Woman on a train (from Darlington)

Many will have experienced a euphoric period of weeks with glorious Mediterranean weather and from watching the human miraculous rescue of a football team and their coach from 2 miles of underground caves and tunnels in Thailand, together with the unexpected triumphs of the England Football team in reaching a semi-final of the World today with the prospect of a final against France on Sunday.  There was also a royal christening involving the “fab four” and a brilliant hundred plane fly past over Buckingham palace yesterday to mark the creation of the Royal Air Force a century ago and where several generations of royals have gained their wings.

In contrast, Prime Minister May devised a way to present a possible negotiated trade deal with the European Economic Community by confronting the fundamentalist Brexiteers and forcing the nominal chief negotiator and Brexit Secretary of State, David Davis, to resign, quickly followed by Boris Johnson, the ludicrous and egotistical  Foreign Secretary  who immediately in  declared his contempt for that proposed, inciting his supporters  into paroxysms of rage and plotting, threatening to depose the Prime Minister if she did not change in her position or if she gives more concessions in the negotiations. Then we have the President of the United States declaring on his way to a NATO summit at which he will demand significantly more money for the continuing US support, that Britian is in turmoil and hopes he will meet up with Boris Johnson, and one also suspects, Nigel Farage. He added that the easiest event before him had become a meeting with the President of Russia. His visit has been downgraded from a formal state visit in which he could have been expected to address Parliament and attend a state dinner and overnight residence at Buckingham Palace. He will be flown to the opening of United State Embassy, to talk with May at Chequers and the Queen at Windsor, and then play golf at his course in Scotland avoiding mass protest marches about his policies and personal life. Here in the North East Jeremy Corbin, Emily Thornbury and other Labour personalities unafraid to talk of socialism will speak at the Durham Gala while the Tall sailing ships will spend the weekend in Sunderland.

I contemplate and prepare for the first of two operations on my eyes to remove cataracts, something which my birth mother experienced also on reaching a similar age and express continued disappointment that a female actor and film maker from Darlington, encountered on the 10.25 from Newcastle to Kings Cross, a week ago Friday, has not made contact as she appeared determined to do. Most likely she Googled and accepted my explanation why aspects of the printed but unpublished 101 in Black and White should not become public during my lifetime, and she would have to wait and see if I was able to complete and publish the two volume autobiography now in the making, or perhaps her husband who sat focussed on his lap top throughout the three hour journey and who admitted that her impulsive enthusiasms sometimes got the better of her, counselled  against further contact.

One of the advantages of looking old, although inside one retains the hopes of a teenager, is the openness and kindness of strangers, and one of the exciting features of contemporary Britain is the number of independent, self-confident and single minded young women that have emerged in the House of Commons, in the news and entertainment media, and experienced through direct contact and communication.

A young woman from Mansfield who engaged me in conversation when enjoying a brunch sandwich in a cool corner of St Pancras station the Monday morning before returning home, was one such example.  She reminded of the young women I met when as a 20-year-old together with a former catholic priest in training, the Anglo Catholic pacifist, anarchist and vegan, Laurens Otter, we hitched lifts on Boxing Day 1959 to join a youth campaign for nuclear disarmament march from Liverpool to Hull and which I repeated over Christmas and New Year 1960/1961.

In December 1959 I was offered temporary work at the Houseman’s bookshop which is still located close to Kings Cross station and which helped fund the weekly publication Peace News. The bookshop manager, Harry Mister asked if I would also help with preparing copies of Peace News for posting on Wednesday evening work group held on one of the basement rooms in the building.  Laurens was also a regular member of the Wednesday evening group and it was his idea that we should join the Youth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament march and where I was already a member of an adult CND group in Wallington where I had lived for all but the first days of my life.

Separately, I had also made up my mind to participate in the January 1960 proposed human blockade of the entrance of the United States intercontinental nuclear missile and air base at Harrington in Northamptonshire organised by the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War.

