This event came to me as a memory flash while in e-conversation with Rohan Candappa in December 2020 on the topic of that “limbo period” between Christmas and New Year. Rohan pointed out:
Limbo is a strangely schizophrenic word. It’s either a time when nothing is going on, or the most extreme dance you can imagine.
Suddenly it all came flooding back to me. The dinner & dance the day after my Barmitzvah. The Peacock Club in Streatham. The limbo dancer my parents arranged as entertainment for said evening. My limbo dancing “career”, not just remembered but I knew for sure that I have photographs.
Why the choice of limbo dancer for a Barmitzvah party? The answer to that question is truly lost in the mists of time. Some would suggest that it was a very “South London” choice. Others that it was an inappropriate choice steeped in cultural appropriation.
My guess is that someone dad knew through his photographic shop business was connected with the charming young lady in question.
Dorothy.
I know that she is/was named Dorothy because the pictures in my parent’s memory book / photo album have clearly been labelled “Dorothy”.
[Infantile readers may insert their own version of the joke revolving around the idea that “Ian was a friend of Dorothy when he was thirteen years old” here.]
Dorothy [Thinks]: What a funny little boy he is. Ian [Thinks]: I could be in here…whatever “being in” might be.
Dorothy showed us how it should be done.
Steve Lytton was one of several people who had a go. Unfortunately for him, his photo survived and has lived peacefully in my parent’s memory book for 45 years and counting:
Friends from the neighbourhood and school might recognise Andy Levinson in the background of the above and following picture. He’s hiding behind is mum. It seems he didn’t have a go at limbo dancing.
My technique showing real promise there. If only I had persevered with the practice, I could have been a contender.
Then Dorothy started to show off.
I mean, really, was that completely necessary?
Seriously, I do remember Dorothy being sweet with me and making the whole event feel special. She was clearly very talented at limbo dancing.
One day I’ll write up other aspects of my Barmitzvah. Sadly, for lovers of music and theology, there is a recording of me singing my rite of passage passage and I’ll feel Ogblog-honour bound to upload it, if only for the sake of completeness.
Anyway, the limbo dancing was great fun. Dad clearly felt that he had pulled off a blinder by booking Dorothy…
…while mum did far more dancing than was good for her, just three months after having a hip replacement:
Update/Footnote Post Publication
I managed to track down and get in touch with Steve Lytton after publishing this piece – it seemed only polite to let him know that his youthful limbo dancing efforts were now in the public domain.
It was really nice to catch up with Steve and e-chat after so many years.
One thing that Steve said solved at least part of the “why a limbo dancer at my Barmitzvah party” mystery:
…what a coincidence. We had a limbo dancer at MY Barmitzvah party…
…said Steve. The penny dropped. We had a limbo dancer at my celebration because I/we had so much enjoyed the limbo dancer at his, a year or so earlier. So the question now really should be, “why did Steve have a limbo dancer at his Barmitzvah party?” Or maybe it was simply the fashion for such parties at that time.
I started keeping a diary in January 1974. So exhausting must have been the process for eleven-on-twelve-year-old me, I took a sabbatical between May and late November that year.
The 1970s diaries cover my secondary school years, at Alleyn’s School. I shall write them up fifty years after the event, in the same way as I have been writing up my Keele University years of the 1980s as a “Forty Years On” series.
The juvenile writing needs some interpretation, both in terms of deciphering the strange symbols that comprised my handwriting back then and in terms of matters stated and omitted. I’ll try to explain and interpret as best I can, fifty years after the event.
I apologise for my atrocious spelling back then. Spellcheck has spared my blushes incalculably often in the IT era that followed my school years, while also drumming in some improvement to my ability at spelling.
Here’s that first page in all its glory.
Tuesday 1 January 1974 – …”Dined At Schmidt’s”…
Dad was at home. Dined at Schmidt’s. Chocolate moose was nice. In evening watched a film. P.S. Traditional walk 6th year.
Schmidt’s was an extraordinary place on Charlotte Street. It was a German Restaurant trapped in time from the early part of the 20th century, operated by an aging gentleman named Frederick Schmidt and his moustached sister, Marie Schmidt. I knew them as Mr Schmidt and Miss Schmidt.
We ate there quite often, mostly when Grandma Anne was not with us, as she was kosher and Schmidt’s was quintessentially not so. I recall that Grandma would occasionally come there with us and eat fish there, while dad would choose his favourite dish, eisbein, a Berlin style of schweinshaxe, with dad pointedly asking for the “VEAL knuckle” as he pointed at eisbein on the menu. Naughty daddy.
I would almost certainly have gone for the liver and onions or the schnitzel as my main course. Both of those dishes came on a platter with some pease pudding and sauerkraut as well as potatoes and vegetables. More or less everything came on such a platter, now I come to think of it. The fact that I comment on the chocolate moose suggests that it might have been a new one to me, but whatever desert I chose there, I would insist on lashings of whipped cream, which, at Schmidt’s, was a highly aerated form of whipped cream which I absolutely loved, both in its look, its taste and its texture. Mum loved that stuff too, on her coffee.
