Aerial memories

Posted on 22nd May 2021 by Ian

It is some thirty years since my maternal grandfather died. It is from him that my mother has inherited an encyclopaedic memory of history, a capacity to recall the oral traditions of the family, and a wide range of recollections of post-war life in our small corner of England.

In a conversation with him one day, she had told him that she remembered seeing an airship.

“How do you remember that, Ruby, you were only two? I had taken you out to Aller with me on the bicycle. On the way back, we were at Whitehill when it went over. I stopped and we stood and watched it for a long time.”

It was a story that had often been questioned. Was it imagined? Was it a retrojection of a later moment? One local telling of it by a man in the village had embellished the story to the point where it was said that Adolf Hitler had flown over.

Sitting with my mother on a blustery May afternoon, I decided to attempt to verify the story. The British airship experience had ended in the early 1930s, the famous German airship the Hindenburg had ended in flames in 1937. How had there been an airship over Somerset in 1939?

A search of the web confirmed that a German  Zeppelin had flown over Yeovil in 1939. Reconnaissance pictures it had taken included photographs of the Westland aircraft factory.

“One day, when your Dad and I were out on the motorbike, we went up to Bristol and I saw Filton airport. I said to your Dad, ‘I saw the Brabazon take off there.’ He didn’t believe me, I told him that Harold Bennett had brought us up in his van.”

The Brabazon was one of those heroic pieces of British engineering that was a complete commercial failure. An eight-engined airliner, only one of which was built, its cost meant it never went into production. The maiden flight was on 4th September 1949.

“Harold Bennett’s van was a long Bedford. There were three seats across the front and he had benches down each side in the back. Harold sat in the front, Glady sat in the middle, and Grandad at the other door. Man and the seven of us were in the back, four on each side.”

An online search revealed that 10,000 sightseers gathered to watch that maiden flight. A further search found a green van similar to the one my mother remembered.

Undoubtedly, in the future every fact will be recorded somewhere, but will there be the storytellers to put those facts together?

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Vinyl delight

Posted on 21st May 2021 by Ian

Brass in pocket, the distinctive voice of Chrissie Hynde on the radio.

Brass in pocket was on a Pretenders album I bought in Oxford Street in January 1980. A fellow student had suggested the shopping expedition on a Wednesday afternoon when there were no lectures. University life was premised upon the assumption that public school routines would be familiar to students and that Wednesday afternoon and Saturday afternoon would be set aside for sports.

The fellow student was the authoritative voice on every aspect of student life, from how one should dress to which music was acceptable listening, and we set off for the Virgin Megastore, the very first one, which had opened some months previously.

The authoritative voice had to concede to others in our company that Virgin was not always the best value and we went to a basement store called Simon’s Records, or something similar.  The Pretenders’ record was bought along with one by Blue Oyster Cult, a band whom I saw live in 1981 and whose album has long since disappeared.

The abiding memory of that long ago midweek shopping trip is not the details of the purchase, but the visit to the megastore. For teenage music fans, it was a visit to a shrine. The Virgin Megastore was the ultimate place to be if one delighted in browsing racks of records, examining sleeve details, and listening to the eclectic musical selection of the shop staff.

The megastore might have been the ultimate place to be,  the Wembley Stadium of recorded music, but just as there were ordinary football grounds around the country where matches might be enjoyed, so there could hardly have been a town in the country where there was not a record shop.

The selection available in the provincial shops might not have been as extensive, the clientele might not have been as diverse, the music played not just as esoteric, but a record shop was always a good place pass half an hour.

There are record shops that linger on, but now their stock is likely to have more by way of back catalogues and second hand discs than current releases. Customers tend to have a much higher age profile than they did in 1980. The music is likely to appeal more to greying hairs and receding hairlines than to nineteen year olds.  The infinite access and unbeatable prices offered online have made keeping a record shop a hard-earned living.

In gaining a whole world of music, we have lost something of our soul. Clicking an icon on a computer screen to download a recording has not the tactile, visual or emotional quality of perusing an album cover, reading the sleeve notes, and walking to a counter where an assistant might discuss both the record and the band.

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The merriest month is passing quickly

Posted on 20th May 2021 by Ian

The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady was a bestseller in the 1970s. It was a gift book, a coffee table book, a book that might be picked up to enjoy its illustrations or to reflect on a line of its prose. Along with the intricate drawings of flora, there were lines of poetry appropriate to the artwork.

“The merriest month of all the year is the merry month of May,” is the only line that remains in the memory. They were words that always brought a sense of joy during the thirty-one days of the queen of months.

Knowing little about poetry, I had imagined for more than years that the words were written by Keats, or someone of similar standing, the sort of poet whose lines might appear on the reading lists of school students. I was surprised when I discovered that the lines are from a song called “Robin Hood and the Widow’s Three Sons” which appears in The Oxford Book of Ballads published by Arthur Quiller-Couch in 1910. The first stanza of the ballad goes:

There are twelve months in all the year,
As I hear many men say,
But the merriest month in all the year
Is the merry month of May.

