Anecdote – Hat and the E-type Jag

Posted on October 9, 2019 by Opher

Anecdote – Hat and the E-type Jag

Hat and the E-type Jag

When I was seventeen I lived at home. We had a bungalow and my bedroom was at the side. I was doing my A-levels, not that you’d know it, and life was quite wild. There was music, gigs, parties and friends. The sixties was in full swing. I had my motorbike and was as free as the wind through my long hair.

Hat was a good friend. His Dad owned a factory and had insisted he left school and worked in it to learn from the bottom up. That was not amusing Hat who found it all excruciatingly boring. They were quite wealthy, wealthy enough for his Mum to have an E-type Jag that she let Hat borrow.

Every now and then I’d be asleep and there’d be a knock on my window. It’d be Hat. He’d borrowed the car and fancied a drive. I’d climb out the window and we’d head off into the night.

Sometimes we’d just drive around.

‘Where to?’

‘It’s always straight on!’

It became a catch-phrase. It would always take us somewhere though it wasn’t as good at getting us back.

Hat’s favourite destination was Brighton. We’d hurtle down the sixty miles to the sea-side, run up and down the pebbled beach like maniacs and then get back in the car and drive off.

It was pointless. That’s what made it so attractive.

For some strange reason the police would take an interest in our exploits. Two young men driving around in a flash E-type Jag in the middle of the night seemed perfectly normal to us but they thought we were up to no good. They seemed to think we’d stolen the car. Unreasonable eh?

Hat did not make it better and there were a couple of times when we ended up being taken in to the police station for questioning.

‘Is this your car, sir?’

‘No.’

‘Do you mind telling me what colour it is?’

Hat, peering out of the open window at the bodywork. ‘It’s hard to tell in these yellow street lights.’

‘Do you know what the registration number is?’

‘Haven’t a clue.’

Hat’s long-suffering Mum would get a call in the middle of the night and have to smooth things out with the disgruntled constabulary. Hat loved winding them up.

On the way home we’d always pop into Heathrow Airport. It was the only place open at that hour back then. We’d run up the long escalator marked ‘Down’ and get ourselves a coffee.

Hat would drop me off. I’d climb back in, get an hour’s kip and be into school the next day.

Anecdote – 1964 – Hitch-hiking round France for the Summer

Posted on October 7, 2019 by Opher

Anecdote – 1964 – Hitch-hiking round France for the Summer

I was fifteen in 1964 and had decided that I would head off for the continent with my older friend Foss. He was sixteen and about to leave school. Hence he was wise, mature and trustworthy. He would look after me.

We had it all planned out. We would catch the ferry to Calais and then hitch. It was fool-proof.

We worked evenings delivering advertising leaflets and somehow got enough money together to last us six weeks. We took ruck-sacks, a tent (with no front) and sleeping bags.

I’m not sure what was in the ruck-sack, I can’t remember taking much in the way of clothes, but I do know that I had the Stones first album and the newly released single ‘It’s All Over Now’ dangling from the back in a bag. I lugged those records all round France – well at least the little bit we trudged round.

It was a bit of an adventure.

The first thing we discovered was that we did more hiking than hitching. Probably due to our huge ruck-sacks, but possibly because of our long-hair, the drivers seemed reluctant to stop.

We ended up setting our tent up with the rats in the back garden of the Youth Hostel.

The French youth seemed in awe of us. Our long-hair caused a bit of a sensation. They would step out into the road to let us by and shout ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah’ after us. We got friendly with them all and they taught us a full range of swear-words in French. Sadly I’ve long since forgotten them.

A very large German guy called Hans was staying in the hostel. He adored the Rolling Stones and used to give us a great big bear-hug and demand that we play it at full volume. There were two timid Austrian girls who would invariably be clustered round the small portable record player listening intently to classical music. Hans, this giant of a lad, would go across with a jovial grin, thump the table with his ham of a fist, causing the needle to skid across, and say ‘Rolling Stones’.

