ABBA - The Beatles.

I'm sorry but I'm going to write about The Beatles again; this time comparing them to ABBA.

Now there was a time when I wouldn't have dreamt about mentioning the two groups in the same breath and I think that is a generational thing. People of my generation usually compare The Beatles with The Rolling Stones but I have never really been much of a Rolling Stones fan.

In the 60s I saw them on stage twice; once at my local dance hall and even ventured in to their dressing room where we had a long chat with Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts.

Over the years, I liked a few of their tracks – It's All Over Now, Get Off My Cloud etc – and I even worked with Mick Jagger's brother, Chris, in a film called Lifeforce for a few months so I don't think I am that qualified to compare the two groups as I would be biased.

I am (nearly) the same age as The Beatles so my experience of them is first hand. I know what it was like before they came along. I remember the very snobby days before their arrival and I remember Buddy Holly being on the Ed Sullivan Show (which I didn't see 'live', of course) and this great, great guitarist and brilliant song writer, this inspiration for the Beatles and loads and loads of major pop artists, was asked by Ed Sullivan (yes a relation, apparently) if he (Buddy) was still at school as if he would go on to something else, more worthwhile after he had sewed his wild oats with his “banjo” plinkety plonk thing. Buddy Holly in his tuxedo standing there in New York City being asked questions by a talentless vacuum cleaner in a suit.

The Beatles appeared on that show in their suits too but it changed eventually.

Before The Beatles politicians in the UK would address journalists by their surname as if they were squaddies in the army but then the silent revolutions came with interviewers like Robin Day who asked all the awkward questions that WE wanted to know the answers to.

I wrote on here before about how I found the first LP – Please Please Me! - the climax to the phenomenon known as The Beatles. After that, in my opinion, they became more of a commodity and certain elements in the group pursued that or rejected it.

I think Lennon veered away from it first, McCartney kind of loved it and wanted to be a pop star; George probably saw the writing on the wall with the astronomical success of the Lennon/McCartney song writing partnership in that his own musical aspirations would have to take a back seat and Ringo carried on playing the drums.

I'm not going in to the silly argument as to Ringo's drumming ability but suffice it to say he played drums on Lennon's later albums and to settle things listen to his drumming on Day in the Life as opposed to McCartney's drumming on The Ballad of John and Yoko.

Over the years since then I have had stars in my eyes with regards to The Beatles; to me they did no wrong. I was on the John Lennon side of things and as the years progressed I drifted further and further away from Paul McCartney and sometimes even looking back at the young John Lennon (he was only ever young) issuing naïve statements about peace and praising Yoko's singing to the heavens I found him, sometimes, cringingly embarrassing.

Somebody once asked me what things might have been like if John Lennon had survived; I answered that for his reputation he was better off dead as we don't know where he would have drifted but I would like to think he would have just settled down and not been an embarrassment like Paul McCartney – no matter what he achieved in the past.

I think the same of Buddy Holly, James Dean and all the other good looking corpses along the way.

So to compare ABBA to The Beatles!!!

How can I?

I played some Beatles tracks recently and, of course, there is always the mood and the moment and I also played some ABBA tracks.

I got a bit fed up of We Can Work It Out and other Beatle tracks but when I played some ABBA songs – on another day, I have to say – I found them very interesting.

Back in their day, I didn't really like them much but my daughter owned the albums, knew the lyrics and played them all the time; so when I saw the stage musical Mama Mia my eyes were opened.

The stage version was very operatic – the singers had very powerful voices, even though they were 'miked' - and the chord sequences together with the naïve lyrics made a very pleasing sound to my ear.

So what's my verdict?

You can't beat I Am the Walrus, can you? Or I Want to Hold Your Hand and Hello Goodbye but if I hear Hey Jude again I'll scream!!!!

The Beatles.

I know very little about Frank Sinatra; I know a bit more about Elvis Presley because he's nearer to my time but The Beatles really clashed with my time line; I know what there is to know about them and where they came from, what influenced them and what was influencing me at the same time. People coming to The Beatles afterwards and maybe, even though they were great fans, loved the music and got to know everything about them, still wonder what the fuss was about.

