The past isn’t what I thought it was going to be

I had reason recently to go through my wooden box of memories in search of photos to digitise for a friend. Most people have a small box of keepsakes that sits romantically on the top of a chest of drawers, and contains carefully curated aspects of past lives that stir memories and promote wistful conversations.

I have a three foot long IKEA panelled box that I imagine is supposed to contain DIY equipment. It is rammed to the top with nearly twenty handwritten diaries, huge numbers of ticket stubs, old collections of birthday cards and bus tickets. It used to be worse. My wife has exerted a gentle influence over twenty years and I have now been able to face up to the fact that I do not need every train ticket from every journey I made to see her when we were dating. Instead I was allowed to keep one. Similarly, my fine collection of early 1990s phone cards have been binned. I am suspicious about this one but I am unwilling to look on eBay to see if I have thrown away a fortune. I suspect not.

What remains are a large number of carefully curated tickets from major rugby internationals, and cherished film tickets. There are also a lot of mass cards for deceased older relatives.

What is interesting for me as I race towards fifty is that I was quite bad in deciding what would be important and should be kept. I should be able to put my hand straight on photos, which I always assumed I would take great care of, but seem to have been put somewhere else and are now lost. By contrast, if you want the railway timetable for the line to Norwich for 1997, I can tell you departures from Shenfield and Colchester without a problem. I kept swimming pool entry vouchers, which are stuffed in the same bag as my certificate confirming that I am godfather to my niece. WHY did I keep such ephemeral items alongside the important stuff?

I have realised is that what could not be foreseen was how easy it was going to be to look things up to remember dates and events. I thought, for example, that I would always need to remember the date of the Lightning Seeds gig at UEA and that if I lost the slip of paper that was the receipt (not even the ticket) the information would be lost forever. The information can now be accessed from my phone whilst sitting on the toilet.

https://issuu.com/ruthselwyn-crome1/docs/uea_lcr_gig_list_90s__3of5_

[It was 18^th January 1997].

To everyone born in the 21^st Century such behaviour must seem so very eccentric. We are living in an age in which music in a solid state is pretty much over. Why keep a CD when you can shout at a machine and it will play you exactly what you want to hear, and usually for free? Purists (and by purists, I mean old people) argued for a long time that to hold an LP in your hands is an important part of the experience. With the exception of the LP backlash fuelled by worried fiftysomething men, music is now an ephemeral experience.

For books, it is a more complicated issue. I have a winning line in this debate. Whenever a devotee of an e-book tells me that I can more or less send my large library of paperbacks to recycling, I pause, adjust my corduroys, and put down my pipe. I pick (seemingly at random – that’s part of the charade) a book from the shelf and open it. Inside is a dedication from my best friend, now passed away. How can I throw that out?

The fact remains, however, that I was really bad at trying to predict what would be important to keep and what would end up being no more than bits of paper. An example of my short-sightedness was how I reacted to the birth of the internet. In about 1995 it dawned on me that every game that Liverpool FC had played up to that point had been helpfully listed on a very early website. I decided to print the whole lot and keep it on paper. Why did I do that? I think I thought that the information might be withdrawn, somehow deleted by an over-zealous keeper of facts. The opposite is true. Today, and for many years, I have spent countless hours immersed in a beautiful website created by enthusiastic Icelandic fans:

https://www.lfchistory.net/

and I am sure that similar sites exist for every other team with fans as dedicated.

What should be my reaction to this? Any normal person would, I suppose, somewhat reluctantly pass eight books of Liverpool history over to a charity shop. Mine sit proudly on a bookshelf, untouched for nearly twenty years. My justification: you can’t throw anything about your football club away! That would be sacrilegious!

As the decade comes to a close, I suppose a New Year resolution for me has to be to throw away even more of my cherished collection of Things. I hope I am better now at predicting what is going to be valuable in twenty years and what is not. Only time will tell.

