Flicking through my 1974 Cub Scout diary I see in scrawled pencil, ‘Mum landed on the Bass Rock’. Why did my mother, Lesley Johnson, want to visit a plug of volcanic rock covered in gannet droppings in Scotland’s Firth of Forth while we were caravanning above the pretty town of North Berwick?
It was down to a passion that culminated in my mother, who never went to university, getting her application to study the Siege of the Bass Rock at Oxford’s Ruskin College more than 30 years later approved as part of the special residential older student ‘Ransacker’ programme .
David Selzer has kindly let me write about Lesley in Other People’s Flowers before, when I told how she was both a Wirral housewife and a local playwright crafting short, funny and poignant plays about Liverpool people under the pen name Lesley Clive. Her work was produced at the Chester Everyman, the Liverpool Playhouse, the Edinburgh Festival and even adapted for local radio and Radio 4.
But while she liked to write contemporary dramas Lesley was also a lover of history – as witnessed in her play about doomed Tudor queen Catherine Howard The Daisy Chain – and that’s why some of her precious holiday time was spent with the seagulls and salty flume on the rock.
Lesley’s fascination with the romantically tragic tale of The Stuart kings led her on this trail. When I was a child, I’d often hear about Charles I’s dashing cavalry commander nephew Prince Rupert of the Rhine and his actions in the English Civil War. Mum was also deeply moved by the stories of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Jacobite rebellions and the suffering of the Scottish Highland clans for supporting the Stuart cause.
The Siege of The Bass Rock is one of the strangest chapters in the whole story of Jacobite resistance. The tale which so entranced my mother concerned four Scots prisoners on the rock who tricked their guards to take the island’s fortress for the Catholic King James VII.
They formed a small pocket of opposition against William of Orange for three whole years merely a mile off the mainland and within sight of a hostile garrison at Tantallon Castle. Lesley was particularly intrigued by the leader of the rebels, Captain Michael Middleton, and his ‘enterprise and steadfastness’, as she put it in her essay dedication.
While at Ruskin she spent time researching original sources and producing a lengthy, very readable essay on the siege. The icing on the cake was a commission from the magazine history Scotland to produce a digest version of her essay for publication. This was a triumph for her.
It’s an incredible story that should really have any film or TV producer drooling with its ingredients of derring do, self-sacrifice and brutality set among stunning, bleak scenery.
The original essay – including the final, sad fate of Captain Middleton – is now available for online reading below as a PDF.
Lesley sadly now has Alzheimer’s and doesn’t recall the inspiring tale of bravery she documented but I have her old painting of the Bass Rock on my study wall. When I gaze at the picture, it reminds me of the tenacity and determination both she and the subject of her dissertation possessed.
“Half a fucking ham stuffed up his left nostril and he still couldn’t smell it!” snorted Wally Stewart as he slapped his boning knife down on the counter at the rear of the Co-op warehouse in Carlisle.
The object of his scorn was one of two recently appointed assistant senior managers of the Carlisle Co-op (full name Carlisle South End Co-operative Society, founded in 1904 by a group of railway workers, Carlisle of course being a major railway town with, at one time, seven different railway companies operating there).
Although we didn’t know it at the time, their appointment was the first sign of the beginning of the end for a Carlisle institution which listed branches numbering up to 40 (the number of my local branch in St Ann’s Hill, created to cater for the large number of new houses built to accommodate workers at No 14 Maintenance Unit of the Royal Air Force).
A figure which I remember hearing was that the Carlisle Co-op had a membership of 20,000, this when the total population of the city itself was about 70,000. There was however a very wide hinterland in Cumberland with village branches and one as far away as Appleby in Westmorland, some 30 miles distant. In my time at the Co-op warehouse there were six travelling shops based there which served the local villages, hamlets and farms.
The change the managers were brought in to introduce was the introduction of a huge Cooperative Wholesale Society central supply base in the North East of England from which the Carlisle shops would order all of their requirements directly rather than submitting weekly orders in their own book to the warehouse in Junction St.
This process led, inter alia, ultimately to the demise of the Carlisle C-op and other local independent Co-operative societies and the subsequent emergence of the modern pattern of purely local convenience Co-p stores. A bit of me remains well pleased that the Co-op ethos is still thriving, albeit in a different form to the one I knew, with 6 million active members as of 2023 and with a target to reach 8 million by 2030.
The Carlisle Co-op central store covered almost half of one side of Botchchergate, the southern entrance road into Carlisle. Here you could cash in your ‘Divi’ (a return based on how much you had spent in the Co-op in the previous year), furnish your house, clothe yourself and your family, buy all of your groceries for the week, order your coal for the fire, get your hair done, get your teeth seen to, organise a funeral and then have a cheese sandwich and a cup of tea at a funeral breakfast after burying or cremating a relative.