When the stanza is complete, even I knew that it was hardly the work of Keats, not the sort of poetry that would be taught in a classroom. Yet, being a ballad, its pedigree was far more ancient, it was from a source much older than those mostly favoured by school poetry syllabuses.  The song was one of more than three hundred English and Scottish ballads collected by Francis Child during the late-Nineteenth Century.

The song was one that had endured for generations, men in taverns, women at firesides, had raised their voices to sing the lines. Perhaps it was just the alliteration, the repetition of the letter “m,” but perhaps they found, in it, something more, perhaps May really was the best of months for them.

A nonagenarian lady whom I used to know  would have concurred with such a thought. The lady loved the month of May and there was almost a hint of regret when she spoke of the coming of the month of June. The month of June, she would remind me, was the month when the days would turn and the daylight would again begin to shorten.  Perhaps the Edwardian lady shared such a thought.

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Blasted to doom

Posted on 18th May 2021 by Ian

It is thirty years ago today that Helen Sharman became the first British astronaut, joining an expedition to the Mir space station. Sharman was chosen from the 13,000 applications for the place on the mission. The advertisement for applicants reputedly said, “astronaut wanted, no previous experience required.”

Born in 1963, Sharman would have recalled the latter years of the so-called Space Race, the decade and a half when the Soviet Union and the United States vied with each other to be the first to achieve particular goals.

It was details of events during that time that would have dissuaded many people from even thinking of applying for such a mission, even if they possessed the extreme physical and intellectual capacity required for such a role. In plain terms, it was something that seemed extremely dangerous, rockets seemed to go wrong.

Apollo 7 was the first mission that I recall. It was in space during my eighth birthday in October 1968. It was the first manned mission since the Apollo 1 mission the previous year in which the crew of three had died of asphyxiation on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral. Stories of the deaths would have formed a background to the coverage of the Apollo 7 mission and, naturally, it was the story of the disaster that lingered long after the story of the successful mission. Perhaps the story of the tragedy of Apollo 1 was reinforced by the story of the fatal crash in the same year of the Soviet Soyuz 1 spacecraft.

After the successful first moon landing during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, the most memorable Apollo story was that of Apollo 13. The close scrape with fatal disaster seemed to be almost a more gripping tale than Armstrong and Aldrin’s walk on the moon. In more recent times, it is not the succession of Space Shuttle flights that ended safely that remain in the memory, it is the tragedies in 1986 and 2003.

A web search revealed that total of fifteen astronauts and four cosmonauts have died during in-flight accidents, not nearly as many as I imagined. Why do the fatal missions loom so large in the memory? Why did the story of Helen Sherman evoke thoughts of being blasted to doom?

Discussing the activity of “doomscrolling” with Year 8 students last week (an activity that apparently refers to the inclination to scroll through feeds spotting bad news stories), I discovered that human beings are hard-wired to take note of the worst stories, that evolution has fitted us for expecting the worst. It explains my misremembering of the Space Age.

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Pete Hill is 60 today

Posted on 17th May 2021 by Ian

It’s Pete Hill’s birthday.

On Thursday, 17th May 1979, he was 18. His birthday party was at the Red Lion pub, at West Pennard in Somerset.

It was a good party. The DJ played lots of stuff by Blondie. It ran late and, afterwards, Tessa Billinghurst took some of us for a drive in her dad’s shiny new Alfa. We were going to the beach, but stopped at Taunton Deane services for coffee and decided to turn back – it was 5 am on a bright May morning and there was an economics test at 11.

The lines of the test paper ran into each other and the supply and demand curves kept moving around. “This will test those of you who think it is OK to go partying”, said Mr Howe. He was very grumpy when he handed the paper back to me the following week, begrudging me the 81% I had scored.

I have not seen any of them since 15th June 1979; the day the A levels finished. I hope Pete prospered; I always liked him. I hope Tessa, who emailed me from France a dozen years ago, is still succeeding in the career she followed. Tessa was great fun in the short time I knew her and undoubtedly remained so. I hope Mr Howe is still enjoying a well-earned retirement; he taught me most of the lessons in life worth knowing.

Pete is 60 today, probably by now a very different person from the one I knew. I don’t know if the Red Lion is still open; I hope so. I wonder if Tessa still drives shiny sports cars.

Forty-two years later, do the pieces from a long past jigsaw still matter?

Perhaps it’s about choice and possibility; perhaps part of being human is having the capacity to exercise random choices. If Pete and Tessa and Mr Howe were not part of the story; then the random choices they generated would not have been possible. Life would have been less without their presence.

Maybe Pete’s party is about even more than a past possibility. Albert Einstein once expressed the belief that “the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one.” If all of time happens together, then the party is not just about a Thursday evening forty-two years ago, it is part of the present, except, of course, there is no present, as there is no past and no future. Einstein believed that the only reason for time was to stop everything happening all at once – a convenient arrangement as it would mean missing a lot of parties.

Pete’s party was forty-two years ago this evening, or this evening at what seems like forty-two years ago, either way, I’m not going to Taunton Deane services in the morning.

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