fishing gear, industrial-size rods, not the hook-and-sinker hand-lines that I grew up with. The women looked alike, almost twins. With them was a younger girl, as pallid as they were red; washed-out, straggly blond hair, and, I’m thinking, the features one associates with Down’s syndrome. The girl was so very white that I wondered if she might be an albino. Rare genetic misfortune if so.

There were several members of a family, all albinos, at Hurricane High School in Utah back in the 1990s. That was a close-knit community, and one might expect oddities with families doubling back on themselves.

The girl on the Amble Pier was mumbling to herself. I’m hard of hearing thanks to decades of extremely loud music (I have felt too embarrassed to consider a hearing-aid, but my eyesight is crap too and I have difficulty reading the captioning on the telly, so I really should have my ears looked into). The girl didn’t seem threatening.

In July of 1968 I spent several weeks in London with my mother. One day we were sitting on a bench at Marble Arch and a woman appeared, screaming obscenities, which she soon directed at us. We’d stayed sitting while other people in the area got their skates on. This mad woman was, I suppose, quite mad. Nowadays we have tablets one can (and really should) take.

When I was in Lower 4 at Warwick Academy, our Physics master was a Welshman with a Spanish surname. Go figure. One day one of the few girls in the Physics class must have been grappling with some demon, perhaps her blob, and she took umbrage at something the teacher had said, had addressed to her. He may have asked her for a formula. (I still recall a few formulas relating to motion ... S = UT + ½ AT² ... though I couldn’t explain them.)

The girl, who would have been about 12 or 13, stood up and screamed abuse at our teacher. It was the first time I’d ever heard a girl swear, and she did it with considerable volume and variety. I wasn’t sure how Gabe (the teacher) could possibly do the disgusting things that Carol (the girl) suggested he do.

Carol disappeared then and there. She walked out of the Physics class and Lower 4. I think she was switched to a Commercial course and spent the next few years typing and doing shorthand. The Academic students rather looked down on the Commercial boys and girls. Commerce was for dummies.

My first job was in the accounting and finance department at AIG.

Gabe was not a very inspiring teacher of Physics. I have an unsettled grudge against him. At the end of a term, back in Lower 4, we had to sit an examination. When Gabe had marked the papers and brought the results to class, he was in a state of bloody-minded rage that was almost a match for Carol’s. Gabe said that all the pupils that had failed the examination would have to take it again. And it turned out that only one of us passed it. Me. And the vile man suddenly decided that I should stay after school and take it again too.

I wasn’t too fond of Physics after that. Certainly no fan of Gabe.

That said, Gabe and one other teacher were the only members of staff from Warwick Academy who attended the funeral of my step-mother who’d taught History at the school.

I’m sitting on the Amble Pier watching the mists forming in the Coquet Estuary to my left; Cailean is watching a piece of paper that has blown past us.

I have a GCE “O” Level in Physics, and I took Physics and Pure and Applied Mathematics at “A” Level, along with classes in Statistics and Engineering Drawing. I picked up an “A” Level in Biology too.

When I studied the mechanics of DNA, I think the scientists had the strands spiralling in the wrong direction. Cannot say that ruined my life, I didn’t come undone when I found out years later.

I’m reading a life of Alan Turing, his was possibly the greatest mathematical mind of the 20th Century, and there’s rather a lot of Physics to wade through. And Scientific Philosophy. And there’s no way one can measure how long a piece of string is. In fact, existence itself is dodgy at best. “What is?” We cannot really answer that, so how the devil can we deal with “What will be?”

“We were talking about the space between us all ...”

I've wondered why the Mormons don’t come knocking at our doors here, or gather in pairs in railway stations. Where do we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going?

Saw a programme on the telly the other night, on Time. The presenter and his guests all had ideas about time. And space. Apparently, if aliens don’t invade us and carry us off into Captivity and make us build pyramids for their worlds, our sun is going to burn out in several billion years’ time. That would be the end of the Earth’s time, and our solar system. Galaxies will dissolve; the Universe will expand until the spaces are so vast that the stars seem to go out. The Big Crunch is not a definite.