We would sometimes see Esther Rantzen in the delicatessen section of the establishment, where we would usually spend some time after eating, perhaps choosing some delicacies to take home with us or just browsing. When I met Esther properly some 20 years later, I mentioned that I remembered seeing her in Schmidt’s several times and we had a joyous reminisce about that lost world.
The traditional walk was something I did with my dad over the festive season every year for many years – initially I suspect it was mum’s way of getting a bit of peace for an hour or so and giving us the chance to walk off all the food we’d eaten. I think of Boxing Day as the usual day for that event, but it seems it was held back until 1 January that season – perhaps a weather-related change.
Wednesday 2 January 1974 – …”bought 5 History Books”…
Uneventful yet bought 5 history books. I cannot quite reconcile those two phrases.
I can, however, identify the books. They were from the “Everyday Life” series. I still have them:
The eagle-eyed amongst you will have spotted that there are nine books from that series depicted above, but the diary entry reports me buying five books. The even-more-eagle-eyed amongst you might be able to spot that the five “Everyday Life” books to the right of the picture look considerably more thumbed than the four to the left, which I’m sure I purchased at a later date.
I suspect that I spent my own money on those books (I’d have been flush with Christmas money or Hanukkah gelt at that time of year). The list price of the five books I bought that day comes to the princely sum of £1.45, but I’d wager a good few bob that these books were discounted after Christmas and I might have scored the batch of five for around £1 in W H Smith. I loved those books, which is why I have not been able to part with them, even when I cleared out most of my childhood books.
I especially loved the two about life in the stone ages. These related to the period of history we were being taught that year at school.
In both of the Stone Age books, I have written:
Ian Harris 1.S.
If found please return to 1.S.
I must have been taking these books to school with me on history days – possibly leaving them at school overnight sometimes. Only those two have that inscription, but inside the one about Roman Times, I discovered…
…an ancient, small piece of blotting paper, with one quite large blot on it, marking the place between pages 64 and 65 which, judging by the spine of the book, is as far as I got with that one 50 years ago. This discovery felt like a bit of a Pompeii moment, my juvenile reading trapped within a moment of time many years ago, providing evidence of reading interrupted and never resumed. I feel a relentless desire now to finish reading the book, which I think, fifty years later, will require me to start again from the beginning. I’m guessing that I’ll be able to whizz through the 130 or so pages quite quickly. But again I have put off the task to another day. It won’t be another 50 years, that’s for sure.
…”Saw Tommy Cooper”…
The Tommy Cooper Hour will have been this one – Episode 3 – click here. It will have looked a bit like the vid below, an episode from the same series, shown a few months later:
Thursday 3 January 1974
Went to dentist. No fillings yet. Drawn darts match. 5p Kalooki. 2 Rons [The Two Ronnies] good.
The dentist will have been Harry Wachtel, a slightly eccentric Austrian-Jewish refugee dentist who practiced in Streatham for several decades.
How a darts match ends up drawn I have no idea. Neither do I know who I played in that drawn match. Can’t have been one of my parents (dad would have gone back to work and mum would never go near my dartboard…come to think of it, nor did dad). Possibly Andy Levinson came round. Ot possibly I had a game of my own devising which enabled me to play against myself and secure a draw.
Kalooki probably did involve my mum and it seems that I got lucky, skilful or both, making 5p (that’s a shilling in real money).
The Two Ronnies was this episode. Interesting that I was allowed to watch TV that late at that age – it was possibly my starting secondary school that got my bedtime shifted towards and beyond the watershed.
Friday 4 January 1974
1×2 + bull at darts. Saw Fantasia for a third time – it is great.
I’m guessing that Fantasia was not shown on TV that week, so it would have been a visit to the cinema. I don’t say who I went with, but that might have been with mum (she loved Fantasia too) as I think I would have named my companion if I had gone with a friend or even if I had gone with Grandma Jenny. Probably local, at the Streatham ABC or Odeon.
My burgeoning darts career tails off soon, at least in the matter of diary mentions. I suspect that the dart board was a new toy for Christmas 1973.
Saturday 5 January 1974
Mum bought coat £22 reduced to £9.95. Went to Lytton’s. Played Striker with dive goalies.
Striker with dive goalies. That sounds amazing. I have re-established contact with Steve Lytton in the 50 years since that epic event. I wonder whether he still has his Striker set and is up for a rematch.
A peachy holiday. Mum, me, Denise, Steve & Tony Lytton.
Oh boy did the memories come flooding back.
Just before the end of 2020, I tracked down Steve Lytton, with whom I hadn’t been in touch for many decades, on the back of a memory trigger about limbo dancing:
We had a very enjoyable e-chat. At one point, Steve said he couldn’t remember how we met, but I remembered it clearly. We met as a chance encounter between our two families in Golden Sands, Bulgaria, in August 1972.
