Frankly

I met a boy called Frank Mills

On September twelfth right here

In front of the Waverly

But unfortunately, I lost his address.

He was last seen with his friend, a drummer

He resembles George Harrison of The Beatles

But he wears his hair tied in a small bow at the back

I love him but it embarrasses me

To walk down the street with him

He lives in Brooklyn somewhere

And he wears his white crash helmet

He has golden chains on his leather jacket

And on the back are written the names

"Mary" and "Mom" and "Hell's Angels"

I would gratefully appreciate if you see him tell him

I'm in the park with my girlfriend and please

Tell him Angela and I don't want the two dollars back, just him.

⦿

Do you know the song? Until this very morning, I had no idea that if features in the musical "Hair" which I have never seen. "Frank Mills" has been recorded by various artists over the years including Barbra Streisand, Sandie Shaw and The Lemonheads but it was this version that arrested me  at the end of the sixties - by the Dutch singer  Raina Gerardina Bojoura van Melzen or Bojoura for short. Later she would marry Hans Cleuver, drummer in the Dutch band Focus.

The song has an unusual kind of intimacy, with small but affectionate details. The standpoint of the singer is one of starry-eyed innocence. Who was this guy - Frank Mills who went off with the two dollars he had presumably cadged off her and her friend Angela? Was he a real Hell's Angel or just a rebellious kid? By the way, today "The Waverly Inn" is a high end Manhattan restaurant.

The song's music was written by Galt MacDermot with lyrics by Gerome Ragni and James Rado. It has been here in my head since 1969. I never did flush it out and finally it has secured its place within this humble Yorkshire blog. Dear Bojoura, if I do cross paths with Frank Mills, I will indeed tell him that you do not want the two dollars back, just him.

Jobs

Tasker Dunham over at "A Yorkshire Memoir" has just been merrily blogging away about part time jobs that people did when still in full-time education.

Living in a village situated in the middle of productive farmland, there was always money to be made at harvest-time. I mostly recall potato picking and also pea picking. Even for a ten or eleven year old boy, such work was back-breaking. You really knew about it when you had spent six or seven hours stooping in a field and in addition the filled wire baskets were a struggle to lug back to the trailer.

I had an evening paper round between  the ages of twelve and fourteen. There were around forty copies of "The Hull Daily Mail" to be delivered every night. In those days almost every other house in the village subscribed to that paper. My friend, Paul Budd, delivered weekly and monthly magazines. I recall that a man who lived in a  bungalow on the edge of the village subscribed to "Playboy" but for several months he never got it on time. I am sure you can guess why. 

I must have been fifteen when I began working at the turkey farm near Brandesburton. It involved weekends and some holiday work. It wasn't a proper "farm" as portrayed in children's story books, it was more of a concentration camp. There were several sheds populated by thousands of gobbling white turkeys at different stages of development. The job was mostly about feeding and watering them and ensuring that the shed floors were reasonably clean. Fresh wood shavings had to be manually scattered  every two or three days. As they grew older the turkeys became noisier - quarreling over food and the imminent approach of workers like me.

When I was sixteen, after I had finished my O level exams, I got a job at a caravan camp just south of Scarborough. It was called The Crow's Nest - formerly just a farm - and it was run by the Palmer family who, I believe, still run it today. I was provided with a small caravan to lodge in and I had various duties to perform - mostly related to the farming side of the business. There were eggs to collect from the battery sheds where in three tiers, hens shared hundreds of cages from which wires ran into troughs out of  which you collected the eggs  twice a day. There were also wax milk cartons to fill and seal in the dairy every afternoon.

During the Christmas holiday of 1970-71,  I was the stand-in caretaker at the village school. The regular caretaker, Maurice, was hospitalised I believe. I had to clean every floor in the school - mostly using a heavy floor-cleaning machine that scrubbed and then buffed the floors. It was difficult and tiresome work but financially beneficial so I didn't mind too much.

From sixteen to eighteen I was the lead singer of a semi-professional rock and roll band and though I did it for the love of it, we occasionally received pay packets. I guess that in the time I was with them we played fifty or sixty paid gigs. We called ourselves Village and I still have the pewter tankard that the band's manager presented to me  a month or so before I left them to follow a different dream - teaching in The Fiji Islands under the auspices of Voluntary Service Overseas.