The girls would scurry away and he’d play the whole album at full volume, nodding his head in time to the music and grinning.

That was a great summer. I became an expert at table football, discovered yoghourt, wine and that there were hundreds of different types of cheeses and bread. In post-war Britain we were living in the shadow of rationing and a paucity of food. The British had become extremely conservative. Cheese was cheddar and bread was white bloomers or sliced fluffy stuff. If you wanted something exotic you had a Hovis.

I was wide-eyed walking round the market. There was a whole stall of bread, black bread, brown, with rye and whole-grain. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Then the cheeses; it was the first time I’d ever seen cheese with holes in, great round cheeses sliced open, goats cheese, sheep’s cheese, green cheese and blue-veined. It opened up whole new horizons. The expansion of my palate was augmented by two Slavic girls who took a shine to me. They would cook up these delicious meals and force them on me. They seemed to think I needed fattening up. I’d never eaten so well. The variety, spices and flavours were heavenly.

Shopping was an experience. I rapidly discovered that the French could not understand French; at least not the way I spoke it. I was reduced, after a painful series of pronunciations that were getting more and more like Peter Sellers, to having to point. But the shop-keepers had a sense of humour. On one occasion I wanted a single onion for my spaghetti. The greengrocer only sold them by the kilo and they were ridiculously cheap – something like 10 centimes a kilo. I tried to negotiate the price of a single onion which he found extremely amusing. From that day on, every time I went past the shop he would rush out and give me an onion with great delight. In other places the humour was not quite so benign. I bought, having developed quite a taste for this novel discovery, fifteen cartons of different flavours of yoghourt. But I had not taken a bag. The shopkeeper was very unhelpful and I could not get him to sell me a bag. He was determined to see how I would manage to carry those fifteen cartons. I was equally stubborn and decided to show him that I could. Somehow I got back only having dropped three.

A circus came to the market square. There were jugglers, tumblers, horse-riders, clowns and a strong man who lifted up weights with these great wicked daggers into his arm-pits so that if he bent his arms he would impale himself.

The summer was long and hot. We drank wine, ate bread and cheese and hung out with a range of nationalities.

I was fifteen and I discovered that people were people where-ever they were from, and we could get along famously. I also discovered that there was a world of difference and difference was good. The whole feel of the place was a world away. Oh – and foreign girls were terrific and they liked little English lads with long hair.

That summer shaped my life.

Anecdote – The Colonel and the National Front

Posted on October 6, 2019 by Opher

Anecdote – The Colonel and the National Front

This is Pete and I back in those halcyon days.

The Colonel & the National Front

Back in 1970 Pete and I returned to college for our second year. Somehow, despite the hundreds of concerts and other essential interactions we had managed to pass the exams (with a retake or two for me). With our usual meticulous planning and panache we turned up on the first day expecting everything to fall into place. It went as could have been predicted. We couldn’t find a room to rent and were on the streets. After a night in a phone box we headed off to the Students Union to seek help. They kindly directed us to a squat on Ilford High Street. It was an empty shop. We were instructed to do a secret knock on the door and ask for ‘The Colonel’.

We found the place and performed his intricate knock that made me feel like one of the Goons in that sketch where they had to do a thousand knocks on the door.

We must have got the intricate pattern right.

After a while there was shuffling the other side and a voice, in a strong Scottish brogue, asked suspiciously who it was. We explained who we were, who had sent us and that we were to ask for ‘The Colonel’.

We stood in the road as a great deal of clanking and shifting took place the other side of the door. It opened a slot and a rheumy eye looked us up and down. Seemingly content the door then opened to reveal a man with grey hair, a clipped moustache and big eyebrows. He was wearing a kilt. He ushered us in quickly and we passed through the door into a dim stairwell. The cause of the clanking was immediately obvious. Above the door was suspended a huge body of metallic junk with everything from bike frames to parts of prams. It must have weighed a ton. Anyone forcing their way in would have had the whole lot descending on their head. The Colonel was prepared for bother. He wasn’t a Colonel for nothing.