THE DIVI
In the second ‘Carry On’ film, ‘Carry On Nurse’, the character Henry Bray (played by Liverpool-born Brian Oulton) is a snobbish, would-be upwardly mobile, patient.
In a scene set at visiting time scene his wife arrives and proudly shows a new jumper she has just bought with her Co-op Divi. He is very embarrassed at this announcement being made in a public ward!
Is this a reflection of the idea that only the ‘Working poor’ used the Co-op and he didn’t want their social status broadcast?)
Liz Hodgkinson writing in ‘The Oldie’ (May 9th 2022), describes how, for the first time in her life, at the age of 74, she visited a Co-op supermarket.
When I was growing up in the then tiny town of St Neots, in Cambridgeshire, only common people shopped at the Co-op. Anybody with a bit of money, such as my mother, would get their shopping from the more expensive food and clothes shops, even when the goods were identical.
The process with the Divi was fairly simple – when you bought something you gave your membership number and got a receipt for the payment.
Your purchase amount was then recorded and at the end of the year, depending on how much you had spent you got a percentage back in cash or goods
Part of the site (No 48 Botchergate) is now a Wetherspoon’s called ‘The Woodrow Wilson’, named after the American President whose mother was born in Carlisle.
The text reads: The ideals of the Co-operative Moment, inspired by the reformer Robert Owen, were put into practice by the Rochdale Pioneers, who opened their little store in 1844. All Co-ops were based on the principle of profit-sharing known as the ‘divi’ (or dividend). With each purchase, customers received tokens or tickets, which they could later exchange for cash or goods, the remaining profits being reinvested.
This building was once part of the Carlisle South End Co-op Society store, built in 1904. The Carlisle Co-op was set up by a group of London & North Western Railway workers, who held meetings to publicise their idea in the Deans Hall on Charles Street. Their first shop opened in June 1861.
The original store, on the opposite side of Botchergate, sold groceries and provisions. It opened twice a week, with committee members taking turns behind the counter. Overcoming initial financial problems, a drapery department opened three months later in the neighbouring building. After some years, success was such that the Co-op moved across Botchergate to larger premises. This is the building that you are now in, which opened in April 1869, when the celebrations included a tea-party and a ball.
Top: The Rochdale Pioneers Left: Robert Owen.
I worked as student in the warehouse in summer holidays between 1963 and 1969. (I started my first teaching job in 1968 but needed the extra cash to get married in early 1970!)
The warehouse was situated in Junction St in the industrial area to the west of Carlisle railway station, on the opposite side of the road from Shadddon Mill (at one time the largest cotton mill in England with its landmark Dixon’s Chimney – the eighth largest in the world at 305ft tall and a landmark visible from anywhere in Carlisle.)
I think the warehouse had originally been part of a complex of woollen mills in the area because there was still a mill stream with dam and sluice gates just opposite the entrance for the warehouse staff. Apparently, when the adjacent mill shut down for the summer break the warehouse staff had earned a bit of extra money cleaning the accumulated debris from the stream and dam. The Co-op dairy was on the same site but we never saw the milkmen who started at 5 in the morning and were long gone by the time we arrived for work at 8.They were a race unto themselves, all of them appearing short and very wiry, used to running from their floats to deliver milk in time for people’s breakfasts. Also there was the shoe repair workshop where a really helpful young man who was deaf and dumb once repaired my own shoes.
The warehouse staff contained a number of people who had spent their working lives with the Co-op, starting as apprentice grocers and working their way through the grades as “Second Hand”, “First Hand”, “Bacon Hand” as they learned to manage and serve the wide range of groceries which the average local Co-op shop stored.
One such was the person with whom I first worked on the top floor of the warehouse, Henry Davis. Henry was in his sixties, a small meticulously neat man, a devout Methodist, quietly spoken and very exact in his handling of the orders that came in. In fact he was so meticulous and precise that when he had actually worked in the stores he would, apparently, remove a single raisin or currant from the scale when he was weighing out the loose produce for a customer to make sure she didn’t get a single currant or raisin more than she was paying for!. This was in the days before everything was pre-packed as it is in modern supermarkets. Biscuits would come loose in tin boxes to be weighed out, raisins and currants and other dried fruit would be in large bags.
(A favourite cheap purchase in those days was a bag of broken biscuits!)
Customer complaints led to him being banished to the warehouse (hence my title).
The top floor stored all of the canned produce sold in the shops, peas, baked beans, soups, canned vegetables.
It even stored canned macedoines (mixed vegetables).When I did a web search for macedoines the results showed a predominance of French recipes and products. Tesco, Sainsbury’s and even Waitrose don’t list them as a product. I was steered to specialist online retailers. Fascinating to think that the shoppers of Carlisle were so sophisticated in the 1960s!
