Just marking the day

Today would have been my Dad's ninetieth birthday - in this 'three generations' photo he is younger than I am now.








It is also the anniversary of Effie Traves' birthday - in Timaru, New Zealand in 1891- and of her death, in childbirth in a hospital in Ymir, British Columbia.  She married my father's mother's brother, and a few years ago, in New Zealand we met up with a nephew of hers, who gave me copies of letters and photos.

Fifty years ago today

Fifty years ago today I woke up in Saffron Walden, last morning of a stay with school friend Sue, a stay which both underlined to some extent my social ineptness, compared to hers, and included several ‘firsts’ - pubs and snogging against a wall with just-met strangers  -  all taking place against an insistent, ever-repetitive, slightly whining,  ‘From a jack to a king.’ 

Fifty years ago today, the bus ride home, Saffron Walden to Bishop’s Stortford and a second bus from there to Hunsdon, and me so filled with a heightened sense of  ... of something ... that I still recall the sensation, that fizzing self-awareness as I looked south across the valley of massed trees in Much Hadham to the space where the turreted fairy-tale castle was no more.   (This castle re-inserted itself into my head last year, become inspirational  background to a to-be-written novel, subsequently a found Flickr photo of its ruined state connecting me to a boy I sat beside in primary school, much more than fifty years ago;  the novel is now one-third writ.)

Fifty years ago today I dressed for the youth club visit (the reason for my earlier than otherwise intended return home) to the ‘59 Club’, in Hackney Wick, knowing only that  it’s leader was the ‘Ton-up vicar’, in brown shoes, mustard colour dress and nearly-black stockings which I still have, the rip reminding me of an unthinking trip on a rose-bush.

Fifty years ago  we travelled there by coach, me sat next to Gillian, and there, in semi-shadowed, high-ceilinged dustiness, I danced and talked to Steve, marvelling at the antics of the hunch-shouldered mods, gloomy circling round handbags and dressed in polka dots;  unexpected in a bikers’ club;  we snogged all the way home.

Yesterday's offer for National Poetry week on Jo Prescott's site

Anyone can make a mistake

Four has always been my lucky number

fourth of the fourth doubly so

forty-four plus four years ago

I reluctantly returned

from a weekend with a school friend

for a youth club visit.

Fifty-nine club,

Ton-up vicar,

Lambeth

Open-mouthed at Mods

Spotted dresses

Shoulder-twitching

Head down circling

Bags on floor.

Not us!

We laughed together

Danced and smiled and talked.

Snogged on the coach all the way home

Fell into a rosebush

And he asked me out.

My Dad said ‘Prospects?, ‘A’ levels?’

And ‘not on his motorbike!’

And I replied

‘just the pictures, that’s all!

I’m not going to marry the man!’

2010 Anniversary of 1966 Wedding

This forthcoming Friday is our forty-fourth wedding anniversary.
Not significant in commercial terms, no precious metal or stone nor, to the best of my knowledge any spurious gap-filler of ... flowers or futons or figs. Nevertheless I see it as sort of significant if only for the fact that I was born in a house numbered forty four.
And because we started going out together on the fourth day of the fourth month. So I shall give this wedding anniversary a more apt attribution. I shall say this occasion is our lucky wedding anniversary.



We just wanted to be married, so we could live together, sleep together.
My mother wanted to be the Mother of the Bride and endlessly discuss weddings with her work colleagues, so would have preferred us to wait another six months at least.

His parents wanted us to get married in church, despite the fact that neither of us were believers. The hoops they made us jump through, in their attempts to persuade us included a deeply funny tea party to which his mother’d invited the vicar, overcoming her antipathy to his extreme blackness of skin in the hope that he’d talk some sense into us; he, however, appreciated our lack of hypocrisy.

I asked Steve’s recently widowed aunt to make my dress and jacket (nothing fancy – a simply shift) but she rather cocked it up.

My father got so fed up with all the aggravation about church weddings, and was nervous about making a speech, that he offered us £50 to elope to Gretna Green.