A Tragic Age

Everybody's flying and no one leaves the ground
Everybody's crying and no one makes a sound
There's a place for us in the movies you just gotta lay around
Nobody told me there'd be days like these
Nobody told me there'd be days like these
Nobody told me there'd be days like these
Strange days indeed - most peculiar, mama
John Lennon (Nobody Told Me)

IN THE LAST FORTNIGHT I have had three separate interactions with three long-time friends that, some days later, on reflection, have a connection and, taken as a whole, allow me to address a curious period in my life that I have touched on only briefly, and hardly openly to all. I dare say that anyone interested in therapy, incoming or outgoing, would make a note on this page I am writing, perhaps even two notes. (1) He faces his past. (2) Will he come to terms with it?

A friend of mine, a little older than I am in the record books, but who has reinvented himself to such an extent that when we were colleagues at AIG in Bermuda, when I was certainly in my early twenties, he would have been quite unborn (truly a trick of the light!) offered this opinion on my life. “Ross, you’ve had a pretty unhappy life. It’s no wonder you suffer from depression.” Pretty unhappy is another way of saying miserable, disastrous, awful, crushing, unsatisfying (and unsatisfactory), and failed. But the good news is that one can blame it all on having a father who buggered off when one was still in short trousers. That (sort of) makes it all right. And, as some wit noted, the consultant psychiatrist will tell you: “If it ain’t one thing, it’s your mother.”

Days later, I had a message from the wife of a friend who wasn't really writing on his behalf, who was not so much baring her teeth as her own suffering soul. The friend’s wife remarked on the good life I lived, with the inference that this was not something new. Inferred because she said that (while I was living my good life) her husband had had to struggle to support and bring up his family. He’d had to work hard. And I know he did, for a fact. Blessings on him. My friend came from a more privileged background than I did, but our lives followed the same route for a time. So far as I know he remained on that particular path and I did not, and my divergence is, I suppose, the sin that his wife sees: my unexpected and unearned good life.

Less than a week ago I sat down to talk into the night with an old friend I have known longer than my AIG colleague, as well as the other friend and his wife I’ve mentioned. This friend, who attended the same grammar school that I did, knows my story, as much by direct observation as by hearing it related on the telephone or on paper; he has seen the ups and downs, the lines growing deeper and longer on my face, the greying and whitening of my hair, and, I think, my delight at living where and when and how I do. We have walked along Horseshoe Bay Beach in Bermuda at night, the waves booming on the soft sand and the rip tide pulling silently in the dark. We have walked in a cold, howling gale on the Northumberland coast, and we’ve sat in the chapel in Durham Cathedral dedicated to the Venerable Bede amongst soft and warm whispers. That friend always sees the good in things if at all possible. He remembers funny moments with both of my parents. I'm fine with my parents. Parents, and their children, should just do what they can. This is not to say one should do the very least one can get away with when the boxes are being ticked. One should reach out, up, down. One should gather, and set free, with enthusiasm. That third chapter in Ecclesiastes must be one of the few in the Old Testament that should not be fed to the fires, for it is poetry and poignant and pointed.

Listen, I did not have an unhappy life. It’s still wobbling along and it’s still not an unhappy life. However, I have had unhappy moments. I have had times that were a real struggle, but I’ve never thought to top myself. Indeed, I have survived days and nights and weeks and months that some people might not manage.

When I was awfully young, perhaps six-years-old, my mother was taken ill and had to go (from Bermuda) to Montreal, Canada, for treatment related to her grand mal epilepsy. For reasons I’ve never quite understood, and probably never shall, my younger sisters and I were farmed out individually for a spell. I was taken to the home of strangers, who talked loudly to me, as adults without children tend to address youngsters, and had to live there, go to and from school by bus and on foot as their very small, very young lodger. I can still recall (I have an astonishing memory) the walk from the bus stop, up a winding road to the strange house. My hosts would not be there, they both worked, their maid would let me in. I remember lying on my bed in their very nearly empty, small box room, and closing my eyes against the brightness. I wasn't even sure what I was supposed to call these people, best to try to avoid them.

John Lennon pressed buttons for me in 1967 when he sang: “Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.” John was farmed out to his Aunt Mimi, his father had buggered off, his mother had buggered off. His suffering was revealed in his music. I managed somewhat better than John Lennon, but had to make do without the genius that can come with the pain. I did share some traits with Lennon: a very bad temper, the use of and growing dependence on drugs, difficulties with relationships. However (and this essay might be called “However”) no end of teenage lads in the 1960s were shirty and shitty and shit-faced. Truthfully, George Harrison was my favourite Beatle. George went singing “Om” and I went singing “Come, Come, Ye Saints”.

I went to parties, I went to dances, I went to clubs and discotheques, and I went to pubs and restaurants with live music. I made lots of really super friends. I skipped school and took the train to London and walked for days in museums and galleries, usually by myself. I did not study very much, but passed my courses, usually with good marks. I went to the movies when I could, and to cathedrals and castles. I read so many books and was blessed with the longing to read more. I chain-smoked (didn’t we all?) and drank fruity cocktails till religion had to be investigated, tried, lived and then discarded. Curiously, but I'm grateful for it, I emerged from religion fairly sober and not smoking.

I had a go at painting pictures and writing poetry, and was not terribly good at either. I believe I could write a pretty good letter in the days before email and text-messaging.

I travelled a fair bit, despite health problems. I confess I self-medicated and sometimes took wing and even with my astonishing memory I lost time, and have no recollection of the journeying. Arriving usually meant sleeping for a few days to burn off near-lethal doses of drugs. But I felt driven. I have seen some remarkable places on my travels. I’ve met some terrific people.

So, my critic, the one who thinks I’ve had it too easy compared to some (her husband), could almost take these words above as my own confession that I’ve had a pretty good time of it. Surviving is good once one has survived, but getting there can be bumpy.

About six years ago I was wakened in the night by strange sounds and smells. I opened my eyes. I was in a room, in near dark, which was just eight foot square. There were three cots in the room, each six feet long, two feet wide, a thin mattress and a mix of raggedy blankets. I was waking up on one cot, my head was almost on the feet of someone in a cot at right angles to mine, and the third cot was empty. In the small square of space in the middle of the cots, below a dim ceiling light, the elderly black man with an Islamic name who usually occupied the third cot was standing naked and having violent, noisy and thrusting sex with a very large black woman. Really, the most obvious thing in the room was this woman’s heaving backside as my skinny roommate battered her.

