A SNAPSHOT.

I have been having flashes of a an image, rather like some cheesy 'whodunnit' where the heroine with repressed memories sees fragmented scenes of a faceless  man ...a tattooed  arm...a shoe crunching on broken glass, you get the picture. Usually it is the genre of film where she goes up into the attic of the very old unlit house during a violent thunderstorm and we know the assailant is there, waiting and playing very creepy music to ease her way up the stairs.

My flashbacks are thankfully totally benign. They are of me, on a bicycle aged 16 1/2 on a lovely summer's day in 1950 ; visions brought on, I have no doubt, by the book I am reading at the moment by Frank McCourt  'Tis, the sequel to his masterpiece Angela's Ashes. The time line is familiar and his story of the pale sore-eyed semi-literate fighting against all odds to study, his longing to belong, to be able to discuss Dostoevsky with other students,  to know how to talk to girls/anyone in authority shamed as he is by bad teeth and eyes like 'piss holes in the snow' -resonates with me.

So there I am riding the deserted Sunday lunchtime  streets of The Bay; I know where I have been and where I am going.

 I have just come from the house of a couple who are close to my current boyfriend Hugh. Hugh is an orphan and he is a fairground boxer. The Hudsons live in a fine detached house...a Grange or a Lodge with out- buildings, a gravel drive and a paddock behind the house.  Mr. Hudson has two artificial legs...Mrs Hudson is the image of Googie Withers.  They are superior beings.  They have a library in their house, a small room of crammed shelving, a dark wood table and two leather chairs.  He asks what would I like to drink and I catch Hugh's eye, he looks as non-plussed as I.  I ask for a Port and Lemon because it is the only drink I have heard of...I do not know what Port is but with the lemon in there it should be drinkable.  He serves it to me in a cocktail glass with a piece of fruit I do not recognise stuck to the rim.  I don't know if I must eat the fruit  before or after taking the drink. or must I not eat the fruit at all.  Hugh is drinking water and the Hudson's  something clear containing something on a stick but I watch them anyway. She takes the stick out of her drink and nibbles at the green berry, while he holds the stick out of the way while draining the drink, then he puts the berry into his mouth. No help to me.   I sip my drink, it is delicious and the smell of the fruit begs me to put it in my mouth.  It is pineapple though I do not know that, I just know that it is delicious and juicy and I want more. I drain my glass and eat the fruit. I am offered another and because I have no knowledge of how to behave I accept.

These are pre-lunch drinks; the Hudsons and Hugh are going on somewhere... sounds very exotic to me. I say goodbye and ride my bicycle very fast all the way home. I think that the Hudsons thought I was unsuitable for Hugh...He did have the most elegant manners for all that he was a Fairground boxer. Perhaps they adopted  him. The sun was warm on my legs and the drink had worn off by the time I reached home. I never said a word to mum.

ANOTHER PIECE OF THE PUZZLE

Another piece in the puzzle.

I have used that title intentionally, because I am beginning to think that these posts, dedicated to my past are bits of the jigsaw that, completed, and read in the correct sequence [I purposefully publish out of order] will help me to understand why I am me.

Gretel S. [Mutti] really deserves a chapter all her own in my story. Not just because she was an extraordinary woman, which she was, but because of the effect she had on my life.

Born in Holland in I9II Mutti moved with her parents to Germany when she was eleven. I am not sure exactly when she moved back to Holland but it was there she married an Englishman, Norman S, and had a daughter, Marjorie. The marriage broke up, Germany invaded Poland breaking their treaty with Great Britain and war was declared. Wrapping two Persian rugs around her middle and with only what she could carry, Mutti brought her eight year old daughter to England as the Germans marched into Holland. She arrived when the country was in turmoil.