On Boxing Day 1959 I commenced a journey which changed the course of my future life after spending Christmas Day with my birth and care mothers and their eldest sister at the council flat in Wallington where we had moved into one of the two blocks of six flats, two on each floor, built on the site of one of the 140 plus V1 and V2 rockets which had exploded in Croydon Airport during the War. We had shared a requisitioned house with the Cheeseman’s, where Paul had served with the RAF regiment in North Africa and we were allocated adjacent flats in the Maldon Court. Bute Road block by the local authority when the owners of the requisitioned house at the Stafford Road end of Onslow Gardens had pressed for its return. We had gained the accommodation with the help of our Member of Parliament, Robert Carr, who became Sir Robert and a Home Secretary, and the three sisters voted Conservative until one of their nieces persuaded them to vote for Tom Brake, the Liberal Democrat who survived the treachery of the Tory Party coalition and remains the MP for Wallington and Carshalton, the constituency created  with  reorganisation of local government in London which ended the separate borough of Beddington and Wallington and its local government and political connection with Mitcham.

I joined Laurens in London to commence hitching lifts and after he angered one countryman who had been out shooting we were required to walk for miles to the nearest town where we spent the night in sleeping bags in a bus shelter arriving to meet up with the score of core marchers who had already developed into a close group but made us most welcome. Unfortunately, I was not able to go to Hull, leaving at Doncaster to hitch lifts back on my own in preparation for the protest at Harrington.

Two of the remarkable young women first encountered on the trans Pennine campaign were to have important and positive influences on my life at that time, although it was a third who I had met at the offices Lord Russell’s Committee 100 who was instrumental   in my decision to go to Ruskin College and not become the first paid organiser of the London Region CND with its office also in the basement of Peace News.  The first of the two was a sixth form student who went to India on her own for several months before going up to Oxford where we encountered again as Ruskin College also had premises in the city. She attended my subsequent wedding and became a senior university administrator. The second, then a student teacher from Manchester became a Professor of Education. She travelled to be outside the gates of Stafford Prison on October 1^st, 1960 when with five others we were released from voluntary captivity after refusing for six months give an undertaking to discontinue our civil disobedience protesting the possession and potential use of weapons of mass civilian extermination. She also visited to help with my readjustment back into everyday society when the prison experience proved more traumatic than appreciated at the time.  It is noteworthy that the father of another the young marchers went on to hold two of the most senior political positions in government and she also became a university professor. I met her again with the man she was to marry on a Scottish hillside the morning after the joint Direct Action Committee and Committee 100 land and sea action against the location of USA submarine with Polaris nuclear missiles in Holy Loch in 1961. Another of the young women who participated with her well known Church of England Clergyman father was reported to have subsequently become a dancer at the Folies Bergére in Paris.

The decision, we now know, following the release of Cabinet papers, to place the submarine base so close of the main city of Scotland had been forced by the USA government in exchange for the technology enabling the independent British system to become deterrent effective. News of the development had reached the six of us in Stafford prison where two of our number worked in the main library and I in the daily lending library on the prison C wing. The Potter, and subsequent author of Smallcreeps Day, Peter Currell Brown and I had talked of a Gandhi Satyagraha style march with canoes to the Loch  before attempting to plant a peace flag on a submarine and I had written a letter suggesting the project to the Direct Action Committee who asked if I would be the chief Marshall for the first week of the project and then help with project planning in Scotland from a base in Glasgow. Peter had made the canoe which set off from Trafalgar Square at the end of the 1961 Aldermaston March  and George Clark who was the organiser and  chief marshal for an event where over 100000 perhaps more than 200000 had participated, had invited me  to join him at a meeting with police at Scotland Yard where it became evident I was the focus of interest when members of the Home Office and Admiralty were introduced and others I suspected the CIA or USA embassy staff were not.