I enjoyed working with him as he would sit and talk of olden days and his Methodist faith. He introduced me to the mysteries of A1, A1 Tall and A2, these being the different can sizes, 12oz , 16oz and 20 oz equivalent as I remember.
The heavy boxes had to be moved using a Slingsby barrow to the hoist and then down to the ground floor to be put with orders from the three other floors in a pen to await delivery.
The trick with the Slingsby barrow was to have one with a front blade well worn down and sharp so when a set of, say, five heavy boxes of cans of Co-p soup was to be moved, you tilted the boxes forward from the top, slid the blade underneath and then tilted the load back onto the barrow and so away.
Slingsby barrow
You can now buy a vintage Slingsby barrow like the one above for upwards of £90 on the internet!
Another character of similar age and background to Henry was someone whom I shall call William. In contrast to Henry he was a very embittered person, deeply resentful of his transfer to the warehouse. At morning and afternoon tea breaks he would remind us in strident tones of his history in the Co-op and his achievements as Second and Bacon Hand. Unsurprisingly, even though he was obviously an unhappy person, this did not endear him to his workmates.
By total contrast the most cheerful person I came across didn’t actually work in the warehouse itself.
As part of the set of buildings there was a joiner’s workshop where the coffins for the Co-operative funeral service were made as well a garage for the unmarked private ambulance used for the transfer of bodies from hospital or home.
‘Ocky’ as he was known – I never discovered his real name- was a rotund, red faced man with a permanent genuine beaming smile on his face.
On one occasion a couple of young Scottish delivery men had just finished unloading at one of the warehouses bays when Ocky came in and said, “Can you give me a lift with a box boys?”
They agreed and went out with him.
When they had finished one of them said, “That was very heavy!”
“It should be,” said Ocky. “There was a body in it!”
The men just fled!
The ground floor of the warehouse was where all of the goods were initially delivered to be then distributed across four floors. In my first years there the main worker was Danny Harris, probably in his 60s, originally a miner from West Cumberland with the distinctive accent from those parts which sounded (still sounds?) very different from the Carlisle accent. One explanation for the differences is, apparently, that when the Lowther family started to develop coal seams stretching from Whitehaven to Maryport , they brought in miners from the North East of England. The subsequent blending of the Cumbrian accent and the North Eastern one produced unique patterns of pronunciation limited to a fairly narrow coastal area.
(My wife, from Liverpool, tells of meeting an old miner from West Cumberland at a church gathering. His accent was so impenetrable that she maintains she couldn’t understand a word he said!)
A couple of examples of the accent (and dialect) run –
“Hoosta fizzin, marrer?”or “How are you feeling mate?
“Ahs gan yam” or “I’m going home.”
Danny was softly spoken and completely committed to his work. He always approached unloading delivery lorries with concentration and speed, making him hard to keep up with.
Unhappily, on one occasion when he was unloading sides and hams of pigs he maintained his usual speedy pace from the lorry to the big walk-in refrigerator where the bacon was stored. He sweated heavily with the effort and, as I understand, the shift from being heated to being very cold caused him to develop a very bad chill so that he went home sick.
He never returned to work because it was discovered that his heart was damaged.
A few weeks later the same delivery crew arrived and asked me how long the unloading would take,
“About thirty minutes,” I replied.
“Danny used to do it in fifteen!”
“Yes,” I said, “and Danny will never work again!”
I made sure that it did, in fact, take 30 minutes!
I have thought over the years how terribly sad it was that a life dedicated to hard work, providing honest and uncomplaining labour for his wages, should end so sadly.
Danny, like a good number of people within the Carlisle Co-op, was a devout Catholic.
(Conversely, my father-in-law in Liverpool, also a devout Catholic, would not shop at the Co-op because he maintained it was a Communist organisation!)
Danny was the treasurer of his parish conference of the Society of St Vincent de Paul, a grassroots charitable organisation dedicated to giving financial and practical help to those individuals and families in need. Each conference was funded by donations from parishioners and gifts.
At a meeting of conferences in the presence of the Bishop of Lancaster, Danny proudly announced that his accounts showed a £50 surplus. Another conference announced a deficit of 5 shillings (25p). The bishop just said, rather drily, “I’m glad to see one conference knows the meaning of the word ‘charity’!
(This story was told to me by the warehouse foreman, another Catholic and member of the SVP, who on his Sunday afternoons visited The Garlands a large long-stay mental hospital on the outskirts of Carlisle. He would take cigarettes, sweets and companionship to the patients.)
THE SUGAR WALL
Every so often a lorry laden with three and a half tons of sugar would arrive either from Tate and Lyle in Liverpool or the Sankey Sugar Works in Earlestown (now both closed down, Sankey in1979 and Tate and Lyle in 1981).
