My diary entry for 11 December 1974 includes the phrase:
Disappearing World. Ongka’s Big Moka. Rather amusing.
In October 2016, while pondering the idea of Ogblog but before I had started the project in earnest, I uncovered this diary entry and vaguely remembered the television programme to which it referred.
I Googled the programme name and read the Wikipedia entry, which, at that time, reported that the programme was first broadcast in 1976 – probably when it received its first US airing. A bit more Googling enabled me to confirm 11 December 1974 as the first airing date so I (in the form of Ged Ladd who is an occasional but keen Wikipedia editor) corrected the Wikipedia entry.
Anyway, since my October 2016 detective work, someone has, helpfully, uploaded the Ongka’s Big Moka film to YouTube:
It might have been this television documentary that sparked my lifelong interest in the tribes and cultures of Oceania.
I do also remember being inspired by the exhibits from the Pacific South Seas in the Horniman Museum, on an Alleyn’s School visit, probably around that time, but I do not recall which of those inspiring introductions, television or museum, came first.
Perhaps I’ll find a reference to the Alleyn’s visit somewhere in my diaries, but it might be pre-diaries or during one of my irritating diary-writing-intervals in those early years.
One of my old school pals might just help me to date that school visit, although I suspect there were plenty of such visits on field days “back then”, as the Horniman was such an easy place to visit from the school. So unless I did something memorable on that trip…
…I dread to think what memorable thing I might done, but my lifelong interest in that part of the world does include a fascination with koteka.
Still, I suspect that the date of my visit to the Horniman is either in my diaries or lost in the mists of time.
Images scraped with loving care from Alleyn’s Scriblerus
I went with my parents on the Saturday evening to see the last night of that year’s Bear Pit production; a double-header no less – The Lesson & The Real Inspector Hound.
Let us gloss over the monumental water polo victory in the morning…11-7 that reads, just in case you are finding my handwriting a little hard to read.
Let us not linger over the fact that the 12-year-old me thought it important to say that I thought the Generation Game was good…
…whereas 12-year-old me failed completely to mention that Barry White – “The Walrus Of Love” – “The Pachyderm Of Passion” – was riding high at the top of the charts at that time with this classic sound:
No. Let us please focus on Bear Pit production for December 1974. My job back then as a juvenile critic was to be clear, incisive and decisive in my opinions. I think I achieved that:
Bear Pit. The Lesson – boring. Inspector Hound – good.
The late, great, Trevor Tindale spent at lest 100 times as many words saying…if I have understood the thrust of his argument correctly…more or less exactly the same thing in Scriblerus some months later.
…and went to Sicily with my parents, turning 12 while I was there… [Ogblog yet to be writ on this topic. Alleyn’s pals didn’t want to know all about it in autumn 1974, I doubt if anyone is desperate to know about it in autumn 2024]. The photos can be viewed through this link or below.
Then I went back to school, joining 2AK. By the end of November, I was ready to be a diarist again – indeed I kept a diary pretty much unbroken for the next 14 years, after which I switched to event logs to accompany my appointment diaries.
I think I might have taken some guidance from my parents or friends on what to write about, in the immediate aftermath of my return to diary writing. I talk a lot about what I saw on TV and for a while prefaced each daily report with a one word summary of the weather. The latter habit soon passed. The watching much TV habit passed once I finished school, so my knowledge of soap operas and comedy shows is extremely patchy for the 1980s and almost non-existent by the 1990s, when for many years I had no TV at all!
My handwriting was truly terrible back in my school days, made worse by the use of coloured Tempo felt tip pens (or occasionally pencil or goodness-knows-what-sort-of-writing-implement) for the diary.
I am reliably informed by educationalist friends that my bad handwriting and terrible spelling would no longer justify a clip around the ear and recriminations about my laziness by school-teachers. Apparently it is a condition known as dysgraphia, which would open up all manner of possibilities for my special needs, including the provision of IT equipment in class and at home to assist me, plus, presumably, pity rather than opprobrium.
Anyway, let me try to transliterate the first few days of my return to being a diarist:
Saturday, 30 November 1974 – Performed whodunnit play. Afternoon uneventful. Dick Emery and Upstairs Downstairs good.
