Churchill and the Magpies.

See that above?

That's our garden. We have an apartment so we have to share with others but it's usually as empty as that. We have a couple of benches and, in all that green, there are thousands and thousands of birds.

I have just bought a 35mm camera and some film is on the way so I should, when it comes, be able to take better photographs than this:

I've always hated digital cameras they have turned a load of people not interested in photographs in to a load of people who think they are photographers. I don't boast that I am a particularly good photographer – even though I have taken one or two good snaps in my time – but the photographs from the past, which are interesting to me, are the rejections; these days those rejections are rejected at source.

Now what is this about? Every morning at dawn that Magpie gets on the tree, which is about 60 feet high, and looks around the garden to see what is going on. He may be the male or the female but for the want of political correctness we will call him a male as the male and the female of the species are different.

He looks around and near the ground is his spouse. They have just had some babies – some chicks – so at dawn he looks around.

Around here we have Red Kites flying about but they usually appear on overcast days and as you can see today is a beauty.

Also wandering about is a crow. Now this crow would come into the garden with his spouse. He would land on our roof, about 3 feet or so above the camera shot, and when he would see the coast was clear Mrs Crow would arrive. They would go up by the trees and walk – yes walk – the whole length of the garden which goes on a good few yards behind the camera shot. They are looking, when they walk, for little bits of worms coming up for a drink but today there is only one crow. We don't know what has happened to Mrs Crow maybe she is a late crow; we don't know.

As this is happening there is a television beaming across the nation with a man called the Prime Minister answering questions from a grilling he received from MPs the evening before. When each question is asked a look of confusion appears on the man's face. It is a strange face as it has the look of a schoolboy with moused up hair trying to make its mind up which way to hang, rather like the testicles of a condemned man about to hang from a rope. 

He blinks a few times at each question and thinks of the time when he wanted to be another Churchill and the saying 'be careful what you wish for' comes to mind as he must have wished for some kind of crisis so he could do his Churchillian 'cometh the crisis cometh the man' act but the crisis is totally out of control and he knows it as he tries to defend the reputation of a ne'er do well, a mountebank, to be precise, of the first order.

And in the garden the crow, by himself today, as I said earlier, is skulking around by that little toadstool, you can see there, which is actually a water bowl for the birds which, if I think of it, I fill with water.

Mr and Mrs Magpie have spotted the crow as he seems to be heading back down the garden with a look towards the trees to the left of the picture. That is where the baby magpies are hidden in their nest. So the two magpies fly close to the crow – let's face it they are all in the same family of animals, both types of crow – so they know what he is after.

One magpie is to the right of the crow, as he walks past the trees and the water dish for the birds, and Mrs. Magpie is to the left. They stand at a distance when the crow veers to the right of the picture. The magpies then move so they look to be in a pincer type of position, ready to attack Mr Crow when, and if, he is foolish enough to try to get to the other side.

On the TV the would be Churchill wishes he was handling such a crisis with Field Marshal Montgomery leading the field but no - he is trying to use the word fantastic as many times as he can in a sentance with his fantastic cabinet, his fantastic plans and his outrageous ambitions.

The Magpies manage to win the day and later on they will train their little babies to fly, take them to the top of that tree, and when that happens I hope to have some ASA 200 in the camera and let's hope I get a clearer shot next time.

My pen in my hand and some paper in the other.

Well I am sitting here with pen in one hand and a piece of paper in the other, wondering what I am going to put into the paper from the pen – of course neither of these things exist, any more, as they have been replaced by a keyboard and a screen.

Time goes along and we are in a lock-down and not allowed to go anywhere without permission from the police.

At the bottom of the garden there are three of my neighbours and we take it in turns to dig the tunnel.

We figure if we start digging near the back fence, which joins all our gardens, we should be able to sneak through and get as far as Pinner Green by Christmas; 2021.

I have never been a fella who feels cooped up when at home as lots of times it wouldn't worry me if I never opened the door again. I have everything I want here, all the things I have purchased over the years: guitar – in fact two guitars, a banjo. six harmonicas, at least, a pair of drum sticks but no drums.

Never bothered me before; I used to be the solo drummer when I was in the army cadets between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. One of my duties was to teach the drummers joining the band how to play a military drum. In the breaks in the canteen – the NAFFI – we would sit around with our sticks and practise our paradiddles and quavers on a table. So I can do that but when I have recorded songs, here, I have used a drum machine. Although once in a while I would use my fingers on the desk, a packing case and on one song I slapped my bare knees; now that hurt.