The sugar came in packs of fourteen 2lb bags in a heavy paper wrapping making a total of about 275 individual packs to be unloaded.
We had no pallets or fork lift trucks in the warehouse so each pack was lifted on to a set of rollers and passed into the warehouse where someone (often me in the summer) would build a wall of sugar inside one of the pens.
It was a bit like bricklaying.
To ensure stability you laid two packs lengthwise horizontal to the wall of the pen and then three vertically The Gemini AI-generated image shows what it looked like ( allowing for a 60 year time difference.)
FLAVOURS OF THE PAST
Regular visitors to the warehouse were commercial travellers seeking to maximise the sales of their particular products. One such was a rep for Kellogg’s cereals. When the General Manager of the Co-op was on holiday this particular rep persuade the whizz-kid new assistant general mager (not the same one who couldn’t smell gone-off bacon) to order enough Corn Flakes to feed the whole of Carlisle for three months! The consignment was so big it couldn’t actually fit in the warehouse and had to be stored in the old stables of the adjacent dairy.
I don’t think the assistant manager had a bright future in the Co-op!
A much more welcome visitor was Mr Hoggett, owner of Hoggett’s crisp and pickles factory.
He was always immaculately dressed and wore a smart trilby hat. He spoke with a soft Tyneside (Gateshead) accent and was always pleased to receive an order.
Sadly, the firm is, as far as I know, long gone. However, there is one claim to fame connected with it, namely that a certain John William Hoggett, born in 1869, is reputed to have invented the world’s first flavoured potato crisp – vinegar. Conversely, a correction in the Newcastle Chronicle reads, The original flavour was cheese, not vinegar, as we said, and it was invented by John William Hoggett, of Hoggetts Food Products, who is still alive and well. It wasn’t invented by his father or grandfather, so there.
(The oldest reference to potato crisps, or ‘chips’ in America and Australia apparently dates from England in 1817).
THE HORSE KNEW THE WAY AND THE HAIR OF THE DOG
My most memorable workmate was Harold McCormick. He had been a Co-op milkman and still retained the small wiry frame and hurrying pace typical of the milkmen of that time.
He was in charge of the floor that stored cereals and tea. The popular cereals included Cornflakes, Rice Krispies, Coco Pops, Puffed Wheat, Weetabix and Shredded Wheat
He had served as an infantryman in the Burma campaign but the only thing he ever said about it was that he had learned to smoke on the march up into the hill country and that eventually he and his fellows would even smoke tea leaves!
He still rolled his own at work but not from the tea around him.
Tea ranged from the popular 99 (so-called because originally it was simply the number on the blender’s chart) to the upmarket Indian Prince. Both are still available but in those days only in packet form.
I also learned what kibbled corn is – maize that has that has been crushed or cracked into smaller, more easily digestible pieces, very useful as feed for chickens and birds, especially in a time when more people would have kept hens, other fowl and pigeons. Carlisle was, and is, still the big town for a large rural hinterland.
A frequent topic around the morning tea break between Harold and Dick the delivery lorry driver was the search for the “Good pint”.
In the 1960s all the pubs in and around Carlisle were government-owned, a relic of 1916 wartime regulations (The Carlisle and District State Management Scheme) to prevent drunkenness among the munitions workers around Carlisle and Gretna. In the 1960s rumour was that the senior civil servant in charge of the scheme in the Home Office was a teetotal Methodist. Pub managers were civil servants, paid the same irrespective of how much or how little drink they sold.
A favourite and much-frequented pub by Harold and Dick was The Joiners Arms, known by them as “The Blue Lugs”, the name apparently coming from the fact that the joiners in the workshop to the rear of the pub had blue ears from the lead in the pencils which they kept behind their ears. Another version says the local workers used blue chalk to mark wood. When not using the chalk they stuck it behind their ears, hence “blue lugs”.
The pub dates back to at least 1785.
The building behind the pub is the McVities biscuit factory which in my day was known as Carr’s Biscuit Works. The girls and women who worked there had a fearsome reputation among those of us boys still at school beyond 15!
‘THE CRACKER PACKERS’ Hazel Reeves
As I mentioned earlier, Harold had been a Co-op milkman in the days when horse-drawn milk floats were still used. He delivered in Stanwix, a northern suburb of Carlisle across the bridge over the river Eden, about two miles away from the dairy. He was very popular with his customers and on Christmas Eve a lot of them insisted upon him having a celebratory drink. Not surprisingly, at the end of his round Harold was a lot the worse for wear because of the drink taken. As he himself told me this didn’t matter because the horse, having done the journey five day a week for the preceding 52 weeks, knew its own way back to Junction St without any guidance from Harold.
