Random Positive Memories  1951 – 1988

It is interesting and perhaps necessary as one gets older to reflect on things which were particularly important in one’s life, the sort of things which are the first ones to pop into one’s mind if one thinks of a certain place, person or period of time.  It can also be quite fun!  Elsewhere I have explored what makes me, me.  Here I intend to look at events, many of them small, which have stayed with me in a positive manner through my life, and sometimes strengthened me when I am a bit low.  On another occasion I shall look at events from 1988 to 2018 and also perhaps those which affected me in a negative manner.  Of course, some did both, and some are just a tad too personal for me to write about.  So, that said, let’s start with the first.

It was at Dartan Hall, where I was born and raised for my ‘tender’ years, in God’s Own Country; to be specific, in the fair county of Armagh.  I was lying on my back staring up into the branches of the family favourite oak.  I was perhaps 7 years old, it was a beautiful, sunny day and I was in that somewhat dozy state which can be such a delight.  My eldest sister, Carol, was back from Sadlers Wells on holiday and I was listening to her playing something mellow on the cello.  Everything seemed perfect, and it was the first time I can actively remember that feeling.

The next such occasion which comes easily to mind was lying in bed in Copper Hall, where we lived for a while in Cumberland, listening to the Helm wind doing its best to batter the Hall and knowing, though it could well take Dutch barns away, I was safe, snug watching the flames in the fireplace and the dancing shadows on the ceiling, my feet on a stone hot water bottle with a towel wrapped round it.

I remember, too, lying in the same bed, aged probably 9 and about to go away to school, and contemplating death, specifically my first intimation of mortality, as Wordsworth didn’t say, a girl I knew whose name, face and grin I remember well nearly 60 years later.  I don’t remember what killed her but I know it was quick because suddenly she wasn’t there and I was informed as gently as possible that she wouldn’t be ever again and yes, people I loved were mortal. 

It was a rather dull thing to be learning, in truth, but there you go.  In retrospect my parents handled it/me very well, so if one was going to have to discover this sort of thing, it was good that I was left with a certainty she was elsewhere, not an empty void, and that when people died, generally, they were going to another place and one would see them all in good or God’s time.

Somewhere in the time between living in Ireland and my brief sojourn in England, I recall, too, that my father borrowed a boat, I’m pretty sure from his brother, my dear, jolly, smiley Uncle Peter.  It was a small converted landing craft I think (my cousins will be able to put me right) and we were holidaying in it or on it (not sure of the correct usage there) pottering along the river Thames.  It was during that holiday I fell off, into the water.  The Squire leapt in and fished me out.  It wasn’t frightening; the reason I remember it is that they made up a little song about me and even then, somehow, I knew that that was pretty special, and I felt well loved. 

It was also on that hol that we found out that I had an allergy to bee stings.  I don’t remember much, in truth, about it but I gather it was fortunate we were at a mooring in London somewhere at the time, and though my parents could find no pulse and nor could the ambulance men, or initially, subsequently two doctors in the hospital, apparently I suddenly took a big breath and sat up, a bit like I imagine Tim Finnegan did in the song about his wake. 

I’m guessing it must have been a tad concerning for my parents, the first of several such incidents, though without the bees.  Fortunately they didn’t know it at the time or they might have tied me to a beehive, with some justification, to be honest.  This, of course, led to all who cared for me defending me from the onslaught of any innocent bee which came within a hundred metres of me. One of my beloved cousins whom I shall not name or mention the gender of, who when young had a bit of a stammer – no longer the case. Now, when said cousin saw that I was under potential attack but had not noticed, said cousin would get a little over excited and concerned and say there was a ‘Bbbbbbbbbig bbbbbumble beeeee’, which actually took rather a long time to get out, allowing the maligned beastie to fly on quietly about his business. It made me feel well loved again, and I reciprocated it and still do.  A lovely human being.

Time passed, as it does – or doesn’t, depending on your view of the universe, but for the purposes of this account of random positive memories we are accepting does – and off I went to Prep School at 10, as I had always known I would, and my parents took to going on holiday abroad when I was back for the 10 week summer hol.  They bought a camper van and we wandered a great deal from country to country in Europe, sometimes meeting up with cousins who were similarly wandering.  Such wanderings quite often ended up or included a house – theirs I think, or shared ownership, not sure - in a village, Castillon,  high about Menton on the south coast of France, their favourite country and mine, on the conveniently named Col de Castillon. 

 

Now, a short history lesson is required, though not for those of you who know a bit about the French somewhat unfortunate, if one wishes to be kind, defence policy after WW1.   You’ll know they built a huge series of defences, often in mountains, called the Maginot line.  Unfortunately before Belgium declared itself a neutral, the plan was that if the Germans got frisky again they would not be able to attack the French industrial complex to the north, because of the Maginot Line, and French and their Belgian allied forces would sweep through Belgium and give the Germans a kicking. 