I’ve forgotten the man’s Islamic name, though I’m tempted to say it was Abdul, but he had been Michael somebody, and he had twelve children by as many women (at least, he said), but no matter his faith, he was a dealer and user of drugs. I’d often be interrupted by his drug parties, which seemed to be held fearlessly, despite the rules of the Salvation Army which ran the Homeless Shelter stating that no drugs or alcohol (or women) were permitted on the premises. Michael Somebody (or Abdul) took a moment from his sex to announce to me that the girl he was with was willing to fuck any and all the men living in the hut that night. That would have been well over a dozen, in a wooden building with smashed windows, and broken plumbing that generally resulted in toilets overflowing so that faeces might be running down the central passageway between the tiny box rooms.

The night I was taken to the Homeless Shelter a bed, a cot, had become available only because the previous occupant had just died in it. Another resident was found dead in an open ditch behind the shelter not long after. Because I was white, I was threatened regularly. I understand that: the residents, all black, thought I was a spy for the Police Force. The Police did do searches from time to time, but the residents had advance warning and drugs and stolen goods seemed to disappear for a convenient period. We were all told to ride the buses till midnight (to keep warm and dry) and then to sleep in any park with an open gate. That meant only the park outside the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club. I’d been to parties at the RBYC in my time, and now I was hidden under its shrubbery trying to sleep while noisy partygoers left the Club.

The day after Abdul’s friend serviced all those wanting it in the Homeless Shelter, I moved out. I slept in the cemetery where my mother is buried for a few nights, and went and raised a ruckus with a social worker, who suggested I move into an abandoned building (he suggested a former hotel dormitory awaiting demolition). Somehow, things fell into place and I was offered an efficiency apartment in a brand new Government project. It was very basic, but clean (I know, I cleaned my room and often others) and dry, though in a neighbourhood one could not be outside in after early evening, particularly if one was white. I started doing house- and pet-sits, and I got an evening job coaching a creative writing class at night school. It happened that I had the opportunity to leave Bermuda, and I’ve rebuilt my life. Well, it’s still under construction, as any life should be.

So, why was I suddenly homeless six years ago? It happened rapidly. I had moved from a cottage to an apartment, with my little dog, Aleks, and two days later I went out for an hour. When I got back, Aleks was gone. As he was micro chipped the story came out: Aleks had been taken and used as live bait for fighting dogs. A tiny dachshund to give pit-bulls the taste of fresh blood. I have been able to survive, to get through, many things, many trials and upsets, in my lifetime, and my life has been a good one, but I could not believe, accept, understand, and cope with the murder of my beloved little dog. (I still have dark hours when I miss Aleks terribly). I broke down. I went walking. I walked away from everything. I fell down when I could walk no more. This went on for about a week. Then I walked into the Police Station and said: “I’m homeless. What do I do?” I was put in the back of a police car and, siren blaring and lights flashing, we roared through Hamilton to the Shelter.

It was a horrible experience living in that shelter. Over the months I was there I lost about four stone, my only food was at the Salvation Army soup kitchen five evenings, or the Seventh-Day Adventists’ kitchen two nights a week. I'd guess we ate spaghetti five times a week. If you are homeless in Bermuda, you must keep moving. The authorities keep anyone they suspect of being of no fixed abode on the trot. My God, but I walked a good deal! One thing I hated: At the SDA kitchen the preacher referred to me as “Pops” because, I suppose, I looked old and tired.

There’s probably a good quotation that would explain that I would do well to give back on account of the good fortune I’ve had for five years now. From Savage Garden: “I believe in Karma, what you give is what you get returned...” I’d like to be putting something into the system. Perhaps writing this down is a start. (1) He tells a rather strange story, and it's true, and it might be entertaining. (2) He might just shame the Bermuda Government over its handling of homeless people, and make a difference.

NOTE: I looked online for a photograph of the Homeless Shelter owned by the Bermuda Government, and operated by the Salvation Army. There was nothing to be seen. The Shelter was built many decades ago and has been in a state of disrepair for many, many years, and the Bermuda Government is yet to replace it, though funds have been found, easily, for golf courses and for captive dolphins, for world travel, and for cars for the Party faithful. Shame! Shame! Shame!

Laughing and Having a Party

I think people tend to live, whether they like it or not, influenced by what's next door to them.
Campbell Scott

WHEN I WAS TWO YEARS OF AGE my parents bought a half-acre plot of land (with my mother’s parents’ money) and my father drew a simple design for a house which was soon built by professional builders and friends and family members, all pitching in. I can remember my grandfather up a ladder with a bucket of plaster, and the sound of limestone roof slate being cut from big blocks on a wooden platform supported by saw-horses. Some earliest memories.

Before our house, the first in the private sub-division called Tamarind Vale, was finished, our neighbours, on the lot to our north, had their house well under way. My father had sketched the plans for both dwellings, and both plans were flawed, not thought through. Nowadays one would have to submit plans drawn up by a professional to some governmental board for approval. My father would have spent on a ruler and a pencil, and not much more.

The half-acre immediately to the south of us remained unsold for a year or two while homes rose here and there through the Tamarind Vale estate. Eventually the dead cedar trees were cleared and burned, and the excavations began for a good-sized unit there. I was old enough to walk and climb about this latest house, so near us, as it was under construction. It was the first in Tamarind Vale to have two floors. Norman and Adele Jones bought that house when it was completed, and Adele lived there until her death earlier this year; for about 55 years I’d guess. I’d sold our place when my mother died in 1992. I’ve looked down on Tamarind Vale and my mother’s house by way of Google Earth, and (as I’d heard) the house is almost unrecognizable: much bigger, and the main entrance to the property is now on the side we called the back garden, our front closed off.

I can, in my mind, still walk myself through Tamarind Vale as it was when I was young, a boy with a fishing line and some bait walking barefoot on the hot tarmac, sometimes hopping from one foot to the other, to our dock on the Harbour. The children from Tamarind Vale spent unsupervised holiday time at the dock, swimming and fishing, even though one of us, Mikey, had fallen overboard when there with another neighbourhood youngster, Billy, who couldn’t save him from drowning. An adult neighbour got little Mikey’s body to shore.

