Express delivery

Last night we watched a comedy in which three friends are in an immobilised cable car with a pregnant woman when she goes into labour. The whole thing was wildly unrealistic, but we nevertheless scoffed at the utter incompetence of the characters in the face of this emergency.

After it was over, though, I started to think. The male character was completely useless ... but, truth be told, I was choosing to forget that  my own first human birth was, in terms of my own part in it, an even more inglorious occasion – happy in its outcome only through good luck.

Nineteen years old, with fellow student Jon, I dropped in on friends Karl and Hannah in their small town home. Hannah was heavily pregnant. Karl wasn’t there: Hannah, tired of his fussy worrying and pacing, had ordered him out of the flat for a night on the town with his friends to give her some peace. She welcomed us in, sat us down, and went to put a kettle on. Then she screamed. We rushed through to find her on all fours, on a wet kitchen floor, wide eyed, gasping and panting.

Wide eyed, gasping and panting ourselves, we ran around in a headless chicken manner and flapped our hands uselessly until Hannah caught her breath and called us to order. She told one of us to go out to the telephone in the square, call the midwife whose number was pinned to the kitchen door frame, then find Jon and bring him home.

I would have welcomed the chance to be out doing something and away from the centre of useless responsibility, but Jon reached the door first so I was left alone with Hannah.

Hannah, though only twenty and in her first pregnancy, took charge with natural authority. She sat me in a chair, held my hand, reassured me.

I discovered later that, at under two hours, it was an unbelievably quick and easy delivery – but at the time it seemed to go on for ever. Hannah saw me through it, patience itself most of that time though there were a couple of stressful moments when she shouted at me to “stop being a useless wanker”.

I did as I was told, breathed deeply and stopped panicking when instructed.

By the time the midwife arrived, I was holding a hastily wiped baby girl roughly the right way up and Hannah was plying me with heavily sugared coffee. Jon, who had had to visit many cafés, pubs and bars in his search for Karl, returned with him some time after that to coo in an inebriated manner over the baby.

Having seen a fair number of deliveries since then, it's easy to forget, easy to pretend to myself that I've always been where I am now. But no; I really shouldn't judge the characters in the ski lift comedy. In fact they stepped up to the plate better than I.

Careers advice

Vivid's mention of careers advice in her latest post prompted me to post this … though it has little to do with Vivid's intent, nor her important message. It is just an aimless an anecdote about careers advice, 40+ years ago.

In my mid teens my parents were on a home posting in Britain, between two overseas ones, and I was doing time in an all boys grammar school in … let's call it Shirecester.

At some point the school was visited by Mr Tombs, external careers advisor. (I change his name to spare his blushes … but his real name did have an equally ominous and sepulchral sound.)

I went into my careers interview with high hopes.

“So” said Mr Tombs, jovially, “what do you want to be when you leave school?”

“A photographer!” I replied, with enthusiasm, and waited expectantly for advice on how to pursue this career ambition.

[As I have mentioned elsewhere, I was eight when my maternal grandfather gave me an ancient Brownie box camera. I was captivated by the endlessly subtle shades of grey, in both print and negative; I would sit and lose myself in them for hours at a time. Even the utter failures were a wonder to me. That such a rich tonal range could exist between white and pale grey in an overexposed frame! Then my father showed me how those tones grew before your eyes, under a red light in the smell of hypo. This was magic made flesh, and I was hooked. By the time of my interview with Mr tombs, I had a complete portable darkroom, understood metol and hydroquinone, the use of borax as a buffer, the effects of temperature and agitation. And the Brownie had been replaced by folding wartime Dalmeyer which was my pride and joy.]

“Don't be silly” replied Mr Tombs, with a dismissive laugh, “you can't make a living at that. You seem to be good at mathematics; that's the way to go.”

And my first ever career advice interview was over.

I thought carefully about Mr Tombs' advice. Was it really impossible to make a living as a photographer? What of my heroes such as Eve Arnold, Jane Bown, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Barbara Morgan, Yousof Karsh, W Eugene Smith, Dorothea Lange; did they not make a living?

[I didn't bother my parents with this. I knew that they had no detailed knowledge to help directly, but they did give me something much more valuable: unfailing, unquestioning support for my passions and a belief that I could do anything at all if I wanted to. They also gave me, just after my my meeting with Mr Tombs, a concrete vote of confidence in the Russian-built Leica-copy camera which replaced the Dalmeyer.]

The editor of Shirecester's weekly local newspaper was as generous with advice as Mr Tombs had been brief. Naively, I just turned up at his office, one day on the way home from school, and he invited me in. He explained pay scales, apprenticeships, qualifications and the importance of a portfolio. He introduced me to the local technical college, and steered me through its complexities.

When I next saw Mr Tombs, a year later, I was older and wiser. I had completed an evening course at the college, going there twice a week straight from school and gaining a vocational qualification certificate. I could quote salary scales. I walked confidently into my second careers advice interview.

“So” said Mr Tombs, jovially, “what do you want to be when you leave school?”

“A photographer!” I replied with deliberate determination. On the desk between us, as evidence of seriousness and feasibility, I placed prospectuses for relevant degree-level courses in Bath, Hounslow, London, Rochester NY, and Vienna.

“Don't be silly” replied Mr Tombs, “you can't make a living at that.” With a magician's sleight of hand, my prospectuses disappeared. “You're good at mathematics; that's the way to go.”

From Shirecester we went eventually to a Mediterranean island, where we would stay until I took my A level exams at age eighteen. Though we were not an Army family I travelled, in a local bus with a motley mix of other expatriate children, to a British army school 80km away – a raucous bus journey over the Island's pitted roads. At this school, too, there was careers advice and I was looking forward to a fresh start after the disappointments in Shirecester.

At first, I had hopes of the permanent careers teacher, Mr King. He was available every day, but I soon learned that he had little or no idea of life outside the school. He was only the careers teacher because nobody wanted Latin any more and he could teach nothing else. I settled down to wait philosophically for the professional careers specialist, flown out from Britain by the army once a year, just after the Easter vacation.

[Meanwhile, I fell in love with the island and, being 16, heroically but unsuccessfully with every girl in sight. My camera went with me everywhere; my friends called it my ‘growth’, but without malice. All my friends and classmates were documented (especially the girls). When we staged A Winter's Tale and Waiting for Godot as part of the English Lit course, my photographic record took longer to view than the performances themselves. All my money went into film, chemicals, paper. The island's Ilford Photographic importers, a genial pair of Armenian brothers, maintained a shop between a brothel and a mosque, and encouraged me just as the Shirecester editor had done. I got my materials at a discount, and was sometimes given marginally outdated stock at no charge at all.]

The day came.

I had learned some lessons; this new start would be on my own terms.

First impressions count. I would give clear signals to this new careers advisor that I had done my homework; that I was not a romantic, glamour-seeking, head-in-the-clouds David Bailey wannabe. Under my arm I had a clean, brand new ring binder, carefully devoid of teenage graffiti. It contained three years worth of notes and questions about potential photographic career paths.