 Unprepared for a war that was inevitable - thanks to the dithering of Neville Chamberlain the Prime Minister of the period, men were hurriedly conscripted and trained, factories converted from peacetime products to producing uniforms, guns and ammunition, tanks, planes and field kitchens. The powers that be, requisitioned schools, houses and land as headquarters, living accommodation, training bases, and stores. Khaki, pale blue, and navy blue uniforms now predominated and the accents of all nations could be heard in the towns. Sign posts and place names were removed from roads, sticky paper strips criss-crossed windows in trains and blackout curtains in every home cut out any chink of light that might lead an enemy bomber to its target.
Rationing began; gas masks were distributed and were obliged to be carried at all times. Municipal parks were dug up and planted with vegetables, and Barrage Balloons looking like floating elephants protected important sites. Lorries collected iron railings and garden gates to be turned into shells for bombs and bullets and the Black Market was born.
After living for a while with her estranged husband Mutti moved to Bedford to be near her only brother Paul, who was a Trades Union leader.

Mutti was a sturdy five foot nothing of energy, with the face of a mischievous but rather plain, elf. If there was something she wanted or needed she would find a way to get it. She would badger people into submission using a mixture of coercion, persuasion and moral blackmail. She sold her rugs and some jewellery and bought a large run down house and proceeded to beg or borrow the means to repair and paint it. When it suited her she would play the poor refugee who had escaped Hitler by a whisker. 
She had the idea of creating a housing billet where officers could rest and relax; near enough to London to commute to their offices, yet far enough away to avoid the nightly bombardment. Having conceived the idea she followed it through by shaming those who were doing nothing, to help her in her plan. Beds and bedding were donated; shops were scoured for the necessary equipment for her kitchen and for all the other essentials. 
Mutti knew her antiques and was not above trading the food her officer’s food stamps brought her, for more rugs, fancy tables even object d’arts. Eventually she had room for eight officers and her fame as a cook ensured that the waiting list for places grew and the numbers stayed constant. She knew how to make a little go a long way. Cream was a thing of the past and butter rationed so she would take the cream from the top of each bottle of milk, letting it stand for a while before draining off any liquid then whipping the cream to top her coffee or her fancy puddings. Her soups were legendary; made from a stock pot that was always on the go. It began with a chicken carcass or meat bones with onions, celery and bay leaf and then took all the leftovers that came back from the vegetable dishes. Nothing went to waste, ever. She bought day old bread and stale sponges for half price. The bread was held under hot water for a second then baked in a hot oven until it was as crisp and fresh as new baked. The sponges were soaked in sherry and made the base for sherry trifle. She gave her men Goulash and Blinis, bashed tough steak into submission, tied pieces into sausage shapes and pressure cooked it in rich gravy until it melted in the mouth, salted runner beans in the summer glut for winter delight and made her own Sauerkraut. In a time of restrictions, her officers ate very well. 


She did not waste money on sending soiled washing to a laundry. Monday was washday and beds were changed to crisp fresh linen and she would still be ironing at eleven in the evening. She had one particular and peculiar quirk which she credited for her boundless energy. Every afternoon after lunch she would retreat to her bedroom, remove her shoes, climb on the bed and cover herself with a rug. She would close her eyes and sleep for precisely ten minutes and wake refreshed. Wherever she was in the world [and I have witnessed this in London and New York and heard of her search for a bed or bench in Franco’s Palace in Madrid] she would enter a hotel lobby, remove her shoes, lie back on a couch, close her eyes and sleep for the required ten minutes. No one disturbed her. By the time hotel staff decided to rouse her, her ten minutes were over and she was up, shoes on, shopping bags retrieved and on her way. 


Her fame spread and her bank balance grew. She grew close to one of the officers, Reginald Floyd, a tall buffoon of a man who could see at once that her dragooning character was a perfect foil for his own laid back laziness. Marjorie went to Bedford Girls High School and became a perfect English rose.