The upshot of it is that I am not using either of my guitars, harmonicas or drum sticks; why? Because at the moment I have so much time to spare that I haven't got the time.

I am editing my little film but nine times out of ten when I sit down to do it I notice a joke on Face Book, or a comment I have to answer or a brilliant saying will come in to my head and I have to put that in my 'news feed' instead. Unfortunately, like a drunken insult, it doesn't look so brilliant in the cold light of day.

I was talking to a pal of mine the other day, shooting the shit and reminiscing, putting the world to right and the thought came to me: I was like this as a child! My folks would send me out to play and I would stand at the bottom of the garden looking at the house. My dad would come out and say 'go and play!'

It was the same when we went on holiday. I liked the caravan (sorry my American friends a caravan – a trailer??) who knows - and I liked the tent when I went away with the boy scouts – I just found a photo of me when I was 5¾ so you can see how inquisitive I was; I look quite satisfied.

That was when I had been at school for 12 months. 

I hated school and that was a school photograph. That was the one my dad carried around with him in his wallet. I remember when I first saw it as I can't remember looking at it when I looked like that I also remember school at that time and I hated it. I couldn't see the point of going there. I suppose I found out all the kids there spoke with a different accent from me and maybe that confused me. 

I walked to school with a neighbour and on the way we would walk down St Paul's Road, in Birmingham, which had a railway bridge going across. The roadway, under the bridge, was very small, maybe just about enough room to drive a car through, but my mother wanted me, when I went by myself a year or so later, to cross the road outside Doctor Cronin's surgery. 

I could never, even at that age, figure out why it would be safer to cross the road by the doctors. Maybe she thought if I got hit by a truck the doctor would come out and save me. So I would walk with the gang of kids and their mams and let them go ahead to cross the road where it narrowed and I would nip over through the morning traffic by the croakers – salvation or bandages.

I have often wondered if this place, the UK, became something like Yugoslavia, with several fighting factions, that we would be figuring out a way to get to Pinner – half a mile away. Would I go over the gardens, sneak through the trees or get into the River Pinn and swim there. The River Pinn, by the way, is hard to see, as it's in a ditch at the side of some roads. It's near our current doctors' surgery which would please my mother but the fact is I would have to walk down the river as there probably isn't enough water around there to sustain me – it gets a bit deeper by the doctors so if I get into difficulty in the water the doctor can come out and save me.

Empty London.

I have tried, over the years, not to make this blog too political. Once or twice people have wanted me to give their cause a mention, and I think I did once, but I might not agree with the cause so never again. 

Good job I'm not a newspaper taking all kinds of adds, but I prefer to waffle on in my own way.

The current shut down all over the world is being made political, not by me, but by – now let me think: ah, politicians. 

They are looking out for themselves and their jobs.

Whenever there have been other epidemics and pandemics, shall we say, in Africa and, shall we say, Ebola, the medical teams move in, people like Doctors with Borders, get the military to build fields hospitals, and take it from there.

Ebola was a killer, a real frightening one and we can only imagine how the people that died suffered in their agony and pain.

But this latest Coronavirus, Covid 19, is being handled terribly in the UK and America. Now why is that? How can anybody say their man, their politician from their political party is doing better than the man from the other party. How can people justify accusing someone of something sinister just because they ask the right questions in parliament and then call them Mister Smarty pants or Clever Clogs?

I'm not answering any questions here by the way. 

I know the reason they didn't ask me to sort the situation out is that I wouldn't be any good at it so why give it to scheming politicians?

If you think about this one it reminds me of some of the films of contagious diseases - in fact one of the movies is close to this one and has been noted by the experts (**&).

A bit like 9/11: it was used in many thrillers and people took no notice. 

Obama noted a few years ago that we weren't ready for a pandemic as we had no stuff.

The UK doesn't produce anything at the moment, doesn't make anything, apart from music, games and movies. In fact the creative industries bring more money into the country than most other industries which are service industries and includes tourism.

We don't produce anything that could help us deal with the virus not even face masks. We (I'm fed up of using we as I think we are doing a lousy job) are not even good at preparing for anything; we send soldiers across to other countries without enough armour or tanks and whatever is needed to kill as many people as the armies like to kill.

