And finally...Cyril!

Continued from Cyril and More Cyril

We first encountered Cyril when we kept our pub, The New Talbot.  Mum and dad rather collected ‘waifs and strays’ and seemed to have a weakness for odd characters.  It was not unusual to have a living room full of people, after closing time on a Saturday night, enjoying an after-hours drink on the house.  On these occasions, mum often put on a bit of supper because she was concerned that a number of her ‘characters’ didn’t eat properly.  This was almost certainly the case with Cyril, who appeared to exist on a diet of cigarettes and tea.  Whenever she provided a cooked meal, you have never seen anyone eat with such concentration and attention to detail as Cyril.  It was a standing joke, in our family, that you had seen nothing until you had seen Cyril chasing an errant pea around his plate!

To the best of my knowledge, Cyril didn’t drink an awful lot, confining himself mostly to the odd half pint.  However, these after-hours sessions often involved the consumption of one or two shorts and, probably because of the meagreness of his diet, these seemed to ‘get over’ Cyril quite rapidly.  In the exuberance of alcohol, he was known to adopt an Italian character and pursue my mother around the room, all the time entreating her with a stream of mock Italian.  This had my mother in fits of giggles.  I didn’t think much of it as a ten-year-old but, then again, inebriated adults were never much of a source of humour at that age.

At these same soirees, Cyril was often encouraged to ‘do his party piece’.  Apparently, at some point in the past, he had made the mistake of admitting that he frequently spent time standing on his head, because he believed that this improved the circulation to the brain.  Thereafter, he was forever being entreated to demonstrate this, and I think he was nagged into it on a few, rare occasions, but I never witnessed it.

Another one of Cyril’s all-consuming hobbies was entering newspaper competitions.  He even took the ‘Competitor’s Journal’ every week and used to let me have back issues of this, when I once expressed an interest.  My interest soon waned when I realised that, although it was apparently possible to win such competitions on a regular basis, you more or less had to devote your every waking moment to tracking competitions down, clipping out tokens and devising witty tie-breaker answers.  My heart wasn’t in it, but Cyril never gave up, although I can’t recall him ever winning anything.

Cyril’s other love was The Royal Antedeluvian Order of Buffaloes, or The Buffs, for short.  Cyril always attended his local lodge and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Order’s rules and regulations.  Many people, I believe, used to attend The Buffs for the social side of it and many didn’t take all the ritual and regalia too seriously, but Cyril did.  Because of his encyclopaedic knowledge, along with his memory for what had transpired at previous meetings and what precedents had been set, I believe he rose to quite a high position in the Order.

In many ways, Cyril was an eccentric’s eccentric.  He had a sense of humour (see his ‘Italian’ exploits above) but this did not extend to seeing anything remotely funny about his own beliefs and practices.  If anything, he took himself rather seriously.  Nowadays, I suppose Cyril would be regarded as being on some spectrum or other, but then he was just one of the rich panoply of characters with which Burton seemed to be populated.

On occasions when my mum hadn’t seen Cyril for a while, and wondered if he was alright, I would often be sent around to his home in Oak Street.  I always knew that this would be a waste of time because he was either not there or, if he was, he wouldn’t come to the door.  On the very rare occasions that he did answer the door, he would only open it a fraction and peer through the crack, cigarette puffing fit to burst.  To the best of my knowledge, no-one ever got to see inside his house.  I suspect that he was someone who tended to hoard, which might explain his reluctance to let anyone in, but who knows?  Well, I suppose the answer to that is, whoever had the job of dealing with his estate, because…

The one remaining oddity of Cyril’s life was that everyone

knew that he had left instructions that his body was to be donated to science on his death.  This was way before such a practice was generally known about and was the cause of much comment.  Amazingly, despite his sporadic diet and immense consumption of cigarettes, Cyril lived a long and active life.  Regrettably, when he eventually shuffled off this mortal coil, I’m told that science didn’t actually want his remains and so he had to have the burial that he had never planned.  Nevertheless, I think he would have been pleased with it.  The Buffs have their own funeral ceremony, which I had never witnessed until Cyril’s interment.  It’s rather touching and relates to the circularity of life and there was quite a turn out of Buffs to take part.  

I think Cyril would have approved!

You can find a whole bunch of stores like this, here.

More Cyril

Continued from the original article ‘Cyril’

My abiding memory of Cyril is inevitably wreathed in smoke.  Not by the mists of time but usually via a Players No. 6 Tipped which he held constantly in his mouth.  He was one of those people for whom a cigarette was something of a permanent appendage rather than an occasional enjoyment, even to the extent of breathing through his fag as he gave one of his detailed accounts about something you were either not interested in or had no connection with.

