Old Gaffer

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  • The Conservatives New Party In Northern Ireland

    Inventors find regularly that their idea is not unique, it had been triggered in more than one head. So is the case with political theories. I wrote something on a New Party and posted it, and then discovered we may have one in a couple of years time in Northern Ireland. The nucleus of the party, the Northern Ireland Branch of the Conservative party, is already in being, and now that they have David Trimble in the Lords, they have a name to conjure with.

    I first became aware of this new venture, when the local Bangor office of the Conservative party sent us a questionnaire asking a series of questions which were basically standard, but unfortunately, taking into account Northern Ireland politics, the answers were totally to be predicted if one knew the political leanings of the individual answering them, as there are basically only two effective alternatives. If they are to gain credence, their approach will have to be much more sophisticated. A broad based inquiry is fair enough for market research, but politics is a different animal and should be treated in more detail in more areas.

    In my piece on the New Party I was careful to stress that the party should grow from within the community, and not be foisted on it. The party should appear more interested in the community than in politics per se, and definitely be more locally based than has been the case recently. The new party should create its own popularity through its own good works and popular policies.

    The new party must take each item of the political fabric as applied to the infrastructure and the population generally, talk intelligently to the electorate and not at it, and what they say should not be typical political rhetoric. The years of the Blair campaign have sharpened the minds of the populace to the point where they can see psychobabble at 50 paces. When examining the fabric they must decide to state openly, whether what they find is excellent, acceptable, or unacceptable. From this menu they could then postulate a programme of proposed change, accompanied by the reasons and paths by which these changes may be brought about. Too long we have bumbled along, grumbling and disapproving, while being totally frustrated because of our impotence in the face of incompetence and change for change’s sake

    The choices would obviously be determined by priority taking into account costs, an assessment of the possibility of success, and urgency. A sample of the sort of problems I have in mind are the problems facing policing, youthful delinquency, the stabilisation of the educational system across the board, town planning, top heavy central government staffing, housing, the plight of single-parent families, infection in hospitals, and an improvement in all levels of the infrastructure, particularly roads, sewerage and water.

    I give here two rough examples – (A) The chronic lack of housing. There must be statistical analysis within the curricula of the Grammar schools. If the new party decides to examine the housing situation throughout the North of Ireland, it would seem possible that the sixth forms of various schools throughout the province could be marshalled to supply the statistics in various categories, and also ideas of how housing could be provided and where, reconditioning included, thus enabling the less advantaged to get on the ladder at an affordable cost. This proposal would then be widened to include the drainage problem, the various methods of paying for housing by the individual. The knock-on effect of this would be that in many cases the parents of these children would be interested too and so the theme of the Conservative party, or any other party, would not only be brought to the attention of the populace, it would generate goodwill – such as ‘at last someone is listening!’

    (B) The burgeoning central civil service. Possibly in this case it will be university students who would be given the task of going through history to discover the good and bad points of local government, devolved and central government, and to come up with a workable plan of how a government can be localised to the best advantage for all, while still leaving the overall guidance in the hands of central government.

    It is not going to be quick or easy, and it can’t all be done by amateurs, but the status quo is with us for some time to come and that will give the Conservative party a few years in which to consolidate and grow. You never know, out of it may come a blueprint for the whole of Britain.

  • Religion

    Having been through the religious mill, from complete certainty, through doubting, to agnosticism and finally to atheism, I am fairly aware of the different degrees of religious belief from the fanatical to the dilettante. It is therefore unwise and unfair to openly denigrate belief in whatever God, as there are those who rely on their religious beliefs for their support and the whole balance of their lives, and may be susceptible to persuasion from someone whom they believe to be more experienced.. So I propose to lay out some of the congruities thrown up by fiction, heresy, paganism and pure greed.

    Right down the ages, from before Roman times, up to and including the Spanish Civil War, and World War II, those in control have used religion as a goad, or an excuse, to achieve their ends. What I find incongruous about this fact is that the masses allow themselves to go along with these fictions so contrary to the basic aims of the particular religions. The pilots of Germany and Italy during the Spanish civil war, were blessed by the then Pope. Kamikaze pilots of World War II, the suicide bombers so prevalent today, and indeed their families and friends, one assumes, view that their acts will take these chosen people from their mundane world and place them in a Nirvana. There is of course the possibility that over and above the religious belief is a desire for acknowledgement and excitement. The Crusaders, I think, in many cases, were misled, most had actually no idea of the Koran, the religious maxims, nor the history and art of Islam. And most were probably more interested in what they could get out of it materially, than spiritually.