Before the drowning, Norman and Adele Jones’s eldest son, Bobby, had died of cancer. He was perhaps seven years old. I can remember Bobby quite well all these years (decades) on. Bobby was the first person that I knew “my age” to die. I didn’t understand death then, and I had older relatives dying; but I felt keenly the departure of friends, whether for a holiday abroad or to live overseas. It was (and is) more difficult to be separated from the living than from the dead.

In 1967 another lad from the neighbourhood, Eddie, passed away after a freak accident and resultant surgery he did not survive. Eddie’s father died not long afterwards; a broken heart we all said. They’d lived in the house where Mikey, the boy who drowned, had lived ten years earlier. That had spooked us.

Those boys’ ghosts do not haunt me in my dreams and mental revisits to Tamarind Vale; neither does my mother (and so many neighbours of my parents’ age now dead). Rather, they are part of the background sights and sounds and as alive now as those of us who have survived. We are all part of it.

I did not live a particularly solitary childhood, but I could amuse myself with a book and pass on a game of softball on one of the empty lots. Saturday mornings did mean a few hours at the movies, our friends our age would go too, catching the bus at the bottom of Tamarind Vale. After the film got out we might take the Belmont Manor ferry back to Harbour Road and walk the mile or so home to Tamarind Vale.

On Harbour Road, not far from our home, the English actor, author and playwright Noel Coward lived in the gatehouse at Spithead. I remember being aware of that, but not being much impressed. I’ve read the biographies and now know that Coward would have been having a pretty gay time in Bermuda, avoiding the taxman.

Our neighbours were, almost without exception, extremely kind to us. My father had left my mother and their children not long after I’d started school. Single mothers were rare in the 1950s. So rare that my mother, who had been an enthusiastic and active member of the Church of England, was told by our parish priest that if she divorced her husband she would not be permitted to take Holy Communion. My mother never went to church again. Over 30 years later that same Vicar, raised to a Canon or some such, turned up at my mother’s bedside in the hospice where she was dying of cancer. By then my mother was unconscious, she was to die the next day, and the Canon said to me: “Would you like me to conduct your mother’s funeral?” I muttered something about him not wanting her in life. Why only in death? That Vicar - who preached “Love thy neighbour as thyself” – struggled to be a good neighbour.

I often played music at a considerable volume if I was home by myself. I know it disturbed neighbours downwind of us. Perhaps, especially, because my music of choice was the long-haired variety. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. I’m paying for that loud music now, being fairly deaf and requiring a hearing aid. Eh? Sorry?

My childhood was a time when one left doors unlocked if one went out. If one’s laundry was on the clotheslines and rain threatened, a neighbour would bring it inside. Many homes might be left with doors and windows wide open, while families gathered to watch the kids playing baseball or softball, or for a picnic at the dock or at the beach. Baseball because a number of our neighbours were families stationed in Bermuda with the U.S. Coast Guard.

Tamarind Vale is a long while ago, and close at hand. My youngest sister was telling me that she doesn’t like neighbours, homes close together, and doesn’t much like company. I told her that I liked living in a small block of flats. I rarely see my neighbours, but I know them and quite like them (as does Cailean). I enjoy community dwelling.

That said, when I win the Lotto I would almost certainly buy a large home with lots of space between it and any neighbours. But I would have people living in it with me (a valet, cook, maids, and a gardener) and be open to visitors. Come and spend the summer. The winter. And I know just the place.



On a hilltop above the Northumberland seaside village of Alnmouth there is a very large and rather antiquated building that has some history. It has been a private home, a club, a small hotel, and it is now a friary. The Friary of Saint Francis is a retreat for a better class of retreater, I’m guessing, having seen some awfully posh sports cars on the gravel in the forecourt. The few friars wear long, brown, monkish robes and sandals, but look quite well-off, a better class of friar. I imagine their paying guests, arriving in the costly cars with designer clothes, wouldn’t be comfortable with scrawny, gaunt, perpetually-fasting, hungry friars lumping about in hair vests. Hell, until Henry VIII put his oar in, the religious houses were comfortably well off, and then some. Storybook Friar Tuck was a big man, man. And Jesus wears a Rolex.

The Friary building has been added upon, and there are portions with a religious flavour, but it is, at heart, an enormous country house overlooking the north end of Alnmouth Beach. There must be four floors and masses of windows facing the North Sea. I have no idea what a property like the Friary would go for on the market if the Brethren wanted to sell up, but the view alone would be worth a small fortune. When I win the Lotto, and I have a large fortune in mind, I would make the Friary an offer so enormous that they could not resist.

I’d probably have to leave the basic outside structure of the Friary intact, unchanged, but I would remove all of the Christian iconography. The inside would be completely renovated. I’d want my any-time-at-all visitors to have all the comforts of a hotel on Park Lane, luxurious accommodation with a spectacular view. And when the storms rage in from the North Sea, my winter guests might warm themselves at an open fire and watch the surf smashing onto the beach and WW2 fortifications below, or read in a recliner chair, a blanket over the knees for extra warmth. At least one miniature dachshund to maintain order. Two to run riot.

I might be some measure from the nearest house, beyond spitting distance, but with my Lotto money I could bring the neighbourhood inside, bring my friends in. It’s a dream, a fantasy, but better to be prepared in case one does win the Lotto. My Lotto Dream, in which I entertain at home, and make a place for friends and family to come and be pampered for a spell, fits in with my Childhood Remembered Dream in which friends and family (excepting my father) were all around. The main difference between the dreams of things to come and those already done would be the level of comfort, some nice touches: art, music, books, fine food, company, and conversation. These things I had as a boy, but it was a struggle. One might borrow a record or book, go to a gallery to see a Vincent van Gogh, talk beyond one’s mental means about the Coming of the Counter-Culture, but it was a bugger to get regular invitations to really upscale dinner parties. I went to dine at the homes of lovely friends, and had the steak my mother could not afford, but being waited on was rare.