I went up to the first floor balcony, found the room, checked my watch, knocked on the door and entered with a spring in my step.

And stopped dead, horrified.

“So” said Mr Tombs, jovially, “what do you want to be when you leave school?”

The ghost of Christmas past

My first consciously remembered Christmas.

I don't know the year, but I haven't yet started school. We are in my maternal grandparents' home on the south coast of England. It is Christmas eve, dark outside. There is a thick, freezing fog, shifting and swirling against the window pane.

My father is not here; The Queen has sent him somewhere on her inscrutable business; we are between postings, between homes. My mother, though she laughs and plays with me, and we all talk of the fun we will have tomorrow, looks wistful when I come on her unexpectedly. I can feel her lack of enthusiasm for the holiday, whatever she says.

I have had a bath. I am ready for bed, in a maroon dressing gown with braid cord piping around the seams. I look up and there is a face at the window, emerging from the night to cross its eyes and poke out its tongue at me. I shriek in surprise; my mother and grandparents jump, look at me, follow my gaze to the window; there is nobody there. My mother gathers me onto her lap, folding me in her arms. 

My grandfather answers a knock at the front door. We hear his surprise; the door closes. Then my father is in the room; he has bummed a ride on a cargo flight from god knows where, then hitched south through the fog. He must catch the same plane back on boxing day but he is here now and my mother glows with renewed life and joy as I am included in the midst of their embraces...

I don't remember any other Christmas presents from that year, though there must have been some; just that one.

Do they know it's Christmas?

Once upon a Christmas, quite a long time ago, I had just returned from working with a charity in an East African desert. Two countries tore themselves apart there, while people who cared nothing for either the war or Christmas lived precariously from day to day. Weapons detonating every day cost more than the price of a lifetime's food and medicines for the populations of both countries. Before that, in West African mountains, I watched members of nomadic tribes pledge eternal loyalty by giving five grains of wheat.

Back here in the rich world where the weapons come from, I wandered along the main shopping street of a peaceful town. Advertising invited me to buy a battery powered toy for an amount which would feed a desert family for five years, a watch whose price would keep a mountain tribe in luxurious security for life. A sheet of gift wrapping paper could cost more than a year's starvation food.

The world seemed to disappear slowly down the wrong end of a telescope. For a time, I confused Christmas with what had been done to it; I lost my perspective for a while, and it would be some years before I start to find it again.

I'm an atheist who doesn't celebrate Christmas (and Christmas is a pagan, not Christian, festival at root), but the essential message of Christmas nevertheless seems to me an important one. Unfortunately, the message of Christmas can be very hard to find amongst the tawdry mess of christmas as I see it around me from mid November onwards.

Another Wayne, another place...

Bush Falls, from which I quoted this morning, contains a cast of characters amongst whom two are called "Wayne" and "Sean".

Wayne, in the Bush Falls context, is a sympathetic character – the moral hero of the story, in fact. Sean, who fills the central villain rôle, is a bully at school who grows into an adult bully who blows things up for a living.

Oddly enough, though, I once knew a Wayne who later blew things up for a living.

In a grade 5 classroom at Elizabeth Fields Primary School, I sat next to Wayne for an interminable few months. When the class teacher asked a question and I supplied the correct answer, Wayne would mutter "clever dick!" and punch me in the right ear. If I got the answer wrong, Wayne would mutter "ree-tard!" and punch me in the right ear. If I kept quiet, Wayne would mutter "answer, you pommie bastard!" and punch me two or three times in the right ear.

I'd like to be able to tell you that I stood up to Wayne, defeated him, earned his respect ... but it wouldn't be true. Wayne was three times my weight and I was a coward. Instead, I invented game theory and the minimax solution: answering a question, whether right or wrong, brought only one ringing ear while silence earned me several. I became known as an enthusiastic answerer of questions, and acquired the nick name "professor".

Wayne's father blew things up for a living ... mostly destroying tree stumps, but sometimes creating irrigation or drainage channels. Wayne once brought a detonator to school and ... but that's another story. Some years later, long after I was on the other side of the world, I heard that he had gone into the family destruction business.

A bestiary (3)

Rising a hundred metres or so from pure arid desert, the mesa was a geological and ecological freak of nature and a perfect research base camp. Its tip was the end of a natural water pipe: an aquifer seam from the mountains to the south, water driven along it and then upwards by the weight of their much greater height. Further north, occasional oases marked the onward route of the subterranean flow. The spring which oozed out onto the mesa's slightly concave plateau was too meagre to support a human community but it managed to maintain a miniature subsistence ecology and associated microclimate. At the apex of the mesa's food chain came a tribe of cats. Not an exotic breed of wild cats, but recognisably the feral descendants of felis catus: the common house cat.

The calls on my time by the work I had come to do were regular but short; the gaps between them long. Inside my shelter, amongst and made from the threadbare scrub, or outside it when the sun was low, I had a lot of time in which to watch the cats. They were a matriarchal tribe, ruled subtly by a medium sized, inscrutably dignified female, black with a white flash between her eyes, whom I dubbed "QueenMum". The males did a lot of posturing and wailing but the females, except for the brief periods when they came into season, ran the world.

Highly socialised, the adults shared food and childcare; each individual tended to have a 'best friend', so a litter of kittens generally had four adults looking out for it. QueenMum's best friend was Missy, an elderly grey; the two of them spent much of their time sitting together on a mound, surveying QueenMum's domain. They vocalised extensively amongst themselves, and even more so to the kittens, with a complex repertoire of modulation – either they were using language, or the weeks of solitude affected me more than I realised.

The one exception to this civilised state of affairs was Thug, a small white female. She spent half of her time sulking and glowering at the edge of the community, and the other half picking on its other members. I never saw Thug catch any food of her own. On a good day she would saunter up and share someone else's kill; on a bad one she would launch in and simply take it for herself. Her assaults were of such psychotic intensity that she was never resisted.

Gary was the biggest member of the tribe, an enormous tigerstripe male. On a bright night, under a nearly full moon, I watched Gary haul the carcass of a lizard, larger than himself, up the side of the mesa. It took him several hours; a cat is designed for eating at the kill, not for carrying, but he had a litter to feed. The first hint of dawn was showing on the horizon beyond the distant highway when he finally wrestled his prize over the rim onto the plateau. As he dropped it, Thug appeared from the darkness in a storm of hissing, spitting and screeching. Gary, intimidated though perhaps ten times her body weight, backed off and she started to feed. Overcome by the unfairness of it, I stood up and went to shoo her away; she stood her ground, spitting fire at me, but gave way eventually when I pushed at her with a booted foot. "There you go," I said to Gary, shoving the lizard towards him; but he made no move, just sat and watched me. One by one, the rest of the tribe appeared; they sat in a circle, unblinking eyes glittering, staring at me. It was the first time I had ever interfered in their lives, and it was a mistake. I went back to my shelter, embarrassed. The lizard lay there, uneaten, ignored, gradually eroded over the days and weeks not by Gary or his offspring but by ants and bacteria.