    The fact that the creation of the world and all that it containes is so remarkable, so unbelievably complex and yet so logical, creates a mental vacuum which has to be filled in order to explain these complexities, and so from the very beginning, man has invented his own measures of achieving these aims. To some, for no logical reason, they look upon the Creator as a benign, omnipotent, omnipresent deity, who will make everything right, whereas if there is such a thing, it is totally blind, is insensitive to the needs of its charges, and this includes the animal kingdom and the vegetable kingdom, and is totally permissive when it comes to atrocities committed in the name of religion.. And yet this philosophy, called religion, if anything, teaches us how to live together amicably, courteously, and with consideration for others. The fact that religious beliefs probably never were totally accepted, least of all by those expounding their merits, seems to indicate that the social graces are more important than the religious ones.

  • In Search of Progress, 1920 To 2000, Part 4 of 4

    How does it all add up? We have bad behaviour among the young, a tinkering government bent on flying kites instead of legislating We are taxed beyond reason in every sphere, and our lives are less gregarious.

    Let us look at the young. Bad behaviour could be expected, because the plight of a lot of the young people today is so different from the childhood of myself and my children. The better off treat their children better than we were ever treated. However, with few recreational facilities, 24,7 TV, the iniquitous website, latchkey children that are on the increase, and the loss of the extended family, children are left very much to their own devices, and these too are few and far between. It is unsurprising therefore, they congregate in gangs, that there is gang warfare, which not necessarily takes the form of inter-gang fighting, but a war against the affluent. All the time you have working single parents, the problem will remain, because parental influence has diminished incredibly. The State is expected to cope.

    It is costing the nation money for policing, insuring against, and clearing up after the damage caused by young people. Might it be cheaper to provide them with something enjoyable to do? The housing legislation encourages young women to have children in order to obtain a dwelling, The problem will worsen. The escalating breakup of marriages needs to be addressed as this too contributes to the situation. From my own experience, I beg those in authority not to be penny-pinching in any solution they may consider. What is put in place must be professional, of a high-quality, and funded for a long haul, as habits are not changed overnight. To enter a badly decorated, and furnished youth club, is intensely off-putting – I know!. We need much more, confidential, professional help on tap for the young to beat drugs, loneliness, and the other ills besetting them, something similar to ChildLine.

    One issue influencing the finances of the young is inheritance. We were frugal by necessity, and have saved enough for a comfortable old age. Now we’re finding that the family home, which basically was always sacrosanct, a safe investment, (only the very wealthy paid inheritance tax) is now being taken from us piecemeal with payments for nursing, taxes and diminishing income. The false rise in the value of property, is now presenting the elderly with a dichotomy. They wish to pass on the money to the younger generations to get them out of their own financial difficulties. With swathing inheritance taxation, avoidance takes a number of forms, one of which is to pass on the house at least seven years before you expect to die. This however, with the insecurity of marriage, ceases to ensure that the value of the property will go to those intended, as a divorce among the legatees might create a settlement whereby that portion of the property would go to somebody entirely different.

    I fear this government is more interested in covering its losses than in looking after the welfare of the population. I have already referred to the penal system elsewhere, but must touch again here. Due to overcrowding and underfunding, there is little attempt made to change the outlook and proclivities of the incarcerated, many of whom should not have been there in the first place. We are steadily building a serious problem with the influx of refugees. Drugs too are a similar problem, leftover from the 60s. Neither simple to solve, but closure of our borders, and more stringent search legislation might help to stem the flow. I don’t understand why we ever opened our borders, in the first place, we managed to avoided other EU blanket legislation.

  • In Search Of Progress, 1920 To 2000, Part 3

    Mid 50s to Now. The 60s psychologically, had the same effect as moving from a dark room to one with garish lighting. There were crazy fads like burning bras, a totally fatuous symbol which lasted only a very short spell. The whole aspect of clothes, hair styles especially, coloured hair and the Mohican were rampant and in my view a lot of it in bad taste. The word kitsch was now common, and peoples’ attitudes to one another seemed no longer to be as considerate and mannerly as heretofore. Those short years were the turning point that has brought us to where we are today.

