My beloved probably life partner, given my age and Kate Bush almost certainly not going to a) phone me b) lose 30 kilos c) look the way she did at 18 again, made a cruel remark the other day. It’s been repeated quite a lot.
My best conference suit, a fetching single-breasted, very dark grey Daks chalk stripe, would look good for someone going to a fancy dress party as a gangster, apparently.
I objected to this on several grounds. Firstly, word on the street, or at least, on The Sopranos, and I’m hip to that jive, tells me that actually, fairly ghastly pastels leisure-wear in XXXL man-made fibres are much more the thing, or were 20 years ago when it was made. Which is probably the root of the problem.
That suit was one of two I bought in Newcastle, en route to Oslo, via Kristiansand, so long ago that they still had a ferry there, sixteen years back. I had to take the ferry because if I flew there was a sporting chance of dying, or more of a chance than usual flying, light packets of flak over Bremen notwithstanding, after I’d managed to get five massive Deep Vein Thromboses from flying too much. I was going to a conference. Not the one where the Financial Times described me as ‘the Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen of market research’ in a piece I wish I’d framed. But after that one I ended up speaking at a lot of conferences and I didn’t have a thing to wear. Actually, I did. I had a rather nice lightweight blue linen job from Cordings bought very late in 2001 which I’m definitely not throwing out. It isn’t just the fact it’s got years of wear in it, nor that it was and is the sort of kit James Bond used to affect for hot weather jobs. That one’s just My Suit. It er, suits me, sir.
For my younger readers, that was the catch-phrase from a comedy show, again about a thousand years ago.
I had the dubious pleasure of being mugged by two Geralds exactly like this in Turnbull and Asser one Christmas. I’d gone for a haircut at Trumpers, where probably on behalf of the Jermyn Street Retail Association they plied the customers with free whisky while you waited for your trim. For not much – or it didn’t seem like much after the whisky – they did your shoes and fingernails while you sat and waited. I’m neither going to listen to nor accept any criticism of this whatsoever. You don’t get full employment any other way. Irrespective, haircut done, tip given to Young Adam, counsellor, confessor and barber, I lurched into the glowing dusk heading West. Which fatally sent me past Turnbull’s Christmas window. If you’ve never seen this then you’ve missed one of life’s considerable treasures. The east window was all ties. Silk ties. Brightly lit. Fantastic silk ties, woven, Italian silk ties instead of the printed Chinese rubbish in Tie Rack. Ties, in those days, at those conferences, mattered. Ten minutes later, after I’d been comprehensively Geralded, two ties up and £105 down, I was back on the street, more than slightly dazed. I still have them both. The ties, not the Geralds, you understand. A hugely brilliant yellow Paisley and a not such a good idea multi-coloured Cubist creation. The Paisley I’d still wear anywhere that needed a tie.
I bought loads of other stuff for conferences. A grey flannel suit by Crombie, which I wore so much it actually wore out. Unlike the wool and cashmere houndstooth check trousers they made which turned an evening in a taverna in Greece into something of a shining memory still. The suit I had to buy when British Airways managed to lose my suitcase somewhere between Heathrow and San Diego didn’t get much wear apart from that one interview I had to do with SURFPAC and then again with SPAWAR, the weekend Sadam Hussein was found in a drain and once again, too often in my life, someone very calm in a uniform seriously considered shooting me. It’s so rude, apart from anything. not what you expect when you go to interview someone by appointment. I’d already told the taxi driver to slow down and don’t approach the gate that had big signs on it saying ‘Do Not Approach This Gate.’ Reading didn’t seem to be part of his core skillset.
The three sets of Italian Super 110 black wool trousers, another Ian Fleming recommendation for hot weather suavery – am I really ever going to wear them again? In rural Suffolk? Seriously? The brown double-monk Lobbs, possibly anywhere. The blue suede double-monk shoes, maybe Aldeburgh on a dry Saturday. But black Super 110 wool trousers…. probably not. And it hurts to type that.
But what do you actually do with this stuff? It’s going to stay in a charity shop forever, unless someone thrifty suddenly decides they need possibly somewhat dated hot climate business kit, which is borderline unlikely. It’s far too good for the clothes bin at the fire station where they probably put everything through a shredder and re-spin the yarn or send it in bundles to Africa. If that still happens. Ebay beckons if I can be bothered to go through the faff of writing it all up and getting tough plastic jumbo size envelopes.
It’s remotely possible that the well-dressed gangster, and possibly even the well-dressed conference-goer, speaker or not, might maybe, just conceivably not wear decent kit this stuff any more. I was moderately shocked when pilot cases were replaced by little rucksacks. I mean, really? A rucksack? And a water-bottle with a drinker thing on the top as if you’re still teething? Seriously? But time apparently moves on. I’m not doing conferences these days. Or market research – thanks to the Internet everyone knows everything now, apart from knowing that liars tell lies, obviously.
So a lot of my wardrobe is going to go. No reasonable offer refused. But not those houndstooth trousers. Nor the haunting strains of Some Enchanted Evening that seem to waft from the cupboard whenever I see them. I think it’s my age or something.
Have you bought anything online? Well, good for you. No Covid risk, no engagement, no chat, no ‘how does it feel in your hand?’ But hey, that’s all so like last century, daddio.
We don’t do business like that now.
