Anecdote – My Grandfather – A Psychic Medium.

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Anecdote – My Grandfather – A Psychic Medium.

AppleMark

My Grandfather – A Psychic Medium.

My grandfather was a meter reader for the water board. He became a Psychic Medium.

My mother was a confirmed Spiritualist. She believed in her father and thought you could converse with the dead.

I thought the whole thing was nuts.

My grandfather would go into a trance and talk in a funny voice. He had an American Native Indian Chief – called White Eagle, a china man called Chan and a cheeky cockney and put on voices accordingly. I last saw him when I was fourteen. I found it embarrassing.

My grandfather used to hold séances and healing sessions. He was also a homeopath. He was very successful at it and was able to give up his ‘day job’.

Among his ‘achievements’ was a healing session on a Mr Cuthbert Coulson Pounder, who was famous for designing diesel engines on ships like the liner the Queen Mary. He had terminal, inoperable cancer of the kidneys. He went to my grandfather in desperation. My grandfather held a healing session in which he removed a tumour from Cuthbert’s kidney. Later medical examination confirmed there was no longer a tumour there and Coulson survived for many years. He went on to write a book about my grandfather and grandmother, who my mother swore was the real power in the partnership, entitled ‘Healers from another world’.

I cannot explain this but I still am very skeptical of his activities.

My mother used to regularly go along to the spiritualist church to get ‘readings’ and messages from the dead.

She believed him.

I don’t.

Anecdote – The Petrified Forest and the Petrified Trucker

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Anecdote – The Petrified Forest and the Petrified Trucker

AppleMark

The Petrified Forest and the Petrified Trucker

Somehow we ended up touring around America in our VW van, with one big tent, three kids and the mother-in-law. It wasn’t meant to be like that. The mother-in-law had come out to visit. Liz’s father had died and she was grieving. It seemed that a trip out to us might help.

She had her return flight booked from San Francisco. The idea was that we would drive up to Frisco first before heading off on other adventures. When it came to it she could not face going back so she came round with us.

One of our stops was the petrified forest. The fossilized trees were incredible red crystalline structures and we loved the striated colours of the badlands.

That night we pulled into a truck-stop and put up our tent. It was really a stop for long-haul truckers who needed to pull in to get some sleep and we weren’t meant to be there at all.

At midnight a huge refrigerated truck drove in and parked near us. Because it needed to keep the goods frozen it had to have the engine running. That wouldn’t have been so bad except that every minute it would rev up. It woke us up. The canvas of the tent was no barrier to noise.

‘What is he playing at?’ Liz’s mum moaned in a disgruntled manner.

Finally she could stand it no more. She got out of her sleeping bag, put her dressing gown on and went off, armed with her walking stick, to confront the trucker.

She rapped on his window with her stick and told him to switch off the motor. It was the middle of the night and he was waking everyone up.

I had a mental picture of a huge tattooed trucker peering out at a little old English lady threatening him with her walking stick. I wasn’t quite sure where this was going.

He switched the engine off and mother-in-law came back to bed. The next morning the truck was gone. I could imagine a whole consignment of frozen goods having to be dumped.

How was he going to explain that one away?

Anecdote – A favourite teacher – someone who changes your life.

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Anecdote – A favourite teacher – someone who changes your life.

 

A favourite teacher

They say that everyone has a favourite teacher, someone who they had a special relationship with who changed their life. I’m lucky (or greedy). I have a number of them.

My really special teacher was a certain Mr Tranter. He’d never know the impact he had on me. I must have only spoken to him a few times and he rarely actually taught me, but I watched him, listened to him and was greatly affected by him.

Mr Tranter was an individual. He came to our school when I was seventeen, taught Rural Science, and left fairly quickly. He was ridiculed by most of my friends who could not handle his eccentricity. I loved it.

Our Rural Science department had sheds, animals and vegetable gardens. The animals included a pig, some chickens and a sheep. The vegetable gardens had a range of vegetables. They were tended by the students under the supervision of Mr Tranter.

Mr Tranter appeared with his casual clothes and a bike. The first thing he did was to declare that his bike was common property, anybody could borrow. This created such a stir among the students who immediately pounced on this as weakness, took to riding it about the school and dumping it in obscure places. Mr Tranter didn’t seem fazed. He calmly retrieved it and carried on.