    Money was becoming freer, but life was hardly lavish. We still had a toe in the restrictions of the 40’s, but by the 80s people were talking in millions as they are today in billions.

    In the late 50s, vast swathes of cities were being demolished and lying dormant and the areas ravaged in the Blitz were still barren. Council and Spec building was invading green-field sites out of town, supermarkets were beginning to replace the corner and high street shops. Dual carriageways and motorways were creeping onto the landscape, and flying as a daily means of transport was now enjoyed by all. The Coronation introduced a lot of us to TV, but its real hold was yet to come. Mass production was affecting prices, especially cars, with the result there was a rising increase in traffic. It was in 1963 one of the most stupid acts of Parliament occurred when Beeching was allowed to decimate the rail miles of the UK rail network, and leave us with the transport problems we have today. It was also in the late 60s and 1970 that Rock festivals became popular.

    Social and leisure changes, more than anything, have smudged the British class system, progressively since the 60’s The cult of the ‘Personality’, more than anything. There is still the Aristocracy. There is no longer a working class or middle class, there are just the very poor, the impecunious, the comfortably off, the wealthy and the filthy rich – take your pick! Some plumbers earn more than doctors; rock stars could buy a bank. Money is tending to be the yard stick of today, not moral values, social skills, or plain respect for one another, and this trend, especially among the disadvantaged and the young is growing at an alarming rate.

    The mid 70s era was when Princess Diana came onto the scene, and the populace at large became aware for the first time of how voracious the paparazzi were. Prior to this it was the Continental Press that generated the scandals of royalty, and ‘names’, and blew sundry whistles. It was in this era we saw hordes of people with cameras scrambling for the same picture and making life miserable for these poor individuals. The news of today merely demonstrates that we never learn from the past. Having one’s photograph taken is one thing, but being almost trampled to death is unacceptable, and I’ve never understood why there has not been a law which reduces the number of people taking photographs to a sensible few. More to the point, the reward for the taking of photographs, or giving one’s view on a particular incident, should not be a six figure sum, which to some is too irresistible. It should be so little, that conscience rather than greed has at least a hope of being effective. Legislation to this effect is long overdue. The government seems to forget that the changes taken in the 60s included the upsurge of ‘greed at any price’.

    Part 4 delineates possible lines of thought with respect to solutions

  • In Search Of Progress, 1920 to 2000, 2 of 4

    ’39 to the Mid 50’s In 1939 most of the school children, with some parents and children of a younger age, were evacuated. I included, so I did not see the barrenness of the towns and cities without children, which must have been the case. Children by and large have a softening affect on their surroundings. Adults take the time to consider their needs and their wishes, even if they don’t always accede.

    In 1940 the whole fabric of life changed, almost over night, caused by three factors, recruitment, evacuation now a permanency and the Blitz. The speed with which the new war machine went into gear is a credit to the coalition government which was managing things. Then there were no spin doctors, or stop and start legislation. Life was real and earnest. People in every walk of life, from the hosts of the evacuated children to the women who went into factories, living a solitary life with husbands away, stuck it out with little complaint that I ever heard. The camaraderie during the Blitz, is well documented, the way country folk helped to look after the evacuees was of a similar ilk, but the class system was not dropped in the face of such hardship and damage. The classes came closer together but respected one another. The barriers might have been softened but they still existed, It was then all the open spaces were cut up for allotments, some never to be reclaimed.

    At the end of the war, there was a serious problem with respect to labour relations. Earlier, perforce, every vacancy had been filled by some young person coming up, until ’46, with the results that demobilisation caused chaos as many of us never did get our job back, because we in turn had taken somebody else’s job in the meantime. By the same token, rationing didn’t end until 1952, so in effect expansion was limited until then. In the late 40s one could still buy beautifully tailored clothes at knockdown prices, because the prices were held down by government policy. By the mid-50s all this had gone. Fashion had picked up, fashion itself was applied almost to every walk of life, and the Festival of Britain, celebrated throughout the country, seemed to inject a feeling of prosperity and a new awakening which lived with us for a long time after.

