What A Difference A Year Makes

Fragility of health

In January 2004 I had a mini-wake-up heart attack.  A million and more historical events prove to us that a heart-beat of time can change lives, from freak accidents to man-made evil crimes (in peace and war), to unexpected natural disasters or virulent diseases.  But, more mundanely and frequently, the wear and tear of modern life on one’s own body and mind can contribute to life-changing reassessments of priorities.  My own parents and my mother-in-law died over relatively short periods (see blog below.)  Ray my father-in-law’s long slow decline from Alzheimer’s was not an ending anyone would hope for.

Questions, questions

Should I have worked less hard during my career?  Would that have prevented my heart attack in 2004?  Should I have changed my working life more profoundly after the heart attack in order to reflect what I knew about my unhealthy working habits?  

Giving Attention  

All the above questions are of course pointless.  Pointless, I tell you.  The past is a country you cannot revisit; only the present and future can command attention.  And thus, in my newly-retired and philosophical state, I look back on the maelstrom of Christmas 2013 and thank goodness for the impending arrival of 2015.  I’m looking forward to Giving Attention to things I want to give attention to.

So Goodbye to the elements of 2014 – in an order that makes sense to me….

Kitchen transformed....

Game of Life, Dorking/Dorking Halls, Old Tiles,

Hello Dorking.... Farewell Dorking....

Polesden Lacey, Blake Ward, Elgar Ward, Retirement, Box Tree Dinner, Bistro Pierre, Farewell Raymondo, Top Withins, Zaara’s, Ghosts, Johnson Over Jordan, Wolf Hall, Bring Up The Bodies, King Lear, The Likes of Us,

Hailsham, Pevensey Castle, Battle, Sissinghurst, Monks House, Chawton, Paris, Denbie’s, Pericles, University Reunion, Goodbye Work, Recipes, Cooking, Menus, Walking, Northcliffe, Hirst Woods, Canal, Salt’s Mill, Macmillan Cancer Support, Kerry Madden-Lunsford and Norah, the Bronte Parsonage,

The Lancelot-Barr Crew and The Unicorn's Ruin at Saltaire Festival...

Lancelots, Brown-Shelton, Thompsons, Tuffnells, Hickey-Howsons, Boyhood (my film of the year), Houses, Gardens and Abbeys, Hampton Court, Kew Gardens, Wandsworth Common, Tower of London, Wicked, North-South Divide, Margaret Atwood, Owen Jones, Flaxby and RR Donnelly.

Images of New Year's Eve at Bolton Abbey

Many of the above elements will return

More Shakespeare, of course.  And blogging and starting to learn how Facebook works....  Many of the above elements will return and a welcome return they will be.  Family, friends and beautiful places – may there be many more of those memories.  But there are a few nuggets amongst the list that I hope will never return…. Here’s to 2015!

Happy New Year One And All

The Best of Times, the Worst of Times....

As Mr Dickens wrote in the opening of his epic Tale of Two Cities

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way….

One of the best of times.... Come Dine With Me at home....

Becoming an orphan

I was bereaved earlier this year.  Having married in 1986 and therefore able to enjoy parents-in-law, my only remaining “parent-figure” died.  I have had to grow up.
  

Edward Patrick, Annie Elizabeth, Joyce Mary and Raymond

My own father died in 1985, my mother in 1995, my mother-in-law in 2000 and in February 2014 my father-in-law died.  I may blog about Eddie, Anne, Joyce and Ray in the future, but for the moment all I want to reflect on is how privileged I am that I have been able to retire early.  That’s a consequence of my father-in-law’s careful attention to saving up for the future of his daughters.  And a consequence of my good fortune in marrying one of Ray’s daughters.

Beloved brother, wife and sister

Boxing Day

And it was great to catch up with my siblings on Boxing Day at the Black Rock in Wakefield and compare life’s joys and bruises….

Beloved brother with family and niece

"Small cheer and great welcome makes a merry feast." - Balthasar from The Comedy of Errors

Beloved family members with two couples-to-be in the centre - two weddings to look forward to in 2015

My oldest brother enjoyed downtime abroad.

Beloved brother and partner in Madeira

Merry Christmas One And All....