Now the governments are running scared because we might run out of money, have a recession which might give them an excuse for more austerity.

We have just spent the last few years fighting about Brexit and now we (not again – not me) don't have to pay the 13 Billion to the EU. 

If it was so important to save that amount of money, as the EU was bleeding us dry, where did all the money come from that is now being spent or promised?

Since 2010 this government has borrowed £870 Billion – nothing to worry about though as the national debt started around the time of the Napoleonic Wars and will never ever be paid off – Never!

Dystopia.

You'll have to go along with me for this as it only might go somewhere. I will type it, check for spelling and typos then copy and paste onto the site.

For the past twenty or thirty years there has always been a Bruce Willis to come along and put things right. He would confront some Lex Luther figure who would hold the antidote to the virus and take it from him. 

Luther would have been demanding a trillion dollars. $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. 

Yes that's what it is in a British trillion but as there are only one thousand millions in an American billion they would put a trillion at $1,000,000,000,000.

Just twelve zeros and trillions do exist even though in Britain that word is hardly ever used – even though it's almost the national debt. The USA's national debt being about fifteen of that 'F' word which has risen by about Two Trillion (TT) since PINO has been in charge.

My daughter has a friend called Pino which, I believe, is Sicilian and that's a good bet particularly as his father was from there. In this case PINO, as you know, is President in Name Only.

And there is no Bruce Willis here to help us even if he goes up in a rocket to stop the Haemorrhoidal Thyroid of an Asteroid aiming for the earth. 

In other words it doesn't matter that there is only a PINO who thinks he is in a movie arguing and fighting with the staff of his government about what to call the virus.

In other words we are in Desolation Row.

I put that on Facebook yesterday and was very pleased when a friend replied Cinderella is already sweeping up!

It meant that someone is on the same page which I think is what's right and wrong about things - it's great that someone knows it's a Dylan lyric and terrible when you realise that even at this stage there are those who don't know and don't think it's important in any case. And we do need both.

We might say everything is relative or what's best is only according to taste but no matter what your politics are if Mars decided to attack the Earth we would all join forces to fight the red devils – no it might not be PC or even be racist to call the people from Mars red anything.

But I digress.

At the moment we are being attacked by aliens – POUS is still arguing at the top but all the way down to the very bottom people are arguing about whether the virus came from someone eating a baboon in Zimbabwe or a penguin at the north pole.

They will give huge theories they got from a friend at London Zoo and then be shot down by finding out that there are no penguins at the north pole – or dry cleaners in Cambodia (Look Back in Anger III i 50; John Osborne) for that matter.

So if this was a movie the opening scene would be like something above, maybe with some distant echoey music, maybe an old 1930s song, and an old newspaper being blown across the empty London streets.

We would need an existential hero rather like Rick Blaine, from Casablanca, or even Woody Allen actually trying the virus and finding out it gives virility and enhances Manhood in the offspring of all who survive it.

In either case it would be an existential hero as they are needed to save the world even though they say 'I stick my neck out for nobody' – as they don't want to change things even though they know that life is meaningless but they know it might mean something to somebody.

The thing about this crisis in this crazy world (Casablanca again) is the same as the financial crisis in 2008 will be a temporary change to world socialism except the USA – it was only a part socialist policy in 2008 when a lot of money was thrown at the banks - but in Britain at least, it will be fully blown this time.

It has to come now and again and maybe forever one day.

This time all the private hospitals in the UK have offered their services to the NHS at cost, a very large proportion of the work force will be paid by the state – even the self employed eventually – people will not be required to work, a basic payment will be made to everybody, except the self employed (I'm kidding), and the banks will charge and give zero interest then the whole capitalist system will break down.

Out of this a hero will arise - hold it hold it where am I going?

During this PINO will give everyone a cheque for $1,500 and achieve, what he doesn't want but is going the right way to achieve it and that is - Dystopia.

Indian or Native American.

There are lots of things you, or we, don't know about America. We lived there for seventeen years and there are still things I don't know. One of the things I learned on the way back to London, the last time I was there, was on the in flight radio, and this is when I had been back in London for about three years: I found that the American horse racing industry dope their horses as a matter of course. 

In the UK it is treated the same as with human athletes - cheating.

In America they wouldn't dream of letting horses race without medication, i.e. doping. They reckon the poor horses will burst their lungs if they raced without being treated.