Sunday, 1 December 1974 – Classes started a Hanukah play. Afternoon Grandma Anne’s. Planet of the Apes on TV v good.
Monday 2 December 1974 – Inter-form soccer v good. Extra + Rothbart. TV Likely Lads, Waltons and Call My Bluff v good.
Tuesday, 3 December 1974 – French, maths and Latin tests. Classes v good. TV Paper Moon and Mighty Continent.
I cannot remember anything about the whodunnit play, but I think Michael Lempriere was our English teacher that year (other 2AK folk might confirm or deny) – if so, then drama-oriented English class activities were very much his thing.
Weirdly, although I report that the inter-form soccer on the Monday was “v good”, the rear of the diary also records, dutifully, that our opponents were 2AS and that we lost 2-6. Was I really that good a loser back then?
I have no idea what “Extra + Rothbart” means, other than a sneaking suspicion that Bernard Rothbart must have refereed that game and presumably gave us some extra practice and/or coaching after the match, that pleased me. I remember Mr Rothbart a chess and hockey master, not soccer. And of course I will never forget about his sad demise just five year’s later:
Thursday, 5 December 1974 – 40 out of 50 for Latin test – good. No other positions. Learnt Hanukkah baruchas [prayers] with Mr Morris. Mastermind and Monty Python v good.
Friday, 6 December 1974 – Rather uneventful. PE good. Ken Dodd quite good.
The PE was more likely to have been with Mr Sherlock or Mr Berry than with my form master, Tony King. But they were all of the sporty teachers, for sure.
What a sporty day Wednesday 4 December 1974 must have been for me. Just in case you cannot read what the day’s entry says:
11th in chemistry.
Fives lost 15-3 to Wrightson & Weber, beat Mason & Candappa 15-7 and beat Pavasi & I Goodwin 15-3, 15-0.
Fridge ball 533.
Some of this perhaps needs explaining. “11th in chemistry” is and perhaps will remain a bit of a mystery. 11th in the year would be quite good; whereas 11th in the class more predictably mediocre in that subject. It’s not well explained in the diary; much like my answers in the chemistry test, no doubt.
No, it is the fives and the fridge ball that caught my eye for further exposition.
Looks as though Cookie and I warmed up as the afternoon went on; perhaps this was a breakthrough afternoon for our nascent doubles pairing. Earlier references to fives in my diary seem to be singles games.
Apologies to David Pavesi – firstly for the surprising mis-spelling of his name, as we knew each other well from primary school as well as at Alleyn’s. But also apologies to him and Ian “Milk” Goodwin for the drubbing. Why we played a second set against those two after a convincing first set I really cannot imagine. Perhaps they requested another chance. Perhaps we four wanted to play some more and everyone else had disappeared.
Fridge Ball
I suppose I do need to explain the magnificent and extraordinary sport of fridge ball, just in case the reader is unfamiliar with the game.
In short, fridge ball is to table tennis what real tennis is to modern (lawn) tennis, but instead of a medieval courtyard, which is the theatre of play for real tennis, the theatre of play for fridge ball is a modern kitchen. Fridge ball is played with a ping-pong bat and a ping-pong ball.
Sadly, there are no photographs of the 3 Woodfield Avenue, London, SW16 fridge ball court as it looked in 1974, but there is a photograph of the court from 2012, when the house was being refurbished in preparation for letting – see below.
In front of the visible wall (to the left of the picture) stood a large 1960’s-style fridge-freezer; the surface against which the ball has to be hit. The floor surface back then was linoleum of a rather insipid hue. In the photograph you can actually see a layer of blue glue awaiting some fancy modern flooring substance, the suitability of which for fridge ball was not even tested.
The game, simply, is to hit the ball against the fridge door as many times as possible, ideally getting some interesting bouncy business off the floor and/or the jauntily angled pantry door (shown open in the photo but naturally closed for play) and/or the panel doors below the sink,and/or divider doors (just out of shot at the bottom of the photo, which at the time had helpfully unobtrusive recess slots rather than potentially rally-ruining handles).