To say that Harold was fond of a drink (or several) is an understatement. However, I never once saw him affected by alcohol over the six years I worked with him. He saved it for weekends and holidays. The highlight of his year was in the summer when “The Scotch folk” came to stay. Harold would get a week’s pay plus two weeks’ holiday pay on a Friday afternoon and have it all spent by Monday! He would say how, when sitting “With the company” in a pub, he would go to the toilet and on the way there give the nod to the barman. On his way back a fresh pint would be on the bar for him. He would down that, return to “the company” and ask, “Whose round is it?”
The only thing approaching advice he ever gave me was when he said, “No matter how much drink I had had the night before I always made sure there was a bottle under the bed for first thing in the morning.”
Happily, in the 60 or so years since, I have never had occasion to put that particular piece of advice into practice!
I still remember Harold with great affection. He taught me what it was to earn my wages by doing a thorough and careful job in fulfilling the orders for the shops we serviced. His voice always softened when he mentioned his wife, “My Evelyn.” He was universally liked by all in the warehouse and I was genuinely saddened when, a few years later I learned that he had succumbed to heart failure.
This, I hope, has been a fond description of, and tribute to, the people of the Co-op warehouse with whom I worked in my summer holidays over six years. I was always accepted, never patronised and always felt valued as one of their team.
After fifty years as a teacher of English I remain proud that I could once hold my own among men who may have left school at fourteen or fifteen with no formal qualifications yet who still taught me what it means to work and behave as a mature adult.
They have all gone into the dark and the site is now occupied by Jewson’s and Kwik Fit.
When I pass where the warehouse once stood they always come vividly to my mind across the 56 years since August 1969 when I got my final pay packet and went back to the rest of my life.
Really enjoyed the journey – from the Raj, to the cleaning of clothes in a river; from Lord Wavell, the penultimate viceroy of India, to an anthology of poetry he produced called Other Men’s Flowers. Earlier in his life he could recite just about all of the poems in the anthology from memory. Wavell went on his own journey – from military maestro to frustrated diplomat. The last poem in the book, which he modestly describes as a wayside dandelion not fit to be in the garden with the other poems, is his own creation.
Here’s to “all beautiful things that help us forget the dreariness of war”.
With thanks and best regards
Sarah L Dolan
PS I do have a small confession to make. At school I got a ‘U’ at history ‘O’ level. Since then, I have learned that history should not be confined to the classroom or the past as it is a living force which touches all of our lives.
David shows so much generosity in sharing other people’s work on his website. It’s an honour to join this community and be included in ‘Other People’s Flowers’. In this age of the individual, this is a breath of fresh air. The themes of my recent poems are aligned with this way of thinking – how the self is intrinsically connected to other people, the creatures who live on this planet and the landscape in general. The moods and colours of the landscape are reflected in me and sometimes I wonder if the colour of a dress I may be wearing finds its way into the landscape.
I live on a hill overlooking the Alwen valley with my husband Pete. The music of the land is all around – the streams, waterfalls, the river, the sound of trees in the wind. Bird song is never far away, even in winter and the donkeys from the farm opposite are unrestrained in their braying. Chaffinches, goldfinches, siskins, blue tits, nuthatches, greater spotted woodpeckers, robins turn up at our door for breakfast, lunch, dinner and tea. I think they eat better than we do. As well as the song birds there are the more subtle sounds of bats chattering in the roof, leaves unfurling, the sound of bees and hover flies.
The love I feel for this wild place, on this earth, is unconditional. The kind of love you feel for a partner, a parent or a child. It is precious. When we harm the earth, we harm ourselves. It is self-harm. I quote Just by Radiohead (1995). ‘You do it to yourself, you do and that’s what really hurts, is that you do it to yourself, just you. You and no one else’.
The poems and music that I have included here are words that comment on how humans are harming this world but also how people are finding innovative ways to heal landscapes. There is also a celebration of the beauty of this incredible world. All the poems and the song are also on a specially created video – which is available on my Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/100063451100133/videos/4070467436574443
My first poem, 235 decibels is from ‘I Am Nature’, a recently released book of eco poetry written by Leaf Pettit, me, Patricia Sumner and Andrew Sumner. This is available from https://www.veneficiapublications.com/product-page/i-am-nature235 decibels was first published, though, by Abergavenny Small Press in June 2021 and looks at how submarine sonar effects the creatures in the ocean.
235 decibels*
hard to remember how it was
when they improvised and tossed
a tune for days on end
when small one set his voice free
when they all played catch bubbles O O
O O
when a chorus of bass notes
overtones tail-slaps clicks rumbles
filled the sea
when wind sang the lighthouse
there was a time when they could answer
songs from beyond the krill place
a time when their voices
were loudest
but now dark ones ____________________
won’t stop ___________________screaming
and lurk ___________________in the deep places
stealing music and sleep _________________________
sometimes muscles _______________remember old patterns_________________
but they ______________can no longer tell _____________what they sing
moon still licks it tongue ________________over their backs
but there is no meaning in this water_________________
* A Submarine sonar is 235 decibels. The loudest rock concert is 130 decibels.