I can see him now, perched on the dining chair that sat just inside our living room by the door into the kitchen.  Grey hair brushed back surmounted a weather-lined face sporting small, thick, round wire-rimmed glasses through which he peered owlishly, the cigarette bounced around his lips, below a thin, wiry body dressed in an old check sports jacket with a grubby green polo shirt underneath leading to gardening trousers and boots.

Cyril could, and would, tell you chapter and verse about people you either didn’t know, or knew about very vaguely.  He could be a great repository of gossip but it was rarely the juicy sort about people in whom you were really interested.  Mostly he recounted his tasks for the day, which made him sound really busy but, when you boiled it all down, you wondered why he bothered.

Apart from his gardening, Cyril’s other main focus was composing poetry.  He was known as ‘The Burton Bard’ and always included this ‘nom-de-plume’ at the end of each poem, although whether this was a self-styled epithet or something someone had once said, I have no idea.  Cyril’s idea of poetry owed a little more to William McGonnagal than William Wordsworth but that’s being a bit unkind.  He specialised in poems in birthday cards and Christmas cards but particularly birthdays.  

When we became added to his significant list of recipients, I always looked out for the verse inside which was carefully and neatly penned and usually had the first letter of each line in a different colour.  It usually followed an AA, BB rhyming pattern, generally included truncations of words that only ever used to appear in 19^th century poems and hymns (such as “o’er” and “where’r”) and the way each line scanned rather depended on what he wanted to say rather than whether it fitted into the rhythm of its predecessor.  Another feature of his poems was invariably a count of the words in the printed verse in the card, and the recipient’s name shoe-horned in somewhere along the way.  Nevertheless, he must have spent hours composing and laboriously printing out each poem for the dozens of people he sent cards to and the whole exercise must have taken a big chunk out of his meagre weekly income.

It would have been easy to be sniffy about Cyril’s poems and many people were (and I guess I was probably as guilty as anyone in my youth) but the time and devotion they depicted was something it was less easy to mock.  I think we all looked forward to opening Cyril’s card and it was a real concern if one didn’t turn up.

Presents were less usual, which was hardly surprising given his vast audience.  For one significant birthday (which I suspect was my 21^st) he did give me a brand new Collins’ English Dictionary which has had a great deal of use over the years and still holds pride of place on my bookshelf.  This was in recognition of my being a fellow writer, which he clearly wanted to encourage.  Mum, whom he held in very high esteem, was the only one who got a present every year.  She had once mentioned that she liked Black Magic (the chocolates, not the satanic practice) and this went down in his little book.  Thereafter, she always received a quarter pound box of same for her birthday and the poem in her card made specific reference to this (which rather gave the game away!)

Quite how he afforded his hobby, I don’t really know.  Cyril had taken early retirement from the Railways when his Uxbridge St. Signal Box had closed with the demise of the brewery railway system.  Thereafter, he survived on his small occupational pension for years before his State Pension finally kicked in.  This was augmented by a few pounds here and there from gardening and doing odd jobs but there can’t have been an awful lot left to spare at the end of each week.  Cyril viewed the cards he had to write as a mammoth task requiring significant organisation and endless hours of toil and I’m sure that was the case.  He would never have seen all of this as a hobby, to him it was a sacred duty for which he would toil to his dying day.  The idea of ‘not bothering’ for once, for reasons of economy or time, would never have crossed his mind.

Next time, I’ll tell you how we came to know Cyril, about some of his more eccentric practices and about his eventual demise.

You can find a lot more of Philip’s nostalgic recollections here.

Cyril

I’ve been thinking about Cyril quite a bit over the past few days.

I should, at this point, make clear that I do not usually spend my days thinking about Cyril.  In fact, it must be quite a while since he last crossed my mind.  What brought him to the fore this time was that I have been mowing the lawn.  

This is the sum total of my efforts in the garden, apart from occasionally hacking some innocent tree to within an inch of its life.  This is not due to any particular indolence on my part, other than the regular background indolence that is such a feature of all my works (or lack of them).  No, it has more to do with (a) not being really interested and never having been and (b) having absolutely no knowledge of what should be there and what shouldn’t, (b) being quite clearly linked to (a).

Whilst mowing the lawn, I decided to try and do something about one of the edges which was being taken over by a bunch of delinquent wild strawberries (I only know what they are because I’ve seen the tiny strawberries in the past, otherwise I would just categorise them as ‘green stuff that spreads like nobody’s business’).  

