My Other Stuff – Page 7 – Writer-insighter

They called it Martlesham

I came within thinking distance of dying today. As in thinking ‘hmm, this is a distinct possibility. Glad I made a bail-out plan. Now let’s see if it works.’

Boat stuff. I had two things to do, and only took oooh, most of the day to mostly do one and half-do the other. When I checked the boat yesterday I found water in the bilge -about a foot of it. Nothing that hasn’t been there before and rainwater rather than river water, which is good because the leaking through the hull has stopped, but bad because the roof leak hasn’t gone away. Whoever put the grab rails and winding blocks and all the other deck furniture on the the coachroof (no, I don’t know why it’s called that either. Cabin roof. Better, isn’t it?) used screws that went all the way through. So does the water when it rains. Well done, that man.

That should have been easy. Take out the old pump and float switch and put new ones in. Would have been one answer, but being thrifty and prudent I had to convince myself they were both irredeemably shagged, so had to work out which wire fed which, and of course they’re under water so I couldn’t see what colour they were until I thought just chop them out and replace anyway. Which I did. And found, of course, that the exit hose wouldn’t fit the new pump and neither would the adapter. It took over an hour to think of how to fix this. Answer 1 – Gaffa tape was rejected in favour of Answer 2 = superglue. Eventually.

Then the new pump stopped working. For reasons unknown. I think I tripped the push button cut-out when I shorted everything. Because water. There don’t seem to be any actual fuses, just this push button thing. Worst case, 12 volt shock. I thought that wouldn’t kill me but I didn’t get a shock anyway, somewhat surprisingly.

Task two was to go onto the river bed and dig a hole around the rudder. It’s a drying berth. That means when the tide is out – and there’s around 4 metres of tide to go out – the boat sits on the mud of the river bed. Because the Folkboat rudder is where it is and the shape it is, it dug itself a hole in the mud, four and a half tons of boat settled on it and in a month it snapped the tiller.

I made a new one, but that month has also warped the rudder to one side. Instead of lashing the tiller straight at the next high tide, thinking what’s done is done and leaving it be I went over the side. But I wasn’t entirely stupid. For once.

I put the boarding ladder over the side first. I wore waders. I considered carrying a whistle and wearing a lifejacket. And didn’t do either. More to the point, I tied not one but two lines to the boat and to the jetty and draped them where I could get at them if I sank into the mud.

I sank into the mud.

But that’s ok, I thought, because I’ve got waders on, and the boarding ladder, and these two ropes. Which was all true, except I was up to my left knee and past my right knee and I couldn’t actually get out. Every time I got a leg a little bit higher the other leg sank deeper. It went on for a bit. Getting deeper. People had to live like this for four years in Flanders. Usually they did it for two weeks at a time or until they got shot or exploded. But frankly, I wasn’t thinking about them today. And that’s not just all me, me, me. This was a bit serious.

The only way out was to jettison the waders and climb back up the ladder, pouring sweat, having achieved nothing at all apart from nothing. And realising how you could actually get a heart attack doing stuff like this, because it was massively, massively draining and I couldn’t and still can’t quite work out why. But it was. I could feel my breath getting short doing it. Four hours later I ache pretty much all over, even after a hot shower.

But I got out. I didn’t die, from drowning or a heart attack. I found almost a metre of plywood in the bow I’d put there for General Purposes and these definitely were. I dropped it over the side near the boarding ladder and climbed down again, in the wellies I’d stupidly forgotten were in the starboard locker anyway and stood on the plywood to recover the waders, only getting 90% muddy in the process. I tried to dig the mud out from around the rudder but water kept flowing into the hole even though it was pretty much Low Water. I couldn’t see where I was digging and each shovel full was heavy as a very heavy thing and I thought: ‘Actually, this is stupid.’

And it was. I gave up. It took another hour to get all the mud off the waders and the ladder and the plywood and the ropes and me and just about everything I could see, apart from the swan I was worried was going to attack me when it came over to where the hose was. I was hit by a swan once when I was a boy. I literally didn’t see it coming until it did. It didn’t break my arm as advertised, but it wasn’t fun.

I wasn’t looking forward to a renactment today. But this was an old swan and a swan well used to people as it lives in the boatyard and it doesn’t bother the boatyard people and we try not to bother it, moving slowly and not towards it. Turned out it was just thirsty and wanted a drink from the puddle of water spilling off the muddy ladder, less than three feet from me.

I got the pump and the float switch mostly wired up, even though I ran out of rubbish connectors and had to Manfix it with twists and insulating tape. The push-button cut-out didn’t. The solar charger does. I’m going back tomorrow to stow the hopefully dried-out ladder and lines and lash the tiller again, and make sure everything’s ok. Which it will be. Just so long as I don’t go walking on the river bed again. There’s no future in it.

In plain sight

Once upon a time, a lot of East Anglia was like this. As far inland as Cambridge, an hour’s drive from the coast certainly was. You could get a boat up there from the sea. You can still get sizeable boats into Norwich, or at least as sizeable as 151-foot long Swedish gunboats, like the one the Sea Scouts use there. No, of course not as a gunboat. Not even in Norfolk.

It’s not so much a different world as a forgotten one. The water speared deep into the land. It still does, but we can’t seem to remember.

The biggest Saxon church I ever saw. — The biggest Saxon church I’ve seen. In the Peterborough diocese. Hereward probably knew it.

But people did. When the Normans invaded England in 1066, we’re told that pretty much that was that. Except it wasn’t. In February 1067, dead king Harold’s mother lead a revolt in the West Country. Then there was a revolt in Northumberland, lead by Morcar, Earl of one of the four Saxon kingdoms. That failed too. Unlike Harold’s mother, Morcar got away. He came down south and around 1070 joined up with the last English leader, Hereward. Just ten miles north of Cambridge they hid in the marshes surrounding the Isle of Ely.

A man called Belsar was given the job of fixing Hereward once and for all. He lead his men to what was probably a much older camp on the edge of the marsh commanding a track to the Isle itself. Being Norman and convinced of the supremacy of shock and awe tactics he built a wooden causeway across the marsh to stage a direct frontal assault on the last of England. And as often happens with shock and awe assaults, things went a bit differently to the plan. If there was one.

It sank. The weight of the assault force sank the causeway. There wasn’t anywhere to go. The men on it couldn’t escape sideways because they needed the causeway across the marsh in the first place. But it was sinking. They died. Personally, I think the causeway might have had some help in sinking from Hereward and his men. But I don’t know.

I found it and walked the causeway last week. The fen was drained back in the 1600-somethings and there isn’t any marsh there any more. There isn’t any malaria now either, which is nice.

I was trying to feel some of the atmosphere of the watery fens. The snag was I was at least three hundred years too late. The track across what definitely wasn’t marsh any more was just another drove road, the kind of boring nothing-made-of-mud I remembered from childhood holidays on the Somerset Levels. Some kids got to go to Spain. We got Congresbury. It wasn’t the same, really.

I dumped the car what I hoped was far enough away from the four people living in a caravan surrounded by their own crushed plastic bottles and the ashes of their fires and their refuse in bin bags and carpet offcuts used to smooth out the barbed wire fence keeping people out of farmland around Belsar’s camp. I walked past the four separate fly tipping dumps in what for two thousand years was a major arterial route through this part of the country, the most direct route from Cambridge to Ely, where the monks lived. Where Hereward hid out. Where his relation, the king of Denmark, came over by boat to help out, and while he was there, to help himself to the loot from the sacking of the abbey at Peterborough.

Past the 1960s farmhouse at the end of a metalled road cutting through Althred’s Causeway. Out onto the flatlands again, putting up a heron that lumbered into the sky like the awkward little dinosaur it was and forever is. All the way across the bone dry, drained, boring track. Everywhere was flat. Until you start to notice the places that must have been islands in the marsh, little places mostly under an acre that stand ooh, some of them six or seven feet above the fields around them. And you wonder what was there. Or when.

Because what definitely happened is that after the wooden causeway sank, Belsar’s, or maybe Belasius’s, death squad got hold of a witch. They built a wooden tower and stuck her in it with orders to scream curses at Hereward. I mean, hey, we’ve all been on the end of that. Some of us, anyway.

Hereward sneaked through the marsh and not being someone who appreciated women going on and on and on at him at volume, set light to the tower before he disappeared back into the marsh.

The atmosphere had changed. It was six or seven miles out across the moor to the Isle of Ely. I met a huge dog but more interestingly, I learned something I knew long ago, how hard it is to see someone who doesn’t move. Two boats came along as I was crossing the river. I just kept still, in plain sight. Not a nod, a wave, not a hint that they knew I was there. An old lesson other people practised at that place, almost a thousand years ago.

The Wake

Unsurprisingly, I had an argument on Facebook with a ridiculous pro-Brexit racist who sincerely believed that a) there was such a thing as ‘pure English’ and b) that Anglo in Anglo-Saxon meant English, rather than Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians and Franks. Just about anybody with a boat and an axe, really. And predominantly from the Low Countries, before they were called that themselves.

Just as a little history lesson, for those who bafflingly don’t know, if there was any such thing as ‘pure’ English – actually no.

You can’t even start from there. If there was something English then there would have to be an England, and until after the Romans, who left about 400AD, there wasn’t a single kingdom. There wasn’t until only a short while before the Norman Conquest in 1066. The Danes, or Vikings, if you prefer, had invaded whenever they felt like it since about 800AD. They even invaded the same week as the Normans and again just afterwards.

In 865 they landed in East Anglia to take the four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Mercia, West Sussex, Northumbria and East Anglia. In 1013 Aethelread the Unready was defeated by Sweyne Forkbeard. Not the most notably English name, not least as he was Danish. Sweyne died in 1014, but Canute got his throne back in 1016. He was Danish, too.

Just fifty years before the obviously French Normans obliterated the Anglo-Saxon world, it was already obliterated. Except even the Normans weren’t really Norman. They were Danes too, who’d got there just fifty years before. And it wasn’t just East Anglia. The Danes got as far as Shropshire. Which in England is pretty much as far as there is to go. They weren’t kicked out of Scotland until 1263. Even then they had to be bought off.

Since then we had the Welsh Tudors, Plantagenets I know almost nothing about and William and Mary who were Dutch, long before the current crop of Saxe-Coburg Gothas. From Germany. Since George I, who died without bothering to learn any English, because he was the king anyway, so who cares?

It’s not exactly ‘pure,’ Englishness. It used to stand, ideally, for tolerance. And cricket, of course, the only professional sport where you can drink tea during the match as a player, not just as a spectator. And church clocks and bells and mists and mellow fruitfulness. And honey still for tea, obviously. But none of it pure, apart from the honey, in any sense that would appeal to people who talk about these things usually without being able to state with any certainty who their own father was.

And the wake? Not a wake for those things. The wake meant ‘the watchful.’ Hereward, our very own East Anglian rebel, the anti-Norman freedom fighter, the man who shares Robin Hood’s stories for the very good reason that Robin Hood’s stories were adapted from the tales of Hereward, a hundred years earlier.

Unlike Robin, Hereward was very much a real person, documented in three separate Anglo-Saxon sources including the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which isn’t of course to be confused with the Bath Evening Chronicle, nor even the Western Daily Press.

Hereward’s story is something I’m working on now. Someone had said wouldn’t it be great if there was an English Game of Thrones? And even better if it was in East Anglia. And of course, there was. Just that most people have never heard of him. I can’t work out why. But then, just lately facts about what it is to be British have become much less important than fantasies. And we’ve all had enough of experts now.

Draft One was done in a week, with 70 pages down. It was ok in parts but it wasn’t doing all the things it needed to do. So I’ve got to do it again. Bits are salvageable, but not many. And I am very, very tired. Not of doing this, but because of this. So for tonight at least, I think I need to sleep. Early, deep and long.

Third Childhood

I claimed my name was Fred and that I was a lorry driver. Neither of these things were true. I was four years old at the time.

Fine. When you're six. — Fine. When you’re six.

I also claimed to be a cowboy, something that fascinated me up until the time I saw real cowboys in the supermarket shopping for their supper instead of hunting antelope where the buffalo roamed. I lived in Aspen at the time. But I’d long since stopped pretending to be a cowboy. Not least as affecting a huge Western moustache and wearing cutaway leather chaps had connotations that could clear a dance-floor in seconds by then.

I did, admittedly, like listening to ELO’s Wild West Hero. And for that matter, Elton John’s even older Roy Rodgers. There was something I could relate to, living in the West Country that wasn’t like that imagined Wild West country at all. Where I lived there weren’t any deer, or at least not until you got out onto Salisbury Plain. There were a few there, obviously. But the buffalo left about 300,000 years before.

Something about Reg Dwight, who got about as far west as Rickmansworth before he got famous, something about that whole untamed praries thing echoed in my head. But I stopped dressing-up as a cowboy when I was about six years old. Maybe before.

I’ve only once dressed up as a footballer, and that was for a fancy dress party. Well, a murder mystery party thing, anyway. And thankfully, no photos survive.

I don’t get football. I don’t understand why it’s more important to know how many goals England won against West Germany in 1966 than to know what the EU is before you vote to leave it, or whether West Bromwich Albion is even a thing now, let alone Hamilton Academicals. I’ve been to Hamilton. It’s not, very.

My father insisted on the nearest we ever got to a religious silence while the football pool results were read out on TV on Saturdays, after we’d had to watch some utterly unintelligible football match commented on by a man screaming ‘he shoots, he scores’ and getting paid for it. I couldn’t understand horse racing commentary either, which was much the same thing. Shouty. Didn’t like.

I didn’t like books like Skins. I didn’t like the way that football violence and racism and abuse were all neatly airbrushed out, as soon as the mega money moved in and Pavarotti started singing about a make of Japanese car. All the boot boy casuals aggro hadn’t gone away. But it was suddenly Very Rude to mention it.

I didn’t like Alf Garnett, long before he was adopted as a candidate for Britain’s patron saint. I didn’t like living near the Arsenal ground, the old one, notwithstanding that it looked like something that Mussolini would have been pleased with.

OK, it was handy being able to blame football fans when I got a new convertible from the company I worked for, didn’t know how to get the roof up, stood on the back seat and pulled it until it all broke (oh I was younger, alright? I’m not like that now.). But.

You couldn’t park on a Saturday and if you did you couldn’t get back before six. And forget going to the shops or the Tube on match days. Don’t get me wrong. If people want to play football, great. If they want to watch it, I don’t understand that but fine, it’s nothing to do with me. I didn’t and don’t understand why it’s ok for that to inconvenience all the people not doing that. I said it’s nothing to do with me. I’m fine with keeping it that way.

But most of all, I don’t understand why adults, people with children, people allowed to vote, dress themselves (presumably) up like chubby toddlers to watch millionaires kicking a ball around. I was in Ipswich the other night. Some football match was on then, presumably. At least, men in their forties, fifties and even sixties had poured themselves into Portman Road’s finest XXXL this year’s strip and were walking around the town centre and nobody was sectioning them.

It baffles me. It didn’t used to happen. If senilityisthe seocnd childhood, these days there also has to be a third one, one where grown men raid the dressing-up box and pretend to be Wayne Rooney, IN PUBLIC. Walking down the High Street. At least the equally risible 50-somethings poured into wetsuits sailing plastic tea-trays at the yacht club have the decency not to waddle about looking like something Greenpeace couldn’t get back into the water. And guys, it may be Olympic year but trust me, they aren’t going to pick you. No, seriously. Especially not with that deeply unfashionable fungal infection that won’t go away because of you wearing wet neoprene shoes for eight hours on Saturdays.

But dressing up as a football player when you don’t? Really? As an adult? Maybe I should dig out my cowboy hat after all. Turn on the TV. Shut out the lights. And act my shoe-size, not my age. Take it away, Reg.

Maybe it’s me

I learned to read a long time ago, but not as long ago as the people who were teaching me to read. Not my parents, or Sunday school, or teachers at school. I mean the man – and I think it must have been a man – who wrote the books I learned to read on.

retro

It puzzled me all through my 20s and more, why nobody else had the same books at school. For French we had the Bertillon family, three children called Marie-Claude and Philippe at Alain, because Mme Bertillon, apart from epitomising understated Parisian chic (and how did that work? Her husband worked at the airport, for heaven’s sake) was undoubtedly Catholic, like Ken Leary, like the kids who went to The Other School, St Augustine’s. Which was never talked about, being about 400 yards away. Monsieur Bertillon was a douanier, the guy who asks if you’ve packed your own suitcase, out at Orly, commuting by motobycyclette. Moped then, before FS1Es were even a twinkle in a designer’s eye.

Because while everyone else in the UK learned to read on Janet and John, I got Dick and Dora. Who nobody’s ever heard of, except it seems, in Australia. Possibly because one internet source tells me Dick and Dora were replaced in schools in 1949, which isn’t when I went to school, but explains quite a lot about my world view.

A bit like the time I spent half an hour on a vicious argument in the street with a girl who insisted we’d been to a club last week, but the aircraft hanger with 200 TV sets nailed to the wall where we had to drink warm beer out of plastic glasses sitting in total isolation while our ears bled to Tainted Love (which couldn’t have had any bearing on our relationship whatsoever) wasn’t anything like a proper nightclub, or at least the Rick’s Bar that was in my head with that label.

I blame Dick and Dora. Actually, I don’t, because they taught me right from wrong.

Right is Aga cookers in warm, cosy, bright, welcoming kitchens. Right is where you’re always accepted and adults are there to help. Right is umbrellas blowing inside out in November and men’s hats blowing off in March, and April showers and daffodils and supper is always waiting for you. Right is proper artwork and hardbound covers and rabbits and imaginary elephants in parks devoid of syringes and proper wooden benches and balls and Airedale terriers and cats called Fluff. And cars with running boards. And cigarettes. And real men wore silk scarves.

I’ve spent years wondering when all this is going to actually happen. I was coming to the conclusion that it actually might possibly not until I did some teaching at summer school and found myself making a mask of a horse’s head using a badminton racket (ha! Ingenious, non? Obviously it wasn’t my idea), A4 paper, some crayons, sissors and a well-known brand of glue. I had a helper, naturally. She was 11 and advised on the colouring, and whether the bridle should be drawn on or applique paper. She thought drawn on was better, despite her success with the brown blaze on the horse’s nose and the eyes, chiefly, I suspect because she thought I was doing too much of it and wanted a go herself.

And suddenly, it really was Dick and Dora world. It was sunny outside. We were making something people wanted, something that made people happy. We were totally absorbed in it. We made something, literally, out of nothing. A pretend world, where horses really are made of paper and badminton racquets. Or at least, enough so that when they saw our horse, pretty much everyone smiled that day. And I smiled too, at what I didn’t know. But I think it was the fact that finally, I’m an adult. And I was helping.

A walk in the woods

Last week my arduous afternoons consisted of sitting reading a book under the shade of a tree, on the mounting block in a riding school yard while ‘my’ kids, the best in the whole school, had their three-hour riding lesson. It was a tough job, but hey, somebody had to do it.

I don’t ride. Last time I did I ended up in Charing Cross Hospital with concussion, whiplash and third-degree burns, which sounds like a busy day at the circus but was a more mundane reaction to riding while drunk in the sun and not turning left when the horse did. But I was made to ride when I was a kid. I didn’t want to. It was that or elocution lessons. You think I’m joking.

Apparently, I was supposed to be grateful I had riding lessons. Most kids didn’t. And if I didn’t like them, if I didn’t like the feel of soaking wet jeans chafing my legs against a borrowed saddle, if I didn’t like bored horses stepping on me, if I didn’t like getting asthma so that eventually I was allowed to stop when an hour on a horse meant a day in bed, then I was just ungrateful

Every single word of this is true. But last week I discovered that while I still don’t really have any great desire to go riding as opposed to looking good on a horse, I also don’t have asthma, or any allergic reaction to horses, dung, straw, hay or stables. Which came as some considerable and pleasant surprise. Maybe I grew out of it. And maybe it was nothing to do with the horses at all, but no matter. It’s gone. What hadn’t gone was my occasional not hearing people properly, assuming I have and over-reacting in a way that makes Clive Dun’s Corporal Jones look like a study in under-acting.

Teaching English, I’d tried showing them You Tube clips of Jones screaming ‘Don’t Panic!” to reassure them about the exams. I’d tried showing them ‘Allo Allo’s Officer Crabtree, to show the importance of proper pronunciation, but that didn’t work at all.

They didn’t get it. But they were laughing?

“Yes, we were laughing because you were laughing.”

Which was a good lesson in itself, although more for me than them.

The biggest Utterly WHAT Did You Say? came at the stables. We were walking back from the jumps at the end of the lesson when I asked one of the older girls, not the one who rode like a centaur, the gymnast, my favourite.

Nor her mate who rode like an Apache, dark and wild. No. This one was probably about Number Three in the ranks of Carl’s Cavalry. I asked how her ride had been but I wasn’t ready for her answer.

Apparently, her arse was afraid.

Sorry?

She said it again.

In France they call them arses, apparently... — In France they call them arses, apparently…

Where the utter blinking flip did she get phrases like that from? Who’d told her this was an appropriate thing to say? What on earth had given her the idea that this was an acceptable response when her English teacher was asking her a question? Hmm? Well? I’ve got all day. It’s your own time your wasting (Trad. Arr. All Teachers Ever Until They Get A Grip And Stop It).

Which possibly predictably produced instant utter bewilderment. Is it not the right word? But it is?

No, it certainly is not.

But – this is, is it not, my arse? She nodded at the huge four-legged black animal walking amiably next to her.

Well, probably obviously to you, dear reader, but not to me walking down a dusty track in the woods surrounded apparently by arses, it wasn’t what she was saying. Or rather it was, but not what she thought she was saying. Because she was French. And the ‘ash’ sound (no it is NOT, it’s aitch! As in hotel! For heaven’s sake!) isn’t one that comes naturally if you don’t have it in your head. And the vowel sound O comes out as A, too. So when the poor bewildered girl told me about her horse being scared of a jump it sounded as if she was saying something completely different.

Next day’s punishment was reciting the words on the board:

I held the horribly hot hideous horse’s hoof in my hand.

They all did it. For up to ten minutes afterwards. Then it was back to normal. And having to remember that what people say is not always what they mean. Especially when they didn’t say what you thought they said. Just like the time I told them:

Oui, j’adore les chevaux aussi. Mais c’est n’est–ce pas possible pour a manger le tout chose.

It was in Norway. It would have been rude not to. And like a steak, since you ask.

A certain smile

Trop belle pour toi
The first bus left at 03:30 and after the final show and the singing and the tears and the laughing and the exchanging of the addresses and the hugs and the couple running their hands all over each other outside by the bins – and they were teachers, not kids. Or I would have had to use Stern Teacher Voice™ to say “Stop That Now. Stand Up, The Pair Of You. What’s Your Name? Not You. I Know Your Name…..”

The litany you can remember from your own school days, but in this case I left them to it and walked away un-noticed. Straight to the staffroom, to tell everyone I could find, obviously, or at least the two French women I liked to talk to. But anyway. Alors.

I had a meeting that day, one that might change my life, a discussion with a former BBC script writer about a TV script about Hereward, our almost forgotten resistance fighter, a man good with a sword and an axe, a David Beckham of the jousting field, if Beckham had come from the big house in the village with the stables, where the daughters have their own ponies and Nanny has her own car because we don’t want her living in. I mean, it’s not 1070 or something, is it? That kind of Beckham, where the kid goes off the rails because Daddy keeps bailing him out when he messes up instead of using Stern Teacher Voice™.

Remarkably effective used sparingly, no more than once a week maximum. Like anything else, a shock tactic has to shock and if it’s something you do every day then it isn’t something that’s going to shock anyone, apart maybe from yourself when you realise how useless it’s become. So go light on it. And I did, which means I didn’t even let the couple know I’d seen them. Just the French women, obviousement. Just in case they said ah dewnt know what ees zat chose, at which point I could say look, I’ll show you. Ennee, meenie, miney mo, um, you first. Er, no, um, no, first choice…. Obviousement.

The darker haired of my French friends advised me to get some sleep between the first bus going and the second one at 07:30, so after reading her a story for a bit we went to our separate rooms and did, for a little while. Sleep, you understand. Not er, you know. It wasn’t discussed. About an hour and a half, I think. Sleeping. A little and deeply, but not long.

After the last bus had gone I was left standing in the sunlight, my French friends driving down the A12 back to their lives again and after the last free, weird breakfast that had everyone English wondering ‘why do French people mix up their food like this?’ and French people wondering exactly the same about the English. The answer being that it’s school food and nobody ever eats like this nor will again unless they’re kind of sad man who can remember School Dinners being a concept restaurant.

And after a short walk in the sun down to the river and the peaceful little square-towered village church in the woods, a church straight out of Miss Marple, past the alpacas, past The Big House where Hereward Beckham could easily have lived, although I preferred to think the offspring of the house was more like one of my favourite pupils, the quietly, exceptionally clever girl who will be an international lawyer and make an absolute fortune, or the girl who liked riding and athletics and who reminded me so, so much of an ex who tugs at my heart still, if I’d known her before all her stuff went wrong, when she still had dreams and confidence and a life before her. But nothing I can do about any of that on this sunny morning except be quiet for a little while in the sun, remembering all of these new people who are gone now in the still of this huge school by the river this summer morning.

I said goodbye to the two French directeurs who had become my friends. The other English teachers hadn’t seemed to bond with them that much but I found them good company. We joked and talked about food and language and how the French burned Joan of Arc, which they seemed to have got wrong in their history books as her having been handed over to the English who had the lighter fluid that day, but no matter. One teenage girl, flambe, s’il vous plait anyway.

I packed quickly and got in the car and drove away, thinking about the way someone’s teeth were so white against their tan, and blond curls and the way the red tabs on the back of someone’s trainers stuck in my mind. Thinking about, as Francoise Sagan put it, a certain smile. A tone of voice. A glance. A delicate hand running through hair. There are much worse things to do than summer school.

Bon. Alors. Trop belle pour toi. Now there’s a TV script to write. So let’s get on, because I’ve got Stuff To Do.

Just, oh, you know.

Another chance

A long time ago I was in a musty weekday sailing club bar, on one of those English days when life is passing helplessly along outside the window, the other side of where the buzzing fly was. I looked out over the little lake outside and caught the end of what the woman next to me was saying.

On the water, she said, out there on the water, it’s like having another chance.

We didn’t fall sobbing on each other. Or wrestle each other to the floor tearing at each other’s clothes. We were English, after all. But we knew exactly how the other was feeling. Sort of but not quite the same as those silly plaques you find in twee marina shops, that say things like A Day Spent On The Water Does Not Count As Part Of Your Allotted Span. Which if there is a God and he’s English (and obviously he would be, if there was. Unless He was Jimmy Stewart, which was always distinctly possible) is almost certainly true, but not the point. What the woman meant was just as an impressive friend can’t recall canoes at school without relishing the recollection of teenage solvent abuse (yes, you. Bless you x) something about sailing always makes me think about school and the way we learned to sail there. It wasn’t grand. We had two Enterprises and two Mirror dinghies I hated because they were ugly, and a gravel pit next to the railway station and Mrs Shearn, who was cool and Mr Collins, the good PE teacher, who’d been a paratrooper in the War,m the real war, so he didn’t have to prove anything to anyone, unlike the runty little wannabe PE teacher he had to work with. We did sailing because we were rubbish at games. Because we were the cool kids. Because we could read, and drove to Stratford to see Shakespeare on our own time and wore silk scarves and desert boots and generally weren’t right. Except we were, in our haze of patchouli and Samson rollies in liquorice paper gusting up whenever the dinghies went round the back of the island out of sight of the teachers. Who knew exactly what was going on. Who were utterly cool, those two.

But some years on, I tried to get my Folkboat into the water today. It’s been out for two years so a seam has opened up and needs re-caulking. We’re going to have to try again tomorrow and there is a lot on tomorrow, with a new summer school starting, although thankfully not too far away. I don’t know the schedule yet, so I don’t know when I can get to the boat if I can’t get it to its new mooring tomorrow. Launch time is 11:30, High Water is 13:15 and there is two hours either side to get her into her berth. Then she’ll get another chance. Again.

I’m not a racist but –

Thomas Mair looking to the right, just like the people who tried to pretend he had nothing to do with Britain First.

After the Referendum I’ve learned a number of things.

The most important issue facing the UK today is how rubbish Jeremy Corbyn is. This is the major preoccupation of the UK media, so it must be true. The fact that the entire referendum was a squabble between entitled rich boys who will never, ever have to face any personal consequences of their actions is wholly and completely irrelevant. Especially when one of them is paid hundreds of thousands of pounds a year to promote himself in the fiercely independent British press owned by people who aren’t British, but know much more about how to be it than people who actually live here.
It was never about immigration. Oh, OK. Well, it certainly wasn’t about economics, was it?
It was about democracy. Which is why there are no plans whatsoever to reform, let alone abolish the completely undemocratic House of Lords or the monarchy, and stand to attention when you type that word or you’ll learn to expect Britain First knocking on your door, too. Which now you might anyway, because Britain First are not to be condemned. And that’s official. After MP Jo Cox was shot dead by a Britain First supporter, who was also saying in the dock “I am a political activist,” just in case anyone was unclear what this murder was about, not a single MP condemned Britain First. Not one. That fact alone tells you pretty much all you need to know about racism in Britain today. You don’t need to approve of it. All you need to do is refuse to condemn the people doing it.

I’m quite British, as well as being of a certain age, so I’ll give you some British. We all like British, don’t we? I mean, not many other countries do now, but we’re really, utterly brilliant. It said so in all the tabloids and they don’t lie. Except about Hillsboro. Or Orgreave. Or Charles de Menezes. Or Stephen Waldorf. Or Freddie Starr eating my hamster. But apart from that they don’t, ever. So are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

Once upon a time in Bremen or thereabouts, a friend got talking to an old lady who used to live next door to some Jewish people a long time ago. One day they weren’t there. Their front door was open though, which most of the street found quite convenient when they needed to borrow household items like a piano, or a sofa, or some curtains, or in fact most of the contents of the house now it was obvious nobody with hair like that was coming back to ask for a cup of sugar, ever again.

“So,” my friend said, and with her hair like summer wheat and her cold blue eyes and the way she said “So!” when she was just being herself and trying to be friendly, it was always quite scary if you were brought up on a diet of Colditz and The Great Escape.

“So! Where did they go?” She wanted the old lady to say the words. Auschwitz. Dachau. Treblinka. Any one of the litany. Or even just: “I don’t know. ” But none of these words came.

“They just went,” the old lady said. My friend asked again.”But where?”

“Well,” a little more slowly this time, “They just went.”

Because the old lady knew the rule that my friend had never had to learn, thanks to the EU. You do not ask where people go when you know racists came and killed them. You do not ask where people from another race are taken when your name might go on the list, or anyone else’s. You do not call the police when the neighbours are taken away, especially when it was the police that took them. And when you have to face what has happened you don’t say “yes, but I got a new sofa out of it.” Except that’s essentially what some people are saying exactly, here in the UK, now.

Today I’ve heard ‘well, there are bound to be some casualties.’ So it’s ok that hundreds of billions have been wiped off the economy. It’s ok that the £ is plummeting against the euro which is supposed by Brexit to be such a failing currency. And it’s totally ok that a hundred racial attacks have been recorded in a couple of days, that a shop has been firebombed, that leaflets telling Poles they’re vermin have been posted through letterboxes.

Nice Mr and Mrs Brexit didn’t do it. They just voted shoulder to shoulder alongside the people who did. And when those different people go, once again, Mr and Mrs Brexit with their shiny principles and their Cross of Turkish St George and their reduced pension they voted for and their intact, laughable non-democratic government they wouldn’t change for all the tea in China, even if they could afford it any more, despite, or perhaps because that They’ve Got Principles, still won’t know where they went.

They just went.

Again. Funny how that happens. So if you’ll excuse me I’m not going to be singing Tomorrow Belongs To Me. I know all the words. And I know how it ends.

https://youtu.be/29Mg6Gfh9Co

There’s this place

If you remember awful films from the 1970s you’ll recall The Eagle Has Landed, when Michael Caine was fatuously cast as an aristocratic Cherman Orfizzer. Torn by the demands of duty and the Prussian Code he refuses to surrender holed up in an East Anglian church. Somehow he faced the destruction of the vestry by an equally improbably-cast JR Ewing without saying that he’d been only supposed to blow the bleedin’ doors off. The acting from everybody, not just Michael Caine, was atrocious. Americans with their patented Bullet-Proof Film Arm™ clutch at gaping bullet wounds as if they’d got splashed doing the washing-up. Storming the church the GIs stand usefully just inside the door heroically spraying bullets instead of getting shredded by the hail of outgoing fire directed at the one place they’d be guaranteed to have to be. Everyone who’s supposed to be German has to suck their cheeks in and dye their hair blond as if they were on their way to see David Bowie in Berlin, although as it was made in 1976 maybe they were.

It was different in the book. In particular right at the very beginning, where author Jack Higgins fictionally or otherwise claimed to have found German tombstones in a Suffolk churchyard. Apparently there are some, but I’m not sure where. Just down the road from me a big house was broken into while Churchill’s double was there, right on the coast. Details of the local defences were stolen, along with the petty cash. Several sergeants found they weren’t sergeants any more. Those are checkable facts but more easily now than then.

In the 1980s someone who lived there told me “something” had happened in a little village down a lane on the coast. Nobody knew what. But something did.

In the early 1990s the rumours resurfaced. Shingle Street got famous. Questions were asked in Parliament. Why was whatever did or didn’t happen an Official Secret for 75 years?

The rumours themselves were confusing. Peter Fleming (yes, Ian Fleming’s brother. The one who married her out of Brief Encounter) was involved in British propaganda in the war. One of their jobs was to make the Germans think that Britain had secret weapons of mass destruction to repel an invasion instead of the laughable 50 tanks and 200 field guns that were all that was left after Dunkirk. The one the propagandists chose was fire. Somehow, the story went, the British had discovered how to set the sea on fire.

As apocalyptic visions go, it’s not bad. When I was about six my mother said a sunset looked as if the whole sky was on fire. This was a time when thanks to nuclear weapons that could have been a distinct possibility for anyone who wasn’t a politician. I still remember that nightmare. It makes me shudder still.

But the rumours didn’t just grow. They were corroborated, with evidence. People in Germany saw train-loads of burned soldiers coming from the West when all the fighting was happening in the East, long years before D-Day. On both sides of the Channel, people reported secret mass graves being dug. Less refutably, some people in Suffolk recalled an invasion alert and actually seeing burned bodies, at least one boat with German markings wrecked on the shore and an emergency request for coffins to be sent from Ipswich to Shingle Street. All checkable, not rumour. But who were they? One theory is that they were Germans dressed in British uniforms. Another, that they were wearing British uniforms because they were British and got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, a training exercise that went wrong.

The Top Secret classification in itself isn’t that mysterious. Everything relating to state confiscation of private property is classified, and all of Shingle Street was summarily snapped up by the Government and everyone told to leave. There used to be a pub there. On VE Day the Army blew what was left of it up. They wanted a bonfire to celebrate and there wasn’t any other wood nearby.

There’s no evidence of mass graves that I know of, but there was no evidence of anything happening at Slapton Sands where the Americans were massacred on the golden beaches of Dorset. That was kept tucked up out of sight for fifty years. Shingle Street is just down the road from me, a cycle ride away. I don’t know what happened there and I probably never will. Something did though. Something happened everywhere.

The pub was never rebuilt. One of the Martello towers is derelict. One has a million-pound penthouse on top. One has a Home Guard post improbably still cemented into it. A rare, unusual circular pillbox guards the bridge over the ditch that would have been filled with petrol. Another, much rarer one-man iron pillbox rusts away in a lane a mile or two up the road. Anywhere else it would be in a museum but it’s Suffolk. There’s so much history here, so little now.

And no. I didn’t know Lalo Schifrin did the music, either. Damned bank managers. They never change, do they?