But I'm getting ahead of myself. Memories, particularly the recall of names has never been a strong point of mine. Some people close to home can remember down to the letter events 20, 30 years ago whilst I am in total confusion to remember not only the particular but the event at all.
I'm not sure why this is. Whether like Walter Mitty I live in a dream world where reality only break's through every so often and the things which happen around me are a haze.
A trip to London to see the South Bank Exhibition was an excuse for my Dad to indulge me in his love of history and where better than the seat of Government. We had ridden down to London on his motorbike. A trip which today I would reel off without a thought on the motorway but this was before motorways and the A1 would have been the route he took. 200 miles on his motorbike, an old ex WD (War Department) bike with a huge wide saddle. I remember the saddle since by the time we arrived in those mysterious streets of London Town I had lost all sense of circulation in my short little legs and resembled a cowboy descending off his horse after a day in the saddle, bow legged and very stiff.
My Dad was in his element as he dragged me around the places of his dreams. The Science Museum, Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery standing next to to South Africa House, the country which was to play such an important part in my adult life. Theatre land, the world renowned names standing cheek by jowl, on display but out of pocket for a couple down from "Up North".
Less so the trudging round from building to building as he absorbed the emotional impact of seeing these important pillars of Empire set out in Whitehall. Admiralty House with its antennae sprouting from the roof, sending messages to the mighty ships patrolling the seas across all corners of the globe. Horse Guards Parade and the mounted sentries, ablaze in their polished breast plates and plume helmets, sitting on their magnificent, ever patient horses.
Photographs outside the door of No 10 Downing Street, in an age when there was no need for security other than the single Bobby on the door. The public were not the enemy in those days and we felt it our right to be everywhere.
Westminster Abbey with its hushed atmosphere, historic tombs heaped up like a history lesson in stone. Saint Paul's with its Whispering Gallery running around the dome and higher, after climbing up the narrow stone steps, out onto the roof, directly under the cross for a magnificent view of London below. I was 11 when my Dad and I did the trip and 50 years later I retraced the route up the same stone steps, this time panting a little in my 60th year, thinking all the time of that first accent and my Fathers yearning to imbibe in me his love of our history and our place in it.
The Festival of Britain on the South Bank Of the Thames in 1951 was a modern day attempt to signal we were still a force to be reckoned with. The latest designs and inventions were on display including a brand new railway engine which was to reappear in my own history, this time in Melbourne, many years later on its last journey, pulling into the station, an example of the closing of the romance of steam and making way for the ubiquitous diesel.
Standing at that moment in Australia on the other side of the world, it was not lost on me the grasp of Empire. The power and influence which a tiny windswept island in the cold, often stormy North Sea had in far flung parts of the Globe. Today, she has shrunk to a bit player on the coat tails of one of her settlements, the USA, who through nature, isolation and an immigration policy attracting people from every corner of the World to became strong and powerful, wresting the leadership from our hands as we struggled to survive another of the many wars that have ravaged Europe for centuries.
As a young 11 year old this was lost on me and with my friends we were busy conquering our own world, the fields and woods around us. About 5 miles away (in our compass a long way) on the other side of the main Bradford to Ilkley road, way off our beaten track was a pond and one weekend my pals and I (reminiscent of William in Comptons famous stories,Just William) decided to camp there. We were very young and its testimony to my parents, particularly my Dad who I suspect won my Mom over to let us go and spend the night alone. Not withstanding our fears of the dark and the nocturnal sounds, we camped in the fold of the hill oblivious of our surroundings in the pitch black, we gathered for comfort around a torch, feeling ourselves to be no lesser adventurer than Captain Scott.
Memories of Just William epitomise the innocence of those days. Our consumption of comics, not the pictorial kind but the ones like the 'Hotspur', the 'Adventure', the 'Rover', the 'Wizard', and the Eagle which, with the exception of the Eagle were all largely prose based stories.
"I Flew with Braddock" about an RAF pilot flying a Mosquito fighter bomber in WW2.
"Wilson the Wonder Athlete" who climbed Everest and ran a 3 minute mile. Characters depicting the grit and endurance we depicted ourselves, they were our heroes and we impatiently waited the papers to be delivered each week to immerse ourselves in this harmless hero worship.
I suppose they were our celebs !!
Girls didn't play an important part in our lives at that stage and we had to haul ourselves into our teens before we took any interest. The newspapers were pretty much devoted to news about local and world events with only the 'News of the World' printing what my parents would call salacious news. Needless to say it never crossed the threshold in our house and there were many men who, on receiving it would swear they only read it for the sports pages !!
The Times (pre Murdock days) was the Establishment paper, a large lightweight paper it prided itself on its factual reporting. It was often said that if the Times had reported a story you could take it as read, verbatim. The obituary page was scanned by the upper class for the death of a relative receiving a mention and the Royal reporter was followed avidly to keep up to date with the Royal Family. As members of a very different segment of the population it was not on our readership list but there were many households who had pretensions of grandeur or at least imagined they the shared common values and who would buy the paper "to be seen as being genteel"!
