10th November 1933 – 28th April 2024
Hammersmith Bridge – Allen’s favourite among his more recent paintings
Allen Alfred Freiesleben was born into a working-class family in west London, in November 1933. Before working in a Lyons Corner House[i], his mother had been a nanny and a cleaner, while his father, a lorry driver, spent his early years in Brazil – grandson of an émigré originally from Leipzig. It wasn’t easy having a German surname during WW II[ii] – indeed Allen’s father narrowly escaped internment as an ‘enemy alien’, though later became a night-time firewatcher[iii].
Allen with his parents, on his 1st birthday, Nov 1934.
Allen’s earliest love was the cinema. When asked about films from his youth, he would immediately recall the location of his first viewing whether it be, amongst other venues, ‘The Gaumont, Hammersmith’[iv] or ‘the Globe, Acton’[v]. If sirens sounded when the family were at the cinema, rather than making their way to an air-raid shelter, they would huddle together and continue to watch the screening. The later demolition of many of these cinemas was a great sadness to Allen, as if a superior reality located in the past, became thereby less accessible.
The Acton Odeon, circa 1930s[vi]
Unsurprisingly, the Second World War was a formative nightmare, during which the Freieslebens – temporarily adopting the name Fry – were bombed out twice. Briefly evacuated to the countryside near Derby, Allen and his younger sister Sylvia (‘Bubs’) returned – as was so common – just in time for The Blitz[vii] and the heaviest bombing!
Allen with his sister, mum and a family friend, 1938?
As a delivery driver my grandfather often used to park his lorry under Hungerford Bridge overnight. Allen had vivid memories of journeying around London in his father’s cab and travelling home by train, sometimes during air raids.
Intensified by my nan’s memories of her sister, “Aunt Mags – what got killed by a buzz bomb” (a sentence she often repeated, eyes watering, from the 60s until her death in 1990), the V1 “doodlebugs”, haunted my childhood also – due in part to Allen’s terrifying recollection of playing on a bombsite[viii] in late 1944: when the engine of a V1[ix] stopped directly above . . .
Which way should he run?
A 2011 entry in one of Allen’s notebooks:
An answer to a crossword clue was ‘embankment’ —————– and I was suddenly swept away on a tide of nostalgia. Don’t think I’d fully realised until that moment the lasting impression the Thames in London – especially West London – has had upon me. What a huge role it played in my childhood and youth. The house we, as a family, were moved from ‘cos of Blitz damage, was a stone’s throw from the river, though we couldn’t see it because of factory walls. In Chiswick, we again were close to the Thames. Now, in Dorchester [70 years later], there is a river, but it is a trickle compared to the Thames in W.4.
Allen in the early 50s
After the war, in the early 1950s, National Service found Allen stationed at an army stores and distribution depot near Bicester, where he became a corporal before being demoted for going AWOL one homesick weekend.
Allen’s mother had had a leg amputated after contracting tuberculosis of the bone[x] in the late 1930s, so learning, whilst in the army, that he had tuberculosis in his lungs, felt like a fatal blow. Allen spent months in hospital, yet to his eternal, hypochondriac disbelief, didn’t die. He encountered modern art instead! The fortuitous discovery of French Modern Painters by R H Wilenski[xi], a “wonderful book” combining art criticism with a social history of the early 20th century, made Allen aware of ‘fine art’ and all the ‘isms’. John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, was also a great influence. Allen remained resolutely left-wing his whole life.
A painting from the 2000s
Always fascinated by cartoons, Allen could immediately see links between Mickey Mouse and Picasso – and never intended such observations satirically. Cartoons, after all, are abstractions of a kind. Picasso became a God in his eyes: he cried when he learned of Picasso’s death, in April 1973. Art basically changed Allen’s life, expanding his horizons infinitely. Other deep friendships from the 1950s also helped to consolidate his unshakeable belief in art[xii].