Welcome to the squat.

The squat was the Colonel’s home but he kindly operated as a temporary residence for the dispossessed. There were quite a lot of them around in the East End of London. Rachman was still in operation frightening people out of their homes and taking over the places to charge extortionate rents and pack in immigrants. He was making a fortune out of the misery of others.

The squat had a number of rooms. The Colonel had the front room. He was a Colonel from a Highland regiment and received his pension weekly. It was soon apparent as to why he was living in a squat. In one of the other rooms there was a young couple with a three month old baby. They looked terrified and tearful. It later transpired that they had been targeted by Rachman. They had been renting a room in a house that the Landlord wanted. They been told to go but as they did not have anywhere to go to had ignored the warnings. One morning a bunch of goons arrived while the young man was out looking for a job. They had broken in, smashed up all their possessions, including the baby’s cot, and thrown everything out the window into the garden. They’d escorted mother and baby out to the street and then proceeded to smash the stairs with a sledge-hammer so nobody could get back up.

No wonder the family were terrified. They’d rescued what they could of baby clothes and possessions and ended up at The Colonel’s.

Pete and I were shown into a bare room with filthy floorboards. I put my new cream-coloured ankle-length sheepskin coat on the floor as cushioning (I never got it clean again) and unrolled my sleeping bag on top of it. Pete unrolled his on the bare boards. We were home.

We all gathered in the Colonels big room that overlooked Ilford High Street, talked and watched the shoppers from on high. On Friday the Colonel received his pension and proceeded to blow it on scotch whiskey which he drank from an old chipped white enamel mug with a blue rim. The more he consumed the merrier he got and then would serenade us with song. He had an amazing ability to add ‘Ne’ to the end of every word.

One song stands out:

‘Wunderbarne’

‘Meinne Pretyne Wunderbarne’.

It was quite a feat and we were all struck dumb with admiration, or at least we were struck dumb.

One Saturday morning we were subjected to a protest by the National Front against squatters. I bet Rachman was behind it. A huge threatening mob of Nazi’s appeared in the High Street, chanting, making Hitler salutes, pointing up at us and making threats. Between this menacing mob, who were busy working themselves up into a frenzy, and us was a thin line of police. It was getting extremely violent and explosive as the mob grew to a hundred or so and the fury mounted. It began to look as if the handful of police were going to be swamped and we were going to end up as mincemeat. In hindsight this probably wasn’t helped by Pete and I sitting in the window with our feet on the shop front that jutted out below us, waving to and mocking the obnoxious fascist skinheads who did not seem at all pacified by a couple of long-haired freaks grinning down at them. Peace and love were not in their repertoire. They were baying for blood.

The furore eventually abated and somehow the police managed to keep them from storming the place.

We were only there for three weeks before finding a room but it was an experience.

The week following our departure the Colonel was arrested for indecent exposure.

One Saturday morning he had been partaking of his Scottish elixir of life and decided it was a good idea to demonstrate his vocal skills to the Saturday morning shoppers. He’d clambered out of the window on to the shop front, mug in hand, and proceeded to serenade the shoppers below with renditions all most likely based around the magic syllable ‘ne’.

The shoppers were not as enthralled as we had been. One of the ‘disgusted’ ladies had reported the event to the police. By standing on the front of the shop the Colonel had clearly revealed to all and sundry exactly what Scotsmen wear under their kilts. At least one of them thought it wasn’t a pretty sight. The inflamed ladies of Ilford achieved what the National Front could not and the squat was shut down.

The Sixties – My favourite films from back then.

Posted on October 5, 2019 by Opher

The Sixties – My favourite films from back then.