When I first arrived on the mesa, lying low by day and building my bivouac, the cats and other wildlife were intensely curious about me. They came and watched me, sniffed the things that I had brought with me. After a while, though, having decided that I was nothing to do with them, they ignored me. They lived, loved, fought, bred, ate, died, without acknowledging my existence. Young kittens who sought to investigate me were called back with a throaty bubbling growl when they got closer than about two metres, but there was no other acknowledgment of my existence. Even when I went and sat amongst them, the kittens between my feet, they acted as if I were nonexistent. The affair of Gary, Thug and the lizard was a unique exception; so was Bastet.

Bastet was a young piebald female, of the same generation as Thug. She was a restless spirit, often hunting or prowling the perimeter while the others sat or slept or sunned themselves. Though she joined in with the life of the community, unlike the others she seemed to have no 'best friend'. Where they killed, shared the kill, then slept, Bastet would often trot into the group with a rodent in her jaws, drop it beside a litter of kittens, then disappear immediately to hunt again.

And, unlike the others, Bastet often visited me in the shelter. I would wake from sleeping through the heat of the day to find her also asleep, inches from my face; or awake, watching me. She investigated every item I had brought with me, vomiting copiously after sampling the can of lubricating oil. She looked in at me the wrong way through the telescope as I photographed, rushing round to cuff the camera each time it clicked. She prodded and sniffed with particular interest at the seismographs. She sampled my food; I had nothing to obviously interest an obligate carnivore, but she developed a surprising fondness for peanuts and for spiced fried lentils. She delivered her first litter of kittens in my sleeping bag while I was out, then moved them to my spare underwear leaving the bloody afterbirth behind for me to find later. Within a few days, she moved both kittens and underwear outside where she could tap into the community childcare network.

The other regular visitor to my shelter was Jerry, a small mouse of some species unknown to me. Like Bastet, he took whatever food was on offer and showed no fear; my supply of dried fruit and mixed grain muesli bought me hours of amusement at negligible cost. After a while, his fondness for currants dyed his nose and whiskers purple. Occasionally, Jerry and Bastet would be in the shelter at the same time; this made me nervous at first, but some kind of truce seemed to exist within my space. Outside, though he was too small to merit a deliberate hunt, Bastet would have eaten Jerry if he had crossed her path. Inside, they ignored each other.

In preparation for my departure from the mesa, my work completed, I methodically obliterated all signs of my stay: equipment and waste packed up, shelter dismantled and scattered, latrine pit not just filled in but planted over with scrub cuttings. Bastet sat and watched me, unblinking, as I went out all of this. On the final night, as I descended the western slope through the rushing wind to the waiting truck, Bastet trotted surefooted beside me. As we loaded my gear under the tarpaulin, she watched intently.

Before departure I signed a sheet confirming that the summit was clean of my presence, returned to the state in which I had found it, but in fact I had broken the rule in two small ways. Beneath the patch of scrub where my shelter no longer nestled, I had left one last meal of spiced fried lentils; and into Jerry's burrow I had poured a quantity of muesli and dried currants.

A bestiary (2)

[by special request from Julie Heyward...]

In my early childhood, before either of my brothers, was a blue and green budgerigar called Toss.

My mother hated cages, so Toss could often be seen trilling from chair backs and picture rails or swooping between them. If I stayed motionless for long enough Toss would sometimes alight on my head, claws latching into hair. The sudden scratching at my scalp was alarming at first, but I soon got used to it.

Usually very fastidious about returning to his cage and conducting personal hygiene needs from the dowel perch onto his sandpaper floor, Toss made one mistake. On a parabolic transit from one picture rail to another, he whirred between us across the dinner table. My father sat, frozen with fork halfway to mouth, staring at the black and white puddle which had blossomed in his plate of stew.

Some years later, in Australia, I was agog with excitement. It was from here that Toss's ancestors had come; here, budgerigars flew wild! I roamed the countryside at the abrupt edge or our town, looking for them, without success. Eventually I discovered, to my disappointment, that here they were not in the brilliant colours of Toss; those I found in the wild wore a quieter camouflage livery, reminiscent of the European sparrow.

There were, however, plenty of other brilliantly coloured birds to compensate. Out in the bush they were everywhere: large, small, flying jewels. Parakeets, in particular, flaunted their riotous plumage openly across the bush. In a valley where we sometimes went to picnic at weekends, wild kilometres out into the bush, they filled the sky with their raucous chatter. One of this flock, obviously escaped from captivity back to the wild, repeatedly called in an unmistakable Yorkshire accent: “Eeeee ... who's a silly bugger?”

A bestiary (1)

Olly the tawny owl was rescued by Karen, elder sister of my schoolfriend Dave when I was fourteen. Finding him unfledged and half dead on the road in daylight, she took him home and weaned him from milk to household scraps. By the time I met him, he was a young adult with an established place in the household.

Olly had, despite Karen's best educative efforts, never learnt to fly. The nearest he got to it was a frantic fluttering as he descended from his favourite perch atop the stairpost just inside the front door. Getting to this perch was a laborious matter of climbing first the stairs (gripping the carpet with claws and beak, falling back often), then an ottoman and the back of an upholstered chair on the landing. By this process he reached the top stairpost, from which a scrabbled slipsliding descent of the bannister led (barring frequent accidents) back down to the lower one. Watching this process, I understood how Robert the Bruce felt about his never-say-die spider. When Karen came into the house, Olly would fling himself off the post in a tumble of feathers. As long as she was at home, he would waddle about the house in faithful pursuit of her. When she left the house he started the long trek up the stairs and down the bannister, back to his perch.

Karen fed Olly on raw meat scraps. Since Olly had never learned how to stand on one claw and eat with the other, as owls are supposed to do, these scraps had to be placed at just below beak level; a modified shoe rack sat in the kitchen, for this purpose.

At some level, Olly knew that he was a bird. If Karen was in the downstairs living room during daylight hours he would scrabble his way up onto the window seat, then the sill. Through the window he watched the starlings pecking industriously at the lawn. On fine evenings the family took him out into the garden where he waddled about, taking the air and fluffing his wings. After a while, on these outings, he invariably stopped and examined the ground fixedly for several minutes. Then he tried to peck at it like a starling, fell on his face, couldn't get up, and had to be rescued.

Acid drop echoes

In commenting on Friday's "Acid drop" post, Geoff Powell mentions Aldous Huxley's Doors to perception and Dr C quotes from T S Eliot's The love song of J Alfred Prufrock. Both are curiously appropriate.

At the time of "acid drop" I was in the middle of my A-levels (for non British readers: a two year examination course usually taken from aged 16-18) – specifically, A-level English Literature. Prominent amongst the texts on the course were Huxley's Brave new world (which necessitated reading of other Huxley in general, including The island in particular and therefore, by extension, Doors to perception) and Eliot's poetry (explicitly including Prufrock).