    This sudden feeling of freedom sponsored the Crazy 60s when everything went and nothing seemed too outr?. This was a period of free love, the flower people, and Carnaby Street. The problem was that nobody had thought it through, it was spontaneous, and revolutionary. Young people latched on to it with a zeal which was breathtaking, and the problems that we have today through the barriers being broken down so completely, can be visited on those few months when this madness was at its height. When drug taking took hold, new drinking habits were formed, and the class system crumpled, not overnight, but was badly bent. What had taken hundreds of years to establish by attrition and necessity, were swept away in a few months and nothing worthwhile was put in its place In this period, with food shortages and dried foods being imported, new recipes were being promulgated by the government, and food itself became more healthy – vegetables came into their own, and imported tinned food became a staple.

    In the 50s, life was virtually unchanged socially, although domestically it was again a unit and heralded the baby boom. All changes were slow because money was still short and we were having to shift into another gear. It was really not until about 54 that life really started to improve, wages started to rise, shops filling with imports and new goods.

  • In Search Of Progress, 1920 to 2000 1 of 4

    20’s to ’39. What follows here, and several other posts in this vein, are narrow views of one person, not over-views determined by research. They are done mainly to determine how life has changed over 80 years.

    Take children; the phrase ‘children should be seen and not heard’, in its various forms, was a Victorian maxim people lived by in the 20s’s. Children’s opinions were rarely sought, they would sit in company, hardly moving, until given permission to go elsewhere, if they were lucky. Visiting relatives were rarely on speaking terms with them, and their visits occasioned the best of everything to be produced, and one had to be on one’s best behaviour. For a child to offer an opinion might be considered insolence, and could induce a crack round the ear. There was little or no traffic, other than horse-drawn vehicles or men pushing barrows.. Playing in the street therefore, was not only acceptable, it was expected. Children built up relationships with various delivery men, men with horse-drawn milk floats, coal men, bakers, and anyone else who would allow them to have a ride on their carts, in return for helping with deliveries, for a short time. Children ran after carts, and grabbed a lift on the back, when the driver wasn’t looking. Children either for the family, or to earn money, gathered the horse droppings in a bucket to use as fertiliser in back gardens.

    The change clearly came, with the advent of commercial motor vehicles – a gradual process in which change was not really noticeable in the street, or in the general life of the children, until World War II, a period of nearly 20 years.

    Family life; the two world wars seriously affected the size of families and the up bringing of children.. In the 20s and early 30s there were ‘Maiden Ladies’, unmarried women who lived at home, because the men they might have married were lying in rows, rotting in a foreign field. So the children of those who had married were looked after by their grandparents, their parents and the maiden aunts. Housing was in short supply with a building programme just getting underway. Hitler set it all back and once again extended families were forced to live together, resulting in children being cared for by a number of people. In the 60s all this changed, people’s aspirations became greater, with greater affluence, and a burgeoning housing programme. Families now lived in their own homes without the same amount of inter-parental care. There has been a steady change in domestic circumstances, through aspiration, necessity, or just keeping up with the Joneses, until we have arrived at the point where both parents are working, and the children are leading much less gregarious, and more singular lives. In the 20s wages were low, transport took time, families were large, and extended families could be colossal, so every aspect of life was determined by these factors and the class system. Then the classes varied in size tremendously. The upper class was a small group, very wealthy, with a total disregard in most cases for the plight of the under classes. The upper middle-class consisted of professionals, very successful businessmen, the clergy, schoolteachers and those with inherited wealth. The lower middle class or artisan class, included shopkeepers, businessmen and the like. The rest, the biggest class, were rubbing along on what amounted in most cases to a minimum wage – the working-class. It was the class system as much as anything throughout those years, which determined the limits of family life.

    In the 20s the upper class and the upper middle-class, would go on Continental holidays, stay in hotels here and abroad, drive cars, live in detached houses, or terraced houses in selective neighbourhoods, or in the country. The lower middle class generally lived in small terrace houses, might run a car, would holiday at a seaside resort, staying in a boarding house.. The working-class holiday was taken on the local Commons or with daily trips, if they could afford holidays at all ..From the 20s up until about 1930 there was little change, but in the late 30s change became much more rapid. Traffic increased, Woolworths came to London and expanded throughout the country, making competition for the working-class’s spending more competitive, and therefore increasing choice automatically. Motor vehicles were being used for transportation, with the result that private vehicles were regularly coming down in size and cost, and hence more common. With more spending there was more affluence, even for the working-class and the cycle effected great changes in the social boundaries, producing a flow of movement upward and downward between the classes, the beginning of what we have today.

