Throwback Thursday - Loot and Pip

That's my brother and I,

just to show I wasn't always scowling. This is a studio photograph taken by my Uncle Jack, the family photographer, and I would guess that the 69 in the serial number he has given it refers to 1969, when I would have been in my eighth year, and Pip, my brother Philip, now usually just Phil, would have been about ten. He wasn't called Pip much after a very young age, except by my dad, it embarrassed him. Once Mrs Grange, a large, jolly, generous and cultivated friend of our family, saw Phil on Berkhamsted High Street with a couple of his mates when he was about seventeen and called out 'Hello Pippy!', much to his shame and chagrin, of course. Mrs Grange had wanted to be my godmother when I was born, but my mother in a fit of integrity for which I never quite forgave her, said no, I was not going to be christened, she didn't believe in it any more and wasn't going to go through the motions. Mrs Grange delighted me when I was sixteen by seating me on her chaise longue and offering me a cigarette in front of my parents. It would have been worth being hailed in the street as Looty to have been on the receiving end of Mrs Grange's indulgence and patronage, but it was not to be.

There are a whole series of these photos of us and our parents (one of which is in the post about my mum a couple of years ago), for which we were all obviously scrubbed and brushed and dressed in our best (that dress was finely patterned velveteen in rich blues, greens and purples, still my favourite colours, though I was disinclined towards pretty dresses by then), with a range of expressions from the serious to the hilarious. They are really very nice photos; I often think that Jack was a rather bad photographer of people because his heart wasn't in it, but these are mostly warm and attractive. I don't know what he was saying or doing to amuse us, typically Phil has given way to pure mirth first, but my smile is genuine, if a bit vague. In the next one I am open-mouthed with laughter too.

Mum once said to me when I was in a particularly lugubrious and miserable phase, probably a bit older than I am in this photo: 'You know you can be a depressing person. Philip can drive you mad sometimes but at least he's not depressing'. I know this sounds harsh, I probably was driving her to distraction and I'm really not fishing for sympathy about it! Nevertheless, despite this and the frowning photographs, my abiding memory of childhood, at least where my interactions with Philip were concerned, were largely of this pure merriment that you can see in his face here. Laughter was one of his principal driving forces, along with learning and cleverness; he ruled our television watching like a dictator, (I was scarcely allowed to know of the existence of ITV, only BBC passed muster) but more even than the geeky (the word didn't exist then), improving tenor of Blue Peter and Tomorrow's World, it was the funny stuff that had him yelling up the stairs or down the garden ' Loot! Tom and Jerry/Dad's Army/ Morecambe and Wise...' or whatever. He would get so excited watching something he found particularly uproarious that he would bounce up and down, higher and higher, in his seat, and my dad would say with exasperation 'Pip, can you not do that to the furniture!'

We went through the motions of scrapping, big brother, little sister; physical fights when we were small, in which in fact he was as inhibited as a well brought up puppy, I was rarely hurt and indeed rather relished it if I could claim to be, since as smaller, younger and female I would inevitably get sympathy from everyone else in the family and he would get told off. I never felt unsafe. My sister still laughs and does an imitation of a six-year-old Philip protesting 'Favouwitithm!' when she hauled us apart. (Her other favourite quote from him at this age was when she brought some particularly gifted older design students home from college and they found themselves interviewed by him with intense scrutiny. After they had left he remarked to her 'I didn't know you had such intelligent friends!'). I also remember a time when we were perhaps in our teens, on a caravan holiday, when we decided to have an insult joust; we sat face to face and came up with the most imaginative names we could for each other. I finally called him an amoeba, and he graciously conceded the match to me. And another holiday moment, when we were very little, a warm summer evening when we were out and about, and he said 'Loot, I wish you weren't my sister.' 'Why?' 'Because you're nice.'

Despite my dolorous and tragedy-queen moments, when I was in disgrace with fortune and my classmates' eyes, which led to my mother's comment about our respective characters, I think in many ways I found childhood and school easier than he did. His particular cleverness, his unmoderated excitement which caused him to bounce on the furniture when Jerry got Tom caught in the mousehole and which still distinguishes his speech and manner now, his curly hair, all made him different in a time when I think perhaps it was harder to be different than it is now. But he didn't whinge, he found things to make him laugh, he got cleverer, he went to Cambridge and he married Angela, a mathematician at least as clever as he is. They live, as far as I can tell, happily ever after.