At the end, perhaps, all time will exist simultaneously. Carol will shriek her vulgarities at Gabe. I shall squint through the fog at Warkworth Castle. Harry Hotspur will say his lines in the Globe Theatre. The Angel Moroni might even drop through Joseph Smith’s ceiling.

“Is he friendly?”

“The Angel Moroni?”

“No. Your little sausage dog.”

“Sorry. My mind was wandering a little. Yes, he’s quite friendly, just likes to yap a bit.”

Of Contrition, and Other Prayers

Christus, Mormon Visitors' Center, Salt Lake City



Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
William Shakespeare (The Tempest. Act V. Scene I)

SHE WAS ALREADY ON THE BUS when it reached Amble, where I got on board for the ride to Hawkhill on Monday morning. There were few empty seats on the lower deck and I had to sit near the back, just across the aisle from the very elderly lady holding a fair number of small pamphlets and bits of folded paper. I took it all in, fortunately having left home wearing the appropriate bifocal glasses.

Across the top of a printed page that the aged lady was holding in both hands, I could read the large type.

ACT OF CONTRITION

I couldn't read the words below the title, but could tell they were laid out somewhat in the form of a poem. I thought it might well be some sort of prayer. The giveaway was noticing that the old woman was whispering as she read, perhaps just mouthing the words, I couldn't actually hear her over the noises of the bus and its passengers.

I wondered what an ancient person, she looked old enough to be Miss Marples's mother, was doing so fervently praying for forgiveness of sins on a bus on a Monday morning in Northumberland. Had she been out whoring all weekend? Had she broken her ASBO? Was she on her way to score some smack?

Who knows? Perhaps this little, old lady did something terrible as a young girl and has been regretting it ever since, unable to forgive herself and forget. Unable to believe that her God might have given her the all clear.

Apparently, Roman Catholics say this prayer when they confess their sins. The Church of England has a version. One might be old enough to have prayed this in Latin. The lady on the bus did not turn her page for the twenty or so minutes that I sat across from her, and she kept moving her lips. She must have been repeating the prayer. Had she been told to do this as an act of contrition? A piss-up on the Sunday, confession at sunrise on the Monday, pray it off till Noon.

The lady didn't look like a drunk. Mind you, I have known, and do know, some ancient folks who will suck on a bottle for comfort, and they don't all look the part. It can be confusing, I know one biddy who sails with no fewer than three sheets to the wind and one can tell immediately what she is up to, but she looks and acts extraordinarily like my mother (who died 17 years ago), and my mother never took a drink stronger than Tetley's Tea. Revisiting my mother in my mind, she sometimes appeared to be not only loopy, but looped.

"Oh! For fuck's sake..." I thought to myself. "Someone fervently muttering prayers on public transport. She's a suicide bomber!"

I do not recall being instructed in the ways and means of prayer as a very small child, though my first books were religious (sent out to Bermuda by relatives in England who were concerned with me having been born into a Heathen environment, blacks meaning cannibals rather than carnivals in their minds in the early 1950s). I remember I had one story, with a picture, about a little blond-haired, blue-eyed boy, just like me, who was dying. The little boy's parents told him he was going to meet Jesus, but the child was having none of that. This was hard on his parents, of course. The little boy died alone one night in his bedroom, and when his parents found him in the morning he was half-upright, reaching skywards. His parents were happy as clams because they knew he was reaching out to Jesus at that last moment of his life. I'm not sure that was a very nice story to send me when I was six- or seven-years-old. The adventures of Biggles would have been more appropriate, surely. Not surprising then that I've spent much of my life being a sad bastard instead of a flying ace.

