Gordon Brown

2008-09-28T15:35:46+02:00

I'm probably in a small minority but although Blair was strong on presentation I feel that Brown is the man with the true labour beliefs and I hope that the windy backbenchers worried about their jobs and all the lovely perks don't manage to vote him out. I think that Brown might have some sort of personality fault but why should we have to be persuaded by some one with a toothpaste smile and no principles.

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Not quite sure why I am writing or what I am going to write about

2007-01-13T11:56:07+01:00

I often walk about with what must be some sort of expression on my face and am asked, "Where are you?" I say that I am writing a sketch, a speech or a novel, or having an imaginary conversation or telling my grandchildren about the war when I was a child.

In the second world war, when there was an air raid warning people used to sit in what was known in our house as the gas cupboard because that was where the gas meter was installed but people often referred to such a place as the cupboard under the stairs. The reason for choosing this place to shelter was because when a house was bombed, very often this was the only part left standing. Also, when people were killed or injured it was caused not by the direct effect of a bomb but by their house collapsing on them. So what was required was something to protect them from their own house.

I was a few days short of being 5 years old when the war started and my brother, John, was fifteen months older. When the air raid siren sounded, a very loud undulating sound, my mother would get us out of bed and we would sit in the cupboard under the stairs until the "All Clear" sounded; the same siren but now a continuous note. Everybody thought that the All Clear sounded friendly and comforting whereas the Warning sounded frightening although it was basically the same sound. The sirens were usually mounted on the top of buildings such as police stations. I feel sure that the one we heard was on the top of Greenford Police Station. It was tubular and silver and I now realize that it must have been an electric motor with a fan at each end designed to make the loud noise. I think it was mounted on an angle iron framework which was fixed to the roof or maybe the chimney stack.

Everyone must have known that war was imminent even though the country was not prepared as families were offered Anderson Shelters that were installed in their gardens. A hole about three feet deep had to be dug and, I'm guessing, about 8ft square. Along two sides were put heavy corrugated iron sheets curved at the top. The tops were bolted together to form a room. Additional sheets were fitted at the ends and a small space was left at one end for entry and exit. I seem to remember that at the end opposite the door the central panel was not bolted into position but was fitted with two pieces of bent steel. I can't remember how they were fitted but I remember them clearly as about eight inches long and about three inches bent at right angles because towards the end of the war I had a pair as cowboy guns; you had to have a good imagination. Concrete was poured in between the soil and the corrugated iron and a concrete floor was provided. The soil dug out was then put on top of the shelter so it looked like a pile of earth with corrugated iron ends. We never had one of these shelters as I think our dad either didn't want his garden messed up or thought the shelters would not work. I vaguely remember spending a raid in someone's shelter but I can't remember our neighbours having them. I remember the details from visiting them in my mates' gardens. One of the problems with them was that water could get in but could not get out. People had to keep them dry but the shelters always had a smell of damp.

When I started this blog I didn't know where I would begin. I thought I might start with earliest memories, school days, meeting Gloria, National Service, Rotax, anything. So I just started.

Please could someone let me know if they get this far on the blog or do they get cut off after so many words. I would like to write one continuous blog if that is possible. I can access some people's blogs and not others; why is this?

One of the things I do to pass the time is teach one-to-one at a Young Offenders Institution. It's not as difficult as it sounds as they volunteer for basic maths or english; I try to persuade them to do both. We have a large assortment of worksheets and support stuff which means that you can start at any level. You carry out an assessment and make a start. Some of them maintain 'attitude' for a while but soon relax when you appear not to notice. With one boy I was making very slow progress with even cvc words (consonant-vowel-consonant) but when I suggested maths he just sailed along. we recapped on addition and subtraction and then onto long multiplication. You are told not to ask what they are in for but I asked what he was doing before he came in and he misunderstood me and said that he was a drug dealer. I think he must have been picked up for something and that they then found out he was an illegal immigrant. He was kept in a large holding centre where they decide what to do with them but while he was there there was a riot. He was being held in the YOI while they tried to collect(construct) the evidence but when I went back one week he had been shipped out. I think the idea was that if he was here illegally who cares what he did; we can improve the Home Office figures by getting rid of him.
One of the frustrating things is that lots of the boys are only there for two or three weeks pending trial or sentencing. The boy I am teaching at the moment is from Columbia and although he doesn't know his tables he can do long multiplication and division, and I have just started him on decimals. Also, I am teaching him how to raise numbers to powers and how to multiply and divide them. One of the problems is that most of the boys have never been made to do anything so they take time to settle down to doing homework, or should I say cellwork. As an exercise he wrote me a letter where he said that he, with God's help, would have to be a man and not a boy, and take control of his life. I told him that his decision was excellent and although he could ask for help from the Almighty it might not be wise to wait around for it.
I often find that a boy has suddenly started going to church, wearing a crucifix or growing one of those thin line muslim beards. Everywhere you go in the place there is some sort of cleric lurking - choose a religion and there is one of them there. I feel very strongly that vulnerable people are exposed to these supernaturalists. It is a backward step to allow those people into prisons and certainly not into YOIs. I'm sure that what they need is education, not indoctrination.