We see each other only now and then, but I think we hold each other in real affection. When I'm around him, I try a bit too hard to be clever and funny.

Throwback Thursday - Chapman's Dam

When I was four, in 1966, I went with my parents to stay with my Auntie Joan's family in Pennsylvania. We went there again when I was thirteen, the second time my nearest brother came too, but this first time, my being just a foal at foot and not yet at school, it was just me. I had a lovely time; I was considered cute and a honey, made much of by everyone from the pilot of the Aer Lingus plane that took us there who sat me on his knee in the cockpit (that was possible then), to New York hotel maids and men working on the streets to my teenage American cousins and their buddies. 

The picture was taken at a place we called Chapman's Dam. I just googled it and in fact it's actually Chapman Dam, and is still there, of course. I remember it as a sunny place with little beaches and barbecue and picnic tables. I appear to be being fed marshmallows, probably by my cousin Honey, who was really called Marjy after my mum. I don't know who the little girl behind me was, I vaguely remember another child I was friendly with.

Joan was my mother's only sister, she had gone to live in America at the end of the Second World War, because she was a GI bride. Uncle Lloyd, her husband, who for some reason we often knew as Uncle Kit, had been stationed in Northamptonshire where the Cutmores (my mum's family) then lived, he also went to France, maybe for the Normandy landings, I should probably know more about where, when and how as one of my American cousins has been researching it and even made it over here very briefly in the last year or so but I didn't get to see him, but I forget the details. I think Lloyd finished up in Brest so he must have been through Brittany, and thus the cross-hatching of historical coincidence shows itself again there in a small way.

This was the first time the two sisters had seen each other in that time, twenty years almost exactly. It was certainly an exciting thing for them. As always there was, well, history: little bits of grit of bitterness, rivalry, jealousy, diverging accounts of How Things Happened, hurt and soreness around my Gran, their mother, and how she saw and treated each of them. It was wartime and a hard time for all of them, and everyone too sad and reproachful to easily see the other's point of view.  Yet the two sisters supported each other too, made clothes and food and were company for each other and their children, they named their daughters after each other. Joan was altogether a sweeter, easier person than my mum, less sharp (in both senses), more rounded at the corners; once when we talked about her, after the second visit, Mum said she saw her besetting sin as a kind of laziness. She didn't mean idleness, Joan was hardworking, creative, resourceful, handy and outgoing, as Mum would have been the first to acknowledge, but I think she saw in her a kind of complacency, a deeper rooted shiftlessness which didn't try to analyse or criticise or change things much. More kindly it might be seen as acceptance, patience, a sanguine temperament. But Mum not being like that herself, didn't see it like that. 

I loved being in America, both times. My impression of life there was of abundance, though Joan and Lloyd were always quite poor, I think, financially and lived rather hand to mouth. Yet there was a pile of toys for me when I got there, looked out from the attic or donated by friends of the family, which were wonderfully different from anything I'd seen at home, someone bought me some guppies which swam around in a glass vase on the windowsill much to my fascination, there were chickens and dogs, and somewhere else, some friends' farm I think, maybe the family which my eldest cousin finally married into, where there were piles of young puppies and kittens I was allowed to stroke, and an old blind man who asked to be allowed to touch my face to see me with his hands, which I also liked. There was open house at weekends (I think that was more the second time) with huge amounts of food cooked and served, most of it home grown, and when my mum queried whether it was quite reasonable that so many people should descend on the place expecting to be fed, Joan was quite affronted. 

They visited us a couple of times afterwards, including to come for Az's wedding when I was fifteen. Joan died about ten years ago. We had kept in touch on and off; I rang her when my Mum died, perhaps ten years before, and she told me I was a brave girl to make that call. 

Throwback Thursday - Black jeans and Ginger

This photo is unusual in that it has a date written on the back, in my mother's handwriting, 'August Bank holiday, 1967.  It shows my brother and me - I am in the foreground - with three kittens. It was taken on holiday in Hastings, Sussex, on a farm where we were staying in our caravan.

The odd thing about this - apart from that Mum chose to date it, which was almost unheard of with our family photos, so that puzzling out the wheres, whens an sometimes even the whos of them is an endless source of frustration - is that I was fairly certain until now that we got our ginger cat, for he it is who is on my lap, when I was six, but I would still only have been five in the summer of 1967, at the end of my first year at school. Once again, the rather dour and mistrustful frown; Philip, my brother, looks much cheerier.  