Beginning to Look Back

Looking Back

As 2014 ends, I can only hope 2015 and future years contain less personal trauma. I hope in future years I can compose blogs more regularly and without obscuring too much of what I am truly thinking and feeling. The images below contain (for me) total pleasure and excruciating pain. And also contain (for me) love beyond belief. And some bewilderment. The end of the year is a good time for looking back…. 

Harriet home from India/Nepal, Egypt, goodbye teaching, home from the hills and, in images below, Emily home from Dorking, Kerry and Norah on the Moors, Surrey and the South, Barr-Lancelots, the Tower of London, Fountain's Abbey, the wonderful Margaret Atwood at the Ilkley Literature Festival

Last Christmas

Between October and December 2013 everything changed – in my world, at any rate. Last Christmas felt very fragile but this Christmas, everything feels different. No doubt next Christmas will feel different again. And the one after that. Change happens.

Change and the Illusion of Time Management

Change happens. Constantly. I used to believe in Time Management. But I now think it is a redundant concept. Time cannot be Managed. All that can be managed is what you do and what you say. You give your attention to chosen actions and that attention affects naturally occurring changes, hopefully changing things in a direction you want. Anything you ignore will undergo changes anyway. Because change is a constant. Time marches on. Change happens. Constantly.

Get Everything Done: and still have time to play

So I’ve increasingly over the years tried to live by the following philosophy, espoused by my friend Jane Howson and written about eloquently by Mark Forster: you must Give Attention to the things you want to affect. You can never Manage Time; all you can do is Give Attention to what you do and what you say. Because Change will happen anyway. Give Attention to the things you want to change. As Linda Loman says in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman

attention must be paid.

Resolutions

Approaching 2015 is a time to look back and a time to look forward. Next year I’ll be 55. 55 years before I was born it was 1905 - a lot of Change has happened since 1905. A lot of Change will no doubt happen in 2015.... and in the five years following.... what will 2020 be like? Time will tell. Excelsior!

Odeon Screen Unseen

Riz Ahmed and Jake Gyllenhaal

Take Your Chances

Odeon cinemas have started doing a Screen Unseen scheme where you attend without knowing what you’re about to see.

Last month my family and I saw Nightcrawler with Jake Gyllenhaal as Lou Bloom, an instantly memorable movie character who will be counted alongside Travis Bickle and Michael Corleone as emblems of the corruptions of the age.

Nightcrawler is the disturbing tale of an ambulance-chasing media hound who starts to manipulate the stories he covers. Riz Ahmed as his intern Rick and Rene Russo as news producer Nina are equally brilliant in more tragic roles; they are characters who are equally as culpable as Bloom but are also damaged irreparably by the protagonist’s increasingly evil decisions. It's great to see Riz Ahmed's rise to major films like this after remarkable performances like his bedtime Lion King story scene in 2010's Four Lions. It won't be long before he's a leading man, in my opinion. And I've always enjoyed watching Rene Russo, after scene-stealing in 1993's In The Line Of Fire and being a convincing Frigga in the Thor films.

Rene Russo

Lighting and editing

In some ways Nightcrawler reminded me of a 1970s art-house film, lit like an urban noir and with editing rhythms that produced an accelerating tension. The ending – where there is plenty of smiling and ‘pep-talk’ is as chilling as anything I’ve seen at the cinema in recent years.

Whiplash

This month we were also lucky to see Whiplash, a film I might not have chosen to see but was glad it was offered to me by Screen Unseen.

Two brilliant central performances

Another terrific but disturbing film. Starting with a black screen and the sound of a neurotic drum roll that starts as if played by a child, gradually becoming military and then turning into a sublime performance of superhuman speed, the sound acts as a metaphor of my journey with this film in the cinema – I felt innocent at first (thinking I was watching Fame, then Full Metal Jacket for drummers and finally Amadeus-meets-Drumline. With two brilliant central performances and switches of tone that induced breathless emotional effects, I would recommend this film to anyone who admires intense acting, character-driven films or films about svengali-like teachers. Or indeed anyone who appreciates fine percussion or jazz music. 

JK Simmons and Miles Teller in brilliant performances

Academy Awards?

JK Simmons may well be nominated for an acting Oscar, though most people would want his character to be hauled before a judge and jury and sentenced to painful hard labour. Miles Teller is horribly believable as a gauche prodigy with family issues, and an unattractive stubbornness – but he occasionally smiles with tender hope and you root for him. Would you want to be his friend or girlfriend? Probably not. If I were in charge of the Academy Awards it would receive Oscars for Film Editing, Music Score and Original Screenplay. JK Simmons and Miles Teller will, though, I expect, be competing with Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo for acting honours in the next awards season. Good luck to them all.   

