Open Writing

From 1969 I travelled up to Holborn to my new part-time, term time only, job at the Kingsway College for Further Education in Keeley Street, where I worked in the General Office with Tony Duffield. I was attached to the science and maths department.

In this building was a pharmacy department, a legal and business studies department and a secretarial department. One group of day-R
release boys came from Express Dairies for English and maths. They were always to be heard badgering their teacher to go swimming.

This was also to be my first encounter with foreign students. I can recall a Vietnamese boy, and another, a Burmese boy whose father ran the Burma Trading Company in Kingsway. One of the pharmacy students was a Nigerian with tribal cut-marks on his cheeks, and there was a small sprinkling of Muslims and Hong Kong Chinese. Temel Dayi a Turkish Cypriot asked me to write a letter for his father who wanted a job as manager of a Wimpy bar. As a token of thanks he made me a lovely trinket box from olive wood. One day this boy asked Edie our canteen manageress if he could make us some real Turkish coffee and this she allowed him to do one quiet afternoon in her kitchen, and we sampled the darkest coffee I have ever tasted. Neither of us was keen.

There was an abundance of good films in 1969 including Women in Love with Oliver Reed, Alan Bates and Glenda Jackson, Paint Your Wagon with Lee Marvin, Midnight Cowboy with John Voight and Dustin Hoffman, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with Paul Newman and Robert Redford and The Italian Job with Michael Caine, which had lots of car chases and the famous and well-remembered quote “You’re only supposed to blow the bloody (car) door off.”

In March 1970 the French plane Concorde made its first supersonic flight.

On July 10th 1970 Les and I celebrated our Silver Wedding, but where and with whom I cannot remember.

Films of 1970 included Ryan’s Daughter with John Mills, and the American film M.A.S.H. set in the Vietnam war with Alan Alda as Hawkeye. In 1971 we saw Fiddler on the Roof with Topol, The Go-Between with Julie Christie and Alan Bates, The Railway Children with Jenny Agutter, and Death in Venice with Dirk Bogarde.

In February 1971 Britain went decimal. We had new coinage. A shilling was now 5 new pence. The old sixpence, shilling, florin and half-a-crown coins became obsolete.

In 1972 the state of Bangladesh in Eastern Pakistan broke away to join the Commonwealth, and at this time Pakistan withdrew from the Commonwealth.

Somewhere about this time we had a holiday on the Gower peninsula in Wales. We visited Dylan Thomas country and drove far along the Pendine sands, where the sea went out for quite a long distance. We had driven down to be nearer the edge of the sea but not knowing the tide came in under the beach and the car began to sink into the sand and we had to be rescued by an R.A.C. jeep.

At the guest house where we lodged the lady would give us cups of tea and Welsh cakes when we came in for the evening. With my egg and bacon at breakfast I was the only one to try her laverbread, made with seaweed collected on the shore.

Les who had been working for Fleetway Publications as publicity and production manager in Farringdon Street, moved to the 27th floor of Kings Reach Tower on the South Bank and travelled up to Waterloo every day. It was one of the new tower blocks beside the Thames, quite near the National Theatre where we often went to enjoy their productions.

By this time we were avid fans of several television programmes and regularly watched the Home Guards antics in Dad’s Army, Upstairs, Downstairs with Gordon Jackson, the Black and White Minstrel Show, and the Morecombe and Wise Show. Val was a fan of Monty Python’s Flying Circus with Michael Palin, John Cleese and Eric Idle.

One of the printers Les knew owned a bungalow on the northeast coast of Norfolk at Mundesley-on-sea. For several summers in the early seventies he let us use it for holidays and we got to know the north coast of Norfolk very well. We visited Cromer, Sheringham, Blakeney, Cley-next-the-sea, Wells-next-the-sea and Holkham Hall with its vast expanse of beach where samphire grew. We had our evening meals at the Manor Hotel at Mundesley.

By now Val had gone from University College to St.George’s Hospital at Hyde Park Corner, where he worked long hours of duty. He finally qualified as a doctor in 1973, having taken a year between to do a BSc in pharmacology. It was there he met a Belgian girl who had chosen to come to London to requalify as a nurse here. We met Val’s girl friend Anne-Marie by being invited to a delicious meal she cooked for us at the Nurses Home. She came from Arlon in the Ardennes. Val went over there to meet her mother and brother.

When they married in July 1973 Les and Cathy and I went over to Arlon and stayed with her mother Rene for the wedding. Many friends and neighbours called at the house with gifts and flowers and there was a pre-wedding reception and never had we seen so much champagne. It was stored in icey baths in their cellar. Jean-Ives, her brother was kept busy bringing it up.

Val’s old school friend Bill Piggott (from primary school days) drove them to the Mayor’s house for a formal ceremony before going on to the big church in Arlon for the wedding to take place. The wedding breakfast was held at a hillside hotel outside the town. At this time Cathy wore a pink mini-skirted dress and Val had side-burns and wore flared trousers.

The couple rented a flat in south London and sought medical posts abroad to increase their bank balance. In the summer of 1974 he became medical officer –in-charge, with Anne Marie as a staff nurse, of the Grenfell Mission Hospital in Port Saunders, a busy port with a thriving fishing industry in Newfoundland, It was also the centre for the annual seal culling. Through the freezing winter, they travelled on skidoos to get from place to place, and Val went aboard the boat that took the travelling dentist round the island.

Before their return home late in 1974 they bought a second-hand Volkswagon and went from Newfoundland across to Nova Scotia and drove right across Canada to the Yukon, coming back east by train, then on a Polish cargo boat the Batori to England.