East of Eden

Have just finished reading East of Eden, John Steinbeck's ambitious and ultimately impressive novel of life in the Salinas Valley, first published in 1952, though I have to say the lapse in time is, for me, puzzling. Why did it take me sixty years to get around to it? One thought is that I might have been put off by the 1950s film of the book, starring James Dean and Julie Harris, though I cannot put hand on heart and say I actually watched it. At least, I can't remember it in any detail.
Steinbeck was one of the first 'grown up' novelists I turned to once I left school, and had already devoured The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row and To a God Unknown by the time I left South Lincolnshire for Norfolk, or more precisely Norwich, where, it was widely rumoured, the streets were paved with gold. So in that sense Steinbeck was representative of a particular time in my life, and when that time ended I simply left him behind.
On reflection, I may also have caused this to happen to Thornton Wilder (The Bridge of San Luis Rey) and to Dylan Thomas and Under Milk Wood, a tape recording of which I heard for the very first time in 1955 in the basement lounge of Urchfont Manor, in Wiltshire, during a 'Writing for the Radio' course run by a BBC producer and thankfully paid for by the RAF. Ever since then I have had a recording (LPs, tapes, and now CDs) of this classic piece, forever linked in my mind with approaching demob.
Is this what happens? Does a book, a piece of music or prose, listened to or read at a particular time, forever lock one's memory into that time? If it happened to me with Steinbeck, then it certainly also happened with Richard Addinsall's Warsaw Concerto, a piece of film music often criticised as a 'pastiche' but one which always makes me think of the last War, and in particular of those grainy black and white photographs in the News Chronicle of columns of refugees or troops struggling for survival during the long Russian winter.
What - or rather, who - happened in leisure reading terms post-Steinbeck, was HE Bates (particularly Fair Stood the Wind for France, and his titles from Burma, followed by his English rural stories), followed by Nevil Shute, whose titles I loved and many of which still sit on my shelves.
There were many others, of course, often of a similar genre, and things did not really change again to any great extent until about 1960, when I discovered Ernest Hemingway. Then, of course, everything changed. 
  

The Dressing Room

In eleven seasons of reporting on the ups and downs of Norwich City, and watching upwards of fifty football matches a season, only twice did I make it into the Canaries' inner sanctum on match day, once before a kick-off and once after a final whistle. There were a number of reasons. The most obvious reason why it was not commonplace was that dressing rooms are, or rather were, looked upon as the players' home from home, the one safe place where they could get away from incessant public scrutiny, even if it was for only 15 minutes. The placing of a TV camera there, as seen occasionally nowadays, seems to me like rigging CCTV in a public loo. We just don't need to go there.
The before-match experience was at Huddersfield. I'd travelled with the team, eaten a light lunch with them,  and seen them into the dressing room when, to my surprise, the manager suddenly launched into his briefing.
To be honest, it was fairly mundane stuff. 'Try to unsettle them early on. Go for a quick goal and make them counter-attack. Play your normal game.'
He mentioned only two opposition players. One was a striker who favoured his left foot. 'Force him away, steer him towards the touchline.' The other was the opposition goalkeeper. 'He doesn't fancy high crosses,' the boss said. 'He flaps.' Then he turned to one of City's inside-forwards (which shows just how long ago it was) and said, 'Tickle him up a bit when you get the chance. Show him you're around and let him know he's got you coming straight at him when he goes for corners.'
The other dressing room occasion was at Bolton. City had lost heavily and many of the travelling fans were disgruntled. The team was slow-handclapped off the pitch, and afterwards there was a demonstration outside the players' entrance. When I went to the dressing room, having finished reporting duties, I could hear the City fans' rhymical clapping in the background and the chants, in unison, of 'You didn't even try . . . '
Inside the visitors' dressing room a first impression was the strong smell of embrocation and surgical spirit, and the second, a view of the sallow-faced players, still in their muddy kits, sitting quietly in postures of total exhaustion. The floor was a litter of bandages and bloodstained clumps of cotton wool. In one corner a player was being intermittently sick. Another rolled down his socks and showed me his shins, which were lined with bumps and dents accumulated over many seasons. Nearly all the players had bleeding places on their feet and legs, and so many bruises I couldn't really count.
Later, we all left by the players' entrance to find the team coach in the car park, the cries of the fans still ringing in our ears. 'You didn't even try . . . '
I thought, blimey, they tried. Harder than usual, actually. But on that day, nothing worked. Most of them were carrying wounds which, for us, would have raised the possibility of a week off from work. They, however, faced a coach journey back to Norwich, a day off, then training again on Tuesday. None of the wounds and bruises I saw would have healed by then.
So I don't think many fans quite realise the damage sustained by pro players, and the effects of accumulations of injuries sustained in what is, after all, a very close physical sport.  