 

Unfortunately the Belgians declared neutrality and due to extremely harsh winter and various logistical problems the French were unable to complete defences along the Belgian border so, incredibly ironically, the German forces swept through Belgium and gave France a kicking, and the rest, as they say, is history … but not quite, because at the Col de Castillon there were still defences and metal pillboxes scattered over the mountains. 

 

Our visits started in the relatively early 60s and not only did I not at that time know much of the Maginot line, I sure as hell didn’t know sections of it were still in use, not I hasten to assure you by French troops who hadn’t realised that they had come second in that particular match and were still on high alert for sight of the Hun!  Whatever they were doing, they were there and I didn’t know, so as was my introspective habit at the time I would potter off alone, always on the lookout for Bbbbb – no, I wasn’t, actually it was snakes and scorpions – I found one of the latter in my bed which didn’t really please me a great deal or, indeed, lead to restful sleep!

 

Anyway, I tended to take my harmonica with me when I went rambling and sat on one memorable occasion on one of the metal ‘bumps’ that was nice and warm to sit on, and played a while.  It was obviously not to the taste of the total musical Philistine who was probably sleeping under my seat.  To express his discontent he hit the under part of my ‘bump’ with what I realise in retrospect was probably a rifle butt.  I only tell this tale because this was the first time I ever, almost literally, shit myself!  I have remained cautious about where I sit ever since!  Up there on the hills around the village the norm was you’d see nobody.  It was a place for me, especially during my years living at the Royal, where I could be alone and process my experiences of life, deciding on what mattered and what didn’t. 

 

Oddly enough, I now recall, it was also a place where local gendarmes would wend their way up the winding road to the Col and shoot the shit out of the village sign!  Strange behaviour, when one thinks back.  It would be replaced and then the same thing would eventually happen.  At the time I just thought it a French eccentricity, just as the Bedouin used to shoot the speed cameras in Kuwait, but in retrospect, with the wisdom of years I assume a gendarme had an ex-wife living there and it was his way of expressing his feelings about the sweet lady!

 

Sickbay at the Royal School, was also a place where one could be solitary, and silent.  I remember once listening to the lambegs on the Mall and then the siren going off across the city.  It was slightly surreal, as was the fact that it didn’t matter why one was in sickbay, a starvation diet generally seemed to be necessary, even if you had two broken legs, to ensure you weren’t being a malingerer.  It was a good place to be when the 3 weekly haircut was required and one missed the barber’s visit.  How important that seemed then, to miss the obligatory hair cut! 

 

Going back to the solitary silence, you can perhaps imagine what it was like when 24x7 one had the company of one’s peers.  That was wonderful, don’t get me wrong, but time out was equally sometimes special.  In sickbay one would have a Matron come in to check you from time to time, a doctor might pop in, and a maid would come in with meals and then come back and clear up.  That was it!  All the rest of the time one could read, doze, daydream, listen to birds or the wind and sort of sleep whilst awake, mind almost empty, totally at peace with oneself and the world generally.

 

After school I went up to Belfast; bright lights, big city after charming but sleepy Armagh, the city wherein the Royal had stood for 400 years and where I was born in Darton.  I was in the ‘big city’ to learn how to be a teacher at Stranmillis College, the Education Dept at Queens University.  I had been accepted for the priesthood and was to go on to be a priest, so I had been offered a place in John’s, Durham, the Squire’s old Alma Mater where he did his second degree, to study theology after I qualified as a teacher.  Fortunately I didn’t follow that route!  My life has not been priestly.  That aside, I loved what I ended up doing and would not wish to change it, mostly. 

 

Just as with my time at the Royal, I could write great screeds about my life in Belfast in that troubled time.  For all that there are dark memories there are many more which are light.  One such, which perhaps only somebody who lived in a rather old-fashioned boarding school will ‘get’, was, during term time, walking home after one or seven pints of Guinness, Harp Lager or if skint, Porter, no uniform, wearing cowboy boots, jeans, T shirt and leather jacket and casually eating a pork pie in the sure knowledge that there would be no bell tomorrow to wake one up.  Heaven!

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Scrolling forward a few years, I had married a lovely lass from Ireland who I met at Uni, and the Squire had given us a camper van as a wedding present.  In a summer hol we set off across Europe, just going wherever we fancied, stopping wherever we took a liking to and generally having a very pleasant, unstructured holiday.  We’d both ‘done Europe’ rather a lot, though of course it is far too wonderful and diverse to truly ‘do it’, and it was jolly to just find places by chance, meet people off the beaten track, stay or go as we wished, ensuring pretty much every day there was a beautiful view to wake up to.

