Things I Miss #8

In the early 1970s the news media reported a streaking epidemic, streaking being defined as running naked through a public place usually for a dare or as a prank. It appears to have started in the USA but quickly spread to the UK, so soon no major sporting event was complete without a streaker. Several cricket matches were enlivened by streakers, as was a 1974 England v France Rugby Union game when an iconic photograph was taken of the streaker, Michael O'Brien, with his genitals covered by a policeman's helmet. Another notable streaker was Erica Roe at Twickenham in 1982, and her name still resonates among rugby fans. A streaker interrupted the 46th Academy Awards in 1974, causing the host David Niven to remark,  "Isn't it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings?"

In 1974 a novelty song, "The Streak" by Ray Stevens, reached number one in the UK singles chart, with lyrics that included:

"He ain't crude, Boogity, Boogity
He ain't lewd, Boogity, Boogity
He's just in the mood to run in the nude

Oh, yes, they call him the Streak
Boogity, Boogity
He likes to turn the other cheek
Boogity, Boogity
He's always makin' the news
Wearin' just his tennis shoes
Guess you could call him unique."

Things I Miss #7

At my prep school most boys owned a spud gun of some sort. The superior ones were made of metal, while inferior plastic ones were also popular. One dug the barrel into a potato, pumped the grip with one's fist, and used the compressed air to fire the spud pellet at someone or something. There was also a cap-gun version that claimed to fire the spud pellet by means of the explosive discharge from the cap, but I never saw this actually work. The metal version (the "Potato Zapper") also purported to double as a water pistol, but as with the cap-gun, this never actually worked. As raw potatoes were rarely available at school (except, accidently, at meals) one had to make do with an apple.

Things I Miss #6

Before the days of email and Facebook, people used to have to hand-make their party invitations, and either dish them out by hand or through the post. In the days before use of word processors was widespread these were lettered by hand or, if one wanted to be flash, with a typewriter. The office photocopier was surreptitiously used to make copies, sometimes with an amusing photograph or drawing added. I remember using a photograph of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's (where she's using a long cigarette holder) and inking in "LOVE" and "HATE" on her knuckles. For cocktail parties I always used this Osbert Lancaster cartoon.

I remember using the standard abbreviation "PBAB" on an invitation in California and getting concerned phonecalls from American friends asking what it stood for.

Random Memory #8

 In Vienna in the early 1980s my family rented the bottom half of a large two-storeyed villa in Döbling. The villa, painted in Schőnbrunn yellow, had been the childhood home of our landlady, a millionairess in her own right who had married money and, more importantly in Viennese society, married up rather well in terms of the millimetric view of social class that pervades le bon ton  in Vienna. Being freed of the problems of money, she could afford to keep the house and its substantial garden intact (imagine a house in Hampstead with a two-acre garden). The wizened gardener came with the rent, as did a coach-house halfway down the garden, about the size of a semi-detached in Chiswick, wherein the gardener kept his rake and stuff. There were several walnut trees in the garden which I used to harvest out of boredom by hurling heavy bits of wood into the trees, trying not to hit the red squirrel which thought it held domain. The downed walnuts were covered in a green husk, so I had to put them in an annexe of the coach-house to ripen. A month later I went to check on my walnuts to find they were gone. I found the gardener watering one of the rose gardens and asked him what he’d done with the/my walnuts. He told me the millionairess had turned up on a snap inspection of her property and claimed them. 

 My father nicknamed the millionairess "die Gräfin" and my mother, not knowing German, used to refer to her as “die Griffin”.

Things I Miss #5

There was always a Hermes portable typewriter in the house, about 12” square and encased in pale blue, known as a Hermes Baby. I remember reading Joan Didion’s packing list in 1979; it included bourbon and a typewriter. I knew what she meant. I used to see foreign correspondents in African airports, at Schipol, Rome, CDG, Madrid. I learned to touch type on the Hermes, and dreamed of being a foreign correspondent, filing breezy dispatches back from Havana and Kinshasa.

In 1985 at university in California I was told my turgid essays needed to be typed. I enquired at the university library and was told there were two upright Remingtons in a “private study” area in the basement, where the serial killer grad students hung out. They (the typewriters, not the serial killers or grad students) made a splendid clacking sound and looked like something on which I should be hammering out sports stuff: “Mikey Sullivan stepped up to the plate, his pug-ugly mug coulda told a million stories; then he unwound one and sizzled it over the plate and boyaboy was that heard on in at the pickle barrel.”)
I also had to write my student dissertation (“Some Aspects of Travel Writing”) on my Hermes. It was pre memory stick days so I wrote much of it in my head; which I still do, with paragraphs forming in my head.