Sinatra was one of the greatest voices of the century; I got to know how he breathed, how he held a phrase, when others might have 'pointed' the note and how he let half a bar go through, sometimes, before coming in with the next note. We could feel those high notes paining him or was it the emotion in the lyric? – Set 'em up Joe – whatever the case he was a 'one off' – but he could only do one take when acting in a movie.

John Frankeheimer said he had to leave a scene, which was out of focus, in the movie The Manchurian Candidate because 'old blue eyes' couldn't do the same performance again.

I sat in the same town as Sinatra, Los Angeles, watching the same local TV stations going out, seeing someone on there, who had run in to hard times, someone who needed money for surgery, or a funeral or a trip somewhere to save their life and I got to know that someone somewhere in Los Angeles called up the TV Station, found out who needed the money and I eventually got to know that the anonymous donor, the guy who came up with the big bucks was Frankie Boy himself – Sinatra.

Terrible things have been written about him; a bag man for the Mafia and all the other stories of his dubious associations but I know nothing about that; I know about The Beatles.

When a novelist or a great artist paints something or writes a novel they start with the first mark and finish with the last one and The Beatles were started the day John Lennon picked up that first guitar and finished with . . . . finished with what?

Finished with four beats on the drums by Ringo and a cymbal crash on the day they made their first LP – that was the day we lost our virginity – 'between Lady Chatterley and the Beatles First LP!' - to paraphrase Philip Larkin.

The Beatles were three working class lads and a posh one – a middle class one; the middle class one – the posh one - was John Lennon and he was the one who, ironically, eventually wrote Working Class Hero – but that was when it was all over and it was all over the same year it started; 1963; fifty years ago.

I saw The Beatles three times live and those three performances summed up their progress. There were two performances at a small dance hall in King's Heath Birmingham and one as a support act for Tommy Roe and Chris Montez; The Beatles closed the first half of that show and when they had finished their act a third of the audience left. That show was sandwiched in between the two shows at the aforementioned ballroom.

The first show at the dance hall was magnificent; most of the audience were men; well 18 to 25 age group men – about the same age as The Beatles - and not that many girls. This meant that nobody screamed and we could hear them. Ringo still had the Teddy Boy hair cut and had bits of tape wrapped around his sticks. My brother walked up the stairs with him and in the bar afterwards John and Paul played around with the photographers and tried to get Ringo and George to come out and take part and people, who were with us, were included in the photos.

Not us; we were cool dudes propping up the bar, on the look out for girls and eventually when Ringo and George came George was wearing a fur coat right to the ground.

George looked to be the hard man even though John hit the headlines a few weeks later when he got into a drink induced fist fight with one of their roadies.

The difference between the two 'dance hall' performances was huge. They were tired the second time, we'd just found out John Lennon was married and the girls screamed too loud and, even though we could just about hear them that night, nobody heard them again.

I realise the many people who saw The Beatles in their live performances over the years, right up to their final performance at Candlestick Park, San Francisco, had to make do with seeing them in a huge stadium and not being able to hear them at all, but when we saw them they were less than 20 feet from us and they sang all the songs they sang on their first LP the first time and a variation of that the second time.

Before The Beatles, pop singers in the UK covered American songs that hadn't been released in the UK; songs such as Rubber Ball (Bobby Vee/Marty Wilde), Tower of Strength (Gene McDaniels/Frankie Vaughan), 100 pounds of Clay (Gene McDaniels/Craig Douglas) and many others. The British covers are the second artist mentioned above after each song title.

In those days, covers were covers and revivals were called revivals which are called 'covers' today. In those days not many singers wrote their own songs; they concentrated on their voices so everybody was what they would call today a 'cover band' – although we didn't call them bands. The bands in those days were bands - big bands with trombones, trumpets saxaphones: Joe Loss, Ted Heath  – going back to Glenn Miller.

The Beatles were a group who sang mostly other artists' songs – these days called covers.

They sang Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry songs, mainly and they also sang a lot of the black girl singers' songs: The Shirelles, The Marvelettes etc. The last time I saw them they opened their act with Paul McCartney singing the Tony Orlando version of Beautiful Dreamer – note for note from the phrasing to the screaming wows!