Thanks, Odeon Screen Unseen for prompting me to see these two memorable films.

I shall lose my life for want of language

The Renaissance 
Just as the visual arts in Italy gave Europe a High Renaissance 1490 to 1530, so England produced a Language Flowering 1580 to 1625 during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. This period turned the remnants of Middle English into Early Modern English and the wordsmiths were fed hungrily and fed each other with a kaleidoscope of utterances as a result of:

• the expansion of printing
• the import from abroad of goods, ideas and foreign phrases
• the agitations and traumas of the religious and parliamentary schisms

It was essential, as Warwick advises Henry IV, that

                             ....to gain the language

‘Tis needful that the most immodest word

Be looked upon and learn’t

Influences on Language in Jacobethan times

Shakespeare’s contemporaries
Hugh Craig in the Shakespeare Quarterly Spring 2011 reported admirable computer-based research on a good number of Shakespeare’s fellow writers to compare how many unique words they used. Guess what? Shakespeare didn’t come first! Does this diminish him? Not in my book. It just shows in what an extraordinary linguistic cauldron he was living. Shakespeare came SEVENTH!  After Webster, Dekker, Peele, Marlowe, Jonson and Greene. Shakespeare’s vocabulary numbers are often quoted as HIGHER simply because of the VOLUME of work he produced. But if you only count the average numbers of UNIQUE words, then Shakespeare is by no means top.

Marlowe, Webster, Dekker, Peele, Jonson and Greene

How crucial was a university education? (Not a lot!)
Not only that, but the snobs who deride Shakespeare’s authorship because he didn’t go to university should be flabbergasted to know that John Webster, the most linguistically able of the Jacobethan playwrights  didn’t go to university either. He was a coach-maker’s son. Ben Jonson, prisoner, mercenary and bricklayer as well as playwright, who teased Shakespeare about his classical learning, also never made it to university. Going to university (then and now) was no guarantee of linguistic ability, talent or common sense.

Commemorative stamps: Tennant, Sher, Oyelowo, Scofield, Kestleman, Annis, McKellen

Greater than the sum
Aristotle’s Metphysica contains the concept that the Whole is Greater than the Sum of its Parts. That’s the way I feel about Shakespeare. Knowing that he didn’t go to university, knowing that he suffered family tragedy, knowing that he got tangled up in financial disputes, knowing that he nicked a lot of his material, knowing that some bits of his work are vulgar or rubbish, knowing that he didn’t use as many unique words as six other writers at the time – all these factors make him more culpably human. Or should I say admirably human? Or vulnerably human? Or disgustingly human? Or splendidly human? Or just human? His soundscapes and landscapes seduce me and inspire me. Because if nothing else his work shows the many sides of everything it is to be human.

He was “not of an age but for all time!”
Ben Jonson’s words (in the subheading above) in the Preface to the First Folio speak truth. Parolles in All's Well That Ends Well says “I shall lose my life for want of language.” I say I don’t know how my life would be without Master Shakespeare. After my family and friends, he is the greatest love of my life. Sad, maybe, but true.

Suit the action to the word

It’s not what you’ve GOT, it’s what you DO with it

Despite stealing most of his plots from other books, Shakespeare’s linguistic reputation relates to what he does with his sources, what he does with the language, how he portrays characters in action and how he reveals issues and themes in narratives that thrill and delight 400 years later. THAT’S the nature of his GENIUS.

For Example: Mercutio, Jacques, Malvolio, Aaron

Mercutio is mentioned in Shakespeare’s source for Romeo and Juliet but is in no way like the brilliantly funny, meteoric and doomed character in the play we now have. Certain characters appear to be completely original but they are essential to the texture of the plays we know, especially when staged: Jacques in As You Like It, Malvolio in Twelfth Night and the baby-loving Aaron in Titus Andronicus - all original characters.