The only reason that I am in a position to ‘do something’ about the edge of the lawn is because I have invested in an edging tool.  I normally keep as far away from tools as physically possible and try not to have them in the house, because I know that I would be tempted to try and use them and that way lies danger and guaranteed humiliation.  

I was only tempted to buy this one because I’m in a state of permanent warfare with the lawn, in an effort to curb its desire to spread over the paving slabs and the edging tool does that job nicely.  Stemming the Invasion Of The Wild Strawberries was slightly more problematic because it entailed creating a relatively straight line where none had appeared for quite some time.

I can’t do straight lines.  This was a cause of bemused sorrow for my metalwork teacher, Mr. T., back at Anglesey Secondary Modern but a cause of outrage in Mr. W., who attempted to teach me Technical Drawing and Woodwork. Mr. W. took it as a personal insult and once sent me for the cane for planing a piece of mahogany from a nice piece of wood with a vaguely straight edge into something resembling a cross-section of a particularly rough sea.

My efforts with the lawn edging tool were no improvement.  If anything it’s a slight diagonal with occasional kinks but at least the wild strawberries know what they’re up against now.  Looking miserably at my latest failure, I was forcibly reminded of Cyril and my mum’s wish to have a small, semi-circular flower bed.

In the course of his very long and somewhat singular life, Cyril wore many hats.  He had been a railway signalman at one time, which would have suited his orderly mind and solitary ways down to a ‘t’, but the demise of the brewery railways and, as a consequence, the multiple crossings which were such a feature of 1950s Burton-on-Trent, meant that his job was made redundant.  Taking early retirement, he filled his days with odd jobs, one of which was gardening.  He took on the management of a select number of gardens, usually owned by retired people who could no longer manage them.  In the summer months he could often be seen cycling to one or other of his projects with bags full of tools and cycling back with some vegetables or flowers.  He always cycled, whatever the weather, never owned a car and I doubt that he ever learned to drive.

I would have loved to have seen a garden under his management, I should think it would have been a sight to be seen.  HIghly ordered and neat, I would imagine, but whether any particular project would actually have been completed…I somehow doubt.

Take my mum’s flower bed.  She did want a semi-circular flower bed to break up the rectangular stretch of grass which we, laughingly, called a lawn.  The state of the ‘lawn’ can be judged by the fact that we never, to my knowledge, owned a lawnmower so the grass was only kept in check by a combination of my rabbit (who also contributed a few holes) and me hacking away at it with hand-held shears on a Sunday afternoon in an effort to avoid falling asleep and joining my dad in synchronised snoring to wear off the effects of Sunday lunchtime’s visit to the pub.

We could, of course, have dug something up ourselves but mum wanted to put a bit of work in Cyril’s direction as he always seemed to be teetering on the edge of poverty.  We did a fair bit of teetering ourselves, from time to time, so mum knew what it was like and tried to help discreetly when she could.  Cyril agreed to look at the job and went down our garden to suck his teeth and take a few measurements.  He then disappeared for weeks on end before reappearing, without any warning, and carefully marking out the site of the proposed flower bed with pegs and string.  This exercise took hours because, for him, it had to be geometrically perfect.  When it was finally laid out to his satisfaction, he disappeared again and I’m not sure whether he returned to the project again that summer.

It all became a bit embarrassing.  We had a flower bed that existed in theory only.  We could have gone ahead and dug the thing ourselves but mum felt that would only upset Cyril.  Tackling Cyril about the job was difficult because he always seemed so busy and seemed to look on it as a favour that he was doing us, when mum had only really asked him to do it as a back-handed way of giving him a bit more income.  I’m fairly sure that it was completed eventually, but I’m also sure that it took years when it ought to have been finished in an afternoon, at most.

I’m conscious that I’ve only really scratched the surface about Cyril in this, so I’ll tell you more next time.

You can find a lot more stories, in a similar vein, here.

Braving Benidorm

I’ve just come back from Benidorm.

There, I’ve told the world and I don’t care who knows it!

Benidorm has a particular place in the national psyche, it tends to be a useful shorthand for everything that it wrong about package holidays and, especially, the British holidaymaker.  It occupies the same place that Torremolinos used to hold in the 1960s.  I don’t suppose the T.V. series of the same name has done much to change its image, either, although my knowledge of that is limited to watching one episode, which I found was sufficient.  Not being snobbish about it, because I know it is hugely popular, it’s just not my thing.

All of which is rather unfair, because Benidorm has got a lot going for it.  The Levante and Poiniente beaches are huge, clean and very attractive.  The old town is charming and picturesque and there are a massive amount of places to eat, drink and be entertained, for all tastes and purses.  Also, it is not just a bolt-hole for package holiday Brits.  When we were there the British were easily matched, if not outnumbered, by retirement-age Spanish.