Each time I saw them they finished their act with John Lennon singing Twist and Shout – an old Isley Brothers song. John Lennon ruined his throat the day he recorded it for their first LP, album, whatever you want to call it and that LP was called Please Please Me!

There is a lot of confusion about Ringo's status as the drummer; the fact remains that he was and still is, a better drummer than Pete Best; he is a better drummer than most rock drummers who used to bore the pants off us in those days with their fifteen minute drum solos. Ringo was left handed (on the drums) and The Beatles wanted him to join the group because they knew him from Germany where he played with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes and, more importantly, he knew them.

The great thing about their first LP was that they recorded it in one day; they showed up at Abbey Road Studios at about ten in the morning and Lennon finished his famous Twist and Shout shortly before midnight – although I'm told it was more like 8:45 pm. At lunch time the workers went to lunch but 'the lads' stayed behind and rehearsed A Taste of Honey – which was one of the few 'over dubs' on the LP – and the rest were recorded in single takes; I don't mean one take per song but complete takes till it was right.

And that was it – The Beatles had done it! As soon as Ringo joined the others and they made that recording it was the beginning of the end; all the hard work had been done and the business plan, the publicity plan, the image controllers and publicity men took over and that innocent day February 11 1963 would never be repeated.

We were lucky enough to see them on February 15^th (so I am told) just four days after they made the Please Please Me! LP.

The LP is as close as you can get to their live act and is their best. Oh you can worship Sergeant Pepper and The White Album, the changing sound of pop music with John Lennon's Tomorrow Never Knows but the innocence of the Please Please Me LP and the sound of the group that day would never be repeated. Four beats on the drums by Ringo, a cymbal crash and it was all over.

Baby Boomers.

Elvis Presley.

As John Lennon said 'he started it.'

Yes that's right! Baby Boomers; who are they? Well they seem to be mentioned in America more than over here. In fact the man in the street here wouldn't know what the various generations are called; and why would they.

The Baby Boomers were that generation born after the war – yes the 2^nd world war – up to 1964; so that is between the years 1945 and 1964. The war was over, the troops came home and all those children were born. 

And what did they create? Nothing.

They think they did; they think they're special but you look at the people who actually changed the world. The tremendous amount of people born in 1926 – The Queen, Marilyn Monroe, Mel Brooks, Andy Griffith, Don Rickles, Jerry Lewis, David Attenborough, Hugh Hefner, Chuck Berry, Kenneth Williams, Eric Morecambe, Leonard Rosseter, my pal Aubrey Morris and many more.

Now if you haven't heard of all of them or appreciated their talent you are the one who is 'missing out.'

What ever happened in 1925 or the first few months of 1926 to produce such a unique and talented lot might be worth looking into. 

They were born eight years after a whole generation died in the first world war – two million, in fact, never came back to the UK, from the war to have kids who would create jobs fifteen to twenty years later and leave four to six million vacancies in the jobs market when they retired in the seventies.

That was the real cause of stagflation – but that's another subject!

Now I don't fall into the category of a Baby Boomer – I'm not too young I'm too old. I was a war baby; just like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. They were the ones who followed the pioneers – people like Elvis Presley, Woody Allen, John Cazalle and the subject of one of my posts Jerry Lee Lewis.

Those were the people who started Rock'n'roll as it became. There might have been something else beforehand but Little Richard, Jerry Lee and Elvis are the ones who started it; The Beatles built on to that with the Stones.

Then in the seventies it all went wrong, musically, which we have seen recently with the excellent TV series here in Britain called The Seventies.

People like James Taylor, Crosby Stills and Nash ruined everything with their savourless songs with no beat and very little melody; it's no wonder that in the late seventies punk came along.

The Ramones.

Great band but all dead now.

Punk Rock was originally supposed to have started with garage bands or groups. People have always said it started near where they used to live; well it probably did. They were all influenced by the same people – The Kinks, The Kinsmen and main stream rock 'n' roll – but the people who made it famous – really famous – were The Ramones, The Sex Pistols and The Clash.

Punk Rock went back to the three chord basic guitar playing – 'C' 'G' and 'F' – sometimes throwing in an A minor chord for good measure but it was back to basics like the fifties.