If the ball is accidentally hit to the left of the fridge (to the kitchen entrance), the ball is out and the rally is over. If the ball is hit to the the right of the fridge (an entrance that leads to a little laundry area and side door to the house), the ball is out and the rally is over. If the ball is hit above the fridge, gawd help you because the ball will probably get stuck behind the fridge and is the devil’s own job to retrieve. Needless to say the rally is over but also, almost certainly, your enjoyment for the evening, as mum and dad take matters into their own hands to terminate the game at that juncture.
If you hit the ball hard enough for it to get some action off the back surface or the cooker, the ball is still in play but that is a dangerous tactic given the strange bounces you might get back there. Aficionados of real tennis might enjoy the idea of hitting the grill/grille – a winning shot in realers but merely part of the ongoing fun/difficulty in fridgers.
Where you can see drawers at the back of the court/right hand side of the photograph, in my day there was a recess under a surface there and a stool kept in that space. If the ball went into that recess it was out and the rally was over, making the back of the court even more treacherous than it would be today.
A second bounce does not necessarily terminate the point, although most second bounce situations tend to lead to the ball not bouncing at all and ending up dead, which thus ends the rally.
It really is a magnificent game, full of skill and playable as an addictive solo game, not entirely unlike the pinball addiction that subsequently grabbed me for some time. Indeed given the size of our family kitchen, it worked best as a solo game.
But here’s the thing.
Fridge ball 533.
Just think about that for a moment. A 533 stroke rally. That is a remarkable score.
I think there was also a playing condition that allowed for externalities (such as mum wanting to do the washing up or dad wanting a cup of tea), such that the player could catch the ball in the non-bat hand (not scoring a stroke for the catch, btw) and then continue the rally once the interruption was over. Frankly, I can’t imagine having had the run of the kitchen for long enough to score 533 without such a playing condition. Not on a midweek evening after playing four sets of fives at school.
What a marathon sporting day.
Does anyone reading this piece remember playing fridge ball with me or similar games in their own (or other people’s) homes? I’d love to hear all about it if you did.
Although I started keeping a diary at the beginning of 1974, after just four months of that daily routine I then took a sabbatical for nearly seven months. I must have been exhausted from all that scribbling.
So May to November 1974 is a bit of an unrecorded blur, which is a shame.
Michael, like me, had grown up around Tooting Bec Common. Lord’s might be our field of dreams now, but back then, the only cricket pitch we were likely in any way to experience live once school was out for the summer, could be found on that common:
Tooting Bec Common – our field of dreams back then
1974 was the second summer of my proper cricket awareness – avidly following the major games on the TV and/or radio, wanting to catch a bit of the Sunday League match on telly if I could…
…but probably was the first summer that I and my entourage summoned the courage and sufficient equipment to venture onto the common to play.
If some of the bigger, older teenagers wanted the pitch, at that age it meant game over for us little-uns. I recall us challenging this pecking order once and returning home with bruises for our trouble. So our lot was sometimes reduced to trying to play on a relatively flat, well-shaved but ordinary patch of grass on the playground side of the common.
Just beyond the right hand side of this photo. I fancy a bowl on that.
I don’t suppose the pitch (or lack thereof) made much difference to our games back then, when we were 11 on 12. We weren’t yet physically equipped to use the full length of a pitch properly, nor were we playing with a proper cricket ball. I seem to recall using a rubber ball – heavier than a lawn tennis ball but nowhere near the weight and hardness of a cricket ball…mercifully.
I have a very clear memory of trying to emulate the players who had captured our imagination that summer; the players of England and Pakistan in 1974. The commentators had made much of Sarfraz Nawaz and the prodigious swing he was able to achieve with his bowling. We wanted to do that. Here’s a clip of one of his finest hours, the following year, against the West Indies:
My strongest memory, though, does not involve using any technique that the cricket coaches might deem helpful in making the ball swing…or for that matter in bowling with any form of accuracy or purpose.
No.
My strongest memory involves doing a little sideways jig at the start of the run up and then lolloping towards the crease to bowl. False memory had combined this unusual approach with Sarfraz Nawaz. His was a most memorable name; by the early 1980s expert marketeers were naming pop groups in similar rhyming style because such couplets are so memorable.
But I digress.