I tried using a friend’s electric typewriter but found I sometimes typed faster than the golfball could keep up, which I found disconcerting. I sympathised with Philip Larkin writing to Anthony Powell in August 1985, saying how bold it was of Powell to buy an electric typewriter (“the only time I tried one I was scared to death, as it seemed to be running away with me.  I felt as if I’d been put at the controls of Concorde after five minutes tuition”).
 

Random Memory #7

Random memory: my father bought a sailing dinghy and put it on the car's roof rack, and drove from Brightlingsea to Vienna via Calais. I stupidly accompanied him. On nearing the Austrian border he started worrying that he'd have to pay VAT on the boat, and insisted we stop in a layby and make the boat look "used." We did this three times, and I had to make cuts in the boat's keel with my penknife. Appropriately enough, the last time we stopped, it was in a town called Bad Fussing. At the border crossing my father started to bore the Austrian customs official with blather about the boat. When the bloke in the uniform started licking his pencil expectantly, I out-Teutoned him by looking at my watch, tutting, and saying, "Diplomatisch." We were waved through with salutes...

Random Memory #6

I watched a 1979 “road movie” called Radio On by Chris Petit, shot by a German cameraman called Martin Schäfer, in black and white. Half of it was shot in Bristol, in a weird hotel called the Grosvenor which was stranded like a submarine’s conning tower in the middle of Bristol ring road. My friend Gavin and I noticed the hotel said “Bar Lounge” so we popped in for a sherbet. Gavin and I were the only pair of 50 people not in our pyjamas and dressing gowns, as it was a DSS hostel. I asked the barmaid if she knew about its kinematic history and soon realised she was not au fait with das neue Kino. She then perked up a bit and said they’d shot an episode of Softly, Softly in the bar, and Frank Windsor was a gentleman.

 

Random Memory #5

A family friend was, for a short time, “bullfighting correspondent” for the Daily Telegraph. Although never taking part in bullfights himself, he was an aficionado and spent much of his time in the Camargue. He was friends with several cattle breeders, and owned a couple of Camarguais horses. He used to ride out with the local cowboys (gardians) when they were rounding up the cattle. Many of the bulls are exported to Spain as fighting bulls.

The 1974 film of Alistair MacLean’s Caravan to Vaccarès takes place in the Camargue, and features a Provençal-style bullfight. The part of the Westland Widgeon helicopter pilot in the film is played by Graham Hill...

Things I Miss #4

In the late 1960s and early 1970s I remember often in the UK seeing nodding dogs on the rear parcel shelves of Ford Escorts and Hillman Avengers. These were stylised figures of dogs sitting or lying prone, usually made of plastic with some plush-effect covering to simulate fur. The oversized head was separate, contained a heavy weight, and was attached to the dog’s body by a hook. The movement of the car would cause the head to nod and sway.

My maternal grandparents never owned a car but, for some reason, did own a nodding dog. This was kept on the windowsill in the bedroom, and fascinated me. The bedroom had red and pink flock wallpaper, and I remember how the slightly disconcerting feel of the flock was mirrored by the feel of the nodding dog’s “fur.”

I believe that the nodding dog has made a slight comeback as Churchill Insurance now offer a dog in the shape of their “mascot” Churchill, the bulldog.

Nodding dogs are not to be confused with American “bobblehead” dolls or “wobblers”.

Neglected Authors - CLR James

“Our house was superbly situated, exactly behind the wicket. A huge tree on one side and another house on the other limited the view of the ground, but an umpire could have stood at the bedroom window. By standing on a chair a small boy of six could watch practice every afternoon and matches on Saturdays. From the chair also he could mount on to the window-sill and so stretch a groping hand for the books on top of the wardrobe. Thus early the pattern of my life was set.”
 
So begins CLR James’ Beyond a Boundary, possibly the finest book on cricket ever written.
 
James was born on the island of Trinidad in 1901. In 1932 he moved to Nelson in Lancashire, where his friend Learie Constantine (later Baron Constantine of Maraval and Nelson) was playing in the Lancashire Cricket League. James had two manuscripts in his luggage – the autobiography of Constantine, and The Case for West Indian Self Government. With the help of another great cricket writer, Neville Cardus, he obtained work as a cricket reporter on the Manchester Guardian. He also joined the Labour Party and became a leading Marxist theorist, later changing to Trotskyism, finally describing himself only as “a Leninist”.
 
During the 1930s James wrote some of his best-known works of non-fiction, including World Revolution (a history, praised by Trotsky, of the Communist International), and The Black Jacobins (an account of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian revolution).
 