The following lyrics were written for a song called The Seal recorded by The Amazing Clouds in 2019. The Amazing Clouds were Pete Regan, me, and Dom Oakes. It was written after visiting Ramsey Island just off the coast of Pembrokeshire. It was Autumn and the seals and their pups were in full voice.
Seal
I sit on polished rock
and listen to the seals.
Their song coils into my mind.
I dive into water.
I swim with the cormorant.
I swim with the gannet.
Bubbles are jewels on my skin.
I am born for water.
I am a shape-shifter.
The setting sun blinds me,
I’m lost on the stormy sea.
Seal pushes me to shore,
it’s there I leave my human skin.
I am born for water,
I am a shape-shifter.
I am continuing the theme of water with The man who called back the fishes. This poem is also from I am Nature and is based on the work of Dr Tim Lamont and Dr Stephen Simon who are trying to regenerate coral reefs by planting new corals and then playing sounds of a healthy reef through underwater sound projectors. This process has been found to encourage sea creatures back to the reef.
The man who called back the fishes
He began at dawn, playing reef music
whilst planting coral polyps in rock
cervices under the rippled, sunlit surface.
He purred for shoals of angel fish,
grunted for male frill fin gobies —
played the güiro for the spiny lobster.
The volume rose in a steady crescendo
through the day until it peaked at dusk.
In his dreams he painted outlines of eels,
filled in the colours of damsel fish
and the others who lived here before
the cyclones, before the bleaching.
The music rode ocean currents,
skirted islands, entered caves,
followed rafts of driftwood.
Ray by ray, fish by fish, urchins,
triggerfish, shrimp, parrotfish,
whitetip sharks, reef octopus,
manta ray, barracuda, trumpetfish,
yellowtail snappers, glassy sweepers
and starfish came back for his music.
They joined in with an eruption
of pops, howls, chirps and grunts,
whistles, snaps, bumps,
buzzes, squeals, heart beats,
teeth-gnashing, tail-slapping,
gill-flapping and staccato clicks.
He floated in this new oasis,
turned off the music
and listened.
The next poem, Blossom Symphony is about the natural music in an orchard and how the cycles of the seasons spiral into the future. I’ve used the pantoum form to enhance the feeling of repetition.
Blossom Symphony
Blossoms unfurl —
a single phrase repeated
over and over —
orchards heartbeat.
A single phrase repeated,
embellished by bumble bees —
orchards heart beat —
leaf veins breathe.
Embellished by bumble bees
and nightjar churr —
leaf veins breathe —
voles chomp on June-drop litter.
Nightjars churr —
counter melodies from wasps.
voles chomp on June-drop litter —
hawk-moths purr.
There are counter melody from wasps
and woodpecker drumrolls,
whilst hawk-moths purr
along with mineral-water arpeggios.
Sky rests in roots
liquid sun rushes through branches —
swells embryo fruits.
Under trees they clink glasses.
Liquid sun gushes through branches
they listen to the bubble fizz
under trees they clink glasses —
share a cider kiss.
They listen to the bubble fizz
over and over —
share a cider kiss
as blossoms unfurl.
My next poem was written in the North of Sweden just after midsummer. There is nothing quite like walking up a mountain with no one else there, reaching the peak at midnight and it still being light.
Midnight Circle
Sleep is vacuum packed as we walk
above sun-lit clouds into midnight.
You haven’t shaved for five days;
your face as raw and uncomplicated
as glacial scoured rock.
Our shadows stretch out
behind us touching
the lemming that sped
between birch trees,
the golden plover who stood sentinel
over her chicks and tracing our boots
as we trod softly on elk and Sami trails
and finding you watching me
swim naked in a mountain stream.
Our shadows pause trembling
on the glittering river where I found
a rounded stone which I roll
like a precious egg in my hands.
Lastly, I return to the Pembrokeshire Coast with a poem about the Smalls Lighthouse which is about 20 miles West of the Pembrokeshire coast in the Irish Sea. It is a wild and remote place. It is hard to imagine how the lighthouse keepers kept their sanity on these windswept and lonely rocks. This also appears in I am Nature.
My mother Lesley Johnson is an award-winning Wirral playwright with several works under her belt penned under the name Lesley Clive; plays that were professionally produced and brought to life on the stage and local and national radio in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Sadly, she has no recall of her creative life – I’m afraid Alzheimer’s Disease casts this distressing spell. But her works were always present on the page and on old recordings waiting to resurface. But if not for David Selzer’s kind prompting, it’s unlikely I would’ve unearthed and digitally copied the original analogue cassette recordings and I’m incredibly grateful for this opportunity to introduce Lesley ‘s plays to a new audience.
