I wrote letters to mum and dad which doubled as my diary/travelogue. Here is a scan of the third of them.
Category: Friends and Family Events
Second Letter From Mauritius, 17 July 1979
I wrote letters to mum and dad which doubled as my diary/travelogue. Here is a scan and then transcription of the second of them, which relates to 17 July 1979.
Dear folks,
As you may have realised from the drift at the end of letter one, I had the inspiration to save writing time. You want to know what I’m doing all the time and I want to keep a diary. Thus I am sending you my diary as I go along which is why I wanted to keep the letters for me when I come back. Please send me news from home about once a week or fortnight or I will feel forgotten.
This morning we first went to Lynford Smith’s house (the priest from England) who drove us to Rose Hill to Garçon’s house…
In July 2019, writing up these pieces around the 40th anniversary of my visit, I managed to trace Lynford Smith to St Barnabas Church, an Anglican community in Vancouver – click here.
If anything changes at St Barnabas, here is a link to a scrape of that page taken in July 2019.
… from where we went to Port Louis for the day .
There we had a workers lunch in the market, a full lunch for a big 10p (a little less). We then visited Jan Sooknah a cousin of Bill’s. who immediately insisted we go to his house for tea and was very pleased to see us. He is a lawyer. All lawyers here are very rich. He lives in the district which is the Mauritian equivalent of Beverly Hills or Hampstead Garden Suburb!!!
They want us to stay there for a while: we may do later. Then we came home for supper where we had octopus; the food is superb!!
We went for a walk after supper and befriended the sons of the owner of the café (very convenient) and some of their friends. Marraz Biltoo is very popular around here and knowing him means instant acceptance and friendship.
Sugar cane grows like grass in Mauritius, you just tear it off the trees. It has the fascinating property that the fibres (if you carry on chewing rather than spit them out) clean your teeth and are good for the gums.
We are having the time of our lives here, the weather is good And improving. It is so different from England you wouldn’t believe it.
I won’t write a whole letter every day; soon the news will become less no doubt, so I will dig sections of letters, but I will be writing each day, you could say.Anyway all the best, have fun, lots of love Ian
First Letter From Mauritius, 16 July 1979
I wrote letters to mum and dad which doubled as my diary/travelogue. Here is a scan followed by a transcript of the first of them, which relates to 16 July 1979.
For those who struggle to read my beautiful manuscript, here is a dictated transcription:
Dear Ma and pa,
Well here I am, in Mauritius. It’s 7:15 AM and the sun will soon be making its presence felt. We are right at the tail end of the wintry weather (that means cold nights), but wrapped up in a blanket I was quite warm enough, so the assurance that I won’t need the blanket for much longer is quite irrelevant. Mindyou, I’d have slept like a log through anything after getting about half an hours sleep on the plane.
The flight was most enjoyable. At Heathrow we met a Biltoo, Arriss, who travelled with us and being in aviation he knows the ropes. Bahrain, our first stop (at 1:45 GMT 3:45 Bahrain time) was smelly, with workers sleeping around on the airport floors etc.Seychelles wouldn’t let us off, as it was raining when we stopped there, but the weather in Mauritius was lovely.
We arrived at 11:15 GMT, 2:15 Mauritius time and were met by Marraz (whose home I am in now) Garçon (with chauffeur to take all our bags) and Narrain (whose wife is one of Bill’s sisters). Of course they brought their families with them, (except Narrain as there was no room to 6 kids). First of all we drove to Garçon’s house.
The first thing that struck me on the journey was the extreme poverty. People living in rusty shacks etc. The second thing was the wonderful smell of the island, this mainly caused by sugar cane.
Garçon’s house at Rose Hill is like a mansion. We may stay there for a while. We quickly moved on to Narrain’s house – that was when we met Tiffin (Bill’s sister) and the six children. Then we went to Marraz’s house. Marraz has pull here, so the words Marraz Biltoo got us straight through customs etc. at the airport.
That evening we were visited by the Anglican priest from Catford [Lynford Smith] who I recognise and who recognises me. He says you can’t possibly see Mauritius unless you live with Mauritian people for some time, like I’m doing.Anyway I’ll be in touch soon, lots of love Ian.
PS Please keep my letters as I’m too busy to write everything down for you and keep a diary
I refer to Anil’s dad as “Bill” in these letters, but I remember him as Dat (or Dutt) and I am pretty sure everyone in Mauritius called him Dat. Perhaps Bill was his nickname or simplified name in England.
Drewy’s Party and Subsequent Matzo Ramble, 14 and 15 April 1979
I have been reminded of this weekend by several coincidences in the past few days/weeks.
