A first draft - and it shows

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MajGenl.Meade
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A first draft - and it shows

Post by MajGenl.Meade »

REMEMBER, REMEMBER

In addition to religious and national holidays, there is a day or days that call up in each of us memories of the past. People tend to remember where they were and what they were doing when particularly traumatic public events happened. On a personal level, we each recognize anniversaries of births, marriages, deaths within the close circle of family and friends. For me, three consecutive days in November are unavoidably causes of memory and reflection. Two of these involve people I have never met, though I saw one in person on three occasions. The other has been dead for more than 400 years.

On November 5th in 1605, Guy Fawkes was discovered and arrested in the bowels of the House of Lords, guarding barrels of gunpowder intended to destroy the building, the dignitaries above and especially King James, the First of England, the Sixth of Scotland. Fawkes (and others) were trying to rid the country of the Protestant “Scottish beggars” and re-establish a Roman Catholic monarchy. Fawkes was executed by hanging in January 1606.

In early 1606, Parliament passed a law (not to be rescinded until 1859) requiring an annual observance of November 5th. All ministers of religion were to give thanks for the deliverance of the King (and Parliament) and to read the anti-Catholic wording of that law to their congregations. Londoners were encouraged to light carefully tended bonfires in celebration. Within 50 years, fireworks made an annual appearance across the country along with the bonfires and after 1673 the custom of burning Guy Fawkes in effigy was adopted.

Fast-forward to 1955 and the approach of Guy Fawkes’ Night was an exciting time on my street and thousands of neighborhoods throughout England. We knew nothing and cared less for 17th century politics and the travails of Protestants and Catholics through the ages. We wanted to create the best “Guy”, a disreputable collection of discarded parental clothing, stuffed with crumpled newspapers, a head that might be an old football or a stocking suitably filled. A hat and a cheap mask purchased from the corner store completed Guy’s very being. He and many other Guys, though none as good as ours, were paraded around town in misappropriated push-chairs, wheelbarrows and homemade wooden go-karts. We chanted “Penny for the Guy” over and over, encouraging passing adults to give us money to buy “bangers” (not sausages but small fireworks for a penny or tuppence.

Why is this of any significance to me down through the years until even now at 71 years of age, I smile and remember it fondly? It’s because of my father. Through the end of October, he would build a bonfire in our back garden. It wasn’t a huge affair but it was there. I suspect it was my mother who purchased the small box of mostly harmless fireworks – simple stick-rockets, Roman Candles, Jumping Jacks (they flashed) and Catharine Wheels that fizzed and sparkled, spinning around the nail that held them to the fence. And it was Dad who set the light to blue touchpapers. It was easy to see that he got as much enjoyment from it as any of the children.

There’s another connection between those happy days of November 5 and my father. His birthday was celebrated on the following day, November 6th. The two days are linked in my mind inextricably. My father was a small man – I outgrew him (and my mother) by age 17 – but he was afraid of nothing. Perhaps my mother. But he wasn’t afraid to get down on the floor in the living/dining/sitting room with me, and set up his own rank of (my) toy soldiers as I had prepared my own line of men facing his. Armed each with a spring-fired Dinky or Corgi models of artillery guns (I think mine was a 25-pound howitzer), we’d take turns shooting dead matchsticks at each other’s armies until someone’s last man fell. Heavens! These days, parents would sue any company that sold a model gun that fired a projectile, assuming the nanny state didn’t get there first. We practiced boxing in that same room until one day in my sixth year when I caught him full on the chin with a mighty swing and laid him out. Mum stopped future fisticuffs

I don’t miss Guy Fawkes like I miss my Dad. But every November as we approach the 5th and 6th, I think of them both. Poor Guy, a ragged bundle of hand-me-downs, stuffed with newspaper, still remembered long after his fellow conspirators are faded into a collective ignorance, and my father, carefully placing Guy up on the unlit bonfire. “Guy, Guy, stick him up high / put him on the bonfire / and there let him die” we all chanted. And the festive fire was lit, Guy sagged into embers, and the fireworks whooshed into the sky, raining the burned sticks all over the street.

Nowadays, there are few such celebrations in back gardens in England. There are more restrictions on buying fireworks. The custom of making Guy and collecting pennies (!) has almost died out. There are community bonfires and firework shows, carefully policed. Dad would have hated that. He liked to do things with his son, not watch other people rather joylessly at the doing. And nowadays I have a third date added in 2016 to make my trio of memories – November 7. The day the music died.

I never met Leonard Cohen but often wished I had. He became part of my life in 1968 when I was 17 and on my first day in London as an employee of the British Post Office Overseas Telegraph Service. My school-friend Terry and I walked from South Kensington tube station to 75 Onslow Gardens to become tenants of a hostel for Civil Servants. A typical room had four beds, four wardrobes, four chairs, four lockers and one table. We were greeted on arrival at our new room by a familiar face – Barry Hook, a fellow former pupil of the Dover Grammar School for boys. “Listen to this,” he said. And carefully placed the arm of his record player on a spinning copy of “Songs of Leonard Cohen”, released to general disinterest in the USA but a hit in 1968 England. From then on, I bought every album he made as soon they were available.