In a couple of days I'm off on holiday so please don't think I've died or lost interest.

Many thanks for the advice mosi but unfortunately I didn't understand what you said about inserting a code into my blog. Were the codes the number in brackets after mosi and where do I insert them - or shouldn't I ask that.

14/3/07
Well, I've been back from California a couple of weeks; we stayed with a couple of friends who had rented a house in Summerland which is south of Santa Barbara. It's a pretty rich area but these places don't seem to have a centre to make them a town or village in the english sense. We were on our way back from Australia where we had been for about three weeks. We did the main bits except Adelaide and Perth and it was all very nice but I really didn't see what they all went on about. In fact the thing I really did like was that they were all so proud of the place. We all had to stand back in awe and look at a cliff. Surely they knew about Bryce Canyon and Monument Valley. I like the way they have this love/hate thing with the Brits, They always seem to know what's going on in the UK, lots of coverage on our bit of snow for example and Camilla etc. and they love talking about being British descendants, from convicts or otherwise; whereas, day to day, we don't keep up with their world at all.

Earlier I mentioned how sitting under the stairs protected you from a collapsing house in the blitz and in California I noticed that even the most expensive houses were built of wooden frames clad with waterproof chipboard (forgotten the name) and this was in turn covered with horizontal planking. Also the roofs were of corrugated sheet. I assumed that this was earthquake protection in that if the house suffered a quake it would not collapse but twist out of shape and not collapse on the occupants; comments anyone?

Did I ever tell you, of course I didn't, that my dad once said, "You got kicked out of the cubs, you got kicked out of the sea cadets and you nearly got kicked out of your apprenticeship; the best thing you ever did was marry that Gloria." And do you know, I think he was right. In December we celebrated our 50th anniversary at a place called Stoke Club and it really was rather good. We obviously invited my and Gloria's relations and one of her cousins I remember was also married a long long time ago and I remember thinking at the time that she looked pretty hard and that it wouldn't last long.(I think people said something similar about us, not the hard bit). She did not look at all well at our do and died shortly afterwards. We then found out all about her. She was born in Ireland but her mother was on the game. The girl got a little job in a factory, I think she was 12 or 13(by the way, she wrote all this down before she died) but the mother found out and used to go down to the factory and collect the wages. The owner/manager of the factory then gave her enough money to get to an uncle in London. she told of how she got on the boat and stayed close to a couple as though she was with them and turned and waved as though friends were seeing her off. This little girl then managed to get herself from Liverpool to London but the Uncle was not at all pleased to see her on the doorstep and said that she could stay one night. An aunt then arrived and took her off and although the girl was taken in she felt that she was always made to feel grateful. She eventually married Gloria's cousin, Keith, and they were devoted to each other. She became involved with a Downes Syndrome organization that was always underfunded. Not only did she work tirelessly to raise funds from local organizations and companies but every year she would write to them giving details of where their money had been spent. This must have been quite an ordeal as we could tell from the beautiful letter she wrote that she had had virtually no education. So much for my ability to size people up.