Firstly, I used the following photograph to illustrate one of my party pieces from 1979 (no photos from the event itself) only for it to dawn on me and other commentators what the origins of the following photo must be.
Also, as part of my Ogblogging, I uploaded one of my old NewsRevue songs, Privatise, which is sung to the tune of Bright Eyes. It’s a real good one, though I say so myself – click here.
I played Bright Eyes while working on the Privatise/NewsRevue piece and it brought on a solid wave of memory from that April 1979 weekend. You couldn’t get away from Bright Eyes that spring; it was the Easter Number One, it was everywhere. I’ll insert a link at the end of this piece as a reward for those who…scroll all the way down there…I mean read this fine piece of mine in its entirety.
Drewy’s Party 14 April 1979
I don’t remember ever decorating at Anil’s house, but that’s what the diary says I did, before going on to Drewy’s place in Harrow-On-The -Hill for the party.
There was a group of visiting BBYOniks from the USA (New Jersey I believe) in town – earlier diary references cover earlier sessions with them. That is probably why I took my camera. Indeed, the photos of Drewy’s party are the only party photos I took throughout those years (unless you consider the conventions to have been several-days-long parties, which is not a ridiculous contention).
The stack of pictures from the party itself, all 31 of them, can be viewed here. A few good examples follow.
A few familiar faces (and some unfamiliar ones) in the above picture. All familiar faces in the picture below.
Simon Jacobs showed off his cigarette party trick for the camera:
I’ll need to do some work in Photoshop to enable people to see Simon’s smoke well – but I’m sure you all get the idea.
Drewy could do a perplexed expression for the camera in those days, so he did that.
It was a big house, the Drewy house. Many of us stayed. Frankly, that number of people often found ways of squeezing into smaller houses – this Ivor Heller Party piece from the previous spring (1978) refers.
Aftermath and Ramble, 15 April 1979
So how have I managed to find solid evidence that my unidentified fragments of negative, including the above “trews-free in the park” picture come from the same weekend?
Not so easy.
The main suspect in “the mysterious case of the trews-free gentleman” (see the first photo of this piece, above) now lives in the USA himself. When approached, he immediately started pleading the fifth amendment, which I think has something to do with bearing arms – I really should have made more attention when I did that comparative law module…whatever, I knew I’d need to handle this character very carefully indeed.
Still, once the gentleman had been offered immunity (which is apparently what you do with guilty folk in America to get them to sing), he sang like a canary.
More conclusively, now that I have gone back to the original negatives and looked at the whole fragment, I have also found the following picture on the same strip:
Also on the same strip, a couple of nice pictures of Linda, so she must have been there too. Perhaps she has some memories of this weekend to add:
Given the negative numbers and the fragmentary nature of the negatives, I am vaguely recalling that this roll of film was not finding its way happily into and through my camera. Indeed, from the depths of my memory, I think the camera jammed on the ramble, hence the shortage of pictures on that stack.
My diary is clear that we went on from Drewy’s place to a ramble:
Case proven.
As I write (14 April 2017) it is the 38th anniversary of the Drewy Party and Matzo Ramble weekend. An auspicious anniversary, as it happens, because this is Easter weekend and also the middle days (Chol Hamoed as they are known) of Passover, an unusual coincidence of festivals, just as it was in 1979.
In the run up to this Easter, there has been a storm in a teacup in the UK about Easter Egg Hunts being renamed as Cadbury Egg Hunts – click here. Whether this was done for marketing purposes or was, as some have suggested, “political correctness gone mad” to remove the specific reference to “Easter” I neither know nor care…
…but in the spirit of the modern era, perhaps we should rename the Matzo Ramble as a Rakusen’s Ramble. Or, in honour of our recently departed visitors from New Jersey, a Manischewitz Meander…
…now I’m rambling. Have a look at the Bright Eyes vid below. Those with memories that go back that far, might just get a little memory flash of that 1979 spring. If so, I’d love to learn about your memories too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGyQmH9NZcw
An Evening At The George Canning, 8 April 1979
I enjoyed several evenings of beer and music with mates from Alleyn’s at the George Canning pub, Effra Road, Brixton.
I was reminded of it (April 2017) while writing up the party and rambling events of the following (Easter) weekend of April 1979 – click here – by spotting the following diary entry from the previous weekend, 8 April:
Went to George Canning in eve
No information in that diary entry on who my companions were that evening. I remember going to the George Canning with Jim Bateman more than once and also I’m pretty sure Mark Stevens. Perhaps also Paul Deacon and/or Graham Majin on at least one occasion; others joined us too, I think, on one visit or another. This aspect of my memory needs help.
