Abacus

Quite apart from the two redoubtable women, every item in this picture is familiar to me. I'd say this dates from 1961 or '62.

Here are two of my great aunts, both of them Jersey women. They lived with us in the early 1960s.

Marie-Louise (left) we knew as Auntie Marsie. She was born in 1882. Her sister Clementine-Louise (Auntie Ti-Ti) was born in 1874.

The only unusual aspect of the shot is the apparent absence of Marsie's cigarette.

There were times when it was a challenge to see across the room through the nicotine haze.

This has to be early afternoon, the traditional time for a rest after a busy morning of domestic chores.

Both were avid readers, fans of long-gone popular magazines such as Tit Bits, Reveille and John Bull.

They relished a racy read and, no surprise, my brothers and I devoured the mags as soon as the aunts were out of the room.

Loads of celebrity gossip. I remember reading a spicy series on the rise and rise of Soho strip-club supremo Paul Raymond. I would have been about ten.

Marsie, in particular, appreciated the occasional saucy frisson. According to family legend she once snapped her library book shut, muttering: 'This is disgusting!'

'Whatever's the matter?' queried my mother.

Marsie reopened the volume and whispered the offending passage in her best pas devant tones: 'The Chinese shopkeeper stood at the counter, his abacus before him. Idly, he fingered its little balls.'
And here they are as children.

Titi stands behind her little sister. But which one is Marie Louise? I think she's the youngest here. But the sister on the right has her gaze exactly as I recall it when she was an old lady.

The short hair would have been unusual in England at that time - but was the style for girls in French-influenced Jersey - so my mother told me.

There's a strong possibility that the third little girl is my grandmother, Gladys Marguerite (Daisy) who died in 1936 - so, sadly, I never knew her.

Free Nelson Bundela

I so wanted her to shut up, the fair-haired, power-suited young woman opposite me on the train. Two phones. Too loud. Too much.

Over the course of several calls my fellow passengers and I piece together the sheer awfulness of her day - her second day in her first job after university, working for a big-name international firm of accountants.

In brief: I'm based in Edinburgh. I flew to Birmingham this morning for an appointment in Coventry. I was supposed to fly back to Edinburgh this evening. But I missed my train connection to the airport because of a taxi driver with a dodgy tom-tom.

(Er, tom-tom? Techno-savvy readers will have grasped, unlike moi, that a Tom-tom is a type of satellite navigation device.)

This is a bad thing because I have to join a bunch of new colleagues at Edinburgh Airport early tomorrow morning so that we can all fly down to London for a high-level conference at Windsor. It's an accountant thing.

But now I'm heading south, not north, to High Wycombe, where my kind grandfather will meet me so that I can stay the night with him and Granny, prior to one of them driving me to Windsor tomorrow.

This is good because I'll have a bed. But also bad because I'll be up half the night washing and drying my clothes. All I have is what I'm wearing right now.

Further bad thing: my boss has resigned and skidaddled without giving me names or conatct info of any of the people who'll be at the airport tomorrow morning wondering why I'm not there. Can things get worse? Oh, yes.

There's Nelson.

Nelson is in my flat in Edinburgh, awaiting my return tonight. Without me, he may die. So I have to phone a friend, and my letting agent. Friend will kindly collect flat key and go and check that Nelson is OK, ensuring that he is fed and watered.

I've enough stress in my life without having the death of a six-month-old rabbit on my conscience.

And it's not as if Nelson's short life has been angst-free.

Until four weeks ago Nelson was Tilly. My boyfriend returned from South Africa, took one look at the bunny and - whoosh - instant gender re-assignment, with a nod to the great Mandela in the re-naming.

I'm SO unlucky - and, yes, I really was born on Friday the thirteenth.

Hmm.

Unlucky? With kind grandparents on hand to ferry and accommodate? With a chum to rescue Nelson? With a flat in Edinburgh's New Town? With a boyfriend who can sex a rabbit at ten paces?

Please.

By this stage the train is nearing my destination and, to my surprise, irritation has long since morphed into rapt attention. I SO don't want her to stop.

Something to do with the power of story, perhaps?

What started as merely an irritating voice has become a real young woman who's in a bit of a pickle - and a bunny with gender issues.

Fellow-passengers are offering advice and suggestions. Could you call your head office? Call the airport to page your colleagues? Call the conference venue?

