Will You Dance With Me?

I must have been about 11. Mum said that we were going out for a special Sunday treat - we were going to Trincas for the jam session. I think I probably thought she meant we were going to get some jam - anyway I was underwhelmed. But - it was with Desmond and the Tibetan boys and I was promised a banana split so I acquiesced and at three o'clock we went.

How can I make you see that scene? It even now defies description. Several hundred young people on the dance floor - jammed on the dance floor. People on tables twisting - for yes, this was the time of the Twist. I think I knew in the first thirty seconds or arrival that I would never be one of the 'cool' people. This was on a whole new level. This was not my sheltered small baba life and I LOVED it!

My sister, meaning well, told everyone how good I was at doing the Twist. NO! Not here in this place. I was never going to dance in front of these people. I think buoyed up by love I ventured onto the dance floor and weakly twisted my hips in a parody of the real thing. I knew and they knew it but all oohed and aahed at my 'talent'. Then the band played Let's Twist Again and the real dancing started all over again. It was incredible, unbelievable and I lost my soul to Rock and Roll.

I had to wait nearly three years before I got back there. Going to a jam session in my own right as a person not an appendage. The same fevered atmosphere still existed although the Twist was long gone. We had to queue for an hour to get in and once in stake a claim to a table and guard it with our lives. The session ran from 3 'til 7 every Sunday afternoon. Always with live music and always the bands that we all wanted to follow. In those early days that was the Flintstones with 'my' Peter Yeti singing Mustang Sally. It was four hours of hedonistic pleasure - we danced, we talked, we cried and we laughed. For those four hours Trincas became a microcosm of the real world - all human life was there. Jealousy and anger and love all simmered and stirred in the melting pot.

I don't know when it stopped being fun - I just know that Trincas in the evening became a place to go to and Sunday afternoons belonged to off course betting on the Bombay races at the RCTC. We all needed a different stage for our dramas and, to an extent, needed to not play them out quite so publicly. We outgrew the jam session - bands like the Great Bear needed a bigger stage and being listened to not gyrated to. I still shiver when I hear Mustang Sally though.

At the Zoo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65YUe2PJTAQ

Weird things to do in Calcutta on a Saturday afternoon included ice skating at the Birla Ice Rink - always very welcome in the hot weather even if all we did was go round the edge as the ice gave up the ghost against the humidity and we slushed through puddles. The best one though was a trip to the zoo.

Calcutta Zoo was a place of wonder for a child and guilty pleasure for an adult. It was always a bit smelly and some of the monkeys were definitely motheaten but there were bears and white tigers and huge gentle elephants who would delicately and tenderly relieve you of a monkey nut with their trunk.

I have to be honest though - the zoo was the only place you could get candy floss and for me that was best part of the whole experience - to be covered in sticky pink sugar and watch the monkeys as they moved through their enclosure and also held their hands out for the monkey nuts, which they took, not as gently as the elephants, but with an urgency that implied this would be the best nut ever.

The white tigers had been a gift from Russia and they were very rare. When I was a little baba they were exciting and beautiful - as I got older they were still beautiful but now clearly suffering in the heat and humidity of a Bengal far from their higher altitude homelands. I have a strange ambivalence about zoos - I love them and hate them in equal parts. The child still within me loves to see the animals and marvel at the behaviour - the adult finds it hard to reconcile captivity for human entertainment as being in any way acceptable. My friend Blue Wright works tirelessly to save the tiger in its natural habitat and she more than anyone else made me realise the sadness of the zoo - that for many species it may be their only way to survive. We need better zoos but, more importantly, we need better wildlife laws and protection.

I got my love of giant turtles from seeing my mother rescue them and send them back out to sea in Puri and the zoo always saddened me when I saw them so far from warm sand and the blue sea that is their natural element. I always avoided the reptile house - far too many snakes and the glass never looked strong enough.

It was a splendid Saturday afternoon and Alipore was lucky to have the zoo but I do hope those tigers have airconditioning now although I doubt it. It has a charmed memory for me as a place of exploration and gaining knowledge and that golden glow that happy childhood days always seem to acquire.

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If Wishes were Horses...