A large oil painting of Allen’s from 1959 – part Matisse part Kitchen-sink[xiii] perhaps –
which hung in the living room of our council house in Aylesbury for years
Allen and friend Ginger drove to the south of France in Ginger’s worn-out bullnose Morris in the 1950s, to try and experience the atmosphere of post-war art in the sun firsthand[xiv]. They didn’t stay long, but soon afterwards, inspired by the artists working in the far southwest of England, Cornwall became Allen’s favoured destination. In one of his old folders, in contrast to the tone of the semi kitchen-sink[xv] oil above, in August 2024, I unearthed this coloured ink sketch of Polperro harbour made in 1959 – still looking fresh 65 years after it was painted:
Polperro harbour, 1959
Boats and harbours were a favourite subject of many of the painters Allen was intrigued by or admired – from Alfred Wallis to Terry Frost. I richly recall a summer holiday in Brixham in the early 1970s. Our holiday let had a massive picture window, overlooking the harbour far below. What a change from inland Aylesbury where gulls were rarely seen! In the mornings, we’d walk down to the harbour and the whole family would be encouraged to draw. I can remember trying to sketch a basket of crabs. There was no perfectionism involved in this and no wrong way to do it, just different ways – often a key factor behind the freedom inherent in the best of modern art. Enthusiasm, engagement and playing with the medium were vital to Allen, whilst theorising and any kind of connecting philosophy, were distinctly secondary[xvi]. His sketches were often the basis of later abstractions. This rapid colour drawing of Axmouth, 52 years on from Polperro, comes from one of his sketchbooks:
Allen later claimed to prefer “not to see the sea” – and I’ve often wondered whether this decision stemmed from a disillusionment similar to that which created his loathing of Christmas. Just as the excitement he felt for Christmas as a child[xvii] became hollow tinsel and baubles for him, perhaps the potential offered by the sea, advancing and retreating into lively flashing harbours, or its wider sense of infinity, became overwhelming? Perhaps they both invoked a potential felt in the past, or even – in the case of the sea – mocked the limitations of the human condition?
From an entry in one of Allen’s notebooks, 2014:
Got an idea that Alzheimer’s could be brought on ‘cos it’s too painful to remember the relative happiness or purpose of life in the past. If this be true, I’m in danger of developing it.
One of Allen’s covers for The Oldie – May 1999
It was on another trip – pilgrimage almost – to St Ives that Allen met Valerie Gee[xviii], a recent graduate of Harrow Art School, who was working as a teacher in Northumberland. Once her summer holiday ended and she returned to Corbridge, Allen and Valerie were faced with months of separation. In the event my dad caught a train up north for a long weekend and they got married in Hexham on September the 29th and had a brief honeymoon in Allendale (!!) Back in London a few days later, divided again by their work responsibilities, in a letter franked 4th October 1961, Allen writes: “I did have a terrific urge to throw up my job and get the first train to Newcastle”, later asking: “Are there any Forestry jobs going up there?”
I was born in August 1962 and my sister, Rebecca, in January 1965. Lawrence and Rebecca – what aspirational names our parent’s bestowed upon us![xix]
Valerie with my sister Beck and me, circa 1968
In the late 1950s, following a string of jobs in which his main objective was to avoid work and get on with ART, Allen had become a meter reader for the Eastern Electricity[xx] Board. He’d discovered that if he walked fast enough, he could do five days’ work in three, allowing more time to paint and work on cartoons for publications such as Punch.
Allen’s Punch cover design, published in May 1963[xxi].
In Turnham Green, he had the privilege of reading E.M. Forster’s meter. Forster was still in his dressing gown in the middle of the day, which Allen humorously noted would have been considered scandalous at the time[xxii] (unlike in Morecambe, Heysham and no doubt elsewhere in 2024[xxiii]). Forster was initially irritated by the disturbance, before they both became absorbed in a conversation about abstract art. Allen often recalled this encounter, in addition to later meetings with actors John Gielgud and David Jason, as well as Ian Gillan of Deep Purple. Occasionally, he was driven to try and write about the dislocating or fascinating effect of these chance encounters, but sadly never completed the resulting atmosphere sketches to his satisfaction.
1963, Stonehill Road, west London – “under the flyovers” –
looking to the skies . . . or the lorries!
In 1965, the council house my parents shared with Allen’s parents virtually under the Chiswick flyover in Stonehill Road, was condemned as “unfit for human habitation”. Council house waiting lists were long, but thanks to Eastern Electricity needing meter readers beyond London’s Green Belt, our move to the expanding town of Aylesbury[xxiv] was accelerated.