The Eleven-plus

The prospect of the examination known in South Lincolnshire as the Eleven-plus hung like a lead weight around my shoulders just after the end of the Second World War. I thought I was reasonably bright. I could read. I devoured books, and I could write moderately well even though the handwriting left something to be desired. And I knew certain facts about certain parts of the world. But the thought of the eleven-plus was terrifying, because it would decide which school I went to next - grammar or secondary modern, or stay put at the town's senior school. The problem was, when the time came for the exam, book reading and general knowledge just didn't come into it. Fright inevitably gained the upper hand.
I remember some of the exam papers even now. There was one on maths. I was not good at maths, and it was an awful drawn-out struggle. There were also a lot of what I would call puzzle questions. Questions such as, 'Which motif is the odd one out?' and 'What letter/number is next in sequence?' It was all as gibberish to me as 'if A and X equal 53, and Y is 3, what is B and E?'
A few weeks' later I knew I had failed. When the whistle went one playtime and we all queued at the school door, one or two of the boys bumptiously announced they would soon be going to the grammar school. 'You've failed,' one of them said to me. Obviously, those who had passed had been told their results in advance.
My luck changed when it was found I was top of the failures and that there was one place left at the Gleed secondary modern school at Spalding.
On my first day at the new school the new intake, 'failures' all, must have been looking glum because when the teacher faced his new class he said: 'Well, cheer up. You're the lucky ones if you think about it. If you'd gone to the grammar school you'd be learning Latin and have homework every night. We don't do that.'
He was right, and we all cheered. It was going to be OK after all.

Marcus le Touche

One of the best things about being a newspaper columnist in Norfolk was opening the morning mail. You never knew what you would get. One day I got a letter from someone who wrote, 'In Burgh-next-Aylsham there is a circus clown who lives in a tiny caravan beside the river Bure, who entertains children.' There was, too.
Marcus was sort-of retired when I first met him, sort-of because he was still honouring occasional bookings for children's parties and garden fetes; and his home made wooden caravan turned out to be about the size of a tiny trailer capable of being towed behind a car. He lived on his own on a meadow in this little caravan beside the Bure with no electricity and nothing but a little stove for warmth and a small dog for company. Yet he gave every appearance of being blissfully content, and he told a wonderful tale.
He was descended from Hugenots, he said, and spent his early youth with a circus in South America. His betrothed, a trapeze artiste, was killed at his feet in the circus ring, and so he never married. Then he went to Hollywood, appeared in some early short-reel films, played cricket for Ronald Colman's ex-pat team, went to Africa with one of the first wildlife film crews (an enterprise which became bankrupt) and ended up touring this country with various shows - now accompanied by a little dog - with an act which appealed mainly to children.
For a time, he said, he lived next door to the violinist Albert Sandler, and remembered him rehearsing in the garden. He said he also appeared in a Royal Command Performance, presumably in the 1930s-1950s (though I haven't been able to trace this), and had by this time become, officially, Clown Roma. Then his appeal dwindled. Television lured away child audiences and vandals attacked his caravan (in Nottingham, I believe). Twice his van caught fire, and by the mid-1980s his showbusiness career was over.
On one occasion Marcus allowed me a glimpse of a pile of scrapbooks crammed with photos and cuttings and old programmes, all of which, I assume, were lost in one of his fires. When I took my youngest son to meet him, Marcus and his dog immediately produced an impromptu performance of part of his act.
And once I recall inviting him to lunch at Jarrold's restaurant in Norwich, a city he visited occasionally. He turned up in a check Norfolk jacket and trousers, a deerstalker-type hat and shiny brown boots, and won over the waitresses with his old-fashioned manners and charm.
'My dear boy . . .' he would say, because Marcus was gentle and charming in what I imagine was an Edwardian sort of way, and utterly comfortable with his lot and his tiny number of possessions.
Then a few years' later he died and I do not know what happened. I lost him then in a sense that I have not been able to find any recorded trace of him. No listing of him having been the official Clown Roma, no reference to any Royal Command Performance, no glimpse of his surname among Hugenot archives or in the records of the Hollywood cricket team.
But he certainly existed. He once insisted on giving me his portable typewriter, as he did not use it any more, and I eventually handed it on to my youngest son, who still has it and who still remembers him. As for Marcus and his legacy, he seems to have packed up his tent and disappeared, just like the circus. 