I spent twelve years in primary and secondary schools and I believe we had some sort of morning assembly every day except during examinations when the Hall was being used for those. Our assemblies were of a religious nature, Church of England. We sang Church of England hymns, chanted its refrains and prayed its prayers. There must have been Catholics and Methodists present, I know of Presbyterians, Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses. I do not recall any obviously Jewish pupils, but I think we might have had some amongst the Americans. No matter what we were outside the gates, at Warwick Academy we practised the Anglican Faith. I've remembered many of these prayers and hymns for more than forty years since my last assembly in the Purvis Hall at Warwick Academy. If you repeat something enough, and twelve years is enough, God knows, it begins to stick with you.

Jesus said:
I am among you as he that serveth
Whosoever would be chiefest
Shall be servant of all
I have called you friends
You are my friends if you do
Whatsoever I command you
etc

We had that one on Tuesday mornings. It is, when I reread it here, a bit confusing. When does one's servant start commanding and get away with it? On Tuesdays, apparently. And when that little boy died and Jesus came to collect him, to grasp his outstretched arms, did Jesus speak in this sort of Double Dutch?

We kept on muttering our set prayers for more than a decade, but in the last two or three years the Headmaster introduced audience participation. After the many Amens, somebody might play a guitar; there might be a bit of a poem or a short reading about some great event (British and white, of course); or a mini-biography of some Great Man. I don't think we ever acknowledged any Great Woman. Sorry, Mrs Pankhurst. Everything was written down and read. If somebody played a guitar, there was no singing with it. Too risky. You wouldn't want Bob Dylan's influence.

I attended the Church of England, St Paul's in Paget, for a number of years. The hymns were our school hymns, the Communion Service used the King James Version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, both of which were co-opted at school. The language was beautiful.

Then I became a Mormon. The Mormons use the KJV, thank the many gods who were once men, and the other LDS scriptures are also (curiously) phrased rather like the language of the KJV. I'm not sure that the folks in Illinois spoke that way in the early 1840s, but God was dictating the books and He does.

There are only a very few set prayers in Mormonism. The Sacramental Prayers must, repeat must, be said word-for-word as on the printed card. The Baptismal Prayer has to be word perfect. And prayers in the secret Temple ceremonies are proscribed. However, if Sister Smith is asked to give an opening prayer, an invocation, at a Sunday service, she can say anything she wants. The brethren on the platform will trust her to start with "Our Heavenly Father" and close with "In the name of Jesus Christ. Amen." The middle is inspiration; a grocery list. Most of the time it is bland enough and not offensive to God or man. I've never been shocked, though I've been bored silly when too many minutes pass.

The Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith prayed, as a young teenager, on the subject of which of the many churches in the neighbourhood was the right one, as every church, every preacher, had a different take. And those were just the Christian sects; I don't think the boy was exposed to many Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, Animists, Muslims and the like. That would have really done his head in.

Well, as every Utah schoolboy knows, Joseph Smith was visited by God the Father, Jesus Christ and various angels. He had one angel, Moroni, beaming down through the ceiling of his bedroom. (Did that boy in my book have Jesus descend through the overhead light fixture, or emerge from Narnia in the back of the wardrobe?) You have to be careful when you pray: you might just get a response that will leave you mental.

I spent over twenty-five years praying LDS fairly-free-form prayers. They were conversations with finite entities at first, and then became, if you'll excuse my language, poetry imagined crossing the Infinite to whatever might pick it up on the radar. I may have been praying to Fairy-Winged Frog People on a watery planet in 1995. So long as they don't reach out and touch me!

A few Sundays ago, a friend invited me to a Church of England Sunday Family Communion Service here in Amble. I was curious and figured I could wake in time and stay awake. I went along; I even wore a coat and tie.

