Time to talk about the British republic

In a post-Brexit time of national uncertainty and economic struggle, it’s perhaps logical that the death of the grandmother of the nation should be the cause of mass sorrow. That said, a long weekend just spent in London made me aware of the sharp contrast between the tourists and devotees in the centre and the workaday folks going about their business in the periphery. That Queen Elizabeth II worked hard in her role as head of state is not for me in doubt. That over 70 years were spent in this inherited position is a cause for personal admiration and respect. However it should also be a reason to step back from the emotional fray and ask why? That the appointed ‘national’ broadcast media are going into expected overdrive to mobilise mass mourning is not surprising. However that shouldn’t prevent the more reflective among us from doing what the prime ministers of Jamaica and Antigua & Barbuda have just announced they will be doing, and having a national debate about whether their countries will become republics or not. Perhaps it’s indecent to suggest such a debate in Britain at a time when our former head of state hasn’t even been interred in the national imagining let alone Charles III formally crowned. But surely it’s precisely at this time that we should stop and wonder what maintaining the monarchy, or at least maintaining it as is, is good for? 

The much vaunted 'neutrality' and claimed ‘non-political’ nature of Windsor family rule will not only be tested by our new King’s attachment to a range of deeply political causes and opinions, but politics very much goes with the Windsor turf, as it were. You can’t be head of the Commonwealth and be sworn to uphold the Protestant faith and not be political. To think otherwise is to dwell in a soft, pink, cotton notion of the world forged in story books and childhood delusion. The king, like the late Queen, is a deeply political figure, as any head of state would be. 

The question is whether we’re happy to maintain a political system, and yes, ‘regime’, that having a monarch whose government uses royal (prerogative) powers, ensures? For those quirky enough to have watched the more than hour long ceremony on Saturday morning live from the Privy Council, an appreciation of all that is undemocratic, indeed archaic, about our political system was in full, open and transparent view. It was as if Penny Mordaunt had won the premiership and Liz Truss had been kicked straight upstairs before even passing Go as PM. 

As Leader of the House of Commons, Penny Mordaunt led the business of the great political and clerical good who constitute this former Executive body. However her announcement of the Privy Council’s decisions underpinning the uncontested ‘election’ of Charles as king was straight from Medieval Britain. The Union of the kingdoms of England and Scotland was a constant reference point as was much Monty Pythonesque referencing of the Great Seal and of interim Seals of some kind. The newly minted monarch himself grew visibly more irritated by the arcane absurdity of all that he had to voice ‘Agreed’ to. However for him, his Consort, and his Heir, I suspect this was all so much tiresome theatre, as no doubt it would seem to any still watching members of the public. 

However the substance of what was on display was an assertion of power by unaccountable decree from a body, the Privy Council, whose official purpose is to “counsel” the monarch but is in practise more about the underpinning of the royal prerogative powers that all governments exercise by reference to the crown and not to the sovereignty of the people. Charles’ stated affirmation of his office, that he is the sovereign, made clear where powers still lies in Britain. It may be his 'constitutional' understanding that God and the elected government, in that order, should guide him in the performance of his ‘duties’, but our unwritten constitution gives “his” government a welter of unaccountable royal powers to exercise on his behalf. 

Should we care? Well, declaring war, signing international treaties of any kind, issuing executive decisions such as orders in council without proper parliamentary scrutiny, are all the exercise of royal prerogative powers. They quite literally have nothing to do with claimed electoral mandates turned into parliamentary legislation. A country that has supposedly ’taken back control’ doesn’t seem to care that as an electorate they have little control and that their sovereignty is only partly honoured in name and largely ignored in practise. 

The great symbol of British parliamentary democracy is not the office of prime minister but the speaker of the House of Commons, the person who, ceremonially speaking at the ‘State Opening of Parliament’, bars the monarch’s entry to the legislative chamber via Black Rod. Speaker Hoyle though was a mere attendee at the Privy Council on Saturday, lending his democratic imprimatur to the thoroughly undemocratic proceedings.

Perhaps this is all liberal elitist claptrap, point scoring by a member of the over-educated classes when ordinary folk just want a decent day’s pay for a decent day’s work, and affordable, heatable, housing to live in. But if the masses aren’t actually determining who governs them and how, and if their elected representatives don’t hold sovereignty on their behalf, then what hope is there that popular needs and desires can be met? 

Arguably the last time a collective programme of mass need was addressed by an elected UK government was in the latter 1940s when the second war in two and a bit decades had brought an establishment and party political consensus that things could never be the same again. Democracy’s role was merely to choose those in the red corner as the ones who should try to administer it. No Labour government has in practise done anything to challenge the monarchical constitutional settlement other than to partially limit the power and membership of that residue of royal favour, the unelected House of Lords. The maintenance of the monarchy shouldn’t however be a matter of left V right. It should be a matter of democracy V unaccountable power. If Scotland goes independent then it’s likely to replicate Windsor’s prerogative powers over an elected Holyrood.

