Self-Winding · A Sort of Progression

Michael Sowa: A Summer Night's Melancholy

He died today having been poorly for a while. We had him for seven years and he was a real character. Crazy to say that you loved a chicken very dearly, but we did. He was a good cockerel to his hens, gallant in offering food, a strict disciplinarian when they got bitchy and a real Don Juan - no egg went unfertilised. He liked to be picked up and fussed and he adored G who could do anything with him. We are so sad.

I gritted my teeth and watched The Passion of the Christ on Channel 4 tonight, I had chickened out of it at the cinema. As a producer/director Mel Gibson is given to taking liberties with historical record and in this film there is additionally a famous case to be made for accusing him of anti-semitism and sensationalism. Nevertheless the power of the piece is overwhelming. During the worst moments, tears flow, the eyes turn away from intense cruelties, the gut twists with pity for any being, divine or otherwise, that experienced such anguish. It is a remarkable piece that uses extended stress on the viewer to give its message. I can't go to sleep now for thinking with despair of the continuity of human violence, and of many other brutally explicit images that bear witness to it with the same drama and intent as Gibson's film.

To lighten the tone a little, I note that the IMDB front page on The Passion of the Christ has a note warning that a linked review contains spoilers. I was also misled and disturbed by what I, at first, took as a rather racist front page headline in Sunday's Observer - "Brown faces deepening revolt over embryo bill."

Happy Easter.
We woke up to a white landscape this morning. It won't last.

Ballade of Dead Actors

Where are the passions they essayed,
And where the tears they made to flow?
Where the wild humours they portrayed
For laughing worlds to see and know?
Othello's wrath and Juliet's woe?
Sir Peter's whims and Timon's gall?
And Millamant and Romeo?
Into the night go one and all.
Where are the braveries, fresh or frayed?
The plumes, the armours -- friend and foe?
The cloth of gold, the rare brocade,
The mantles glittering to and fro?
The pomp, the pride, the royal show?
The cries of war and festival?
The youth, the grace, the charm, the glow?
Into the night go one and all.
The curtain falls, the play is played:
The Beggar packs beside the Beau;
The Monarch troops, and troops the Maid;
The Thunder huddles with the Snow.
Where are the revellers high and low?
The clashing swords? The lover's call?
The dancers gleaming row on row?
Into the night go one and all.

William Ernest Henley (1849-1902)

In what is now one of the trendier areas of London, a large flat above an electrical shop at No. 292, Westbourne Grove was my early childhood home in the 1940's. Even back then, a stone's throw from Notting Hill Gate and close by the antiques and fruit & veg markets of Portobello Road, it had a lively and eccentric atmosphere.

Streets were gap-toothed from the bombing, the old mews passages behind tall, shabby Victorian terraces were still cobbled and lived in by working people. Opposite us, at No.297, my aunts lived above their hairdresser's shop; I would go to 'work' there aged about six, in a small pink overall (cut down by Mum), sweeping up hair from the floor, handing pins to the stylists, chatting with ladies who were wired up to permanent waving machines like strange hydras.

In their large premises over the road, the Jones family sold antiques or, more accurately, second-hand goods; clever at business, they would go on to make a fortune by being in exactly the right place when the trade took off in the sixties and the sweet times started. Years later, Mr. Jones pulled up by a bus stop where I was queueing and whisked me home in a gleaming Rolls Royce.

Before all that came along, I'd play on the pavements with a chunky infant called Celia from the dry cleaner's who had a pedal car and used to bash me about rather a lot; her Mum kept a beery-smelling drinks bar in her basement and was thought racy because she wore ankle chains. I used to sneak into Mr. Merton's the newsagent's and try to peep at the Jane strip in the Daily Mirror which was forbidden by Gran who took the paper and thought it vulgar. It was a bit, but I needed to find out why.

Largely starved of colour in those post-war days, I'd gaze with desire at huge glass, stoppered bottles of coloured liquid in the chemist's window on the corner of Kensington Park Road, one was a deep purple, I wanted it so much. The pharmacist, who looked, I now realise, the spit of Gerard Depardieu, was foreign and locally known as Fidey Fo, probably from his accent - he once diagnosed my uncle with "de-fungi-of-de-feet". "Bloody fool, they're just chilblains," was Jack's verdict.

Chain-smoking June, an art dealer in Portobello, who was reputed to have won and spent the Irish sweepstake prize, would read bits of "Alice" to me in a mannish Irish voice. She parcelled up a second-hand edition of Wonderland (that I still have) and gave it to Mum to put away for Christmas; I knew it was on top of the kitchen cupboard and it is hard to believe the real excitement with which I waited for it to be mine. Her flat was a dusty maze of stacked pictures, rubbed velvet chairs, books and ashtrays.

On the corner was Barnes' bicycle shop (still there, all credit to them for resisting the lure of gold) whose owner always smelled of rubber. I use to play pretend games with his daughter out on the roofs, at a distance of three houses over, until the clock on St Peter's Church over the wall chimed for bedtime. We could have fallen to our deaths, I suppose, out there on the high 'leads', but it was assumed that we would be sensible.

Our neighbour ran a small general shop; Mrs. Spiro, a vast and gloomy lady, given to wrap-around print aprons, would cram small rolls of Lyons' ice cream into cornets with her grubby hands, thus charging up my immune system for life. Above an electrical repairs shop and a picture framer lived my Uncle's landlord, Reginald, thin, dapper and heavily Brylcreemed, he and his handsome boyfriend chatted with much gesture about their sinking sponge cakes and soft furnishings. They gave me subconciously, I'm sure, a lasting enjoyment of the type of blokes whose gayness makes them comfortable with women and women's things.

Irene, the little hunchbacked lady in the flat next door to them, would cut out the Roly Robin stories for me from her Woman's Weekly. I thought she kept sweeties in her hump and always hoped she would unload someday when I was around. She had a lodger who was a little more than just that. Don was sweet but distinctly odd, he had a pouty, red, pursed-up mouth, wore detachable collars and had ramrod straight deportment. We children collapsed in hysterical laughter once at a church concert (over the wall) when he sang a ballad tailored to the voice of Paul Robeson - The Cobbler's Song- in a high falsetto for what seemed like hours until we were nearly ill with crying.

The walk to school in Chepstow Villas took me past Henekey's pub where the aforesaid Uncle swore that he had seen my Mother Superior dancing on the table with a pint of Guinness. I half believed him. Sam, another uncle, once told me as a joke that his job entailed knitting barbed wire, this I reported as interesting to my friends and suffered the full fallout. I was a gullible child.

Further up the Grove was the Roxy Cinema, a flea-pit really, where Mum took me to my first film - Nelson Eddy (wearing lipstick) & Jeanette MacDonald in Rose Marie. I couldn't get over the wonderment of it. More wonderful still was to be my first local and very tentative contact with the theatre. (To be continued)

The picture of No. 292 is reproduced from an estate agent's advertisement which tells, in itself, the latest episode in the history of a Victorian property.

Picasso: Girl Reading at a Table. 1934.
Impossible not to be in awe of the variety and tireless development of his work.

I believe my sister is collecting original ideas for a new bathroom. This amusing trompe l'oeil painted floor would make a great talking-point; it would ensure that absolutely no-one would be tempted to have a read on the loo, or, indeed, that there would be much of a queue to use her facilities at all.