I do not care for camouflage
Or artefacts to block the view
From under the flyovers
Invisible, unbothered, always new.[xxv]
In March 1966, along with my younger sister Rebecca, the family moved to Elmhurst Estate[xxvi] – a new-build island which breathed a spirit of post-war optimism – floating[xxvii] over the fields at the town’s north-eastern perimeter.
A sketch of Allen’s from near Dorchester, 2014 . . . recalling the Vale of Aylesbury
in the 1970s
However, assigned to read meters in remote Buckinghamshire villages, Allen soon discovered that the old equation of five days’ labour into three, didn’t go.
Perhaps it was the promise of long holidays that encouraged Allen to train as a teacher? His mature student days at Bletchley college were highly prized, but the occupation itself – teaching at Elmhurst Middle School – rapidly grated on his nerves. Enduring for 15 years, he was glad to take early retirement in 1986, finding through an ex-colleague at the ‘Board’, the perfect part-time job: reading the meters of people consistently absent during normal working hours[xxviii]. He could choose to do this early morning or in the evening, leaving most of the day to continue with his own work. When I was staying from Devon, we were able to engage in our London walks, trips to garden cities, or simply visit local village pubs to talk and maybe have a lunchtime game of darts. Mistaking his age, the Board continued paying him to do this quite special job well into his early 70s
1989 photo of Al and Val
In a notebook from 2015, I found this:
One of the agreeable benefits from being a meter-reader was getting to really know all the surrounding villages & towns encircling Aylesbury,[xxix] in the 200 square miles or so, covering the ‘round’. The same applied to the 20 or so sq miles of the ‘round’ in West London[xxx]. Today, having been in Dorchester for about 8 years, I walked roads just up from Max Gate I’d never walked before, and, got ‘mislaid’! There were two houses remaining on an exclusive 8 house estate, all detached, one of which I would buy if I came up on the Lotto. Again, I was unsuccessfully trying to find somewhere to sketch. On the way back, cutting through the Sandringham Sports Centre, the sunny day and two boys cycling into a large empty space, brought tears to my eyes ‘cos I was taken back to a similar sunny Sunday, empty of people, in the back roads of Chiswick – just Ginger and me. No responsibilities and no thought about all the life before us . . . . . I don’t think I’m all that keen about being an oldie.
Estate Extent. Viewed from the Tindal Hospital demolition site – before Elmhurst Estate lost its often-watery frontier
on the edge of Aylesbury[xxxi]. Lino print on mixed media, (L W Freiesleben, 1984)
An extract from Allen’s notebook:
While walking through a newly built housing estate I was taken back to a younger me and the thought of younger families moving into newly built houses – probably triggered by seeing a house numbered 10[xxxii].
Flats being built across the road from us[xxxiii], Elmhurst Estate, c.1970,
Oil on board, Valerie Freiesleben
Al and Val relocated to Dorchester in 2007 and for six years they frequently went sketching together, working from the cab of his small Bedford Rascal[xxxiv] in inclement weather. It is always interesting to compare their occasionally overlapping views – dad’s faster, mum’s patient and therefore half-finished. I can easily hear him saying, “OK, I’ve had enough, let’s go!” But no doubt he sometimes went for a wander and a roll-up instead.
Mum at Pecorama, Beer, Devon, June 2003
Tragically, my mother died at the end of 2013, leaving Allen to carry on alone, a member of local painting groups and ever enthusiastic about art. Fortunately, my sister and her daughters lived nearby, always there to help and encourage him.
From Allen’s Notebook September 2014:
All nostalgic memories probably begin, “it seems only yesterday”:
Walking back from the cinema in the Blackout . . .
A snowy, misty walk towards Tring – and a pub (now no longer) . . . if someone was here [I would say all these things] . . . so one takes to writing it down instead . . . .
Stop moping!
“Signing Off” Allen’s last (unfinished) painting, April 2024. Acrylic on board 58.5 x 78.6cm
Email from my sister Beck: “Do you know, that the ‘signatures’ was the painting he was working on when he died? He was working on the king and queen for ages and couldn’t get it right . . . So he put it aside and started the signature one – ‘boustrophedon’ or as an ox ploughs a field – I’ve come across the term in letter- cutting! But weird to think it was his last work – like signing off….