Things change. The Vicar was a lady, and a very nice one at that, I had a chat with her after the service, not mentioning Dawn French's show on the telly. The assistants, bar one, were all female. All elderly, I might add, except for the organist who was young and rather attractive, and married to the one young man, also attractive, in the choir. The congregation was pretty grey. So it goes. The hymns were printed on sheets in a small loose-leaf binder, the service on loose pages. Perhaps the fat hymnbooks we used back in the day are too heavy for the OAPs? I knew none of the hymns at St Cuthbert's, they were mostly copyrighted in the 1970s, many written by women. The service, including quotations from the Bible, was in what I suppose is Modern English. A bit like Art, people don't want Constable's Hay Wain above their fireplace in 2009; they want something by Damien Hirst, or worse. I hardly recognised The Lord's Prayer. The Nicene Creed was no longer a prose-poem. I'm surprised that "Amen!" hasn't been replaced with "Yeah, Baby!"

At one point we were all instructed to share a greeting of peace, or some such, with our neighbours in the pews. "However," said the Vicar, "with the Swine Flu epidemic we won't actually touch each other." I'm still wondering what that is about!

I come back after thirty-five years and everything I loved about the Church of England service that I'd missed in Mormonism and my Post-Mormonism has gone. Has become, I suppose, a bit LDS!

Have the Roman Catholics modernized to this extent? I'm not going over there, but I'm curious. Was the lady on the bus puzzling over Latin, or the English I grew up with, or was she wondering what the hell the people writing the scriptures in 2009 are on about?

The First Day of School, Before and Beyond

You put your right arm in
You put your right arm out
You put your right arm in
And you shake it all about
The Hokey Cokey

I CANNOT RECALL my neighbour's name. I've lived in one of the flats this old building has been converted into for some three years now, and only one of the other flats has changed hands. This neighbour, who I can see outside of my kitchen window (she's having a guilty cigarette), lives on the first floor and one over. She's not my noisy neighbour overhead, and has, in fact, complained about that noisy couple and that has helped control the din. And I cannot remember her first name. Curiously, I do know her surname.

The doorbell for my neighbours' flat is in a small porch next to my kitchen door, at the bottom of the stairs that lead up to two flats. Below the doorbell are the number of the flat and the surname of the occupants. And I can remember that name clearly. Is it because I have seen the written word that I recall it with ease? My neighbour's first name, which I greet her with when I see her, which is very infrequently, is the name she introduced herself as in our first spoken conversation years ago. Might it be that something written makes a bigger impression in the learning process in my case?

I can recall, in considerable detail, my first days of Kindergarten at Warwick Academy. That's back in January of 1955. I can still see the room, hear the voices, and even feel the excitement. It was not a frightening day for me; I'd been looking forward to it. No tears, all eyes and ears.

In fact, I can actually go back to schooldays before the first day of Kindergarten. When I turned four I was sent to Humpty Dumpty College. This had nothing to do with my shape, which was rather thin, and everything to do with nursery rhymes. The College was Bermuda 's first nursery school. A fairly small group of white boys and girls gathered at the home of Auntie Peggy each day and Peggy and her colleague Auntie Norma would teach us how to sing and dance (I did both badly, but with worrying enthusiasm, and loudly). When not clogging and clapping, I imagine we must have learned basic reading and writing because I could do both when I turned up at Warwick Academy 's Kindergarten, and that had a traumatic result in January 1955.

I remember a good deal about my graduation day at Humpty Dumpty College . Twins Sheilagh and Maureen MacCulloch and I were the College's first graduates, and it happens that we all went on to Warwick Academy and continued through all the forms there for the next eleven or twelve years. On graduation day the MacCulloch girls and I were dressed in black gowns and mortarboards and we stood on a window seat in a bay window, the dark curtains drawn behind us, and were feted briefly by our teachers for the benefit of family, friends and fellow pupils, and then handed our diplomas. At that point the three graduates had to chant the following verse together: "I am a graduate of Humpty Dumpty College … Of nursery rhymes I have full knowledge … And now I've been given my college degree … To help me progress with my A-B-C." I not only remember the rhyme and the gowns and the window ledge, but I recall seeing, as I stood between the twins, some sort of light and movement over to my left. I think the curtain in the bay window must have moved in the breeze and a brief moment of afternoon daylight had broken into the ceremony.

