The spirit of Scud FM lives on!

Posted on 10th February 2021 by Ian

Those who remember the First Gulf War will recall that news coverage of the allied campaign that began in January 1991 differed considerably from the coverage of the Falkands War that had been fought just nine years previously. Being in the main city of the Philippines, Manila as the first allied air raids commenced, there was a strange sense of the world shrinking as CNN carried live reports of the military action. It was very different from the pre-packaged broadcasts from the South Atlantic.

The most vivid memory of the war is of my mother phoning to say that my father had departed for the Gulf. It seemed incomprehensible, he was fifty-four years old and had left the Fleet Air Arm in the 1960s. It seemed that the Royal Air Force was so short of groundcrew that civilian technicians like my father we asked to go to work at one of the bases from which the RAF was flying. My mother was convinced that he was bound for Dhahran in Saudi Arabia. Someone in the RAF to whom I spoke thought it more likely that the civilians would be deployed in Cyprus, in a reserve capacity. As it was, he had travelled no further than an Italian base in Sicily when the conflict ended.

The personal connection gave me a much more keen interest in the coverage of the closing days of the conflict. The BBC focus for coverage of news of the war was Radio 4 FM. It became known as “Scud FM,” Scud being the name of the missiles used by the Iraqi forces against the allied advance.

When Saddam’s forces were driven from Kuwait, the allied offensive halted and there were no further “breaking news” stories. However, Scud FM had become used to resources and airtime and did not wish to return to peacetime allocations. One cartoon showed allied soldiers outside of the studios shouting to those inside, “come out, the war is over!”

So it is with Covid-19. “Follow the money,” would say an economist and writer I knew in Dublin. Follow the money now and billions are being poured into particular departments, ministers have gained unprecedented powers. Once it has been given, it is hard to take back money and influence. People do not readily relinquish budgets and authority.

In the coming months there will be an ongoing struggle unconnected with clinical realities between those reluctant to return their former low profile positions and those shouting at them that the war is over.

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Thank you for the music

Posted on 9th February 2021 by Ian

News of the death of Mary Wilson brought memories of the many happy hours spent listening to The Supremes, to Mary Wilson, Florence Ballard and Diana Ross.

To be a working class teenage boy in late-1970s Somerset and to like The Supremes meant being in a small minority. There were certainly Northern Soul fans around, I remember people with “Wigan Casino” written on their pencil cases, but their music was much more niche. Groups that enjoyed commercial success did not tend to find favour with the Northern Soul fraternity, and there were few soul groups that enjoyed greater commercial success than The Supremes. Friends at sixth form college liked heavy rock, they liked Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, or they were fans of music from the punk and New Wave groups. To have admitted a liking for the sound of Wilson, Ballard and Ross would have invited derision from those with a taste for the sort of music one would expect at a college within walking distance of Glastonbury.

What is baffling at a remove of more than forty years is how I came by records from the early years of The Supremes. I would have been too young to have bought the records when they were first released in the earl-1960s, yet by late teenage years I had acquired a pile of seven inch singles by The Supremes. It escapes me where a teenage boy in rural Somerset might have bought records from more than a decade previously. Were there record shops that sold second-hand records? Perhaps they had been bought from a market stall. In times when online purchases were twenty years away, there were not many options available.

In those distant days, I used to think that the records I had were collectors’ pieces. I had records by The Supremes on the Stateside label, in the years before they were a Tamla Motown group. I used to imagine that one day my liking for their songs would make me lots of money as I sold off the singles. Of course, the arrival of the Internet, and particularly of eBay would reveal the naivete of those teenage imaginings. When adjusting for inflation over a period of almost sixty years, the records have probably shown no appreciation whatsoever in value, there were so many of them pressed.

However, the monetary value never really mattered, the delight of listening to those songs was greater than anything I could have spent. The sound of The Supremes was the sound of optimism and happiness and bad dancing around the living room. It was a place of escape for a teenage boy who struggled with the world in which he lived.

Thank you, Mary Wilson, for all of the smiling moments.

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Cold days

Posted on 8th February 2021 by Ian

There being few students in school and there being a requirement for doors and windows to be opened, the business manager seems to have curtailed the hours during which the school heating is allowed to be turned on. By eleven o’clock, the radiators are reduced to a faint lukewarmness.

The weather forecast suggested a sub-zero wind chill, so I made sure to take a warm coat and scarf for the day’s lessons. But, in mid-morning, there came a moment of delight, apparently a plumber was servicing the system, it required the heating to be fully turned on. The radiators in my room had never been so warm

When I was young, being cold was normal. There was a fire lit in the living room on a daily basis. Sometimes, not often, the kitchen fire might also have been lit. In the bathroom, which was downstairs, there was a paraffin heater that was lit while we washed; but on cold nights, it had to go outside to ensure the pipes in the toilet did not freeze. The other rooms were unheated.

The purchase of a big grey convector heater was a great boon, although it could not be used on a casual basis. In 1972, four electric storage heaters were fitted in our three bedroomed council house, and the toilet was moved inside. It seemed the most cosy house in England, we still had to go downstairs to the toilet, but it no longer had a seat that chilled the flesh.

In the years of ministry in parishes, the cold moments returned. Half of the thirty years were spent in buildings from former times, big rambling glebe houses, dating from times when servants were a customary part of life, it was impossible to keep more than a handful of rooms at a tolerable temperature. People in the parishes regarded the oversized buildings as part of the heritage of the community and many thought clergy should regard themselves as privileged to be living in such houses, had they experienced the places on winter mornings, they might have revised their opinion.