I wish

for peace - not just

world peace

but my mind in

peace

I wish

for courage - not just

the bravery kind

but the living every

day kind

I wish 

for love - not just

the couple kind

but the unatltering, accepting

kind

I wish

for happiness - not just

smiles and laughter

but the joyous liver of life

kind

I wish

for time travel - not just

the science fiction kind

but the finding happiness in the past

kind

I wish 

for the tears to stop - not just

the silly kind

but the gut wrenching sobbing that 

makes you feel sick

kind.

I wish 

for it all to stop - not just

a catch of breath

but the no breath, no feeling

kind.......

If you go down to the woods today!

Just been watching a fairly ordinary magazine type show called The One Show and they had a story that has got me hopping mad. Apparently our government has decided to privatise our woodland by selling off many of forests that are currently in the hands of the Forestry Commission and are there for all of us to enjoy.

I cannot imagine England without the woods - we are soon coming up to bluebell time - and there is nothing like a walk through a beech wood over a carpet of bluebells to lift the heart and to reaffirm a belief in a higher power.

When Anna and Katie were little Mum and I would take them to Savernake Forest, beloved of Henry VIII for hunting and chasing Jane Seymour. We would park the car and walk deep among the trees, find a clearing and, using a little camping stove have bacon and eggs out of ration tins. The girls would climb the trees and run on ahead and back thrilling in the freedom and the beauty of the green roof above us.

When I was small I would be taken to the bluebell woods to see the fairy rings and the hollowed out tree trunks they lived. My own fairy, Belinda, came from these woods and travelled back to India with me. I let her go back to her native woodland when I was about eight.

England is about trees and greenery - we love out forests and our woodland. I cannot believe that seriously this coalition government can do this and I know that I and many like me will fight with every fibre of our being. If you live here in the UK write to your local MP - I am going to. Our trees deserve our loyalty.

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Black dogs and Grey Skies

Sorry I have not been as prolific as  usual. The latest bout of medication seems to have taken away the need, or indeed the ability to write - so I have stopped it for a couple of days and am gradually beginning to feel things more clearly. It surely is a conundrum - with the meds I am fine, even tempered and respond cow like to even the most alarming events. Without the meds my mood crashes, I cut and feel every slight little thing - but I can write and think. What would you do?

I know my friend Gregg hates the term black dog for depression but it is just that that perches on your shoulder, the weight of and contradiction of hating something you love. Churchill knew his depression well. I would love to talk to him about it - I wonder if the war helped? Or maybe he just had days where to function normally was enough.

It is a strange thing this illness - it creeps upon you like an alley cat seeking food. The signs are there but so discreetly that it is easy to simply see them as oddities. Then WHAM! the sky falls and the black cloud descends and all is grey and foglike. To move is too difficult - to speak too much trouble and anyway what to say? "Bit depressed actually", to which the reply is usually, "Have you been for walk? Done some exercise? Spoken to.....?" Well, yes actually I have - the walk knackered me and I almost fell over when I started to hyperventilate. Exercise???? And I don't want to speak to anyone because it is always the same. I am down and they feel a sense of pity that they try not show.

Thank God at the moment I haven't reached the suicidal stage - it comes in stages. I am indifferent to life but too tired to even think about killing myself- but if I was to die tomorrow I doubt I would be disappointed.

And then there is the eternal dichotomy - I don't want people but I am lonely. What I really want is wake up and find that this has all been a horrid dream and that I am in my old (comfy) bed with Ben and Rosie asleep beside me. That I am not a vulnerable case number any more but just Joanna. Joanna who believed in good over evil, loving life and playing the glad game.

And oh yes - I want a dog! Not fussed if he is black - I can lead him round then.

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CROWDS AND RIOTS

I know that I write with rose tinted glassed about Calcutta. We lived under a Marxist government at a time of conspicuous consumption by the young and rich. The two eventually had create tension and a war for the hearts and minds of the people of the city was joined.

When I was about ten there were terrible anti. Muslim riots that had Abdul and his father sleeping in the flat for their own safety. We stood on the roof and watched the Muslim quarter go up in flames. They were in some way linked to the first Pakistani war and nobody bothered to ask the Muslim population where their allegiances lay. They were cause for some unspeakable violence and a form of race hatred that went beyond its need. Abdul had not desire to live in Pakistan - he came from Bihar and was a Bihari first and then a Muslim. The fires burnt for many long nights and then - stopped. India had won the war, retained Kashmir and everybody returned to their normal lives.