I'd looked forward to my first day of Kindergarten because the form mistress, Lucile Davis, was a family friend. When my grandparents first emigrated from England and ended up in Bermuda, of all places, they lived in very modest conditions in a neighbourhood one would not want to live in now, except perhaps for the scenic view of the North Channel off of Pembroke Parish. My grandparents returned to England , my grandfather thinking to make it big in the furniture business. It was the Great Depression and I imagine furniture was being used for fuel and not for much else, and the business went tits up. Eventually my grandparents returned to Bermuda and my grandfather worked for the British military in the NAAFI there, shortly before and during World War Two.

My grandparents, at that time, rented a cottage called "Lynden" from Lucile Davis out at Spanish Point, down the coast, in a better area, than their earlier dwelling. Lucile had inherited a fair bit of land from her adoptive mother (Lucile had been left on a doorstep in Florida as a newborn), a woman with the unpleasant name Roach who went quite mad. Lucile and her husband and their two children lived in the old Roach homestead, and cottages and a wooden bungalow were rented out. Happens that Lucile's husband frittered away the money and the property. I believe my father liked Lucile's husband, and he might have been the only one.

My father, sent to Bermuda with the Royal Navy during the War, had wound up working at the NAAFI for my grandfather, and subsequently met my mother, I'm the post-war result. When my parents married on 28 August 1947, Lucile Davis's daughter was my mother's flower girl. The favour was repaid twice. I was Lucile's son's page boy at his wedding in about 1954, and my sister was Lucile's daughter's flower girl a few years later. I'd been reluctant to be a page boy. In fact, I wasn't told about it until two days before the event when I was trotted off to a rehearsal. It was at night, past my bedtime, and even though in the Pembroke parish church in which my parents had married and where I was christened, the venue was not familiar as my parents had moved to the parish of Warwick when I was two or three. The day of Lucile's son's wedding I refused to take part, I wasn't in the mood. My father was annoyed, stood me on the toilet seat and dressed me in silly clothes, slicked down my wavy hair with water, then hauled me out to the green Morris Minor and off we went, with me steaming. Despite my fit of pique, the wedding went off very well, and several times, going down the nave of the church, I stood on the train of the bride, bringing the procession to a brief halt. It was not intentional as I recall, I just didn't move well to music and was under-rehearsed.

As young children, my sisters and I regularly visited Lucile Davis at her home (when old Mrs Roach was still alive, she'd have been locked in her room) on a weekend. My father would talk to Lucile's tipsy husband, and my mother would sit outside and look at the sea, the same view, almost, that she'd had as a child from Lynden, and Lucile would walk me and the older of my sisters out to visit her poultry. We liked the chickens well enough, but simply must see the turkey. And I only ever recall one turkey, of dubious temper, in its run. Was it a pet? Was it eaten for Christmas and then replaced with a young bird?

On that first day of Kindergarten, I knew my teacher, Lucile Davis, before we walked in the doors. I was not at all afraid, was most excited. And the room seemed spacious (I've seen it since and it was not large, and 20 or more children crammed into it must have been something of a health and safety nightmare) with doubles tables, two seats behind each, all facing the teacher's desk and a blackboard. On each table were two abacuses, one for each pupil. At the back of the room was a very large easel on which was a flip chart. The chart featured words and pictures, simple stuff of the "Run, Rover, Run" variety. There was also a piano and a box of raffia grass dyed in many bright colours. There was a small lobby for the classroom which featured coat hooks and benches, and there were child-size lavatories.