A Home Fixture

The best thing about youthful football enthusiasm was that it was directed at, and enthused by, one's home team. By and large it is the same today, even though satellites and the internet have allowed the game's tentacles to spread globally; much further, anyway, than the next town or village.
There is no doubt that the foundations of the popularity of the English game were geographical. A community, be it city district, town or village, had a football team, and lads from that city, town or village wanted to play for it. Rivalries were nurtured and traditions established. Location, nickname and team colours helped to help define where you lived and where your loyalties resided.
The rebuilding of the old clapped-out Victorian framework of grounds, however welcome, has nonetheless put the ideal of localism in football under strain. My football mid-life dreams and visits were rooted in dark, shabby, thrilling places like Roker Park, the Baseball Ground, Highbury and Maine Road, Ninian Park and Filbert Street. Nowadays, watching Final Score on Saturday TV, I am often left in the dark when the linkman shouts, 'There's a goal at the Amex (or the King Power).' But that, after all, is my fault. I'm out of touch.
What I do worry about rather more is the thought that the game, for purely financial reasons, might one day decide to move away from its geographical tradition and instead embrace the monetary wiles of the franchise. This could mean someone might be able to buy the club (sorry, brand), and the players' contracts, and move it all, lock, stock and barrel, from the south of England or where-ever, to the north-east, for example.
The key question is then: if a club moves away from his traditional geographical base (because of a new stadium, say) is it still the same club? Or is it a new club? And there are related questions. For example, if a club does move away from its traditional location should it have to rename itself and start again in the bottom division?
I have to confess that the closure of Wimbledon and the birth of MK Dons did bother me in a sense that here was a club which (a) moved from its geographical base, and (b) called itself something else. So, should it have been made to start again and gain admission to the Football League, like every other new club has to do?
Now, I have nothing whatsoever against MK Dons or their modern stadium. But I do think that at some point someone is going to have to decide what constitutes a new club, or whether a fresh start in a new location automatically means beginning again. Something like a 20-mile rule ought to do the trick. Move a club more than 20 miles from its historic home and it is a new club which will have to make a fresh start.
Anything to keep a franchise-type culture at bay. 

