Teddy's Life. A Giant of a Man

The year was 1968, and about four months before Christmas I moved into my furnished bed sitting room.  My first time away from Mum and Dad.  Of course I still saw them once a week when I went for Sunday lunch and did my washing.  (I know what you are thinking.  No, I used the Launderette next to my watering hole, The Sudeley Arms, where I could be sure of bumping into friends while my smalls were tumbling and spinning)  Some of my friends had that effect on me when I was twenty-two!

Christmas approached, and I imagined the feast that Mum and Dad would put on for us.  Turkey and all the trimmings, Christmas Pudding, and Trifle for Christmas Tea.

Calamity!  A couple of days before Christmas, my parents phoned to tell me to stay away.  They had both got flu.  They would be staying in bed.  I was not to go anywhere near them.

So I went shopping.  A powdered curry reconstituted with water, a half bottle of German Riesling, and an individual fruit Christmas Pudding.

I should mention that my bedsit was in a very large 200 year-old house overlooking the Park.  My ex-Polish landlord Teddy, and his family, and his wife's family and children, and two other people of my age all lived under the same roof.

One other thing about Teddy.  He had a tattoo on his arm.  It was a number.  Once, when we were by ourselves in the house, he explained that he had been a slave worker in Auschwitz for six months at the end of the War.  He told me a lot more, too, but it wasn't the sort of thing I'd want to write about here.  He was a lovely man, the sort of person you feel better for knowing.

Just as I was serving up my Christmas mini feast, there was a knock on the door.  In came Teddy.

"What are you doing here?  Why aren't you at home with your parents?"

I told him what had happened

"Oh dear!  I'm afraid I need your chair" he said, as he took my only dining chair and disappeared down the stairs.

I was destined to have a Perpendicular Christmas Dinner.

The door opened again.

"Well, come on!" he said, "I need someone to sit in it!"

So I followed him downstairs into the very elegant dining room, and he directed me to my chair.  There were three in his family around the table, as well as another four in his brother-in-law's family, two or three cousins, two or three friends, and four people from off the street.  Including me, about seventeen or eighteen of us sat down to a full Christmas dinner featuring a large roast goose.

It was quite remarkable.  I was reminded of it a few weeks ago, when I had a signed print reframed.  He gave it to me when I left his house to go to University.  He did not want it, and it was a good luck present from him to me.  Whenever I see it I am reminded of a very kind man who lived a very different life to my way of life at the same age, and his wife Renee, who both gave me such wonderful memories of a very special and unusual day!

Last Night I had a Dream

Last night I had a dream.

I was a boy of eleven again, and I was with my parents.  After our teatime picnic somewhere in the New Forest, Dad suggested that we head for Southampton Water as he had read that there were lots of ships in the Port of Southampton that evening.

Just as the Golden Hour was upon us, at about the time of sunset, we joined a friend with a small boat at Totton, then sailed down to Hythe Pier and back.  Back in 1957 there were no container ships and no container terminals.  There weren't many planes, either.  Those that had to travel, travelled by ship.

A series of ships with white hulls and yellow funnels were moored one behind the other in the New Docks.  These were vessels of the P&O and the Orient Lines.  All of them were moored in a straight line, bow to stern along the mile-long quay.

In those days, the local papers used to have a column giving dates, ship names, shipping lines, destinations, and sometimes even cargoes, so a small boy had much to dream about as he read the Shipping News.

Our little boat sailed down the River Test, past these huge liners, some of which were preparing for six- or even eight-week voyages.  The Chusan was in-bound from Singapore via the Suez Canal, while the sharp-eyed would notice the little blue flag with the white square flying from the bridge of the Orcades that denoted she would sail within the hour for the Mediterranean, Suez Canal, Aden and India.

Also outbound, but not until after dark, the Ocean Monarch of the Shaw Savill line made ready for her long journey through the Panama Canal and across the Pacific to Sydney, Australia.

The light was fading quite rapidly now as we passed two Union Castle Liners.