  • Cartoons

    If you choose to read this, you can decide whether I’m talking rubbish yet again. Inside all of us there is a semblance of the Peter Pan syndrome, a little corner that harks back to childhood – mine is elephantine. My grandchildren, in their 30s, give me Shrek, Valiant, and other cartoon DVDs for anniversary presents. Joseph Barbera , of Tom and Jerry fame, died recently aged 95. His death drew my attention to how cartoons have advanced from the jerky days of Felix, through Popeye, the Barbera reign, so now all is wham and bang and hell take the consequences.

    Since the dawn of time humans have been making up simple, almost childish, stories and folklore to entertain themselves and their children. Christmas used to be time for a regular treat to visit the pantomime, where outrageous stories were enacted by ridiculous actors. Those stories and the stories read to children at bedtime were silly, simple and entertaining. They didn’t contain sharp dialogue or philosophical content, rather they conjured up an entirely new vista, peopled with strange, bizarre heroic or devious people or animals in people form. In the old Tom and Jerry cartoons, assuming one ignores the animals are bipeds and have human attributes, the story held together; nine times out of 10 we had an inkling where the mayhem was leading – the coloured lady always jumped on a stool at the sight of Tom, and fell off, and so on, but it was all logical. Now if a character jumps, he leaps so far, the jump becomes a flight, with no reason how this has been accomplished, rather like the totally absurd actions of Martial Arts Films, which are equally illogical. I believe it is a soft option of the script writers, to get the characters out of trouble without complication, more detail and less cost to themselves.

    The American film industry has adopted fast cross-cutting,- shooting from one scene to another, when the first scene has not been fully played out, and the viewer is required to mentally filling the gap. Any lack of concentration by the viewer, or to miss some vital section of footage, and the logic of the story is ruined. This has moved now to cartoons, where the action is at lightning speed, but the detail, the storyline and the drawing quality is sacrificed to a soft solution and saving in cost. Compare Shrek, Valiant, Wallace and Grommet, with the Ice Age cartoon, the difference is incredible – the action and the stories are so at variance. In Ice Age the dialogue is repetitive, sophisticated, over the heads of the average child, and contributes boredom rather than interest, in my view – even as an adult.

    Fairy stories are not just for the child, they are the world in which people’s imagination can be stirred, their mind is distracted from their everyday world, and perhaps the child in them still wants to climb the been stalk. Let’s keep it that way, and forget progress for progress’s sake

  • It Is Almost Beyond Belief

    It must have been an April fool’s joke it could not have been anything else, or so I thought, it is so ridiculous. I have been fishing from childhood, in lakes, in the sea and now, years later, the government suddenly wants to charge me for fishing in the sea. The fact that it’s a ruse to get more money to pay for the war, which none of us wanted, is believable, and if true would only add salt to the wound. As far as I know the government has only jurisdiction on the coast between high and low tide. I remember having to get a way leave for doing work below high tide. If it wasn’t a joke, I would have thought that the legal departments of the government would have pointed out that the government has no jurisdiction beyond low tide and therefore no right to charge for fishing from boats. I was not aware that fleets of foreign trawlers, fishing off the coast are paying dues to this country for the privilege of doing so. But even if they are, to charge a man for the standing on the shore on his day off to put a piece of string with a hook on it into the sea, with no guarantee of a return, is ridiculous. Is it so vital, that the government is prepared to waste our taxes supervising this farce, collecting the money, and running it? I could only believe, in view of the month, that it was an April fool’s joke, and should have been promulgated on the first of April. However, because last evening, 11th of April, it reappeared on the Northern Ireland News, one has to believe it is fact. I have long been convinced that there are people working for the EU and Number 10 who have so little to do they think up asinine legislation, rather like others might do the crossword puzzles.

    It would be rather interesting if on a given day, right round the country, those living within easy access to the sea, should all take rods and pieces of string with a weight on the end of some, bait-less hooks on others, and put their lines in the sea to confuse this vast band of men who are going to be policing this heinous activity of murdering, if they’re lucky, a few fish

    The bane of the elderly. I don’t know precisely what people are being paid today who are doing the job I did when I retired, but I suspect that it is five or six times what I now receive as a pension, which is allegedly half pay. What is happening to pensioners and the people on lower incomes shouldn’t happen to a dog.