 

All was going swimmingly until the camper died on us somewhere near Lake Garda.  We had AA International, Gold Star with nobs on cover but ... it was Italy, we spoke precious little Italian and it was August and Italy was on holiday!  Sitting wondering what to do, watching the sun go down, suddenly a car stopped and a lady got out of the passenger side.  She was a Brit, and as we were to learn, married to an Italian.  She asked if we had a problem and on hearing about it insisted we come back and stay with them, saying Tullio, for thus her husband was named, would sort things out in the morning.  They took us back to their lovely house which overlooked Lake Garda, wined and dined us ludicrously and then we went to bed, replete and unconcerned.

 

We ended up staying with them for a few days, though Tullio went with me to a local garage – closed – drove to the owners house and told him, it seemed quite kindly, that since his garage was an AA International Gold Star with nobs on affiliate he would fix the camper that very day or lose his affiliation.  Thus the camper was fixed, with no charge, and Tullio and Des spent the next few days showing us around and throwing before us gargantuan meals and wine and marvelous company.

 

One evening Tullio and I were sitting outside on their balcony enjoying a gentle breeze and sipping Jameson’s.  It transpired that he was a managing director of a company which among other beverages made Italian Whiskey.  He said it sold well but when I asked if I could try some he told me apologetically that I couldn’t; he kept none in the house and personally found it perfectly vile.  That was quite evidently that!  We returned to sipping our perfectly wonderful Jameson’s and rambling on about the world.  (I’ve never truly understood why people around the world, and especially in Scotland, bother to make the bat’s piss that they try to pass off as whiskey when there’s perfect stuff available from Ireland.  There’s loads of the pretend junk about.  When I was a member of the Commonwealth Club we had at least 200 different brands and that was some years ago.  Most odd! )

 

Back to the ‘memory’, the whole visit was a splendid gesture of generosity on their part and I think we were all mutually sorry we had to be on our way, but I had promised I’d take Magee to Venice and the holiday was drifting away.  We stayed in touch for a while but as often happens, that sort of dissolved in the passing time; the memory of it has often served me well though when I have felt a little jaded with regard to human nature.

 

We did get to Venice, a city I have always loved since I was first taken there by my parents in childhood.  I know it is hugely overcrowded these days and visiting cruise ships are wrecking foundations with their wash etc. but I have little time for people who don’t recognise it as one of the true wonders of the world.  I shall not go on about this, but am glad to report that Magee loved it too, as did my eldest son Rex who went relatively recently. 

 

Magee was, as everybody is, knocked out by the Piazza San Marco and took great joy in sitting outside one of the many restaurants drinking coffee, wine or having a meal, listening to one of the little bands who play outside many of these places, watching the world go by.  Incidentally, I also have very little time for people who moan about the high prices.  The absolute bullshit rip-offs one hears about at times are unacceptable but generally it costs a shedload because you are somewhere unique; you are, indeed, privileged to be there and the folk who are charging for you experiencing this wonder are trying to ensure they don’t starve over the non-tourist season. 

 

If one wants to eat cheaply there are many lovely little places, away from the famous attractions, still surrounded by wonderful architecture, where Venetians eat and where, in my experience, one is treated very well.  Magee and I did that often but I knew something she didn’t so I booked a table outside a restaurant she particularly liked in the Piazza San Marco for one evening.  Shortly after we arrived all the bands who had played around the sides of the square during the day came together as an orchestra.  She was truly spellbound.  There is magic in the world; one just needs to search it out.  It doesn’t have to be expensive, as that evening certainly was, but absolutely worth it.  My next little memory is a case in point, where it cost little but marked my soul for life.

It happened thus; Valda, my second wife, and I were working at the British International School in Riyadh which had about 1000 British (expat) pupils.  The school was a little outside the city, surrounded by desert, and we and a few other staff lived within the school compound.   We were there for 6 years, though we had a vac for 15 months in the middle of it so Rex, my eldest son, was born in Britain.

Desert is incredibly diverse and teeming with life.  You see and feel things which are just not possible elsewhere.  This is not the place for me to try to make desert real for you, but there is one event which, as I said, marked my soul. 

It was during a vac and a great friend who was a Brit, a farmer and a real desert old hand asked if we fancied accompanying him on a trip down to Jizan, close by the Yemen border, via Taif and Abha, with off-road excursions daily into the desert, each night camping.  It was a round-trip journey, including the excursions, of in the region of 3,000 klicks; we were taking two Land Cruisers – we considered Toyotas the most reliable vehicles for the endeavour, and reliability was quite important on this trip - laden with all the stuff for every eventuality, including three compasses, as we had no access to SatNavs then.  