We are told that the late Queen was so shielded from the mucky and constitutionally inappropriate business of politics that in 1975 her Governor General in Australia turfed out an elected Australian Labour prime minister in cahoots with the then Prince of Wales and the Queen’s private secretary. These were royal powers used secretly to get through a political impasse that should have been Australia’s political business, but was actually the business of the UK monarch’s own Governor General. The British Labour Government of the day was seemingly equally constitutionally “shielded” from what the British royal house was up to. 

Britain plainly needs a head of state to at least arbitrate when there’s such a political impasse at home. It was feared that the Queen couldn’t be shielded from doing that if there had been no prospect of a UK parliamentary majority ‘to get Brexit done’. The prospect, pre-PM Johnson, beckoned of the Queen having to appoint a national (coalition) government to get through the political morass. Some would argue that it’s surely better that such a political arbiter be the head of the house of Windsor than perhaps an archly party political figure appointed as a figurehead president. (Few serious republicans in Britain want a US-style presidential political system.).

This is not just a matter of what kind of head of state do we want when the parliamentary arithmetic is bothersome. It’s very much more than that. It’s about who do we think should rule us, whether as head of state or in terms of the laws, orders and executive decrees that are currently issued on the basis of monarchical power? Should these be our laws, argued over by our representatives, or the prerogative of a royal house that, as witnessed on Saturday, elects itself?

An affront to parliamentary democracy that produces Truss as PM and Corbyn as Labour leader

Both main UK political parties have for more than a decade betrayed parliamentary democracy in favour of a US primary-type method for electing a party leader. On Monday we witnessed some of the awful consequences of that in the live televised head to head Truss-Sunak ‘debate’. The style, and no doubt agreed structure, of the prime time BBC1 broadcast was a grotesque dumbed down pandering to broadcast media conceptions of what the public will stomach. Given that it was the Parliamentary Conservative Party that reduced the candidates to two, and that 160,000 party members who, for the cheap price of an annual membership fee, will determine who the PM is, then any preconceived notion of what the British public wants is irrelevant. Another consequence of this Tory leadership election method, just as is normal now during a General Election of course, is the rival camps’ petty abuse on social media. I note that the media broadcast the five candidates’ debate before it shifted to a two horse race among Tory party members. However the choice of whether to broadcast these debates was that of the Tory party. They could have kept the election of their parliamentary leader where it properly belongs: in Parliament.

This Tory members’ party leadership election is worse than a US-style party primary because this is the third election in a row among Conservative Party members that has selected the PM by selecting their party leader. I accept that we live in a parliamentary democracy and that therefore the choice of PM is not the people’s direct choice. And I accept that the resultant new PM is not obligated to call an instant general election because, yes, their, authority comes from that elected Parliament. It is precisely my belief in parliamentary democracy, despite residual royal authority exercised by an executive only partly checked by an elected parliament, that means that I think that a parliamentary party should determine who its leader is, not that party’s membership. The fact that the media has influence on any such membership election of any major political party is largely the fault of the two parties for agreeing this method of choosing the leader. And for agreeing to televise the debates. 

Surely an election method that brought us Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the opposition and which runs the serious risk of imposing Liz Truss on us as PM, is very flawed indeed. I stand by bad electoral outcomes if that is either the popular will or the will of popularly elected MPs. I wholly object to bad, or any, outcome decided by a narrow band of Tory or Labour Party members, especially when this narrow band in either party can get to determine, directly, who the Prime Minister of the UK is. 

I would like to think that the two main UK party leaderships could agree together to go back to the future and resume parliamentary democracy when it comes to choosing their party leader. However this would be akin to reinventing Labour’s civil war of the 1980s, and for the Tories it would upset a membership base that seems to like the power to ensure that ‘chief betrayer’ Sunak can be prevented from entering No10 in favour of someone whose economic grasp revolves around printing money and whose regional knowledge when visiting an enemy capital suggested she wasn’t fit to teach GCSE Geography let alone lead the primary European military power.

Running for (creative) therapy

I am once again putting rubber to the tarmac and running the Hastings Half-Marathon on March 20th. I am doing it for two reasons: exercise obsession and to raise money for an important new therapy project being set up by two friends of mine. 

I have vowed to hang up my running shoes after I complete this event. In fact I am giving up my neuro-sports obsessionalism in general. However, before I go cold turkey on this particular (non) coping mechanism, I will seek to go out with a modest bang.

My fastest half-marathon was fractionally over 1 hour and 35 minutes, a performance conducted six years ago at the 2016 Hastings Half. I got to within 32 seconds of that in 2019. I'm now approaching 58, but have stated that I want, this year, to run the Hastings Half-Marathon in under 1:30. That said, if I can at least improve on my PB, however modestly, I'll be totally delighted.

The last Hastings Half, back in 2019; author far left

More importantly, but relevantly, I am raising money for GROWING CREATIVE COMMUNITIES. This charity is about to launch from the Langney (East Sussex) home of Amy Syrad-Hardy and Adam Llewellyn-Smith, and will offer creative therapy for adults, and a recreational space solely for men. I can personally vouch for how effective Amy Syrad-Hardy's creative therapy classes are. 

If you would like to sponsor my run, I will transfer all monies raised directly to GROWING CREATIVE COMMUNITIES. (Please message me accordingly and I will send you my bank details).