Peter had left the core group of some 30 as it wound in its way through England for six weeks, with selection based on giving something up, a job, a course place, a husband and children. He formed a base camp in the private loch side grounds of the Youth Hostel at Strone Point Dunselma Castle and known locally as the Big House. When I commenced research, I discovered that the young warden had emigrated to Australia and that her son joined correspondence on Trip Adviser (see Dunoon) about the YHA and which included reference to her participation in the land demonstration.

Another of the six Operation Foulness men held in Stafford, Michael Nolan, also joined the group on the loch side. Mike had also participated in the Harrington demonstration and he and I had shared adjacent cells in Bedford Jail after refusing Police Bail. We were locked up for 23 out of 24 hours on the Sunday with two half hour spells of exercise in silence and walking yards apart so we could not communicate. This was because we were under 20 and therefore had to be held separately from adult prisoners. The other men also held until we appeared before the magistrates said they had a great time kept together in the prison Library. Among those arrested was the daughter of a judge. We were collectively represented by a barrister who made an impassioned political speech, one Greville Janner, and we were given an unconditional discharge.

13 of the 15 arrested, who participated in the second Operation Foulness project competed the six months.  Terry Chandler also under 21 had to serve his time alone in Wormwood Scrubs. He joined the Holy Loch camp and a photo of him planting a flag at Holy Loch reappears from time to time and in the recent BBC documentary covering the release of the government papers. A photo of me being water hosed in a launch appeared in some papers at the time of the Whitsun demonstrations.

A more prominent photo being carried by policemen appeared in Guardian after Operation Foulness in 1960.  In 1959 I trained and worked as a salesmen for the office machine firm Olivetti, having passed top of the four week training course and in 1964 while completing a Home Office secured and financed course to become a qualified child care officer, I met the person who was second on the course and who had worked the same sales team in the City of London ,when he walked out of a restaurant in a street in Norwich as I was on my way  back to the Children’s Department. He said that the Guardian photo had been pinned to notice boards throughout the company with the banner “This is what happens if you do not sell.”   

The third photograph of me proved of potential greater significance when a team at the West End Police station in central London came under media and official scrutiny in 1963 after they attempted to frame a member of the National Council of Civil Liberties who participated in a demonstration and who also contributed as a cartoonist to Peace News.  After Harrington, a posed photo of me holding a grappling iron taken against the boundary of the nuclear rocket station and air base was published in Peace News, stating that I was a staff man, which I was not. I had then put down what would have been regarded as an offensive weapon and capable of damaging property before helping to form the human blockade at the entrance of the base. The potential significance of the photo and my minor roles in the peace movements of that era will form the subject of part of the autobiography with its themes of the difference between coincidence and connection, that the appearance of anything is only one aspect of its reality and that everything we do and say can be viewed and heard by anyone anywhere, anytime with the technology.

The only female member of Operation Foulness who joined the Peace Camp was the young and single Ruth Townsend who stayed in the area after the demonstrations and went to work in a local hotel.  The interaction between the local community and United States personnel who worked at the base, the base supply ship or crewed the submarines in brilliantly described by Andrene Messersmith in The American Years Dunoon and the US Navy, and provides the perspective of those who served and of the local population. She was 11 when the first submarine arrived and later married a US Master diver.

The amusing aspect of my encounter with the young and adventuring young woman from Mansfield whose mother wanted her to see the world, is that she had initiated the conversation and whether this had been noted by the station camera unit or it was noticed that I moved from one end of the five row seats to sit next to her in the middle of the five, having  previously moved from sitting beside  her  to then end seat when it became vacant, or that I had initially left the shoulder bag by the end seat after moving the case before me, it provoked a visit from a station security lady from Croydon, originally from Ghana who checked that the shoulder bag was mine and then asked if the young lady was my daughter.