I was only in Kindergarten for a few weeks. I never had chance to weave a raffia basket. I recall singing a few hymns and songs, another teacher came in to play the piano, and we did dance the Hokey Cokey, but Humpty Dumpty College had taught me, and the MacCulloch girls, the lessons of Kindergarten. We could read and write quite well. We were sent to the next form, Transition, and I left Lucile Davis behind.

Not entirely behind. Lucile Davis was still very much a friend of my mother and grandparents, and lived to a good age, though her mind went near the end.

Back in Kindergarten, there was something I did not know that would have been taught to me and wasn't, and I am still completely ignorant as to the ways of the abacus. I have no idea how to use one. I believe one can do mathematical calculations with an abacus, but in Transition we learned by using our heads, not our fingers and some beads. When we started working out what were then useful sums … figuring out the money of the time … I'm not sure that an abacus was suitable for pounds, shillings and pence (and half-pennies and farthings), which may be the reason the abacuses did not appear in classrooms above Kindergarten. I used non-decimalised pounds until about 1970, and it was a nightmare.

Am I missing something not having mastered the abacus?

I've just this very second remembered my neighbour's Christian name. It's Allison. Now that I've written it down by way of my keyboard, I may find it easier to remember. Unfortunately, Allison has gone inside and I cannot pop my head out and call her by name and wish her a good afternoon.

Walking On the Edge of Eternity

Tidal Pools, Amble, 1 January 2009

Coquet Island, from Amble, 1 January 2009

Amble Pier, 1 January 2009

Harbour Entrance Light, Amble, 1 January 2009


Amble by the Sea, 1 January 2009





So here hath been dawning
Another blue day;
Think, wilt thou let it
Slip useless away?

Out of Eternity
This new day is born;
Into Eternity,
At night will return.

Behold it aforetime
No eye ever did;
So soon it for ever
From all eyes is hid.

Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1881

OUR SCHOOL HAD A SONG AND A PRAYER. The song was in Latin, and something of a rip-off of a common school and university song in Great Britain and on the Continent about the brevity of life, best known by its first line Gaudeamus igitur, meaning Therefore let us rejoice… It's also a drinking song in Europe, especially popular in the pubs in Vatican City where the national language is still Latin. I made that bit up. But it is a drinking song. The European first verse goes:

Gaudeamus igitur
Juvenes dum sumus.

Post jucundam juventutem

Post molestam senectutem

Nos habebit humus.

This translates as:

Let us rejoice therefore
While we are young.

After a pleasant youth

After the troubles of old age

The earth will have us.

Warwick Academy, in Bermuda, poached the first two lines and then inserted two verses about bears (the school crest featured one chained to a stump, the better to be baited), and rising up and flourishing, and Quo Non Ascendam (the school motto: To what heights might I not ascend?). Included from the original full version was Vivat academia, which speaks for itself. Omitted in the Warwick Academy song was Vivat omnes virgines (wisely, it would have been a lost cause). We did not sing Post molestam senectutem because, don't you think, it looks as if it might mean After being molested by old teachers.

And we roared out the School Song on those relatively few occasions on which we had to sing it. I'm guessing if there were 550 pupils at the school in about 1965, perhaps ten knew what the Latin words meant in English. I cannot say I did. I didn't even know what the translation meant when I came across it. But we roared, we let rip.

The only other song we really put our all into was Jerusalem, with lyrics by William Blake. That most English of hymns: Think the WI, think Jam and Jerusalem. And I cannot imagine, in our tremendous effort, our near or actual shouting, we had a clue about what Blake was trying to convey. Blake had gods and angels all around him, much as Yorkshire men have ferrets in their trousers… A way of life.

A shame that Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poetry has not been made into hymns or school songs as he rests somewhere between the divine and the rodent, don't you think? If Andrew Lloyd Webber is looking for a subject for a new musical, how about Rime of the Ancient Mariner? Solos for seabirds, shanty songs, aria for an albatross. Fire and ice. It could be fabulous.