I think I'm a year or so older than in the previous photo I posted, I look it and also by that short hair, which I got just after my sister Alison (Az) came back from visiting our older sister Helen in London with her dark hair in an urchin cut. I immediately wanted one too, though I remember Az lamenting the passing of what must have been the last of my infant blond streaks.

Another thing I remember particularly were the black denim jeans I am wearing in the picture, no white knee socks here, though still the Clarks t-bars. We didn't wear trousers that much as little girls, certainly not to school where they were rather frowned on by stuffy head-teachers, I think. But those I loved, and I have always had a penchant for black denim jeans ever since, though you can't always get them. I've had three pairs in my life, including one now, and I've felt good in all of them. I wouldn't mind a black and white striped t-shirt like that either, but I could probably no longer really carry off such broad horizontals these days.

So Ginger came home with us from Hastings. We hadn't had a cat since the black one, who had been brought home from another holiday and another farm, that of my Dad's Aunt Ethel in Somerset, had been run over on the aforesaid lethal A41 some three years before. Mum vowed we wouldn't have any more dogs or cats, but her resolve weakened when these orphans presented themselves. The farm had a number of cats; the mother of these kittens had given birth to them in a haystack and kept them secret from the farm owners, but had then been run over when they were about six weeks old. That might have been the end of them, since no one knew they were there, but our Ginger had found his way out and his sisters had followed him, so the story went. He was, then, a hero, we were told. We took him, I think some other holidaymakers took the other two.

The naming of cats is a difficult matter, it isn't just one of your holiday games... Ginger was endowed with an embarrassment of rather grandiose names, none of which stuck. I think Mum wanted to call him Hastings, for obvious reasons, and she was fond of the place having spent her nursing training years, some of the best of her life, there. I favoured Orlando, after Kathleen Hale's marvellous creation, and Philip, on account of the hero thing, wanted to call him Perseus.  In fact he really had no name at all for about the first six years of his life other than Puss or Pussy, and was only slightly less vaguely dubbed Ginger when we acquired a second cat, Tiggy, to distinguish him from her.

He was a clever, somewhat eccentric cat, inclined to be quite deadly and uninhibited with teeth and claws if you looked at him over the back of the sofa or through the banisters, but a great playmate, loved to dance around the rim of the tub at bath times, would attentively watch us playing board games then reach out a paw and move the pieces, and accompanied us on all our holidays, taking car journeys in his stride as long as he could curl up as close as possible to my dad's feet while the latter was driving. Once as a kitten he shinned up Az's legs in their skinny trousers which made me squeal with delight and her with pain. He used to knock at the back door to come in (the knocker was at waist height) but never if you were outside watching; try as I might, I only caught him in the act of doing so once. He was kindly and solicitous towards Tiggy when she was a kitten and peaceable and companionable with her when she grew up. In the last year or so of his life he co-existed in rather curmudgeonly tolerance bordering on armed neutrality with my collie, Phin, once he had sent him flying with a clawed swipe on the first day of the puppy's arrival. 

He once climbed up onto the kitchen counter and curled up asleep on a warm Victoria sponge cake on the cooling rack.

He never did meet his end on the A41; one evening a man came to the door having hit him with his car, we brought him in with his eyes all wonky and a bit of blood on his face, put him in the warm dark cupboard under the stairs and he sauntered out the next morning and ate a healthy breakfast, he always liked his food and grew rather fat later in life. He didn't venture much towards the road after that, though I always dreaded any knock on the door in the evening. He moved with us to Brighton when I was sixteen, but didn't have a very long life by cat standards, living to about twelve. His eccentricity turned to dementia, accompanied by incontinence, and one morning my dad slipped away with him to the PDSA to have him put down without telling any of us. 

I was sad, but maybe not as sad as I am now thinking about it. It's a long time between five and seventeen, and the focus of my affections had moved to my first dog, then to my first serious boyfriend, more worthily in the former case than the latter, I must say. I've always had a fondness for ginger cats though.

Throwback Thursday - Riverside Gardens

Nothing like a well-tried alliterative formula for a prompt, lots of people do this one. Went and looked out the old photo albums my wonderful nieces put together for my mum in her old age, and pulled out a couple of faded instamatic snaps. Scanning them was less straightforward; I use the PC less and less (Chromebook for me, a betwixt and between kind of technology), never really got very au fait with Windows 10 and don't keep up with all the changes, now there doesn't seem to be such a thing as a control panel, I finally found something called fax and scan somewhere I've forgotten where and probably won't be able to do so again. Why do they have to keep changing things? Like bloody google doing away with Picasa web albums, so now I'm obliged to upload photos to google plus and again I can never remember what I've done from one time to the next, and I really don't want to be involved with google plus but they manoeuvre you into it anyway... blah blah blah moan moan moan.