Prufrock affected me deeply; not only in its own right, but in its unifying echoes down the halls of wider literature from Dante to Joyce. The particular phrase quoted by Dr C ("I should have been a pair of ragged claws...") caught in my imagination with especial force; in 1968 and 1969 I worked on a whole series of photomontages which sought to express what those words moved in me. And I have (not surprisingly, within my own psychology, though I am surprised to hear Dr C echoing it) often heard them clattering around my memories of the acid drop.

I had read Huxley's Island and Doors before that night on the beach and, being a teenager, drew from both a romantic view of chemically altered perception. Having a bad trip put an end to that rose tinted romantic view – perhaps unfairly, perhaps equally unrealistically, but certainly and definitively – for a long time. As an adult, I've often considered the issue with an intellectually open mind (and realised that a good trip would have had the opposite effect) but never remotely approached willingness to experiment with it in practice.

Literature never goes away; it's one of those graces which entwine with the roots of being, enriching and nourishing and informing, for life. Part of its ongoing wonder, though, is the fact that it goes on delivering slow burn surprises for ever. Though both Huxley and Eliot have both been linked to the acid drop incident in my mental attic, they have never connected through it to each other – until, courtesy of Geoff and Dr C, now.

---

• Aldous Huxley,
  • Doors to perception, 1954, London: Chatto and Windus [current: 2004, London: Vintage. 9780099458203 (pbk)]
  • Brave new world, 1932, London: Chatto and Windus. [current: 2007, London: Vintage. 9780099518471 (pbk)]
  • The island, 1962, New York: Harper Brothers [current: 2008, London; Vintage. 9780099477778 (pbk)]
• T S Eliot, Prufrock, and other observations. 1917, London: The Egoist. [current: several versions including complete and selected poems collections and also as The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock, 2008, Warwick: Greville Press. 9780955915123 (pbk)]

Acid drop (...and subverted Friday crab blogging...)

Personal nostalgia alert ... and an apology to Dr C for dragging his Friday Crab Blogging series into disrepute.

A chance combination of circumstances have, over the past two weeks, involved me in an unusually intensive and prolonged series of conversations around the analysis of data on substance abuse. I've found myself thinking how strange it is that someone who has so little experience of the issue should be so involved in making pronouncements about it.

Many years ago, for reasons which now escape me, I found myself talking to an elderly woman in a small rural village about Israel. "Oh", she said, to my bafflement, "they do like their LSD there, don't they?" Such was my naïvety at the time that I recognised neither the antisemitism (which would have horrified me if I had realised what it was) nor the meaning in context of LSD (an abbreviation for Britain's pre-decimalisation currency). I stood there, hiding my puzzlement at why she should think that Israelis were particularly fond of lysergic acid diethylamide.

I've never felt any inclination to do drugs. There was one accident a long time ago, at school; there have been some supervised official trials later in life; I got mildly stoned on other people's smoke, from time to time in the early 70s; but no actual use. Some of my friends, yes; me, no. Not from virtue; my sense of rebellious adventure just couldn't overcome my reluctance to surrender self control. In other words, I'm boring.

One accident a long time ago ... perhaps accident is the wrong word; but it was certainly unwitting on my part. It also played a crucial part in my subsequent reluctance to experiment further.

I was in the last year of school. I'd been dancing with Maryjane Peterson (all names have, of course, have been changed beyond recognition) in Galli Mavri, a night club in the long wall. I had allowed myself to fantasise at an unrealistically hopeful level, and was now feeling tragic. I also had a headache. Danny Whelan offered me an aspirin. It was a funny looking aspirin; much smaller than most, so I asked if he had two; he laughed, and gave me another. I went to find a glass of water.
Danny was with Maryjane's best friend, Brenda Williams. In retrospect, that was the first night of the rest of their lives together which is a romantic thought; but at the time it was just an uncomfortable coincidence – I probably had the dubious distinction of being Brenda's last fling before Danny. "Fling", on second thoughts, overdignifies our encounter. It was very short, taking place in the half hour break between Physics and Double Maths. It was conducted in some discomfort, amidst the disorganised clutter of the sports equipment storage hut. And it ended with Brenda observing, as she gazed out to sea and adjusted her clothing, “yes ... well ... I'd rather have eaten a carrot”.

That was Wednesday; on Friday, she arrived at the dance with Danny. Most of us were only surprised that this had not happened earlier. On the mysterious scales of one to ten which preoccupied conversations in the boys' and girls' locker rooms, Brenda and Danny were both up around 99. They seemed an inevitable couple.

Dancing with Maryjane, I had plucked up my nerve as the music died between numbers. It had been a slow dance, Flowers in the Rain. She hadn't moved off to dance with anyone else in the last hour. We were both hot and sticky with the exercise and the summer night. We were right next to an open door, and nobody would notice our departure. "Would you like to get some fresh air?" I asked, hopefully. She stepped back a pace, pushed her hair back out of her face, and gave a foxy grin. "Why; do you have a carrot with you?"

I ran a glass of water, swallowed Danny's aspirins, and ambled morosely down to the beach.

Galli Mavri was built into a gatehouse and several adjoining chambers in the old Moorish defensive wall around the mediaeval east coast port. Off this coast, decisive or inconclusive sea battles had been fought in wars between Greek and Persian, Greek and Greek, Venetian and Turk, British and German, man and tempest. In the centuries since the wall was built, the old harbour which it defended had silted up and a new one established down the coast. By the summer of 1969, the looming stone overlooked nothing but the lazy shifting water of Citron Bay. The doors opened out onto the road outside the wall, along which very little traffic moved unless coming to Galli Mavri itself. Beyond the road, the ground fell away through a short band of low scrub and wild melons to the white coral sand beach. The wall behind the club, betwixt it and the city, was thick enough to protect residents from the noise; even in front, once you crossed the road and dropped below its level, there was almost nothing to be heard.

I wandered a little way northwards along the beach. In the distance, in the same direction, were the lights of Ayii Irini. Under the jetty at which the town's fishermen brought in their small boats and conned the tourists, I sat down on the sand. With my back against the wooden piles I watched the splintering dance of moonlight. While I waited for the aspirin and the gentle susurration of water against wood to do their work, I mentally rehearsed different versions of myself as Tragic Hero.

Something was terribly wrong.

I was sitting inside a huge dark temple of pillars. Between the pillars, the sky was on fire: a million blazing lights which burned silver holes into my eyes. There was a vast cosmic hissing sound all about me, as an ocean breathed up and down the sand. The sand itself had become immense and world devouring; I could feel every single grain as it swelled to a glass-sharp bolder and cut its own individual pit into my skin. The universe was embalmed in an overwhelming stench of salt, tar, decayed fish. I was clad in sheets of harsh fabric, its surface a moonscape of mountains, valleys, ridges deeply indented with potholes between its crisscross fibres, abrading my flesh like sandpaper.

My feet were being boiled. I looked down, and saw the obscenely monstrous saucer shape of the crab. I knew that the crab was seeking me. When it found me it would crunch me to pulp and powdered bones in those pitiless claws. I turned my head, scanning across the crab from left to right, getting an idea of its size; the whole scan took a thousand years, and through it all I could hear the click and grind of my moving neck.