Who we seem to do business isn’t governed by the Consumer Credit Act or the Consumer Rights Act. In case you’re unfamilair with it, (and as someone who buys stuff you shouldn’t be, it’s easy enough to find out about it. Here, for example: on the UK government’s own quite helpful website. It isn’t difficult to understand. If you want the actual text of what these Acts say, that’s pretty easy too, if for example, you want to see what your rights as a consumer are.
Yes, ok, there are no pictures of tits in it and it isn’t presented by Davina McCall or Nigel Farage, (which seems to be the baseline of UK medai and attention now) but despite that, it’s worth reading, whatever your reading ability, because it tells you, without any argument or what this bloke down the pub whose mate used to do all the servicing on a judge’s car said, exactly what your rights are.
As a model, ww.legislation.gov.uk does exactly and precisely what a government website ought to do for its citizens. It’s an index of un-engagement on both sides how few people know about it. In essence, the Consumer Rights Act, introduced, you’ll be absolutely un-astonished to learn not by a Conservative nor by a Labour MP, much less either Party itself, but by Liberal-Democrat Jo Swinson.
So you have rights when you buy something. You have right to get what you ordered. If you didn’t actually see the thing then you have the right to cancel when it turns up on your doorstep and it’s not what you thought it was.
This week this has happened twice, both times with an English company although one of them, registered in England, has a Chinese director and wants to pretend it’s Chinese.
?“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” ?“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” ?“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
Lewis Carrol: Through The Looking Glass
The easy one to deal with was a T shirt. 100% merino wool was what it said on the description. That was what I wanted. What turned up said on the label 100% cotton. In many languages, English being the first. One of the laws of internet commerce seems to be that words mean anything you want them to mean, just as Lewis Carrol had one of his characters say. Cotton, wool, issa T-shirt, innit. Made of sunnink, mate. Merino. I like the sound of that.
Which seems to be the way internet copywriting works now.
The other way internet commerce seems to work depends on whether you pretend your company is Chinese or not, and depends on pretending when you’re sitting in your chair in England, ordering goods from a website displaying a company registered in England with an address in England, the goods being dispatched to, delivered to, and paid from an address in England, that actually, this is a contract made in China and Chinese law applies.
Which, to use a legal term, is utter bollocks. And I’m utterly fed up with it.
I don’t know if they know it is and I do not care. More on Friday if they haven’t paid up.
A curious summer. The weather is peculiar and I keep thinking about Summer Camp in Wisconsin, about four thousand years ago give or take some naughts. A time for shooting, cook-outs, marshmallows toasted over a twig fire (which I can’t stand), canoeing, sailing, Gene Fleck’s Meadow Inn Bar, Chevrolets and cheerleaders, which I very much could, notwithstanding that heartbreakingly, every one of them is probably a grandmother now. Which isn’t much of a Springsteen song title, let’s face it.
Well I gotta get a new pack of Rennies
Got me a lot of acid reflux these days too
Takes so long to bend and tie-up my shoelaces now
Gotta do what nobody else will ever do.
But I still remember summer camp-outs
Still recall softball bleachers and the flag
I can still see her smiling in the dashboard light
Back when almost everybody had a fag.
Bruce Springsteen: Prob'ly A Grandma Now.
Maybe I shouldn’t quit the day job. But while I don’t still remember driving in my brother’s car, (her body tanned and wet down by the reservoir, each night on those banks I’d lie awake and hold her close just to feel each breath she’d take….. Damn, but I loved that car) I do still love Swing music, something that’s done the opposite of fading away over the years.
It almost started with Glenn Miller, thinking back, but before that I heard a tune I’ve never forgotten, Cole Porter’s Begin the Beguine, the most flying down to Rio song you could wish for. I have no idea why I liked this music aged thirteen. I liked what passed for normal music back then, or some of it, anyway. I still think ELO, Genesis, Godley and Creme and Roxy Music were sublime, from that time.
Maybe though, it was these two. Love it though I do, I can’t listen to Benny Goodman’s song without thinking of a cartoon cat dressing up to catch a mouse before getting smacked in the head with a ten-ton weight. Maybe it’s just me.
Yesterday I lamented the fact that deck shoes might be fine on decks and docks but they’re useless on a tidal slipway. Today I proved it. The Lizards arrived, fresh from Ebay.
So say goodbye, it’s Independence Day.
There are about seven million things wrong with the way they look. They look like….. they look like…… I can hardly bear to say it. They. Look. Like. Trainers.
There. It’s out. I don’t care whether they’re made of Happy Cow our not. It means the leather isn’t leather, but given the cow definitely doesn’t need its skin any more I have to say that doesn’t particularly concern me. They were a bit warm on the water today, but when I set off at 14:30 the car thermometer said 30 Centigrade, so they probably ought to have done.
They’ve got white laces. Not leather. Not even Happy Cow lookee-likee leather. I thought it was shock cord, but no, they’re actual laces. White ones.
But, and it is a huge but, BUT…. just look at that sole. It’s not just Vibram rubber, although Vibram is wonderful stuff, invented by an Italian mountain climber who was like me, even if only in that he was fed up of slipping, especially given that could have got him killed.
Slip Sliding Away
It’s a Vibram rubber sole with MAHOOOOOSIVE cleats which even more miraculously, doesn’t mark, doesn’t weigh as much as a handkerchief and absolutely definitely tested-it-myself-on-a-wet-muddy-slipway-today does not slip. Oh, and they actually support your foot too. You could go for a decent walk in these if you felt like it, which is something true deck-shoes aren’t really built for. Quite how the Last of the Mohicans managed in moccasins remains a mystery, but maybe being able to walk further and faster might have meant not going extinct. That and no fire-water, land-grabs and thunder-sticks arriving, anyway.
