Pentewan

Wasn't it Paul Simon who wrote: "I have a photograph inscribed with memories" ?

My father loved dabbling in photography. He taught me how to develop film and then how to print pictures. In his improvised dark room there was a red light and there were big brown bottles of chemicals. One was a "fixer".

He took posed pictures of old men from our village smoking pipes or drinking pints of beer and he left behind a photo of Pentewan in Cornwall taken in 1958. Lovely Pentewan where we went for long summery holidays from 1957 to 1963 or 4. We had a Lynton Triumph caravan. A heavy, ugly pre-war beast but all six of us slept in her.

They were magical days. The sun shone. Me and my brothers - we spent hours on that beach. To the very left of the picture there was a stream that meandered from the nearby china clay works at St Austell bearing slippery white kaolin. How delightful it was to paddle in that smooth white clay or make temporary dams. And we would swim or splash in those pleasant Cornish waves.

There was "Kelly's" wonderful honey-coloured ice cream to relish in crispy wafer cones and warm Cornish pasties from the village - fist-sized traditional pastry parcels filled with seasoned minced lamb and chopped potato and carrot. You couldn't buy exotic foodstuffs like these in faraway Yorkshire.

There were excursions to Land's End, The Lizard, Fowey and Truro but mostly we loved just frittering time away around the beach and the caravan site. As a four and five year old I was well-known for wandering off - just walking away and becoming totally lost. For those summers, they often made me wear a label round my neck with my name and holiday location on the reverse side. It was a hard plastic label with a chain and on the front side, the legend "Castrol" was printed in red-white on a dark green background. Of all my brothers why was it me who wandered away? I like to think of this as a clue to who I would become.

Pentewan last year

Echoes

Mum and Dad circa 1946

Photo upon photo and a decision to be made about every one. If the great PhotoGod were to look down upon me I would have to say "Guilty!" for throwing away so many memories captured on little rectangles of photographic paper. In World War II, my father got to visit Egypt, Palestine, Ceylon, Kashmir, Sudan, South Africa, the Persian Gulf, the Himalayas including Nepal as well as many remote parts of southern India. It was a mind-expanding adventure courtesy of the Royal Air Force. Unfortunately, most of the snaps he took are tiny and in fading black and white. If only he'd had a modern digital camera!

I discovered that before the war he'd travelled with a friend to Germany - including Koblenz and Cologne. It was most likely 1936. Two recently qualified teachers from St John's College in York in their sharp suits smoking manly pipes and blissfully unaware that all too soon all hell would break loose. There'd be jackboots on those very cobbles and man's noblest qualities would become as emaciated as the rib cages of little children in Nazi death camps. Nearly all photos from that pre-war trip are now in our blue wheelie bin.

Dad and friend in Cologne, Germany 1936

And of mum, the photos reminded me that in the early nineteen thirties she enjoyed being a member of the Parkgate Dance School between smoky Rotherham and the mining village of Rawmarsh where she grew up. Some light and fantasy amid the everyday grimness. There were many pictures of assembled casts in various peculiar costumes. Perhaps it was good practice for 1943 when she would become the drum majorette of the Women's Air Force band in New Delhi. And some of these pictures now reside in the blue bin.

Mum - Parkgate Dance School 1932

You can't hang on to everything but for every five I throw away I seem to be saving one. I wonder if I'm being ruthless enough. After all when they are bagged up, the saved photos will probably just sit in drawers or attics, unstudied and half-forgotten.

Past

You may remember that at the weekend I came home from my mother's house with lots of photos. In fact hundreds if not thousands of them in three suitcases and a couple of boxes. Today I pretty much sorted through just one of the suitcases - ruthlessly ditching a couple of armfuls but still left with over a hundred individual photographs that are now arranged in family distribution piles on our dining room table.