The Durban Castle and the Edinburgh Castle were smart as paint with their lavender hulls twinkling with the fairylights of the portholes, and their large floodlit red funnels with the black tops.

A Red Funnel ferry fussed out of the Town Quay on its way down Southampton Water to Cowes on the Isle of Wight.  Red Funnel was also the company that supplied the tugs at Southampton.  In the days before fancy devices like bowthrusters were invented, tugs had to manoeuvre the large vessels until they were going fast enough to steer by themselves.

Easily larger than the others, the Queen Elizabeth, of the Cunard Line was at the Ocean Terminal.  There was a deep sonorous note from her foghorn and she began to move!  She was outbound for New York, and would be there in about six days time.  She, too, had her two red and black funnels floodlit, and twinkles of lights in her black hull and white superstructure.  Soon, her passengers, film stars, politicians and businessmen would take their places at some of the many onboard restaurants as the ship sailed round the Isle of Wight.  She had four tugs round her, like a mother hen and her chicks.  There was a tug at the front, one at each side, and one at the stern, facing the other way to keep her straight.  They were soon discarded.

It was now dark and we were below Hythe Pier, almost as far as the huge Warsash Naval Hospital.

A wonderful sight!  The two-funnelled Queen Elizabeth, having discarded her tugs, disappeared down Southampton Water, and as she did so, the three-funnelled Queen Mary, inbound from New York, passed each other.

We turned round and headed back to Totton, past the "Mary", which was berthing at the Ocean Terminal.  Past the Orcades as she began her long voyage to India.  We passed the other liners, everyone a mass of lights, until we got back to Totton.

I remember it as if it were yesterday.

Thinking about it, it was, when I was fast asleep.

What a shame digital cameras had not been invented when I was a boy.

Hydrogen for power

Hydrogen we are told is the miracle fuel.  You see, when it burns, you don't get any nasty carbon dioxide.  All you get is lovely clean water.

However . . .

ll those of you who are older than a certain pre-computer age, you will remember the spirit duplicator.  Without going into the technicalities, you put what you wanted to print into the duplicator, wound the handle, and out came some damp pages with fuzzy violet writing on them.  I say, writing, because you could hand write on them.

I mention this, because in my year 9 Chemistry exam we were given our papers, but before we could get started, a very embarrassed Chemistry teacher announced that

"Question 4 is not very clear.  It should read "What is a fuel?". 

What a swizz!  It clearly said "What is a Fuck?"  This rapidly went round the classroom producing "fucks" all over the place.

The following week, the marked papers came back.  Question 4 had not been done very well at all.  Our teacher said that a fuel was something that could be changed to something else and give out heat.

None of us seem to have learned much at all since that day, but the sad fact is, that if you want to produce energy, you nearly always have to use fuel, and that fuel heats up the planet.

If you take a glass of water, you have zillions of atoms of oxygen joined on to two zillion atoms of hydrogen.  You need quite a lot of energy to separate them into the separate gases, molecules of oxygen and molecules of hydrogen.

You separate the two gases, and then you burn your one zillion hydrogen molecules (two zillion hydrogen atoms) in oxygen to form water and heat.

Hydrogen is a fuel, and far from being the wonder of the century, we are still fucked up.  Big time.

So what can we do?  Well, there are just too many people on the planet.  We could kill off the baby boomers, but as a boomer, I have to tell you I would resent that solution.

We need to grow plants which will remove carbon dioxide from the planet, NOT provide food and NOT provide forest fires.

Make everything out of wood, preferably hand made.  Grow pond weed followed by water lilies, and rhubarb, (we don't want forest fires!) and gradually we could work up to vast areas of rice, which could be used for thatching.  This would tire people out until they were too shagged out (see question 4) to do anything except sleep until sunrise. 

With fewer people, who knows, maybe the planet will have a chance.

The future of the Planet . . . and sadly, how to solve the problem

There's a lot of news at the moment about how we've messed up our planet, and the next two generations are complaining and demonstrating about how we have let them down.  To a certain extent they are right.  I own shares in a company that mines coal and iron ore.  Others have shares in steelworks, and more still have money invested in metal goods.  All the investment in the world contributes to global warming.