Perhaps the advancing years have caused the blood to thin, or the metabolism to slow down, but there has developed an aversion to the cold. It is not hard to understand why so many people moved to Spain upon retirement, it wasn’t about flamenco or sangria, it wasn’t about beaches or bars, it was just about being warm.

It is not the snow that is the real problem, although it may be mildly inconvenient, it is the cold. It is the chill that penetrates to the bones, and that leaves the whole body shivering.

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In the midst of life

Posted on 7th February 2021 by Ian

Clive James’ The Fire of Joy was his last work, completed in 2019 against a background theme of his terminal illness. The book’s subtitle is, “Roughly eighty poems to get by heart and say aloud.” Never having the capacity to recall poetry more complex than the simplest doggerel, and never having been in a context where people recited poetry, I have made no attempt at learning the lines.

In the postscript to the book, “Growing up in poetical Australia,” Clive James reflects on the poetry he encountered in his youth and ponders how it reflected the vast absence that constitutes much of Australia. He concludes “When I myself come back, it will be in a box of ashes.”

Aware of his impending death, his earlier passing reference to lines from Harry Hooton is an allusion with a deep poignancy. The lines are quoted within the context of a brief discussion of Australian poets, he does not expand upon the brief poem:

In the midst of life
We are in Perth.

The idea that life in Western Australia equated to death might not have been popular with the inhabitants of the city at the time of Hooton. How readily would the allusion now be understood?

The community in which I grew up would have been minutely small compared to the hugeness of Australia, but when you live your life within a few miles of where you are born, then ten miles can seem as distant as a hundred miles or a thousand miles. There was a sense of isolation as deep as may have been felt in the sort of place where Clive James suggests a dog changing its position in the afternoon sun is noteworthy.

Perhaps such isolation created a shared sense of meanings. My family never went to church, ever, yet we would have understood Hooton’s words, we would have known they were from the funeral service. Perhaps from books, perhaps from television dramas, perhaps from skimming through the prayer books the old clergyman brought into the classroom on a Friday morning (The Burial of the Dead was much more interesting than the Catechism).

It seems likely now that words from the Sixteenth Century services of the Church of England have no more meaning for most people than references to classical literature have for those who like myself never read the classics.

In the midst of life, we are where? In times of remote lessons, the answer I would probably receive in the chat box is “idk.”

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Rolling westward

Posted on 6th February 2021 by Ian

A GWR train from Paddington rolled across the bridge, it appeared entirely empty. In these strange times, trains seem to run without passengers.

The train was a far remove from the British Rail Western Region locomotive that would haul a train from Paddington into Taunton station, where those on the platform would include boys returning to their Dartmoor school.

The station announcer would tell us, “The next train from Platform 2 will be the 1404 service to Penzance, stopping at Tiverton Parkway, Exeter St David’s, Newton Abbot, Totnes, Plymouth, Saltash, St Germans, Liskeard, Bodmin Road, Par, St Austell, Truro, Redruth, Hayle, St Erth and Penzance.”

However gloomy we may have felt, there was poetry in the announcement of the coming departure.

It was always a source of intrigue that the number of stops west of the Tamar was double the number in Devon, not that we would be seeing any of them; the carriage reserved for our return to school would empty at Exeter St David’s, a mere two stops away.

Perhaps there would have been a chink in the gloom if we had travelled on a Paignton train instead of a Penzance one; it would have stopped at Exeter St David’s and Newton Abbot, but would have taken us through Exeter St Thomas, Starcross, Dawlish Warren, Dawlish and Teignmouth, before reaching Newton Abbot, the station closest to our Dartmoor destination. A Paignton train would have allowed a pondering of Starcross, a station name worthy of a place in a novel, and a journey along the Exe Estuary and the sea wall at Dawlish.

Of course, the places were no more poetic than any other town or village in the south-west of England, (which means many were very pretty, yet no more so than their neighbouring settlements); but it was the railway that endowed them with an aura of mystique. The crackling into life of the 1970s public address system; the accelerating rhythm of the announcer’s voice as he listed the stations, drawing to a sharp stop at Penzance; and then the heavy silence as we waited.

There would be a humming sound from the rails as the diesel locomotive approached, rolling into the station as it drew a long train of carriages; open plan ones in the spirit of 1970s egalitarianism (had we travelled from Yeovil Junction to Exeter, we might have caught a compartment train, with its potential for considerably greater teenage mischief).

The doors at the end of the carriages were opened by sliding down the window and leaning out to reach the door handle. As the carriages passed, a teacher’s head would appear through a door window, eagle eyed as he looked out for the small knot of boys who would complete the school party. Last on the train meant sitting with people no-one else wanted to sit beside, but that somehow captured the dejection of the moment.

Yet, were it not for the train, the experience would almost certainly have long since faded from the memory; how many road journeys do we ever remember? Travelling by rail seemed somehow to heighten the experience, to place it in a grander, more dramatic context, to turn moments that were gloomily prosaic into times that became deeply imprinted upon the memory. Could there have been a sense of anything poetic catching a National Express coach or travelling in our Austin Cambridge car?

The platform at Taunton was a connection with something greater, it gave a sense of being part of something with direction and purpose, not that teenage boys could ever have articulated such thoughts.

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