Friday, January 24, 2014
Bingo,
a peeping tom and war poetry
It would be hard for any technology-using
child of the 21st century to put themselves in my place in 1953.
Earlier posts on this site draw pictures of an innocent time of nesting,
damming streams, fantasy medievalism with lances and shields, a tiny primary
school of 23 pupils and only the occasional fisticuffs creating small dark
clouds on the horizon. I can’t recall much to fear in those days, though this
may be due to heavy caution and some capacity for adroit language in staving
off incidents before they erupted. I recall being paralysed up a tree as I
witnessed older boys lying in the grass and inducting younger girls in the arts
of having foreign fingers moving like furtive crabs claws inside their knickers. Though I must hardly have
known what was involved, I knew that it was a transgression and both boys and
girls would get into trouble. I
knew telling tales would have me kicked and punched. Better to hang there like
a frozen fruit and wait for the call of the school bell ringing in the teacher’s
hand outside the main door, setting everyone scarpering the quarter mile to be
in on time. Better no-one ever knew that I knew.
Surprisingly, I did not suffer from stage
fright. Nor have I ever. From plays to speaking at UNESCO to hundreds of
delegates, I have been able to create a zone and stay in it, impervious to the
possibilities of pratfall or the humiliation of sudden silence. When I was into
double figures, age-wise, I embarked on a concert tour with another boy called
David Salinger. I was a soprano and he was an alto. Our duets would seem today
to be a bit sugary and designed to melt old ladies’ hearts, I suppose. Maybe we
simpered as we learned to play on audience emotion. The concerts were organized
by my father to raise money for the construction of the village hall in
Shadforth. The acts were redolent of a post-war period. A handsome twenty odd
year old crooner called Lennie sang The Old Rugged cross:
On a hill far away stood an old
rugged cross,
the emblem of suffering and shame;
and I love that old cross where the
dearest and best
for a world of lost sinners was
slain.
… so that a mournful, reverent hush fell
upon the audience, many, I realize now probably having had family members
killed during the recent war. Another individual, nameless now, a drama queen
in his middle aged splendour, recited J. Milton Hayes’ The Green Eye of The Little Yellow God. It began..
There’s a
one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Kathmandu,
There’s a
little marble cross below the town;
There’a
broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,
And the
Yellow God forever gazes down.
It was a poem from the Raj. My father may have
been behind its choice. He never really recovered from his prominent status in
the army in India. The concerts always ended with a prize draw and Bingo, then called Housey Housey, a communal
competition to win a prize too big to be easily got with ration coupons; “Two
fat ladies sixty six, one and one legs eleven, six-oh blind sixty…” I know you
could have heard a needle drop, the intonations of the caller and the silence
of the audience only interrupted by the screech of “House!” from a winning
contestant.
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Labels: Autobiography: concert parties, rationing and childhood intimacies
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