The roads were superb apart from in the mountains – we saw snow in Saudi Arabia! – where a multi-squiddilion road project had washed away.  The locals in the areas had told the Swedish contractors that when it rained in the mountains it got kind of wet in the wadis.  The Swedes shrugged and continued, and thus it was we found a road maybe 30 klicks totally ruined, with sections of carriageway 200 metres long smashed into rocks half a klick from where they once had been.  We drove along the old tracks and saw a fair few vehicles which had obviously been on the road when it had got ‘kind of wet’.  Not pretty.  

Understand, one could drive for a hundred clicks and see no other vehicle, surrounded by desert, with occasional gas stations with little mosques attached.  At one point we drove through an area where a town was being built.  All the roads were built on a grid systems.  All the lights were in place and we saw a massive generating station which ensured they were all working, including the traffic lights.  There were a few buildings round the generating centre and, of course, a mosque, though probably the people who were keeping the show running were Thais or Filipinos. 

It was, however, pretty surreal because apart from those buildings the place just consisted of beautiful roads.  (Now here’s a thing, as an aside, how come even back in the 80s Saudis could build roads that didn’t melt even when temperatures in the shade would reach 50 degrees, while in the direct sunlight it could be 65 degrees centigrade, and in the UK roads melt at 24 C?)  Anyway, this was an extensive layout, and the traffic lights all worked, but somehow or another it had slipped through the planning system or something, so no other work was being undertaken.

Anyway, I digress, again.  What marked my soul was a side trip which eventually took us a couple of hundred clicks from the nearest road and probably more like 400 klicks from any other habitation or human beings, at least.  We went into The Rub' al Khali desert, otherwise known as the Empty Quarter, 650,000 squ km of sand, ‘the largest sand sea on the planet’.  It is what people usually think about when they think of desert, endless rolling dunes. 

Being there is not something one can really explain; it’s something that’s inside one more than outside.  We set up camp, latrine, our tents and beds etc.  Tents had sewn in ground sheets and beds were all on legs to try to discourage anything that might want to visit in the night from coming up to say hello.  You needed a reasonably thick sleeping bag because it gets cold in the night.  John had his bed outside because he liked to look at the stars.  They were stunning!

Anyway, one night when it wasn’t my turn to cook I climbed up a dune and went over to the other side.  The sun was going down so it wasn’t too hot.  I sat down on the sand and all I could see was dunes, beautifully curved, and because the sky was so clear, stars coming out.  Though my companions were only a few hundred metres away I could hear nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  Complete, uninterrupted silence.  Apart from my companions I was hundreds of clicks away from civilisation.  If the Land Cruisers let us down or we got our compass readings wrong, we were screwed!

It was wonderful!  I was sitting where almost certainly nobody had ever sat before, in the entire history of humanity, and since the dunes change with the wind, I was seeing what nobody had ever seen before or would be able to see after me.  The sky was crystal clear and I felt totally in awe of what I was experiencing and at the same time, totally at peace.  Also, the hardest bit to explain, something loving was there with me.

I just sat there until John, the desert farmer, came over and gently shook my shoulder.  I wasn’t startled, surprisingly – you can take the man out of Ulster but not Ulster out of the man! - and when I looked up he looked at me silently for a long moment, gave a little nod and then said something that should have been odd but wasn’t.  “You’ve got the desert in you.  I thought you would.  It’s wonderful, isn’t it.”  He smiled that crooked smile of his and told me grub was ready and we walked back into the relative ‘civilisation’ of our camp.

You know when people say to you that you should relax and go in your mind to some place where you feel at peace and so forth, well, that place in the Empty Quarter where nobody had been to before and nobody can have gone to since, that’s where I go, and it quite literally, is my place, and John was right, I have got the desert in me, and that unexplained feeling of love, and it has served me well through all the many years since.    

My last positive memory from this period in my life was a rather strange event.  It was around halfway through July 1988 and I was flying from Dhahran to Schiphol I think.  Earlier that month the United States navy had accidently shot down an Iranian airliner over the Gulf, an Airbus A300, which was destroyed and all 290 people on board, including 66 children, were killed.  

 

Things were a bit tense in the region and as a result for some reason, my flight was made to circle above Beirut while Syrian fighters came and checked us out.  We had to all open our window shades and I was sitting in a window seat.  The atmosphere on the plane was pretty grim, in truth, but for some reason my mind flipped briefly to ‘my place’ in the Empty Quarter and I felt again that weird feeling of love.  I knew everything was going to be okay and just by blind chance I looked again at the nearest fighter.  It was so close that I could see the pilot with all his clobber over his face etc. And bizarrely I thought I had caught his eye.  I raised my glass of Remy to him, he put a thumbs up and then he peeled away and shortly thereafter we were told to keep our window screens open but that we had been allowed to go on our way, a way which now included an unscheduled drop-in to Cyprus for a refuelling, our peregrinations above the Lebanon having depleted the fuel supplies.  It was an interesting trip home.