Nearer than the crab, closer to me, something moved. I looked down. Two hugely loathsome pink slugs writhed in casings of leather straps on the sand. I threw up my hands in self defence, and two more horrors flew at my face: pink, again, long and fleshy, with bundles of swollen pink jointed sausages flapping and flexing at their ends. I stopped moving. Movement attracted the creatures. Stillness was hope. I sat still. I sat still for æons, as the sea breathed and the sky burned and eternity marched its way through my head in heavy boots. As I sat, frozen, the rest of the world hammered in. My head was swelling, and in another millennium or so would burst from within. The columns of the temple groaned like overhead thunder. The sand whispered and rustled, the crab ticked like a cosmic clock, and I listened to the mountain building movements of my heart. Through it all, the intolerable fire in the sky burned on and fractured into the blazing sea.

After many lifetimes of stillness, the giants came. I heard them first, their long slow voices booming vastly along the sand, but dare not turn my head. Then the crushing slithering echo of their footsteps. Finally, they came into view. Three of them, towering above me, their heads in the fire of the sky. The one in the middle had dark-rimmed pools where eyes should be; they flashed inky black, then flared with the same inferno as sea and sky. The two on either side were women; the oceanic rise and fall inside their clothing, as they moved, generated agonising waves of desire which would shatter me into a myriad glittering shards. One of these had the star fire in her hair, the other a swirling curtain of midnight. They saw me, their noises rising in pitch as they changed direction to swoop down on me.

The one with no eyes came first, loomed close. Discovered, I abandoned my stillness strategy and tried to fend him off. The jointed sausage-things appeared again. One of them collided with the eye pools, which shattered. The other fell against my mouth and I bit it; pain roared through me. The giant reached out a sausage-thing of its own: I opened my mouth, hearing the muscles and sinews grind, and bit that too. The giant made a world splitting trumpet sound and withdrew.

One of the others, the dark haired one, also reached out, but past me on either side, out of reach, closing behind my head, pulling me into the continental softness of her front. In the sudden darkness, free of flaming sky, the smell of salt and rot swept away by a musky living scent, surrounded by the rush of a torrential bloodstream and the two-stroke double thudding of a giant heart, I found an inner point of still quiet. I was bathed in low breathy twittering giant-voiced reassurances. I cried rivers which carved valleys down my face, across the endless desert and into the fiery sea.

I am told that Astrid, Richie and Megan sat with me, held me, reassured me, for more than an hour before any of them dared leave in search of help. Galli Mavri, with the only nearby telephone, had closed; only when the last customer had left, and they stood outside locked doors on a quiet road, did my absence worry them. While others drifted off towards Ayii Irini, Astrid insisted on looking for me.

I wouldn't move until the monstrous crab was despatched. Examining the sand carefully, Richie found it – about a centimetre across, long dead, its shell empty – and carried it down to the sea. The stars were bright enough to see by, but they could make no sense of my ravings about a burning sky. Richie's hand was bruised and bleeding where I had bitten him; so was mine, where I had bitten myself. His face was cut and bruised by his broken glasses. Since I panicked at any attempt to detach me from Megan's increasingly tear-soaked cleavage, she insisted on staying attached to me until I was safely through my bad trip.

Megan and I shared a bottle of orange Fanta, every school day; by pooling our resources, we saved money on the price of two separate cans. We had almost nothing else in common. One lunch time, without comment or explanation, she gave me an LP – the Bee Gees red-flocked album, Odessa. I wasn't a Bee Gees fan, but that particular album remained one of my most treasured possessions until, many years later, I lost it in a difficult move. I have a copy on CD, now; the title song, in which the singer floats lost on an iceberg in the North Atlantic, still reminds me oddly of white-hot stars over a white sand beach. Friendship is the strangest thing. I was moved and warmed and touched and humbled to discover how deep this Fanta friendship ran.

I stood on an iceberg once. Not alone; I was with a large group, though they seemed irrelevant in the terrible desolate beauty.

Richie bore me no ill will for his mangled hand and lacerated face. He and I invented some story or other for parental consumption. For weeks afterwards he would offer me sweets, pebbles, seeds, snails, anything small and round, insisting that they were aspirin, and I would find empty crab shells in my bag.

Astrid was my best friend; but her story is a separate one, for telling elsewhere.

Danny married Brenda, and they now run a small road haulage business.

Hand ’is heye full hof harrer

Ray Girvan has just put up a JSBlog post entitled ’Arry and ’Arriet. It is, as always, fascinating (to me, anyway, since my interests and curiosities often run closely parallel to Ray's) ... but this post of mine has only the most tenuous connection with its substance. Instead, I found myself flicked back to childhood by the title itself.

My maternal grandfather played endless word games with me¹ and would often coach me through tongue twisters. One of my favourites, which he attributed to his friends ’Arry and ’Arriet (there you are – a connection at last!), was this evocation of an iconic moment from English mythology:

’Arold of Hengland
Sat hon ’is ’orse
With ’is ’awk hin ’is ’and
Hand ’is heye full hof harrer.

The specific memory which first slid into my mind when I read Ray's title was of walking along the lines of pea plants in my grandparents' huge garden², with my grandfather, when I was about four years old, trying to recite the whole thing with every deliberate error in place, whilst simultaneously scrumping peas straight from their pods...

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1. And probably, in doing so, played a very large part in making me the person I am. He teased me unmercifully (but always affectionately; I loved it and him) with things I couldn't understand. One strand was recounting to me conversations with, and the doings of, his friends ’Arry and ’Arriet. They always sounded wonderful people, who lived wonderful and joyous lives, and I wished that I could meet them ... I realise, now, of course, that they were imaginary ... and that they represented his own childhood, before a fluke of history and war shunted him into the military officer class where he adopted protective colouration with which he was never really comfortable.
2. The same garden which, on another occasion, saw me burying chocolate buttons under its boundary hedge...
   

Chocolate and moral philosophy in Stone Lane

A general guiding rule, for me, is "never go back". If the place (or person, on context) holds bad memories, why revisit them; if good memories, why risk spoiling them? It's a good rule, on the whole ...when I forget to follow it, I usually wish I hadn't. However ... I'm human and I do, sometimes, forget. So, finding myself not far from a seaside town on the south coast of England, where I spent many happy fragments of my childhood, I have allowed myself to be tempted into a wander down memory lane ... or, more accurately, Stone Lane: a long rural road running out from the town's margins into open countryside.

The seven or eight kilometres of Stone Lane held only six houses, then, all in one cluster. There are eight now; still in one cluster, several carrying the same names as half a century ago though most of them are modern rebuilds on the sites of those I remember.

This one, for instance. It bears the same name, "Stonevale Cottage", as did the house where my maternal grandfather lived ... but it's a completely different building, perhaps twenty years old at most. And that builder's merchant (part of a large national chain) behind it: that occupies the quarter hectare of what was his garden and my adventure playground.