The sixties was one of those immensely creative and different periods. It felt to me like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. We had the war and then the austere fifties where Britain was still full of rationing and catching it’s breath. Then we had the colour and liberalisation of the sixties – full of vim and vigour, where anything was possible.

The music scene was the most obvious expression of those times but then there were the fashions, comedy/satire, politics, newspapers and film.

My favourite films included:

2001 – A Space Odyssey. Arthur C Clarke/Stanley Kubrick masterpiece. I do not think it has been bettered as a Sci-fi film.

A Lion in Winter – incredible Historical drama.

Easy Rider – Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper masterpiece of motorbikes, drug deals and the schism created by the counter-culture.

Blow-up – a romp with a photographer, dolly birds and a murder.

Romeo & Juliette – Olivia Hussey – She could break your heart.

Solaris – The Russian 2001.

Far from the madding crowd – Thomas Hardy meets Julie Christie

A Clockwork Orange – Stanley Kubrick masterpiece of an Anthony Burgess book – Banned for a long time because of the copy-cat gangs. A futuristic drama with philosophical shades. A Malcolm McDowell special.

Women in Love – D H Lawrence’s genius coupled with Alan Bates, Glenda Jackson, Jennie Linden and Oliver Reed.

Alice’s Restaurant – featuring a very young Arlo Guthrie and based on his epic song.

The Knack – came out early and had a big effect on me. I painted everything in my bedroom white!

If – a story of public school and youth rebellion with Malcolm McDowell again.

Get Carter – The epitome of Michael Caine Northern Gangster movie.

There were a lot more but that will do for now. They seemed to catch a bit of the rich tapestry of the sixties.

Anecdote – The Spider.

Posted on September 19, 2019 by Opher

Anecdote – The Spider.

It is Autumn. This is the time that the huge spiders come in. I just had to remove one that was so large I thought it was an octopus!

The Spider

I am an entomologist. I don’t mind stick insects. I love butterflies, beetles and grasshoppers but when it comes to crane flies I am hopeless. They are flying spiders.

Spiders terrify me. I’m an arachnophobe.

We were seven years old and out playing in the street with some of the older boys. There were hardly any cars around on our estate. It was pretty safe.

My friend Jeff was the same age as me. We were both little and wiry and used to spend a lot of time together playing. We swapped comics, played on our bikes, tennis and cricket. We spent most of our life outside.

It was summer and we were having a hot spell. Jeff and I were dressed alike in shorts with short-sleeved shirts.

One of the older boys had made a find round at our friend’s Martin’s house. There was a path at the side of the house and someone had left a bucket there. It was one of those white enamel buckets with the dark blue rim. There was a spider in it. It was unusual because of its size.

The spider was a classic house spider but it was huge. Nobody had seen one that big. It looked like a tarantula. Its long hairy legs actually spanned the whole bottom of the pail.

Of course we all had to go and peer in at it. It sent shivers through me. I’d never seen anything quite like it.

Equally inevitably what happened next was as predictable as day follows night. One of the big boys grabbed hold of the spider and began chasing us around with it.

We ran off terrified as he bellowed with laughter and pelted after us. There were kids scattering in all direction.

He caught Jeff.

Jeff was in the middle of the road when he was caught. We saw the boy thrust the huge spider down Jeff’s shirt.

It was like one of those frozen moments of horror.

Jeff stood like a statue with his arms out either side and screamed. He screamed and screamed and screamed.

We were all shocked. Even the boy who had done it was shocked. We all stood and watched from a distance as Jeff screamed.

Doors flew open and neighbours rushed out. They thought there had been an accident.

There had.

Jeff was shrieking and had wet himself.

The neighbours asked us what was up but nobody would dare speak. We were transfixed. We could all imagine that huge spider scurrying around under his shirt, running over his bare skin. Its legs and hairs on his flesh. We were watching for signs of it. We were watching his shirt.

Our eyes were on stalks. Our breath was held firm. We were waiting.