    The incredible rise of single-parent families within the country, together with the fact that a lot of young women become pregnant so that they are entitled to a small dwelling, and get away from home and the environment that they don’t like, is putting a tremendous burden on our housing stock. This in turn has the knock-on effect of making housing so expensive, that the young married people cannot get on the housing ladder, and the pensioners are penalised to such an extent, that they can’t help. The pensioners are in a Catch-22 situation. When they fall ill, as a fair proportion do, the money they had scraped and saved to help the families will be eaten up paying about 500 hundred pounds a week for sheltered accommodation, or taken at 40% in inheritance tax when they die, because their houses have risen in value to such an extent. Those pensioners on low incomes, with little savings, are finding that their take-home pay has diminished appreciably, because for long periods their dividends and pensions have been tied to bank rates which have been lower than the cost of living index.

    The Conservative Party in Northern Ireland. Recently a questionnaire came round to the houses in our district, asking our political views. Clearly the Conservatives feel that they can offer an alternative solution to our problems if they are selected. Whether this is true or not is beside the point, because politics here have devolved into nothing more than a bipartisan system on tribal lines. I personally found it ludicrous that Eire is subsidising the British economy by several million pounds, indeed I’ve found it degrading and Blair should be taken to book for allowing it to happen.

    For almost 40 years we have been hoping to get back to those halcyon days of 1968, when politics was the last thing on the mind of the major portion of the population, and Catholics and Protestants were living side-by-side amicably. Instead of which we’re back into the bad old days of charge and counter-charge, rhetoric and the blame game. We need yet another party like a hole in the head, the more parties we have the more the vital votes are split and manipulation and tactical voting produce the same old results.
    When you consider that the Unionist party, which used to dominate the horizon for eons, only now fields one member of Parliament, the writing is on the wall. I find it incredible that David Cameron would allow his name to be used on a circular, when anyone with any political knowledge of Northern Ireland would know that at this time it was a total non-starter

  • The Change To Naval Life In 1940

    Prior to 1940 the Navy in today’s terms was a cross between a monk’s seminary and a football supporters club. Lower Deck life aboard ship was hard, totally masculine, and without any privacy. Shore leave was limited, often only a few hours and lived at strength 10. The sailors were proud of the Navy and proud to be in the Navy, but their relationship with society was varied. Allegedly, notices on establishments in towns adjacent to a dockyard read – ‘Dogs and sailors not admitted.

    WW2 was tough on the regular Navy and even tougher of the poor innocents joining. Prior to it, most of the Navy Lower Deck was recruited as ‘boys’, many from orphanages. More than their home, it was a secure haven, they had camaraderie, almost every need was catered for, and every year was like the rest. For those with ambition there was a limited ladder to climb. The chasm between them and the Wardroom, not only didn’t bother them, they accepted it. From the Wardroom aspect, there was a glass wall and no matter how high a promoted man might rise as an officer, there was an unwritten view expressed or not, ‘he was Lower Deck, you know!’

    Then came the HO’s – Hostilities only – volunteers or recruits, of every class. Round pegs in square holes, some found their vocation, and then the rest. In the beginning all HO’s were resented by the Regulars. The phrase HO was an insult. a put down, and it took several years for the stigma to be dropped, because the HOs had proved themselves. We, from sheltered civilian life, in our teens, knew nothing of life,. Four letter words interspersed into sentences and even between syllables were rare in the ’40s at that age. Talk of brothels, sexual deviance in all its forms, living in crowded conditions for weeks on end with little respite, having to guard food because of hunger, or mis-appropriation, all had to be accepted. Punishments through ignorance, misunderstanding, or with good reason, could be cruel and unnecessarily harsh, all without putting a foot on a ship. This is no exaggeration as later pieces will give proof. One had to be a tortoise, with a thick shell, keep one’s head low, preferably close to the ground for scuttlebutt, say little, be cautious of whom to trust and go slowly.