My research for this piece reveals that it was another Pakistan bowler whose run up had us “class of 1974” kids jigging hither and yon before bowling: Asif Masood. Here’s a clip of him bowling that year (at 2’56” and possibly other places) – dig the jig:
I would like to analyse Asif Masood’s run up a bit more. Wikipedia describes it thus:
a backward step before a loping approach to the wicket which John Arlott likened to “Groucho Marx chasing a pretty waitress”.
Whereas his Cricinfo entry describes it differently:
a bizarre start to his run-up in which he turned sideways to the wickets and leaned backwards before starting his approach.
You can judge for yourselves, dear readers, by watching the above clip. I am reminded of a Lancashire expression, which Asif Masood himself would no doubt understand now, as he married and settled in Bury after his cricket career:
‘Ere’s mi yed, mi arse is cummin.
The premature arrival of my upper torso and limbs does nothing but harm to my performance at ball sports – I’m pretty sure that the same applied to my friends on the common – but that didn’t stop us from becoming convinced that the secret of success was to emulate that run up. I’m here to tell you that we were mistaken.
Of course we didn’t want to BE these Pakistan stars; we wanted to BE the England stars. Geoff Arnold, for example, with his furtive look of teeth-gritted concentration as he ran up – we emulated that too. I cannot find a clip of Geoff Arnold bowling, but he is still hanging around at Surrey, would you believe, so you can find recent interviews and all sorts by clicking here.
Chris Old’s days of glory against Pakistan came four years later – this was the only fairly relevant clip of him bowling I could find – don’t blink or you’ll miss it:
https://youtu.be/j9KgmiGBWA8
Quite lollopy too, Chris Old’s run up. Not as lollopy as Asif’s, obviously, but enough lollop to enable the 11 year old impersonator to switch from being Asif to Old by the simple expedient of eliminating the sideways jig.
So who were the heroes of that summer of 1974? I’m not talking about the actual test match and ODI heroes – you can look them up through the above links for pity’s sake – no, I mean the Tooting Bec Common heroes. The 11/12 year olds who were performing far more exciting feats of glory. No “three test matches – all drawn” for us.
I’m struggling to remember, so will simply brain dump what little remains in my brain in the hope that it triggers some memories in others. Apologies to those forgotten or misrepresented through inclusion.
Andrew (now Andy) Levinson lived in our street and was a perennial companion in those games. Stuart Harris (no relation; one of the “Naff Harris’s” from the posh end of the road) would sometimes join us, for sure, although my diary has more to say about Stuart in the context of tennis than cricket:
I recall getting into a scrape with David Pavesi, Andy and others, when some bigger boys thought we were on their patch, but I think that might have been Clapham Common nearer to the Pavesi house, as I recall Mrs Pavesi nursing our bruises and egos after the incident. I don’t recall David venturing to join us at Tooting Bec but he might have done.
Alan Cooke would often come around to my place and I suspect that some of those games involved him.
Other Alleyn’s folk, such as Paul Deacon and Jonathan Barnett, were certainly cricket lovers with whom I watched and talked cricket, but I don’t recall playing cricket with them in the holidays. I also remember talking cricket a lot with Richard Hollingshead that summer term (another story for another day), but I don’t recall playing with him.
Lloyd Green might have joined us occasionally, as might Stuart and Jeremy Starkin, Richard and Graham Laikin…although I remember those lads for football on the common, not cricket.
What better way to get a kid like me enthused about a sport than to give it a sense of danger and prohibition. Thank you, Miss Plumridge.
To summarise, in the summer of 1974 we wanted to play cricket and we wanted to look the part. Roll the clock forward several decades and I think the following photo proves that I did indeed acquire a fair chunk of that “look the part” skill, without acquiring much, if anything, else that could be described as skill.
With thanks to Charles Bartlett for this deceptive picture of me circa 2004
But a love for a game like cricket is also a gift. I might not have been born with talent, nor could I acquire very much skill through graft or imitation, but the love of the game is certainly also a gift. And part of that love for cricket was formed as a kid, playing those silly games, emulating our heroes, on Tooting Bec Common.
Playing cricket in the back drive behind our houses in Woodfield Avenue.
There was nowhere suitable to erect my stumps. Propped against the garage door was unsatisfactory.
There was one vaguely suitable pot-holey area but that meant bowling up hill with little run up and the holes were not well placed for the even distribution of stumps.