My mother was born and bred on the Wirral and despite being a young mum with two fractious kids living in a crowded three-bedroom semi, she somehow found time and space to write. She didn’t have her own study in which to concentrate but worked on a desk in the parental bedroom and she lacked the networks people often forge at college that can help open doors – she didn’t pursue higher education until much later in life when she attended Ruskin College in Oxford for a time to study a particular historical Scots’ event (another fascinating tale to surface one day).
But Lesley did have a deep love of and huge appetite for plays, poetry and literature and a marvellous circle of encouraging friends. These included David and Sylvia Selzer, friends of my parents going way back to when David taught alongside my father way in the early 1970s. All were highly engaged with the creative, cultural life of the Wirral and Merseyside. And Lesley had tenacity in spades. She built her own network among the regional theatre groups and actors, writers and radio producers in Merseyside.
I was fairly oblivious to mum’s creative efforts in childhood and my early teenage years. I often heard the typewriter rattling and clattering and sometimes we’d be ushered out of the front room when the landline rang so she could have long, private conversations about current projects. But I didn’t pay much attention beyond being aware she was ‘writing.’
It’s only when going through her papers and belongings on her move into a nursing home that I realised the extent of her work. It’s a heartbreak that she is still alive but unable to elucidate on her writings – but the cache of official BBC reading scripts, recordings of radio productions and local newspaper cuttings paint a picture of a creative life well-lived ‘in the provinces.’
Lesley’s plays embraced historical dramas and contemporary life, all leavened with dashes of grit and humour. Her radio commissions also took on important Northwest events, such as the tragic sinking of the submarine HMS Thetis in Liverpool Bay, George Stephenson’s tenacious battle to build the first intercity railway from Liverpool to Manchester and the Liverpool policeman’s strike of 1919.
I only saw one play performed on stage myself, this was Any Way You Want Me about the recollections of an ageing rock’n’roll groupie; it was poignant, funny and rather rude, I recall.
The Daisy Chain also stands out in the memory because I recall the family excitement of its broadcast on Radio 4 back in 1979. It’s an evocative account of the thoughts of Catherine Howard, Henry VIII’s very young fifth wife, on the eve of her execution. It’s a moving story of thwarted passion, the fears and follies of youth and the sacrifices made on the altar of power.
The play was one of her prize-winners and was aired both on Radio Merseyside and Radio 4’s 30 Minute Theatre. Other plays like Back Step told stories of women trying to shake off the restricted roles placed on them by the society, class and poverty of a few decades back and all the stories are shot through with imaginatively biting and amusing lines that prevent them being mere tales of misery.
I have now published the broadcast audio recordings that are salvageable on YouTube as a testament to Lesley’s passions and her unique voice, not quite stilled but no longer that of a storyteller. Among the various casts are actors who were well-known at the time, such as June Barry, or who became recognisable names like Julie Waters. The hard work of all the actors and production teams on all the projects of this not that distant era deserve applause.
Below is the full list of Lesley’s works with clickable links to available plays on YouTube.
The Daisy Chain – Radio Merseyside (1977) – winner of BBC Radio Northwest Playwright’s Competition 1977, Thirty Minute Theatre, BBC Radio 4 (1979 featuring June Barry)
Back Step – Thirty Minute Theatre, BBC Radio 4 June (1980)
Shadow Tick – Thirty Minute Theatre, BBC Radio (1980 featuring Julie Walters)
Tie Up – London Fringe Production, Playhouse Upstairs (1976)
Any Way You Want Me – King’s Head, London, Birmingham, Liverpool Everyman Theatre, Manchester, Buxton Festival (1981 featuring Linda Beckett) and Edinburgh Festival (1982)
Jam Side Down – Liverpool Playhouse (1983)
A Basket Of Stars – children’s play, Wirral Youth Theatre (1978)
‘Caminante, no hay camino, sino estelas en la Mar…’ Antonio Machado
To teach or not to teach? That is no longer the question…
I am honoured to have been asked by David to contribute to ‘Other Peoples Flowers’ on his website, so please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Jeff Teasdale and I have known David for many years, although exactly when our paths first crossed is a mystery lost in time to both of us. It was probably initially on one of the teachers’ courses that Cheshire LEA (Local Education Authority) was so good at providing in the 1970s and which took place in very special places like Cheshire’s Canolfan Conwy Centre on Anglesey/Ynys Môn or at Bangor University. In such environments, away from the hurly burly of the classroom, left behind in the exhaust(ed) Friday night fumes of what is now the westward-bound A55, the environment for stimulus in the creative subjects was established, and was supported by a sympathetic and very human Director of Education, John Tomlinson. In those halcyon days we also had independent people called Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools (HMIs), who were knowledgeable, generous with their time, and helpful, and certainly not intimidating as their successors seem to be today. Such background support to our work in the classroom with students was – and remains so – essential to the well-being of education, both for its teachers and its children. Sadly little of that ethos exists anywhere in this country now, and I think David would agree that our years then and ‘in the thick of it’, were possibly the best years ever to have been working in education, and especially in places like Cheshire.