These punk rockers were the late Baby Boomers and they disappeared when their time came unlike the early ones.

So now the Baby Boomers will be retiring – the first ones retired here last year (aged sixty five) and over the next twenty years they will be dying.

If you want to invest in the future – go into the funeral business.

Being Irish and liking The Beatles

The original Dubliners

Here I am again – thinking; well I was thinking about something and what it is that identifies us to where we come from; I mean why are some people, a whole race of us, Irish? It's something in us isn't it's something in the soul – or even the sole.

The Welsh, Irish and Scots are basically Celts although there will be somebody to argue with that and say that the Celts are in the Baltic states or the Caucuses or some other wild place. The Celts are supposed to be wild and – I suppose I would have to agree with some of that as I've seen some really wild buggers on the west coast of Ireland and in Scotland. I don't think I've seen much wildness in Wales and there is another part of the British Isles that are supposed to be Celtic and that's Cornwall.

Up to the age of 5 I led as sheltered a life as any preschool child and spoke with the accent of my parents. We were an Irish family living in England but I only met Irish people; my parents' friends were Irish, their children were Irish and our grandparents were Irish and we all spoke with Irish accents; what else?

Then when I went to school I suddenly found that the kids and the teachers spoke differently; what was that strange way of speaking? They had English accents and I had an Irish one. So started my life of mimicry, I suppose, as I didn't want to stick out as being different.

I spoke with an English accent at school and an Irish accent at home; when I went to Ireland, which we did 3 times a year, they would call me English; that was my nickname. When I played football in the streets the other players would shout at me to pass the ball “Over here English!” they would say.

I would shout back “I'm not English, I'm Irish!”

Then I would return to England and school with an Irish accent again and when we played football and they wanted the ball off me they would shout “Over here Irish!” and I would shout back “I'm not Irish – I'm English!”

Can you blame me for growing up confused?

After a while what I was didn't matter; I got on with life till I was asked what I was and I had to say – Irish.

It's in us we're Celts.

In the 1960s my cousin loved The Dubliners and I loved The Beatles. I don't know if he'd ever seen The Beatles, and I'm sure I'd never seen The Dubliners, but we went our separate ways loving our Beatles and our Dubliners.

Even though I felt Irish, when the chips were down, and I had been thrown out of one or two pubs for rowdy behaviour – sometimes with my dad – I suppose I felt English till I actually discovered The Dubliners just like my cousin Eamon; they were magnificent.

I bought as many of their records as I could and that led me on to buying a lot of other Irish stuff.

I saw The Dubliners at the Barbican in London and people of all ages were actually dancing in the aisles. The rhythm was so infectious and tribal that I couldn't help but get out of my seat and kind of 'move' – it wasn't dancing but the whole of my body felt stimulated by this bunch of bearded big bellied middle aged men.

So I think the big thing about identity and knowing who you are owes a lot to the cultures of where you are from - namely the music.

I went from there to learning a lot of Irish music so I could sing it and accompany myself on my guitar and banjo; I was never a singer but I learned to sing and eventually made a CD – A Bit of Irish which is 16 Irish favourites but I had to lie about them being favourites as one of the songs was The Wild Colonial Boy, which I think is Australian and another one The Coombe I wrote myself.

John Lennon

It was John Lennon's birthday on Saturday – the 9th – he would have been 70 years of age; hard to believe. We were served with a lot of his music on the radio and on Saturday we watched the movie Imagine – for Beatles or John Lennon fans that movie is a must. You will see that George and Ringo played on the album Imagine so it was really another Beatles album without Sir Macka.

John Lennon has always been more important to me than The Beatles and John had more influence on society than the straights, the squares, realise and would probably accept.

I saw The Beatles, with my brother, three times in their very early days. Now isn't that something? Friends have said they saw Sinatra, Elvis, Nina Simone, Bing Crosby et al but they don't get it. We saw The Beatles – in their early days and The Beatles, with John's influence, changed things.

The Beatles made it ok to question authority; they tried to be working class, but they were never working class, they were students when students usually liked jazz. Lots of students liked jazz because students were supposed to like jazz but when The Beatles came along students started to like rock.