The rumour was that he lived in the shed with the chickens. I don’t think that was true. Later there was a rumour that he was responsible for the early return of the French Assistant who was no longer menstruating. That might have been true.

That might have been it. He might never have really reached me if it had not been for a rainy Wednesday afternoon.

I was seventeen. I was full of Kerouac, angst, hormones and Rock Music. I was the long-haired rebel. In the 6th Form all the sixth formers were prefects except me. They had duties to perform. They had a Prefect’s Room to play around in. I was not deemed suitable to be a Prefect. That suited me fine. I was banned from the Prefect’s Room so I had no place to go. I had time, because of the lack of duties, so I hung around chatting up the girls. Seemed a good deal to me.

On Wednesday afternoons the Headteacher organised a series of talks from outside speakers. On that rainy day it had obviously gone wrong. Perhaps the speaker had not turned up?

I had just watched a documentary about Donovan the night before. It had made an impression on me. It was an attempt to show his life before fame. He was rambling around the Scottish islands with Gypsy Davey and revisiting those days. I had been enraptured. It seemed to knit in with Kerouac. This was closer to my vision for the future. Rambling round seemed to have far more attraction than a boring career.

So I was ripe.

For some reason the Headteacher had thought that Mr Tranter might like a platform to express his views. We were his audience. I’m still not sure that the Head knew what he was opening us up to.

Mr Tranter bewitched me. He started by telling us he was only working at the school for a short time. He was working in order to earn money. That money was being used to build a boat. He and his friend were attending a course on boat building and another on navigation. They were building their own boat with the intention of heading off around the world. They were planning to work bars, take any casual job they could, and drift around the planet.

I was enthralled.

He then proceeded to tell us about his life prior to arriving at our school.

Mr Tranter had left school with a bunch of qualifications. That should have propelled him to university and a career. It didn’t. He chose a different route.

Back then in 1965/66 people didn’t drop out. The whole antiestablishment view was nascent and confined to a tiny minority. Everyone was heavily in to Rock/Pop music and the fashions that went with it but few were sold on an alternative lifestyle.

Mr Tranter told us about his years of freedom.

He had rented a hut on Box Hill in Surrey. To pay the rent he had taken a paper round. Every morning he got up with the sun and delivered newspapers. The rest of the day was his. He cultivated vegetables that he ate and bartered for other needs. When he needed something more he did odd jobs.

He had time to think, to read and socialise.

It sounded idyllic to me.

I think that hour had more impact on me than anything else.

All my friends came out thinking he was a nutter. But for me I could see the beauty of it all. Life was an adventure. You had to seize it and make the most of it. It made me question what the purpose of my life was.

Mr Tranter opened up my mind to all possibility. That’s real education.

What a teacher! He certainly affected me.

Anecdote – Travelling Around Texas in a Greyhound in 1971

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Anecdote – Travelling Around Texas in a Greyhound in 1971

 

Travelling Around Texas in a Greyhound in 1971

Texas was out of step with the rest of the States in 1971. I picked that up without any hard detective work.

Liz and I were on or homeward journey, virtually living on a Greyhound bus. We’d started off again in Los Angeles, headed for San Diego and then down to the Mexican border. Getting across that border with long hair was nigh on impossible so we’d looked across and boarded the bus again.

We were heading back to New York via our friends in Boston. We’d had a great time in California. Our experience of America was of long-haired youths, peace-signs, sharing, colourful clothes, great music, great vibes and a shared view of a desire for a better world. It looked like the whole of the young world was caught up in a hallucinogenic whirl. The world was changing. There was a new sensibility and a new era.

Then we hit Texas.

It wasn’t the long drive across open flat lands; it was the people. It was as if not only the sixties hadn’t happened yet but the 20th century was still on its way.

Our Greyhound bus rolled to a halt in a small Texas town. It was as if we’d gone back in time or washed up on the set of a Western film. There were wooden boardwalks with hitching rails on the front of old wooden shop facades and dusty roads. I half expected Wild Bill Hikock to stroll out of the saloon.