It took a while but eventually I traded my Monkees albums for a less than full-size acoustic guitar. I added the “Leonard Cohen Song Book” to my collection of poetry and novels, Beautiful Losers, Flowers for Hitler, The Favorite Game. On the night-shift at Esso Europe in Green Park, after completing work, I learned those songs on steel strings until the inside of the guitar was noticeably speckled with blood. I bought an acoustic with nylon strings. Cohen was a constant feature of party evening sing-a-longs. My highest, perhaps literally, moments ever were in a public gardens, early one Sunday morning, up Finsbury Park way with my best friend Ken, a bottle of wine, the guitar and Ken’s great voice scaring away the birds.

My first wife and I cemented our relationship over her singing “Dress Rehearsal Rag” as I played guitar. We saw our first Cohen concert together at the Royal Albert Hall in 1976 London and two days later I saw him again in the far smaller Victoria Palace Theatre, an unscheduled show. That was the last concert that I attended until I took my current wife to Hamilton, Ontario in early 2009. We were soon to leave for unknown years in South Africa as missionaries, working to support Basotho children at a youth home. My wife became a Cohen addict (still is). As am I.

And there it is. When November rolls around, three days connect me with memories of great joy and pleasure, great loss. On the 5th, I’ll think of poor old Guy, burned in effigy with so much enthusiasm and how my Dad shared in my life, so often, at my level yet was always father. Even on November 6th, he always managed to make it appear that he was thrilled with the half ounce of Old Holborn, or that little plastic container with a tiny screwdriver handle and several bits (again), or the after-shave. And on November 7th, I’ll put the lyrics of “If It Be Your Will” up on on my Facebook page. I hope it is played when the time comes for saying goodbye to me. Altogether a more fitting tribute to life than those we chanted around a bonfire 60+ years ago.

If it be your will / That I speak no more
And my voice be still / As it was before
I will speak no more / I shall abide until
I am spoken for / If it be your will
For Christianity, by identifying truth with faith, must teach-and, properly understood, does teach-that any interference with the truth is immoral. A Christian with faith has nothing to fear from the facts

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Gob
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Re: A first draft - and it shows

Post by Gob »

Nicely written, many thanks for sharing.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”

ex-khobar Andy
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Re: A first draft - and it shows

Post by ex-khobar Andy »

There were three albums issued within a year which triggered a 'I didn't know they could do that!' reaction in me. The first was The Songs of Leonard Cohen and I could probably quote most of the songs even now but Suzanne led the way. And quickly in 1968 my then GF's flatmate Penny (who went on to greater things - got an OBE - and whom I once literally bumped into years later in the streets of North London) introduced me to the Hair! album and Cheap Thrills by Big Brother and the Holding Company with of course Janis Joplin nailing down the vocals. What a year!

I - and GF and Penny - were at the University of Sussex in Brighton on England's south coast. Ten miles up the road is Lewes, a town of (then) 10,000 or so people but which was the capital of English Bonfire Night celebrations. During the reign of Mary Tudor 1553 to 1558 the powers-that-were attempted to reverse the Reformation - the negation of Catholicism begun by her dad Henry VIII because the horny bastard wanted to divorce Catherine of Aragon so he could marry the comely Anne Boleyn - and in doing so burned 280 Protestants at the stake. Among these were 17 in Lewes including 10 in one night in 1557. That was the largest single stake burning event in British history.

So bonfires have a special place in Lewes history and the people there still use the Guy Fawkes Night bonfires as an excuse to mark the execution of the Lewes martyrs. Six 'bonfire societies' rival each other in putting on the largest loudest spectacularest commemoration on the night and (according to Wikipedia) about 80,000 people show up for it. In the 60s and 70s there was a marked anti-Catholic flavor(u)r to the whole thing - effigies of the Pope were burned - but I think that aspect of it has really toned down now.

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MajGenl.Meade
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Re: A first draft - and it shows

Post by MajGenl.Meade »

:ok interesting,ex-kA
For Christianity, by identifying truth with faith, must teach-and, properly understood, does teach-that any interference with the truth is immoral. A Christian with faith has nothing to fear from the facts

Burning Petard
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Re: A first draft - and it shows

Post by Burning Petard »

Andy, it is my contention that longer hair and other flamboyant affectations are merely the males' emergence into the glorious plumage which is the birthright of his sex.

Totally from an ancient personal memory. I have not heard the song in decades. My vinyl version of 'Cheap Thrills' disappeared mysteriously at the same time my son went off to college. It took another four decades before I paid any attention to Leonard Cohen. I have the words "listen to the hummingbird" printed and taped to the side of my bookcase just 24 inches from this computer.

Sometimes memories and the context in which they were formed makes for a nicer experience than the original event. Is that the definition of nostalgia?

snailgate

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Joe Guy
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Re: A first draft - and it shows

Post by Joe Guy »

Very thoughtful and well done, Meade.

No edit required.

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