I’d love to move my mother (who has been a ghost these past 18 years) into my Lotto Dream home, the former Friary. It would be nice to have her in the flesh, but with time and times rolling on, her spirit would be welcome, perhaps walking a gallery. Calling out, as she did when she was ill and worried in bed: “Ross! Ross! Are you there?” And I’d tempt the ghost with a dish of bread-and-butter pudding into a well-lit room overlooking the Sea. I’d read a book, and my mother would stand at the window for a spell. A magic spell. The sun shining through her. And a mini-bus load of friends arrives that evening. Dinner, then charades, perhaps cards or Scrabble, and somebody will play the piano and sing something by Cole Porter. “The girls today in society go for classical poetry. So to win their hearts one must quote (with ease) Aeschylus and Euripides ...”

We could all sing along, quite loudly, because the neighbours are far down the hill, and the neighbours are us.

Signs and Wonders

Durham Cathedral & Castle from Railway Station

And the people bowed and prayed
to the neon god they made,
and the sign flashed out its warning
in the words that it was forming,
and the sign said: “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
and tenement halls”
and whispered in the sound of silence.
Paul Simon. The Sound of Silence

LAST TUESDAY I SPENT THE DAY wandering the narrow, cobbled streets of Durham in the northern English rain with an old friend from Utah. Richard had never been to Great Britain before this long journey, we met at grammar school in Bermuda forty-mumble years ago.

Like me, Richard has his roots in this part of the world, his mother’s family were converts to Mormonism in Lanarkshire, Scotland in 1849, sailed to the Americas in 1853, and eventually trekked across the plains to the Rocky Mountains. Richard’s great-great-grandfather, James Campbell Livingston, 1833-1909, was appointed by the Mormon Prophet Brigham Young in 1860 to be head of the quarrying operation for the construction of the Salt Lake Temple. Livingston lost his right arm in a blasting accident in 1870, but continued to supervise the granite quarry until the Temple was completed and dedicated in 1893. James Campbell Livingstone had three plural wives and 18 children, and held a number of Church offices, including that of Patriarch.

Salt Lake Mormon Temple, Utah

When we arrived at Durham Railway Station, which is on high ground, we found the City well sign-posted and were able to make our way down to the River Wear, then up to the Cathedral and Castle. The only traffic (besides pedestrians) seemed to be very small buses and the odd bicycle, and we were able to walk in the street easily and safely as we climbed the hill. The buses had electric signs flashing their stops and ultimate destinations.

I have visited Durham Cathedral before, on a cold but dry winter’s day in 2006. That day I was on a coach tour and had to walk around the building rather quickly, and I was only able to see the major attractions there. Last Tuesday we had plenty of time.

I was pleased to notice that outside the main doors to the Cathedral there was no sign indicating entrance fees (Westminster Abbey, in London, had a £10 charge years ago). There were several other signs at the door in Durham. One covered the policy on dogs, only guide dogs being permitted inside. An elderly, ginger-coloured with a grey muzzle, Labrador was tied to a post outside the door, on a leash long enough that the dog could sit just inside the archway. The dog was friendly, and rather a charming touch. Mind you, in my perfect world Cailean would go everywhere. Once inside the doors, there were large signs telling visitors that no indoor photography was permitted, and that postcards were available in the gift shops. A large wood and glass box had a notice to say that it costs over £3 million a year to maintain the Cathedral, donations appreciated. If one is a UK taxpayer, one can use an envelope provided and there is some benefit to that. The glass case did not have a great deal of money in it, and only a half-dozen envelopes. Hard times, or do the regular Anglican worshippers use direct debit payments?

We walked along the nave to the high altar where we were told that we might stay only very briefly as a Mothers’ Union service was to be held in fifteen minutes’ time. We’d noticed many women wearing lapel pins, and some wearing blue robes, along with male and female priestly types swooshing back and forth importantly. We headed back to the rear of the nave and asked at the information booth where the Café was. Just off the Cloisters, several doors and twists and turns and it would appear before us. But, we were warned, the restaurant would be packed to its ancient arched ceilings with really old ladies from the Mothers’ Union. We got chatting to one of these ladies, all the way from her home in Wales for the service. It was a national conference.

As we walked along the Cloisters (my favourite part of these very old cathedrals and abbeys, I could imagine sitting there to meditate many centuries ago, away from the world) I held my camera out through the arches to take a (probably illegal) photograph. God did not strike me dead, and I quite appreciate that. I’d prefer not to die in a church in case it would be thought I was a religious type.

Durham Cathedral Tower from Cloisters

The Cloisters’ walls had many signs on them, rooms and exhibits in this door and that. The Café was as far down as one could get. As forecast, it was crammed with grey-haired ladies, many (perhaps most) looking a bit wobbly with sticks, crutches and Zimmer frames. Some were clinging to slightly steadier women. One wonders if the Shrine at Lourdes might be a bit like the tea-room at Durham Cathedral during a conference.

Richard and I pushed through the doors and joined the massive queue. I explained the difference between a line (American) and a queue (English) to Richard while we shuffled ever so slowly towards the buffet with its rapidly decreasing comestibles.

Most of the Mothers’ Union crowd seemed to be eating soup (it would turn out to be tomato and basil) with a large bread roll and a knob of butter, with a cup of tea. A few made do with just tea and a scone. We did see a few plates with clearly over-cooked broccoli and cauliflower on them, which Richard wondered at. My father liked his vegetables cooked to a tasteless sludge, but it was because he had (like all these Mothers) dentures and could not manage crisp foodstuffs.

We moved at glacial speed and reached the counter just as hundreds of little old ladies were alerted to the start of their service in the main body of the Cathedral. We were able to ask for scraps left in the serving dishes (I had pork stroganoff and roast potatoes with the last slice of Victoria sponge cake for dessert), and when we turned around the Café was almost empty. Tapping canes and frames could be heard moving along the Cloisters towards the service.

A sign by the food cases said that the Cathedral’s own ale and mead were available. I’m betting not a single little old lady went for that option. Not while in control of a Zimmer! I should note that there were no mobility scooters inside the Cathedral, and they must not be permitted as the doors were not friendly-looking, and the entrance passage involved two or more right angles, and the Cloisters were beyond more twists and turns.

These Signs made me Wonder

After our meal, which turned out to be substantial (if expensive), Richard went to see Saint Cuthbert’s famous door-knocker. One may enter the Cathedral for free, and walk past the replica of the original door knocker on the main doors, but to see the real thing near the Café costs a fiver. I wasn’t that eager. I went in search of the Toilets.