Nevertheless, you can’t get away from the ubiquitousness of the all-male and, increasingly, all-female group there for a stag or hen weekend.  Some resorts seem to attract this phenomena and it’s sometimes difficult to see why.  Blackpool is hardly a surprise, of course, but why Tenby, and even Whitby?  In my youth (which I’m prepared to admit, was a very long time ago, now) the tradition was for a stag or hen night which, at its most adventurous, might be in a different town.  Now it seems as if it must be at least a weekend and preferably longer.  This gives the definite impression that the preamble to the ceremony has become considerably more important than the life of marital bliss that is supposedly being entered into.

This phenomenon becomes more apparent at the weekend, I’ve discovered.  You become more and more aware of groups of girls, usually dressed similarly and often with sashes proclaiming the wearer to be part of ‘Trace’s Hen Do’ or some such.  You’re often surprised to find that the chunky girl at the head of the procession, carrying a six foot inflatable pink dildo and with the expression of a bulldog chewing a wasp, is also sporting a ‘Bride To Be’ t-shirt, which is somewhat straining credulity.  Despite the outward signs of frivolity, sashes, inflatable goods, fake tiaras and so on, it is often the case that none of the party look particularly happy, and that definitely applies to the putative Mrs. X.

The male version is not entirely dissimilar, although they mostly dispense with sashes and tiaras (but not necessarily).  The nod toward uniformity tends to be matching t-shirts with some sort of slogan such as ‘Baz’s Boys On Tour’.  The common denominator with these groups, apart from the pint of lager in a plastic glass usually held in the right hand like a sort of trophy, tends to be the walk.  I’ve studied this carefully and there seems to be some sort of rule that you should walk as if you had recently suffered a catastrophic rectal calamity and you’re trying to keep as far away from the product of this as possible.  Of course, in some cases, this might be not too far away from the truth.

It has to be said that the Brits do not cover themselves in glory here.  I think it tells a story that all the warning posters displayed around the resort by the police, urging people to respect others, drink alcohol responsibly and so on, are only available in English.

You might think that I’m just an old kill-joy who wouldn’t know how to enjoy himself it he tried, and you might have a point.  I have to admit to not behaving terribly responsibly on my first couple of visits to Spain in my teenage years (see 'Night Boat to Palma' and  'High Spirits')  

Oddly enough, the scene of my embarrassment that I depicted in the ‘HIgh Spirits’ article was replicated while I was in Benidorm, but fortunately not by me this time.  We had been having dinner in the hotel restaurant and some chaps who must have been approaching my age, if not actually overtaking it, were on the next table.  Shortly afterwards, as we were enjoying a quiet drink in the bar, I noticed this same group leaving the hotel, presumably to go ‘on the town’.  This was about 21.45.  At 21.55 they came back in to the hotel, this time escorting another chap of a similar vintage.  He was quite obviously not feeling a lot of pain, had a glazed expression and a tendency to giggle.  They had to work hard to stop him diverting into the hotel bar and managed to get him into the lift.  It was pretty obvious that he had been enjoying a rather good night out.  

The following morning I was surprised to see him up and about and attempting a little breakfast.  I couldn’t help but overhear his friends explaining to him what had happened the night before (which he clearly couldn’t remember).  Apparently they had gone into their first bar of the night and had seen their friend in the distance, much the worse for wear and clearly in trouble, and had rescued him.  

I felt as if I had found a kindred spirit!

You can find a lot more of Philip's ramblings about yesterday and today here.

Cast Your Fete To The Winds

Quite a while ago, the Derby Telegraph changed the format of its Bygones section.  The daily article was replaced with a photo and short summary and the bulk of the written nostalgia was now to be contained in a two-page or so supplement published on Mondays.  The upshot of this was that my regular monthly column, whichI had been cheerfully dumping on the good citizens of Derbyshire for over ten years, fell by the wayside.  However, I was encouraged to submit something for the new supplement and, ever the optimist, I did.  When this failed to emerge, as one month faded into another, I supposed that it had gone to the Great Wastepaper Bin in the Sky and I pretty much forgot all about it.  

Imagine my surprise, therefore, when a friend told me that he had seen an article of mine in the Derby Telegraph.  Sure enough, the article I submitted in May of 2018 had finally surfaced in April, 2019!  At this rate, by the turn of the next century, I could have enough for another book.  Admittedly, I would be 146 at the time, which might be a bit of stretch, but still...Today, Derbyshire, Tomorrow...Uttoxeter?