Leaving the train at LS, I murmur: 'Goodbye. I hope everything works out for you and Nelson.'

Later I find myself saying a wee prayer for them.

Harry at Ethel’s Party

Ethel has invited sixteen little friends, eight boys and eight girls, to an outdoor party, perhaps to celebrate her birthday.

And here they all are in sailor suits and best pinafores sitting in a grassy meadow near Stroud in Gloucestershire. It is a summer day in the early 1890s. And if it is her birthday, my guess is that there will be six candles on the cake.

As befits her status, Ethel is in the centre of the group, gazing stolidly at the camera, obeying the instruction to sit very still – as have all the children apart from two girls (tsk!) whose blurred faces show that they fidgeted at the crucial moment.

From the neat-as-new-pins perfection of their get-ups, I imagine that the party proper has yet to begin. At least four of the boys seem primed to explode into mischief.

A dark-suited boy on the left of the picture stares directly into the lens, knees drawn up to his chest. He seems hesitant, a little shy. His body is turned away from the group, increasing a sense of separation from the knot of lads on the right. I wonder if he will have as much fun as them.

His name is Henry Herbert Rowe, but the children at the party call him Harry.

I called him Grandpa.

I have only one memory of him. I was six and, hesitant and shy, I backed away from the gentle, bald-headed stranger. He died a year later in 1957, aged seventy.

A birthday-party picture of me aged six shows a small boy, knees drawn up to chest, staring straight into the camera. Put the snapshot from the fifties beside the Victorian picture: Harry, Rory – peas in a pod.

He was happily married to my grandmother for twenty-eight years until her early death from cancer. They had one child. His second marriage was not happy.

Harry loved children and may have doubted that he would ever be a grandfather. His daughter did not marry until she was thirty-eight – and then produced three sons in as many years. How do I know he loved children? From his postcards.

Work as a commercial traveller for a West of England woollen mill took him on long journeys throughout England and Scotland, and from every destination he sent picture postcards to his grandsons. I have roughly one hundred of them: castles, steam trains, battleships, ocean liners, aeroplanes – chosen carefully to delight and intrigue small boys. And all addressed to us as individuals – it never occurred to him to send a single card to all three of us.

Here’s an example from 17 January 1954: The card shows the ocean liner RMS Bermuda steaming into New York harbour.

Dear Roderick, because you are the youngest I am sending you the biggest ship. I should like to have heard you singing at the pantomime! Love to you from Grandpa.

On my way to the class I stopped, as I often do, at the Arts Centre gift shop to top up my stock of postcards. I enjoy matching the card its recipient. I guess I send between two and three hundred a year.

And though I may not be the liveliest spark at the party, I try to remember to send my host a thank-you card.

I’m sure Harry sent one to Ethel.
This is from a series of short 'life story' pieces written as part of an evening-class course. More pieces are stored in the 'Short stories' list to the right.

Quiet days are the most dangerous

Quiet days are the most dangerous. Days that are in between more important days.

Like today in Krakow. Yesterday we arrived by plane. Tomorrow the trucks carrying our bikes will catch up with us and we will start our holiday journey to Budapest. So today is a free day and we have time on our hands. There’s no point in unpacking.

A town called Ozwieczim is only twenty kilometres from Krakow and we decide to go there. It’s a hot August day and we share the cost of a taxi. The countryside is green and wooded. We pass small farms where the harvest is beginning.

It’s mid morning when we reach Ozwieczim. There are many other visitors. During the war the German occupiers gave the town a new name: Auschwitz.

Our guide is Polish. She speaks quietly and our group has to stand close to catch her words. She leads us through what is left of the camp: rows of brick-built barracks and tall tenements that remind me of nineteenth-century factory buildings. Between them are gravel paths and many tall trees. And it’s quiet: leaves rustling overhead, dappled sunlight, our guide’s soft voice.

Here are the main gates with the inscription ‘Arbeit macht frei’ – work makes you free. Here someone has threaded a white carnation between the bars. Here the transports arrived. Here new prisoners lined up. Here the separations were made: to the right those fit enough to join the working parties; to the left, all others. Here is where the prisoners slept and ate and defecated and became infested. Here is the ramp down to the bunker where they undressed. Here are the heavy metal doors. Here are more flowers.

We go into one of the tall buildings where there are maps and photographs. At each stop our guide speaks briefly and then the group silently separates to look at what is there.