One must go out of the end of the Cathedral most distant from the high altar windows, and then a sign points to the left and right, around a corner. A smaller sign suggested a Resource Centre was around that corner too, but I couldn’t see it. Of course, the sign read MENS instead of MEN’S. Should one send a message to God in blue pencil, or let it go? Hell, put it on a website, embarrass the Deity.

The Mothers’ Union service was under way in the main body of the Cathedral, and Richard and I stood at the back to watch and listen. The preachers were so far away that one could not really see them, or determine their gender, and the sound system was not the best. The hymn singing was so dreadful that I reckon the congregation had new and/or unfamiliar books. I certainly didn’t know the few words I could make out. The Lord’s Prayer was mumbled, but I noticed a family of Asians standing at the back near us intoned the Prayer perfectly and clearly, before resuming their personal conversation in Mandarin or something exotic.

There did not seem to be any recent signs or notices with a Christian message. In the very old chapels within the Cathedral one could see some writing on the walls, often damaged courtesy of Henry VIII in the 1530s and Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s. Old tombs and monuments had headless bodies. The signs all seemed to be towards gift shops, all in English, and not terribly well done. Assuming they get their £60,000 a week, it doesn’t go very far. Perhaps it costs a bundle just to dry clean all those robes?

Richard climbed the spiral stairs up the Cathedral’s main tower. I sat outside on the Green and made conversation with a couple who, like me, were knackered from all the walking inside.

When Richard emerged we went across to Durham Castle and joined a wonderful tour with an attractive young guide. She was a PhD student, had lived in Alabama for twelve years, and had an international sense of humour. This Castle was new to me, though some parts of it are nearly 1,000 years old. It is in use by Durham University, the Keep is now student residences. The best part, in my opinion, was a very old Norman chapel in the basement that had vanished for generations, and that has recently been rediscovered and cleared out and opened to the visiting and worshipping public.

An hour or so later, we walked back down the hill, taking photographs, and made our way to the Railway Station by following the many helpful street signs. On the way I excused myself and dodged into a public toilet down many slippery stairs (it was still drizzling rain) well below street level. A very small toilet with only three urinals and two cubicles. I was the only person there and stood at the urinal nearest the door. Then Richard decided he’d use the facilities too, and came in and went over to the third urinal just as I was leaving and another bloke was coming in quietly. The stranger stood at the middle urinal. Not looking, Richard thought the only other person there was me, but I’d gone outside. A minute later Richard emerged looking a tad flustered. He’d said, thinking I was at the urinal, “That’s a fine stream you’ve got going there. You won’t be coming down with prostate cancer any time soon.” Then he realised he was talking to a complete stranger. I do not know what the fellow said, but Richard suggested we get our skates on.

Waiting for the Train to Alnmouth

We were at the Station just in time to catch the northbound train heading to Dundee; it stops in Newcastle and Alnmouth before crossing into Scotland. A very, very long train, this one. We had to walk through carriage after carriage to find seats. There were many unoccupied seats, and most had small notices to say they were reserved. In fact, few people boarded the train in Durham and Newcastle, and almost none in Alnmouth where we got off. I wonder if one can actually disregard reserved signs on trains. Had the seats been reserved and vacant since the train left King’s Cross?

Cailean had been alone in the flat for eleven hours, but had not peed indoors. He needed to go out for sure! After a short walk, I came inside and wrote a dozen postcards and popped them in the pillar box across the street. I suppose, more correctly, one should write and post any postcards where they were purchased. “Having a lovely time ...” rather than “Had a lovely time ...”

Under the Bomb

One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.
Emily Dickinson

IN OCTOBER OF 1962 a group of young girls with their dance teacher drove up to the main entrance of the United States Air Force Base in Bermuda. The mini-bus paused at the gate and the guards, who seemed to be on high alert, surrounded it. There was a great deal of fuss, questions were asked over and over, the armed soldiers were clearly most anxious about these young visitors in their leotards. On the side of the mini-bus the words: THE BERMUDA SCHOOL OF RUSSIAN BALLET.

This was the fortnight when politicking and posturing by three very different world figures with troubles at home brought the world rather close to nuclear war. The Americans had recently put intermediate-range ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads in southern Italy and Turkey, all aimed at the Soviet Republics. In the spring of 1961 American forces and Cuban exiles trained by the CIA had attempted to invade the Caribbean island of Cuba and had been turned away by the troops of Fidel Castro and Ché Guevara (a clear embarrassment for American President Kennedy). In the USSR, Nikita Khrushchev was struggling with domestic policies including difficulties with agriculture. Hungry citizens are rarely happy. Khrushchev was aiding the Cubans, glad of a client state near America’s underbelly.

Kennedy, Castro and Khrushchev were all flawed and dangerous. If religion may be said to be dangerous, this was in part the committed non-religion of the atheistic Communists. I’m not sure that the Kennedys preached their Catholicism as most Americans were a different kind of Christian and didn't seem to trust Papists. One wonders if Kennedy dreamed of restoring Catholic leaders in Cuba, and dreamed of getting praised by the Pope for doing so. Who knows? We know Kennedy lied and cheated. Khrushchev had to tell a few fibs to keep his position as Premier of the USSR. Fidel Castro may have been the most open and honest just then.

So, in October of 1962 the USSR shipped intermediate-range ballistic missiles to Cuba and got found out. Castro, in the style of the totally mad revolutionary you’d think could only exist in bitter comedies starring Peter Sellers, wanted the Soviets to make a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the USA, even though it would certainly mean Cuba being wiped off the face of the Earth. Think about that: Annihilation is good for the Revolution!

Armed submarines set sail, and aeroplanes flew about, with nuclear-tipped devices. The guards at the gate at Kindley Field in Bermuda stopped the School of Russian Ballet mini-bus and worried about little girls not yet in their teens armed only with slippers. And I cannot say that much of this registered with me. I met some of those ballet students a few years later and heard their story. We laughed at it all.

In the 1950s I had seen photographs and film of nuclear explosions. Those wonderful mushroom clouds. The British were setting them off on atolls in the Pacific, I believe. The Americans would light up the sky in Nevada. I would, years later, come across the Down-Winders in southern Utah who had been bathed in radioactive fallout as their military practised the extermination of humanity in the desert to the west. One finds it hard to believe that the devastating effects of radiation could be so conveniently ignored. Was it for the common good?