This was flattering as granddaughter was more appropriate. I cannot remember why the woman who lives in Croydon made the generalization that Ghanaians were different from West Indians but this was something I could in part concur from my experience as the Senior Child Care and Court Officer for Ealing Council at Acton in the late 1960’s which had a large West Indian origin community, and where after 6 months I had become the Area Children’s Officer for Central Ealing where there was a post WW2 Polish community, now enhanced with the enlargement of the European Economic Community, and also of Hungarian refugees. I was educated about Ghana by a new member of the managed team who had come to England to train and gain experience before returning to her homeland.  From her, my experience working in Acton and a Home Office Children’s Department course on ethnic diversity, I had become aware of the full and long terms impact of British slavery which profited from selling and exploiting women and their children separately from the men in the West Indies, and the British exploitation of homeland-based Africans but where the Christian approach to family life strongly influenced.

It was by accident that I encountered the woman from Mansfield. I had set off later than usual from Premier Inn close to East Croydon Station for a Thameslink train to St Pancras because I had a standard ticket and could not enjoy croissant with butter and jam, a banana, coffee with biscuits, a newspaper and free Wi-Fi in the First-Class lounge at Kings Cross. Leaving around 10.30 had been a mistake because I forgotten that with the completion of the transformation of London Bridge into one of Western Europe’s finest railway stations the Thameslink trains now stop there again instead of the route via the Elephant Castle and although mid-morning, it was standing room only again on one of the new spacious 12 coach trains.

Arriving with my large and heavy suitcase containing breathing machine, large heavy binoculars to counteract the reduced cataract sight in my left eye which had made seeing a cricket ball in flight no longer possible, plus laptop and book, I needed a seat to recover and eat the sandwich previously purchased. I have used the seats below the domestic high-speed trains and across from the entrance to Underground stations to eat food several times before, usually buying a sandwich deal from Boots or chicken wings and a single chocolate desert from Marks and Spencer’s located at this end of the station. I was surprised that there was only one vacant seat between, as it transpired the young woman from Mansfield, and another woman on the end seat. When the two women who had occupied the other two seats departed I moved myself and luggage to the end seat and it was at this point that the young woman who had been engrossed in her mobile phone looked across and asked if I had been on holiday.

I explained that I had spent the weekend based in Croydon where I was born and was returning to the North East where I had lived since 1974. She volunteered that she was born and bred in Mansfield but hoped to make a life for herself in London in marketing, a great coincidence because several times a year I stay at the Mansfield Travel Lodge, which as she immediately pointed out is in Sutton in Ashfield over the border from Mansfield. She was also familiar with the developed village where members of my family live and the reason for high house prices compared with those in Mansfield and other villages due to the curtilage involved in parents being able to apply to attend the Minister school at Southwell, now an academy and where she volunteered information which concurred with my own understanding. It was the coincidence of this connection which prompted me to move again and sit in the seat next to her moving my case in front of the vacant seat and the shoulder bag by the side, on its own, and it may have been this act and not my previous movements which attracted the attention of security staff.

Last year I stopped for a visit to McD’s in the food court above Victoria Station and a lady sitting at the adjacent table asked me to mind her luggage while she went off to get a drink. When she was away for what seemed to me a long time I mentioned this to table clearing staff and when this appeared to have no outcome, I spoke to the catering unit who directed me to the station management staff office with its entrance in the far corner of the available seating area. I explained the situation and location via the doorway communications system and returned to my seat. The woman who appeared a foreign national with limited English went away again as a member of the security staff arrived and followed her to intercept. At that point I left to be on my way.

On Saturday June 23^rd, I had attended the second visit of 77-year-old Eric Burden and his latest group of The Animals at the City Hall in Newcastle. Usually I would take my aging car to street parking in Newcastle, a car park in Gateshead for some shopping at Tesco afterwards, or to the car park at one end of the Metro Station at South Shields. In all instances this avoided the climb on the way back up a steep hill to where I live close the Arbeia Roman supply fort which served the Legion defending Hadrian’s Wall on the north bank of the River Tyne. My car had refused to restart when I was trying to move in the carpark of the Emirates Riverside County Cricket ground Chester Le Street for the international one day contest between England and Australia and I had missed the early part of England’s Innings being towed from the ground to the garage I use in South Shields, and then watching the final overs on television at my home. It has taken two weeks and a gold bar for the problem to be identified and the parts required located and the vehicle returned in working order.