In some rooms long sections of floor have been angled up. Tumbled out on these slanting surfaces are the prisoners’ possessions: a tarnished slope of a thousand silver cigarette cases; a slope, wide as a playground, of dolls and teddy bears; a slope of jumbled artificial limbs; a slope of false teeth; a slope of hanks of hair.

And then the longest slope of all, extending the full length of the long building. The slope of suitcases. Suitcases and suitcases and suitcases. Nothing else. Each case has a name and address painted neatly on the lid by its owner: Stein, Rosenberg, Pehrlmann; Warsaw, Berlin, Dresden.

And I stand in that quiet room and I look and I think.

I think of every case I’ve ever packed for every journey I’ve ever made. Suitcases packed in hope for arrivals safely achieved. I choose one case and read the neat white painted name and I try to picture A E Bergmann packing it on a quiet day like this. I turn away.

Outside it has grown hotter. An Australian family tags on to our group, the father balances a video-camera on his shoulder, seeing the camp through its lens.

Near the gate a taxi is waits to take us back to Krakow.

Swim with confidence

It is the first day of our summer holiday.

We are in Cornwall. The sun is shining. Gulls are squawking. There are five of us. But we are not staying in a ruined castle, or camping on a small island just offshore from a deserted cove, or roaming the lanes in a gypsy caravan. Instead we are at the Hotel Bella Vista, West Looe.

We are sitting around the breakfast table in the bay window, overlooking the crazy golf. Beyond are rocks, a curve of tide-washed sand and the sea, turquoise near the shore, then sapphire. This morning it’s glinting with a million diamonds. And it’s waiting for us.

From oldest to youngest we are: my mother, recently widowed; her (and my) cousin Vera, who is blonde, glamorous and twenty-nine; my brother Jack who is sixteen; my brother Brendan who is fourteen; and Rory (that’s me) who is twelve.

This is the first time I have been on holiday in a hotel. Everything is excitingly different from at home: the dining room, vast with a rich, swirly pattern on its carpet; our table, with its ranks of cutlery, the heavy silver pots for tea, coffee and hot water – and the butter, scooped into little swirls, in its own silver dish.

And we have our own waiter: Bruno, tall, Brylcreemed and Italian, who calls my mother signora, and Vera signorina, and who winks at me. Everything about the hotel makes me feel grown-up.

My mother is not so sure about Bruno: ‘Don’t trust those Latin looks, Vera. A bit of a gigolo if you ask me.’

Vera laughs. Why? I’ve not heard Bruno giggle once.

‘Please, Mum, can we all go to the beach today?’

‘I don’t see why not. Jack, Brendan, you’ll be happy with that?’

‘You’ll come in the sea, won’t you, Vera?’

‘Not today, Rory – much too cold. Maybe at the end of the week.’

‘But the holiday will be almost over by then. Swim today, Vera. Please. Please.’

‘No, thanks. I’ll watch you, all right?’

‘Oh, Vera – you’ll enjoy it once you’re in. Honestly.’

A look from my mother: ‘Don’t insist, Rory. Vera will swim when she feels ready.’

But I have an idea: ‘Vera, if you’re nervous about going in the sea, there’s a special pill you can take and then you don’t feel even a bit scared of the water.’

‘Oh, really?’ says Vera, pausing as she cuts her bacon.

‘Yes, there’s an advertisement in the Readers’ Digest: a picture of a lady diving off the high board into a swimming pool. It says: “Use Tampax and swim with confidence.”’

There’s a short, but very distinct pause.

'Jack, don’t snort,’ says my mother. ‘Rory, I think I’ve left the car keys in my room. Run and get them for me – at once, please.’

As I push back my chair, she reaches for her Daily Telegraph, unfurls it briskly, scanning the headlines: ‘“Russian Spacewoman Orbits Earth”. Well, Vera – whatever next?’

Not VG at games

Dear Headmaster
It is imperative that you excuse my son Rory from taking part in outdoor sporting activities: rugby, soccer and hockey are entirely out of the question.

As an educationalist, you will appreciate that certain pupils have ‘special needs’. Few, if any, have needs that are more intensely special than those of this gifted, sensitive and deeply intellectual boy.

At this critical stage of Rory’s development, exposure to the rigours of the sports field could trigger an irreversible physical and psychological disintegration.

Naturally I wish to support the school’s sporting ethos. Rory’s consultant and I are eager that he should take as much appropriate exercise as possible – swimming, for example.