There is something rather exciting, amazing, about the cloud an A-Bomb or H-Bomb can kick up. There’s art in it. There is natural art in a tornado, in a tsunami, in a landslip. But the nuclear bomb is our invention, and we drop it, or bury it in the sand, having set the trigger and moved sharpish to one side. In the 1950s I recall fabulous sunsets, courtesy of atmospheric nuclear tests. How could a young boy be fearful of that? I never sensed guilt at Hiroshima or Nagasaki in the conversation of my elders.

Despite Castro’s malicious goading, Khrushchev did a deal with Kennedy. The missiles were taken out of Cuba and the Americans removed their missiles from Turkey and southern Italy. Kennedy kept his part of the bargain secret, and that made Khrushchev seem to have lost the face-off. Khrushchev was removed from office a couple of years later. Kennedy was unpopular enough in some circles (those conspiracy theories continue today) to take a bullet. Fidel Castro was condemned to a half-century in fatigues. I don’t think even the Russians took Castro that seriously, and he was a constant drain with the need for foreign aid and only the Communists willing to give it.

One woman, it is said, links Castro, Khrushchev and JFK. Lady Jeanne Campbell - daughter of the 11th Duke of Argyll, granddaughter of Lord Beaverbrook, and grand-niece of Queen Victoria’s daughter Louise – was a socialite and foreign correspondent for the Evening Standard. Lady Jeanne was, apparently, the intimate of the Cuban, Soviet and American leaders. Some claim she was the lover of all three. It’s a wonderful story, if true, and would make for a great film plot. In fact, even if it is a fantasy, it would entertain. One of my cousins is married to Lady Jeanne’s daughter. (Her father was American author Norman Mailer who was the subject of FBI monitoring for 15 years after J. Edgar Hoover decided Mailer was a possible Communist sympathiser.) My grandmother rather liked Lady Jeanne, not at all concerned by the exotic history. She also liked Norman Mailer, who was only briefly married to Lady Jeanne Campbell.

I was living in the history of 1962 without being aware of it. My friends from the Russian Ballet were closer to it, but hardly alarmed. Their mini-bus was cleared at the gate and went through to complete whatever business they had on that patch of the USA in Bermuda’s East End. I was told the story in 1965.

Almost fifty years on, we have a few rogue nations, and some dodgy friends, with some nuclear capabilities. Bush and Blair lied about Iraq. However, we do have North Korea – a peculiar, family-run state where the millions seem to take no notice of their fearless leader’s dubious sanity. Kim Jong-il is a nutter. Kim has nuclear devices and missiles, though not many of them. North Korea could take out a very large, populous city in that part of the world. The thing is, the reaction would involve countries with far greater military force. And I suppose that is a cloud I must live under. We all must.

If one is to fear something, best to stick with the knapsack left unattended on the platform at the village station. Report it if necessary. It may just contain history.

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.

Observatory

There's one thing that he loves
and that is flattery.
One week he's in polka dots
the next week he's in stripes,
'cos he's a dedicated follower of fashion.

They seek him here,
they seek him there,
in Regent Street and Leicester Square.
Ev'rywhere the Carnabytion army marches on,
each one a dedicated follower of fashion.

His world is built 'round discotheques and parties,
this pleasure seeking individual always looks his best
'cos he's a dedicated follower of fashion.

The Kinks (A Dedicated Follower of Fashion)

I’M CHAIN-SMOKING CIGARETTES and sipping my Bacardi and Coke on the first-floor balcony outside The Hoppin’ John, a restaurant and bar complex above Front Street in Hamilton, Bermuda. I pop the maraschino cherry the bartender had added to my drink to make it appear classier, and to indicate it has alcohol in it, in my mouth, bite it in half, and swallow the pieces. Richard rescues the cherry from his glass and flips it over the wrought-iron railing, aiming for the tourists walking below. We’re here for the Eclipse of the Sun.

It’s cloudy, dark clouds, and when the Moon passes between the Earth and the Sun there is little change in the light. We’re talking about books we’ve read, the ones we liked. No mention of the duds. I try to tempt Richard into having one of my Kools. He declines, common sense rather than a Mormon upbringing, I imagine. I’m chain-smoking enough for two, grey smoke in the grey and faded light.

At The Hoppin’ John I usually order the Club Sandwich in the afternoon.
One night four of us went to The Hoppin’ John for dinner in its inner restaurant. No windows, dark panelling, portraits in gilt frames, plush carpets, dim lights in the sconces, starched, white linen tablecloths and napkins. We’d been given money enough for dinner, our benefactor had thought, but we ordered turtle soup, escargots, Chateaubriand and full table service, flaming desserts and Brandies Alexander. We’d done in a few bottles of Aloxe-Corton red. When the bill came, the cash in our envelope was not enough. I was the only one in the group with money in a current account, I was employed, and I got to write the cheque for the excess.

We’d been on the television that evening, to talk up local art on "Date before Dinner". After a few cocktails and pills to help loosen our tongues, get the words flowing. I’d become wonderfully relaxed, expansive. Peter played the piano in the studio, live. Chopin, I think.

One evening a friend and I had dinner on the balcony of The Hoppin’ John. If it was not too chilly, and not raining, it was pleasant enough there, above the pedestrians and cluttered traffic, across from cruise ships and freighters. On this occasion, it was summer. Time for Bacardi cocktails: rum and Grenadine over crushed ice, sweet and sickly, and toxic. My friend, facing me, whispered: “Turn around slowly and look behind you.” A drag on my cigarette and I casually twisted in my seat. I was seated about three feet away from a face I instantly recognised. One of the most famous faces in the world at that moment. The super-model Twiggy. She was with her then manager (and boyfriend) Justin de Villeneuve. De Villeneuve was really Nigel Davies, which seems naff enough without Frenchifying himself. Twiggy was really Lesley Hornby. And the Walrus was Paul. Those were the days.

Twiggy was not only dining next to me, in a restaurant partly-owned by my mother’s brother, but she was also spending her summer holiday break in my uncle’s house, next door to my mother’s place (where I lived). We’d seen Twiggy and friends coming and going on their rented mopeds day after day, and heard their parties around the pool. One of my sisters walked over to see Twiggy, who was polite enough to invite her in briefly. My sister did not ask for an autograph, she just said: "Hello!"