In the last decade of his life, Allen remained active and independent, walking into town to get shopping or buy The Guardian – or later, The Dorchester Echo[xxxv]. He enjoyed drinking red wine, playing FreeCell on his ancient computer and watching detective dramas such as Midsomer Murders: “You know Loz, the good thing about losing me memory is I can watch the same episodes of ‘tec [detective whodunnit] mysteries . . . and the ending is always a surprise!”
Oldie cover December 2001
Though acquaintances saw a genial façade, he became increasingly cantankerous, even misanthropic. He railed against the ‘modern world’, saying that he preferred life in wartime. He particularly hated smart phones, cold weather, Christmas – ironic considering that he published a lot of Christmas-themed work – and other public holidays that upset his routine. Another frequent complaint was “why didn’t my parents ever tell me how horrible it is getting old? They never warned me!”
Oldie cover March 2002
Cartoons, painting, printmaking, pottery and ceramics remained parallel pursuits throughout Allen’s life as well as remembering the past – especially the 50s:
Some notebook entries from the last ten years:
Remembering the distant past is more interesting and absorbing than other things? Discuss.
Twice to-day walking under a railway bridge triggered a memory of Ravenscourt Park in Hammersmith – had vivid picture of the swings etc and the arches as one enters the park.
Almost everywhere I go now-a-days reminds me of somewhere else. Wandering around Dorchester, a rather seedy part near the market place, reminds me of the one-time Brentford – the Brentford of the gas works – the dust-coated shop fronts that had been converted into dingy little business premises which faced the 20ft black walls (they continued for about ½ a mile) and hid the gas works and Thames from view. This was back in the Fifties and has since been made into some sort of ‘marina’.
Brentford further downstream from Kew Bridge, (photo: Lawrence Freiesleben, 15th August 1979)
Keep getting these reminders of the past – events and places . . . . they come unbidden, suddenly out of nowhere – most of them from the 40s & 50s ————-walking in a field this morning and idly thinking, although I like the countryside, I’m basically a ‘townie’ – and suddenly I’m thinking of the Windsor and Newton shop in Kensington High Street —- (wonder if it’s still there?). Is this a sort of ‘drowning’ where past life is displayed?
As late as 2023 Allen was still fantasising about shifting back to his formative cityscape – if he “won the Lotto – Cos if I won really bigtime, I could move back to West London.” Knowing he would never get around to it, I never seriously discouraged this idea, but it became exasperating for my sister who had to listen to this pipe dream more often. He would of course have hated it after a few hours. Even in the 1990s, a day out in London was quite enough, it was “too busy, too changed, just TOO MUCH.”
Al at Hadley Wood station, Enfield – 7th London Walk, 22nd June 1998
The stage is set but the players have gone
their traces smoothed, dispersed, their picture hooks unadorned . . .
and although some novelty sharpens this relinquished garden
will there always be an emptiness?[xxxvi]
Allen frequently exhibited his work, most recently at Dorchester Library, where his abstract paintings were well received, and the positive comments in the visitors’ book brought tears to his eyes.
Allen at his Dorchester Library exhibition, private view, December 2023
Allen died after a sudden illness on 28th April 2024. At over 90 and without any lingering illness or pain he was fortunate. One of his nine grandchildren remarked, ‘he’s in heaven, sketching with granny.’
Val & Al at Verney Junction, 22ndJuly 2003. “Two lives valuably lived now hasten into the distance.”[xxxvii]
A final entry from Allen’s notebook:
Went on a longish walk – some sort of bridle path that seemed to go on forever, hoping to find a gap in the 7/8ft high hedge either side, that would reveal a cottage or something suitable to sketch – most of the time I could only see the path ahead and had to go over the next rise and round the next bend – I questioned why am I doing this . . . . sometimes laughing at the seeming pointlessness of it – or thinking it could be a form of after life – a limbo of walking to nowhere . . . . . . but I was strangely enjoying the nothingness – didn’t see a soul.
Rebecca and Lawrence Freiesleben, June-October 2024, Stinsford and Heysham
NOTES: All notes accessed between August and October 2024
[i] flashbak.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-lyons-cornerhouses-and-their-nippy-waitresses-35186/
[ii] Such lingering prejudices were still very apparent in the 1970s. As my sister wrote in an email: “GOTT IN HIMMEL! – we went to school in the 70s and 80s and I would often get nazi salutes and teasing due to German name. Seems unbelievable now. But if that was the 70s, it must’ve been far worse in the 50s and 60s.”
