Poldark, my 'andsomes

I’m now nearing the end of volume nine of the Poldark series – no, not the TV series, but the novels by Winston Graham from which TV has now taken two large bites. The books are (‘of course!’, did I hear someone exclaim?) immeasurably better than the television series, though the first of these was excellent. The novels are examples of great story-telling at its most engrossing. Almost everyone I’ve spoken to about the books has said, ‘You just can’t put them down, can you?” Absolutely true.

I don’t know what readers outside the English Westcountry make of some of the dialogue, however – even maybe some young Westcountry readers. One of my great pleasures has been in being reminded of dialect speech which I’d almost completely forgotten from my childhood: ‘little tacker’ for very small child, ‘teazy’ for irritable and out of sorts, ‘my lover’ for any member of the family – and Graham had a marvelous ear for that, and for local pronunciation and comments: ‘Ais’ for ‘yes’, ‘dunnee’ for ‘don’t you’, ‘See ee drekly’ for ‘see you soon’ – ‘directly’ - and so on. The disappearance of local terms – not just Cornish – is very sad, because so many of them are wonderful. I remember from my grandfather ‘dubbit’ for a short, tubby person; ‘gaddle’, to drink down a beer too quickly; ‘mazed’ for wild, slightly mad; ‘pindy’ describing meat that was ‘off’ – and the wonderful ‘airy-mouse’ for a bat.

Thas all fur now, my lovers.

Who's afraid of Michael Tippett?

Just presented a concert - on FineMusicfm.com - culminating in Michael Tippett's fourth symphony. How many listeners were left to hear the final exhaled breath, I wonder?  Even Lloyd Webber is more tuneful. But it's a facinating work, and I programmed it in the hope that maybe one or even two people might overheard the beginning, or a bit in the middle, and thought 'Ho!" - or something of the soret - and listened until the end, and will maybe even search out more Tippett (seriously undervalued and outpaced by Britten). Maybe all I'm doing is putting listeners off a station which will broadcast such stuff, though? Well, I do from time to time programme a concert consisting entirely of top pops- Beehoven's fifth, Mendelssohn's violin conctero, the Overture to Candide. So horses for courses, and if the goign gets a bit tough occasionally, I'm hopefully counting on one or two people staying the the saddle. But hey, if I'm going to start sing that kind of language, it's time to go.

Exercise? - phooey.

Well, I was fortunate. I tried smoking and hated it; tried beer, couldn't stand the taste. Couldn't afford to buy spirits until I was old enough to get drunk and decided I hated that more than the above. Found over-eating made me ill, but that I enjoyed food very much indeed as long as there wasn't too much of it. Didn't try drugs - they weren't around during the years when I might have tried them (at least not in the West of Cornwall!); anyway hated the thought of being out of control, and that life was quite exciting enough without trying to find some artificial means of livening it up any more. Tried a gym for a brief period and discovered I very much disliked physical exercise of any kind - other than walking - briskly but not maniacally - with a book or a dog or two.  I also found that almost everything I enjoyed most in life could be done while either sitting or lying down (though sometimes in the latter case a certain amount of enjoyable exercise was certainly involved). So non-smoking and sober and sedentary. And at the moment in my ninth decade and living happily on walks with the dogs and one cocktail at day at precisely 6 p.m.
Does it sound dull? Well, all I can say that boredom is not registered on any scale I recognise; nor do I seem to bore my friends - or even my wife. Do I recommend such a life? Not really - anyone who wants to hasten their decease is very welcome to do so. The wqorld's over-populated.