He didn’t. But everywhere you looked there were guys in ten gallon Stetsons, cowboy shirts, jeans, cowboy boots with spurs and big silver buckled belts. It was like we were in a movie.

I watched one of these guys, complete with big jangly spurs, walk down the boardwalk, duck under the rail and then climb into a station wagon and drive away. I could not see how he could operate the pedals with big spurs on his feet. Where was his horse?

We made our way into a diner and took a seat at the counter. There was an eerie silence. The waitress assiduously avoided us. She served everyone else. It did not take too long to figure that we could have sat there for a month or two and still not been served. We left.

There was a nasty atmosphere like that scene out of Easy Rider, except this wasn’t a film set and this was for real.

Back on the bus a group of young crew-cutted men got on. They spied us and made a bee-line straight for us. There was all the standard abuse – ‘Is it a boy or is it a girl?’ and ‘How about a dance?’ One guy in particular looked mean. He stood over me and made as if to stroke my hair. It looked like it might turn ugly. I was getting my head round the fact that I might find myself in a fight. I didn’t fight but the bus driver was avoiding the issue and nobody else was jumping to my defence. It could have developed but fortunately I kept my cool and they got off at the next town.

We weren’t sorry to see the back of Texas.

Anecdote – Watts Towers and Death in LA

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Anecdote – Watts Towers and Death in LA

 

Watts Towers and Death in LA

Back in 1979 Los Angeles was very racially segregated. There were Chicano area, Black areas and White areas. There were Chicano gangs, Black gangs and White gangs. As an English person it was all a bit strange. I was to teach in a High school in Norwalk and that year Norwalk had the highest number of gang related murders. That was scary. The week I arrived a young man was executed. He was walking in the park and a group of youths chased him, dragged him back to their car and shot him in the head. It seems he was new in from Mexico. He’d innocently walked through the park wearing the wrong colour jacket. They thought he was from the rival gang. The Crypts and Bloods had a turf war.

We were given a lecture on where it was safe to go and which streets not to go near. We were told not to stop at traffic lights in certain areas. People would shoot you. We had to keep all our doors locked.

Needless to say we took no notice at all of all the warnings. We drove where we wanted.

One of the places we wanted to visit was Watts Towers. They were an amazing set of structures created by Sabato (“Simon”) Rodia who was an Italian artist. It was made out of old bottles and cans all cemented together into these great spindly towers. It was an impressive work of art and one that we were eager to see.

The only problem seemed to be that Watts Towers were in the middle of Watts. That was a black gang area. According to the teachers at school this was a ‘no go’ area. To go into Watts was certain death.

Undaunted we loaded up the van with kids and headed off to Watts. I didn’t have an issue with race; I didn’t see why anybody else would have. We hadn’t done anything wrong.

As we headed down the boulevard it was noticeable that we were part of a multicultural group. In the cars around us and on the sidewalks there were black, white and Chicano all seeming to be in harmony and getting along fine.

When we reached the intersection for Watts it was noticeable that this changed. We were in traffic driven solely by black people; all the sidewalks were full of black people. All the white and Chicano traffic had turned off.

At each intersection groups of black youths, lounging against walls, peered in at us. They seemed bemused. They were wondering how ‘whitey’ had managed to get lost.

We found Watts Towers, despite the fact that satellite navigation had not been invented, due to Liz’s map reading, and had a good look round. They were incredible. We returned to our van and went home.

We hadn’t been shot once! We hadn’t even been threatened. Everyone we spoke to was polite and friendly.

When I told them at school the next day they were horrified. They could not believe we had put the poor kids at such risk.

I believe you have to live by your principles and take people as you find them.

Anecdote – Dad’s death in Walton hospital.

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Anecdote – Dad’s death in Walton hospital.

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Dad’s death in Walton hospital

Death is not a subject that people want to hear about these days. We are institutionalising it. We leave to the experts – the medical team, nurses and then the undertakers. I think we should talk about it more.

This fear and silence is a modern phenomenon. Death used to be more common. It was not merely the old who died. Most families lost children. Nobody was immune. Because it was more common did not make it any the less distressing. But even so it was the family who nursed and cared for the dying and it was the family who laid out the body. The body would remain in the house. The Irish wake was a celebration of the life of the dead person and they were present at it.