At junior school and later at the Aylesbury Grammar School, I also, was frequently given the Nazi salute. Eventually claiming my full name as von Freiesleben, appeared to grant extra respect – perhaps because of the popularity of the Hotshots version of the Snoopy vs. the Red Baron song? www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=O0qvCnoxFmI&ab_channel=TrojanRecordsOfficial
Originally released by Florida based pop-group The Royal Guardsmen in 1966, the Hotshots cover reached number 4 in the charts in 1973, so you could hardly miss it. Von Richthofen consequently became a notorious hero, one seemingly above class, nationality and politics – at least among children.
[iii] iwm.org.uk/history/how-britain-prepared-for-air-raids-in-the-second-world-war
[iv] One of my dad’s letters to my mum before they were married (postmarked 18th October 1961) fascinatingly describes the atmosphere of a screening of The Guns of Navarone (imdb.com/title/tt0054953/):
“I am attempting to write this in the semi-darkness of the Gaumont Hammersmith. I quite innocently and in all good faith went along to see ‘The Guns of Navarone’ – BIG DEAL! I was forced at the point of a souvenir programme to pay 5/-! [5 shillings] and then shepherded to a seat I had no wish to occupy. Believe it or not there is now an air-force brass band playing! To think I paid for this!
It’s the interval. All over the foyer there are service men shaking collection boxes – big displays of parachute-men. Why don’t they let the war die? I’ve moved from that first seat – that blasted band is still playing – Colonel Bogie now. The programmes by the way were 2/6. I think this is all to get us military minded again –– in preparation for what?!
Lights out!
Not a bad sort of film – I mean for a war film – (why am I watching? if I don’t like them) Greg Peck’s as handsome as ever – etc etc. Greece – as you said recently – looks marvellous !!!!”
[v] From, internationaltimes.it/bomb-damage-maps-a-west-london-digression/:
I might visualise all of my dad’s favourite cinemas, many now gone, places he went with his mum – who once claimed, between verses of a song (she was old by then and often only remembered her early days in the Salvation Army and confused me with my dad) – that she wasn’t frightened much during the wartime raids, because “I’d have known if a bomb had my name on it” – this, despite that her sister was killed by a V1 in 1944.
[vii] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blitz
[viii] Allen had vivid memories of playing on bombsites in a gang led, naturally, by the boy whose father held the highest rank in the army.
[ix] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-1_flying_bomb
[x] Bone tuberculosis (TB) develops if a person’s TB infection spreads beyond the lungs to the bones. See: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculosis
[xi] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._H._Wilenski
[xii] Email from my sister, Beck, 12th October 2024: “It occurs to me we ought to add something about John Banting, Mary Fedden and Julian Trevelyan, John and Helen Cole …from his Chiswick days in the 50s which was what Pat [Allen’s girlfriend for seven years in the 1950s] was telling me about – how they lived in the same block of flats/building and she knew Helen (who became Helen Cole) from an evening class. It’s like he was on the periphery of this group of artists but – I don’t know – didn’t use the network /wasn’t aware that there was a strength in the network? and that is all maybe Class, his deference?”
To which I replied, 13th October 2024: “It would be good to bring in Banting, Trevelyan, Mary Fedden, & John and Helen Cole, but even Banting, Trevelyan and Fedden are comparatively niche names. There’s also the slight link to John Bratby/the Kitchen Sink school and via Bratby’s paintings, Joyce Cary and the Alec Guiness film, The Horse’s Mouth, as well as Chiswick and London itself. Bratby later became a minor novelist – I remember reading Breakdown (1960) at a house where Jane and I stayed from the Twitchen Farm caravan near Bideford in 1980 (to feed the fish in trout pools adjoining the river Torridge). The trouble is, it makes me really sad to think about all this – all those peripheral figures who never “make it” (or “make it” a bit, in the case of Banting, Bratby & Fedden), and all those vanished worlds. With just a little more exposure so many groups of people could valuably be recognized – those parallel worlds . . . Somehow the partial myth of (particularly) post-war St. Ives by the sea and the LIGHT, is appealing to me, whereas 50s London has a diminishing effect – though I love all kinds of films from that period and on into the 60s and 70s) . . . dunno – it all becomes too melancholic. History repeating itself, the impossibility of breaking through, the relative indifference of society towards serious art and literature nowadays etc . . . (anydays?) . . .”