Eventually one of the neighbours got the story out of someone. They undressed Jeff right there in the middle of the road. It was a pale concrete road. They unbuttoned his shirt and took it off. It was hard because he was rigid and still shrieking. They took off his shorts and pants.

We waited in anticipation on the edge of a scream.

No spider appeared.

There was no way for that spider to have run off. We would have seen it. Our eyes were all firmly fixed on him. We’d seen it go down the back of his shirt. It was too big to miss. Nothing had come out yet the spider had disappeared into thin air.

They took Jeff off to his Mum’s. They had to carry him. He was still gibbering and rigid. A doctor had to be called and a sedative applied.

We all stood where we were and stared at that block of concrete.

It had disappeared.

That spider had gone straight from under Jeff’s shirt into my dreams

Poetry – The Spider – It’s real – I know it’s waiting for me indoors!

Posted on September 18, 2019 by Opher

Poetry – The Spider – It’s real – I know it’s waiting for me indoors!

The Spider

It is that time of year again. The large house spiders are on the move. The big males are off hunting females to mate. They bounce across your carpet, veering and halting unpredictable.

They lurk in the recesses and under everything.

They are huge, dark and hairy. Their bristles are evil.

At night they emerge to climb walls and on to beds.

They appear in bath-tubs and showers.

They also loom even larger in my imagination!

I am an entomologist. I should know better. But childhood experiences combine with evolutionary instinct to tell me that these things are dangerous, evil and a malevolent force.

Nothing will persuade me otherwise.

We have a huge one in the house. My wife saw it scurry under the bath.

I know it’s there, somewhere.

The Spider

Malevolently scurrying across the floor,

Scuttling to a standstill, assessing,

Watching with its many eyes,

Weighing up the scene.

Then darting into dark crevices

Impossible to squeeze into

To lurk and plan

Its evil re-emergence.

When darkness falls

It is there

Under the cushion

Under the pillow

Brushing the sleeping face

With its bristles

Legs and gnashing mandibles.

Delighting in its success.

No web

Or patient wait

For this one.

He is quick

And unpredictable,

Equipped with

Many legs

And a brain

That intends

To terrify.

There

When

You

Least

Expect.

Huge

Dark

Hairy

And

Fast.

No ordinary spider.

Opher 3.9.2015

Listening to my old Grandma.

Posted on September 17, 2019 by Opher

Listening to my old Grandma.

Listening to my old Grandma

My Grandma is long dead but she lived to the fine old age of ninety six. She was born in 1890s and so saw the most amazing changes.

I remember sitting down with her while she reminisced. It was extremely salutary. I was entranced.

As a young girl she had played in the streets. They were untarmaced mud and compacted dirt with ruts made by carts. The transport was horse-drawn or steam train. There were no cars. There was no electricity or running water and only outdoor toilets. The house was heated with a single coal fire in an open grate.

She had watched the first planes, made of string and paper (as she put it), crawl across the skies. She saw the first cars bump along the rutted streets. She lived through two world wars and saw her husband and sons go off to fight for God and Country.

Back then the class system was firmly in place. The poor were poor, the middle class were a little better off and the bosses and aristocracy lived in the mansions. Down her street there was great poverty with families not having money to buy food for the children. Kids were sewn into their clothes for the winter to prevent them developing chills. Some could not afford shoes. Infant mortality was high. Every family lost children to disease induced by poor sanitation, malnutrition, cold and damp and disease. She’d lost a child.

She’s seen a different world come into being. Following the wars the Labour Trade Union movement achieved better standards of pay and conditions, the standard of living for ordinary families rose. Cars, televisions, telephones and computers became standard fare for working families. There was welfare for those on hard times. People could take holidays and travel.

The roads were tarmaced, there were millions of cars, and the pace of life was faster.