We have become divorced from the cycle of life and death just as we have from nature. Increasingly we are marooned in an artificial cocoon. The reality of life and death is kept at arm’s length and institutionalised.

My father died from liver cancer at the age of fifty eight. Much too early. He never lived to enjoy his retirement. His illness spanned nine months – the length of a gestation.

He started to smoke when he enlisted in the war at the age of seventeen and it was a habit that stayed with him for his remaining forty one years. I hope he extracted enough pleasure out of those fags to warrant the loss of twenty to thirty years and the life that would have filled those years.

My mum and dad came to stay at Christmas. He was off his food and grumbling of a loss of appetite. Over the course of the next few months I’d phone him at work and he’d say he was fine but he’d been to the doctor’s for some indigestion medicine. It wasn’t until Easter that my aunt phoned and said I should go down to visit him because she was concerned.

I drove down and had a shock when I walked in. My father was so gaunt and thin he appeared to have aged thirty years. He resembled a refugee from Belsen. I could not believe that he was still working.

We had the meeting with the consultant. He told my mother that there was no hope. There was only palliative care. I do not think it sank in with him or her. They pretended it would be alright. He just needed medicine.

My father refused to discuss death. He ignored it.

That summer he grew weaker. He was forced to give up work, then even walking around became too much. He sat and read and watched television.

As summer progressed he became bed-bound. I spent my summer holidays helping care for him along with my mother and older sister. I gave him bed baths and helped feed him. We watched TV together. It was the cricket. He loved cricket and this was Botham’s Ashes. We delighted in the way Ian Botham took apart that Australian team

Dad read one of my books and said he enjoyed it. It was an old typed manuscript. I am pleased that he read it. I look back now and see all the faults in those early books. I have to rewrite them extensively. Dad was an intelligent man who worked for the newspapers in Fleet Street. He would correct and edit the raw stories. My errors must have glared at him but he was too kind to say.

We sat and talked for hours – but it was all trivia. How I would have loved to have talked in more depth about feelings and emotions. But there was a barrier. He knew the depth of feeling without me saying and so did I. That was the way things were then. Yet still it would have been nice to share more. I would love to have heard the stories of his life. But my father was a private man. He did not like to talk about his life and to do so now would have been to admit what was happening. I had to respect that this was not something he wanted. It was hard. It felt like pretence and it was a pretence. We both knew what was being acted out.

He always used to say that he felt alright in himself. I can’t forget that. I do not think he was in any great pain. He merely felt helpless, humiliated, impotent and embarrassed.

In his final week he required medication. They put him on morphine and the decline set in fast. He drifted in and out of lucidity.

Yet it went on. The strain was telling on all of us.

To get a break I went to visit a friend. I came back late evening. There had been a scare. The hospital had called the family in. I went in to see him. He was conscious. I said good night and he said ‘night bless’.

He died in the night.

The next morning I went in. He was cold and as hard as marble. You could sense that he was no longer there. Something had departed.

I remember looking out of the window as people walked by outside. Inside that room I was standing next to the bed with my dead father. My life had changed. Outside life went on as usual.

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Anecdote – The Rituals of a Collector

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Anecdote – The Rituals of a Collector

The Rituals of a Collector

Saturday mornings were my time. I’d take Henry, my youngest boy, with me and we would tour the second-hand record shops in search of treasure. There were five main ports of call.

E&M Mart on Hessle Road was always good for a look. Eddie seemed very indiscriminate with his pricing. You could often find a bargain lurking in amongst the dross. Sheridans was next, in the centre of town. They were a bit more discerning but had a rack of 25p albums where you could often find things of interest. I once spent £21 of 25p bargains and would often go off weighed down with full carrier bags of vinyl. Then it was over to Princess Ave, Norman’s Place and GO Discs which were conveniently right next to each other and then down the road to Pool’s Corner. These were a bit hit and miss but there were always things of interest to be plucked out of the bins.