Prior to that though, I had had no aspirations to become a teacher. With the award of a degree in Fine Art delayed at Newcastle University because of the promise of becoming 1969’s Hatton Scholarship Student for the next year, the rug was pulled from under me in May by, of all funding bodies, Cheshire Education Committee itself. This was the first time a local authority had reneged on their fund-matching a promise since 1929. So, with my plans in ruins around me like Giotto’s earthquake-ravaged chapel in Assisi, and after an intervening job on a building site in Alderney, I went for an interview to teach English in Sweden, this to at least be with my girlfriend who had, being an essential part of the Newcastle Plan, by then reluctantly moved back home. The interview went very well, until I discovered the job was in an iron-ore mining town in Lapland, whereas she lived in the deep south of Sweden. In fact, it would have been easier commuting to see her from Manchester than from the mines in the Land of the Summer Midnight Sun – and its corresponding Winter Midday Moon. So, my teaching career did not lyrically begin in Lapland.
It did begin however – potentially somewhere somewhat less lyrical – in Wythenshawe. On the way back from that interview I had passed by the offices of Manchester Education Committee, which ironically had agreed to fund the Hatton Scholarship in my place to a friend. Elaine and I had unknowingly lived only five miles apart while at school, she on the Manchester side of the River Mersey in East Didsbury, and me on the other side in Cheshire. That’s how random one’s future apparently was: decided on the whim of a bureaucrat working at a desk in the dark recesses of a County Hall. Walking towards the Education Offices, I had reasoned that if I could get a job teaching English in Sweden, I could get one teaching it in England. By the time I was at the reception desk, the English had been replaced by Art in my head, so I asked to see the Art Inspector, John Waddington, for whom I had done some paintings for a local college bistro whilst at Sixth Form. What followed was what he described as being… “… The most bizarre job interview I have ever been involved in…”… Essentially, while I was drinking tea in his office he was on the phone to a head teacher in a school, and the first question over the desk was… “He asks if you can play football?”… Affirmative… “He now asks if you can be in Wythenshawe by three o’clock?”… Again, affirmative… “Well, congratulations Jeff, you’ve got a job. You’re playing on the staff team at 3.30 and teaching art tomorrow morning”… John lent me ten quid for a pair of boots and some apparently ‘”essential shin pads’” – this was a “needle match” against the school first team and ‘”here would be scores to settle”. So, I jumped on a bus to Wythenshawe, danced over some vicious scything tackles with ease out on the left wing only inches from a baying-for-blood school audience uncontained behind a slack rope, and I was teaching art at nine o’clock the next morning.
Within two minutes of starting work for the four weeks involved in a job that I had only intended to take in order to earn a bit of cash to pay my fare to southern Sweden (probably one-way and going there for good), I found I was engaged in something that I wanted to spend the rest of my working life doing. I loved every minute of it. After four weeks at Brookway High School, I became John Waddington’s ‘Emergency Supply Art Teacher’, working in spa towns like Ancoats, Beswick, Ardwick and Levenshulme – in fact, any place I could easily get a bus to by eight in the morning with my ‘art teaching kit’. I razor-honed my craft very rapidly, having a sense of humour being the most effective tool in my arsenal.
After two years back in Wythenshawe – why would I want to teach art anywhere else? – I began teaching in Cheshire, and eventually met David properly, two schools later, in a project called TVEI, and although enthusiasm-sapping as ‘Technical and Vocational Education Initiative’ may sound, it just meant that the creative risk-taking that had been the roller-coaster bedrock of my career to date, could rise to another and county-wide level.
It’s all in my book… chapters of which will be eventually appearing in my new and under-development website.
In the meantime, what follows are a few snippets – a small bouquet of flowers from the equivalent in size of RHS Bridgwater – of what will be on there.
‘…The bearer of these gifts is a young man called Michelangelo… Treat him with kindness and he will produce work which will make the whole world gaze in wonder…’
We exist in two worlds; that world which exists for all of us whether we, as individuals, exist or not and in this image is represented by the Tuscan landscape in front of the student.
The second world is that which exists only for us, in this case the painting between that landscape and us, the viewer, and over which she, the young artist, is layering her own patch of personal and internal sunlight…
By David Selzer