The best kind of riots where the ones that happened at Tolly on race days. Tolly was a icon of class and caste consumerism and it really was no wonder that the a city living under Marxist rule would it hard to stomach. Tolly was always high on the list of organised riots usually caused by a big punt on a horse that could not win but had rumours about finding its fitness in time for the race. One of the leading goondas took a fancy to me and came over as we arrived for the races, "Baba at three o'clock you must go", I told Mum and thought no more about. At three o'clock the heavily backed favourite ran and lost. Instantly my friend threw a Molotov cocktail towards the stewards stand and started shouting, loudly, 'No race, no race".

We moved quickly of the course and went and hid in the bar where we saw the riot in all its glory. The thatched roof of the eighteenth bar was set on fire but no one came close to the main building. It wasn't pretty - policemen charging with their lathies, homemade petrol bombs crashing against the sides of the stands. About six o'clock they all began to disperse and I crept out to see  Pebble Eyes, my informant form the morning. 'Time to go home now baba - we made our point", he had a cut on his face and I managed to persuade him to let Dad take a look, which he did, put in two stitches and gave him some antibiotics. From that day he was my friend.

Another time after a race day I had persuaded my friend Jimmy Gordon to take me down to Second Lane to see Peter Yeti. It was a ridiculous idea - Jimmy was driving his dad's Rover - impossibly wide for and impossibly narrow lane. We knocked down a bicycle and were instantly surrounded by a noisy mob pushing and kicking the car. Suddenly a man's  head appeared at the window, "Taras Bulba yes?", I nodded and he spoke loudly and clearly to the crowd - he took one hundred rupees from Jim for the bike and then got into the front of the car. "They won't follow you with me here in the car. I won 5000 rupees on Taras Bulba today. I must repay my luck." he chattered away until we reached Park Circus and suggested we went home - which we did.

On my 21st birthday I had a real mix of friends on the roof on our flat. There were all my my friends form Harish and Darius to Ivan Alford and Peter's sister Jean. ~Imagine my surprise when our rescuer went up to my Dad and introduced himself as Mr Ghosh, punter. I thought we would all die of concealed giggles and hastily took Mr Ghosh to the roof were I left him with Ivan with strict instructions to keep him away from Dad.

Calcutta is such vibrant city and an emotional one too. What amazes me know is how certain I was that I was in no danger - after all if the chief goonda calls you baba and warns you what will happen you've got to be pretty sure you are and will remain safe.

Beside the Shining Sea

I haven't written very much about Cornwall. I suspect largely because the loss is still within recent memory and still stings. When Cornwall went the last of the dreams went too.

How did we come to go there? Well, my sister wrote to my mother suggesting that we all went on a seaside holiday when she and the girls returned from Kuwait for the summer. My mother asked around and got the name of some holiday lets and booked us all in. And so we went.

The road to Coverack isn't picture book pretty - you criss cross moorland and naval barracks and always with the sense that the sea is near and yet not seen. Across Goonhilly with giant satellite dishes crowning its bleakness and then you turn right along a narrow Cornish lane. And then, oh and then the road falls away towards the sea and nestled in a half moon bay lies Coverack. To see it for the first time was joyous but to return after a long absence was to truly understand the sense of coming home.

As you drove into the village there was Brenda's - shop of all sorts and central intelligence gathering post, the Old Mill Shop with glorious tat for sale and Roy's - Harbour Lights where the old ideas of seaside teas was firmly kept alive. And all this just above the everchanging beach for the wind dictated the sand amounts and they changed daily - sometimes white sand as far as one could see, another time just rocks and rock pools to be explored.

To see the village was to love it - to dream of being a part of it and Mum and I did just that. We plotted and planned, added up our options and dreamt of days spent beside the sea. We both had houses or cottages that were part of the dream package and all looked towards the sea.We were unaware of the Calcutta connection - that Desmond's dear friend Frank Baines had grown up nearby. Once we realised that this was so it seemed almost more apt that we should love it so.