There are some interesting notes on Julian Trevelyan – one of David Hockney’s teachers – in the Tate archive: archive.tate.org.uk/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=TGA+898
[xiii] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_sink_realism
[xiv] See also: internationaltimes.it/a-pint-of-thwaites-gold-for-allen-alfred-freiesleben/
[xv] ibid
[xvi] Years later when I exhibited my own work regularly – and attempted to write any kind of portentous notes about my motivations and aims, it became a long-standing family joke that my dad’s work was “joke” art and mine was “true” art – a characterisation he enjoyed elaborating on at length. In reality, he was as riveted as I am by the impulses, rationalisations and beliefs of artists. . . yet was content in his own work to follow his instinct and aesthetic fascinations, irrespective of any shadowy meanings or linking theories.
[xvii] See Too Many Christmas Trees! internationaltimes.it/too-many-christmas-trees/ :
“The Fag End of the Year has long been my dad’s appellation for Christmas, and he is relieved, so relieved, to stub it out.
“Are you onto a new fag now?” I asked him over the phone on the 2nd of January this year, [2019] and he laughed with the light-heartedness of reprieve. Yet as a child, before they were bombed-out in 1942, his working-class family struggled to have a ‘front room’– a parlour they tried not to use except on special occasions. I’ve always wondered (and he has continued to scorn), whether his loathing of the season was in fact born of a love too intense for the disheartened mind to satisfy? Perhaps he once had the feeling I’m trying to revive now – of a mysterious specialness whose origin is impossible to locate? The only difference being that he has no aspiration to break on through to the other side . . .”
[xviii] By chance, Valerie was the daughter of another delivery driver: Fred Gee worked for BEA (British European Airways en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_European_Airways# out of London airport – which was not renamed Heathrow until 1966.
[xix] Beyond simply liking the name however, my mum also felt that Rebecca, (from the Hebrew Rivkah) tempered the German surname a little. Meanwhile, Lawrence came from her high regard for the novels and poetry of D.H. Lawrence.
[xx] (Trivia): I assumed it was always Eastern Electricity from the beginning, but a letter to my mother dated 28th August 1961 – “I’m sitting with my feet on a dustbin – not a particularly romantic position” – is written on the reverse of some Southern Electricity Board’s, Variation of Tariffs leaflets
[xxi] This cover later formed part of a touring exhibition to the United States, and when the original was subsequently destroyed in a fire, Allen received an insurance payment which matched his original fee. He was very happy about that!
[xxii] Cue Yvonne Mitchell in the evocative film, Woman in a Dressing Gown of 1957. See: www.imdb.com/title/tt0051204/
[xxiii] Dressing gown and slippers (or less) being a common form of dress in Heysham in the 2020s for both wandering the streets and local shopping or even the school run. No criticism intended.
[xxiv] Cadena Cafe, Friars Square, Aylesbury, early 1970s – demolished not much more than 20 years later to be replaced with a very bland mall. Despite all its shortcomings, this somewhat Brutalist area should have been listed.
From The Bow (LWF 1983/2000) pages 82-3 – although the pioneering of Stevenage (which fortunately survives: apollo-magazine.com/new-towns-stevenage-britain-france/ ) is drawn on in this sketch, as well as the original, now vanished, Friars Square, Aylesbury:
“Like a chronological lecture in post-war architecture, from open country we approached the town by crossing housing estates grafted on through successive decades. A cycle path led ultimately to its intended crowning glory: a pedestrianised, split-level market place. Laid out under a square clock on a tower reminiscent of those used by practising firemen, the murals and concrete flower troughs, at this time of year, enliven further the prefabricated, coloured panels and shining squares of glass. Not considered historically significant enough to be worth listing, this whole centre was due for development – the town planners quickly ashamed of their predecessor’s utopian optimism. But what undiscovered part of our twentieth century psyche will be lost when the bulldozers barge in and a slicker, more materialistic and anonymously universal shopping hall, supplants those well-meant representatives and survivors of the post-war dream? Gone is the ideal of culture for all, learning for its own sake; and indoor fountains and tropical plants will replace the black or bronze sculptures, second-rate but vital cipher-keys to a hopeful and forward-looking age, that somehow, somewhere, lost its nerve and its aim.”