That same yard some 50 years later, with thanks to Ayres Treefellers for the picture
Until, one day, the kindly gentleman next door in 3a, Cyril Barnett, proudly produced for me a piece of plywood with three holes in it specifically designed for the insertion of the stumps.
This device – which was a rudimentary version of the above Salford loo stump device and which bears some resemblance, in design terms, to the beer-carrying device King Cricket has named The Device…
…worked brilliantly for yard cricket, enabling the stumps to be placed wherever made sense – which was different placement depending on whether it was simply bowling practice or a game of yard cricket with a mate.
The best thing about this form of stump device was the ability to make the entire thing fall over if you really did hit the stumps flush and with reasonable force. This I rarely managed myself with my floaty donkey-drops – it was more a thing that my opponents might do to me with a bit of medium pace, full and straight.
Sadly no photos survive of Cyril Barnett’s device but I have found a picture of Cyril, probably taken two or three years after he manufactured my stump-thingie.
Cyril teaching me pancake making while my dad was teaching me a bit about photography.
What a kindly neighbour he was. He would have appreciated the two night visit to Manchester in March 2019 that triggered this memory, in part because Cyril was from Manchester himself. Also because I went there to see Rags The Musical and the rag trade was precisely the thing he was in…when he wasn’t doing carpentry or pancake making with and for me.
Sitting at Lord’s in August 2018, watching what is now a relatively rare Indian batting collapse in a test match, I was reminded of the first Indian cricket tour of England that entered my consciousness, in 1974, which also included an historical collapse at Lord’s.
But in 1974 I was not at Lord’s, I was on the South Downs, at the end of my first year at Alleyn’s, on a 1S field trip led by the Head of the Science Department, John S Clarke.
“Who were 1S?”, I hear you cry. The following diary extract/piece explains:
Several people on that list might have better, or at least different, memories of that field trip. I’d love to learn those recollections.
I remember the trip, on the whole, as an unpleasant experience for me. I don’t think I needed much to put me off camping more or less for life – that field trip did most of the job.
I recall I got stung by a wasp early in the trip and had a nasty reaction to the bite, not only in terms of the wound swelling & the resultant pain/discomfort, but also no little fear. John Clarke was a precautionary fellow who insisted that we keep a close eye on the toxic wound and who, as an educationalist, left me in no doubt and spared me no detail about how serious it could be if the toxins got out of control in my body – which in the end they didn’t.
I also (perhaps as a side effect of the sting – possibly exposure to some rare South Downs pollen I have never encountered since) suffered the symptoms of quite severe hay fever for the only time in my life, which lingered throughout the trip.
I do recall that the actual walking on the South Downs bit, which was the field trip’s main purpose, was nevertheless most enjoyable. The trip probably did as much to forge a lifetime’s love of hill walking as it did to put me off camping.
My other abiding memory of that trip was the test match radio commentary, provided, second hand, by Richard Hollingshead, who had a portable transistor radio held firmly to one ear, on the Monday of the trip, while we walked the Downs.
Those of us who straggled towards the back of the walking party probably looked a little like the following Bergman film extract, with Richard the character at the rear, listening and then calling out the astonishing events from Lord’s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abusPM-9mqQ
India metaphorically collapsed and died in a heap that day. 42 all out in 17 overs – the joyous listening session can’t have lasted all that long. Richard Hollingshead was seemingly ecstatic each time another wicket fell and was full of the stats (presumably being fed to him by the BBC cricket commentary team) of the records that were tumbling and might tumble along with the tumbling of wickets.
I have found a little video that shows that ignoble Indian batting performance/ glorious England bowling performance. Geoff Arnold and Chris Old became my heroes; not just for one day.
But when I got home that evening, there was no point telling my parents about the wonders I had enjoyed, vicariously, on that broadcast from Lord’s. They had no interest in cricket.
I did need to explain the swelling on my body and the precautionary observations and applications still needed (just in case), plus the hay-feverish sniffles. I probably had blisters and muddy clothes to explain too.
I remember my mum saying that the whole episode made her think of the song “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah” by Allan Sherman; I think she had a point:
https://youtu.be/4yFTOvO0utY
Other recollections or corrections about that trip will be most gratefully received.