List 1: Things I will be throwing away in 2020

A complete collection of mid-1990s Kronenbourg bottle tops

100+ Southend Transport bus tickets, circa 1986-88 (all for the Number 7 route)

Beer mats from the Jerma Palace Hotel, Marsascala, Malta (it closed in 2001)

Training notes for the 1994 English teaching assistant programme in Normandy

Instructions for the toaster from my parents’ house that they threw away in 1989

List 2: Things I will not be throwing away in 2020

Everything else

If you would like anything from List 1, you can contact me at the usual address.

A long walk

I was staying in Buxton in The Peak District recently and before setting off had marvellous dreams of days walking up undulating peaks and standing, windswept and interesting, gazing at the view.

Sadly the days were eaten up with sensible things like a visit to Chatsworth House, and spending time with godsons, so the furthest I got was a walk around Buxton’s beautiful parks.

When I returned to South London I resolved to complete a long walk anyway, and started to think about the walk that I had undertaken from my front door to Central London a few years ago. I was shocked to discover that a few years was actually nine, so decided to try to repeat it on a quiet Friday lunchtime.

The route is one of the least picturesque that it is possible to take, but directness is a requirement. I walked for half an hour through urban Croydon to get to the main road heading north, and then continued northwards, with a few diversions, until I reached the Oval Cricket Ground in Kennington.

The route takes me through Norwood, across Beulah Hill, straight through Brixton and ends at the Thames by Lambeth Palace, home of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The first thing to note is not a revelation at all. In South London, people like fried chicken. I did not count the number of chicken shops on my way, but think that there could be mileage in research to discover how many US States and cities have been appropriated, following Kentucky, to name them.

They are as ubiquitous as ale houses must have been a century ago.

The second thing I realised, which is something that is now firmly entrenched in life as to not be noticed by most people, is that I was the only person who was not looking at a mobile phone all the time. Everywhere I looked, people were staring down instead of looking up. Hardly anyone pays attention to his or her surroundings.

I thought for a while as I walked about the experience of approaching London in this way a hundred, and two hundred years ago. The main geographical obstacle is Norwood Hill, from which you get a first good view of the capital. It is no longer dominated, as it had been for three hundred years, by church spires. In fact, at St Luke’s West Norwood the church comes into view, and behind it, miles away and many times higher, now looms the city.

The experience of navigating from one church spire to another might be something from fiction, an Austen-like creation. However, what is real is how small churches seem today. At the start of the route is the 43-storey monstrosity of Saffron Square, and at the end the huge towers of the city of London.

There are places on interest en route. CamillePissarro painted the area around Norwood from the 1870s when it was a village. He had come to London to escape the Franco-Prussian War. His wife was from Croydon.

 I also unknowingly passed right by the place when the Jules Rimet Trophy (the original Football World Cup) was discovered by a dog called Pickles in 1966.

The villages are gone. From South Croydon, in an unbroken sweep straight to the northern boundaries, one conurbation stretches punctuated only by the name changes of the boroughs and the occasional park. Sometimes an area is poor, and dominated by bookmakers and budget supermarkets; and from time to time is gentrified and marked by expensive looking barbers and bjiou second-hand shops.

Brixton is the last clearly defined town and has retained some of the venues that make it distinct. It still has a proper cinema that is not part of a multinational corporation, and a thriving market. Music venues continue to draw in culture and free thinkers. It still has edge.

It peters out to the north and becomes just another magnet to wealthy developers, and rich young people looking for somewhere with an exotic postcode and identity.

And then it all changes. The roads get busier, the atmosphere begins to feel like that of a major city, and quite suddenly there is a sense of how people are drawn towards the centre, and how they always have been. The Dick Whittington idea persists, as the national centre for nearly everything is London. Having been in Manchester two days previously, it was an interesting contrast. Manchester strives to appear large (which it is), and important. London has no need.