See also: internationaltimes.it/caprice-of-the-gods/
[xxv] From Beautiful Eyes (LWF, 2019)
[xxvi] From chapter 10 of Maze End (LWF 2013): “The Waterboatman was unsure he could leave London. However, the Eastern Electricity Board (an impressively solid-sounding title: as if the whole regional concern were embodied by a group of beings – managers, supervisors and dependable Union reps – permanently in council at an oak table in some post-war Camelot) needed meter readers out in the shires and a housing quota had been allotted. This enabled willing employees to effectively vault the waiting lists. And so that was how Volcano’s parents alighted upon Arrowsby-on-Lyre – situated in its unspoilt Vale below the chalk escarpment, in the furthest reaches of the once-dreaming kingdom of Metroland. Geographically, by this distance from London, those dreams had always been thinner – the rich comforting nooks of rural exclusion, truly ended in the beech woods and nestling hills closer to Baker Street and Marylebone.”
[xxvii] Parts of the estate were built on old withy beds and until extensive drainage works in the early 70s, I remember large areas of the fields just beyond the edge of the estate, flooding seriously – very exciting to us at the time. See also the related story of Elmhurst Estate in the 1970s: internationaltimes.it/clouds-of-glory/
www.cutalongstory.com/stories/clouds-of-glory/10856.html
[xxviii] From chapter 10 of Maze End: “A year or two into his new job, equipped with a new ‘Hand-Held Unit’, he journeyed out to the absolute limits of Metroland – its northerly zones which never caught on at all. Halfway back, reaching the main road to Arrowsby, he was stopped by the police for exceeding the speed limit. This wasn’t his fault, certainly not. No, he’d just discovered that the wine gums he enjoyed, made his legs go shaky. That was literally the excuse he gave: ‘It was the wine-gums, officer!’”
[This took place on the edge of Waddesdon. The police, fortunately, let him off].
[xxix] Between 1966-1971 and then again between 1986-2004.
[xxxii] Our house on Elmhurst Estate, Aylesbury was, number 10, Hilton Avenue
[xxxiii] A more streetwise friend of mine, managed to start up a dump truck being used on this building site. For some reason, he couldn’t stop the thing, so he set it to drive in circles, allowing us to jump off and quickly run away.
[xxxiv] The Bedford Rascal was the second of his two small vans. Both had upright cabs ideal for sketching from in adverse weather. In the 1980s his earlier van was a tiny Japanese Acty van with a two-cylinder engine – passed on to me in 1992. The Bedford Rascal was also, eventually, passed on to me. When it became obvious in about 2014 that this would not pass its next MOT, it was used to take on a gate in one of my son Jem’s films, (www.hawkvalley.co.uk/ ) ‘Broken Glass’, currently unfinished. See: youtube.com/watch?v=H-tXTK78Ifw
[xxxv] Email from my sister October 14th 2024: “He gave up buying The Guardian because it was expensive and he never read through it, then couldn’t ever finish the crosswords. He got the Echo because it was a lot cheaper and there were two crosswords – easy and cryptic – and he could manage them both. By 2023 his developing dementia meant he couldn’t cope with the cryptic and had forgotten all the crossword tricks. Anyway, if he ever managed a clue or two, he was very proud! I miss doing them actually – we used to do them over lunch most days.😪”
“However, he even HATED the Echo – it had a regular full page spread of ‘old Weymouth’ or ‘old Dorchester’ and he used to moan about this type of nostalgia. Said he hated looking at old photos – I said because he didn’t grow up here, so of course it wouldn’t be interesting to see how places had changed”
“He would also be shocked and appalled at some of the articles. I said all newspapers were full of terrible reports that made people (especially old people) scared to go out. That was my reason for not listening to the news or buying broadsheets. Still stands!”
“So he didn’t read the contents, except the tv pages and just did the crosswords, but it became a habit – Co-op, milk and newspaper…..”
[xxxvi] paraphrased from A Dorset Reverie, (“fortunate mid-August”, LWF, 2024)
[xxxvii] from We Become Hearsay, (LWF, July 2024): “Branch lines may wind through trees and level crossings close behind . . .”
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