But I do remember those evenings at the George Canning reasonably well.
In 1979, the pub looked more like the 1905 picture from this urban history site than the 2003 picture – click here – even though colour photography had just about emerged by 1979 (albeit not often in my camera).
As I recall it, the music on all my visits was British Rhythm & Blues – click here – much like the first albums by bands like the Rolling Stones, Manfred Mann, The Moody Blues, the Animals etc. Whether that R&B was the style of the place always or whether that was merely what you got on the nights we could afford, I don’t know.
But we could afford these evenings on a bit of saved pocket money. The beer was just a few pence more than normal, but if you eked out two pints over the evening you could still get a whole evening of beer and music for a quid.
The George Canning type of pub wasn’t a salubrious environment back then. I’m talking about 1979 Brixton, not the hipster “south-Shoreditch-like” inner London neighbourhood of today.
Indeed I don’t suppose my mum would have approved of us going there had she realised what a dive this pub was at that time; but Effra Road was also the location of the Brixton Shule (synagogue), so (in her mind) what could possibly go wrong just a hundred yards or so up the road from there?
From our point of view, it always felt safe and welcoming enough. The nights we went to the place, it was mostly populated by people who were there for a few beers and some music. Perhaps a few old regulars bemoaning the noise, but on the whole there was a sense of shared music-following purpose.
The place is now far more venue than drinking house; Hootananny Brixton – click here to see the site.
“Over 21s only” it says at the top of the web site…that might have proved to be a bit of a problem for us 16/17 year-olds.
Not bad reviews on Yelp for the current venue – click here.
Not so sure about it as a hostel if TripAdvisor reviews are to be believed – click here.
But looking back to 1979, other old friend’s memories of those outings to the George Canning would be most welcome.
Update: when I shared this piece on the Alleyn’s 1970s Facebook Group, both Mark Stevens and Neil Voce owned up to having been part of that scene.
Mark Stevens wrote:
I used to go and see a blues band there – the Southsiders…I think they were the band that pushed me towards blues more than anything else…
Neil Voce wrote:
Definitely used to go to see them at the George Canning as it was and the two brewers in Clapham
Abandoned By My Parents, The Only Thing For It Was To Party, 11 to 12 November 1978
8 November 1978 – Mum and Dad left first thing for Israel. School OK – cooked myself a delishous [sic] dinner.
Crumbs – my folks didn’t hang around – I had only turned 16 six weeks before they disappeared off on holiday and left me entirely on my tod.
9 November 1978 – School OK, played fives. Went next door for dinner. Linda came round later.
What a good sort Linda has always been. The diary shows many visits from Linda during those few weeks of parental absence. I’m sure Linda’s caring instincts were already in full force and she wanted to make sure I was OK on my own in that house.
10 November 1978 – School boring. Went to Auntie Pam’s for Indian dinner
11 November 1978 – Developed and printed in morning with Linda in morning. Got ready for party. Threw fantastic party…
…though I said so myself. The self-confidence, the certainty of opinion. Writing now (March 2017) I’d describe it as a positively Trumpian diary entry.
12 November 1978 It went on until approximately 6:15 in the morning…
…that’s a very specific, approximate timing from Ian Junior…
…went in evening to Stanmore installation (boring) and dance (great).
More certainty of opinion! I can only apologise to the Stanmore club members. In mitigation, I had discovered tonsil hockey earlier that year and was probably keen to try out my skills at the post installation party, hence my boredom during the official ceremony and my delight at the dance. Judging by the diary hieroglyphics and my memory this was a successful evening (indeed a very successful weekend) by my main criterion of success during that era.
13 November 1978 – Got home in the early hours to find an apple pie bed.
I have tried hard to extract confessions for this one; I have got precisely nowhere.
Ivor Heller’s Fifteenth Birthday Party, 20 to 21 May 1978
I was inspired to write up this piece (in March 2017) when I saw David and Ivor Heller’s Facebook postings about their parent’s 60th wedding anniversary.
It would be hard to exaggerate how much hospitality, kindness and generosity of spirit we members of Streatham BBYO (our youth club) received from David and Ivor’s lovely parents.
So, the following party memory is but one of many memories that sprang to mind when I saw the wonderful pictures from their diamond celebrations. Perhaps this party sprang first to mind because I have recently been swapping bants with old friends from Alleyn’s School about teenage parties. Indeed there will be a few more Ogblog postings about the subject of parties.