Because the band  due to perform in the first half of the concert had withdrawn, Eric Burden had performed a 100 minute set without a break from 8 pm so I was on a Metro train back comparatively early than usual, but  it was already dark and I decided not to go across the grass bank which softens the gradient but continued along the road from the station which passes the Wouldhave Wetherspoons, and car park of the then closed Morrisons supermarket, and crossed the bisecting road, intending to pass by a Bangladesh Muslim religious building and go to the next road junction before turning upwards. As I crossed, a man standing in the roadway by a bicycle called my attention that there was an apparent young person collapsed on the pavement. The body looked that of a teenager, but I could not see the face which was bent down towards a closed phone laying on the pavement. I asked if the individual needed help and there was no response. The individual appeared alive. I told the man I would call an ambulance and provided the location. I was asked to confirm the individual was breathing and then place full length on their side. It was at this point I saw that the person was a woman and not a teenager. I provided the emergency control centre my name and the ambulance arrived within minutes and two very young staff asked me to repeat my involvement and advised that I was free to be on my way. Because I did not smelt alcohol I speculated this was a substance abuse misadventure.

Over the past five years of travelling from Kings Cross to Newcastle I will have become well known to the station camera monitoring unit as someone who is among the first to stand in the area before the platforms and not on concourse and then attempt to locate and get on the train even though I have a reserved seat. This is because  my large case does not fit upright within the provided luggage space on the present East Coast line trains. There are two places within each first-class carriage where is possible to stand a large case upright without blocking the aisle otherwise it necessary to lay the case flat and expect that someone else will lay their case on top. In each visit it is possible to work out the most likely platform for the departure and wait to the back of the area to avoid the rush of people departing or arriving to catch earlier trains. Last year I noticed a young woman sitting on the ground in what appeared a semi-conscious condition very similar to the woman encountered in Baring Street, South Shileds. I asked if she needed help and gaining no response alerted station staff who arranged for help which arrived as my train was announced and I needed to make my way.

On the outward journey of the weekend visit I had booked a seat on the 12.25 which departs from Newcastle and as it transpired on the day it is possible to board the train at noon, having first enjoyed a bottle of water and taken biscuits for later the trip together with a copy of the Times  from the first class lounge. The seat facing me was booked from Newcastle but remained vacant.  It was rejected by a young man who disliked rear facing seats. The hot meal offered in the menu that I fancied was the Lemon and Lime chicken, but I had to settle for a sandwich, a cake and some crisps, and the first offer of a whisky and ginger with ice. When the young couple boarded at Darlington they chose to sit together with the young woman facing me taking the unoccupied seat from Newcstle and immediately appearing to want to engage in conversation while her partner, later she identified as her husband, immediately became engrossed in his lap top. I explained about the absence of the hot meal when they looked at the menu and this was later explained as kitchen flooding and the non-use of the ovens.

My first visit to the capital this year had been a day trip a couple of weeks beforehand. I had planned family visits by car to the Midlands and the Sussex coast and with a stay in Croydon in between, in March, but the late winter ice and snow put paid to the plan and the lost cost of the accommodation. Because one aspect of the biographical work concerns Soho life in the1950’s and 1960’s I decided to visit the National Theatre for a production of Absolute Hell set in Wartime Soho and the new production of a work staged as The Pink Room in 1952 and directed by Terence Rattigan. The critics hated it and it closed after three weeks at a significant financial loss. The advance briefing was that the play covered the interaction between the Members a private Soho Club, the ‘Vie en Rose and where there was debate from national politics and Buddhism to the aftermath of the Holocaust. There were such mentions in play but these were several notches below the level of the script of The Happy Prince, the brilliant film of the last days of Oscar Wilde after his release from prison which I experienced at the Cineworld, East India Dock on the Sunday having supported Essex who lost against Hampshire in the final of the one day 50 overs each side held at Lords on the Saturday. The Happy Prince  has a script as substantial in terms of the quality and wit as the plays Wilde. I accept that given that the Pink Room was presented before the era of the Angry Young Men it is not surprising that the subject matter of the play shocked and offended.