GROWING CREATIVE COMMUNITIES will be a totally inclusive charity offering safe spaces for conversation and creativity. Based in Pevensey, East Sussex, it combines two elements: creative therapy for adults, and a recreational space solely for men. ‘Your Creative Self’, run by Amy Syrad-Hardy (38), will provide both group and 1:1 therapy for anyone who needs it, whether they realise it or not. Amy is experienced and trained in providing creative therapies focused on the whole self: mind and body. She is also a survivor of Childhood Sexual Abuse (CSA). Consequently, she is both professionally and  intuitively aware of how trauma affects people. Her creative therapy is focused on adults who may be struggling with the manifestations of trauma, whether due to CSA or to more recent domestic sexual or physical violence. Amy encourages people to use paint, paper, words, or just about anything, to express how they feel and to connect with the whole self.  

‘You do not have to think of yourself as ‘artistic’,’ she stresses. ‘It’s all about using different methods to tap into repressed emotion: anger, fear, shame, whatever it is that you might be feeling,’ says Amy. ‘Or if it feels like you’re not feeling anything at all.’  This Amy will do in a group setting, or via 1:1 therapy for those with specific trauma-related symptoms such as an eating disorder, suicidal ideation, addiction, chronic illness etc. 

Amy’s husband Adam Llewellyn-Smith (38) has lived experience of trauma and is bi-polar. He has actively supported Amy in her fight for justice against a former abuser. Adam is a videographer, photographer, producer and editor. From personal experience he understands how much men who’ve survived trauma need to communicate, whether with themselves or with others. Adam is setting up ‘MENT’ (Mental Health Emotions Narrative & Times) so that men can have a dedicated space where they can allow themselves to talk, or to explore. Exploration could be creative, with paint or words or by simply sharing an enjoyment of music. Or it could literally be exploring by walking or exercising, or it might be engaging in sports. MENT will provide men who perhaps aren’t used to expressing themselves, in any form, with an opportunity to gather and to just see where the conversation, or the activity, takes them.

GROWING CREATIVE COMMUNITIES will be based out of Amy and Adam’s home studio space (‘ALS Studios’). They have also booked three other facilities in the Pevensey and Westham area, including Montague Farm in Hankham. Over the next couple of months they will host exhibitions of creative work by trauma survivors at these locations; one such 'pop-up' event in being lined up for the end of March. 

Adam and Amy’s charitable project aims to support anyone who’s feeling isolated, anyone who’s struggling with depression, anyone who’s had trauma. Whatever your story, it’s likely that you will find someone, or something, that you can connect with via GROWING CREATIVE COMMUNITIES. As the work of the charity grows, it will draw on a network of trauma therapists and counsellors. Fees for  counselling and other forms of support will be set low to help ensure maximum inclusiveness.

If you want to find out more about GROWING CREATIVE COMMUNITIES, contact Amy and Adam via email on artarshcreate@gmail.com or via their individual Facebook pages:  Amy and Adam.

Self-portrait (by me)

Postscript: I am very pleased to say that I raised £770 for GROWING CREATIVE COMMUNITIES and am very appreciative to all those who donated money and/or expressed their support. I sadly didn't make it home in less than my PB, but my finish time of just under 1:39 wasn't bad. The key thing is the taking part and the cause, and the cause is a very good one for sure. A launch photography exhibition has already been held by Adam in a Pevensey pub, and he has three more planned in the Pevensey and Westham area over the Spring and Summer of 2022. Amy will be hosting an exhibition of her art and of those who've benefitted from her creative therapy (including me) during the same period.  

Penge by bike

I am on an assignment: to work out what I want with what’s left of my life and how I can ensure that I am stable, perhaps even happy, with whatever I choose. Those most affected by this, and others who know my condition well, have counselled that I need to focus on myself in working this out. Only I can save myself. My own sanity has to be my priority, just as those I love must prioritise their own sanity too. Paradoxically perhaps, this may both require more isolation and more support mechanisms. It’s another fork in the road and I cannot, this time, plough down the middle. With these ideas in mind, on Wednesday I opted to turn my back on my future and go exploring for more remnants of my dead past.... in Penge. I am at a loss as to how I got there. Figuratively speaking that is, as my dissociation is generally of the willful kind, not strange blanks where I am totally disconnected.

I had actually reached a rare calm the night before. Perhaps this was an unexpected reaction to the existential sanity of late period Mike Peterson in the utterly compelling court room-based Netflix documentary ‘The Staircase’. Peterson had served eight years in prison after having been found guilty of killing his wife whose death was actually apparently the result of a tragic accident. In keeping with the limited capabilities of the US legal system to entirely exonerate someone falsely accused, I was never entirely reconciled to his innocence. However, as presented by the end of the series, an elderly innocent man had come to accept that he couldn’t get that time back, nor fully clear his name, but that what mattered was acceptance and to make the most of what remained of his life.