With this in mind, I am considering making a donation of £1.75 million to fund an Olympic-sized heated pool.

I feel sure, Headmaster, that you will have no difficulty in complying with my request.

Sincerely

L A Keegan (Mrs)

It’s lunchtime on a granite-cold January afternoon and, regrettably, my mother has once again failed to write this letter. So, barring a lucky outbreak of bubonic plague, it looks like I’m going have to face my fate: I’m sentenced to rugby.

Boys are heading upstairs to get changed. I stall, extending my piano practice by five minutes: Scarlatti (Grade 1) needs me. By the time I get there, the dorm’s deserted. I rush into my kit, clatter downstairs and check the team lists, ranged in hierarchy from the Olympus of the First XV to the grungy depths of my team – the Junior Scraps.

I huff and puff up the hill and along half a mile of pavement to the Scraps’ prestigious twice-weekly venue in a rented-out farmer’s meadow.

Despite my inaptitude for team sports, I’m not too bad at running. At least it warms me up and gives me time to prepare for the challenge that lies ahead. I am about to exercise the power of my will.

Raising an eyebrow, Mr Carter (cords, duffle coat, college scarf, bobble hat) checks me off his list. I take my position – full back (where else?) – and the incomprehensible ritual begins.

‘I am invisible. I am invisible. I am invisible.’ As I murmur my mantra, my breath forms arctic cloudlets. And it’s working. A confusion of boys is doing something violent in a steamy blur at the far end of the field. Stay there, guys.

Gradually the combination of wind-chill and mental exertion numbs me into submission. Rooks flap up from the skeleton trees, black splodges on a moleskin sky. The two white aitches tower impassively over us – twenty-nine true believers, and one just-visible heretic.

Life class

Tall, brisk and confident, Brother Sreenan teaches chemistry and religious education as if they are the same subject.

Whether dispensing facts and formulae, or rules and rubrics, he expects maximum attention and minimal interaction. We need information. He has it. What’s to discuss?

‘Boys, now that your upper-sixth year has arrived, we shall divide our RE lessons between two vitally important topics. The first is to prepare you for the trials and temptations that will assail you as you enter the world beyond the sheltered confines of your schooldays. The second is how to fill in your UCCA form.’

So here we are, an assortment of middle-class youths from nice enough homes in a school that, though private, is far from pretentious. Outside, the Vietnam War is cranking up, the Beatles are recording Sergeant Pepper and 1967’s summer of love is bursting into leaf.

Meanwhile, pacing to and fro in front of us, Brother Sreenan has information to impart.

‘Boys, I need to warn you about a particular kind of man.....

'I mean the homosexual.

'Boys, be on your guard. And read the signs. Beware the mohair sweater. Give the suede shoe a wide berth. And should you chance to find yourself in hospital (following, perhaps, an injury sustained in a vigorous game of rugby) be careful lest you find yourself prostrate and alone with a male nurse. I say no more.’

Chalk dust floats in midday shafts of sunlight and my thoughts drift.

I see myself gasping helplessly in mangled wreckage, my life ebbing away.

Then, ‘Don’t worry, pal. We’ll soon have you out of here. You’re safe. I’m a nurse.’

I look to my rescuer. But relief turns to horror as my gaze takes in the moral nightmare that confronts me: maroon mohair – and Hush Puppies.

‘Boys, you need to realize how very different women are from men in their attitudes and assumptions. For instance: you return home at the end of a taxing day at work. Your wife serves your dinner. You eat it with a good appetite. And then, to your astonishment, your better half bursts into a flood of tears.

'“Whatever is the matter?” you inquire. And through her sobs you learn the cause of this contretemps: “I have spent the whole of today making and hanging a new set of curtains for our dining room. And you have not even noticed!”’

There are guffaws from around the room.

‘Yes, boys, amusing enough. And yet how very much a part of the natural scheme of things. It is in the female nature to prize and cherish such domestic matters. And it is equally a part of the male psyche to fail to notice them.

'It is your duty as a man and as a husband to make allowances. Always remember: that is how she is; that is how you are.’

‘But, Brother, the thing is…. Well, actually…. I would have noticed. We’d probably have chosen the material together. A jokey design with a pop-art theme. Maybe in the sale at Habitat.’

My interjection, of course, is silent.

I’ve decades ahead of me in which to work out what it means to be a man.