Working class homes usually read the Daily Mirror with over a 4 million daily readership and was the most popular followed by the Daily Herald 1.5 million. The popular "white collar" paper was the Daily Express on 4 million and the Daily Mail on 2 million.
People in those days were very polarised in their views and very often reflected their parents view of the world. In so many ways there was a continuum of thought and practice with tradition and respect for what had gone on before held important.
The Reference Library reading room was very popular. The great hard backed volumes of particular news papers were brought from the racks and opened out on sloping wooden desks to pore over keeping abreast of news. Today we have 24/7 TV coverage from all corners, giving their blow by blow reports but back in the 40s and 50s one had to rely on the written word which inevitably were a second hand version and usually about a week late when reporting from the far flung corners of the world.
Reading and the slow absorption of the printed page meant we were not pummelled as we are today with crises after crises, we were immune from the tragic sight of staving children, from the worlds suffering and confined ourselves to our own personal hardship.
A feature of the Reading Room were the characters who used it. They came often off the street, especially in the cold winter weather to find warmth, people who were on hard times often homeless. Without the benefit of home they often lacked the hygiene that a daily wash under the tap brings. Remember, few houses in the working class districts in the 40s had plumbed baths and the early morning wash at the kitchen sink was at best not very effective. It's hard to think today how unsanitary these arrangements were but somehow we never noticed.
Above the Library Reading Room was the main Reference Library. My Dad spent many hours in this room studying for his exams and when I was old enough he introduced me to the wiles of this "holy of holy's" with its huge well worn wooden tables to spread out the books you were referencing. The place was usually full. The constant search for a particular book was gained through an indexing system held in card drawers, the cards and our slip of paper provided the librarian with the site information for him or her to wander off into the bowels of the library to find the book you needed. The silence broken only by the scraping of a chair and the distinctive smell of old books was brought home to me when in Cape Town, I was in the main Library in the Gardens. It started to rain outside and I was suddenly jolted back to my home and the Bradford Library, it brought tears to my eyes inducing such strong nostalgic memories and it made me homesick for the very first time.
Libraries have always figured in my concept of living in a civilised society and in the days of Apartheid in South Africa the one pinpoint of light in Johannesburg was that of allowing black schoolchildren access to the libraries reference area. South Africa had benefited from the Colonial pattern of leaving buildings and traditions such as Reference Library's dotted in and around the central parts of her main cities and these building were an oasis of calm and tranquillity where learning and respect for others was generally observed. The sight of those young black kids thirsty for knowledge, covering difficult and long journeys to get there should have been a wake up call to the political masters but no, their ideological blindfold meant they left it too late.
I was never one to be drawn into popular culture. Smoking once tried was put aside until equipped with the collage scarf and an armful of books I fancied myself the Oxbridge type and took to smoking a pipe. On reflection it might have been Harold Wilsons influence but it didn't last long. Sitting in the cinema showing off to my friends I inhaled too much St Bruno smoke and after setting my head in a spin, vomited over two rows of not very happy patrons in front of me.
My pipe was put away and has remained in the proverbial drawer ever since.
Slowly girls began to take shape, or their shape began to form an impression and the Friday night / Saturday night dance became the highlight of the week. Balancing the pleasure of dancing and the allure of the opposition sex with Night School, Cycling and eventually Rock climbing and weekends away in the Lake District, all competed for my time, along with that necessary evil work. Dancing gradually took a back seat but not before the enjoyment of many love sick evenings when Jill or Susan, Jane and Mary bequeathed their favours on someone else and one was left the long lonely walk home, alone.
Dancing is the perfect hedonistic pastime known to both sexes and whilst it takes two to tango it often meant having to pluck up courage to ask the girl you liked for a dance. The walk across the floor to ask her for the dance and the even longer walk back when she said no was all part of night. When you, poor slob was granted permission to dance your heart soared as you tried to impress her with the tricky steps you had memorised from watching others. It was not unlike watching certain birds perform amazing acrobatics to catch the eye of a potential mate. The music of The Platters or Pat Boon slowed the steps but increased the heart rate. The sound of Bill Haley or Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley or Little Richard made it impossible to sit still and once on the floor you performed like a demented banshee until the music stopped. Just watching a YouTube recording of Little Richard brought out the goose bumps again as this little American showman pounded the piano and screened Good Golly Miss Molly into the microphone !!!
Later after a couple of years we progressed to Ballroom dancing, gliding around the large Mecca Ballroom to the sound of a big band up from London, the best was Joe Loss with his get up and dance signature tune "In the Mood". We would step out the dance steps, the Quickstep, the Foxtrot and the Waltz, adding a flourish or two which we had picked up from Victor Silvester's TV show "Come Dancing". To twirl and swirl around the ballroom with someone who could dance was tremendous, it brought out the symmetry between a man and a women aligning the best instincts, not of conflict but of harmony as you swayed around, one person leading the other following not in a dominant, sub dominant way but each accentuating the other, a woman's beauty and seductive prowess, the man's strength and and masculinity.