Closing down the i-Pad I stood and marvelled at the panoramic neon beauty of London, as viewed from the top of a Leyton tower block. The vast visual sweep provided a calming almost soporific effect. I cannot remember ever standing in this 10^th floor flat and feeling so relaxed in the still, almost silent urban beauty of it all. I sabotaged this soon enough though in what I told myself was simply a conscious choice to just be me and to see where that notion might go if I imagined myself living alone with just virtual friends and a confessional keyboard for company. In the middle of the night self-disgust fought for control with a range of self-calming techniques. A couple of hours later the imagined tight rein on the exercise addiction had gone very slack and, in the almost light, I pounded the pavement en route to the Walthamstow filter beds via a quick spot of self-flagellation at the public exercise machines in an adjacent park. Running up the ten flights of stairs in a ball of sweat I hurried back to bed in the hope of more sleep. A planned day of facing the future by facing the computer screen, possibly punctuated by an overdue haircut and an online discussion on Bahrain, didn’t help to relax me. The thought of taking my push bike for an overland train journey to Penge seemed a more appealing option.

The past is never dead. In fact it is always present. In George Orwell's '1984', O’Brien, the senior official who eventually re-programmes Winston Smith, gets him to incant: 'Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.' Winston Smith's successful treatment was for the alteration of memory.

Memories aren't free

I don’t know if my half dozen visits in recent years to my early childhood hometown are an attempt at controlling my past in order to re-shape my future. I just know that the attraction of revisiting Penge's remembered combination of freedom and claustrophobic conformity doesn’t fade, and that it especially grows when the present, let alone the future, seems far too difficult to contemplate. In the night I had remembered what it felt like as a boy to cycle away from home and to feel free, alone, on the roads and in the parks of the area. It was a strange sensation to be doing the same thing, at presumably greater speed, 45 years later. It wasn’t quite my childhood flashing back before my eyes, but I felt a peculiar rush as I raced past various monuments from my first 12 years. For the first time since I’d left Penge in 1976 I found that St John’s Parish Church, via which I had received something of a Christian education, was actually open. While not officially open to the public, the friendly female minister I spoke to outside and the welcoming Church volunteers inside encouraged me to take a look around, highly responsive to my expressed and seemingly open and honest desire to revisit the place that had evidently had a major imprint on me.

Temperance & Hope, designed by the William Morris Co.

Chancel of St John's Church

It was not like the emotion generated on my last visit to Penge when I had stumbled through a dark alley behind where we used to live. Nor was it like an earlier revisit when I felt child-like glee at once again seeing the dinosaurs ('Dinos') of Crystal Palace Park. Being inside St John’s Parish Church was to witness that the large, dark, almost foreboding chamber, full of stiff reverence and austere pews, had given way to a largely white space stripped of its rigid, hierarchical regimentation. What's more, the primary space of communal worship was now obviously much more accessible in both the literal and metaphorical sense. The imposing brass eagle whose spread wings had formed a lectern encasing a huge Bible was now unceremoniously parked in one corner of the seemingly unused altar. Pride of place though, under the stained glass of St John The Evangelist, remains the wood carving depicting The Last Supper. 

The lofty pulpit

A more democratic space for worship

The intricate stone of the original pulpit is now essentially a well-preserved reminder, to me at least, of a fast-fading past. I wasn’t saddened, nor exactly disappointed by what I witnessed though. I didn’t imagine St John’s Parish Church Penge would have the grand sweep of yesteryear. After all I am, physically and experientially speaking at least, much grown since I last entered here, even if I often still reside in my child. I had perhaps a greater appreciation for the stained-glasses than as a boy, noting their 'modern' beauty, and could freshly appreciate some other church features. The high-vaulted wooden ceilings, the beautiful arched doors, and the design of the baptismal font in which I had surely been dipped. This was incongruously located close to the exit where money-changing had once attracted me in the subtly-lit but long gone Church ‘book shop’. It didn’t look as if the baptismal font was still in use, surrounded as it was by dozens of folded chairs. That said, I am sure there are still Christenings at St John’s, so maybe.

Baptismal font at St John's Church, Penge

The St John The Evangelist stained-glass

Walking around the outside of the Church I was reminded of where my brother and me once rode our home-made go-cart, and of a surprising (even to me then) Church fireworks display hidden round the back. More poignantly, I recalled a never-forgotten dream experienced soon after we’d left Penge when I was flying around the church grounds like a large bird (an eagle perhaps?). Briefly revisiting the Rec for the inevitable cheese sandwich, I pushed my tired legs to carry me up, once again, to Crystal Palace Park. Sleepless the previous night I had had the idea that the resumption of my childhood mode of transport would connect me with something visceral from my past life.

Fly like an eagle?

Being back here again may have been an avoidance of necessary work on planning my future, but I continue to hope that returning will somehow reveal some deeper, and less dark, mystery from the past. Cycling up to the highest point of what had once been an exciting racetrack for motorbikes of a certain vintage, I prepared to revisit the high-speed childhood thrill of freewheeling home on a bike. For a brief period it felt the same as I once again raced down through the park, zipping past the now rusting splendour of the Crystal Palace Bowl, until sadly a cluster of walkers, some with barely controlled small children and even smaller dogs, necessitated me braking before taking a wrong turn and ending up in the Sports Centre car park. Perhaps as a boy I just didn’t care about interrupting the danger of racing round tight bends, getting a speed buzz at 10 that a man approaching 60 fears to do when so many other grown-ups are present. That said, continuing down the High Street at speed on a push bike still has its moments. An urge to scream as I careened down the street was, inevitably, repressed. I’d earlier once again tried to be gain access to our former flat above the High Street shop, but, 'Surprise, surprise, surprise, there was nobody home.' I didn’t try again.