Messing up the environment

What strange decisions local authorities make. I walked the dogs this morning from the wharf at Mosman (NSW, Australia) along a path which follows the side of the bay out to Robertson's Point, opposite the CBD and the Opera House - one of the most delightful walks in the area, but one I hadn't done for a while. Halfway along the path, Mosman Council hands ove responsibility for upkeep to North Sydney Council. In the Mosman section there has been some necessary tree-felling and tidying up, but the path is much as it has always been - allowed to remain very uch in tune with the environment. But North Sydney have now laid a very white wide concrete path through their section, utterly out of place; and even worse, where there were nice wooden palings and railings, they have replaced them with bright very new aluminium (?) railings, completely out of place; at the entrance to Old Cremorene Ferry Wharf, they have replaced nice of steps in local stone with very new white concrete ones, each edged with coloured material (in case, I suppose, you don't reconignise them as steps) and ugly black plaques of knobbed material to indicate to the blind where the steps are. You would think that the whole thing was designed by cretins to look as much as possible like a city entrance to a tube station. Yet out at the point itself, the new ferry wharf is (like the one at the Mosman terminal) rather well designed, and they have set the entrance to it off at an angle in order to leave a generous stub of the old wooden wharf where the little cafe has been serving travellers for umpteen years. Now how can there be such a contrast between witless destruction of an environment and such generous consideration? A mystery to me.
The problem with the worst of the new set-up I suppose is due to the dreadful 'Health and Safety' consideration. Why aluminium railings should be considred safer than good wooden ones I don't understand, however. Why concrete steps instead of local stone ones which will chime in witht the area? And why bright concrete for a rural path rather than black bitumen or something similar? And how many unaccompanied blind people are going to have negotioated the often quite difficult path to a ferry wharf and suddenly need an indication of steps?
No answer to all that, I guess, ecept the human capacity for messing up the environment whenever possible.

Up in the Gallery

Banjo Paterson, the author of ‘Waltzing Matilda’, was travelling to London on a P. & O. liner in 1900 when  a woman sailed into the saloon ‘as a dreadnaught steams into a harbour’, and struck up a conversation with him. Hearing who he was, she asked him to write a song for her – she paid as much as a quid or thirty bob for a good number, she said, and before they parted at Southampton she gave him a ticket for the first night of her coming season.

It would have been like being given a ticket for a Madonna first night, for Marie Lloyd was the most famous music hall artist of her day – on her way home after a triumphant tour of Australia. Paterson never wrote her a song; but it didn’t matter – she had plenty of her own, numbers she made famous, such as My old man said follow the van, Oh, Mr Porter! and the notorious She sits among the cabbages and peas, which she defended strenuously against Watch Committees and local councilors who strangely thought there was something suggestive about it. When they proved incorrigible, she changed the line to ‘I sits among the cabbages and leeks.’

 Between 1850 and about 1950 the toffs had their opera houses, the working and lower middle classes had the music halls, and each had its repertoire of tunes which at their best, once heard, followed you around for life like a faithful dog. While the opera buff would whistle ‘Questa quella’ as he shaved, the girl who sold flowers in Piccadilly or spent laborious days in some awful East End factory would sing

‘The boy I love is up in the gallery,

The boy I love is looking down at me,

There he is, can't you see, waving of his handkerchief,

As merry as a robin that sings on a tree.’

 That, one of the most evocative of all the old music-hall songs, was made famous by Marie, though originally written for a less famed but beloved artist, Nellie Powers. Its composer, George Ware, was one of a host of those who wrote songs for the music hall – often commissioned or ‘owned’ by individual artists: Ella Shields made famous her husband William Hargreaves’ Burlington Bertie from Bow and Florrie Forde had a success with Harry von Tilzer’s Down at the old Bull and Bush. Charles Collins wrote for Marie (My old man) but also for Harry Champion (Any old iron and Boiled beef and carrots). Harry J. Sayers sold Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay to Lottie Collins, and Henry E. Pether helped make Vesta Victoria a star by providing her with Waiting at the church.

The popularity of these tunes was universal, but they were written with a particular audience in mind – the composers and lyric-writers used situations with with which the poor, who scraped together pennies which admitted them to the Old Mo (the Middlesex, Drury Lane), the Shoreditch or Hackney Empires or the Oxford Music Hall, were familiar. When Gus Elen, with his thin, insinuating voice, sang about his little back garden with no view he was describing something his audience knew well:

   ‘by clinging to the chimbley

   You could see across to Wembley

   If it wasn't for the 'ouses in between’.