So I have to say it. Don Johnson wouldn’t have liked it. I don’t. But it’s true. This fake leather looks-like-a-trainer deck shoe does everything Sebagos or Sperrys do. Just about twenty times better. Ok, they’re even more expensive than either of those brands although thanks to some judicious shopping and a special offer from the seller mine were sniggeringly cheap. They’re made in Italy, not China, so whatever else you can say about them you know they haven’t been individually washed in children’s tears. They’re utterly brilliant.
You might think my boat shoes didn’t have much to do with Miami Vice. You would be wrong.
Imagine a world where an actress got a job without five kilos of silicon slapped on her sternum. I know, ludicrous, isn’t it? But also imagine a world where smoking, not just being smokin’… was ultra-cool. Imagine loose, deconstructed linen jackets with a buggy lining worn to drive a red VW Golf down the Route d’Or to the Med, still ranking as one of my utterly coolest escapades. A world where Rayban Wayfarers weren’t just the only shades in town, they were compulsory, back when Persol was a washing powder. A world where the coolest guys didn’t wear socks. And they definitely wore deck shoes.
So you had a choice. Sperry, the original, from 1935 Long Island Sound, or Sebago, the post-war baby-boomer born in 1946 a barely-decent interval after Johnny came marching home, from the shores of Lake Sebago in Maine. And you couldn’t afford either, back then. I couldn’t, anyway.
The story goes that Paul Sperry slipped on deck and took a header off the side of his boat. Or if you prefer, he saw his dog running on ice and had a good look at its paws to see why it didn’t slip. You pays your money and takes your fable, according to your inclination. What he didn’t do, obviously, was walk anywhere there was wet mud, or weed, or seemingly on any boatyard slipway with any tide. It’s just struck me in a real DUR! moment that no, he didn’t, because Lake Sebago being in inland lake doesn’t actually have tides. Just like the lake at Camp Menominee didn’t have tides. And while both companies sponsor things like transatlantic races and the Americas Cup, neither of those pass-times involve much carrying a rubber dinghy down a 45-degree ramp covered with river weed to row out to your boat. The point is, Sperry or Sebago, cool or cooler, while they’re great on a wet deck, those W-cut rubber soles are absolutely fricken lethal on a wet slipway. With a capital L.
Before I got a boat again I’d have said who cares? Certainly back in the ’80s, when to be young was if not very heaven then a pretty close second, when I was on summer camp in the land of a thousand lakes and ten million mosquitos, with free daily access to canoes and sailboats and a pontoon and a lake, and not quite as frequent access to cheerleaders with and without pom-poms, I’d have killed for a pair of Docksiders. Or Topsiders. I wouldn’t have cared which.
Last year, to mark well, getting old, probably, I bought some Sebagos in a sale. Not leather. Red. Neoprene, for sailing. They’re incredibly comfortable, but also incredibly fragile and the toe on the right one is currently delaminating after I got it stuck under a board on the boat. Something you might think a deck shoe should be able to deal with. So I bought another pair, but not Docksiders.
Campsiders are much the same but with a cleated sole. And camp because (waves hands too much, shrieking No silly, not that kind of camp! Oh, you are a one!) I don’t know. Because you’re supposed to wear them around camp I guess, (see how it comes back unprompted, Nancy-Jean?) instead of the tacky red nylon trainers I lived in back then when I wasn’t wearing Dutch paratroopers’ high-top boots, an incredibly comfortable thing you never see these days.
Slip them on and just like Meatloaf, I remember every little thing as if it happened only yesterday, parking by the lake and oh, you get the drift. And they’re sweet memories.
“You don’t know how to ease my pain…”
So when I bought modern deckshoes yesterday, having slipped just once too often, if felt like betrayal. They aren’t leather, for a start. They have a massively cleated Vibram sole. They’re quick drying. Non-slip. Non-marking. Italian. Even more ludicrously expensive than the most expensive Sebago. They actually (whisper who dares…) support your feet, something moccasins of any kind never do, in my experience.
By any rational measurement they’re about two hundred times better at being deck shoes for real-life boating involving slipways, weed, mud, boatyards and boats. I fell on that darned slip last year and didn’t rightly know what happened for a second or two. At my age, at any age really, I don’t really want that level of brain impairment, now or ever. But they don’t look right. Don Johnson would never, ever have worn a pair of Lizards. Not back then, anyway.
My school wasn’t famous, or private, or judging from its results, special in any way, certainly not academically. A lot of the time it seemed to labour under the delusion it was still the private boarding school it had been in the 1920s, insisting you needed Latin O Level to have any hope of going to Oxford or Cambridge.
What it made up with was better. It had a sailing club. That wasn’t very grand either, just two Mirror dinghies and two Enterprises on a gravel pit outside Westbury railway station. I guessed at the time they’d dug out the gravel for the railway.
It was only the kids who were different who did sailing. The kids who didn’t like football or rugby or cricket. Which was me. It was also the coolest couple in school, Peter Knee and Sandy Stanley. They were a big enough reason to go sailing on their own. They were magnetic. He was quite small, dark curly hair, very softly spoken with the hint of a lisp and the heir to the local department store. She was – well, she was just so utterly utter I could rarely even speak to her. Blond straight hair. Alpaca jumper. Jeans. Lived outside the town, somewhere in the wilderness around Dilton Marsh.
So far so teenage crush. But those two actually taught me something, by accident.
If you sail you need to cut rope, now and then. Rope isn’t what it used to be and it wasn’t back then either. Unlike the movies, rope is made of plastic and when you cut it, even with the sharpest Indiana Jones machete, it frays in seconds and makes a nice big fluffy unseamanlike pompom. Which is great if you’re a cheerleader but I never made the team.
Not all of them, anyway. We can leave Toni Basil’s frustration dating a closet football hero for another day
It was in the Sixth Form Common Room, near the record player, where if you didn’t have a lesson or at lunch or break you were allowed to just hang out not at a classroom. And it had a record player. You could bring in if not games, then at least your own music. I mean, how utterly cool was that? Lunch and pre-lessons to a soundtrack of Camel’s Snow Goose, Kate Bush’s Kick Inside, Lou Reed’s Transformer, the Floyd, obviously, and absolutely no punk rock of any kind whatsoever. It wasn’t really our sort of soundtrack in leafy Wiltshire. Lou Reed’s and David Bowie’s ghetto hymns were about the limit, really. Gene Genie loved chimney stacks – well, so did our parents. They forced rhubarb in theirs. We never really knew what Gene Genie did with them, but if we thought of it at all we’d have guessed probably the same.
The Thing I Learned
Apart from that I have a thing about girls in alpaca sweaters and tight jeans, obviously, was rather more useful. If you want to cut modern rope and line for sailing you need an electric cutter. The other thing you learn about that is you don’t do it very often, and certainly not often enough to fork out the £100-plus you need for a decent cutter. It’s insane. But you still don’t want pompoms.
You can try cutting the rope by holding it over a flame. A lighter gets too hot to hold and you end-up breathing in horrible black plastic smoke, apart from which if you’ve ever dropped molten plastic on your hand you’ll quickly realise you don’t ever want to do that again.
You’ll ideally need a candle, but a lighter would do. Most of all, you need silver paper. Cooking foil. Cut your line then twist cooking foil round the cut end, tight. Put it in the flame. Keep it there until horrible black plastic smoke comes out of the end of the twist, preferably without breathing it in. Then have a cup of tea, or at least two Lou Reed tracks. Perfect Day, maybe.
It’s ok now. It’s cooled down so you can unwrap it. And you’ll find, once you twist the silver foil off, you just saved £100-plus.
If that’s not neat I don’t know what is.
There you go. Knee’s isn’t what it was, nor is the rest of Trowbridge. The past is another country and besides, the wench is if not dead, then at least no wench any more. But Peter and Sandy’s tip still works. It’s just a perfect day. I’m glad I spent part of it with them, even if just in memory.
First sail in the new Drascombe yesterday. Well, new to me, anyway. According to the maker’s plate they stopped using about 1975, it’s early 1970s, like lots of good things. Oh, you know, David Bowie, Queen, Mud, the Sweet, Slade, Bay City Rollers. And yes do actually do like all those things, even though you couldn’t say so at the time with some of them. I learned to sail then, too, or started to.
We went on holiday to Cornwall, as was the custom. My mother, not knowing what else to do with a teenager, commendably packed me off on a dinghy cruise off Padstow. It was a fantastically sunny day, open water, warm, a little boat, a blue sky. And an instructress only a few years older than me, which would put her in her late teens, tanned in shorts and looking so altogether like a racier version of a Betjeman idol (so short in sleeve and strong in shorts – oh come on, you DO know…) that I couldn’t actually speak to her, let alone listen to anything she said. I spent a lot of time not looking at her t-shirt. Or her shorts. Or her face. Or her hair. None of which helps the tuition process, I’ve since learned. Poor girl.
Swing, swing together
A few years after that my school, in one of the very few superbly great things I’ll always thank it for, revealed the fact that it actually had a sailing club and if you didn’t want to play cricket (couldn’t see and didn’t know the rules) or football (see above, or try to) or rugby (made the First XV once, but we didn’t have a Second XV and after being thrown literally over a scrum I decided this really wasn’t my sort of thing at all) then you could go sailing, Wednesday afternoon, Westbury railway station lake, bring a change of dry clothes in case you sail like an idiot.
We had precisely two Enterprises and two Mirror dinghies. Call me an old-fashioned aesthete if you will, but there was always something about the squared-off bow of the Mirrors that turned my stomach. It’s not right. I couldn’t comment on the cut of its jib, not least because I always sailed the Enterprises. The cool kids did, or the kids I thought were cool, anyway. The kid who was going to inherit a local department store. The girl who lived fashionably far from the school who was sometimes his girlfriend, who smoked liquorice-paper roll-ups and had one of those names that could be a boy’s or a girl’s. Wendy sometimes; not Peter Pan’s Wendy, but equally a muse. Another girl with a huge amount of golden – no, not blonde, golden – hair curling down her back in the style of the times.
It was vaguely supervised. For reasons never clear to me we had the two coolest teachers overseeing the proceedings, an ex-paratrooper, from a time and of an age when that meant he’d probably been in line for Arnhem, and Mrs Shearn, who was lean and blond and fair. You didn’t mess either of them about. They took it in turns to drive the Ford minibus. Back then, a woman driving a minibus was way up there on the sex wars front line. Way up.
We even learned a bit about sailing. But not enough not to go aground on my first sail this year and my first sail in the new boat. I used the engine to get out of Martlesham Creek into the Deben itself, then turned up river, in the wake if not of Conrad, then at least Edward Fitzgerald, who used to live there. I learned that you can’t unfurl a sail wrapped around a mizzen mast single-handed while you try to steer an outboard. Lesson One. I moored-up to a buoy in the river for a bit, while I sorted the sails. I decided, this being first time out, to just use the jib on its own. The wind was Force Three, occasionally gusting Five but not for very long and yes, I do know. I used my anemometer.
It was supposed to be a furling jib, but it didn’t, as I found out when I tried to gybe. All that happened was that the furling line jammed around the drum and while I was sorting that the tiller didn’t alter the direction of the boat any more. Obviously aground, for a change in the Deben. The wind was coming from what I always think of as the Saxon shore, where once a king was buried. Unlike Raedwald, I ended-up being blown onto the West Bank, and stayed there until I worked out how to get rid of the jib for the moment, then get off the mud.
Today I spent three hours trying to sort the furling jib drum. I bought a special shackle link. A rotating one. I found the shackle-bag I’ve been looking for for nearly a month, put where it should have been for once. I bought two used blocks for the mainsheet from Andy Seedhouse’s magic chandlery as well, for £20 the pair. I got out to the boat an hour before high water.
It took over two hours to sort the jib. New shackle, old shackle, no shackle, all without dropping anything into the water for once, but it didn’t make any difference. It wouldn’t furl without either jamming or spilling line out of the drum and wrapping itself round anything nearby, then jamming. Then it came to me. Someone, for reasons unclear to me, has fitted the ******** drum upside down. Utterly unreal. But true.
I’ve no clear idea why anyone would do that. It can’t possibly ever have worked like that. That would seem to rule out the previous owners. It would also seem to rule out Anglia Yacht Brokerage who I bought it from, who know a bit about Drascombes and have done for years. It’s not something you’d think to look for. So who? When? Why?
Like a lot of things in life that seem important, it doesn’t actually matter. I took the thing off, inverted it, put it back on without any fancy shackles, just upside down or rather not and it worked perfectly first time. And the second. And the third.
So we now have a working furling jib. The centreboard stuck in the mud because Id put it down to give the boat some stability while I worked on it, but that sorted itself with some brute force and a Third Year rudimentary grasp of the workings of levers. I shackled up the two mainsheet blocks and threaded the main sheet through them. I’m not convinced it’s long enough, but then I’m not convinced I need a double block each end for the sort of force a Drascombe sail is going to exert, either.
And now four days when I can’t really get to the boat any way. But it’s ready, finally, ready to sail, with a silent thanks to an unknown tanned blond girl in shorts, a long, long time ago. I wish I’d said at least something.
A day for plastic patriots yesterday, the day that many, possibly most people now don’t know, with people who wrap themselves in the flag and bang on about the war first and foremost. In 1945, yesterday was the last day of the Second World War. It was supposed to be May 7th, not May 8th, but Stalin wasn’t up for sharing a peace deal with anyone else, so far as I understand it.
It was, according to an US fighter pilot I used to know, the first day of massive drinking that lasted weeks, and an immediate two weeks of leave granted to pilots as suddenly the US Army Airforce didn’t have much use for their services, at least in Europe. A lot of the drinking, he said, was because the war was over so they wouldn’t get killed. A lot more of the drinking, he said, was because they thought they’d all be sent to the Pacific to fly ground-attack for the invasion of Japan, so they’d all get killed anyway. Meanwhile, there was drinking to be done.
The date probably accounts for an Instagram post I saw today, bizarrely put up by an account called IamSophieScholl, by someone who is demonstrably and easily proved not to be Sophie Scholl, given that she was beheaded in 1943. I thought maybe it was her anniversary too, but no, she died in February. Her name is next to unknown in Britain, chiefly, I think, because it interferes with the accepted narrative.
They all knew what was going on
My step-brother in law came out with this idiotic statement years ago. It’s stuck in my mind ever since. I asked him if he saw his neighbours being beaten up by the police, the street full of marked police vans, people in police uniforms kicking the door down next door, dragging the neighbours into the street then putting them in a marked police van, never to be seen again, what he would have done. Called the police?
But it became a handy trope to justify the behaviour of the Allies, and handier still to justify the deliberate destruction of every German town of any size. I used to know, as it were, a woman who was born long after 1945 in a place called Hildesheim.
Before.
You almost certainly won’t have heard of it. There was never anything much there. A grass airfield that Luftwaffe squadron KG200 used a couple of times, flying a captured American B17 bomber to drop Nazi agents into parts of Germany over-run by the Allies. A factory that made optical lenses. Not in any sense an important military target. Not even strategically important, on the plain southwest of Hanover. It didn’t matter.
There were seven previous occasions when Hildesheim had been bombed, but March 22nd 1945 was the big one. The Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command issued an order which was very specific: “to destroy built up area with associated industries and railway facilities.” You might want to re-read that carefully, as it’s the exact text.
“Destroy built up area.”
And associated industries. Not the other way around. What it specifically doesn’t say is the fantasy propagated by countless films, TV series, books and Brexiters – we were noble, mate, we didn’t bomb civilians deliberately. It was unfortunate they were there. But that’s war. Where also the first casualty is truth.
The orders for Hildesheim show that to be the total and utter lie it always was. German houses and German civilians were going to be bombed because …well, because they could be bombed. We don’t want all these bombs going to waste, do we? They didn’t build themselves, you know. What do you suggest we do otherwise, chuck them in the sea off Ireland or something?
Almost three-quarters of the houses in Hidlesheim were destroyed overnight, by 250 British airplanes. Fifteen hundred German people were killed. Five hundred of them have never been identified. They couldn’t be.
After.
But today, seventy-six years ago, it had stopped. In theory, anyway. A couple of German units hadn’t heard of the surrender, stuck on the shores of the Baltic. A couple of U-boats had heard and were heading for South America.
But for most people in Europe, it was over. If there was no other benefit of the entire EU project, keeping it being over alone would be enough to justify any amount of contributions. But we forget, just the way we were told to. Just the way we pretend not to.
I got an offer today, one of those Groupon-type deals of a hotel for a silly cheap price. This was three or four nights, at about £130, which is a pretty good rate, despite it being what the hotel called a ‘self-drive’ price.
Nowhere to run to…
I know this hotel. What they mean is you can sail there, or take your submarine there, as people used to do back in the war, when they torpedoed the jetty for fun, training, or take your longship there, which the Vikings did, then when they realised there wasn’t much going on in this little burgh, they portaged the whole thing into Loch Lomond, the next big bit of water, to see if there were better pickings there.
Or you can drive, but there isn’t any other way of getting there. It’s the middle of nowhere in the middle of Scotland.
Like any good hotel, this one is supposed to be haunted. Maybe it is. We’d been on tour, tour-guiding a group of American seniors. This was one of those tours when you just wish you hadn’t accepted the offer to do it, full of people who keep talking about how you Europeans took your life in your hands when you go to the supermarket without a gun.
There were a few who were ok. One tall-is woman with a nice pair of jeans, but mostly an older crowd. It had been a long day. The coach had managed to be in two minor collisions within a half hour that afternoon. Neither of them the coach driver’s fault, but it still happened and he still needed a new wing mirror after a hire van had come round a corner on our side of the road. It shook him. It shook me.
We got to the hotel and after everyone had checked in, after the mass panic when 50 Americans realised there was only one lift and they’d have to – OMIGARD – walk upstairs or wait, I thought I could do with a walk before dinner. There weren’t many places to walk, just up to the end of the sea loch where there was a little park we’d passed on the way in, through the main – the only – street of the tiny loch-head village, past the crumbling wooden pier slowly crumbling into the water. It didn’t matter, it was the only place to go.
After the main street had ended there was a little bit of open country before the park. That’s when I noticed the tallish woman and her nice jeans walking in front of me, about 50 yards ahead but walking more slowly than me.
And I realise the thing I could sense she was realising too – it’s getting towards dusk, we’re the only two people around, I’m gaining on her and this park we’re headed to is a dead end.
What do you say?
I’m not going to hurt you
Somehow it doesn’t sound that reassuring, does it? “You don’t need to scream,” doesn’t help, either. I did what any red-blooded male would do – walk determinedly past her, heading straight for the bottle bank and keep on going, into a damp pasture that lead down to the shore of the loch and stumble on the seaweed back to the hotel that way. Which took about an hour and two falls, which was a total and utter pain but better than having the poor woman think I was stalking her with intent.
The hotel was supposed to be haunted by a Green Lady and a banshee, but only one person had ever seen the Green Lady, a cleaner in about 1971. I asked the manager about it but he asked me not to talk about it. He said he’d never heard about it but things like that scared him, so if I wouldn’t mind, stop.
Dinner passed off without too much of a hitch. I arranged a birthday cake for a girl whose birthday it was at her mother’s prompting, the same mother who reacted as if I’d spat on her plate when I got a cake together from the hotel. So glad I bothered. Early night. Nothing much else to do except sit up drinking with the driver on some tours, and I didn’t want to do that on this one.
I woke from a dream of a woman screaming at about five. At least I thought it was a dream. I got up and opened the door of my room. Nothing. No screams, no running feet, no swinging doors, no sign that it was anything at all except a dream. Back to sleep for a couple of hours, then breakfast, we bid good-bye to the hotel with only one complaint about there being only one towel per guest “So you know what to dry last” and off we go, along the road past the bottle bank in the little park at the head of the loch, past the information plaque I’d had to study for about twenty minutes to allow nice jeans woman to get out of the park without thinking I was following her. Another place they’ll never see again.
We got to a huge cafe in the Lake District some hours later. There was a seat with a group of Philippino women on the tour. They were sat at a table all holding hands with their eyes shut. They looked upset. It turned out they were just saying grace before their coffee and cake but actually, since I asked, yes, they were upset.
The problem was they’d been woken by a woman’s scream at about five am. On the whole I don’t think I’m going to take-up that Groupon offer.
Seventy-six years ago tonight it was April 27th, 1945. A man I used to know was 20 then.
This is a very simple little story. Tonight in April 1945, a young American airman missed his last transport home from a dance and had to walk from Ipswich to where he was based, on an airfield at Leiston, which doesn’t exist any more, returned to the fields it was before 3,000 Americans came to live there.