Back to Warwick Academy (and I hope I never go back, never set foot there again!) I must tell you that I was recently discussing accents with an old friend from schooldays, over the telephone, seven hours across the divide. Perhaps I shouldn't name him, so let's just call him Richard. Now, Richard is an actor and a drama and English teacher, and he speaks well, and not as American as some, I suppose because he spent much of his childhood in Bermuda and he has learned how to project his voice, how to make himself heard. My accent is a mess. I use the English expressions and words, but the squawk that I emit is, at best, some sort of Canadian version. However, I'm fairly good at making myself understood: It is a reasonably clear voice. Hell, I sat in on enough of Richard's 10th Grade drama classes; I should know how to deliver a few lines.

And Richard mentioned the rehearsals we had to go through at Warwick Academy prior to any events featuring the School Song and School Prayer. He, too, recalled the loud, almost joyous, alehouse rock we put into Gaudeamus Igitur, but then said to me: "Remember Miss Devlin and the School Prayer and gra-aw-aw-awnt?" And I did.

Miss Devlin, I believe, was responsible for the music for the School Song and for the Prayer. Reggie Frewin might have fiddled the Latin. Miss Devlin was a peculiar woman, always wore a full length grey fur coat (in Bermuda!) and dark glasses. She spoke with an English drawl; she was very Jam and Jerusalem, even with the Irish moniker. Reggie Frewin was an English fellow, a first cousin of Winston Churchill, all rather proper. But if Miss Devlin could be said to have a broomstick up her jumper, Reggie was often loose as a goose. He was well eccentric.

Miss Patricia Devlin wanted the School Prayer chanted as if by boys at Eton, Harrow or Rugby, and not by the scholarship boys there, god-damn it! If the Prayer had a name, I don't remember it. I think of it as Look with Favour (or Cook with Flavour) - the first three words of the thing. I don't recall much more of it. Let's have a go:

Look with favour
We pray thee, Oh, Lord,
Upon this our school.
(Yadda Yadda Yadda)
And grant…

And one must not sing grant the way Ulysses S Grant probably said his surname. One must not, must never, ever, sing like an American. One must elongate the word grant into at least four syllables: gra-aw-aw-awnt. And so we would overdo Miss Devlin's instructions, chew the scenery, until she'd stop playing the piano, stand up and throw a fit. Her fur coat would have fallen off the piano bench at that moment, if you wondered.

Reggie Frewin died some years ago. So far as I know, Pat Devlin is still around, though she must be awfully ancient by now. I think of her as a menopausal old trout fifty years ago! Seems to me that Miss Devlin was transferred from the music department at Warwick Academy (a school for the better class of white children) to a primary school that was, even after racial segregation ended, pretty much entirely black Bermudian so far as pupils went. How the hell did she adjust? I imagine not a great deal of Latin was sung at that primary school, but the Bermudian accents. Gad!

It's now 2009, and I have to write January, which can be a bugger to spell if I'm drowsy (often!) and I'm wondering if the world can get much messier. Of course it can, but many of us know that it will improve eventually. (William Blake: Without contraries is no progression.) Some people have the means to get through some lean years, and there are tens of millions who will simply starve to death or murder one another. I'm not sure whether the poster child for famine gets time, or has the capacity, to wonder where his next meal is coming from. The wondering is throttled by the pain in his gut.

Yesterday, New Year's Day 2009, I went walking along the coast to the south of Amble by the Sea with young Cailean. I had wakened early and we were en route at sunrise, and I took a few photos of the dawn, the sky over the North Sea. A clear, cold and perfect sort of day.

And, in my head, I sang one of the hymns we sang at Warwick Academy: So Here Hath Been Dawning, which features the words of Thomas Carlyle. This hymn has a lovely melody, and in my head I hear no wrong notes.

Cailean sniffed about, his first New Year's, and I wondered if it is wrong to feel so bloody happy when others are not. Hell, let's sing:

Gaudeamus igitur!

Happy New Year! To a Latin beat!