The discarding process was sad but necessary. Photos of mum's holidays in various places - Jamaica, Malta, Turkey, Canada, Majorca - holiday friends, harbour scenes, apartment blocks, swimming pools, belly dancers. She was very evidently amateurish behind the camera. Photos of village events at the school, the sports club, the Women's Institute. Photos of various people I didn't know - weddings, babies, banquets. All gone - now jumbled in a big blue "Sakis" menswear bag ready for the recycling bin.

Amongst all these photos - the snapped evidence of a lifetime ceased - there were occasional pictures of my brilliant father, Philip, who was heart attacked to death in September 1979 though it really does seem like yesterday. In my early twenties he was my best friend - I am sure he saw the image of himself in me - and I still miss him. I feel quite sad that he wasn't at our wedding and never got to meet the grandchildren Shirley and I produced too late for him to know.

But those three paragraphs above are all just preamble. The main purpose of this post is simply to share with you two photographs I found in the first suitcase. They were taken on October 24th 1981 - our wedding day. Location - St Martin's Parish Church in Owston Ferry, Lincolnshire. In the first photo, moving from left to right there's Simon, my younger brother and best man, my Nana - Phyllis Morris who died in 1988, Mum, me and Shirley, Shirley's mum Winnie who passed away in 2008, Shirley's grandma Minnie Anderson and also my father-in-law Charlie who succumbed to cancer in 2000 and finally Carolyn, Shirley's sister and maid of honour.

Taken a few minutes later, there's me and Shirley with my three bearded brothers. To the right there's Paul of the Irish fiddle in County Clare and Robin of the motorbikes and French gites - way down south near the Pyrenees. Time marches on. How shall we meet tomorrow?

Lurking

Well, I've been lurking around in Ecclesall Woods again on a lovely hot Monday afternoon with sunshine piercing the canopy to dapple glades of bluebells and rare grasses with vivacious light. There are 350 acres of ancient woodland and in past centuries the woods accommodated several rural industries - including charcoal burning.

Another name for a charcoal burner was "wood collier" and one of these fellows accidentally burnt to death in his hut back in 1786. He was called George Yardley and his isolated grave was paid for by a group of his friends - one of whom was the landlord of the nearby "Rising Sun" where Yardley liked to quench his thirst after hard days of physical labour.

This is the full inscription on the gravestone:-

In Memory

of GEORGE YARDLEY

Wood Collier who was Burnt

to death in his Cabbin on

This place Oct 11th 1786

William Brooke Salesman

David Glofsop Gamekeeper

Thos Smith Beesomemaker

Samps Brooksham Innkeeper"

I plan to lurk more often in those wonderful woods but the schoolchildren I saw returning home along a woodland path round about four o'clock had better watch out as evidence of their previous saunterings is visible in the form of numerous pieces of litter - not seen anywhere else in that sylvan oasis. I may chase them with a "beesom" or broom made from ash or hazel wands and thereby become The Lurking Litter Avenger of Ecclesall Woods!

.

Weekends

What a sweltering early summer's day it is here in Sheffield. I've been topless all day, my pecs and biceps glinting in glorious May sunshine as I dig up misplaced daffodils, replant them, sweep the block paving at the front and wash our window frames. No doubt Lady Pudding will have other jobs for me to do before sundown.

Yesterday we motored over to the East Riding to pick over the detritus of my mother's life. My younger brother has resided in her house since she died but it will soon be up for sale.

Here's a photograph I took along the way on Beverley Westwood - the large open common land south west of the town of Beverley where I went to school many moons ago. Between the trees you can see The Black Mill and to the right, just peeping over the horizon - the grandstand of Beverley racecourse:-

And here's a photograph I took last weekend while wandering with Shirley through the nearby ancient woodland known as Ecclesall Woods - a mile from our house.

There were so many bluebells around. They were a joy to see... But wait a minute, the bell is ringing. Coming dearest! Pardon?... Must hurry, her ladyship wants her toenails clipping. See you!