Now if I was going to write a song or a poem about this I could rhyme treated with cheated – but I digress!!

I don't know what they have to do when they enter horses in Britain like The Grand National or The Derby – or as Jimmy Cagney sang the English Derby Cup.

Another thing I noticed when I first moved there was they don't use Frisco as slang for San Francisco. They call it 'The Bay Area' – all of it San Francisco, Berkley and other smaller places near there.

One person I knew in the UK described someone as coming from the 'Bay Area of San Francisco' which is really like saying the England part of London – back ways around.

One of the first auditions I did there for a movie was to play some kind of white man missionary in a film about the old west and the fella auditioning with me was an Indian.

I can't remember his tribe or nation but he was quite intellegant, tall and proud but wouldn't accept being called a 'Native American.' 

He said that came from some white professor or some government body. He didn't mind being called a Native but not American and in any case preferred Indian.

I was talking to a Navajo one time, and wrote on here about it, and he too didn't like the term Native American but then the name Navajo was given to his tribe by the Spanish. The Navajo (with the J pronounced as aitch) are called Diné or Naabeehó but they settle for Navajo. 

Their language is almost impossible to learn unless you learn it from birth which is why it was used in the second world war as a code – only the Navajo could speak and understand it – they were the code talkers and there is a feature film about them.

Of course when the speakers and heroes returned to America they went back to their usually alcohol fuelled squalor.

The Indians are an amazing race and have come on a lot since then.

The other thing about America is when people refer to it as 'The States' – I don't mind the US but it's America.

In fact I think it's a bit non-U to call the place the states which I won't bore you with here.

What else bugs me about the two nations separated by a common language?

Oh yes – when I first went there I met a lot of English people who would refer to America as one of the colonies – I kid you not – but I must say it was only within the first few months and mainly in Missouri where I heard it.

There was a time when a friend of mine was doing business with an Englishman. When she introduced me to him, and before he even opened his mouth, I knew he was putting on a public schoolboy act.

He too was referring to the place as one of the colonies and would refer to Sri Lanka as Ceylon. Straight away I spotted a phony – I don't want to confuse my American friends here as public schools in the UK are a unique selection of the private schools such as Eton and Harrow. Winston Churchill went to Harrow and the current incumbent at Number 10, Johnson, went to Eton. These people aren't the aristocracy, in fact most of them are the sons and daughters of rich people and they aren't the upper classes either and never will be. Johnson father was in trade – heaven forbid!

This phony I got to know, used his accent and his way of walking and standing to try and con the friend.

He was going to supply money and backing for a project and disappeared.

Like I'm going to do now.

Toodle Loo.

Today March 9^th would have been my dad's 107^th Birthday; RIP.

Two women and the middle aged white man.

Look at the two women at the top of this page; those were the two women who argued about me and, hopefully, the only two whoever did. Maybe it's the reason I have always preferred women to men.

I heard a story recently about a guy who had to meet someone in a bar in Australia. It might have been in the outback but the guy was a journalist and had to meet another guy, a stranger, as he was researching something and the custom in the bar was to drink a lot of beer as fast as you could to prove how much of a man you are – or even were!

The journalist had heard this before and heard stories about men coming in with their wives or girl friends and other guys in the bar wondering why they were talking to their spouses instead of standing with the guys guzzling beer. 'Come over here, ya baaastard, and drink with the guys' etc. 

When the journalist had enough to drink he said he would like to go but the guy looked at him and said 'No! You're going up to the bar and getting another couple of beers.'

The journo said 'No! I want to go.'

The other guy, looked the journo in the eye and repeated what he had said before but this time with more than a little look of menace in his eyes.

The journo went up and got the beers and the other guy started to drink as if he hadn't been menacing at all.

Now what this has to do with the fact that those two women above fought over me which might have made me prefer the company of women as opposed to men I have no idea; the Australian story just came to me. But it might be true. In my dotage I still prefer my women friends to the men. Men are boring talking about shit and not listening. I spent an hour or so with two men in a bar in Northampton as they told jokes. They must have been thinking about the next joke when they were being told one so, I suppose, were performing for me and the more they drank the more the jokes became stale and you can tell what that would be like when I tell you that the first gag was crap.

As Shakespeare said What a piece of work is a man!