Although my 1974 diary fell silent for a few months in April 1974, I recall some aspects of my musical education from that period rather well. Alleyn’s School played a major part in that, but not the only part.
Pop Kennard, our Alleyn’s music teacher, did not do a great deal for my singing voice that year either. I recall him getting us to listen to and then try to sing Schubert’s Das Wandern in an English translation “To wander is the miller’s joy…”, which did not sound like the following in our unbroken and untrained voices:
“Take me to your lieder” – that’s what I would have said had I been familiar with the word “lieder”
My contribution to such singing in those days would have provided enthusiastic volume but would have lacked desirable sound, I am pretty sure.
I have subsequently been taking singing lessons by Zoom with “Miss Honey” since early in the pandemic and have improved beyond measure – my early efforts at improvement blogged about here:
I noted in my diaries early in 1974 that my dad invested in a high quality hi-fi at that time. He plumped for that ahead of a colour television set, which we did without for another couple of years while he saved up for one of those as well.
A fair chunk of dad’s enthusiasm for a hi-fi will have been to do with my musical education and the sense my parents will have had that my most impressive musical skill would be listening to music rather than performing it.
I’ll write separately about the small but neat collection of classical gramophone recordings my parents acquired for me and helped me to acquire. Mostly middle-brow stuff, getting me familiar with the conventional classical canon.
But one evening, dad spotted a concert being broadcast on BBC Radio and decided to get busy properly rigging up the hi-fi so that the concert might be recorded to a (then) high quality on the reel-to-reel for future listening.
Connect this beauty to the tuner and the speakers and the Sony TC377 depicted above. Simples.
Monteverdi’s eighth book of madrigals – The Madrigals Of Love And War – performed by the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra under John Elliot Gardiner.
Why dad was so keen to record this particular broadcast I don’t really know. I think he liked the sound of Renaissance music but found it hard to relate to sacred music from that period. High quality secular music of that period was not to be heard on the radio every day.
Dad made this recording on a 5 3/4 inch spool which I still have in a dungeon somewhere and have digitised along with all of the other spools from the Harris collection.
If you want to hear what those madrigals sound like, the following recording by the Consort of Musicke is a very decent quality version – frankly more to my taste now than the Eliot Gardiner style.
Anyway, fact is that this stuff became my ear worms at the end of my first year at Alleyn’s.
What Were Supposed To Be My Ear Worms In Early June 1974? The Top Five In the Charts, That’s What.
To close this piece, here are the top 5 UK chart hits from that week in 1974.
5: There’s A Ghost In My House by R Dean Taylor became an ear worm of mine many years later, when I got into Motown and Northern Soul, but I doubt if it even entered my consciousness in 1974:
4: The Streak by Ray Stevens went on to be number one for a while and was certainly the subject of our schoolboy chatter back then. “There seems to have been some disturbance here” was a catch phrase that did the rounds then, along with the Monty Python ones. I wonder what Pop Kennard would have had to say about the music therein:
3: Hey Rock ‘n’ Roll by Showaddywaddy was most certainly an ear worm back then. This number had entirely escaped my consciousness until I reheard it just now. Now it is stuck in my ear again. It was a seriously retro number even in 1974, although not as retro as Monteverdi madrigals, obviously:
2: This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us by Sparks. In truth, I don’t remember this track from that 1974 period. A few years later I had a copy of this track on a compilation album and then sought out a copy of Kimono My House (the album from whence it came) which was and remains an all-time favourite of mine. Kimono My House was very much my earworm in March 1981, when the story described in the following ThreadMash performance piece was live:
1: Sugar Baby Love by The Rubettes. Another ridiculously retro sound topped the charts that week.
How did that get to number one in the charts in 1974? Yet – listen closely. Do I detect a variant of the folia progression in there? Is Sugar Baby Love, in a sense, a setting for six voices based on a tradition pioneered in 17th century madrigals? Might Paul de Vinci of the Rubettes possibly have been related to Leonardo?
Monteverdi and Pop Kennard might be turning in their respective graves.
Back then, if I wrote “Herbie” I meant this anthropomorphic vehicle…
I ran out of steam for diary entry writing towards the end of April 1974. Well, I had been doing it for nearly four months by then. I suppose I had earned a sabbatical, or perhaps I was afflicted with juvenilia-writer’s-block.