Searching through the racks was a thrill. I would pick out old favourites and peruse them with a smile, familiarizing myself with gems I already possessed and playing the tracks in my head. I would look for unusual or rare albums that I did not have and keep a beady eye out for those obscure jewels that I was constantly searching for. There was nothing quite like the feeling of discovering something special that had been hidden away in among the boring and mundane and nobody else had spotted. That took a level of knowledge that was beyond the ordinary. That was the jag I was looking for, the delight that kept me searching. You would sift through and then, there it was, an album you had been searching for these last decades, revealed in all its glory. My eyes would light up. Heart begin to race, as I lifted it out to examine it, check the condition of the vinyl, check out the back cover, revel in the ecstasy of handling that rare beast.

That made it all worthwhile. Ebay and Amazon browsers can never know the thrill of that hunt.

But it was not just about hunting, tracking down and discovering albums. There was the social side too. You met up with a number of like-minded people. You talked about your discoveries, what you were looking for, your likes and dislikes. You shared your obsession with other equally obsessed individuals. You traded knowledge, information, views and opinions and engaged in gossip. There was many a band, style or singer that I was introduced to by these mad aficionados. They traded their excitement and passion. Some I am still friends with and others have become lost in the wisps of time.

Saturday mornings were special, precious and life-affirming. It was the time for religious rituals of a serious collector. I came home energized and cleansed clutching my prizes to paw over, play and delight in. The cover had to be read, the pictures absorbed, the music concentrated on and the words deciphered. Then they could be filed away with the rest of the collection. These were the rituals that inspired me and set me up for the week.

Anecdote – Bryce Canyon and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

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Anecdote – Bryce Canyon and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

 

Bryce Canyon and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

In Easter 1980 we were driving around America in a VW van looking for the heart of wonder. We found it everywhere.

When we arrived at Bryce Canyon the snow had settled. It sat on the top of the stacks in a four foot layer. The red shale of the canyons walls were more vivid from the damp of the snow and the white tops merely added to the spectacle and made it even more magical.

The scale was impossible to appreciate. It looked like a fairy land. It was only when we walked down between the stacks that we were able to appreciate the size and immensity of the place. The red walls of the chasms rose up all around us enclosing us in its majesty. What looked delicate and intricate from afar now looked deep and mysterious.

We walked down the canyons and found ourselves encompassed in a maze.

The experience was awesome.

Later that day we stopped at a nearby restaurant for something to eat. In a corner was a little old lady and we started talking. She told us that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid used to rustle cattle round in these parts. Their gang used to drive the steers down into Bryce Canyon to hide up until the heat cooled down. As a young girl she had seen them ride past.

The Wild West to me was a million miles away. Yet here it was in living memory. Those old movies of the Wild West were real. We met someone who had witnessed it.

She had not seen Paul Newman and Robert Redford; she had seen the real thing. We’d walked down the same canyons.

Waiting for Roy Harper in Brixton

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Waiting for Roy Harper in Brixton

Anyone who knows Roy will know that he runs on different time to the rest of us. I lived up in Hull and he lived in Brixton. We needed to get together to do some work on the book. As I had no car at the time and was no longer as partial to hitch-hiking as I once had been I thought that train was the best solution. As it was half-term I had some time. I arranged with Roy the times and set off. He assured me that he would pick me up from the station.

Now I hadn’t quite expected Roy to be standing there when I arrived; I knew him better than that.

Clutching my bag I made my way out of the station and sat myself down on a bench in a prominent place to wait.

This was Brixton a few months after the notorious riots. Watching the news all one saw was rampaging black youths, overturned cars, petrol bombs and houses on fire. Brixton looked like a war zone. Colleagues in Hull, which, at the time was not the world’s most cosmopolitan city, thought I was going into some cauldron of race rioting. I was doomed. They assumed that as soon as the denizens of Brixton set eyes on a white face they would tear me limb from limb.

The minutes dragged into an hour. A lady from one of the shops had noticed me sitting there waiting and brought me a cup of coffee. She asked if I wanted to use her phone (this was before the age of mobiles) to contact someone. I thanked her profusely.

The hour became two hours and I was joined by a very drunk old man who offered me drinks out of his bottle, wrapped in a brown paper bag, put his arm round me, and engaged me in conversation.