I peddled on past the old Police Station and The Pawleyne Arms, past the former secondary modern, Kentwood School, and found, more or less, the location of a record shop that, aged 9-10, I used to hang out in, pestering the sometimes indulgent staff to play LPs by Paul McCartney and Hudson-Ford. The Clock House Station shops are now the usual café, nail bar, tattoo parlour, hairdresser variety, and quite a few are boarded up too. I couldn’t work out exactly where the record shop had been. There was no point asking the people on the street in their ‘20s or ‘30s if they had any idea. It might have been the site of the bizarrely named and seemingly moribund ‘Geek School’.

Site of Clock House bridge record store?

Or here? (Clock House bridge, Beckenham)

I peddled further and came upon Beckenham Library, an attractive 1930s facility threatened by the local council, located in front of the hideously ostentatious 'Spa' erected on the site of Beckenham Public Baths. I remembered nervously trying to swim there, watched from afar by my father. I needed a place of rest, of inner calm. Inside the library I picked up a book on the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. A section on dreams argued that these were different states of mind and not to be dismissed as just what happens when we're asleep. These could be revelations of a different reality, of perhaps another version of ourselves.

I then found a shrine to local boy, David Bowie, including a well-made bust of the man. Underneath that part of the Perspex box dedicated to the global musical and cultural legend, were notes about the present-day threat to Crystal Palace Park’s ‘Dinos’, a recognised UK heritage site dating back to 1851. Next to the Bowie bust was pinned a black and white press photo of a hippy-era David playing an acoustic guitar, presumably in Beckenham’s Croydon Road Recreational Ground, evoking ‘memories’ of the free festival that he would soon immortalise in song. A little later I cycled furiously around the same park, unaware that this was the location of the event that inspired Bowie’s beautiful elegy to being… unchained. I was simply searching for a sunny park where I used to escape to.

Bowie at Beckenham Library

Bowie shrine, with a memory from a free festival 

In Beckenham’s town centre I found a kind of genteel respectability that was I think always there. The main roundabout is still dominated by the iconic Deco cinema where the whole family had once been moved by ‘The Belstone Fox’.

I cycled on and spotted a branch of WH Smith’s. What could be more mundane, if not borderline tacky? However it was here in 1973, at a little under 9 years of age, that the front page of The New Musical Express had screamed at me ‘Bowie quits’, reporting the ending of what later we’d realise was just one passing persona (Ziggy Stardust), as the end of the man’s entire career. That headline certainly caught my eye. I was very young, and the NME and David Bowie were probably more than a little forbidding. However, the idea of someone, whom I understood was himself relatively young and definitely out there, retiring had seemed amazing. Inside the dull almost empty inertia of WH Smith’s today I unsurprisingly couldn’t connect very much with that newspaper day of a half century earlier. I doubt if I knew then that he’d lived close by or had played (guitar) in the local park.   

Breaking the news of Bowie's retirement 

I rode back to Penge, going once more along the exciting fast road under the railway bridge. I’d once been driven at speed in the freshly clean white Ford Cortina Mark II GT that had been my Saturday morning responsibility for a few weeks. Alan, its 19 year old owner, sporting the hair cut of a Bay City Roller (or so I thought), incongruously combined with the then de rigeur brown overall befitting of one who ran a hardware store, had somehow agreed to let this 10 year old clean his pride and joy. It didn’t last long – too many smears on the windscreen for his liking. I doubt if I had been sod-casting via my Ferguson transistor radio, but I vividly remember one morning cleaning the Cortina and thinking intently of how much I hated 'Seven Seas of Rhye', the new single release by up and coming band, Queen.

Fast road to freedom

I stopped at a still familiar parades of shops opposite the old Kentwood School on the approach to Penge. I don’t actually recall seeing the stuffed teddy emporium 'Bearly Trading' in its heyday, but whenever it was trading it had definitely long since past. Not Trading at all. Beautiful brickwork though. Cycling on I remembered the site of a petrol station that as a boy I had visited in search of the renowned hurdler Alan Pascoe. According to the local newspaper his flat had been located above, or close by. It was given, in what was a very different era, as No 2 Kenilworth Court. I spotted the steps to the self-same flats and remembered nervously climbing them, thinking of what I would say to a medal winning hero of the athletics track. He wasn’t in, however. Another familiar church offered an enticing message (see below) as I parked up for another furtive cheese sandwich.