In 2010, Twiggy Lawson is still one of the best-known models around, and must be the face of Marks and Spencer. She looks better now - it seems to me - forty years on.

One night I went with friends to a party at the home of the grandson of Bermuda’s Government Leader. It was next door to the Leader’s residence. Sir Henry Tucker may have attempted to embrace Bermudians of all races politically, but I don’t recall any black faces at the party I attended. It would have been rather a shock at the time. (I actually do recall the first time I ever attended a mixed-race party. It was not supposed to be that way, but a New Year’s Eve bash at the private Coral Beach Club was invaded by natives. Black lads burst in and several shook my hand in some sort of black way and wished me a "Happy New Year".) At the Tucker homestead, there were lanterns and candles, music from several stereo systems played in different rooms, and every room was packed with people, most of them smoking dope. I was chain-smoking cigarettes, but I did have several glasses of rum punch from a brand new, shiny, galvanised trash-can.

And the walls and people melted and rose up, and the dim colours one could make out swirled to the music. The music became tactile. Voices became music became colours became pulsing artwork.

I do not recall how I got home, but the pictures in my head, with accompanying soundtrack, lasted into the next morning. I had a telephone call not long before midday to confirm a lunch date at The Hoppin’ John. I knew nothing of it, but I was not at work that day and arranged to meet in the rear porch at the restaurant as it was too cold to sit on the balcony. When I parked my moped and went inside, it turned out that I’d invited about a dozen people to lunch while under the influence at the party the night before. A couple were people I knew, but not exactly my close friends. LSD will do that to you. The bar bill was steep, but I believe we ate burgers and club sandwiches. And I wrote the cheque.

I am chain-smoking cigarettes, and I’m, as usual, a little over-dressed. A friend and I are having lunch in the Café Royal at the southern end of Regent Street. Here Lord Alfred Douglas dined with Oscar Wilde and on one occasion Bosie’s father, the unpleasant Marquess of Queensberry, was actually won over by Oscar’s dinner table talk and charm. Of course, Queensberry destroyed Wilde in the courts and we got "The Ballad of Reading Gaol". I’m wearing clothes left over from Carnaby Street days, a pastel-coloured shirt, floral-print tie from Liberty of London, just up the street, double-breasted, slash-back blazer with a brilliantly-coloured silk lining. We’re watching the patrons within, and the crowds moving towards Piccadilly without.

The Frostop is a burger joint and drive-in on the road, State Street, at right angles to Main Street in Hurricane, Utah. There are few tables inside; most people eat in their cars, trays hooked on the vehicles’ windows. I eat inside, always a BLT, very greasy bacon leaking onto the toast, extra mayonnaise, Diet Coke. In cold weather the windows are slightly fogged-up. I’m watching the cars outside, in the parking area and headed back and forth on State Street. I’m not smoking; the Mormon gods would not like that. There’s no place where one might get a Bacardi cocktail. Once a friend came to visit me and we had to join a private club so that he could get a rum and coke. The membership fee must have been many times the high price of the beverage. The club had no windows. One could smoke inside, the gods couldn’t see through the bricks. Or didn’t care to. The Ten-Mile Mormons would drive that far from town for a drink their bishops would not approve of.

I’m sitting at a table in the buffet restaurants’ eating area at The Rio in Las Vegas. For very little money, one can go back as many times as one can manage to the eight different buffets. Chinese, Mexican, Mongolian Barbeque and so on. I look to my left, directly into the crotch of a very tall, young woman wearing only a bejewelled g-string and pasties, a peculiar headdress featuring feathers and fake-diamonds. She’s in towering heels, and holding a small silver tray. “Keno?” she says. I have no idea what exactly Keno is, and I don’t gamble in any case. I watch her bare arse as she moves to the next table.

It’s New Year’s Eve and I’m on a double-date with friends in a French chateau that some wealthy American bought in France and dismantled and shipped to Utah, reassembling it on the benches on the east side of the Salt Lake Valley. Up here, above the City, there’s a great deal of snow, but the chateau at the Quails’ Run is warm, with central heating and open log fires in vast fireplaces. The food is fabulous and expensive, but I’m a guest, not paying for my date and me. Looking out of the window there’s a snowy yard, and it’s snowing, and in the open there’s a small heated pond on which there are swans swimming slowly. I wondered if they were real, apparently they are. They seem quite content in the steam rising off their swan lake.

In a moment I’m going to pop along to the minimart for a sandwich and some pomegranate juice to mix with diet lemonade. I shall dine in my kitchen and watch the clouds racing towards the flats from the north, the rain beating on the windows. There’s volcanic ash fresh from Iceland’s Eyjafjallakull up there. It may be May, but it is cold today, snowing in the Northern Isles, we’re to expect frost tonight. I’m concerned that my flowering plants in the courtyard may not take too much of this. Cailean is asleep in his bed below my desk; he burrowed under his blanket when I sat to write this. My observations today go down on the keys and up on the page. Later, a cup of tea, no Bacardi cocktail.

Kittens for the Drowning

You cannot believe in God until you believe in yourself.

All the powers in the universe are already ours.

It is we who have put our hands before our eyes

and cry that it is dark.

Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902)

IN 1961 I was staying with my Auntie Maud in the house in Harle Syke, Lancashire, in which she and my grandfather and my great-uncle James Arthur had been brought up in the early years of the Twentieth Century. My great-grandparents had bought the terraced house on Sutcliffe Street, overlooking the moors at that time, before the Great War. A messenger from the War Office brought word to Harry and Elizabeth Lancaster that their oldest son, James Arthur, had been killed in battle on 2 September 1918. The messenger would have knocked on the same door that I ran in and out of a dozen times a day in 1961. I never gave it a thought. In fact, this moment, in 2010, is the first time that I’ve made that connection.

There are so many connections that one can make in life and death. I tend to ramble on the telephone. I have one friend with whom I have had extensive and wandering telephone conversations for over forty years. Not quite Virginia Woolf’s streams of consciousness, we have tended to be more intelligible, I believe. However, even a journey from A to B has tended to include stops in X, Y and Z.