Next door to my grandfather, on his right, lived the Goldman family. Mrs Goldman was round faced and jolly; so was her husband, though he was crippled by some degenerative illness and moved slowly, painfully on crutches. Their daughter Julie, six or seven years older than I, good naturedly took me under her wing whenever we visited. Julie didn't even disown me when Simon, her first boyfriend, with motorcycle, leathers and Teddyboy haircut, hinted strongly that three was a crowd. Mr Goldman welcomed me into his shed; I watched as, leaning on his crutches, he worked a miniature lathe to produce tiny, working steam locomotives or aeroplanes. Mrs Goldman fed me scones, home made lemonade and raspberry jam, clotted cream.

Beyond the Goldmans were Mr and Mrs Villiers. I saw Mr Villiers rarely; he worked in London, leaving early and returning late. On rare occasions when I did meet him, he was tall, balding, and seemed ill at ease with me. He would frown, hop from foot to foot, say “well... hello ... old chap ... well...”, hop some more, say “well...” a few more times, then disappear. Mrs Villiers was a different matter; though quite severely arthritic, she moved continually if slowly about her house and her half hectare of garden, chatting with me the whole time about what she was doing. The Villiers, like the Goldmans, had a daughter; unlike Julie Goldman, though, Angela Villiers was probably twenty years older than I, lived elsewhere and visited only occasionally. I probably met Angela only three or four times in my life. On one of those occasions, though, she took me into her bedroom and showed me her complete childhood collection of Biggles books - the aviation adventure stories of W E Johns. So long as I took only one at a time, took great care of it, and returned it as soon as I finished it, I could borrow them whenever I liked. Over subsequent visits, through the years, I worked my way through them all.

Beyond the Villiers were the Kitsons. I sometimes played or went swimming with their son, Simon, if he wasn't at school. Mr Kitson drove a taxi, and was rarely seen unless he offered us a lift to the swimming pool. Mrs Kitson was simply a person who smiled and waved at Simon as we disappeared to play.

There was nobody beyond the Kitsons.

Opposite the front of my grandfather's house, on the other side of the lane, was the Birds' House. The birds were not a family; this was my grandfather's name for a strip of woodland, about fifty metres wide, which stretched the length of Stone Lane. To the right, southward past the Kitsons', it extended a couple of kilometres to the Top Road which I was not allowed to cross. Northward on the left it ran about five kilometres or so until stopped by the village of Five Elms, pausing only briefly after a few hundred metres to enfold a derelict brick works which could, according to an imaginative child's need, be anything from the Alamo through the lost city of the Incas to a Mars colony.

On the other side of my grandfather's house, to the left, were the Cotters. Mr Cotter was the archetypical caricature of a countryman: weatherbeaten, all brown leathery skin and sinew, grey hair, eyes that squinted into the sun, wind and rain even when he was indoors. He was retired (from what, I don't know) but still managed to work a full seven day week as part time game warden for several local farmers, jobbing gardener, repairer of bridges, stiles, culverts, fences and dry stone walls. He too, like Julie Goldman, good naturedly allowed me to trail around after him; from him I acquired portions of a lifetime's landcraft, learned how to track wildlife, discovered how to tickle a trout, saw fox cubs in their lair. Mrs Cotter was bed ridden (again, with what I do not know); the house was home to at least twenty cats, of which a dozen or so were always to be found on or around her bed. As a child I was afraid of her illness but enjoyed her company in the small snug bedroom. Mr Cotter would bring up a tray with a pot of tea or mugs of cocoa, a barrel of biscuits or a plate piled high with thick sliced dense grained home baked bread, toasted on the open fire and topped with fresh churned butter; Mrs Cotter called him Tom, and he called her Alice, and the three of us ate and talked surrounded by cats.

And beyond the Cotters to the left, the last dwelling to disturb the timeless arboreal solitude of Stone Lane, was the house of Miss Baines.

I am ashamed to say that, for no reason that I can now identify, I didn't like Miss Baines. So far as I can remember, she was never anything but kind and friendly to me; yet I maintained my dislike over the dozen years of our visits to Stone Lane. This thoroughly unjust feeling was so strong that, when I wanted to go down the lane beyond the Cotters' front gate, I crossed over and entered the Birds' House to a depth of ten metres or so, went left through the trees for a hundred metres until out of Miss Baines' line of sight, and only then emerge onto the road again.

When I was about seven years old, Miss Baines presented me with the first moral dilemma I consciously remember having to confront. She gave me a packet of chocolate buttons.

What should I do with these chocolate buttons? Of course, I wanted to eat them. Of course, I felt distrust of them. But, beyond those selfish considerations, I also felt the prickings of conscience and guilt. Was it hypocritical (not that I knew that word; was it wrong) to eat a gift knowing that I felt so much dislike for the giver? Was it ungrateful (I knew that word) not to eat them? Was it wrong to not eat, and thereby waste, food when some people had none? On a practical note: if I didn’t eat them, what was I to do with them? The best solution seemed to be to give them to someone else, who would want to eat them; but who, in the small world of Stone Lane, would accept and eat them without asking questions and (despite my feelings, I had no wish to hurt hers) without risk of Miss Baines hearing about it?

Eventually, I went down to the bottom of my grandfather's long, sloping garden, beyond the shed, beyond the tall lines of runner beans and sweet peas, below the deep bank held up by old railway sleepers, out of view of the house and its neighbours. I burrowed deep into the thick privet hedge which separated the garden from a grazing dairy herd. There I dug a deep hole. Into the hole I counted out exactly half of the chocolate buttons, put back the displaced earth, then concealed the spot with scattered leaves and twigs. The other half of the packet I ate. Back in the house, I placed the empty wrapper in the kitchen rubbish bin.

In 1959 Miss Baines was, I estimate, somewhere in her sixties. She must, by now, be long past caring about the ungenerous spirit of a child to whom she caused no harm and tried to be friendly; but I shamefacedly apologise for it, anyway, to her memory.

Be careful what you wish for

When I was very small, my father used to sing (at my own urgently repeated request) a little one stanza song when we were playing out in the open air. I render it here with an attempt to recapture the particular cadence of his delivery.

I'm a lit-tle prair-ie flow'r
Grow-ing wilder hour by hour.
No-one tries to cultivate me
So I'm as wild as wild can be!

This memory lies dormant for weeks, months, years at a time, then springs to front of stage for no obvious particular reason to dance in my conscious mind for a day or two before returning to the wings. Inconsequential though it may be, it embodies for me something very personally precious about my father, and his relationship with me. A conversation with my brother, a couple of days ago, somehow brought it out for a spin in the light and it is sparkling still at the edge of my day to day thoughts, son on the spur of the moment I just did a search for it.

There are several video clips and MP3 files in the Google listing. I stuck to text hits, though, and the first I found was a partial reference within a longer anecdote. There was a small discrepancy (shown here in red):

I'm a little prairie flower!
Growing wilder by the hour!