Those two women? My mother and my granny. There she is on the left, my grandmother Mary Tuite, nee Fay; born in Dublin Ireland and on the right Esther Mary Sullivan nee Tuite, also born in Dublin.

My granny emigrated to Manchester with seven of her eight children leaving one child back in Dublin. That one child? My mother – Esther Mary Tuite. She was old enough, in her twenties, not to be ruled by her father who wanted her in by 10.00 at night at that age and that's why she moved in with her friend May Davies.

Now May Davies was a name that was always banded about our house as she was my mother's best friend but we never met her. We didn't meet my dad's best friend either and he was called Joe Picard.

My granny moved to Manchester and when my mother was pregnant she sent me to Manchester to stay with her.

Maybe it was too much for her to look after me at the same time as trying to work I don't know and maybe granny suggested it in any case.

My mother came to Manchester to have the second baby and I would be two years and two months old and I can remember standing on the table being dressed by both of my parents as we were going home and my father was arguing with granny. Granny wanted me to stay – isn't one enough for you, she said. It was okay for me, being spoiled by my grandmother, getting her picture taken with me and treating me to whatever I wanted. That picture for the next twenty years was in every one of the houses of the siblings – seven altogether don't forget. I was also told that my Godmother had her photo taken with me too and that she wore a glove on the left hand to hide the fact that she wasn't married as people would think I was her child.

So a complicated how do you do, don't you think!

I did notice that when we left the house in Manchester it was very calm and that is the way to settle arguments.

Exit!

Here we are many years later and those two women are gone; my granny was only 18 years older than my mother and died when she was 55 and my mother died when she was 79.

My father decided where I would live. A very kind gentle man and definitely in charge who wouldn't stand nonsense from either sex.

These days we hear the description of the people who run the world and it boils down to the middle aged white man – sometimes in a suit – but always the middle aged white man.

And of course the middle aged white man has made a mess so far so is it time for the middle aged women to run the place? Is it?

You'll have to think about that. I watched the recent series of Endeavour on TV here and the episodes were set in the 60s. The university lecturer was very badly written. He ate in a very lower middle class home with his meat and two veg, a small dining room piece of shit table and behaved like a salesman at home with his wife or a bank manager wondering if it was the night he has to jump on her when they get to bed or is it the night when they do the jigsaw puzzle.

At work when Morse, the detective, talked about the murder the lecturer referred to women as some kind of species from outer space. For example they do this, or they won't do things like that as if working with a woman was some kind of drudge.

I remember when I worked for the post office as a postman, for the short time I did, that the office of about 100 postmen had one woman and one immigrant – a Sikh. The men had a complaint about each of them.

Mr Singh would grab all the overtime and the woman wouldn't load the vans.

To me? One woman, maybe twenty five years older than me meant one thing. A shave every morning with after shave. Told you I have always liked women.

Of course it was some middle aged old bastard of a boss (a PHG) who would take her outside for a smoke all the time. Would make sure she got a lift to her walk (her mail round is called a 'walk') as her bag was a bit heavy and maybe even more - I didn't know. 
I was always looking for a way out: a job on the vans, a late start (I had to be in there 5.00 am) anything. I would meet old school mates and when I told them what I was doing they'd say 'well it's better than walking the streets!'

It's no good writing about it here or even showing it on TV – you had to be there. If you want to know what it was like back then it is better to look at some old TV on Talking Pictures or a channel that also shows old TV shows as you really had to be there and ask yourself, which we didn't at the time, how did it ever get like this?

So I didn't really reach a conclusion here did I? I didn't think I would when I started but I will say that I don't think I have ever been sexist – I know that as a young man I would look at the young women but the older you get you still look but with age comes appreciation of age.

I was, as I said before, going to write about Los Angeles here, but when I went to have my eyes tested the other day I told the optician about my Heath Robinson photo – this one.                                

Only my little joke about Heath Robinson as my distance glasses were away getting replaced so I tried this joke and the lens worked but . . . .

I also found the photos of my granny and my mother which started me off so I have to apologise for such a long post – unless you enjoyed it of course!

Head on.

               Sunset and Crescent Heights

You hear on the radio that someone knocked a kid off his motor bike and killed him. Then you hear it was a head on collision and the next thing is the car coming the other was on the wrong side of the road. Later it transpires that the car driver was an American not used to driving on the left and then we learn that the driver had diplomatic immunity and has fled the country.