All Fall Out

My National Service number, allocated at RAF Cardington reception unit almost exactly sixty years ago, still rolls off the tongue without the slightest effort. 2708260, sir. It was something you had to remember in order to get a pass, get paid, or go anywhere. Now it is like having a tattoo. It is always with you.
Not that I'm embarrassed at having been called up. Everyone was called up. Well, most of us were. Rumours of favouritism often hung in the barrack-room air. There was the story of a pop singer who, someone decided, would suffer traumas if forced like the rest of us to march about in the rain on a parade square, and so was excused. And another of a cricketer who was also excused on medical grounds, only to be selected for an MCC overseas' tour instead.
Whether either story was actually true, I do not know. But general resentment at call-up did run deep, and it was not helped by procedures at Cardington. One day the entire week's intake was marched into one of the vast hangars to be given a pep talk on the importance of conscription (the Korean war was just over, but there were bushfire wars all over the place, and the Cold War) and the importance of following orders.
Then they said: 'Hands up anyone who attends or has attended public school.'
Out of the several hundred raw recruits about twenty did so. They were promptly spirited away and not seen again for a week when they emerged bursting with pride with white bands around their brand new caps. POMs, we called them. Potential Officer Material. No one else, it was assumed, could possibly be suitable.
The second command was: 'Hands up if you have played professional sport.'
Again, four or five did, including a couple of amateur boxers and a fast bowler attached to a county second eleven. They were given special postings, too, with an eye to joining RAF sports teams.
The whole effect, of course, was demoralising, and left the rest of us with the sole objective of trying to avoid being posted to Compton Bassett which, rumour had it, was the most severe of the training camps.
I did avoid Compton Bassett, doing my training at Hednesford instead; and I did, in the main, actually enjoy my two-year stint as a telephone operator in the signals section at RAF Worksop. But I cannot use any of that to suggest support for a crackpot private members' bill (proposed by Philip Hollobone, Con, Kettering) to bring a sort of national service, or community service, back on to the political agenda. At the very least, any such scheme would almost certainly be selective (public school pupils excused?), and there is no evidence that boys (and girls?) between the ages of 18 and 26 would (a) actually do it, and (b) return to civvy street refreshed and reinvigorated.
In 2005 I went back to RAF Worksop and met two former service colleagues I had not seen for fifty years. We were there, but RAF Worksop was not. It had closed as an operational base shortly before the Hungarian revolution, and was returned to farming shortly after that. So the three of us stood in the middle of harvest fields listening to skylarks and trying to remember the layout. We walked on a remaining bit of the runway, found where our billet hut used to be, and where the signals section was. And I thought: 'There used to be 3000 men here, Meteor jets, hangars and workshops, mess halls and medical centres, billet sites and sports fields. And now, nothing but skylarks and sky, rabbits and harvest fields.'
National Service belongs to the early Cold War period. It is history, thank goodness.
   

The Ghost Runner

A recent glimpse of some 1960s nostalgia, which included some of the leading British sporting champions of their day, brought home how modest and ill-at-ease they all seemed in front of cameras and in the public eye. Not at all like today's preening 'personalities.'
The stars of the 60s came from a very different background, of course. Most things were different then. Sport certainly was. There were no sponsorships, no TV money, no hype. Cricket was still hampered by self-imposed pro-amateur divisions such scoreboards with initials for some and plain surnames for others (ABJ Fennistone-Haugh c Bloggs b BKN Trumpington-Browne, etc), and by Gentlemen versus Players fixtures. Football also promoted a clear distinction between the amateur and the professional. Even so, 100,000 people would still turn up to watch the FA Amateur Cup Final at Wembley.
As for the Olympic Games, they were solidly (or as solidly as they could make them) for the unpaid (and therefore privately funded) competitor only.
To be fair, these rules merely carried on the policies of the pre-War years. But in the 1950s and 1960s the Games 'amateur only' rule was beginning to be queried. Working class competitors, whatever their sport, could not afford time off work to train, and there was little opportunity for them to gain top level or overseas experience. If they competed in local sports - and many towns held annual sports days then - the award of a Woolworth's glass ashtray or a half-crown postal order for winning the sack race would have labelled them as 'professional' and thus ineligible for the Games.
Some sports, I am sure, devised ways to get around this. And certain Eastern Bloc countries enrolled their best sports men and women into the armed services, which got around the training problem. But it would be another decade before sponsorships (horse racing, followed by golf) came in, soccer dropped its am/pro distinction, and Gentlemen and Players cricket fixtures retreated into history. Yet for a short period between these milestones, problems proliferated.
One man who clashed with the authorities was John Tarrant, born in London in 1932. As a youth in the Peak District he took up boxing, and at 18 won £17. Then he switched to running. But when he tried to join Salford Harriers his application was turned down, and at the age of 20 he was banned from official competitions by the Amateur Athletics Association solely because of the money he had won in the ring.
Tarrant, it should be remembered, was a very good runner with a distinguished record. Some would say a top runner, and he had the 1960 Rome Olympics in his sights. Yet he was banned, and he decided to try to do something about it.
In 1956 an important race was held at Liverpool, drawing big crowds. The race began, and suddenly a figure in full racing strip emerged from the crowd, joined the runners, and raced with them almost to the final line when it veered away and duly disappeared. It made headlines, and for the next few years John Tarrant - or The Ghost Runner - 'gatecrashed' dozens of events throughout the land.
One of the towns which held an annual sports weekend in the 1950s was Holbeach, not far from where I was born. It was also hugely popular, drawing crowds and top competitors, including grass track cyclists. And I am fairly certain - though I cannot find a record of it - that The Ghost Runner appeared here, fleetingly, joining in part of a race and then disappearing.
John Tarrant, who died in 1975, never got to complete in the Olympic Games. But he had made his point, and at least he lived long enough to see the Games begin to open up to everyone.   