Not even barely trading 

The worried cyclist approaches the path

Detouring down Green Lane, I headed up Parish Lane, then journeyed along Lennard Road, once again searching for places of sweet childhood memory. A nursery school where I began learning to ride a bike, my Mum looking on happily. A playing field where I’d blagged my way into a private weekend event, scooping up masses of strawberries and cream before heading out. All gone now. However opposite the imposing Holy Trinity Church, soon to be united with St. John's, I found the half-hidden semi-gated walkway that connected to a tiny street of Edwardian houses. In recent years I have frequently revisited this path in my mind. It too cropped up in a childhood dream, and has somehow come to represent a transition to a different realm. I think this pathway had created real fear for me as a child, but somehow it also embodied excitement, as if I could cycle between different emotional states, or more simply escape into a different reality. I rode along the pathway, then carried my bike over the familiar enclosed bridge at Penge East station, as I’d done hundreds of times as a boy, and peddled on.

Conscious that I didn’t want to be taking my bike across London on rush hour trains, I peddled back up toward Crystal Palace Park and specifically Penge West station. In minutes I was back into a different reality. The present, where the past is never far behind, and the future is just one step beyond. I had probably come to Penge to escape the future. My journey into the past had thrown up a lot of notions of escape, alongside some fear and also a kind of bravery. Knocking on doors (then and now), hassling to hear a record that I was never going to buy, getting the best out of strangers. It’s so hard to believe this version of events linking my past to my present, let alone perhaps linking to my future. I have to though.   

         

Penge Revisited (Again)

Perhaps I keep going back to Penge because living there nearly a half century ago was the last time I experienced being part of what I thought was a normal, loving family.

This almost feels like a macabre thing to write because my brother certainly couldn’t go back and risk triggering the childhood trauma he went through in that south London flat. For me, the trauma came later. The self-harming certainly started in Penge though. This isn’t good when you’re nine (or at any age).  However, the photographs from that part of my childhood don’t automatically trigger the shit switch. And my schooldays there were, mostly, ok. However, after two pints of Guinness in The Pawleyne Arms and then walking aimlessly after an abandoned bus ride up Crystal Palace Park Road, I was desperate, crying, and asking my mother to forgive me.  My Mum killed herself. Not in Penge but in the last of the three horror houses my parents lived in after we left London.

There were constant reminders all over town of the festive season. I recalled some nice Christmases in Penge. However, Christmas would be poisoned later. That, and the imprint of my desperate, early teens, lunge into Christianity has left me unable to embrace Christmas as an annual secular glorification of childhood and mindless consumption. Walking round Penge at Christmas also brought up memories of a much later time when I drove to Sussex to cook Christmas dinner for my then elderly Mum, arriving early morning so that I could leave almost as soon as we’d eaten the rudimentary roast. I remember that there was so much smoke in the kitchen that the benign Orwellian monitoring regime kicked in. A disembodied broadcast voice, that of a ‘Life-Line’ operative, asked, ‘Are you alright Mrs Partrick?’ ‘Yes, I’m fine dear,’ I feigned in reply.

You were totally alone Mum, and I moaned at you about how much you needed to get out more, and do this, that and the other. I made you feel like a burden and ultimately that was a key reason why you killed yourself. That, a lifetime of depression, and then learning about your husband’s sexual abuse of your children, all played their part.

I am determined to write this. Though right now I am seriously having my doubts. I sincerely hope that other family members do not see it. If I don’t send them the link, then I guess they won’t. I do want some people to see it though. Perhaps those for whom I continue to ‘perform’ in some guise or other, whether professional or voluntary, playing the responsible and supposedly well-informed person. Everything managed, everything in its place.

There was something very familiar in those desperate feelings I experienced walking near Crystal Palace. It was a sense of abandonment that is deep and goes right back to childhood. That same feeling has this week sent me out running into the darkness of the small hours, unable to sleep, lost in the ‘child’ that these memories evoke or the vulnerability that contemporary triggers engender.  At least I am now able to recognise these feelings. Likewise, I know that going back to Penge for the second time in a little over a year was a risky exercise.  On each return visit the nostalgic excitement progressively diminishes and the darkness is always just around the corner. Of course, the darkness is always there. I have known its contours, its associations, its symptoms ever since that Penge boyhood.

I gazed up once again to the outside of my first home. I can see the bedroom where I first remember things going wrong. I recall an evening when my brother and me had ‘child minders’. I was very upset and pleaded to the evidently distraught Godsmarks that they ‘Tell my parents that it’s happened again.’ What had actually ‘happened’, they didn’t ask. I think I had meant time spent alone in my bedroom unable to cope with my feelings and feeling compelled to either poison myself (Pot Ash) or clean myself from within (soap). I don’t remember the Godsmarks, or any other child minders, ever coming again. Prior to that evening I do though remember the excitement of Mr Godsmark driving me to the centre of London in his (open top) white Triumph Vitesse.

The family flat, High St Penge

This same self-harming nine-year-old was frightened of certain girls; way more than any of the Malcolm Junior School boys (now the 'Harris Academy'). My eventual fight-back against the hardest bullying girl brought down on me the wrath, and one-sided physical punishment, of a deputy head mistress. Having been slapped hard several times on the back of my legs with a ruler, I railed, amidst angry tears of righteous indignation, at what I thought was a self-evident injustice. All of this presumably relates to the horrors I was infusing at home, even if I was not (yet) personally experiencing them. The last time I had gazed up at the front of our former High Street flat in Penge, the shop below was in business and there were signs of life above it. Not so in the relative darkness of this visit (see photo above). Circling the block once more, I walked past the Cromwells’ wall, now fantastically adorned (see below), and tried to work out exactly where the Godsmarks’ old house was. 