I continued my walk along from Lambeth Palace and met family for a meal that evening on South Bank. In total, I had only walked twelve miles. It is a distance that a long-distance walker of the past would not have even felt, and yet my feet ached and I was glad to sit down. I pondered how people walk all the way to Rome, or from John O’Groats to Land’s End. I would struggle.

A conclusion of sorts is that I should walk further and more often. Too often we whistle past in cars, and hardly stop to look. Too often we never even look up from Candy Crush.

Who was George V?

 I have just finished reading Kenneth Rose’s 1983 biography of King George V. It is quite a doorstop and takes some investment of time, but I ended it knowing more about the most anonymous of our recent monarchs.

In popular media he is often overlooked. People are happier to read about the irresponsibility and Nazi sympathies of his oldest son, of the all-encompassing longevity of his grandmother, Victoria.

Oddly, George V has still not passed out of living memory. Although he died in 1936 he was the grandfather of our present Queen (‘Grandpa England’) and his presence and influence seems closer than perhaps it should. He was the last Victorian King – Rose makes it clear that George’s rules of kingship were modelled on his grandmother, and not the long shadow of his father Edward VII.

The Hanoverians and the House of Windsor follow an alternating cycle of responsibility and jollity. George III, for all his late madness, was a responsible and deep-thinking monarch. His sons were reckless and feckless. Victoria, in a reaction to her uncles, was straight-laced and correct. Edward VII, shackled by his mother’s long reign and rules, was a loose cannon. George V was a throwback to Victoria in reaction to the loose morals of his father. And Elizabeth II seems to look back to her grandfather as the model for how to be a modern monarch. We can all be thankful that fate intervened and nobody had to live long with her uncle, Edward VIII, the embodiment of selfish childishness.

Rose paints a detailed picture of George’s childhood, and particularly how his early navy experiences shaped the rest of his life. He was not meant to be king. A long education at sea prepared him for an anonymous life as brother to the king, not for the responsibility of leading a fading empire. Given the choice, it is obvious that George would have preferred a life of Country Squire, shooting as much game as possible, and afternoons with his stamp albums.

Something that Rose makes clear is the education that George received ill-equipped him for his crown. The preparation for kingship focussed on his older brother Albert Victor, a year older than him and in line after Edward VII to succeed. Albert Victor’s fate is a whole other book. He died at the age of twenty-eight, and in a Shakespearean twist George inherited his role and his fiancée.

Rose writes well about George’s long and loving marriage to May, his bride and consort. In times of stress she was a support for him. Over the last hundred years our royal house has been lucky in this respect. Just as May helped George through the burden of the first war, Elizabeth helped his son through the second.

He also resists dwelling on the appalling life and attitudes of George’s firstborn and heir, David. As Edward VIII he was utterly unsuited to the cards he was dealt and we were all lucky that he abnegated his responsibilities when he did. Instead Rose reflects on George’s great disappointment and powerlessness to influence the situation as he entered the winter of his life. It fell to his second son to step up and steer history back onto a straighter course.

George was a reluctant but responsible king. He relied on the advice of his private secretaries and they served him admirably. Stamfordham and Wigram are allowed plenty of space in these pages and their devotion and political nimbleness is made clear.

George was also, however, a product of his lack of education and Rose does not shy away from highlighting his ignorance of the arts. At times George revelled in philistinism and a Little England attitude that must have appalled and worried those around him. Apart from his journey to India, he resisted many attempts to get him to visit his Empire. His simple response was that he had seen it all in his youth. He also comes across, though, as extraordinarily knowledgeable about his Empire as he read every piece of paper that was put in front of him.

It is worth looking back from time to time to see just where the rules and modes of operating come from in the current set-up, and this book is insightful in this respect. The devotion to duty of the current monarch is a legacy of her father and grandfather. Charles’ interfering is perhaps more a Mountbatten trait than a Windsor one. However, when he finally becomes king there is no doubt that the long shadow of his great-grandfather will shape the way he wears the crown.