Sometime in the late forties Mutti bought a large rundown hotel in The Bay, and with her usual formidable energy and courage turned it, in double quick time, into a convalescent home. She took patients from all over Kent for two weeks of convalescent care and some of her very good cooking; with the aid of a regular turnover of German girls, and a number of her ‘stray lambs’; girls like me who needed tender loving care. Reginald or Flukenbush as she called him drove her around in his large black Packard, to the station, to the Wholesalers or to the Bridge Club where they played every Thursday evening. For the rest of the time he played solitaire in their sitting room, changed the occasional light bulb or parked outside the Pier and waited for the showgirls to exit from the Summer Show.

I953 and I enter her world.
I was given a card to take to the Home for an interview with the owner, Mrs Gretel S. who needed a cleaner and general dogsbody. I had been a week without money and I was very hungry. Mutti looked me over with her small twinkling grey eyes, saw with her amazing antennae that I was a waif in distress and hired me on the spot. ‘Time for lunch, my dear’ she said in her comic Dutch/German accent. ‘Come and join us’. It was stew, not any old English stew with gobs of fat floating on thin tasteless liquid; but Mutti’s stew. Succulent meat, bite tender vegetables and soft fluffy dumplings floating on rich thick gravy. I ate three bowls, an act that became part of the folklore of the Home.


I worked from Monday to Friday with Mrs.Robinson- a long term member of Mutti’s staff - I stripped and remade beds, vacuumed carpets and swept the oak-stained and polished floorboards. We dusted and polished furniture, cleaned windows and bathrooms, and folded linen. If all that was done Mutti would find me another job. Dampening and rolling pillowcases, sheets, table cloths, shirts and blouses ready for the iron. Or she would have me stringing runner beans, shredding cabbage or simply stirring a pot. Mrs. Robinson, [Robbie] knew better than to show her face. If her work was done she would hide herself in an upstairs room and smoke another of her endless cigarettes. I however was in some kind of heaven. 


The work, though never-ending, was not hard and everyone was pleasant. Mutti’s assistant, Erna, a tall grim looking German woman was a bit severe but Mutti herself more than made up for her. We had coffee at eleven around the big kitchen table. For the first time in my life I tasted proper roasted coffee and with Mutti’s famous ‘milk top cream’ it was sublime. There would be cake, almond slices, or biscuits and the conversation would be mostly in German. I was told that after a while there would be no translation and I would soon pick up enough of the language to follow what was being said. Sometimes we would sing. Around that table, with our coffee and cakes, one of the girls would hum something and another would pick it up. I learned to sing Das wonden ist dast Muller’s luste [probably not quite right but that is the phonetic spelling] A Roundelay, you know, where one singer starts and the next begins midway, then the third and so-on. The first time it happened it made me cry. I couldn’t believe such happiness existed. I sang all the time and no-one told me to stop. At the top of the house in the attics I would sing 'Oh Mien Papa' from Madam Butterfly, and hit the top note [just]. I was almost delirious with happiness. At the end of the first week I bought a bottle of Hiltone bleach and became a blonde and would remain one for the next eighteen years with a few hiccups along the way. After three weeks I moved into one of the attics at the top of the house and, at eighteen and a half I began to venture into what today would be known as teenager territory.

Marjorie was three years older than I. At first she was distant. I was just another of her mother's stray cats and I think she would have loved to have Mutti's attention to herself, but little by little we became closer until we were inseparable-at least when she was home from the hospital where she was in her third year of nursing training.

Because of Mutti and Marjorie I would begin my own nursing training within a year.

Because of Mutti I became a good cook, learned to appreciate music and gained knowledge of antiques, spoke German and a little Dutch and discovered that caring comes in all shapes and sizes and that by 'paying it forward' can be endless.

My kind of town....

I am going to tell you a bit about my town. It has nothing to recommend it, either culturally, aesthetically or geographically. No one famous lives or has ever lived here [in the sixties the parents of  Peter Noone of Herman's Hermits ran a pub here though he was never seen .]