When I returned to diary-writing at the end of November 1974, I think my efforts were pretty much continuous for a further 15 years. I regret the absence of entries between May and November 1974, but there’s not much I can do about that now.
Ian Sandbrook (who was my 1S form master and is now my e-mail-pen-pal) suggests that I could ask a chat-bot to make up some entries. But that strikes me as a rather low grade task for such a pinnacle of technology. If vast amounts of processing power is going to produce confabulatory text, it should do so on matters of greater import than my 11/12 year old’s diary entries.
I might try trawling my memory and the memories of other Alleyn’s alums for tales of derring-do in the summer term of 1973/74 and the autumn term of 1974/75. I certainly have a few summer holidays memories to share from that year.
Anyway, let’s make the most of what we have left, a few rather sketchy days bringing up the end of the Easter break and the start of the summer term:
Sunday, 21 April 1974 – Classes morn. Afternoon G[randma] Anne.
Monday, 22 April 1974 – Russell [Holland] – Herbie and Run Cougar Run. A good day.
Tuesday 23 April 1974 – New [term] at school, G Jenny afternoon, Classes.
Wednesday, 24 April 1974 – Sports – fives and tennis – uneventful – all ok.
Thursday, 25 April 1974 – Latin ok.
Russell Holland was a friend from my primary school, Rosemead.
There’s Russell at our Rosemead passing out parade, left of picture. Alan Cooke (both Rosemead and Alleyn’s) is the other boy in this picture
It’s quite a childish idea, an anthropomorphic car with a mind of its own, but then the Herbie movies were Disney films. My anthropomorphic car, Dumbo, writes sensibly about all manner of things when the fancy takes him, sometimes on my blog and sometimes on King Cricket, such as the following piece about his run in with the police…
It seems I played a bit of tennis as well as cricket that summer term at Alleyn’s and it seems we started learning Latin, I think with Doggie Johnson, the junior school head.
Perhaps I am confusing my Hebrew classes with my Latin classes, but I think the lessons might have gone a bit like this:
OK, in truth my memory fades, but I still find that Life of Brian sketch one of Python’s very best. If other alums from my year wish to chime in with memories from that third term at Alleyn’s, real, false or just funny, now would be a good time.
If you need a musical memory jogger, the following was Number One and a sound you just couldn’t avoid at that time:
Escaping from the Colditz prisoner of war camp…but only for fun
Tennis continued to loom large in my Easter holidays story, although it is clear from my diary entries that others were losing interest, making the visits to the tennis club rarer:
OK, OK, I’ll translate it. Just hold on a tick.
Sunday, 7 April 1974 – Yomtov [Pesach, aka Passover], so no [Hebrew] classes. Not a good day.
Monday, 8 April 1974 – Bought paints. Painted soldiers. Another bad day!!!!
Tuesday, 9 April 1974 – The Black Arrow [1973] cartoon in morn. Afternoon tennis coaching. No classes, so later tennis.
Wednesday, 10 April 1974 – A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court cartoon. Tennis very good Gary and Mark were there only -people are losing interest.
Thursday, 11 April 1974 – very uneventful.
Friday, 12 April 1974 – Good Friday – Dad home. Good fun. Dad had fun too! Shopped for suits.
Saturday, 13 April 1974 – took a rest. Uneventful day.
I managed to find the Connecticut Yankee film on YouTube, but not The Black Arrow one from the 1970s:
I’m trying to work out who Gary and Mark (the last lads standing with me playing tennis) might have been. I’ll guess that Gary was Gary Sugarman who lived in our road. Gary did have a brother whose name escapes me – possibly Mark. I don’t remember a Mark in our street or entourage from thereabouts.
A message from Alan Cooke which I think unequivocally solves the “source of Escape From Colditz” query:
The Cooke household certainly owned ‘Escape from Colditz’. It was an unusual board game as it required one player to be the German Security Officer who essentially had to thwart all the others.
The rules were a bit vague in some areas allowing vibrant ‘discussion’ in family play
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What better way to get a kid like me enthused about a sport than to give it a sense of danger and prohibition. Thank you, Miss Plumridge.