I could go on to write about work I  undertook during the time I was a university student (1973-77) but I think I will leave that for another time.

Poem

Forever In Our Hearts

It is said that from the roof
You could see to Windsor.

It is further said that eighteen 

Of the victims were children -

Killed by incompetence

And greed and passing the buck

Just to improve the structure's look.

Oh sing me a song of Grenfell Tower

And  flames that roared in that witching hour

A song of seventy two goodbyes,

Tears, excuses and heinous lies.

We hear the anguish of their cries

Forever in our hearts.

⦿

In memory of the seventy two residents of Grenfell Tower, West London 

who lost their lives in the early hours of June 14th, 2017. Seven years after

the terrible event, the official inquiry report has just come out. Of course you 

can never get the deceased back but you can give them the posthumous

justice they deserve. Now the families must wait yet more years for

that to happen. The story is not yet over. Not by a long way.

Travellers

Something unusual happened on yesterday's walk as Tony and I plodded across Carr Bridge Playing Fields. We had already spotted a small group of caravans (American: trailers), some with associated cars and we had both speculated that they might belong to travellers or gypsies. They were parked up near the shuttered pavilion.

One of the caravans caught my eye and I photographed it from fifty yards away with a mature weeping willow tree and terraced houses behind it. There were no people in the shot and besides taking that picture was entirely legal. Ironically, the travellers' encampment on a public  recreation ground was wholly illegal.

Just then I heard a voice from the children's playground and a woman started to walk towards me. I guessed she was protesting about me taking the photograph.

Turns out she was not a woman after all but a teenage girl of around fifteen and she approached with an assorted gang of small children mostly aged between four and ten.

The girl challenged me about my camera work and rather than getting on my high horse and putting her in her place, I decided to play it cool. After all, there might well have been gypsy parents in the caravans and before you knew it I could have been in the middle of an unsavoury scene.

Our voices were not raised and I had no problem with deleting the picture I had just taken.  All the children had unwashed, freckled faces. The smaller kids touched my pockets and appeared very interested in my watch. The lead girl was wearing shorts and a "Barbie" T-shirt with the name "Barbie" repeated in red and white.

After the situation had been diffused, I had a ten minute conversation with Rose and her twelve year old sidekick - Anna. The small urchin-like children had drifted back to the playground area. Both girls spoke in  Irish accents though it is very possible that they have never set foot on the island of Ireland.

ROSE: We've got lots of enemies you know. We have to be careful.
ME: Oh I know that. It's a bit like black and Asian people. They meet lots of prejudice.
ROSE: We get blamed for everything. Any time something is stolen, travellers get the blame.
ANNA: It's not fair.
ME: I understand where you are coming from. Being a member of the travelling community cannot be easy.
ROSE: You are right there. We have got lots of enemies.

Travellers refer to those who dwell in settled host communities as "gorjas"  or "gorgers" for we are not a part of Romany culture. Over centuries there has been regular tension and sometimes conflict between gorjas and travellers.

When I was a boy, I remember a gypsy troop travelling through our village twice a year with horse-pulled wooden caravans. Nowadays, the descendants of those traditional picture book gypsies have modern caravans and nice vehicles to pull them. Superficially, things may have changed but fundamentally travelling communities stay the same.

I would guess that Rose and Anna have rarely if ever had a pleasant conversation with a gorja man. After all, they are probably told from an early age that you should never trust a gorja...

ANNA: Are you famous?
ME: (laughing) No. I am not famous. Are you famous?
ANNA: I'll never be famous.
ME: But I see that you are famous. You have got your name all over your T-shirt. Barbie!
ROSE: I'm not Barbie! My name is Rose.
ME: But it says Barbie! Where's Ken? 
ROSE: (laughing) I'm still waiting for Ken to come along.
ME: And you must be Chelsea! Isn't she Barbie's best friend?
ANNA: No. She's her sister. My name is Anna.

And that's how the meeting continued. A possible confrontation had turned to pleasant banter in the middle of a sports field. I shook hands with both of the girls and Rose apologised for challenging me about the photograph.

I said, "No don't apologise Rose! You challenged me in a polite manner and I think you were quite brave to do that. You didn't shout or swear and I appreciate that. You are a good person, a nice person and I wish you all the very best. I can understand where you were coming from with your challenge. There are some right weirdos around. You have to be careful."

Irish Travellers  ©Joseph-Philippe Bevillard

Miami?