Our parents got on well with each other. Steve and I got along well too, which I’m sure pleased all four parents, as Steve and I were both only children.
Not only did our families hang out together a lot during that holiday but (unusually for holiday friendships) that connection continued for a good few years when we got home, despite the Harris family living in Streatham and the Lytton family living in Hendon.
This was not one of our more photographic holidays, but still there were half-a-dozen pictures from this holiday in “Mum’s maroon album” and I managed to find an envelope with a few more pictures of varying quality/vintage, some black and white from “my camera” (I was only allowed simple stuff at that age; dad wanted me to prove my bona fides as a photographer before letting me use better equipment and materials) and some contact prints, I’m guessing from the Lytton collection. I’ve put them all (16 of them) in the following Flickr album – click here or below:
There is also just a couple of minutes-worth of cine film. The Lytton family feature as much or perhaps even more than my own family in the film. I think dad possibly shot more, but some of the film got sun-damaged – there’s some slight evidence of that damage in the surviving film.
You get 15 seconds of the previous year’s holiday (Port Leucate in Occitania, South-West France, since you asked) as well as the couple of minutes of Bulgaria. A fair bit of clowning around, but the highlight of this movie is unquestionably the beach football, in which mum takes a tumble and then Steve, rather than assisting the injured player, cynically takes possession, playing on. Shocking sportsmanship, caught on film for ever.
I had a few abiding memories from this holiday, despite this holiday being 18 months or so before I started keeping a diary. But the very best of the memories was triggered by Steve, when we e-swapped reminiscences.
Let’s start with my abiding memories and use Steve’s wonderful recollection as the grand finale.
In those days they were using Ilyushin Il-18 Soviet Russian planes that had shown a recent propensity to crash, apparently, although mercifully we were in blissful ignorance of that fact when we flew:
What I especially recall, though, was the “standing room only” short hop from Sophia to Varna in one of those. People were standing in the aisles of the plane holding on to grab-handles like passengers on a bus or tube.
Abiding Memory 2: Viennese Waltz Chicks
Bulgarian Viennese-Style Music Trio Dressed Like 1970s Grandma’s Curtains
Was it really the music of Johann Strauss II that touched my heart, or did I have a kiddy-crush on these lovely musicians? I’m well over the Strauss now, anyway, but here’s the piece that particularly sticks in my mind from that holiday:
That really is a superb barnet and tasche sported by the great Austrian waltz dude
Abiding Memory 3: The Olympic Flame
There was a great deal of excitement when word went around that the Olympic flame, doing a circuitous route from Athens to Munich via several Balkan/Eastern European countries, would be staying outside OUR hotel, The International in Golden Sands, for the night.
We had rooms overlooking the front. I am pretty sure I joined my parents on their balcony to watch the excitement unfold.
A crowd within and without the hotel, pregnant with anticipation.
Then cries from within and without:
Es kommt…Sie kommen…Hier kommt es…
…that sort of thing. The vast majority of tourists in Golden Sands in those days were East Germans.
The torch bearer ran up some steps, ignited the “eternal flame cauldron” where the Olympic flame was to repose for the night, stepped back down to the sound of tumultuous cheering and applause…
…while the Olympic flame petered out in the cauldron.
There was a rapid inspection and rejigging of the cauldron, then the ceremony was repeated, this time successfully.
I was just shy of 10 and was already aware that Santa doesn’t exist. Now I learnt that the Olympic flame is not as eternal as the authorities would have us believe.
Thanks to Steve, I have recovered another wonderful memory of this holiday.
We all had rooms with excellent views overlooking the seafront. But Steve’s room, at one end of the hotel, had an especially splendid view. It overlooked a sectioned-off nudist beach.
Steve, very kindly, shared this world of wonders with me. We would sneak off to Steve’s room whenever the opportunity arose, to have an ogle and a giggle. Steve was around 11, I was coming up to 10 – I’m pretty sure neither of us had a clue what we were ogling at or where all those moving parts might go.
Fortunately for genteel readers, I have no images from that aspect of the holiday and am averse to Googling “1970s East German nudist sunbathers” for fear of the dreadful dark recesses of the internet that such a search might reach.
However, the image of dad, above (modestly attired in shorts, of course) gives a sense of the size and scale of the (mostly) East German gentlemen who frequented that beach. And I have managed to find a similarly modest but suitably scaled East German woman shot …
Anyway, I do now recall that my mum liked to dine out on this story for quite a while. Apparently both sets of parents wondered why Steve and I seemed so keen to sneak off to Steve’s room. I fear that it was me that blew our cover in this innocent yet guilty secret pursuit, by asking to borrow dad’s binoculars.
The parents worked us out, caught us out, made light of it and shared in the humorous side of this story. Dad taught me that quality rather than quantity is what matters when observing the human form, a lesson that has served me well in art and in life.
Tony, perhaps emulating the sights from the neighbouring nudist beach