So far as I can make out his journey was twenty-two miles, give or take a mile or two. But it’s difficult to be sure. The road he took isn’t certain. He couldn’t remember how he got out of Ipswich in the dead of night. There were no signposts; all the signposts had been taken down in 1940, to hinder the German invaders who never came. He had to walk because there was no traffic on the roads at that time of night, and precious little traffic anyway. All civilian car drivers had problems getting petrol and anyway, back then most people didn’t have a car. Even if they did, the airfield was deep inside a security zone, where travel was under curfew and no-one except locals were allowed to travel, for ten miles back from the coast. His memories of the exact route were quite faint when he told me about it. He couldn’t remember where one of his girlfriends had lived in Ipswich either, the one he said he should have married.
You can hear his story here:
I drive parts of this route most weeks, living here on the edge of England. A decade ago I drove the whole of the route with him, when he came over to visit for the annual Memorial Service at Leiston. He laid a wreath on the monument there in Harrow Lane, a place at the edge of a caravan park in a field commemorating the fact that in eighteen months eighty-two men took off from the airfield and never came back. All around the memorial are lush green fields. The few airfield buildings that remain are falling down. We walked around some of them looking at the few things that remained; some old graffiti about buying war bonds, and some more words written on the walls of a hut that turned out to be notes on when some piglets long turned to chops and bacon were born, back in 1960 something. All day it rained on and off, much as Joe said it used to pretty much all the time he was there, from late January until after VE day, 9th May, Victory in Europe day, when Germany was defeated. Everyone got drunk for two weeks. They were given extended unofficial leave because although the war wasn’t over and the Japanese were still undefeated, Japan was a long way away and getting the whole army and air-force machinery around the world to fight Hirohito’s forces would take weeks, so long before jet flight and charter holidays. As it turned out, his squadron were sent to Germany when everyone had sobered up, the airforce of occupation in a country where every town of any size had been bombed.
But that’s rushing to the end of this story, which is really about the road. It’s hard to tell how the journey was made, because obviously it all happened a long time ago and even here in East Anglia things change. I originally planned to walk the same road and see how much it’s changed for myself. From the start, I knew it had changed a lot. It was going to take a lot of detective work to find-out where the road was different and when and how it got that way. It was going to be a combination of his memory of a place that once was, looking at maps to see how the roads have changed over the last 70 years and a bit of guesswork. I hoped that I’d have to use as little guesswork as possible.
I like finding things out, and I like knowing what went before. The first time I knew about the airfield was when I moved into Yoxford, which is a village of about 700 people four miles from Leiston and its airfield and about twenty miles up the east coast, north of Ipswich.
Lt. Col Joe Shea, Leiston Memorial Service
There are no motorways in Suffolk. It’s a county of holidaymakers and retired people. It has beautiful days in summer when time seems to stand absolutely still. And it is bitterly cold in winter, when the wind rushes straight in from Russia, blowing clear across Holland and the North Sea without a single hill in the way for 1500 miles and more. I didn’t know anything about the village apart from the fact that it was ten miles from Southwold and the property prices were about half what they were in the ultimate 1950s timewarp seaside resort. The obvious thing to do was search the Internet, and the first and pretty much the only thing I found when I typed “Yoxford” into Google was a website dedicated to the Yoxford Boys. It sounded like a boxing club, but when I clicked on it the reality was a little different. One of the pilots who had flown from Leiston, a man called Bud Anderson, was not only still alive but had built a website dedicated to everyone who served there, on Station 373, the home of the United States Army Air Force 357th Fighter Group, who Lord Haw Haw, William Joyce, called “The Yoxford Boys” in a radio broadcast.
Along with so much of this story, so much has changed, so much has been forgotten and to make sense of the story I needed to unpick the layers of forgotten things, And I think this story, and all the other stories like this, need to be told. Because this is not a blood and guts tale of how a brave pilot won the war, the kind of thing Hollywood used to make films about. This is one story among literally millions of others about how a very young man did something lots of ordinary young men did, missed his lift, in extraordinary circumstances. And these were. Apart from the fact there was a war on, after Elmer had walked his 26 mile trudge through the spring lanes of Suffolk he had less than half an hour to get ready to fly one of the last combat missions of the war, eight hours of long range patrol and bomber escort into Germany.
Like almost everything else I knew, or thought I knew about what my generation and certainly my father’s and grandfather’s generation always called The War, with capital letters. World War Two was the always the only war for them. Everything else that came after, all the scrubby little bushfights and fiascos like Korea, Cyprus, Aden, Northern Ireland, even Vietnam, all of these were never talked about in the same way. Not even the Cuban missile crisis, probably the closest any of us ever came to total and absolute nuclear destruction was never talked about the same way as The War. That was always in capitals.
I think it was probably because that war, World War Two as they only called it in the Airfix catalogue or the Radio Times, the Second World War, The War affected everybody, whether or not they were in uniform, and all the others really only affected the people who lived near whatever was happening, along with the people sent there to sort it all out. Or not, in most of those cases. Perhaps it was also called The War because it was the last time there was clearly, unarguably, a good side and a bad side and the good side won. Except of course calling any side absolutely good is a bit moot when both sides had the Soviet Union nominally on their side, and many of the people who fought the Nazis with us were sent back by us to the USSR and killed by the Soviets. Who raped tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of German women. The Soviet Union that Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister who Alf Garnett, Margaret Thatcher, Brexiters and thousands of others would not hear a word against knew all about in advance and let it happen.