 Burlington Bertie was a portrait of a down-and-out with pretensions: ‘all airs and graces, correct easy paces’ but ‘Without  food so long I've forgot where my face is . . .’  When she sang ‘My old man said follow the van’ Marie was singing about eviction, trundling one’s belongings through the streets on a ‘barrer’. Too many girls could identify with Vesta Victoria when she sang:

‘There was I, waiting at the church

When I found he'd left me in the lurch

Lor, how it did upset me!’

When the music hall withered and died, as it did finally in the 1950s, defeated by television and changing taste – indeed, by the disappearance of much of its original impoverished audience – those of us who loved it mourned the sad demolition of old music halls like the Metropolitan, Edgware Road, where I saw some of the last of the stars to survive: G. H. Elliot, billed as (grit your teeth) ‘The Chocolate-Coloured Coon’, with his blacked-up face and white top hat singing ‘Lily of Laguna’ and ‘I used to sigh for the silv’ry moon’ – and his friend Randolph Sutton, whose great success was George Stevens’ song ‘On mother Kelly’s door-step.’ ‘Good Old Randy!’ the sailors would chant in chorus from the gallery of the old Grand Theatre in Plymouth when the fleet was in.

Into old age Ella Shields would join them, still in impeccable white tie and tails singing Burlington Bertie and following it up, dressed as a sailor, lighting and smoking a pipe while she sang ‘What a difference the Navy’s made to me.’ When she was 73, in 1952, she went on-stage to do her usual act, and started her most famous number strangely with the words ‘I was Burlington Bertie . . .’  After finishing the song she collapsed on-stage, and died without regaining consciousness. The music hall, in a sense, died with her.

Don't just sit there - do something!

Whenever my parents came across me reading a book, which was most of the time, I alwayd had the feeling that they were within a moment of saying 'Why don't you stop reading and do something?' Not that they minded my reading, or did anything to discourage me; but they weren't readers themselves, in any real sense - Dad took the Daily Express ,but was entirely bemused by Beachcomber, whose wonderful column he simply didn't understand), and Mum occasionally looked at a women's magazine (always referred to as a 'book.' And it was always 'I'm looking at my book' rather than 'I'm reading', as though shameful time-wasting was going on).. But though there was a bookcase behind the settee, the books - a miscellaneous collection of gardening dictionaries and ill-bound novels on bad paper - to one of which, however, I believe I owe my forename) - were never discturbed. The point they missed, of course, was that reading is 'doing something' in the most profound sense - and having something done to one; the mind active, and the book changing the mind, adding to it, correcting and modifying it. The current critical fashion suggests that a reader brings as much to a book as the book brings to the reader; I've never believed this and would never want to believe it. Now, in my ninth decade, I am spending more time that ever 'doing something' by reading which is infinitely more valuable to the remaining years I have than combing the dogs, cleaning the coffee machine or (god help us) polishing my shoes.

What Mr Lilly thought about Gemini

Qualities of the Sign Gemini   It’s an aerial, hot, moyst, sanguine, Diurnal, common or double-bodied humain Signe; the diurnall house of Mercury; of the aery  triplicity, Westerne, Masculine.

Diseases   He signifies all Diseases or infimities in the Armes, Shoulders, Hands, corrupted Blood, Windinesse in the Veins, distempered Fancies.

Places Gemini Signifieth   Wainscot Houses, Plaistering and Wals of Houses, the Hals, or where Play is used, Hils and Mountaines, Barnes, Storehouses for Corne, Coffers, Chests, High Places.

Shape and Description   An upright, tall, straight Body either in Man or Woman, the Complexion Sanguine, not cleer, but obscure and dark, long arms, but many times the Hands and Feet short and very fleshy; a dark Haire, almost black; a strong, active Body, a good piercing hazel Eye, and wanton, and of perfect sight, of excellent understanding, and judicious in worldly affaires.

Kingdoms, Countries and Cities subject to Gemini   Lombardy, Brabant, Flanders, the West and Southwest of England, Armenia. London, Louvaine, Bruges., Norrimburg, Carduba, Hasford, Mentz, Bamberg, Cesena.

-          William Lilly, Christian Astrology (1647)