In 1961, while in Harle Syke, the main topic of conversation on the bus, in the Post Office, at the Mill, was the film “Whistle down the Wind” which had been filmed in the communities around Burnley that year. The people in Harle Syke spoke of it, and strangers in Clitheroe did as well, and people one had never met standing in a queue in Burnley.

When the film opened in Burnley, Auntie Maud took me down on the bus. We’d have seen an early evening show, I believe, as Maud was still working shifts in the Queen Street Mill. She’d been first sent to work in that Mill in about 1908, aged eleven, over fifty years before. I’ve just made that connection, noted it. In 1961, as far as I was concerned, Maud just went along to the Mill of a morning, not of a lifetime. I can tell you that she retired in late 1961 and went to live at the seaside, Morecambe, with a friend. She died of a stroke two months after that, her body was brought back to the family plot in the Haggate Cemetery where we’d trimmed weeds growing over my great-grandparents and Maud’s husband and son who’d all died young. At the funeral, someone said to my grandfather: “Maud didn’t last long away from Syke.” There’s an expression we use to mention death in other words: Maud popped her clogs. Until her retirement, Maud actually wore clogs when she was at work. I don’t know if she’d taken them to Morecambe.

Whistle down the Wind starts with a man flinging a sack into a reservoir or small lake. Not a scenic place, the water surrounded by rough rock and sand, with no grass or trees in sight. The man walks away as the sack starts to sink. And three young children who have been following the man at a distance run to the water’s edge and hook the sack with a stick and guide it to the shore. When the sack is hurriedly opened, we see what even I as a young child expected: mewing kittens.

A few years before I saw Whistle down the Wind, I’d had the dubious pleasure of watching the 1948 film version of Oliver Twist. The entire school I was attending, juniors and seniors, had been marched along to the Morgan Hall where we held assemblies and fairs and pet shows and we’d been instructed to sit quietly on the metal and canvas chairs facing the stage. Below the proscenium arch a large screen had been set up. A film projector was on a table half-way down the room. This was a rare thing. In fact, I recall only two other films being shown in the Morgan Hall, Leni Riefenstahl’s “Olympia” on the Berlin Olympics of 1936, which was shown at night and parents had to accompany the children attending, and another Dickens of a movie, “David Copperfield.” This version of David Copperfield had been made in 1935, starring WC Fields as Mr Micawber.

The 1948 feature Oliver Twist is awfully different from the musical “Oliver!” which it somehow spawned about twenty years later. I’m not exactly sure that young schoolchildren should have been seeing Oliver Twist in the mid to late 1950s before we’d had our souls hardened by television. In Dickens’ original story, Oliver Twist’s life is not at all cute and filled with all-dancing, all-singing, pocket-picking chums. Bill Sikes beats Nancy (who loves him despite their abusive relationship) and eventually he mauls her to death. Make a song and dance out of that!

I recall that murder. I never read David Copperfield or Oliver Twist after seeing those movie versions. I never wanted to. Afraid of identifying with the lads, perhaps. However, grim as Nancy’s untimely (if not unlikely) death is, I best remember, having dwelt on it in dark moments for decades, Bill Sikes attempting to drown his dog “Bull’s-eye”. The dog, as dogs do, was pretty faithful to Sikes, choosing to ignore Sikes’s dark and evil heart. Bull’s-eye survives long enough to see Sikes accidentally hang himself, and I believe the poor dog followed him to Hell.

That sack with the dog and a brick in it has been something of a brick in my spirit. I’ve probably invested more love and concern for my dogs (and those I’ve dog-sat) than most of my family. My Cailean is family; my Aleks was too, as was my Lexi. My cat, Pudding, was also both friend and related in some way.

I have an unpleasant cat story. Sometime in the late 1960s one of my sisters, living with my father and stepmother at that time, had managed to adopt several stray cats, all of which turned out to be female and in the family way. A head count soon after revealed a total of 35 moggies. My father filled a bucket with water and drowned kitten after kitten, and buried the dozens of wet bodies under a hedge. I did not witness this, but heard about it in whispered tones, and then it was never mentioned again. Until today. A slaughter of the innocents.

Whistle down the Wind is about three farmer’s children in Lancashire in about 1961. The oldest girl, played by a very young Hayley Mills (her mother had written the book), discovers a sleeping bearded man in a seldom-used barn. She calls out to him: “Who are you?” The startled man wakes, muttering: “Jesus Christ!” in shock. And the little girl takes the man at face value, and true to his words, and believes she has Jesus in her father’s barn.

The film holds up well fifty years later. I watched it yesterday for only the second time. In 1961, I’d not picked up on all the references to the life and death of Jesus in the film. References and allegories. I did understand, all those years ago, that the children (my age at that time) were innocent, and the adults doubted. I'd identified with the children and thought them in the right. Now, I guess I’d say the children were naive, foolish, and somehow to blame for their ignorance. I’d like to think that even the youngest child questions everything. Everything. The bearded man in the barn is a murderer on the run from the police. He gets Hayley Mills to bring him a gun he has hidden in a railway tunnel. By this time, many, many children have become his followers. The grown-ups know nothing of this. Until a little boy lets it slip. The hunt is on again as the police are called to the farm. The man is holed up in the barn with his gun. Outside, the police are facing a swarm of children.

I don’t have any children. Can’t say I ever wanted any. Watching Whistle down the Wind I had to wonder whether I would want my children, if I had any, wrapped up against the cold, hard, real world, everything doubted. Trust no one. Or would I want my children to make up their own minds, take some chances based on what they’ve been taught (putting an onus on me to teach them), and to stand up for what they believe? Even if it’s risky as heck.

We sent our boys and girls to church and Sunday school in my day, and some parents thinking they are righteous and all-knowing send their kids to churches, synagogues, temples and mosques in 2010. They expect those youngsters to come home filled with the Holy Spirit.

It seems to me that a child that is told to believe in something outside him, to have total and unwavering faith in this something, is put in harm’s way. A child raised up in this fashion must accept the Crusades and the Holy Wars, the Edicts and the Fatwa’s, the flames of hell flickering at one’s feet as one reaches up for the arms of the angels.

Children might as well be placed in a bag with a great stone and flung into deep water.

Surely, it would be better to understand oneself and then one’s relationships with everyone and everything else. No murderous false gods in the barn, or in the Temple, but the feeling of well-being when one wakes in one’s own mind and body. Arriving without travelling.