I remember an English teacher at my primary school who jumped into a conversation about the interminable war games we played at break. Practically every boy, even some of the girls, was on the British and American or the German side. I never minded being on the German side. Even now I don’t know why. It certainly wasn’t a political thing. Nobody told us about death camps, or pretty much anything else. Politics meant Harold Wilson on TV telling us one week that devaluing the pound would not affect the pound in our pockets and the next week reappearing to tell us that actually, thinking about it, it would, sorry about that, easy mistake to make, you know how it is when you’re busy. Goebbels and Goring and Hitler didn’t have television to broadcast on. Maybe it wouldn’t have been any different if they did. But there were differences, just under the surface.
The English teacher pounced on something somebody said, about how the Americans were on our side. She said they weren’t. That they were on their own side. I remember it still, the first time I ever heard a single voice even vaguely different to the official line.
When you start peeling away it all gets a lot less clean and bright than it looks from a distance, or certainly from the distance that black and white war films gave me all through the 1960s, when I was a child. I grew up with the descendents of Polish exiles at school, in a society which had integrated them so effectively that no-one ever thought it was odd that in our little Wiltshire town there were kids called Chris Koslowski and Bozenka Kalinka. Just recently a friend from school remembered reciting the neams of all the Polish kids she remembered; together with another friend she got to around fifty names in one year of school roll of about a thousand. In the same way no-one thought it was odd that there was a little hut with a black coirrugated iron roof calling itself the Polish Deli on the road I walked to school along every morning. I went in there once when I was about fourteen.
I’d seen a deli in an American film and heard Don Maclean singing about American Pies. Thinking about it, that could have been a levee he was singing about, but in the same way and for the same reason, The War and its aftermath, or at least the interminable film autopsies every weekend afternoon that left English servicemen either disgusted or amused at the Americans winning it all on their own, as usual, as they said. But I put deli and levee and America and Fifth Avenue and Marilyn Monroe all together in my head to come up with something completely unlike the shabby shed full of old ladies wearing black buying sausages that I found when I opened the door. And blushed and stammered and wondered how I could go out again without anyone noticing, or how I could answer anyone who wanted to know what I wanted, who would only speak in Polish to me.
I knew what I wanted but I didn’t know how to say it. I wanted to know what was going on. I wanted to be in a deli. But more than that I wanted to be more American, which wasn’t at all easy in Wiltshire in the early 1970s. Around the same time I saw one of the original American Beatniks being interviewed on our local TV station. He had been trying to jump a train and ride the rails at Temple Meads in Bristol, Brunel’s huge station on the Great Western Railway. The Beatnik sounded as confused as I was. Instead of being beaten-up by the railroad guards as he expected, they told him to mind out because the goods yard could be a dangerous place. They probably gave him a cup of tea. I felt like him all the time.
America was everywhere but it was almost impossible to find-out where. At school we played war games because it was the time war films were being made, as our fathers settled into middle age and remembered or pretended to remember a time when they didn’t live on a housing estate so new the pavements were made of gravel. We watched war films every weekend on TV. The films in colour were American. The black and white ones were usually British. The airplanes were a different shape and where the American GIs in the promotional TV shows like Combat, where a platoon fought its way across a generation’s memories of Normandy, where the German tanks were usually American 1950s models painted grey, where the Americans had semi-automatic Garand rifles even aged six or so you could see the difference as the plucky Brits soldiered on with Lee-Enfields left over from the war before, the kind illustrated in cut-away drawings in the red-bound Encyclopaedia Brittanica my father bought.
Years later I found a photo in a newspaper that seemed to sum things up. A tractor at harvest time and two men under what could only be an English sky at harvest time, their tractor looking like something Constable could have easily imagined, towing some arcane reaping machine or a binder or something else to do with harvest and corn and weird flailing mechanical arms, the kind of machine that Brunel would have laughed at before he puffed on his cigar and reached for his pencil and notebook. British mechanised farming in the early 1940s; you could tell because the colours were a bit wrong in the photo. The other clue was the men were harvesting right up to the edge of the field, long before set-aside strips had been thought off, right up to and under the steel silver wing of the B17, the Flying Fortress bomber parked at its dispersal bay on what had been farmland until the middle of 1943. When the Americans came.
Here in Suffolk it’s still impossible to drive more than ten miles without coming across another collection of narrow lanes of crumbling concrete set-out in an A-shape, the runways that are still left, the concrete scars that gave George Orwell the idea to call England Airstrip One when he wrote 1984.
So this is one story. I don’t know yet whether it’s the story I want to tell. Maybe that’s what this story is about, keeping things from ending, keeping the stories after the people in the tale have gone. And like many people of my generation, I like these stories, I know how they end.
Back in January last year I walked the first half of Joe’s walk, from Ipswich railway station to Woodbridge. I’ve never managed to finish it, partly because the road has been re-routed and it doesn’t have a footpath alongside it any more, partly because I keep thinking it should be done at night to see exactly when daylight came so he could see where he was. Partly because there will be nothing there when I get to the end of the walk, no airfield, no huts, no engines starting, just the wind in the trees and the sightless windows of the few huts that at left that haven’t fallen down. Some of them you just don’t go near.
I live on another airfield, a B17 station. The first day I slept there I was woken by the sound of an engine I’ve never heard before or since. It went on for over ten minutes at six in the morning. I have absolutely no explanation for it. A quarter mile away there’s still building that was a generator house, a square brick building I’ve always wanted to convert into a house. Close by it is a long hut that used to the the gym and the chapel. I can’t even go through the door. Something stops me.
No, it’s fine to go inside. Honestly. I just need to tie my shoelace.