Ben Affleck as Mercutio, Alan Rickman as Jacques, Tim Crouch as Malvolio, Harry Lennix as Aaron the Moor with Jessica Lange as Tamora, Queen of the Goths

A Source and What Shakespeare Did
Plutarch’s version of Cleopatra’s barge-ride (translated – from a French version by Amyot – in 1579 by Thomas North) is pretty good writing:

. . . she disdained to set forth otherwise, but to take her barge in the river of Cydnus, the poop whereof was of gold, the sails of purple, and the oars of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sound of the music of flutes, oboes, citherns, viols, and such other instruments as they played upon in the barge. And now for the person of her self: she was laid under a pavilion of cloth of gold of tissue, appareled and attired like the goddess Venus, commonly drawn in picture: and hard by her, on either hand of her, pretty fair boys appareled as painters do set forth god Cupid, with little fans in their hands, with the which they fanned wind upon her. 

And this is what my hero did with North's/Aymot's/Plutarch's prose in Antony and Cleopatra:

The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
Burnt on the water. The poop was beaten gold,
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar'd all description: she did lie
In her pavilion – cloth-of-gold of tissue – 
O'er picturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature. On each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-color'd fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did.

Images of Cleopatra, including Harriet Walter and Kim Cattrall

Copyright?
He’d be in trouble with copyright laws today, but doesn’t it make you gasp? The sheer hutzpah!  And how brilliant, in comparison with the original, are phrases like “Burnt on the water.… Purple the sails…. winds were love-sick…. to the tune of flutes kept stroke…. It beggar’d all description…. pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids…. glow the delicate cheeks….” And the use of the blank verse, the bold opening of “The barge she sat in….”? The way the rhythm pulls like the pulling of oars on a river? The way this speech is given to the semi-cynic Enobarbus, so it does, indeed, beggar all description? Sheer genius!

Elizabeth Taylor, beggaring all description....

Jackdaw Collaborator

Robber and partner
We know (from academic comparisons and now computer analysis) that chunks of Shakespeare’s work was adapted, sometimes closely (nicked you might say), from the works of other writers: Plutarch, Plautus, Holinshed, Arthur Brooke, Thomas Lodge, Robert Greene, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Chaucer to name the most obvious and famous examples. Shakespeare was a jackdaw writer, stealing fragments, adapting plots, robbing motifs and plot devices. We know also that he was a collaborator, working without doubt on some plays with Middleton, Fletcher and George Wilkins. (Possibly Marlowe, Nashe, Peele and Munday too.) (Let me know if you want the evidence for any of the statements in this paragraph….) This doesn’t lessen his achievement in my eyes. Michelin star chefs are not thought rubbish because they use ingredients that have been used before….

Collaborators and writers of Shakespeare's source material

It’s not what you’ve got, it’s what you do with it
Stealing from others for creative and artistic reasons is not a cop-out. As one of my favourite writers, Alan Garner, memorably wrote: “Originality is the personal colouring of existing themes.” Shakespeare’s linguistic reputation relates to what he does with his sources, what he does with the language, how he portrays characters in action and how he reveals the themes and issues in stories that thrill, surprise and delight 400 years later. Poor vocabulary, maybe, in comparison with a modern reader; but, oh my, the way he puts those words together.

You taught me language and my profit on’t is
I know how to curse…. 

Shakespeare Apocrypha.... yes, bits of Macbeth were probably not by WS.....

You Taught Me Language....

To Infinity and Beyond - quick number summary

With 200 words – you can survive (toddler language)
With 850 words – you can thrive (competent 8 year old)
2000 words – the total used by the average modern-day Jill or Joe (teenager base words)
With 4000 words – the Janet or John who reads will function successfully (educated teenager base words)
12,000 to 17,000 words – the number of base words used regularly by a modern adult with average intelligence
25,000 words – popular writers with numerous works
50,000 to 75,000 words – ALL the words known by a modern adult including all the plurals, negatives, derivations, declensions and conjugations (for example counting "is," "was" and "wasn't" as well as "be") [Some of these words will never be spoken but they will be understood when seen or heard in context.]

28,829 words....
My big reveal is that Shakespeare in fact used FEWER words than the number known and understood by many educated modern adults. He used over 65,000 words (compared to 75,000 for the highest ranking modern person) if you count all variations. With the help of computer technology, we now know he used 28,829 unique word forms and 12,493 of those words forms occur only once.  Interestingly, the top 100 most frequently occurring words (the same 100 words back in Jacobethan times as in modern times) make up 53.9% of his entire output.  Put another way, 50% of Shakespeare's work is made up of language used by the average modern 2 year old.