She was over here with her husband so the diplomatic immunity is in his name, and the USA will not send her back here - then we hear she is in the CIA.

Don't watch this space as it's an ongoing case but it reminded me of the first time I went to Los Angeles.

I was wondering, before I got there, what it would be like, driving on that side of the road, even though I had driven the length of France, which is where they drive on the right too. That time I was in a British car where the steering wheel is on the right so it's difficult to see anything if you want to overtake. The person riding shot gun would look out for oncoming traffic and shout 'GO!!' 

And I would go.

In Los Angeles, at the airport LAX, I picked up my rental car and drove around for hours looking for somewhere to stay. Every place I tried was too expensive. I tried to knock them down but none of them would have it and eventually I settled down in the Travelodge in Santa Monica. On the main street, Ocean Blvd I reckon.

But I was delighted, as I settled into my room, that I had found the driving on the right experience second nature. The next morning I checked out and set out for Hollywood Blvd where I had an appointment with a casting director or agent, can't remember which. I got there nice and early then went for a short drive to kill some time.

I saw Laurel Canyon, on my drive, and I thought 'I've heard of that' so I took a right. I was on the right so I took a right and even though the light was on red I could still go around as the road was clear the other way – I new thing for me and a law LA invented – great stuff.

It was wonderful I was playing Aretha Franklin on the stereo listening to the power of her voice and the feeling she had for all those songs. 

Every time I hear that album today I think of that hazy day in Hollywood all those years ago.

I drove to the top of Laurel Canyon and came to Mulholland Drive. I was at the junction there not knowing whether to go right or left. 

It was the crossroads where a guy I knew, in later years, was shot dead as he sat in his car.

This day I turned; I knew who lived on Mulholland Drive – Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson and, even though I tried to look at buildings and drive at the same time, I couldn't really see houses as there seemed to be trees in front. 

Then I did a U turn and went back.

There was no traffic on the road so Aretha was singing and I was in America and it was sunny and then there was a jeep coming at me, on my side of the road, I tried to turn and go passed him but it was too late!

A head on crash!

The big thing about it was that we saw each other and we both slowed down so the impact looks more dramatic on paper than what actually happened.

You see when I saw him, not registering that it was me on the wrong side of the road, I had tried to go passed him on the wrong side too.

'Hey you came at me' he said.

'no I didn't – well I didn't mean to.'

I explained and he had to make a call. He was a script writer on the way to an important script meeting and he told them at the other end that he had hit a Brit driving on the wrong side of the road.

'I'm Irish' I said.

TOMORROW: I move to LA - watch this space.

Who Was Gertie Ford?

Here's a novel I wrote a few years ago:

Yes - - - Who Was Gertie Ford? Still on Amazon I noticed.

In 1966, just two weeks after the IRA blew up Nelson's Pillar in O'Connell Street Dublin, Eddie McGrath is knocked down and killed by the airport bus near the spot where the Pillar used to stand.
His death turns his seventeen year old daughter, Nuala, into an orphan.
She never knew her mother, Gertie, at all, and when she looked into her father's things she found items of her mother that deeply disturbed her.
The tale of Gertie Ford will take the reader to the west coast of Ireland, in search of Gertie, to a world of adventure, heartbreak and tragedy set in the mid forties and 1966 in Dublin, Sligo and Donegal.
In Sligo, Nuala stays with a family of brothers under the pretence that she is going to marry one of them; in Donegal Gertie is introduced to poteen smuggling and in Dublin the reader is given a glimpse of the infamous Magdalene Laundries/Asylums.
There will be heartbreak, rape and incest but it is very minimal as there is a lot of comedy, both in situations and dialogue, and the question as to what Gertie was doing in Dublin on that first day of Spring will be answered. So take the novel Who Was Gertie Ford? the next time you take a train ride but be careful – you may be so engrossed you'll miss your stop!

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Who-Gertie-Ford-Chris-Sullivan-ebook/dp/B004BA5FBO/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=Who+was+gertie+ford&qid=1579136421&sr=8-2

Death of the King -

 

       

                                 King George VI

I put this up last year but I noticed some hits today so copied and pasted – after a quick brush up - with the royal family in the news.

Here we have a little story set in 1952 – and it's true! A little eight year old boy with the name of Christopher Thomas Joseph Owen Sullivan was sitting in class at school. Christopher was his Christian name, being a Christian but not the kind of Christian as the school he was attending - and as he was from an Irish immigrant family he was a Catholic – was being the operative word these days in any case.