Anyway. This is I, aged about four, just along from where we lived. I can remember that blue checked frock, and the nylon ruffled lace collar, which my mum made, as she did most of my dresses when I was small, but not the cardigan, as she wasn't a knitter. I think my sister-in-law sometimes knitted me things (my brother was married before I was a year old, my sister-in-law still knits). 

The expression of slightly sceptical, ironic truculence is one which comes up again and again in photos of me at all ages, so I suppose it must be my face. 

Behind me lie Riverside Gardens. We lived in Gossoms End, in a 17th century cottage set back from a horrendously busy main road - the notorious, pet-killing A41, but round the back was a close of very recently built beige-brick flats, Riverside Gardens. 

'Can Janet and I go to Riverside Gardens, to ride our bikes/ catch butterflies on the butterfly bush/ build a camp/ look for Smoky the cat/stroke Cindy the Beagle?' 

Riverside Gardens was where the cobbler's son next door and I  - whom I wasn't really supposed to play with at all since he first made me eat baths salts and then instigated the episode of playing with creosote in Mr S's shed* - formed the headquarters of the Animal Lost Club; we never found any lost animals other than snails, who were disappointingly reluctant to stay in the refuge we made them. It was also where G, the Only Black Boy in the School, lived; a silent, clearly somewhat troubled, fostered child, who one day when he perceived me walking behind him, turned around and without a word or any expression, twisted my arm behind my back to the point of real pain, then walked on. I didn't cry or scream, simply asked him why, but he didn't answer.

Opposite where I am standing in the photo was the rec. After my rather sententious grumbling about why people don't use public parks and spaces, I was led to recall the rec. It was really rather a horrible, unsafe space; we went there for the swings and big slide and see saw and all the other lethal and now banned examples of children's outdoor play equipment, and for the conkers, but it was fraught with broken glass and vandalism and bullying older children.

This all sounds as though I grew up in a very rough and nasty place, I didn't, we lived in a lovely and picturesque cottage in a very prosperous small home counties town, albeit in a rather rougher end of it. I do have a habit of remembering the bad bits.

With the wonders of google maps and street view, I checked out the area now, in many ways it's surprisingly unchanged; here is a near as I can get to the same spot last year.

Over the road though, things have changed quite a lot; the rec is no more but is the site of a sports centre, the old 1930s council houses where the very poor families lived, and the strange mock-Tudor pre-fabs with their flowery gardens from a pre-war Ideal Home Exhibition where the elderly couples lived, have all gone, replaced with a very nice low-rise housing development with pedestrianised street and little squares, and most importantly, there is now a bypass and the A41 is a relatively quiet street which has changed the atmosphere of the whole town. 

What have also gone are the in-between feral spaces, the undeveloped plots, the fallen trees and nettle-sown patches by the dirty river where we used to run and play, catch butterflies, befriend animals, get frightened and bullied, take some risks we didn't know about and some we did, and invent and imagine, these are all spoken for and tidied up and made good use of now. 

I'm not nostalgic.

*Mr S was the local child molester, but our parents couldn't quite bring themselves to tell us that was why his shed was so seriously off-limits, we thought it was just the creosote.

Cutmores

Needing something to get me back into blogging mode again, I thought I'd try doing a throwback Thursday, one of those alliterative tags people sometimes use as prompts, based on some article from bygone times. So I rummaged in the box of old photos and other sentimentalia and came up with this one, which I've always found quite interesting, and I'll set myself an hour after dinner to write something about it.

These are my maternal grandparents, Ellen and David Cutmore, with Dorren the dog. Unusually the photo has a date on it, 1950, perhaps in my mother's hand. Granny was the only grandparent I knew and can remember. Granddad died when I was a baby, I think, but we never met because my mother and her mother were in a period of estrangement at the time, sometimes known in the family as the Nine Years War. I've a vague idea what it was about, but it's not important. My father and my eldest brother, who were among the Blessed Peacemakers but not pushy about it, kept lines of communication open, so my birth and Granddad's death did not go unreported. Mostly the place of this episode in my awareness is as part of a body of evidence of the Cutmores' aptitude to fall out and have long feuds, silences and estrangements. This fact is a sad one of course, but it also reassures me somewhat, in a carrion comfort sort of way, that my own shortcomings as a daughter were perhaps neither peculiar to me nor entirely one-sided.