Montrave Road, Penge

In approaching the very familiar sight of ‘our’ part of the High Street once again, I saw, for the first time since boyhood, that there was still an entrance to an alley from where you used to be able to get to the back of where we lived.  What’s more, this time the huge gate to it was open. I nervously waited for the owner of what I later realised to be the manager of the nearby ‘Penge Masala’ restaurant to get out of their car and enter the premises. Strangers snooping about the back yards of people's houses after dark, surreptitiously taking photos, would not be welcome. I finally summoned up the courage to go down the familiar and very dark alley. Heart pounding with child-like excitement, feeling half crazy, I stumbled past the back of the curry house, past an abandoned fridge, and nearly fell over the rubbish that was strewn everywhere until I found what had once been the entrance to the back yard of the shop that we’d lived above. All was roughly boarded up and totally impenetrable. Was I going to break in? I had tried to blag my way in via the front door to our flat the last time I was here. I hurried back up the alley, adrenalin racing, past the voices from the kitchen at the back of Penge Masala.

Alleyways of childhood

Through the darkness the light of the street became visible. However, like later when I walked past the edge of Crystal Palace Park, I’d wanted somehow to fall out of the light into the darkness of the old familiar alley and be swallowed up by it. Sometimes, like much later that same night, running in the darkness of Leyton and its filter beds, I imagine deliberately falling into the blackness. Either side of that Leyton path, I could have fallen into the ice-cold water below, but I recoiled at the likely horror of what this would bring.

Back into the light

Walking up past Crystal Palace Park, I had spied the iconic broadcasting tower, strangely barely illuminated but still overwhelming in scale. After veering into sidings and photographing aspects of the area’s Victorian remains (see immediately below), I slipped into the park itself, mindful of the strangeness of all that was being illuminated. 

Crystal Palace gothic

Crystal Christmas

All part of some Christmas shopping spectacle, it seemed. Well-dressed, well-heeled couples walked into the main entrance where merchants offered choice trees and scented candles.  Imaginary conversations went through my head as I strode about in a slightly moth-eaten 20+ year old Crombie coat. You don’t know anything about me, I stated to imaginary interlocutors.  Don’t presume anything.  I am not what you see.  I am not of you.

I’d never fully appreciated that there had always been part of Crystal Palace that was moderately well to do. Large houses still abound. My father used to say we were from Crystal Palace, partly to help people locate where we lived and partly out of social embarrassment at what ‘Penge’ somehow connoted. A thoroughly middle-class white family strode by. Perhaps the children attended the Langley Park grammar school located a bus ride away. I am not of you, I quietly intoned. 

I had no interest in revisiting Langley Park Grammar School for Boys. I had only attended it for nine months, but the elitism of a state-funded institution and its almost exclusively middle-class demographic never left me. My brother had somehow slotted in. He worked hard, kept his nose clean and found some long-haired members of a more rarefied socio-economic grouping to play the officially disapproved of sport of football with during break times. Very aware that I was neither of the council estates nor possessed of the leafy assuredness that comfortable dwellings provide, I though never felt at home at Langley Park. Harold Wilson became an instant object of sympathy for me when I heard the roar of appreciation from the grammar school staff room when the news broke that he had resigned as Prime Minister.

That part of Penge High St that is close to Crystal Palace is undergoing a gentle gentrification including a bourgeois-looking café and a tap room (empty). Some of this process is even finding its way into Penge proper, although plainly not the parade that includes our former High Street flat. I saw a lot more estate agents in Penge on this return trip, and in Southey Street, behind the High Street, a sign pointed the way to a micro-brewery and adjoining tap room. However the street art in Southey Street looked way more enticing (see below). 

Southey Street art

When in 2017 I made the first of a series of return visits to Penge I saw a lot of boarded up shops and very few estate agents. Penge though is only 15 minutes by train from Victoria and has three walkable, overground stations. So, amidst London’s ever-present property price insanity, the attraction to the middle classes of its less salubrious outposts is I suppose obvious. In any case I wouldn’t have noticed so much as a kid that Penge had probably always had its ‘comfortable’ parts. Almost across the road from where we lived, Avington Grove has some large and impressive late Victorian family houses that look as if they have maintained that status. The Wilsons (no relation) lived opposite us in this (see below) quite smart house (although I think it had already been converted into flats back then).

The Wilsons' home

On Kent House Road, where the big houses that I used to steal milk from meet Thesiger Road, there’s a parade that now has an upholsterer’s and an upmarket carpet shop (and this more modest shop, below, whose awning may not have changed in the last 45 years).