13/5/07
As a boy, I know I was younger than 9 as my dad was in the war, I quite liked messing about with electricity and would find some wire in the shed and wire up lamps and poke the wires in a socket, they weren't shielded in those days. My mother who was very loving and caring didn't seem to appreciate that I could have killed myself, especially, as I remember clearly the wires were single strand copper insulateed with shelac. Later I persuaded my mother to buy me morse keys and buzzers and although I never learned the morse code I did manage to connect the shed, about 70ft away, to the house but sending messages was never successful as I didn't realize that all the battery voltage was lost in the long wires and the bad connections which were not soldered but just twisted together.
I did pretty badly at school and to make matters worse I wasn't even any good at sport. I was still at Hobbayne Junior School when the war ended and the men teachers that had been in the forces came back to school. I clearly remember looking at the class noticeboard and seeing that my name was not on the diagram of the team. I know that I used to play left back but I can remember not feeling dismayed when I saw that I had been dropped from the team. Nowadays you would not be so obviously dropped for fear that you would need counseling. My brother who wasn't very bright either but was well behaved at school failed the eleven plus and went to Cuckoo Secondary Modern School, I proudly followed. We then both failed the examination for the Technical School so were doomed to be hewers of wood and drawers of water. I remember that in the first year I was in 1B which wasn't as bad as it sounds as there were also 1C, 1D and 1E. 1E must have been pretty thick as I remember gazing out of the window watching their teacher demonstrating the rudiments of fly fishing. Next year by dilligent application of my academic prowess I was in 2B. the teacher was a Mrs Watts, known universally as Ma Watts, imagination wasn't our strong point, but like a small number of other teachers she was strict and could control a class of 40 boys. My general english subjects were much better than all the rest and at the end of the term by a fluke I was top of the class. This did not count for anything at all but it certainly offended Ma Watts, she was sure that I must have made a mistake and insisted on checking all the results. She finally agreed but what I thought was amusing was that I was first in getting some pretty low marks, like 9 out of 30 for "problems". During this year some of the yobs in 2A approached me about joining their gang, not because I was tough but probably because I was mouthy, swore a lot and spat, yes, really, was in the Sea Cadets and went to the Star Cafe in Hanwell Broadway. I remember some of their names: Tony Buckland, Gordon Dack, Brian Stone (the only nice member of a large very sporty family) Ron(?) Beckett and John Hooker. So for a while I had a foot in two camps, the Sea Cadets who were a pretty unsavoury bunch, the worst of which went to the Star Cafe. I'm not quite sure of the chronology as I'm sure I didn't join the Sea Cadets until I was 13. If you are at or near the top of the class then you go up a form when the new year starts so in 3A the gang was all together. Although they voted me the leader of the gang, as individuals they weren't actually head over heels in love with me. I introduced them to the Sea Cadets and the Star where the Cuckoo boys were referred to as 'my gang' which probably ruffled their feathers.

14/5/07
I'm not really sure of the 2B versus 3A stuff, maybe it was 3A and 4a, but I know that I was in the Sea Cadets when I was 13, you were supposed to be 14. There were a lot of boys older than me so I remember myself as a bit of a wimpy sprog. They were not all good little sailors but more like members of a thieves kitchen. In the summer of the first year about a dozen of us went on a 'camp' on a TLC (Tank Landing Craft) at, I think, Gaerloch Head. I can't quite remember the name of the ship but there were three or four of them and they were named after the Italian landing beaches; the one alongside ours was HMS Anzio. It was a lot of fun but also a double horror for me. Some of the older boys wanted to turk the younger ones. They never actually approached (threatened) me but I bought them off with bottles of lemonade anyway. One day we were treated to a trip on a launch to Helensborough and three of us went on a shoplifting spree. I had a chrome ashtray with the Helensborough coat of arms on it, a postcard map of the town, a comic and possibly a book. The other two boys had persuaded a lady to open a cabinet of souveneirs and pinched a few bits. The lady became suspicious, put the latch down and went out the back to phone the police. We lifted the latch and made a run for it. It wasn't exactly easy to be inconspicuous in sailors uniforms and we were soon being chased by the police. The other two managed to drop their stuff down by some oildrums in a railway siding but all three of us were hauled off to the police station. The scottish police were not actually physical but pretty agressive. They were telling me that my father would probably lose his job as a civil servant (unlikely as he was a parcel sorter in the Post Office). When they said that I wasn't dealing with the London police now, I said in a very respectful voice that I had never had dealings with the London police; the other two boys were nudging me not to be cheeky. We were questioned separately and they kept telling me that the others had admitted it so I might as well. My answer was that I did not know what the others had done but the stuff I had on me had been bought. Afterwards I found out that the others had admitted it but not involved me. The story was that if they could find the stuff they would be let off but when they took the police to the railway yard the stuff had gone. I really admired myself for not being frightened into an admission but the others said they had protected me. The other two had to go to court and were fined two pounds each. The one thing that I really appreciated was that one of the boys lived near me but his mother never mentioned it to my mother. It was after this that I joined the gang at Cuckoo and we all did a bit of bravado shoplifting but because of the scottish experience I was always windy.

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charliesego

Gordon Brown

Not quite sure why I am writing or what I am going to write about