Monument

Standing on a lofty ridge known as Park Hill, the rocket-like shape of Sheffield's Cholera Monument overlooks the city centre. It was erected in 1835 in memory of the 403 citizens who succumbed to that deadly water-born contagion in the summer of 1832. The monument's location was not chosen randomly for it was in the surrounding land known as Clay Wood that the majority of the unfortunate victims were buried.

Back in the eighteen thirties, nobody fully understood where cholera came from. It was even known as Asiatic Cholera and official pronouncements suggested that it was a disease of the lazy and morally corrupt. In Sheffield, that particular idea was challenged when the city's Master Cutler died just before he could complete his honorary year in office.

Cholera swept through many large European cities in the early eighteen thirties causing widescale fatalities wherever it struck. It even reached America.

In 1801, Sheffield's population was just over 30,000. By 1831 it had risen to just under 100,000 - an amazing threefold increase in thirty years. Rural people had gathered their drinking water from the sky, brought it from flowing streams or had drawn it from ancient wells. In developing urban areas with tightly packed housing, old rural water-gathering habits didn't fit. Hence, sanitation problems grew.

One good thing that emerged from the cholera epidemic was the formation of "boards of health" that had the remit to respond to the health needs of the general population. This certainly happened in Sheffield where a leading citizen and moneyed gentleman, James Montgomery, was influential. It was he who laid the cholera monument's foundation stone and oversaw its completion. He wrote poems and hymns about the epidemic, though he was not the only one. A contemporary, Mary Hutton, wrote these lines in her poem "On the Cholera Pestilence":-

How vacant now each sorrowing home

How dark is the distress!

For a darkening cloud of sable gloom

Has veiled our happiness.

Sheffield's Cholera Monument is illuminated at night. It sits high above the railway station and marks a time of fear, death and sorrow. It's as if every major town in Britain between 1831 and 1833 suffered the equivalent of a jumbo jet crash with no survivors. Nowadays, most people looking up to Park Hill would have absolutely no idea why Victorian Sheffielders thought it necessary to construct, at great expense, such an edifice. Nonetheless, I write this in memory of the city's four hundred and three cholera victims.

Potatoes

Hurrah! Our potatoes are coming through at long last. It was on April 12th when I planted twenty four seed potatoes of the Pentland Javelin variety - at the top of the garden in the vegetable plot that we have partially resurrected after several years of lying fallow. I'm talking about the land not the owners!

The seed potatoes were bought in mid-February and I had them "chitting" in a tray near the french doors. My little babies - pushing out stubby little shoots. Now those same shoots have grown, forcing their way through weather-baked clods of clayey soil to reach for the sun. All being well in a couple of weeks I will be earthing up these potato plants, making domed ridges in which new potatoes can form.

It's been really dry in Sheffield for the last couple of months - hardly any significant rain showers. Now that the plants are poking through, I think I will have to give them a good drink. The weather forecast for the rest of this week is super with temperatures rising to 25 degrees centigrade and more importantly for plants - mild night-times. About ten days ago the temperature dropped below freezing on three consecutive nights killing off my beautiful little courgette plants so I immediately had to sow a few more in indoor pots. I've also got broad beans on the go and plan to sow some dwarf beans in the next few days.

We planted ten raspberry canes and the five Glen Amples have budded and leafed nicely but the five Mallings are more moody. Two of these canes look as if they prefer death to life.

Speaking of death, I'm going to a funeral tomorrow. Alison. I reckon she was fifty nine. I met her through work in 1980 and though I never really "clicked" with her as true friends do, we frequently bumped into each other and politely passed the time of day. She was intelligent, a socialist, a teacher, a mother and a feminist with spirit and a zest for life.The last time I saw her was at the morning cinema screening of "A Prophet" back in February. What took her? It was a second appearance of skin cancer that this time invaded her brain. She died in our local hospice ten days ago. Mourners are asked to wear something red at the funeral but I don't think my plastic clown's nose on elastic would do. Perhaps a tie instead. Yes. A red tie to say goodbye.