Then there is this version, from Mudcat, which provides a whole song of which mine is the first stanza. Again, there are minor differences:

I'm a little prairie flower,
Growing wilder every hour;
Nobody cares to cultivate me,
I'm as wild as wild can be.

The International Lions also give a whole song but shorter than and only partially resembling as Mudcat's. Subtitling it I'm a little lion cub, add a line repetition and a wordless twirl to the end of each stanza:

I'm a little prairie flower,
Growing wilder every hour;
Nobody cares to cultivate me,
I'm as wild as wild can be.
I'm as wild as wild can be,
Tu-ra-lu-ra, Tu-ra-le.

Wikipedia mentions the song only under its entry for Lesley Sarony, without attributing it to him, although there are a number of web pages which do make this attribution.

Courtesy of Google Books I find that The Rotarian, vol.13 #3 (September 1918) , gives exactly the same version as Mudcat but the previous month's issue (vol.13 #2, August 1918) adds the last line repeat (though not the wordless twirl) of the Lion's version. Exactly forty years later (vol.93 #3, September 1958), however, a couple of years after my father was singing it to me, has it as:

I'm a little prairie flower,
Growing wilder by the hour;
No one cares to cultivate me,
I'm as wild as I can be.

At this point, I realised that precious memory, whether accurate or flawed, was beginning to blur at the edges. So, I stopped looking. There can be such a thing as too much information, and there can be occasional limits to John's breezy (KJV 8:32) assertion that “the truth shall make you free”.

Million

When I was nine, I counted to a million.

Actually, I started when I was seven; it took me nearly three years. I was nine when I completed the task.

Whenever I had a few minutes to spare, I would count. Sitting on a chair in a shop, waiting for my mother. Eating lunch at school. Walking home from school, my eyes and ears and hands busy with other games, a corner of my brain was counting. In bed before sleep came, or climbing a tree.

I carried a scrap of paper, and when I stopped counting I would jot down where I had gotten to; the next session picked up where the last left off. I didn't tell anyone else about it, apart from my parents.

When I reached my target million, I threw the paper away and didn't think about it again.

I was, in some ways, a strange child.

Spotmaticked

Another inward trip down memory lane ... the same lane, though a little further along, as the one which inflicted "All for love of Halina" on the world, a few weeks back. Pauline Laybourn is still the prime culprit, but can share blame this time with Julie (Unreal Nature) Heyward and Luke (AcerOne) Palmer. In comments to that previous post, both Luke and Julie not only blatantly encouraged me but made reference to Pentax landmarks on their own memory lanes – a K1000 in Luke's case, unspecified in Julie's. For each of them, Pentax was a way station on a journey to somewhere else; for me it was an arrival.^[1]

It's now 1969, I'm seventeen. Since the days of my pining over the Halina, and my pocket money imposed limit of not quite two photographs a day, I've now had two 35mm cameras: a Zorki 6 CRF (coupled rangefinder) and a Zenit 3M SLR. (Neither of them are shown here, and neither is still in my hands, but both deserve a deeply grateful salute.^[2])I have a little part time income, I have been taken under the wing of the local Ilford Photographic importer who sells me short date film and chemicals at low prices, and as a result I am averaging fifteen or twenty frames a day, and can double that on special occasions (such as, for example, the day Suzanne Colley suddenly offered to pose for me...)

Despite all that, I'm still a long way from being able to fund the next step up: from the Zenit to a "professional" 35mm camera with access to a full component system. Especially as I've learned from the show so far that I want the largest available lens aperture. My infinitely patient parents are once again willing to carry the bulk of the investment, we are living in a low cost low tax economy where prices are well below European levels, but the Zenit will still have to be traded in.

What to buy? I will only have one bite at the cherry, and can't afford to get it wrong.

The top fashionable names at the time are Nikon (the iconic "F") and Minolta (specifically the SRT 101, used by W Eugene Smith). But there are other contenders – Mamiya's 1000DTL and the Canon FT QL being high on my list. I am lucky in knowing people who generously lend me all of these cameras for periods of real use so that I can see which suits me best.

I finally come down to a choice between the Minolta and the Canon. I travel with my father to a city 80km away where Andreas, a sympathetic photographic dealer, is offering us terms which can leave him very little profit (he sold me the Zenit at equally low margin, a year ago, and is accepting it back at more than I paid for it). Andreas is expecting us and has the two cameras waiting, ready for my final decision. He also has with them a third which I have never considered: an Asahi Pentax Spotmatic.

I don't at this time know, or know of, anyone who uses a Pentax, and I'm not very interested. But Andreas loads it with a 36 exposure cassette of HP4 and says, “Just give it a try for a couple of hours, have a coffee or some lunch, walk around the old city, take some pictures. Then bring it back here and I'll sell you whichever camera you decide.”

Andreas has been good to me, and never given me bad advice. so I am reluctant to reject his suggestion outright. To humour him, we walk around the old mediaeval city. I take photographs along the way. We get some lunch, and I photograph the staff and our fellow customers.

The Asahi advertising slogan at the time is “Just hold an Asahi Pentax”. As I take my first frame with the Spotmatic, I feel delight in my hands. I know, for the first time, what Henri Cartier-Bresson meant when he said that his camera became part of him. By the time we arrive back at Andreas' shop, I am besotted. I can no longer raise any of my earlier enthusiasm for the other two cameras, which now seem clunky and graceless by comparison.

Andreas insists on rapid processing, drying and contact printing the film, then waiting until I have inspected the results with a lupe, before I make any decision. What I see through the lupe does nothing to dispel my love affair; I know which one I want to go home with me. My only concern is cost; will such a beautiful, perfect thing be beyond the available budget?

But no; I needn't worry; the Pentax is actually less expensive than the original, less desirable alternatives. So much so, in fact, that purchase of a light meter which was to have waited for future funds could be brought forward to today as well.

Fast forward forty one years, and I still have both camera and meter. The meter (a Sekonic Apex) was my trusty workhorse until, as I've recorded elsewhere, it only recently had to be retired.

The Spotmatic still works perfectly apart from instability in its top shutter speed. Though other cameras have usurped its position as mainstay (more on that, perhaps, another time), I still use it for some things and feel that same rightness. Its black and satin chrome have, as you see in the photograph on the left, been painted green on one occasion, grey on another. There were good reasons for this at the time, though they are hard to explain now so I'll skip them. Its lens, a 50mm f/1.4 Super Takumar, has beautifully tactile visual/plastic qualities which I still value sufficiently to use it (with an adapter, in manual stop down mode) on my digital bodies for some types of work.

Pentax (as Asahi are now known, having renamed the company to follow the brand) Haven't always matched that beauty. The K1000 which AcerOne mentions was functionally a bayonet mount version (the Spotmatic used a screw thread lens mount), but somehow missed out on some of the grace. By choosing when to upgrade and when to stick, however, I managed to hang onto that handling delight over the years. When it seemed that Pentax were never going to produce a digital SLR, I wavered. I looked at Canon, Nikon, Sigma and other alternatives ... but I'm glad I waited: none of them sang in my hands as the Pentax (which eventually arrived) again does.