I was the number one Buddy Holly fan and The Beatles reminded me of Buddy Holly and that's why I drifted into them; the other Beatles used the harmonies of The Crickets and the black girl groups like The Shirelles and John's voice, on songs like Baby It's You and Anna from their first LP, is worth a listen to prove my point.

We had heard of The Beatles as they had a small hit with Love Me Do – by the way I've heard the 3 versions of Love Me Do with the three drummers: Pete Best, the session drummer and Ringo and Ringo's playing is far superior – so when they appeared on Thank Your Lucky Stars lip syncing to Please Please Me we knew who they were.

Please Please Me was a great song; John wrote it for Roy Orbison (slower) and was in the same bag as Buddy Holly so naturally my ears pricked up. Three of the Beatles had the famous 'Beatle hair cut' – not Ringo – and John stood with his guitar held high on his chest and his legs open like Elvis and it had an amazing affect on people; me in particular.

The following week Please Please Me shot to number two in the NME charts, and the following Sunday they were due to appear at our local dance hall, The Ritz in King's Heath. We would go there every Sunday to drink their brown ale, nut brown ale or Bruno brown ale, pick up girls and dance; more of the former and less of the latter two I'm afraid.

So we went to our usual spot at The Ritz and saw the most amazing show; not many girls came that night as The Beatles were a geezers (male) group; they were famous in Liverpool and they hadn't quite caught on with the girls yet.

They sang most of the songs from their first LP, Please Please Me, including A Taste of Honey and Twist and Shout and when their set was over we went down to the bar for our nut brown ales and who should join us but The Beatles. The rest of the crowd were still upstairs in the Dance Hall and we were at the little bar.

We didn't have any intimate conversation with them as they were very excited and photographers were asking people to have their photos taken with John and Paul and when they posed they would all shout ha ha ha haaaaaaa and the photo would be taken.

Then George came followed by Ringo; George wore a big fur coat; it would be easy to say there was something about The Beatles and that you could see it at the time but you could; you could see that they had the world at their feet.

We saw groups every week at The Ritz – look it up on line The Ritz, Kings Heath and the Regans who ran it – from The Rolling Stones to Freddie and the Dreamers; when Brian Poole and the Tremeloes came they seemed to have a million dollars worth of equipment, with a microphone each and clear succinct sound but The Beatles shared microphones – which is why their harmonies could be heard.

We saw them twice more; once more at The Ritz when they played their return engagement – and opened with Tony Orlando's version/arrangement of Beautiful Dreamer – but it was never the same. They were too popular and the girls drowned out the performance.

Before the Beatles it was the age of the angry young man – Look Back in Anger and all that and this spread into movies like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, This Sporting Life and other movies but the great mass of youths in the early sixties and the Teddy Boys before them had never heard of Look Back in Anger and John Osborne and all that intellectual stuff that the educated were privy to, so when John Lennon started to ask questions – intelligent questions – we sat up and asked questions ourselves.

There's a piece of film where John is being interviewed, after the Beatles disbanded, and he is espousing peace and an American female interviewer says 'you have it all wrong my dear boy' in such a condescending way that when you see it you want to throw cushions at the TV set; he wasn't taken seriously all the time at the time but the FBI sure kept an eye on him and last week the FBI confiscated his set of finger prints from a New York auction.

So RIP John Lennon; in about two months it will be the 30th anniversary of his death; December 8th (although it was the 9th GMT at the time he was killed) and there will be other remembrances then; number 9.

Memorial Day and my hero.

Burcot Grange (above) built in 1890 and my home for a while as a young child.