Not such a hot shot linguist then?
Anti-Stratfordians sometimes argue that Shakespeare’s lack of a university education is evidence that the son of a glover and a brewer descended from farming stock in the Midlands could not write the works in the First Folio.  But as I have demonstrated above, around 50% of his work is very simple, basic English.

I shall remember this bold language

Superhero-use of vocabulary

In the television series Heroes one of the characters in Season One says “you don’t have to have superpowers to be a hero.” Why is Shakespeare a hero of mine? Well, apart from

• the income generated for the country by Shakespeare tourism and culture
• the endless types of characters and plots he created that scriptwriters and other artists are still inspired by 
• the vast numbers and the scope of the themes in his plays and
• the memorable words and phrases he recorded

I'm also in awe of My Boy Bill’s superhero-use of vocabulary.

From 200 to 4,000 spoken words

A child between the ages of 2 and 3 rapidly picks up about 200 words to survive and thrive when speaking. 850 is the widely-agreed number of words in Basic English – the number that all native speakers have been shown to be able to recognize, use and understand. A less-educated rarely-reading adult eventually speaks between 2000 words and 4000 words, depending on the type of reading they do (this number is of base words, not declensions, conjugations and variations.)

If you count reading and writing, the numbers go up: 50,000 and counting

A native adult can recognize about 12,000 base words and a regular reader will take pleasure in being able to use about 17,000 words. If you count all the derivations of base words the numbers known and understood goes up to 50,000 but not all of these are actively used in either writing or speech. (Camp is a base word but it doubles if you count the noun and the verb and then quadruples if you count the subtle differences between different meanings; using “camp” to mean an iron age fort is not so familiar a noun as the verb “to camp” meaning to put a tent up and stay in it for a bit….! And as for the meanings of “camp” associated with flamboyant cultural excess, well you can see the complications of counting vocabulary use….)  

Shakespeare did not understand a Freudian slip (although they appear in his plays)

David Crystal suggests 50,000 to 75,000 is the kind of number an educated, native, 21st century reader of English would know and understand (even if they didn't use most of them.) Many of those words, of course, are based on inventions, substances, concepts and neologisms created since Shakespeare’s death in 1616. We can forgive Shakespeare if he would not recognize the words iPod or lycra or Watergate/Plebgate or Pluto (as a planet – or dwarf planet – or minor planet – even new nouns shift meaning on a daily basis.)  

David and Ben Crystal's fine book

Academic word counting

Computer technology has now allowed researchers to track with some accuracy the vocabulary in the works of different writers around the world. Average writers in any language in any era notch up around 20,000 to 25,000 words – and they are the ones who produce popular and extensive catalogues of work. Shakespeare’s total vocabulary is not actually as impressive and extensive as many people think - it's not the number of words he used that mattered - it's HOW and WHY he used them the way he did that makes him a hero to me.
 

Something Rich and Strange

Time and Space

Retirement is a strange experience for me. Now I wonder how I ever managed to fit work into the day during my working years. What with catching up with friends, rediscovering the British countryside, trying to get fitter, reading and writing, decluttering the house, learning new recipes, cooking and cleaning, watching TIVO and Netflix, going to the cinema, playing piano, doing jigsaws, training my body to sleep properly…. And realising that, although I thought I was pretty well informed about the Man from Stratford, Planet Shakespeare remains a wonderful place to explore in life and dreams….

The collapsing shelves

The clearest analogy I have of my working life as a teacher is that my brain was filled with stacks and stacks of bookshelves and each one had to be read or edited. The books were piled up to the ceiling of my mind, most of them double-stacked, some of them triple-stacked, and as each academic year went on the piles got crazier, got wobblier, got more precarious and definitely in danger of falling. The shelves were ready to collapse at any moment and destroy my body, heart and soul. In the months since retirement, the shelves have been emptying. They’re being dusted down and I’m starting to rearrange my prized possessions on them. Shakespeare’s presence is a great retirement comfort. Was anyone more creative with language than Shakespeare?

With thanks to Bernard Levin, Robert Demeger and Assemblies "What I Wrote" for school....