 

Kent House offie

Reviewing Southey micro-brewery's website a little later, I noted that among the beers available for four days a week in the Taproom, and anytime if you order online, were the pointlessly offensive ‘Lazy Jesus’ and ‘Hazy Jesus’. The online Lazy Jesus though was proving so popular that it was listed as ‘out of stock’. St John’s Parish Church Penge is only open to the public for an hour a week. I share the anger that some fellow Survivors can feel about a ‘Man in a Purple Dress’ , even if I have retained my childhood respect for a Christian faith that gave me love and salvation. It also taught me to equate the consequences of my abuse with sin. I am still dealing with the shame of that.  

I eventually left Penge in a state of high agitation. I felt pathetic that a trip that I had taken because I couldn’t face a day with either myself or anyone else, had brought a lot of upset.  Unlike the last time I came, this was no journey of self-discovery I thought. I’d arrived in the actual darkness and had continued to dwell there.  However, I had come because I had wanted to ‘feel something’. Writing this now I realise it revealed a lot more than I had thought. Feeling shame isn’t anything new. However, if I am helping myself to process my mother’s suicide nine years on, then this is a good thing. The Pawleyne Arms’ cheap beer had only contributed to what was always going to be an emotional roller coaster. It also brought me a wonderful mash up of a 40-year-old Stranglers’ song (‘Golden Brown’), an all-time favourite number that always instantly transports me to being 17.

The Pawleyne Arms, Penge

A good friend asked me if, in blogging this and other forms of life writing, I felt ‘held’ enough. Perhaps not. But as it isn’t free writing, is typed and is constantly being edited, even mid-sentence, perhaps these are the ‘constraints’ that keep me in check.  I don’t want to be in check though.  I’d hoped this could convey the scream I had wanted to come out, especially by the side of Crystal Palace Park Road. However, hitting ‘publish’ is fairly ‘un-boundaried’ I guess. So here goes.

    

 

Doin' Her Utmost to mix pop with feeling

The new single by The Big Believe 'Doin’ My Utmost' C/W 'Hundreds' is a writing collaboration between Amanda Thompson and Daniel Wylie (of Cosmic Rough Riders fame). The Big Believe though is essentially Amanda, who writes/co-writes and performs most of the material, when she’s not busy being a Necessary Animal that is. As The Big Believe, Amanda Thompson has carved out a distinct niche fusing pop electronica with an Indie sensibility and catchy but emotional vocals.

Single cover artwork by Peter Quinnell 

The 2020 album Juggernaut provided the perfect showcase for this fusion; the single from that album, 'Tania Was A Truth Teller', was an absolute corker.

Album cover artwork by Peter Quinnell

The new single has Necessary Animals’ collaborator Fritz Catlin (23 Skidoo) at the mixing desk, Marcus Sullivan on additional guitar, and Rufus Stone on bass and percussion. While Amanda would no doubt modestly deny that The Big Believe is essentially her, the new single is very much in a groove that she has established as her own. Her promotional material stresses ‘melody’ and ‘energy,’ and these are very much what 'Doin’ My Utmost' is about. 

It’s no surprise that she’s currently getting more airplay Stateside. When it comes to intelligent pop and rock, the US had long favoured broadcasting direct and upbeat songs over the Brits’ more typical knowing introspection. The Big Believe are more than just catchy though; they want to uplift with feeling, and this single is no exception to their musical game-plan. ‘Hundreds’ does the same thing, with just a little less bounce. The Big Believe could be the next big thing. You read it here first.

'Doin' My Utmost'/'Hundreds' can be purchased/listened to via this link.

A Man in a Purple Dress

Passion, anger, self-righteousness, humility, equivocation. It’s all in here. Unsurprisingly this late period Pete Townshend/Who song says more about the author than the subject. Its target is moralising prelates; its visual embodiment is a pope (written pre-Pope Francis). However 'A Man in a Purple Dress' is full of contempt for figures of high orthodoxy in any monotheistic context. More importantly the anger is timeless, focused, articulate; the older Daltrey delivers a vocal that’s emotionally intelligent, mannered and sincere. Townshend accompanies him on acoustic guitar. Nothing more, nothing less. The song is complete. 

Unplugged but wired, circa 2016 Photo © La Stampa

Townshend isn’t saying that for a man to be wearing a long purple tunic is inherently absurd, more that it compounds the inherent risibility of those presented as infallible, or at the very least those who would have us believe they’re wise, moral and well-informed when they preach. Of course Townshend knew when he handed down these lyrical judgments to Daltrey to try to embody, that he hadn’t been above dispensing moral and political lessons to his followers for a few decades either. Toward the end of the song, Townshend, via Daltrey, notes that he too dresses up for ‘grand awards’, and that at least those apparently embodying religious certainty aren’t weighed down by moral equivocation (or ‘astride the fence’). That comes with middle aged agnosticism, presumably. Listening to it today, 15 years on from when it was released, I get an immediacy and a power, a righteous rage that could rightfully be addressed to any public figure who tries to dispense moral authority from within the confines of morally compromised power structures. Take another bow, Pete.   

‘A Man in a Purple Dress’ is on The Who album ‘Endless Wire’ (2006)

A late period classic, released 2006. Cover artwork © Polydor/Universal