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1. I'm not evangelising, here ... I don't believe that any make or model is better than another except for the person who chooses them ... what tools we choose to use is important to us, but not to anyone else. All that matters is what we do with them and that we feel at home with them. But I found my home in a place which they passed through. A bit like Shirley Valentine..

2. The Zorki, as I footnoted last time, came to me courtesy of generous, unstinting and unwavering parental support. I loved that Zorki, and still feel an ache when I look at pictures of it. It was what finally enabled me to explore contemporary photography and find my own limits. Through use of it, I ceased to be a child fascinated by photography, and became someone for whom the label "photographer" was part of my permanent self. But in enabling my growth, it also brought me to a place where I wanted to do things which it couldn't. In particular, an interest in science generally and biology in particular was another vital part of what I was becoming, and a CRF camera isn't well suited to either macro or micro photography. I managed a great deal using ingenuity and home made gadgetry, but there were limits. An inspirational biology teacher let me use a superb Alpa SLR on school premises ... a Rolls Royce, like the Leica and similarly out of even dream reach, but an example of what an SLR could do. So, it came to a choice ... and the Zorki was, with great misgiving, traded in against the Zenit.

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• Willy Russell, Shirley Valentine. 1986 (stage) and 1989 (film, Paramount).

All for love for Halina

Another self indulgent piece of nostalgia. For this you can blame Pauline Laybourn, of Minneapolis^[1].

Back awhile I recorded rediscovery of my first ever camera, a Six-20 Brownie 620C Box^[2], a milestone which at age eight set me on the road to where (and what, and who) I now am.

Now we fast forward four or five years to 1965 ... I am twelve, pushing thirteen, and I have moved on to a 120 folding wartime Dallmeyer^[3] which has dramatically extended my visual range, technical knowledge, and ambition. It has also introduced me to the economic advantages of packing more photographs onto a single roll of film ... where the Brownie gave me eight shots for a week's pocket money, the Dallmeyer yields sixteen (albeit at half the size). Since one pocket money per month has to go on chemicals and printing paper, this is a big deal ... instead of less than one picture a day I wallow in the luxury of almost two!

I have, by now, become a prolific consumer of used photographic magazines. Mostly ten year old copies of Popular Photography, cadged from the attics of amused strangers, but also the occasional Amateur Photographer only a month or so out of date. And every photographic book I can find in any available library. Although I am now at an age where the Amateur Photographer's frequent two piece swimsuit "portraits" occupy a significant part of my attention, I am nevertheless soaking up text and theoretical knowledge like a sponge. And one of the things I have learned from this reading (and some diligent arithmetic) is that a 35mm camera would (even after allowing for more photographic paper) push me up into the three and a half images a day league. Better still, I could perhaps buy 35mm film in bulk and cut it down myself to refill cassettes, cutting costs to allow a giddy seven or eight pictures a day^[4].

There are problems, of course. I learn, without realising it, the capitalist lesson that one must invest in order to profit. To enable that three and a half image habit, I will first have to fund the purchase of the 35mm camera. And saving that sort of money will mean stashing away pocket money and buying no film, chemicals or paper at all for ... ummm [scribbles frantically on envelopes] an insupportably long time. If I compromise, and just cut down on the purchases to save part of my pocket money, the purchase disappears into a remote future beyond the conception of my twelve year old self.

Nevertheless, I continue to dream and to calculate. What I really want is a Leica ... the tool (I know this from all that reading) of all my heroes: Henri Cartier Bresson, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, W Eugene Smith, Eve Arnold, Willard Morgan, Chim Seymour ... but that is out of the question. By the time I save up for a Leica at four shillings^[5] a week, I'll be drawing my pension. We are on the move, as a family, so a Saturday job (which might deliver the Leica by middle age) is not feasible So it's time to drop my sights a little ... which is where the Halina 35X comes in.

Even the Halina is beyond my reach, in fact. Dropping to five pictures a week and saving the balance of my pocket money, I could hope to buy it somewhere around my sixteenth birthday. But that is at least close enough to build dreams upon, if not to realise them.

Snapping back to the present day, in 2010, now. It would be nice to say that the Halina 35X pictured here is the one which I saved for and achieved ... but it wouldn't be true. (My first 35mm camera came to me just over a year later, and it wasn't a Halina^[6] ... but that's another story.) No. The Halina became the first camera I didn't buy. The one shown here I have just bought second hand on a market stall for €2, which is what has prompted this post.

The fact that I never bought the Halina back then in 1965 didn't, however, stop it playing a huge part in my life. For a year I harassed innocent (and astonishingly patient) camera shop managers and assistants with outlandish questions. A columnist in Popular Photography advocated loading bulk film not into standard cassettes but specialised Leitz or Contax cassettes which, when the camera back was closed, would open to allow unimpeded low friction film transit through the light trap. These cassettes only opened in certain cameras (primarily Leitz or Contax, but also a few other expensive marques) which had the necessary modification to the film chamber. At the first opportunity, I was down into the nearest camera shop to ask a bemused assistant whether the Halina 35X was equipped to accept Leitz or Contax cassettes? (Answer: no.) I read of the first crude automatic exposure systems, and how dangerous it was to rely upon them rather than upon the photographer's own experience. Would the Halina 35X, I asked the long suffering manager of the same shop, hamper me in this way? (Answer: at twelve pounds and ten shillings it didn't even have a light meter, never mind automation.)

For just over a year I lived in a hazily glamorous professional future fantasy where I roamed the world (still dressed, curiously, in shorts and a school uniform) delivering back astonishing photoreportage to grateful editors (sometimes at Magnum, sometimes at Life magazine) ... all taken with my trusty and beloved Halina 35X.

And now, four and a half decades on, I finally possess one.

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These footnotes are dedicated to my favourite critic, who has been deprived of this particular exasperation for some time; but, alas, they contain none of her beloved "tingly" ISBN numbers.

[1] Pauline keeps pressing me to put this sort of thing out in the public domain ... that's my story, anyway, and I'm sticking to it.

[2] Also follow up posts with new photographs taken using the Brownie since it returned to me last year.

[3] Sadly, I am unable to find any trace of my Dallmeyer in either print or web sources. There are similar examples, the closest being the Dallmeyer Dual which had a closely matching specification though it differed greatly in several structural details.

[4] Once I eventually had my first 35mm camera (see note [6] below) I did indeed start mainlining on bulk film purchased in thirty metre rolls. Later I discovered the joys of short dated or date expired stock which was cheaper still and showed no drop in quality. And sometimes my father, through various acquaintances concerned with replenishment of military reconnaissance stores, augmented my supply with date expired hundred metre tins.

[5] Four shillings, in 1965, was one fifth of a British pound or 48 US cents.

[6] It was a beautiful Russian built copy of my dream Leica, the Zorki 6, infinitely superior to the Halina and bought not out of my savings but through the boundless generosity of my parents who, I now realise, could ill afford it at the time.