    JAIL I had been a quasi-sailor for all of three weeks when I was put on cell duty, at cells which contained two men accused of attempted murder. We had a Chief Gunner’s Mate who took us for drill. His favourite punishment for serious offences like talking in the ranks, being incompetent, not obeying orders properly was to make a man run round the parade ground with a rifle held above the head at full stretch. Be assured it is very painful after a while, especially in pouring rain without an oilskin. The two men had attacked him, one with a knife, the other a bayonet on different occasions, our sympathies were with them. Naval Jail in those days included picking Oakum – teased out hemp rope, used on tall ships for filling the seams of the deck planks. A piece of rope about a foot long and two inches thick was weighed, then the prisoner, with just his fingers had to reduce the twisted rope to its original hemp fibres, the wear and tear on the fingernails had to be experienced to be appreciated. At the end, the huge pile of fluff was weighed again. The prisoners were only given meat on one or two days a week and had to eat with a spoon. To an innocent civvie, this all seemed extreme and as I was sympathetic to the prisoners, I smuggled proper meals into them, begged from the Wren kitchen-staff and helped them pick oakum, hardly realising that if I was caught, I would be in there beside them

  • African Experience 2, Arrival

    Last Posted 23,10.06

    Livingstone From the age of six until I was eight years old, I lived in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia, as part of the British Raj, although then it was not thought of in that way, even if we behaved so. As a little boy, lifted out of a simple, stable environment, dumped into a totally rarefied existence, I was to find nearly everything alien and therefore a searing experience. For example, the ground was of loose, red sand, with sparse clumps of brown grass and insects and small creatures squirming away as I walked. To a child who went to the seaside only once or twice a year, the opportunity to run barefoot and enjoy the sensuous experience of loose, warm, or hot sand beneath my feet and between my toes, was a transition which was only renewed in my thirties and forties on the hotter beaches of southern Europe. Our house was on the edge of the Veldt, only a few hundred yards from land as it had been since the dawn of time. Certainly not like South London, you did not hear the roar of lions at night in Wandsworth. Cautionary warnings about the dangers of wandering outside the permanent encampment, our town of Livingstone, only fed my imagination and the sounds at night confirmed my wildest dreams, but then I was a dreamer who longed for impossible adventures. If I had any suspicions that the warnings might merely be some form of parental ruse to keep me within hailing distance, they were soon dispelled; at night I could hear the cries of animals in the distance.

    In the garden at the rear of the house were huts, made of reeds from the river plastered with mud, and in these huts were seemingly huge black men, some single, a few with families, who were required, by a tradition imposed from outside, to be subservient, even to a little alien boy. I found that these huts and the occupants had a particular smell, one I remembered long after I had left Africa, it was neither good nor offensive, just distinctive. Years later I was to recall this with some embarrassment when I heard an African remark that whites smelled horribly to Africans. My father was a civil servant in the Colonial Service provided with standard, rubber-stamp type furnished accommodation, filled out by personal possessions collected along the way. To a boy of that age, the traditional civil service delineation of rank by the size and quality of the dwelling and its furnishings would have meant nothing, but the hardness of the tiled floors, the zinc lined boxes and steel trunks against the ravages of the red ant, stayed with me.

    Livingstone, at that time, the seat of Government for Northern Rhodesia was also the Residence of the Governor at ‘Government House’. It was there visiting notables, such as Jim Mollison, the flyer, were put up, where parties were held , even for the children, and where one had to be on one’s best behaviour – children and parents alike. I still believe I can see most of Livingstone as it was then, the houses in rows, occupying such large tracts they seemed scattered, each with its small kraal for the servants, its chickens, its fruit trees and a few vegetables. The fruit trees made a great impact on me, the lemons were like Jaffa oranges, with thick skins which were as tasty as the fruit they wrapped, which in turn was so sweet no sugar was needed. There were tangerines, oranges, plantains and groundnuts – pea nuts, and what was more, for most of the year the sun shone and shone.

    Looking back, now experienced in the ways of the Services abroad, I realise that the hierarchical system, the division between families according to the relative ranks of the bread-winners, certainly pertained, because my first few months were not all sweetness and light, there was a pecking order among the children which I didn’t understand, – at six, how could I? I found myself subjected to bullying by older and bigger boys, from families senior to ours. Strangely the most recurrent image of those days is the ‘Sundowner’ The white population of Livingstone was very small. The whites, by definition, were the masters, in authority; while many of the more menial jobs were either carried out by Africans or Asians. In the evenings, there being no commercial forms of entertainment, the whites tended to meet regularly at one another’s houses for drinks prior to the evening meal – for sundowners. The tantalus was unlocked, the whiskey decanter produced and the same old chat got under way. I, on orange juice, made myself invisible and sipped slowly – when the glass was empty I was sent to bed, and I suspect the real scandal was then discussed.