Thomas was the second name on the birth certificate and Joseph the name on the Baptism certificate. Owen came later, when he was confirmed, and when the teacher asked for full names, in the senior school, he gave him all the names, and was known as that to that teacher forever; especially when he pulled the little side burns of the little boy and said 'so what's your answer to that, Christopher Thomas Joseph Owen Sullivan? Something witty? Something Irish?'

But enough of that let's go back to 1952.

February 6^th 1952 little Christopher was sitting in class wanting a wee wee; the teacher on this occasion said it was OK for him to go and off he went.

On that same day, Raymond Simmonds was playing the wag from school; playing the wag being the vernacular for playing truant, although playing truant is usually knocking time off from school without your parents' permission. In Raymond's case I think his mother kept him from school that day.

So when I came out of the boys' lavatory – me being Christopher Thomas Joseph Owen Sullivan - there was Raymond Simmonds sitting on the school steps.

On that day, the first thing Raymond Simmonds said to me was 'The King is dead.'

We knew, even at my tender age of eight, that the king had been ill and in fact he had died in his sleep that morning.

There are two things I remember about the King: one was that he had the same birthday as me – December fourteenth – and the other was that I thought he looked like Gary Cooper.

So now (or then) I knew what the teacher didn't know, nor the rest of the class or any of the other teachers.

It may have been the only time in my life when I was the smartest guy in the room?

If I went in to class and said something I would be asked how I knew and that would get Raymond Simmonds into trouble as I would have to tell - so I kept it to myself for a while.

Sitting in front of me was Gillian Balmond and next to her was Winifred Bryant; even at that age I was deeply in love with both of them. They would turn around to chat and I would flirt in my little baby ways and eventually, that day, I had to tell one of them about the King.

I can't remember which one I told but when I did, she told the other and the other answered back 'Now Princess Elizabeth will be Queen.'

We went home for lunch and of course it was all true.

There were no cell phones in those days, no Internet and no social media.

Everything seemed safe and at eight I would walk home by myself, with maybe other kids, and maybe a half mile walk and sometimes even raining - or in the snow.

Mothers were at home to feed and love us and the 50s never seemed dismal to me or in black and white.

It's great me being able to publish this on the Internet and the 210,633 (so far) hits from people who read it but look what it has done and the number of zombies it has produced – millennials don't even know how to use a can opener.

On that day mothers outside the school told their children the bad news; the King is dead. Some kids would cry; some of those kids wouldn't even know who the King was as they were too young but the grown ups certainly did.

The King's wife, Queen Elizabeth, who then became The Queen Mother, vernacular for the Queen's Mother, always, till the end of her long life, blamed the late King's brother David (Edward VIII) who abdicated because of his involvement with Mrs Simpson. She blamed him for the death of her husband. She never wanted to be the Queen to Bertie's king (his real name being Albert) - as she wasn't Queen as the current Elizabeth is. She never wanted that as they were happy as they were bringing up their two little girls to live, perhaps, as Princess Anne does now with her husband and children not even taking titles and living relatively normal lives.

A lot of people said Mrs Simpson did a great service to Britain by taking such a dangerous and naïve man out of the running.

The public liked him even though he abandoned Britain during the war, leaving his younger brother and his wife, The King and Queen, in Britain. 

During some of the war, David (Edward VIII) lived in America and whilst Churchill was trying to persuade Roosevelt to enter America into the war David, who sympathised with the Nazis together with the air pioneer Charles Lindbergh, tried to get America on the German side; now if you don't believe this look it up.

In fact at one point Lindbergh was considering running for President – if you think Trump is bad just ponder on that for a moment.

[I did have a photo here of Edward VIII with Charles Lindberg last time, but didn't bother this time.]

Times changed a couple of years after the King died. James Dean became the first American teenager and when the draft finished – the call up – it produced plays like Look Back in Anger, music like the blues and Rock'n'Roll and, eventually, The Beatles.

I loved the influx of Jamaicans into our neighbourhood with their great double breasted suits – I remember light blue suits – with their casual walks and great music and their laughter. Even today they are still laughing even though they were treated terribly for many years and with the Windrush scandal some who have been here ever since found they couldn't get passports to get back in to the country after visiting their homeland.