Ivor’s fifteenth birthday party was especially memorable though.
My diary pages are only of limited use:
I need to post two pages because the party unquestionably lasted more than one day.
For those unable to translate my scrawl, allow me to translate:
Saturday 20 May 1978:
went to Ivor’s party, great. stayed overnight…
Sunday 21 May 1978:
…and stayed the day too. Played snooker in afternoon. Great day.
That’s all he wrote, folks. But that isn’t all he remembers. Oh, no.
I remember that there were lots of people there. Many of “the usual suspects” from our club. Also far flung (North London, East London, some even West London, can you imagine?) friends and family of the Hellers. Like many of the house parties of my youth, “cosy” is a more appropriate term than, for example, “would have been well within commercial venue fire limits”. A great many of us stayed over, so the party remained cosy well into Sunday.
But there were not too many people for the cask of beer so generously provided. I think it was a firkin, I am absolutely certain it was Young’s, it seemed to be a never-ending supply of beer.
I have already written about youthful beer drinking from the summer before, at the Oval – click here. (Probably also Young’s back then). So don’t be shocked, timid reader. This was (or at least seemed) quite normal at that time. Anyway, fine ale was a great leap forward compared with my cheap cider party embarrassment story from three months earlier – click here. I’d also more or less learnt my lesson about quantity as well as quality by May 1978, thank goodness.
I remember getting inadvertently/accidentally doused in a rather pungent scent that Ivor had been given for his birthday. Thoroughly doused, to my irritation. I remember thinking that the resultant fog of scent would reduce or even extinguish my allure. Yet, contre Pepé Le Pew, it seemed to do me no harm at all that night.
So, what an evening, oh what a night and the fun continued throughout the rest of the weekend. I recall that several of the club crowd (and others) stuck around during Sunday; many of us went into Morden for the snooker in a rather seedy hall.
I love my comment from the Monday “all right at school today”, implying that surviving school the next day was an achievement in itself. Probably a very accurate reflection.
Others who enjoyed the Heller’s hospitality, in particular this superb party, might recall more. I’d love to hear some more memories, either through comments on this posting or by other means.
Visits To Greenwich and Brighton With Mum and Dad, 29 to 31 August 1977
I actually set out this morning (I am writing on 31 August 2017) to Ogblog 31 August 1997, in the form of a “what were you doing the day that Princess Diana died?” That I shall do once this piece is writ…now done – click here!
But once I realised that Janie and I went to a Greenwich tavern to meet John Random and Jenny Mill on 31 August 1997…
…and then realised that my previous visit to Greenwich for such purposes must have been about 20 years earlier…
…and then looked up that my previous visit had been EXACTLY twenty years earlier…
…I thought I’d better Ogblog both anniversaries and start with the earlier of them.
Here is a link to the Flickr album with the photos we took on those three days.
The diary page helped me a lot with this one:
I had wondered, when looking at the photo batch, whether I had got some negatives mixed up, as it looked to me as though some pictures of my dad in Brighton had got mixed up with a day trip to Greenwich.
But the diary reminds me that we went to Greenwich twice, going to Brighton on the day in-between.
That summer was the first time in my childhood that we had no family holiday.
Dad must have been very short of money at that time – the business had been doing badly for a few years by then. Dad probably couldn’t justify the expense of getting someone else to run the photographic shop for any amount of time during those commercially better end of summer weeks, even if he could have afforded the holiday itself…which he probably couldn’t.
So he/we simply took a long bank holiday weekend – I suspect he just kept the shop closed until the Thursday.
I have done this as a photo piece using the picture captions to tell the tale; I think the pictures themselves tell most of the story.
The diary suggests that we very much enjoyed our lunch at the Trafalgar Tavern.
Probably we enjoyed the lunch so much so that we didn’t get to see all the things we’d intended to see in Greenwich that day.
On 30 August, we went to Brighton. Only three photos from there that day – all of my dad being blown or blowing in the wind:
We clearly decided to return to Greenwich to finish our sightseeing on 31 August. We took lunch in the Cutty Sark this time, which I don’t think we liked as much as the Trafalgar Tavern back then, if I am reading between the lines of my diary correctly.
The weather looks miserable in the 31 August pictures, as does my mum:
A Visit To Billingsgate Fish Market With Andrew & Fiona Levinson Plus Pen Friend Valerie, 20 August 1977
I was reminded of this 1977 impromptu summer holidays outing at a recent (November 2017) gathering of the old school clan – click here or the link below:
Rock ‘N’ Rajasthan Evening, Mostly Alleyn’s Alumni, 14 November 2017
Not only did both Andrew and Fiona Levinson come up in the conversation that evening, but I realised, when the 1977 Billingsgate visit popped into my head, that the venue, The Rajasthan Restaurant, is just across the road from the old Billingsgate Fish Market. Weirdorama.