My interest centred on the private members club of which three were the most notorious in the decades of the 1940’s to 1970’s, one in Carnaby Street and two Dean Street which is the focus of my interest and I wondered if the Vie En Rose was based on one of them.

The Carnaby Street club was the subject of several reincarnations known for police protected drug taking and for what remained the unsolved murder of a prostitute outside of its door during the War. The murder remained unsolved until very recently when the culprit walked into a police station in Canada and confessed following the diagnosis of terminal cancer. As with the Vie en Rose this club had become a wartime haunt for USA servicemen.  One of the clubs in Dean Street was famous because well-known homosexual and lesbians frequented to get drunk, and for sex and drugs. Wikipedia provides the list of the well-known members and there is reference in the memoirs of George Melly and of his wife. The other Dean Street establishment known for riotous living attracted heterosexual known public figures from both sides of the Atlantic. In the 1950’s and 1960’s my direct experience was restricted to traditional jazz clubs and the left-wing Partisan Coffee bar.

After my visit to the new production at the National Theatre where at short notice I secured an aisle seat a few rows back from the stage for a matinee performance, I had an enjoyable return journey in the company  of St John’s Ambulance ladies from Durham who were all dressed up for a Royal  Garden Party that afternoon. I had then met on the Metro station platform  the present leader of South Tyneside Council. Iain Malcom, where I had worked as Director of Social Services from 1974 to1991 at a time when he was a young councillor and so engaged did we become in conversation about the old days that we got on the train to Sunderland and not South Shields and this meant returning to Pelaw where being midweek there was just time to catch the last train to South Shileds.

I was delighted  when just before making the weekend trip and meeting the ladies from Darlington and Mansfield, I received a copy of Iain’s book on the political and social impact of the 1972 Rent Act called Reluctant Rebels. It is the most authentic account of local politics and the everyday interaction between local politicians, particularly those of the same Party, I have come across since the 1950’s publication “No Love Johnnie” by the Labour Member of the House of Commons Wilfred Fienburgh. Peter Finch played Johnnie in the 1960 film version with a host of future stars-Billie Whitelaw, Rosalie Crutchley, Mary Peach, Fenella Fielding, Donald Pleasence, Geoffrey Keen, Paul Rogers, Denis Price, Peter Barkworth, Conrad Phillips, Mervyn Johns, Peter Sallies and Derek Francis.

I had boarded the train at Newcastle on June 30^th with the intention of drafting by hand a thank you letter to Iain and provide information which I believed he would find of interest and then wanted to finish a significant book about modern Spain by Giles Tremblett in which he travels through a country’s Hidden Past (Ghosts of Spain). I am reading this alongside the 5^th form (2^nd stream)  year prize in 1955 from the John Fisher School, H V Morton’s, A Stranger in Spain. Both my birth parents were born in Gibraltar but with strong maternal Spanish ancestry in addition to Maltese and British and their daily language had been Llanito, basic Spanish laced with English phrases and words from southern Mediterranean countries and North Africa. My DNA is that of the Iberian Peninsula and Malta with only a fifth western and central European with a small element of the Ashkenazi Jewishness although this aspect was not discovered until 2017.

I had settled down to draft the letter and it was after this was completed I relaxed before commencing to read the book on Spain’s rejected fascist past, when the examination by the young woman from Darlington recommenced and she enquired what I did.  Having disclose that I was born in 1939 I was a little surprised by the question, but she persisted so after explaining about the letter and that I was writing about experience and had written and printed a book not intended for publication the interest intensified. I felt challenged because it was at the core of the dilemma I have tried to resolve for some 25 years: how to write a book of truth with public interest which sets out not to harm and which achieves no harm.