But we breathe
Cows fart
Trees burn
Dead animals and plants decay

In Science, (you were probably asleep at the time - I know I was!) you learned about the Law of Conservation of Energy.  You know the one.  When water flows over a waterfall, the water loses Potential Energy, gains Kinetic Energy, and when it gets to the bottom, some heat is given out.  (It's a well-known fact that the water at the bottom of a waterfall is slightly warmer than at the top.)

But that's not the important bit.  There's a bit that almost everyone forgets.  The Law starts with "In a CLOSED SYSTEM . . ."  The Earth is a closed system.  Almost every time energy changes from one sort to another, some heat is given out.  This warms the system, which is the Earth and its occupants.

I am sitting in a cool room.  If I stand in front of the heat pump outside, it feels hot, because hot air is being removed from the house.  In winter, it's the opposite way round.  A century or more ago, a chemical reaction between the fuel and the air (logs or coal) produced heat (and using chemical energy, created carbon dioxide!)

The important part of the Law turns out to be "In a closed system".

The more organisms that we have on this planet, the more energy is changed, more heat is given out and our closed system, the Earth must, by the Laws of Physics warm up.

So, scarily, we have to reduce the number of homo sapiens on the planet.  I say that as a scientist with no hidden agendas, not as a politician.  I was born in 1946 and one billion more people are living on this planet now, all converting energy and producing heat.

Somehow, and I have no idea how, we have to find a way of removing heat from this closed system we call Earth.  How we do it, I have no idea, but if we don't, ecosystems will change including extinctions, the planet will heat up, and the last person will die of suffocation when the oxygen level drops significantly.  Whatever we do, ecosystems will change irrevocably.

Why Christianity?

Recently, I've been reading and writing about my home town in England.

Although Tewkesbury should be well known for many things, above all it is famous for its old Abbey. 

Parts of the Abbey are ancient and go back to its consecration in 1121.  Above anything else, Tewkesbury is well known for its Abbey.  In fact Tewkesbury exists mainly because it was the "service area", the supplier of the Abbey.  Christianity has ruled the town over the last  nine hundred years because of its wonderful philosophy of improving people's morality.  Turning the bad into good.  This is not to say that everyone is saintly.  There would be no need for Laws if everyone was good.  The Ten Commandments would be more than enough to improve people's lives.
In other words, if I can stay fit enough, I shall see if I can endure that huge flight (a day AND a night in the air - about 24 hours!) and attend the 900th Commemoration of its Consecration in 2021.
And yet, even with that potential morality, there have been bad men at Tewkesbury.  A traitor, a rapist, a pirate.  Someone who was hanged drawn and quartered.  And that's only one person from one family!
But there were many many good, tolerant people from Tewkesbury, who chose to ignore the Quakers and Baptists a century before the Act of Tolerance in 1689.  And sadly, many Christian warriors who chose to fight the Crusades.
Those people were Christian because they had all been welcomed into the Church by Christening, or Baptism at a very young age indeed, long before a child was capable of comprehending anything, let alone the tenets of a complex religion.  Good, in the name of Christ does not ring true to me, even though I have a clergyman as a brother-in-law, and I am apparently very distantly related through marriage to a Saint!
Think of it like this.


Say I want to go from the centre of London to the centre of Birmingham.  I could walk, ride a bicycle, a horse, ride in a car, a taxi, or a train, or even an aeroplane, or combinations of these.  I could, thanks to the Grand Union canal, even travel by barge!  If I were in the centre of London, and wished to travel to the centre of Birmingham, I could get there by any modes of transport I chose.  They would all get me there.  Some would be more expensive, slower, more inconvenient, but all would take me from Piccadilly Circus to Chamberlain Square.
And that, I suppose is the source of my doubt.  Can we, as Christians, as Muslims, as Jews, as Buddhists, Hindus, and every other philosophy, criticise each other, when a believer in a car, cannot and will not see that a train may be as good, or do the job properly.  Because religious people, by the nature of their religion believe absolutely in their faith, everyone else MUST be wrong.