The Lost World

Most of the known world evidently forgot to mark a major research centenary earlier this year, for it was in February, 1913, that Clement Reid (and Cambridge University Press) published his book, Submerged Forests. For the first time, anecdotal and research information was brought together to make a strong case for there having been, in ancient times, a swathe of land, now submerged, which once joined the British Isles to mainland Europe. It was groundbreaking stuff, and only now, a hundred years later, and thanks largely to oil and gas research, is much more information coming to light.
The lost world of Doggerland was a land bridge to the mainland stocked with trees and streams, grasslands, marshes and rivers. Particularly rivers, some of which may even have framed the land corridors wherein prey and hunters concentrated their movements. Thus some of our present river systems (the Ouse, Thames) can be seen as surviving remnants of earlier systems and tributaries now under the North Sea.
By about 10,000BC Doggerland was already reduced in size, but it was still attractive to wandering Mesolithic groups as it stretched from north of the modern Wash to the Thames estuary, and joined the mainland - via the Dogger Hills - between the Elbe and Rhine rivers. It was also an important larder, for in addition to fish and fowl there were mammoth, red deer, auroch and wild horses among the willow, hazel, and later, pine, oak, elder and elm.
One ancient river flowed north across Norfolk in the Runton and Cromer area, and this was the origin of the Cromer Forest Bed (700,000 to 600,000 years ago) which formed during one of the warmer periods. The residue can still be seen as a black layer at the foot of the cliffs about 200 metres east of West Runton's slipway. The Runton elephant - actually an early mammoth - was one of its denizens. An even larger body of water, the Bytham River, flowed from close to Stratford Upon Avon, north-east towards Leicester, and then east to skirt Stamford and Peterborough. Then it flowed south of King's Lynn and on to Shouldham Thorpe; south-east towards Bury St Edmunds; and north-east again to exit Norfolk north of Lowestoft.
Where did these rivers go? On Doggerland, the old Thames ran into the Channel river and what is now the Rhine; the Ouse was connected to systems which reached as far as the Norwegian Trench; as did the Cromer Forest Bed river, which flowed by Dogger Hills on the way.
Oddly, there is an echo of all this in the occasional debate on the advisability of siting nuclear power stations near sea shores, one pro-voice stating, well, at least we don't get tsunamis here. Actually, we do. Or rather, we have. In about 6,000BC retreating ice sheets and subsequent readjustments of land surfaces caused a mass of undersea material to shift, provoking a huge tsunami. The landslip occurred off the south-west coast of Norway, at Storegga, near the Norwegian Trench.
The Storegga slides were monumental, and the tsunami seems to have hit east and north Scotland and parts of Northern England. In some places the waves reached several kilometres inland, and layers of sand have been identified at 23 locations. It is likely that the lives of hunter-gatherer groups were disrupted, and the tsunami may even have enlarged the Channel which was beginning to open up in Doggerland and which would eventually grow to isolate Britain from the mainland. 