After two and a half hours a taxi driver offered me a free lift to wherever I was going. Perhaps they wanted rid of me?

Eventually Roy appeared in his huge car and drove me off to his house.

I could not help wondering if a black guy sitting outside Hull train station would have received such a friendly reception?

Anecdote – Sex in the classroom

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Anecdote – Sex in the classroom

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Sex in the classroom

It did not take me long to discover that there were major gaps in the boys understanding of sex. This was 1976 and well before the advent of the internet (which creates an entirely different set of ignorances). They were much less liberal times and the boys’ knowledge was sketchy.

I did not think anything of it. When we came to human reproduction I slotted in my own sections on sexually transmitted diseases and contraception and also did a couple of far-ranging discussions. They went down well and there was obviously a need.

I’d been doing this for a couple of years when me Head of department found out.

‘Does the Head know you’re doing sex education?’ He asked.

‘I doubt it,’ I shrugged.

‘I think you’d better tell him,’ he suggested.

I thought that was a bit strange. Sex ed was an established part of the curriculum in most schools. I couldn’t see the problem. But then I hadn’t reckoned with the school. It was very traditional and old fashioned. I enjoyed that. I liked getting my teeth into it and giving it a good shaking. I saw my job as stirring up the hierarchy.

With that in mind I went to see the Headmaster.

He was enshrined in his oak panelled office, sitting in his leather-bound chair behind his large dark oak desk. I was ushered in and sat before him on a hard wooden chair.

I explained why I had come.

My Head of department had given the impression that I might be walking into a minefield. But he was very pleasant. He didn’t say no. He merely suggested that introducing sex education was a big step. There could be repercussions. Before I did any more I needed to have it discussed at a staff meeting.

I found that amusing but it did not seem to be any big deal. I went along and saw the relevant Deputy Head and had it included on the next agenda. I prepared my presentation and was looking forward to the debate. I had no doubt that I would quickly get through this formality. When the agenda came out Sex Education was down at item number six.

The meeting took place and I sat there with my notes. We managed five items in the allotted time. I did not manage to address my issue. Not to worry. It would be on the next agenda. The next staff meeting agenda went up and I noted my sex education was down at number nine. The penny was beginning to drop. My suspicions were confirmed when the following agenda had no room for my topic at all. I was being stalled. The boss hoped it would all go away.

I produced a sheet explaining the need for sex education and circulated it around the staff. I then went and had personal ‘discussions’ with every member of staff. I managed, with my powers of persuasion, to elicit agreement in principle from every one of them, Deputy Heads included, apart from two abstentions from two religious Catholic staff.

Triumphantly I returned to the Headmaster’s office, clutching my referendum results and confident that I had circumvented the tactics and come up with a result. There was no need for a discussion at a staff meeting.

The Headmaster was unruffled. He congratulated me and suggested the next step would be to canvas the parents for their views. I could see that he expected a strong parental opposition that would scupper it. I was not so sure. I thought the parents were mot liberal and modern thinking than the Headmaster imagined. Sex education was not a major controversial issue.

I produced a single page letter to be distributed to parents. It was approved and sent out. There was not a single negative response.

At my third interview with the Headmaster he congratulated me again and suggested that the next step would be for me to take it to the Governors to gain their approval. I could see the tactics being deployed and wondered what other obstacles might be put in my way. He was stalling for all he was worth.

I put together my presentation and was given a slot at the next Governors’ meeting.. I gave them the works and, surprisingly, gained a unanimous agreement for me to go ahead.

At my fourth visit to the Headmaster he admitted defeat. He conceded that I had successfully jumped through the hoops and could go ahead and do it.

It was only at the end of our meeting that he dropped his bombshell. He was an old guy well into his sixties, and had come from very conservative times, an honourable man.

‘You know Chris,’ he said thoughtfully,’ I know times are different and we have to keep moving forward but I’m personally still not sure about this sex education. I do not believe you can go showing films of young girls masturbating to red-blodded English boys without it having some effect.’

I sat there stunned.

It was only then that I realised what sex education meant to him. It wasn’t contraception, disease and relationships; it was sex films.

Perhaps a little more conversation about content and presentation might have saved me two years of uphill battle?

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