Trains?  They're dirty!  Why don't I give you a lift in my car?  My son's been in the back seat - move all his rubbish to the other side.  You'll have to excuse the toffee papers, my daughter has a sweet tooth, and she will NOT take the wrappers away with her.  The car believer thinks his car is clean, just as the train believer ignores the ten minute delays at Milton Keynes and Coventry which makes the train twenty minutes late.

Who is right?  Maybe everyone is, in their own way
Who is wrong?  Maybe everyone is, in their own way.

That's why, if I'm asked my religion, I answer "Undecided"

Millbank

Mill Bank

At last the water flows to Abbey Mill.

It is summer.

Early in the morning an apricot sky

Greets the new day..

Mist rises from the Severn Ham.

The sun’s disc rises to reveal

Morning Mill Bank. 

Flowers open and Mill Bank prepares for another day of visitors.

For Mill Bank is pretty,

Amazingly pretty.

When Mill Bank was first built, 

The random roof lines weren’t for tourists,

People just wanted some shelter from rain,

And warmth from the chill of a cold winter’s night.

But the cottages are beautiful!

Artlessly, accidentally, built into artful shapes.

Today, in the warmth of the sun, they bask in loveliness,

Their innocent beauty is wrought from the labour of long-forgotten men.

Built by artisans, not architects,

They created this picturesque row.

On summer mornings such as this,

Flowers delight the outsides of the cottages.

Poppies and daisies and baskets of flowers

Adorn Mill Bank.

The Alleys and Courts

The Alleys and Courts

In Tewkesbury when the rain comes down, 

Floods sometimes flow up into town.

There’s a tiny risk that you might drown.

The three main streets are on less low land,

So the houses on the streets are dry.

Small cottages were built 

Behind the houses on the streets,

So the cottages stayed dry.

Ways  to the street from the cottages are “Courts”

Some of the Courts join the streets at both ends.

These passages linking the streets are called  “Alleys”.

They’re too narrow for horses; we walk single  file,

The sounds of our footsteps are heard all the while,

As we pass down dark passages which go back for years; 

We travel through time back to Mediaeval years.

My Uncle Tom

My  Uncle Tom

My Uncle Tom worked in a shoe shop called Frisby’s, 

Which is thirty feet from the Cross.

He fitted boots for all sorts of feet.

That was his job and he was good at it.

By 1916 he wore Army boots

In the Royal Field Artillery.

While he drove along the banks of the Somme.

Could the pale blue sky and the white hoar frost

Remind him of the January Avon?

He drove his ammunition cart, full, to the Line.

That was his job and he was good at it .

The last thing he heard was a faraway gun.

His comrades buried him with due honour.

In less than a year when the Germans drew near,

A shell cratered the grave of Uncle Tom.

His remains were scattered on the banks of the Somme.

But his name is carved on the Tewkesbury Cross,

About thirty feet from Frisby’s

Tewkesbury Poems

Start of another book?

I've been playing around with another book about Tewkesbury.  This one will have some poems in as well as some photos.  I'd love some feedback on whether you think they work or not.

The Severn Ham

Soil, Silt, and Sand

From Central England

Borne by rivers formed by rain and snow.

Each year the waters overflow,

and grasses grow, on the soil, silt and sand 

This land they call “The Severn Ham”.

It’s quiet on the Ham, away from the town.

Buttercups bob in the balmy breeze. 

You can hear that breeze in the mowing grass,

 The grass where  lovers sigh, crows caw, and plovers dance.

Three Rivers meet at the Severn Ham:

The Severn smells of the sea at high tide,

and the silver leaps of the salmon. 

The Swilgate Brook which brooked an army over five centuries gone,

no longer smells of blood.

The sleepy Avon lined with Brummy anglers,

Smells of coarse fish, the wriggle of eels and elvers,

And sleepy, summery, Midland towns.

Tewkesbury lies flat as the horizon,

only broken by the Abbey tower.