It's Memorial Day here; Memorial Day Weekend with the actual 'day' being on Monday and who do I remember? I remember lots of people as I am fortunate to have a good memory. On a site in the UK called Friends Reunited I looked at the people in my class at school and there were just a few; one or two of them got in touch with me, the memory man, and one or two wrote to me that I had forgotten; so not too much of memory man after all. All the things I write on here are from memory and sometimes I look on the Internet for some details like the road where such and such happened; one guy I wrote to, wrote back and said he couldn't remember anything about school at all. If you mention his name to anyone from my class they certainly would remember him as he would sit back on his chair in full view of the rest of the class and . . . well maybe if I put that in it will be picked up as a metatag and draw porn readers to the site – so he forgot all about school did he? The teacher (male) of the class must have seen him but what could he do? What could he say? **** put that thing away? That boy is probably a grandad now and what would his grandchildren think? A year or two before that, a boy at school suddenly stopped coming to school; nobody said anything and we didn't notice that his name had been taken off the register; his name was Michael Holmes. He came to our house to play a couple of times and I got to know his sisters later on; after a few weeks we found out that he had fallen into the canal and drowned. It was a shock but the school didn't let us know; I don't know what age we were but I would guess around eight or nine; I was in the Junior School in any case – Clifton Road Junior School. Now I don't need memorial day to remember Michael as he springs into my mind quite often. What happens here this weekend is the same in Britain only in Britain this weekend it will bank holiday weekend – I think it was called Whitsun at one time and on this American Heathen word processor on this computer it comes out as a spelling mistake – there now I've added the word to the dictionary so it's officially in. In Britain remembrance day is in November and people wear poppies to signify the ending of the first world war at 11/11. That's when Britain remember their heroes. The heroes they remember, of course, are the dead from wars. I think they go back to World War One which started in 1914 and ended in 1918 and there is hardly anybody left who actually fought in that war – the great war the war to end wars. I heard recently that the last one died either here or in the UK. The other world war started in 1939 and ended in 1945; I have to put those dates as some people here have different dates when the Americans joined in; here they might say 1941-1945 and 1917-1918 – I have heard both and, indeed, people just might not know. I hate the idea of war as it has always been young men fighting old men's battles and even though I had a small amount of military service war heroes have never been my heroes; they are everybody's heroes and should be; they paid the ultimate sacrifice and they should never ever be forgotten - but my heroes have always been pioneers and not necessarily people who fight. I am more impressed by ideas and most of the long conversations I have are about ideas; once a week I meet a pal for breakfast who majored in philosophy and we have many an interesting tête-à-tête and I have read books by Nietzsche for example as a result of our meetings; I have another friend I meet once a week for lunch to talk about politics; I talk British politics and he responds with the American version. I feel quite privileged that I have experienced both worlds and can't think what I would have done without that knowledge; I would never have written my novel, for one, and I don't think I would have started my one man Irish show in the theatre – A Bit of Irish. But I have always been curious; I watched a film once called The Land That Time Forgot and I remember one line from it - Plato was right and I wondered who Plato was and researched it; I put this curiosity down to my lack of formal education so when I look back I don't regret anything about my education or experience. But the four men I admire the most (no not the Father, Son and Holy Ghost) are Muhammad Ali, John Lennon, Bob Dylan and Roger Bannister. I really admired the way Ali stood up to authority, forfeited his world championship for his beliefs and finally, in the end, won. A lot of people disagreed with him including Jackie Robinson who was also a black pioneer in baseball – his own business, of course, but I know very little about him. John Lennon was just a hero because he was a singer; I stood within three feet of him once in a bar after seeing the Beatles at the Ritz Ballroom, King's Heath, Birmingham. Looking at him then, and you could see the Beatles were destined for something, I wasn't sure if he knew what was going on; The Beatles came from a middle class background; John wanted to be a 'working class hero' but he was middle class; they were art students and up to that time art students – students in general in Britain – liked jazz. When I say students I mean mature ones as the Americans tend to call everybody at school students as opposed to pupils in the UK. When I was a student – a mature one – we liked The Beatles. Later on John might have been misguided by Yoko Ono but I think he was a man that did more for peace than is generally realised; I know Beatles fans dislike Yoko and he loved her but I love my wife; I wouldn't take her to work. Bob Dylan I just find the most talented poet I have ever heard or read; I like lyrics by Chuck Berry and John Lennon but Dylan has so much imagery in his work - just look at any of his lyrics – look at these I ran into the fortune-teller, who said beware of lightning that might strike I haven't known peace and quiet for so long I can't remember what it's like. There's a lone soldier on the cross, smoke pourin' out of a boxcar door, You didn't know it, you didn't think it could be done, in the final end he won the wars After losin' every battle. I woke up on the roadside, daydreamin' 'bout the way things sometimes are Visions of your chestnut mare shoot through my head and are makin' me see stars. You hurt the ones that I love best and cover up the truth with lies. One day you'll be in the ditch, flies buzzin' around your eyes, Blood on your saddle. I have been more influenced by Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran when I know, as an actor, it should be Marlon Brando and Laurence Olivier. So who have I left out? Ah!! Roger Bannister.