I have just remembered that IN 1963 a film was made here in the The Bay entitled French Dressing and, I have discovered, on the wonderful 'knowitall' that is Google, that it was Ken Russell's directorial début.
Local people were used as extras. Sadly the film has never been  shown on TV nor is it available on DVD

There is a lovely short video of our, 'Pier that was' with the star of the film, James Booth, cycling the length of it to deliver a ticket to a deck chair user. AND LOOK! SAZZIE HAS INSERTED IT HERE FOR ME. YIPPEE!
. .

When I first came here in 1946 to holiday with a friend of my mother, it was a slightly decaying Edwardian town with the second longest pier in England, plate glass was a dubious joy to come and the Street lights were the original and real Mcoys. There were shops selling meat and shops selling baked goods and Greengrocers and two Fishmongers, a coffee bar, Hardware Stores, fifteen pubs, eight churches/chapels/and one Masonic Temple. Charity shops had not been invented nor did we boast a Super Market.  Our friendly grocers weighed our bacon and sugar and tea, patted our butter and biscuits were taken from brown cardboard boxes, weighed into paper bags which were then swung by the edges over and over in a movement that fascinated me, to the extent that I thought I had found my calling. The man with the striped apron tied high under his arms would  pat  moist butter into neat squares, slice the cheese with a wire cutter, turn the handle on the bacon slicer and watch the slices drop neatly onto greaseproof...all this in an atmosphere that was scented with sugar and salt and cheese. Heaven!

It seemed to me then that I knew everyone-our postman cycled through rain and snow, ice or blazing sun, always the same man. He knew us and we knew him, he shared our relief when a letter from Mexico contained a cheque. George was  his name was and his son Terry was a one-time boyfriend. The man who emptied the gas meter was named Fred, he knew us so well that he counted the  French francs we had used when the shillings ran out before pay day, and accepted the equivalent straight out of the pay packet.  We knew our coal-man, his face and arms blackened with coal dust, an empty sack open at one seam thrown over his head and back to give him some protection as he lumped the sacks into our bunker. 

We knew all our neighbours and  their joys and sorrows, sharing, to halve them.

Then, as England began to pull herself up out of post-war gloom businesses boomed and progress stripped The Bay of it's tiny bit of uniqueness. Councillors allowed Jerry building; destruction of  the old and quaint  for concrete blocks which would last only a quarter of the time. Most of the Pier blew down in a storm and the powers that be twiddled their thumbs until it grew too expensive to rebuild it back to it's original glory, putting up only the Pier head or Pavilion in a style reminiscent of a factory.

As the decades passed we would return from some exotic location to find the town dying more and more, shops closed leaving gaps in the High Street until it looked like a row of decaying teeth. Only the seafront came alive, in the summer months as those without the means to enjoy the delights of the new 'Package Holidays' to Spain, would spend their two weeks in B&Bs and their days sheltering behind groynes on our pebbled beaches.

Now there is a new burst of hope for our town as City Dwellers, searching for an affordable second home, and working their way down the coast. have found their way to us. They are buying up and refurbishing and need the boutiques and Bistros and coffee shops. Things are looking up-but so are the prices. But that is a small price to pay [excuse the pun] if we are ever to see The Bay return to its original Edwardian Splendour.

I rarely see a face I know, and Charity shops abound [though a bargain is hard to find these days-no longer are the shops musty, fusty and dusty but smell of strong air-fresheners and display Fair-trade goods which one would not buy in the country of origin as too naff.]

So what is it exactly about this town that brought as back here time and time again?
Well, it is perhaps its very unpretentiousness. It is what it is, a slightly run-down seaside town, where the air is bracing, the sea [now clean] is cold, the shingle is hard on the feet, the penny arcades still attract when the wind is too cold and the shops are, little by little, returning. As petrol prices brings tears to the eyes and Super-markets revel in their monopolizing profiteering, small businesses are starting to emerge again, giving   the personal service we thought lost forever.

And...I can see memories around every corner.