Does it say "Miami"? I think it does. It is the name of a house in the village of East Hardwick, West Yorkshire. I imagine that long ago the couple who reside at No.43 enjoyed a holiday in Miami. It was so good that they borrowed the Floridian city's name for their abode.

Tony and I met up as arranged at ten thirty this morning in the village of High Ackworth, two miles west of East Hardwick. We parked close to the village church which is named after St Cuthbert. Above the door there is a weathered statue of St Cuthbert whose mortal remains, according to folklore, rested in the church one night long ago following the Danish and Viking  invasions that came after the Roman occupation of Britain.

Here is that weathered statue of St Cuthbert, venerated abbot of the monastery on Lindisfarne whose final resting place is inside the magnificent Norman  cathedral at Durham. In my opinion he, not St George, should be Britain's patron saint...

Anyway, Tony and I were mainly in that district to undertake a ten mile country walk. South of East Hardwick we stopped to pick these juicy brambles. They were sweet and - to use one of Mary Moon's words - succulent...

Just ahead, trumpeting bindweed or convolvulus arvensis sang from overgrown verges beneath hawthorn hedgerows to mark the imminent end of summer...

At Low Farm, south of Low Ackworth, this young cow did not low or even moo. Her name is Taylor Swift or did I just make that up? Perhaps.

Also at Low Ackworth, as we were crossing the recreation ground we spotted this intetesting ivy-clothed house peeping over the boundary hedge. I don't know what it's called - maybe Scarborough or Lanzarote.

Squeezed  between the houses at Ackworth Moor Top, I spotted this tiny Chinese takeaway - "The Lotus Garden". It occupied a very unlikely position...

After the walk, Tony and I enjoyed  refreshing drinks in "The Brown Cow" before heading back to our respective homes. Having been rather unwell this past month, it was by far the longest circuit I have undertaken in weeks. 

Understandably, I was drained of energy when I walked into our house and after our evening meal of moussaka and salad, I slept on the sofa for almost an hour. I might call our house Miami too. That will impress the postman.

Transom

Above our front door and not at all unusually is a beam known as a transom. In fact it is part of the door frame. Above that beam is a small sealed window that through history has become known as a fanlight, transom window or simply a transom like the beam below it.

A few years ago, we had a new door fitted and at the time we decided that the glass of our transom should have the house number in it - created via computer assisted sand blasting. This left the number itself defined in clear glass while the surrounding glass  remains evenly opaque.

Such numbers have become quite common in Great Britain in recent years, helping drive-by delivery personnel to better locate houses as they do their rounds. I think it is also a nice design touch and not all that expensive to achieve.

When the window was installed I had no idea that I might be endlessly fascinated by the sunlit image of our house number finding slightly different positions each sunny morning and throughout the year. Of course on cloudy mornings it does not appear.

Sometimes the number curls over steps on our carpeted staircase . Sometimes it's in the kitchen and sometimes, as in the image above, it is sliding over the panelling in our hallway. I have also seen it in bright moonlight.

It's like our very own slow-moving light show. I snapped the image at the top just last week. A little bit of magic that one could so easily overlook.

Dolly

Dolly Parton is a megastar. We all know the story of her very humble beginnings in a one room cabin in the mountains of Tennessee. With her singing voice and her engaging personality, she forged  a successful career for herself in the entertainment industry. 

She could have spent her millions entirely on herself and immediate family but that is not who Dolly is. She remembers where she came from and  has a strong urge to help others. Back in 2020 she made a personal donation of $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center to support the development of the Moderna vaccine in the battle against COVID 19.

But what mostly impresses me about Dolly Parton is the mission she took upon herself in the 1980s to do something very positive to tackle illiteracy. Her Imagination Library organisation has  given out well over 200 million free books to thousands of targeted children - not just in The United States but in several other countries too. Sheffield's neighbouring steel town - Rotherham continues to be one of the recipient communities.

Dolly could never have children of her own owing to her endometriosis and the partial hysterectomy she had at the age of thirty six but she has tried to ensure that many other people's children get off to a good start in life. She recognises the vital significance of reading and writing and how being literate can so often be the key to a fulfilling and happy life.

Over decades, The Imagination Library has worked its magic across the state of Kentucky and last week Dolly Parton received that state's highest public service  award. She became a Kentucky Colonel and that made me smile. God bless Dolly!