Roger Bannister broke the 4 minute mile barrier in May 1954; I was a little boy watching my friend nearly drown at Moseley Road Swimming Baths and finding out that another friend had died. I lost a lot of time at school as I suffered from conjunctivitis (in the eyes) which developed into ulcers; I remember seeing the horrible white things on the blue of my eyes and I was told that this was because I rubbed them; I couldn't face the light and water would consistently run from my eyes.

So that was the end of my education as I failed the secondary exams - but that's only an excuse as I can clearly remember sitting to do a paper for the 11+ and not putting anything at all on to the sheet of paper.

Then one day on the TV, the news came on and it said that the 4 minute mile had been achieved; the race came on and there were only 3 runners in the race; the other 3 were invisible. Christopher Brasher was ahead with Bannister behind up to about half a mile and then Chris Chataway took the lead with Bannister second to him up to half way around the final lap and then on the final lap Bannister took the lead and made history; to a ten year old boy this was like an orgasm. Later in the year the Bannister/Landy Miracle mile and that was the best mile race I have ever seen – do yourself a favour and look for both races on YouTube. I won't give you the result of the latter race but John Landy of New Zealand broke the world record after Bannister and then they had to meet in the Empire Games. Have a look - it will bring a tear to your eye and a lump to your throat.

So I had to go a place called Burcot Grange - above; this is a very large house in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire. It is a very large Victorian House and had been donated to the Birmingham Eye Hospital by its owners giving prolonged treatment of children suffering from inflammatory conditions of the eye associated with harsh city life. It was also a place where squint operations were performed and a lot of the other children had lost an eye. It was at Burcot Grange that I was introduced to elevenses which was a snack at eleven-o-clock; maybe a biscuit (cookie) and some orange squash. It was like being let loose as there were 5 acres of grounds; so we played cowboys with real hills, valley and bushes to hide behind. The other thing I did was run; I was going to be a Roger Bannister and I ran around those acres every day. My mother came to see me with a tear in her eye, and encouraging one in my infected ones, every week and I cried when she left and then forgot her for a while. Of course one of the nurses was my girl friend; she was nurse Hollingshead and maybe 15 years older than me. She wrote to me for quite some time after I left and when I did they presented me with a book by Enid Blyton called, something like, Around the Year. It was a nature book and they wrote in the inside cover to Christopher with lots of love from Burcot Grange. I still have the book which is at my daughter's in Suffolk. As we sat there in the sun the nurses would 'time' me as I ran around the grounds. I remember I could get around in about three minutes; one day one of the nurses, who had timed me, called another nurse and said 'Hey! Is it the four minute mile or the four mile minute.'

I can just imagine the four mile minute. When I got home I would run around the block – where we lived – and I managed to get a sucker to beat. He was Roger and looked more like Roger Bannister than I did and I would let him run ahead of me so I could run along the back straight which ended just by the lane where we lived in South View Terrace on Moseley Road. So Roger Bannister is my hero; he ran for many years after that to keep fit although he retired from competitive racing early after the 'Golden Mile' to continue his studies to be a doctor where he worked at Northwick Park Hospital as a neurologist and later as Director of the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases in London and a trustee-delegate of St. Mary's Hospital Medical School in Paddington. A few years ago I bought his book called The Four Minute Mile, of course, and just as I was coming up to the Golden mile on page 224 about the Empire Games, where he met Landy, I found the page was blank. The next page was there and from there till the end of the book many pages were missing and there was only an intermittent report from that section. I called Amazon, where I had bought it, and they referred me to the publishers, The Lyons Press, and when I called them they hung up on me. So there we are – there are my memories on this memorial day; I wonder what yours are?

Landy and Bannister Statue in Vancouver; the scene of the Miracle Mile.