If you cannot understand my argument and declare "It's all Greek to me!" then you are quoting Shakespeare. If you claim to be more sinned against than sinning or if you recall your salad days when you were green in judgement, you are quoting Shakespeare. If you act more in sorrow than in anger, if your wish is father to the thought, if your lost property has vanished into air, into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare. Of those phrases, "lost property" is probably the most common and it is quite true that it may have been spoken before Shakespeare used it, but it was in The First Folio that the phrase was recorded in print for the first time.

A-Level Language students know that it is when words start to appear in print that they really spread locally, nationally and internationally. No-one had used the word assassination in English Literature before Shakespeare did in Macbeth, the word assassin having its origins in 8th century Arabic – but it was Shakespeare who turned the individual killer, assassin, into an abstract noun meaning the whole event – “assassination.”

Other words that Shakespeare coined that are still in everyday use today are even-handed, far-off, hot-blooded, schooldays, well-respected, useful, moonbeam and even subcontract. We wouldn’t have the word accommodation without Shakespeare, nor abstemious, discontent, or reinforcement.

If you have ever refused to budge an inch, or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, been tongue-tied, been a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle. If you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play or not slept a wink, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool’s paradise – why, be that as it may, the more fool you, it’s a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it and as happy as the day is long) quoting Shakespeare. Even film titles steal phrases from him – Murder Most Foul, The Darling Buds of May, Under the Greenwood Tree, What Dreams May Come, Band of Brothers, The Dogs of War, The Evil that Men Do, All Our Yesterdays, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Sound and the Fury, Brave New World, This Rough Magic, Cakes and Ale, Journey’s End, All’s Well That Ends Well, To Be Or Not To Be, Something Rich and Strange.

Even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I was as dead as a doornail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing-stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot! Then – by Jove!  Tut! Tut! For goodness sake! What the dickens! But me no buts! It’s all one to me! These words and phrases are all creative writing nuggets from the quilled pen of Shakespeare.

Chubbing as a nipper

Childhood freedom

As a child growing up in the 1960s on the Eastmoor Estate in Wakefield, my playground consisted of fields, dens, paths, bushes, trees, woods, a canal, a river, bridges, haunted ruins, marshes, bonfires…. On days out, my eldest brother would take me, my mum and sister to places like Brimham Rocks in North Yorkshire, a weird and atmospheric collection of rocks on the moors near Pateley Bridge. Another day might be spent exploring the ruins of the great northern abbeys – Byland, Fountains, Jervaulx, Kirkstall, Riveaulx and Roche. In winter laking out* might mean involving two gangs playing Kick Out Can in the smog-riddled ginnels** and gardens of the estate.

*laking out = playing out from the Old Norse laik – “to play”

**ginnels = snickets, alleyways

Bonfire night

TV for children was limited, computers were non-existent and so running free seemed to be the only way to live – but back for tea or for bed! Friendships, loyalties, enemies and rivalries were passionate, none more so than around bonfire night when rival gangs went chubbing*** and then jealously guarded their huge bonfires. It was a great honour to be on guard duty, especially if you were a nipper**** and you were paired up with one of the older lads. 

***chubbing = scrounging for stuff to burn on the street bonfire

****nipper = small kid

Chubbing in the 1960s. Photo property of Bill Bullock.

The giant stack – ElfNSafety nightmare
Modern health and safety regulations wouldn’t tolerate the sorts of bonfire night I remember from childhood.  The centre pole was usually an abandoned telegraph pole with discarded railway sleepers stacked around it.  Linton Road householders would shove in broken cupboards, old sofas and discarded toys so the stack looked like an immense wigwam jumble sale.  Whether the urban myth was true – that one year, one boy was burned to death because he fell asleep when on guard – I never found out.  But the nearest Saturday to November 5th always saw the conflagration go up with a roar.

A local bonfire stack that wouldn't be allowed these days

Tasty treats

Pork pies, mushy peas, baked potatoes, parkin and “bonfire toffee” appeared with paper cups of pop from the Corona van – dandelion and burdock, cola, lemonade, orangeade, cream soda, limeade, cherryade. Some “taties” were cooked on sticks in the fire itself. Did the mums all have a planning meeting to coordinate all the food and drink?

Are the memories true?

Every year someone was burned with a banger and every year someone had to stay up through the night until the embers were safe to leave. Was it really as wild and pagan as my memory conjures? Or have the phantom dangers of childhood conjured a more feral existence than really happened?