The churches emptied and people were openly critical of those in power. They no longer ‘knew their place’. They spoke their mind and were not content to be kept down. The class system was weakened. It was no longer ‘God, King and Country’. They questioned the policies and wisdom.

Technology brought electricity, machines, refrigerators, washing machines, dishwashers, hoovers and hot water that transformed the drudgery of life. However my Grandma still had her weekly wash and boiled her linen (and sometimes curtains and other items) in a huge copper on the stove. Heaven knows how she managed to do that into her old age.

Women became more educated and entered the professions. They weren’t content to be mere housewives.

My Grandma was incredulous that in her lifetime there had been a change from bi-planes made of wood, paste and lacquered paper to space-stations and space-craft that could go to the Moon.

The social changes were even more dramatic.

I doubt that we will ever see such spectacular changes again.

It is hard to believe that for centuries very little altered. People went along in much the same way their parents and grandparents had done. They wore similar clothes, had similar jobs requiring similar skills and led a life that was much the same as those of generations before. In the 20^th Century that changed. The speed of change has been continuous. Our children live in a totally different world. The world of 2015 would have seemed like science fiction to my 1950s self. I could not have imagined it. Computers, mobile phones and the internet would have seemed far-fetched.

My Grandma used to remark that she did not think all this ‘progress’ made anyone happier.

Now the divide is between the ways the West lives and the impoverished lives of many in the third world. Perhaps that is the next revolution?

What world, or should I say solar system, will our grandchildren think of as normal?

5.9.2015

Anecdote – Heroin and the guy upstairs.

Posted on September 12, 2019 by Opher

Anecdote – Heroin and the guy upstairs.

During the late sixties and early seventies I lived in London. I had a bedsit. Upstairs from me was a young guy, we’ll call him Joe, who lived with his partner and liked heroin.

Every now and then he’d go off and score some heroin and, because he didn’t use it regularly and never knew the exact strength as he always got it from different sources, he would occasionally overdose.

There would be a knock on my door and a distraught partner would explain that he had passed out, collapsed on the floor and would I help. I’d send her to the phone for an ambulance, go upstairs and get Joe into a recovery position, check his pulse and breathing and wait for the ambulance.

On one occasion he still had the needle in his ankle, which seemed to be his preferred site for injecting. On another occasion he actually stopped breathing and I had to give him mouth to mouth to get him going again.

The ambulance would arrive. They’d assess the situation, cart him off and within hours he’d be back.

I sat him down and talked to him. I explained that one day I might not be in, the ambulance might be delayed, and that would be it.

He shrugged.

I asked him if it was worth it. It was quite apparent to me that if Joe had sufficient funds he would have bought a bucket of heroin, sat in his arm-chair injecting and nodding off for the rest of his life. I doubt if he would have eaten, drunk or got up to go to he toilet.

He said to me that I shouldn’t knock it until I’d tried it. He explained that it was like some endless orgasm. You were floating on a warm ocean in euphoric peace. Nothing mattered. There were no worries.

He offered me some – just to try.

I declined. The worst that could happen was that I would love it. I did not want to spend my life in a chair.

Anecdote – Danger in the old Manor House – a true story

Posted on August 21, 2019 by Opher

Anecdote – Danger in the old Manor House – a true story

I don’t believe in ghosts. Yet there are some things that are hard to explain.

When I was nine years old I used to play with a friend of mine who was the same age. We were wild and free and up to all mischief. No tree was safe from our attentions, no stream or pond out of bounds. We’d play tennis and roller-skate in the streets, build dens, tree houses, rafts and go off on our bikes all over town. Our parents never knew what we were up to.

That was the fun of it. We were free. And at nine years of age so grown up that we could handle anything – or could we?

One of the places we’d visit often was a big old deserted manor house. It had a big brick wall around it and great iron gates. The grounds were massive and overgrown. We hide our bikes in the long grass and shin over that wall as if it wasn’t there.