Jazz was another, in vogue thing in the 50s with the lifting of an embargo on American Jazz musicians into the UK. They came and we flocked to see them. Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, the Modern Jazz Quartet, I could go on and on as we sat mesmerised in the audience of the concert hall. Usually the preserve of the Halle Orchestra, we were witnessing a kind of music that had its base in the Mississippi Blues and which was carried and developed by the improvisation of musicians, not tutored in the strict business of classical music but who felt free to roam where the sound of their instruments took them. Like Rock and Roll it was a rebellion against conformity and we kids loved it.
Our parents as all parents before them looked on and worried where would it all lead, "what next".
I was about 17 when, along with a pal of mine I set off from Bradford and cycled down to Lydd airport on the South Coast to catch the plane to Le Touquet in France. It was our first experience in flying. The plane an old wartime cargo carrier with a nose section that opened up to take vehicles and cargo, accommodated our bikes for the princely sum of 2 shillings and 6 pence or as we called it 'half a crown, whilst our fare was £5. I will always remember the anxiety as the pilot built up the engine speed, holding back the plane on the brakes until, on release we began slowly to trundle down the runway. We would never reach air speed, we were destined to die at our first attempt. Suddenly the bucking of the plane ceased and we parted company with the ground, not a moment too soon, we cleared the perimeter fence and out across the coastline with the sea below. What a relief and what excitement as we slowly gained hight with the French coastline ahead.
The sense of being in a foreign country was much stronger in those days before mass travel made it so common place. The language of course, but everything seemed different. As a cyclist it was not a problem adapting to riding on the "other side" of the road and soon we were off, riding under a blue sky through the hedge rows and large open fields on our way to Paris.
Cycling is close to a Frenchman's heart particularly in those days when along with the Italians they were the champs. It was before the consumerist days of Lycos and commercial TV which was looking to exploit any market it could discover. The Americans and Lance Armstrong were still in the making and ""cyclists, even their perennial foe the English, were welcomed.
The roads were quiet with few cars and in the sunshine we were in heaven as we peddled on to Paris.
Majestic Paris, wide boulevards, massive circular meeting places like the roads around the Arc de Triomphe. Surrounded by busy, honking traffic we rode along under a divine providence on our heavily overloaded bicycles. Seeing the bicycles the motorist took pity as we wobbled around the Arc, changing lanes, trying to work out which was right and which was left and where we were heading. They took pity on us and we made it without a scrape or even an angry gesture, instead there were plenty of friendly waves of Entente Cordial !!
Out of Paris we soon clocked up the miles through the northern countryside. Slowly the climate got warmer as we headed towards Lyon and then down to Avignon. The rural sleepy villages with their water fountains in the market square, cooling the bottles of wine, no fear of theft in these tight knit communities undisturbed by a couple of English cyclists,but intrigued that we had come so far and on bikes !
The simplicity of their lives not yet plundered by traffic, they were still sleeping the sleep of their, their parents and their parent before them. Poor but contented in their ritualistic pattern of life and the work in the fields around.
We rode on, sleeping under the sky without a worry in our heads. Each day was a mile nearer our goal of the Mediterranean, each night tired out we would sleep the sleep of the gods. One night it seemed as if the god Thor had struck since not noticing how close the main railway line to Marseille was to our camp we were startled into life with the wheels of the express hurtling down the line not many feet away. Another more tranquil awakening was to open my eyes to the sight of the large yellow teeth of a plough-horse who had come over to investigate this strange bundle in his field. I was powerless to do anything as I had tied the cord of my sleeping bag tight and couldn't move so we just stared at each other until he lost interest and wandered off.
The climb up the final gradient from Frejus, (the scene, in 1959 of a terrible disaster when the dam wall above the town broke) to breast the mountain range and there below was the Med' with Cannes in the distance. We had made it.
Dumping our heavy gear in the camp-site the next day we were off exploring the famous Côte d'Azur. The bikes as light as a feather, we rolled along feeling like our heroes the Tour riders, we were sublimely happy as we headed through Cannes onto Nice and Monte Carlo.
This was the land of exclusivity of the mega rich and famous and we, two lads from scruffy Bradford were symbolically rubbing shoulders with them. The Casino was out of bounds but the night life with the super beautiful women was there to gauge and wonder at, "no touching please" !!!
The sight of a huge Mack truck slowly ascending one of the steep hills in Monte Carlo, in first gear with the driver out of his cab on the running board getting some cool air. The harbour with its mammoth yachts tied up, playthings for entertaining not for sailing, was a wonder of opulence to our eyes brought up on the gritty sight of the mill and the people who toiled in them.
Four years later fuelled perhaps by these memories I was ready for more.
I left behind an England which was waking to drugs and promiscuity and with a rucksack and ice axe I set off to leave the nest and my protective, ever loving parents, leave my friends to fend for themselves and set off to see what this new and wicked world had to offer.
Mine was a view over the horizon, things just out of sight, new things,and in a sense I was in a self imposed vacuum hardly staying long enough at any one place to imbibe the latest fashion.
I'm not sure what made me jump ship. I had a good life, I was happy living at home and it wasn't a matter of seeking my fortune. Planning for the future has never been my forte, I simply wanted to see and experience new things and new places and so the idea of first, a climbing holiday with some pals and then, who ever wanted to join me, to stay in Europe for a while before going further afield.
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