James later moved to the United States where, despite his disapproval of American lack of sportsmanship and fair play, he stayed for twenty years until deported in 1952. In a vain attempt to remain he wrote a study of Herman Melville and had copies of this privately-published book sent to every US Senator. He then lived in Trinidad and Ghana (becoming involved in the Pan African movement) before returning to England, dying in Brixton in 1989.
 
But it is for Beyond a Boundary that James will be best remembered by cricket aficionados. The book's key question is: “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?". James uses this challenge as the basis for describing cricket in an historical and social context, its psychology and aesthetics, the strong influence cricket had on his life, and how cricket meshed with his role in politics and his understanding of issues of class and race. Written with great lyricism, it is full of shrewd analysis, forthright opinions, and fascinating snippets of autobiography.
 
Later James intended to expand these ideas in another book built around an interpretation of photographs of cricketers in action. He wished to investigate here the sculptural dimensions of the game, approaching the player in action as a form of public art, where “man is placed in his social environment in terms of artistic form”; and he was concerned to situate him within a historical tradition which began, in his view, with the shift from sculpture to tragic drama in early Greece.
 
(A version of this post first appeared in The Chap magazine.)

Random Memory #4

Walking into a bar in St Augustine one twilit July with my friend Gavin and noticing a pool table with Florida's answer to Fast Eddie Felson knocking balls around the baize. I asked if he'd care to shoot a stick with me, and, without looking at me, he rubbed his thumb and forefinger together and said, "Cost you twenty." I shrugged nonchalantly, resigning myself to losing $20, and rolled a cue off the rack on the table as if checking it was “true.” We lagged for break and I lost, and he then potted 6 of his 7 balls in a few seconds, didn't have a clear shot on his 7th, so snookered me. I thought, "In for a cent, in for a dollar," and played the riskiest trick shots I could legally get away with. They all came off. (All the time I was thinking of a line of Paul Newman’s in The Color of Money: “Pool excellence is not about excellent pool;” so I walked the table as if I was bored to be playing some hick in a Hawaiian shirt.) As I was lining up for an easy shot on the 8 ball, my opponent picked the ball up, slammed it into the pocket, flicked a $20 bill onto the table, and shouldered his angry way out of the bar. Gavin and I then "owned" the table for the rest of the evening. Walter Tevis' epigraph in 'The Hustler' is from Andrew Marvell's ' The Garden': "... a green thought in a green shade."

Things I Miss #3

In the 1970s there was a brand of American bubble gum called Bazooka Joe. Inside the packet was a piece of paper with a comic strip featuring the eponymous character (wearing a baseball cap and an eyepatch) "and his Gang." There was also an advertisement for a piece of kitsch (a telescope; an ID bracelet; a birthstone pendant; a “real camera). Although my friends and I assiduously collected these tokens, none of us ever sent off for anything nor knew anyone who had. Somewhere in a cupboard I have a small box full of these slips of paper…

From my Commonplace Book

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.

TS Eliot "Burnt Norton"

Things I Miss #1

In the 1970s and 1980s one could not walk down a street without seeing the spool from a broken cassette tape spilling along the pavement and wrapping itself around lampposts and trees. I suppose most were thrown from car windows after getting jammed in cassette players. It was sometimes possible to rewind the tape into the cassette using a hexagonal pencil or a Bic biro.

A friend tells me they were also used for voodoo: one would record onto a blank cassette the person’s name and what ills one hoped would befall them; and then the cassette would be stamped on and the tape left to unravel in the wind and, it was hoped, the enemy’s life would then also begin to unravel…

Random Memory #1

I lived in Nigeria for many years, and the first place I called home was Kano, on the edge of the Sahara. I landed at Kano aerodrome in a BOAC aeroplane in December 1963. Kano aerodrome employed a bird-scarer, a man on a camel with a long trumpet who would amble to the end of the runway and tootle away hoping to scare off the vultures.

A family friend,James, was born a century too late. As my father says, "He should have been here with Lugard." James was an area manager for the Bank of British West Africa and instead of a Land-Rover he successfully put in a chit for three camels. He used to dress in Tuareg clothes and travel around northern Nigeria on his camels visiting the various bank branches. He also used to leave word with my father that he was "off into the blue" and would disappear for two months into the desert. James' Hausa name was Me Rakume, which translates as "Camel Man". His pidgin English name, as he wore a monocle, was "Window for Eye". Apparently he didn't like visitors so if anyone came into his compound he would stride onto the stoep and shout, "State your business!"

I don't remember much of Kano, but vaguely remember other towns in northern Nigeria: Maidugri, Kaduna, Sokoto. I was taken to a durbar where the Emir of Kano's guard of honour galloped up to him and reined in their horses in inches from his throne. The horsemen were wearing chain-mail vests, supposedly handed down from the Crusades. I later found out they were manufactured new in Wolverhampton.