Here is the relevant page of my diary. Not much going on at that stage of the summer…
..apart from England winning the Ashes! Happy days.
This was the first year I didn’t go away with my parents during the summer school holidays since I was a toddler. I don’t think dad had the money for a holiday that year – business was not good.
Still, it seems that, on the Sunday before, I:
won 1p at kalooky [sic] all OK
Why Jewish grandmothers liked to play Kalooki – Jamaican Rummy is a mystery to me. I think it explained to some extent in Howard Jacobson’s book Kalooki Nights, which I commend to you.
That 1p will have contributed handsomely towards my bus fares and stuff.
On the Friday, the diary notes that I:
went out with Andrew, Fiona and Valerie (pen friend from France). No 23 in evening.
No 23 was my grandmother (of kalooki fame)’s flat. There was a three line whip for the family to gather and no kalooki on a Friday night. Don’t be ridiculous. On the sabbath? No, no, no. Kalooki was a Sunday thing.
What Andrew, Fiona, Valerie and I did on that Friday is lost in the bowels of my mind, so unless one of the others reads this and knows (please chime in if you do) the nature of the Friday activity will be lost for ever in the mists of time.
The Saturday diary entry is more explicit:
went to Billingsgate first thing with Andrew, Fiona and Valerie.
I do recall making a very early start of it and venturing out to Billingsgate with my camera in hand.
Who would have thought back then that I would end up writing a book on commerce, The Price Of Fish, using a multitude of fishy examples, some of which were spawned all the way back then at Billingsgate – click here or below:
But I digress…
…let us return to the 20 August outing. We clearly did a little more sightseeing before we went home – click the link below for the whole photo roll, which is available for all to see on Flickr – click here or below:
As a footnote, I’d like to make it clear that our behaviour with Fiona’s pen friend from France was exemplary, showing her the sights, sounds and smells of Old London Town and generally being hospitable.
I feel the need to make this “good behaviour” point explicit, because some of our fellow Alleyn’s alumni took a somewhat different attitude to French pen pals. Messrs Wellbrook and Grant, for example, hang your heads in shame as I link any Facebook-enabled readers to David Wellbrook’s confession piece on the matter of Chris Grant’s French pen friend in the summer of 1976 – click here for Facebook or below for the Ogblog imprint:
Tish tish.
Holiday In La Manga, Spain, With Mum And Dad, 21 August To 4 September 1976
This turned out to be our last family summer holiday together. The following year dad was brassic (skint) so we just did some day trips and stuff, e.g. Greenwich:
Then the year after that, I did BBYO camps while mum and dad went off and did their own thing early autumn.
I turned 14 on this La Manga holiday and I do remember feeling, even at that tender age, that I had sort of outgrown those family holidays. I sensed that mum and dad wanted some prime time together and I was no longer intrigued by going off and doing stuff with random youngsters who just happen to be on holiday with you.
We stayed in the Hotel Entremares – not the sort of place I might stay in now, but it is still there and looks OK. Mixed reviews now.
The hotel (and to some extent the resort) was brand new then and I suspect my dad picked up a late booking at low cost for a place that hadn’t yet gained a reputation.
Clearly we were treated like visiting celebrities:
There is a movie for this holiday which, believe it or not, actually did yield some “famous for 15 minutes material” many years later, when Visa rewarded me handsomely enough and used some clips in one of their adverts and vines. Here is the whole movie:
Here’s the Visa ad, which shows dad slapping on the tanning oil:
While here is a link to the Vine (remember those) of me and mum looking silly on a pedalo.
In those days La Manga was positioning itself for tennis in particular…
…but latterly (he says writing in February 2019) it has superb cricket facilities by all accounts – at least Middlesex CCC bowlers have just toddled off there to train.
In fact it was reading about Middlesex training in La Manga that made me reach for the 1976 file and Ogblog this holiday.
1976 was the cricketing year the the West indies thrashed England in every conceivable way. I missed the ODI thrashings by being in La Manga.
It also looks as though I missed a thrilling London derby at The Oval too – click here for the scorecard. I do like a match with a happy ending…
…and a season with a happy ending too – see the 1976 final table. So hopefully La Manga will be auspicious for Middlesex again in 2019.
Here is the full stack of photos from our 1976 family jaunt:
