There's a Camel in Our Cellar...

One of this year's Christmas presents was Rhodri Marsden's A Very British Christmas, an affectionate tribute our national traditions and eccentricities regarding the festive season. My reactions ranged from "Oh, yes, I remember those..." to "They do WHAT??!!" and agree with his conclusion that there simply is no 'right' way to do Christmas, and part of its glory is that you can be as reverential, daft or indifferent to it as you see fit.

In our house, this includes continuing to hang up the decorations made of DAS modelling clay which I made when my partner and I were students and couldn't afford to buy decorations:

Or my late mother's 1930's cherubs, complete with the piece of cotton tied unceremoniously round one of their necks, the one with the tetanus-inducing wire hook on its wings and the one with no wings at all. These used to glow in the dark, which has spooked the odd guest who wasn't expecting it, but are now completely glow-less.

And then there is the falling-to-pieces rocking chair my sister gifted us as she didn't have the space for it, and about which we keep saying "We really should get rid of this" - except it's where Rudolph the stuffed reindeer spends his Christmas! Originally, he was placed over the back of the chair to stop our small children rocking it back into chimney block or - worse - the glass doors of a cabinet when it was moved to accommodate the tree, but they're now adults and we are only keeping the chair so Rudolph has somewhere to sit...

These are all 'traditions' which relate to our immediate family, and are changing now the kids are grown and off doing their own thing. We don't 'go away for Christmas' (partly so as to minimise the change/disruption for our autistic daughter) - our family get-together is held a few weeks' earlier, when we de-camp to Bristol for the weekend to visit my mother in law, and where my family come up from Devon to meet for a meal. At one time there were 12 of us, but the passage of time has reduced the number and this year we were 6 and likely to get smaller still over the next few years, as the younger generation have their own work, study, or families to contend with.

There is one major component missing from the Christmases of my childhood, though. My mother was a dancing teacher and she and my dad ran an amateur theatre group in my home town. Despite having a Municipal Theatre (later re-named the Hazlitt, after one of Maidstone's few notable residents), the Borough Council didn't see fit to put on a pantomime, so mum and dad decided to fill the gap. Mum always said her pupils had little outlet for their dancing other than interminable 'dancing displays' and that it would be good for them to get some actual theatre experience, and for their parents to see the results of the lessons they were paying for.

Between 1966 and 1976, we provided the town with its panto - mum's rule that only pupils of six and over could take place, meant that I missed out on being in the inaugural production of Cinderella (I was 5), although I did sit in the audience with my granny, fuming that I wasn't allowed on stage, especially as I knew all the dances. From the next year (Aladdin) until I left home, I was in every production, initially as one of the dancers, then taking on small parts and eventually principal boy (Aladdin, Dandini) or - much more fun - comedy sidekick.

From September every year, when rehearsals started, the house turned into Panto Central. I told my first proper boyfriend "This is what I do every year. You don't have to get involved but..." and bless him, he subjected himself to several years of dancing, singing and tights on my behalf. We lived 'above the shop' - dance studio downstairs, flat above) so scripts  were churned out on the dining table on an old Gestetner machine:

The living room  was festooned with costumes, the sewing machine had to be moved in order for me to do my homework, scenery-painting took place in the cellar (there's a whole other story connected to that - see "A broken mug"), it completely dominated our Autumn and Winter. On Christmas Eve, the panic would set in and mum would rush round un-hanging the costumes from the living room picture rails and hanging them up somewhere else for the duration; the ironing board would be stowed away and the living room would again become a normal family space for two and a bit days.

My special Christmas job was emptying the ashtrays, in advance of the Christmas Eve open house my parents held for friends and family. Mum baked industrial quantities of mince pies and chicken patties (I was never sure what these were - the filling suggested some kind of poultry-based, short crust vol au vent) and a punch which I've never managed to recreate - cider, brandy and a cinnamon stick thrown at it. Mum also used to make her own Christmas puddings which - every year - dad would assess as "Lovely, Fred, but not quite as good as last year's." Her reputation for them grew and at one stage she was producing about 6 puddings for friends and neighbours as well as ours. She never quite got out of the habit of mass-production, though, and was still producing extra puddings and tons of mince pies even when it was just the two of them. The mincemeat recipe - dad's thing, nicked from Mrs Beeton - was passed down to me. It was only when I was discussing mum's newly-diagnosed diabetes 20 years later and mentioned the mincemeat having no added sugar that we realised dad had missed the sugar off when typing out the recipe (I still make it without).

Christmas pudding, 1972 (the year I got a Kodak Instamatic). Not quite sure what that drink is in my sister's hand...

Anyway, back to panto. Once Boxing Day was over, the costumes reappeared, and we prepared to move into the theatre. As my birthday falls between Christmas and New Year, my birthday tea was very often held on trestle tables onstage, between the matinee and evening performances. In a pre-Whacky Warehouse/stretch limo era, this was pretty damned cool. And we all got to wear fancy dress (there wasn't time to change...).

When the council finally cottoned on that they might be able to make money out of a professional pantomime, we found ourselves without a gig so mum and dad simply re-designed the existing productions and took the show on the road, visiting residential homes and village halls, taking panto to the masses (or at least those sections of the masses for whom getting in to the rival panto at the Hazlitt was a bus-ride away). 

After a few years, we realised that those people who'd taken the kids to the panto in December were ready to submit themselves to another round of it in January (when, let's face it, there's not much else to do), so we returned to the Hazllitt after the pro show had finished. Mum and dad continued to put on shows until their retirement, at which point the costumes were given away to other local groups and they moved to Devon.... where they proceeded to join a choir and carried on doing performances well into their 80s, when they finally decided to call it a day.

And as for the camel? That was me aged about five. Like all good amateur drama groups, we had a pantomime cow (stage name: Christabelle) and a camel whose name was Phyllis. One day the gas man came to read the meter and I announced "There's a camel in our cellar." "Yes, dear" he said indulgently, only to emerge from the cellar having read the meter and said to mum "She's right, there is a camel in your cellar." Grown-ups, eh? They don't believe a word you say.

It was an odd childhood....

Scattered Black and Whites...

Nearly two years after their deaths, I am still going through my parents' many photographs. Dad was a keen amateur photographer and did his own black and white processing, so there are hundreds of images to sort through. Today I found a couple of a family holiday in the late 1960's. They say every picture tells a story... 

The cute little moppet in the ill-fitting bathing costume, sunhat and cardigan(!) is me, seen here with mum and our (t)rusty old Austin A35 van. You'll notice the CalorGaz bottle and cooker on the grass, along with a 1 gallon water carrier and assorted items lying around the place. This was the morning after the night before.

We had been staying in Devon for a couple of days and then broke camp and headed for a campsite near Looe, in Cornwall. As we took the tent down it began spitting with rain.

By the time we reached Cornwall it was raining very hard and getting dark, so dad pitched the tent in the only space he could find available and mum tried to organise some food for two small, tired, hungry girls. The rain kept on coming and when the gas bottle floated out from behind the cooker, dad realised that a) pitching the tent at the bottom of a field was probably not the best idea and b) that it was time to evacuate!

My sister and I were put in the van to try and keep dry, along with two bowls of tinned spaghetti, our makeshift tea. Mum and dad tried to salvage our luggage and bedding and get it back into the van. The rain carried on into the night, until it looked as if the van was going to get bogged down in the mud. At this stage, a family with a caravan pitched higher up the site came over to offer assistance. The teenage sons were offering help to stranded campers and their parents asked if my sister and I wanted to come and sleep in the dry in the caravan - I said yes, but my sister wanted to stay with mum. I repaid this kindness by keeping them awake all night telling them that yetis are really very shy creatures and not at all like the nasty ones on Doctor Who!

Eventually, dad decided that he had to move the car to higher ground - by this time his clothes were soaked and he was dressed only in a towel round his waist. He got in the car and went to put his foot on the clutch, but instead put it into a bowl of cold spaghetti which one of us had failed to eat.

The next morning the rain had passed and the day dawned bright and breezy; amazingly, by mid-day, everything was dry and ordered and dad finally lay down in the tent to get some rest. Just as he dozed off, he was aware of some movement and opened his eyes to see the van rolling downhill towards him...

I had got into the van to get my colouring book and crayons and in doing so had trodden on the handbrake, thus releasing it. Fortunately there was a 5 gallon water carrier lying on the ground and the van rolled into this and to a stop. This is me shortly thereafter, with said colouring book and not a care in the world, least of all having nearly killed my father.

I'm guessing from the position of the van parked safely next to the tent in the earlier picture that it was taken after this event. The L-plate was for mum. She was a fine driver - dad used to sit quite happily in the passenger seat while she negotiated the winding Cornish country lanes. Sadly, this competence deserted her in test conditions and she never did get a full licence.

I don't remember what we did for the rest of that holiday. A lot of people would never have gone camping again, but mum and dad continued to do it for another 25 years. Eventually they stopped dividing the holiday between Devon and Cornwall and settled on the tiny but lovely village of Strete, near Dartmouth, where we spent many happy childhood holidays, including the long, hot Summer of 1976, when the campsite threw up dust whenever a car drove in or out and the skyline was dotted with hillfires.

Me in '76: my propensity for stupid hats remained undiminished

And it is here that their ashes are scattered, in a place that meant the world to them - "Who needs foreign holidays" my dad would say, "when you have views like this?"

[It should be noted that they never went abroad, so really didn't have anything to compare "this" to, but I take his point - it's a lovely bit of the country.]

Mindful of these events, though, when we go on holiday we hire a cottage!

Post Script:

The bowls with the cold spaghetti in them? These!

 I found them while clearing the house and brought them home with me to use for gardening. I couldn't just throw them out, could I?

Miscellaneous Items with No Better Home

A tweet last night about odd things older relatives store prompted me to share a picture of a file I found while clearing my parents's house:

This got me thinking about the other oddities we found. My late parents were inveterate hoarders - possibly something to do with being the wartime generation that couldn't afford to just throw things away, but not entirely....

Mum always despaired of the unnamed, dis-assembled pieces of mechanical detritus ("little iron dingbats" as she called them) which dad would bring into the house and then leave on the arm of his armchair, the coffee table, etc. They ran a dancing school and amateur theatre group (for a fuller picture of them, click here), and we lived 'above the shop' so space was a bit limited and our family Christmases tended to be a race against time to tidy away all the costumes before Father Christmas arrived!

When they retired, they converted the house back to a conventional 4 bedroomed house in anticipation of their retirement to Devon. When the time came to move, I was advised to take a trip home to pick up anything that belonged to me that I'd not already collected. We were in the process of buying our own house, too, so it was the perfect time to collect my dolls house (!) and some furniture they no longer wanted. I distinctly remember a conversation with dad which went something along the lines of:

"We're having a good old clear out, as we can't take all this to Devon and it will be less for you to sort through when we die."

This was in 1993. They did multiple trips to the local tip, donated all their costumes to local groups, and off they went to set up their new, streamlined home.

Fast forward to 2012. They were getting on a bit now, and no longer the active 60-somethings who'd moved in. Dad's tendency to stockpile bits of timber (when they bought a new sofa, rather than send the old one to the tip he stripped it down and kept all the component parts, "just in case.") and mum's accumulation of fabric, flower-arranging kit and teddy bears (a late-onset obsession) meant their house was full to bursting. Down for a week over the Easter holidays with the grandchildren, I volunteered to clear out dad's workshop, which was looking like this:

Beneath that lot you can just make out mum's old bureau and a barbers' chair, several sets of tools (dad's, his dad's) the number plate to a long-crushed Vauxhall Cavalier, the strimmer which broke several years before and which he'd attempted a repair with Araldite (as a child, I thought the whole world was held together with this). 

Reader, it took me a week to clear it. 

Fortunately, I had the foresight to catalogue what I found, so I can now treat you to the highlights. Bear in mind, most of these had been transported 250 miles across country in order to sit there for 20 years:

This was a vacuum cleaner which he'd kept because it had an attachment which converted it into a paint sprayer for decorating. It plugged into the light socket. Last used: 1968

A broken mug. To be fair, there is a story to this. We painted panto scenery in the cellar, and there was a hatch in the floor through which flats were lifted and dropped back in. Dad and a friend were painting in the cellar with the hatch open and my sister brought them both a cup of coffee. "Where do you want it?" she asked. "Oh just bring it in" they said, so she backed in through the door in plunged straight down the hatch. Luckily, heavily-painted hessian broke her fall. And the mug (above).

"Why on earth did you keep this?" I asked. "I always intended to make it into a novelty lamp for your sister." he said.

I have no idea of the provenance of this, but it's older than me and probably a fire risk.

An Oxo tin full of sash pulleys. The house was fully double glazed in uPVC.

Three light bulbs he rescued from a skip when his office was refurbished (he did a lot of skip-cycling). They are oversized, screw-thread 200w bulbs that didn't fit any light fittings we either owned or were aware of, at the old house or this one. Again, transported across country.

A box full of dowel rods, "just in case". The yellow ones are from my cot.

This is the other end of the workshop, after I'd cleared it so he could get to his circular saw bench. As I said at the time, "pondering the wisdom of an 82 year old using a circular saw, but let's park that for now..." 

Note also the one spare toilet seat we let him keep of the five he had stored there, "just in case"; the bathroom cabinet from the old house; a home-made light box and a set of plywood circles, purpose unknown; and my grandmother's white stick (she died in 1976).

A wooden box, containing.... stuff. "You can't throw that out, it belonged to Uncle Bert" - this was the man who sold my parents their old home. He wasn't an uncle, but some kind of family friend of my mother's. I left it there - I'm not heartless!

This was a home made inspection lamp, fashioned out of a 'Party 7'-style beer can. "It's only a bit illegal" he said."It's not earthed."

A dolls' wardrobe, given to me by a family friend who is now a grandmother herself. Not sure how/why it made the trip to Retirementland.

Reclaimed window glass..... yes, you guessed, "just in case"

The ladder to our childhood bunk beds, long since replaced with new bunk beds (with an integral ladder) for when the grandchildren come to stay.

My first record player, a very old Garrard deck which dad replaced with a newer one in 1973.

A Gestetner duplicator, the photocopier of its day, which used a wax-coated stencil onto which panto scripts were typed and reproduced using a horribly sticky ink. Making corrections was very difficult, though, so on one occasion Prince Charming declared that "Cinderella shall be my bridge!"

Oh, and there were these in the bathroom cabinet. Corfe's the Chemist had ceased trading before I was born.

At the end of the week, I had the workshop looking like this:

Emboldened, the following year I cleared the attic (well, I needed something to keep me busy while the Royal Wedding was on). Upholstery, old bank statements and the five spare kettles that were stored up there. And the next year, my daughter and I redecorated their bedroom, taking the opportunity to clear a few of the bags full of carrier bags, etc, that were in the cupboards.

And then, in 2016, everything changed. In February, dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer and as his health deteriorated, we had to make adjustments to the house to accommodate his increasing frailty and lack of mobility (Note: don't think just because you future-proof your home by installing a stairlift that old age won't defeat you - eventually, just getting on and off the stairlift is a challenge). As a result, my sister and I had to empty their dining room/study to make room for two beds. Part of the clearance included finding the file that prompted this post, but also some other gems. 

Why, for instance, was his map of all the doodlebugs which fell on Kent in WII stored next to the dishwasher instructions?

His annotated copies of some promotional videos:

And with this over-taping, I swear he was just trolling us...

Sadly, both mum and dad died within a few days of each other and once their joint funeral was over, my sister and I had to clear the house. Despite the clear-out before they retired and my sporadic life laundries over the years, there was still so much to do. My sister's trips to the tip were so frequent that the staff honestly thought she was identical twins! Every utility bill, including the gas bill for the year before they left the old house. Details of every car he'd ever owned. The full pupil registers and exam reports of mum's dancing school from 1948-1992, and the books, the books...

We still have most of these and more still in boxes, waiting to be sorted. We are both book hoarders too, so we now have four people's libraries in the house. Mum and dad's aren't in great condition - mum tended to use paperbacks as coasters - but I don't want them being pulped just because a charity shop can't shift them. We may be e-Baying these for years....

Other items captured for posterity include:

"Seriously damaged. Cannot repair" (but still kept).

Bought for my A level Graphics course in 1979... 

From left to right - dad's 1940s edition of Pigeon Post (bought for him by his elder brother); my rather more battered 1970s edition; the mug I bought him which he kept especially for hot chocolate.

Mum's barrel bag - very modish in the 1950s and it fascinated me when I was little. Not sure I'll ever use it, though.

And finally, I found a swatch of the wallpaper from our childhood bedroom, which stayed up, much to my chagrin, until I was 14.

And now the house and its clutter has gone, and I really need to start sorting things out here so my children don't have exactly the same thing to deal with when the time comes. These were all small, inconsequential objects but contain so many memories of my parents, and the daft-ness of some of them is really evocative of the people they were. As memorials go, this is a fine way to remember them.

[With thanks to @rhodri for giving me the idea.]

Let's have a heated debate....

Back in the late 80s I went to Manchester University as a mature student, and in Freshers' Week I went to a cheese and wine social at the university film society. A momentous decision as it turned out, as I met my partner there and 30 years later we are both still in Manchester, with a son studying A level Film (about whom, more later).

At that time, FilmSoc was a bit nerdy and bloke-ish, but we were a pretty professional bunch for a student society. We showed 5 films a week (from obscure world cinema to recent blockbusters) on industry-standard 35mm projectors. This meant that we needed a team of volunteer projectionists, all of whom needed training. When I joined, their one female projectionist had just graduated and what was left was a bunch of male (mostly) science undergraduates sacrificing their degrees to the needs of the society. Originally, I'd gone along with an idea of writing film reviews, like a good little arts student, but I signed up as a trainee projectionist because it looked like fun. 

Now this was real projecting, not just pressing 'play' on a video recorder. It took several weeks of training and supervision before a trainee was let loose on a live screening. If it goes wrong swapping between projectors (a changeover) the screen goes dark (or, worse still, the melty fireball of doom appears on the screen); if you lace the film up incorrectly the film appears 'out of rack' (the black bar between frames appears in the middle of the picture, with the bottom of one frame and the top of the next). All of which incurs the derision of your audience and is best avoided.

A couple of weeks into the Autumn Term a university women's group approached us to ask if we could put on a women-only screening of Desert Hearts, which had been released a couple of years earlier but not widely shown (this was before the age of the multiplex and even in Manchester there weren't that many screens). We agreed and our Chair, a lovely gentle man who was an expert projectionist after three years doing the job, went to discuss the screening with them. Except he didn't. Not only was he prohibited from entering the Women's Office in the Union building, he had to stand at the end of the corridor to have the discussion. 

The women-only screening, he was told, must have a female projectionist and there were to be no men present in the projection box or the Film Society office behind it. He explained that at the time (only a few weeks into the academic year) the society had no women projectionists, but this was apparently irrelevant. I had done about 2 weeks' training, and could just about lace up a projector and do a changeover, but I'd only ever done it as an exercise and was still nowhere near screening a whole film, even supervised. However, I was the least worst option, and I think a compromise was reached that a more qualified male projectionist could talk to me through the projection box door if there was a problem, but could not come in!

I did it. I managed to show a whole 5 reels without mishap, but it was a petrifying experience and I've still never watched Desert Hearts, but the women's group got its safe space screening, albeit a pretty ropey one. I hope they enjoyed it. I remember thinking at the time (maybe because I'd already had several years out in the real world beyond student politics) that this kind of exclusionary feminism was a bit daft and potentially harmful, something which has come into stark relief over the last few weeks. I've never really enjoyed women only events and don't join women only organisations. I'm not convinced we can smash the patriarchy by removing ourselves from engaging with men. Confront misogyny, certainly, but I would rather come from a position of inclusive feminism. Which brings me to that crowdfunder.

Whatever the arguments about gender self-identification and all-women shortlists, the actions of some of the proponents of this GoFundMe appeal have been completely unacceptable. Whatever pretence they might make at wanting a civilised debate are undermined by the vile comments made by some of its supporters. Dead-naming and deliberately using the wrong pronouns, using insults such as 'dicksplash' and 'chicks with dicks' is if nothing else provocative and downright bloody rude. And when you state "any left-over funds will go to fight against self-id", you've pretty much stated your debating position. 

It's not as if all-women shortlists haven't been used in the past as a mechanism for keeping un-favoured male candidates out of a selection process, so forgive me if I don't see them as some kind of holy grail. If you want to increase representation, you can determine a shortlist for a particular group (we had a recent BAME-only shortlist locally); increasingly this is probably the direction the Labour Party should be moving in. That's a debate; throwing insults at trans women is not.

I've found myself alienated recently from women I had previously considered comrades; this pains me, but I really won't be associated with this kind of intolerant behaviour in the name of feminism. The same women would rail against hate speech for any other minority group, but for some reason trans women are legitimate targets. Women who have rightly fought against misogyny in the Labour Party are now behaving in the same way as those misogynists. 

Encouragingly, though, this appears to be a minority view, and many more people have been supportive of trans rights than have signed up to this campaign. I'm glad, because I have to declare an interest here. My son, that A level Film student I mentioned, is trans. That's not something you're really prepared for as a parent and, yes, it does challenge your feminist views, but ultimately your duty as a parent is to love and support your child unconditionally. I've been told by certain feminists that "it's a phase" or that he's "just a butch lesbian" * but, to be honest, it's looking like a pretty permanent phase, so he (and therefore trans women) will have my full support in this "debate." It wasn't always an easy journey, especially when he first came out, but I've learned a lot and come to respect him for being true to himself. And, given how many of his friends have been disowned or ridiculed by their families, I want him to know that we will always support him.

It would seem that trans men don't figure much in the exclusionary feminist worldview, but I have friends with trans daughters and as far as I'm concerned, it's one fight - trans rights really are human rights. I'm still learning, and I don't always get it right, but at least I'm not getting it completely wrong.

As my son said recently, "Yeah, mum, you used to be a bit of a TERF, but you're better now."

I'm happy with that.




*which conveniently overlooks his preference for men...