Something that strikes me is how old Granny looks here; she would have been only just over sixty, less than ten years older than I am now, much younger than many of my friends and family with whom I feel no difference of style or outlook. She died twenty years later at just over eighty, but here she looks exactly as I remember her at the end of her life.  Her look was always archetypal Old Lady, as you see her here - Lyle stockings, little hard shoes with buttons on, high-neck blouses, felted wool coats and jackets, hats of the kind I used to love to try on in British Home Stores. But I suppose it was a kind of echo of the style of her youth, before and around the First World War. I wonder if, in the eyes of children and young people, I am heading towards, or even trapped in, some similar atrophied recreation of how I dressed and styled myself when I was young? Probably. Yet one still occasionally sees old ladies who dress like Granny did, so they must adopt it as their age advances. 

 Yet Grandad is in a timeless, casual open-neck shirt; it looks quite a warm day, a picnic perhaps. 

They both came originally from East Anglia, from Norwich. Granddad's parents were bakers, they were well regarded small business folk, fair haired, solid. He was a racing cyclist, a very popular figure. Granny said, with a mixture of pride and jealousy, I think, that there were times when the whole stand of spectators around the race track resounded with the chant of 'Davey, Davey, Davey!'; there were cabinets full of silverware and other treasures he had won, some of which we still have. He earned the local fame of being the first cyclist to cycle up Gasworks Hill in Norwich without stopping, still no mean feat. Later he sold bicycles. He was a gregarious man, a man's man, clubbable: cycling clubs, angling clubs, the Freemasons, often a source of worry, bitterness, jealousy for Gran. My mum was, frankly, quite hard in her judgements, yet she rarely spoke harshly about her father, though she didn't idolise him either, and had her reasons to feel bitter and short changed too. On rare occasions when, as an adult, she was able to spend relaxed time alone with him, he was, she said, good company. For a man of his time and class, there was much of the bon vivant about him; outgoing, fond of company, enjoying the finding, catching, preparing and eating of fish and seafood: salmon fishing in Scotland, deep sea fishing off Brighton, prospecting for cockles in bare feet, my eldest sister a toddler on his shoulders, on some sandy stretch off the east coast. In a compliment to my fondness for unusual food and foraging, my mum once said he and I would have got on well. Though when I rather sentimentally expressed a wish to have known him, my sister looked a bit doubtful; he was, she said, rather grumpy and not very friendly towards his grandchildren, accusing them of peeing in inappropriate places when it was really the dog. In the photo he does look somewhat dour, with a set of the mouth that bespeaks perennial impatience, disappointment even, but then you can't always tell from photos.

Granny's background was perhaps rather less happy. She was born out of wedlock, though her parents married shortly after. Mum said she remembered her weeping when the law was changed, some time in the 1920s, to legitimise children whose parents married after their birth. Her father often resented her as being responsible for trapping him into a marriage he didn't wish for. Cruel, that. At these times her called her Rachel as an insult, because she looked quite Jewish. But when he lied about his age and enlisted to fight - and die - in the War, he visited her before he left. My mum was a baby, and he emptied his pocket of change and put it in her hand, which with a baby's reflex, curled round it. 'She'll be all right,' he said.

Ellen was quite a beautiful woman in her youth and liked to dress up; she looked not unlike my sister Alison. Somewhere I may have a photo of her in her heyday, if so I'll post it another time. 

The Jewish strain came from Dutch immigrants to East Anglia some time in the 19th century, no one was quite sure when. It was clear to see in my uncle Jack, the youngest of my mother's generation, who was presumably the one taking the photo.  He was able to procure good meals from Kosher eateries in times of rationing with no questions asked. I was watching Danny Finkelstein on telly today and thinking how much like Jack he is. The Viking traders and Saxon yeomen of my father's and grandfather's genes had altogether subsumed it, however, by the time of my generation. 

Dorren (I assume it was spelled that way, it rhymed with sporren) was a cairn terrier of lively temper but quite good repute. He starred in a photograph taken by uncle Jack which won a prize, called 'A Game of Patience', in which Granddad was playing the card game (solitaire, I think in American English) and Dorren is waiting at the end of the table with his lead in his mouth.

These stories are as I remember hearing them. They may not be the true ones.