This is the article, if you're interested:

This is the time of year when any self-respecting village, society or association’s thoughts turn to holding a fete.  I’m not sure why, that’s just the way it is. 

Actually, like picnics, this is a classic example of the British habit of hope triumphing over experience because, with our climate, the odds of the whole thing being a wash-out are pretty high.  Yet, we all have this soft-focus image of sun-drenched fields bedecked by bunting and filled with rosy-cheeked children gambolling from stall to stall, instead of sullen and evil-tempered families glaring at the persistent rain from under the steadily sagging awning of the beer tent.

I rather suspect that the beer tent had a great deal to do with the apparent popularity of fetes and suchlike gatherings, particularly back in the days when the pubs shut at 14.00 on a Sunday and didn't reopen until 19.00.  The beer tent was often the only way to get an alcoholic drink on a warm summer's afternoon, even though it usually consisted of a glass of flat, warm bitter with some insect practicing the breast-stroke across the surface. Certainly it seemed to me that Burton Regatta's popularity probably rested more on the beer tent than a sudden interest, by the populace, in all things rowing, but perhaps I'm being cynical?

My earliest recollection of a village fete was also my first brush with fame.  Well, that’s probably over-egging the pudding.  It wasn’t so much a brush with fame as a passing nudge from its slipstream. 

The scene was Holbrook Village Fete at some point in the early 1960s.  The guest of honour was the Rt. Hon. George Brown (latterly Baron George-Brown), MP for Belper and a leading light in the Parliamentary Labour Party (he became Foreign Secretary in 1966).  He was a frequent feature on the television news, although not always in a complimentary light.  He therefore managed to combine fame with infamy and was something of a celebrity and quite a catch for a village fete. 

I joined the small crowd to listen to his words of wisdom, which I think largely consisted of "I therefore declare this fete, open!" but I was quite young so I may have missed some of the cut and thrust of witty repartee.  I was then caught up by the crowd and propelled to the first stall where the great man was showing willing by bouncing ping-pong balls at goldfish bowls, or something similar.  In the press of bodies, I suddenly realised that I was right next to the Right Honourable and was, in fact, brushing against the tails of his jacket.  Thus for years afterwards, I was able to say that I had touched George Brown's jacket, which may not have impressed many but was a claim to fame, of sorts.  I gave it up, altogether, when people started saying "George who?"

The second fete that lives in my memory, just in case you found the first example too exciting, was an occasion when I was with my wife and daughter, when my daughter would have been about 10 or 11 years old.  I can't recall where the fete was or what it was in aid of.  I just remember that it was a beautiful summer's afternoon and that the fete had one or two stalls that were being operated professionally by fairground people.  One of these stalls was the ubiquitous hoop-la stall.  My daughter was all for my having a go but I wasn't so taken by the idea.  I was keenly aware of my limitations and had always made a practice of avoiding anything that required skilled hand-eye coordination.  Nevertheless, I didn't want to lose face so I laid the ground for humiliating failure by pointing out the near impossibility of meeting the requirements of the stall for winning a prize.  Not only did the ring have to be thrown over the object in question, which I was pretty sure would be beyond me, but also it had to fall flat, not just over the object but also over the plinth and the wooden base on which it stood.  The odds, I pointed out, were not greatly in favour of the customer.  None of this dampened my daughter's enthusiasm, so five rings were purchased and I prepared for the worst.

I positioned myself at the stall, grasped a ring and sent a silent prayer to whoever looks after 'fathers who aren't much cop at anything'.  I launched the ring and was amazed to see that, instead of clattering sideways into the objects which was the normal outcome, it was floating horizontally above them.  The ring then fell in a beautifully controlled manner, over the object, over the plinth on which the object stood and, most importantly, over the wooden base, so that it lay flat on the stall.  To my absolute amazement, and that of the stall-holder, I had done it!  My daughter was chuffed to bits and my wife and I were astounded.

We were presented with a small stuffed toy animal as the prize for this heroic feat.  It was a dog (allegedly) in a sort of striped romper suit with a pom-pom hat, somewhat reminiscent of a canine Andy Pandy, if your memory stretches that far back.  He was christened Isaiah, because his manufacture had clearly left a lot to be desired and, as a consequence, one of his eyes was higher than the other. 

For many years after, whenever I was embarking on some endeavour where I really felt that I needed luck on my side, Isaiah came with me.  It seemed to work.  Well, more than George Brown’s coat-tails anyway!

You can find Philip's collected works at The Nostalgedy Collection