That manor house was massive with hundreds of voluminous echoey rooms, long corridors, big fireplaces, cupboards and great wooden shutters on all the windows. The front door was always open and we’d just go in. We’d run about on the old wooden floors and skid around the long corridors. We’d play hide-and-seek. It was great because all the sound was amplified and bounced back at you. Our voices and laughter boomed around and we’d thunder around the place. It was great fun. Though hide and seek was difficult though. You could always tell where someone was hiding because all the floorboards creaked. It was impossible to go anywhere without being heard.

We knew that we weren’t allowed in the place and we’d get really told off if we were caught but that made it more exciting. And besides, nobody ever came here. It had been empty for years.

It must have been very grand in its day. I remember the downstairs had huge rooms with high decorated ceiling, embellished cornices and pelmets. When you went in through the front door there was a massive staircase that swept round like something out of ‘Gone with the Wind’. We’d charge up and down in like lunatics and try sliding down the curved bannister rail and always fell off.

We’d go upstairs where there was a long corridor with many rooms coming off it. All of the rooms had big cupboards to hide in and were dingy because of the wooden shutters on the dirty windows with their cobwebs and trapped butterflies. That was fun to explore and poke about.

One day we were upstairs in the farthest room when we heard the front door open. We looked at each other with a bolt of fear shooting through us. We knew we’d been making a racket. Somebody had probably heard us and we were for it. We were in trouble. We crept to the big cupboard and stood inside, pulling the door shut so there was just a crack of light and tried our hardest not to move because that made the floorboards creak. But we were good at that. We’d had practice.

We heard footsteps going around downstairs and imagined some man looking round for us, then those heavy footsteps came slowly up the stairs. We stood as still as we could and tried not to breathe. It was dark in the cupboard and we were straining our ears. Every sound was magnified.

We heard the footsteps coming clumping down the corridor. They sounded loud and heavy like some big adult. They weren’t checking all the other rooms but were coming straight for ours. They must have known where we were. They had heard us. All the boards creaked. Those footsteps boomed and sent minor earthquakes through the building before stopping at the doorway to our room.

We held our breath. We could imagine this big man standing there in the doorway listening intently for the slightest sound to find where we were. Our hearts were racing so fast and loud that we were both sure that he would hear it from where he was. The blood was pounding in our ears. Our breath was ragged and impossible to quiet. The tension was unbearable.

There was no sound from out there. Whoever it was standing there in the doorway they were as still as a statue. Not a board creaked. We both could imagine him frozen in the entrance to our room listening intently for the slightest sound that would betray our hiding place.

We hoped and hoped that those footsteps would retreat down that long corridor, that he’d give up and go away. But they didn’t. We stood in the dark for ages.

The fear was too much. At last we could stand it no longer and together we opened the cupboard to give ourselves up.

But there was no one there.

We rushed out, through the empty corridor, down the stairs, out the door, across the grounds, over the wall to grab our bikes and raced away as fast as we could.

We never went back.

Listening to my old Grandma.

Posted on August 11, 2019 by Opher

Listening to my old Grandma.

Listening to my old Grandma

My Grandma is long dead but she lived to the fine old age of ninety six. She was born in 1890s and so saw the most amazing changes.

I remember sitting down with her while she reminisced. It was extremely salutary. I was entranced.

The roads were tarmaced, there were millions of cars, and the pace of life was faster.

Women became more educated and entered the professions. They weren’t content to be mere housewives.

My Grandma was incredulous that in her lifetime there had been a change from bi-planes made of wood, paste and lacquered paper to space-stations and space-craft that could go to the Moon.

The social changes were even more dramatic.

I doubt that we will ever see such spectacular changes again.

My Grandma used to remark that she did not think all this ‘progress’ made anyone happier.

Now the divide is between the ways the West lives and the impoverished lives of many in the third world. Perhaps that is the next revolution?

What world, or should I say solar system, will our grandchildren think of as normal?

5.9.2015

Anecdotes