A Reminder

Strollers on Sheringham's west end clifftop footpath, which leads up to the Coastguard Hut, may have pondered the origins of a moving little cluster of crosses of remembrance placed just behind the fence - on the seaward side - above, yet close to, the Lifeboat Shed. To the best of my knowledge this is an individual family's private tribute to a lost, loved member. It is an area of the cliffs which, during the last War, was honeycombed with tunnels and heavily defended. What younger visitors or post-War residents may not know, is that the moving little assemblage also overlooks the place where three airmen - enemy airmen, as it happens - did lose their lives.
This War-time drama occurred during the early hours of December 6, 1939, during a night of hail and rain and brisk winds. Residents close to the seafront were awakened by the sound of an aircraft, very low and with engines spluttering, which went on to crash in the sea on the east side of the Lifeboat Shed. Despite an initial fear that 'Jerries might be running around in the dark,' which caused some alarm and excitment, people poured out of their houses in the pitch dark, the lifeboat crew was 'knocked up,' and the lifeboat launched into heavy swell to search for survivors.
Ashore, flickering lights and torches picked out the sight of a parachute draped over the prom near the Whelk Coppers, and an equally ominous glimpse of a swastika-adorned plane rolling in the sea about 50 yards from high-water mark. Despite the wind and the stink of aviation fuel some of the male bystanders waded into the sea with ropes and managed to secure the wreckage to the breakwater, to prevent it drifting away.
Daylight added detail, even as the area was flooded with military guards, officials and aviation experts. The aircraft was a twin-engined Heinkel HE 115 float plane which may have been laying magnetic mines. The story was put around that it had been 'downed' by a 'secret weapon' at Beckham, though subsequent consideration suggested the plane was much more likely to have clipped one of the Chain Home radar towers at West Beckham. The Heinkel also boasted self-sealing fuel tanks, a system which greatly interested British boffins who were working on their own version. Eventually, of course, the wreckage was cleared away, though one of the engines is said to be still there, off the beach, lying in about 20 feet of water.
But what of the German crew of three? The body of one was discovered immediately and subsequently buried, with military honours, at Bircham. The other two bodies were washed ashore several days later. They too were given military funerals, this time at Sheringham's Weybourne Road cemetery. After the War, I believe, they were exhumed and re-buried in the German cemetery at Cannock Chase, Staffs.
It is an odd fact that if the Heinkel had come down at low water, it might well have been recorded as the first German plane of the War to crash on British soil.  

Words of Wisdom

As a 16-year-old school-leaver taken on as a junior district reporter by a weekly newspaper in Spalding, my first editor quickly handed over the job of writing up the week's wedding and obituary reports. It was an office tradition, apparently, that the most recent arrival (there were only five of us) found the 'deads and weds' dumped on his or her desk on day one.
The system then, in 1951, was that you sifted through the wedding and obituary forms, typed up each one on your rattling office-issue Remington, and placed the finished article on the editor's desk. Later, pencil in hand and in your trembling presence, he would go through it line by line making copious alterations and usually suggesting you 'have another go at making it more newsy.'
It was hardly Fleet Street, but if you showed the slightest hint of frustration or boredom he would warn: 'Remember, once you get printing ink on your fingers you'll never get it off.' And he was right. I stayed in the industry for 40 years. Though not on the same newspaper.
One of his favourite grumbling asides while editing my attempts to write a wedding report was, 'All brides are beautiful. You don't have to say so.' In other words, stick to the taffeta and organza.
And his patience often snapped thus while reading a draft obituary: 'You don't pass on, pass out, or pass over. You bloody well die.'
He was right, of course.