One day we went to an auction sale at the old Headland Hotel - it was being sold up before being turned into holiday flats and cottages. As we walked around its shabby Edwardian grandeur the theme music from Murder on the Orient Express played on the room radios and we looked at views and agreed that this was a very special location. Little did we know that within a year we would own a share of the 22 acres of cliff side and a cosy cottage called Kalimpong to bring the old dreams and the new even closer.

The time came when I felt dreaming should be pushed into reality and together we set out not as visitors but as locals. Two weeks after we arrived Mum was diagnosed with throat cancer and the dream faded as we fought with an increasingly difficult reality. By the time Mum died the dream was gone - our last throw of the dice was an attempt to get her back there but even that failed. The dream was in ashes around us. After I sold the cottage it took five years to go back- but I love it still. Cornwall is a place that heals the heart and feeds the soul. It is the place of dreams and dreamers.

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Not very well

Even being poorly in Calcutta had its up side. For one thing you got to spend all day in bed in an air conditioned room - never a bad thing when the temperature and humidity conspired to make you feel even worse. For another, someone like me, whose world revolved around books, was given a stack of new books to read in bed.

When I was small the gifts that would come were always paper dolls with cut out clothes and fuzzy felt farmyards. I was never a neat cutter out and predated Velcro with sticky tape to keep the intricate dresses and smocks on. My favourite was, unsurprisingly, Pollyanna and I would spend hours dressing and redressing a cardboard Hayley Mills in a selection of outfits. I think the fuzzy felt must have presaged my love for Farmvile - there was something so satisfying about the green of the grass with the cows and pigs and chickens artistically arranged.

It was during one of the times ( I was sickly child) that I was given Anne of Green Gables and Girl of the Limberlost. For weeks I was happily entwined with the Anne's "kindred spirits" and with the cruelty of Elinor's mother. It never crossed my mind that they were from a time long gone. I know I was given Little Women when I had my appendix out and, submerged in post operative gloom, wept at the death of Beth.

Illnesses varied - rarely dysentery, more often tonsillitis or some other long forgotten lurgy. I know when I was about fourteen I had dengue- not pleasant and it left a mumbling echo - even now when I have a fever I get the dengue rash beneath the skin.

My worst one was sunstroke. We had a school sports day - in May, in the baking sun and although my weak ankle meant I did not take part I was running errands for all and sundry. The following day at Firpos for Sunday lunch I regurgitated my fried chicken and ended up in bed for the next week. The school had a sharply worded note from my father suggesting they confined Sports Day to the cold weather months in future.

My appendix was a typical in the way that things got done. I had stomach ache, my father said it was nothing. I wept in pain - he said he had seen nothing but crying children all day and expected a little peace when he got home. They fought and my mother took me to lovely Uncle Eric - Eric Davies. Within the hour I was in Woodlands and my appendix exploded as they lifted it from my stomach. Mum stayed with me the whole time I was in Woodlands, leaving only to get her hair done and change her clothes. Maybe that is the  reason I knew not to leave her alone towards the end.

How strange to feel nostalgic over illness, but, recovering from this beastly bug has left me a little low and feeling unloved. To remember those days is to remember being 'a top brick' and knowing nothing but love and care. How nice it would be to have a pile of books or some cutout dollies to take me through this. Still I have had Farmville.

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Flu!

Today is the first time since New Year that I have felt well enough to contemplate writing anything. I have had flu and it has been horrid. Earache and a sore throat that would give sandpaper a run for its money!

Happy New Year to any of you I haven't already wished. Hope that 2011 is going to be exactly what you hope for. I am still trying to come to terms with my lack of resolutions - still feel I should somehow be prepared to make the new year better than the last but at the same time unwilling to put the pressure of expectation on myself - I know where that leads and it isn't pretty.

The last few days have passed in a haze of general unwellness - lots of fluids, paracetamol and hot water bottles. Why is it that being unwell reduces us to such babies? All I wanted was comfort food and a shoulder to cry on. What I got was solitude and whatever was to hand in the kitchen.

I must tell you about my Chrismas present from my blind neighbour. He trotted off to Basingstoke by himslef and came back with an animal print scarf and gloves. Very Bet Lynch! I have had to tell him that my apirations to cougarhood are not great. So kind though. Maybe my resolution should be to accept his next proposal!!!!!

Durzis and Dhobis

One of the great gifts of living in Calcutta was the clothes. You would go to the market or to Bombay Dying or Mayur and buy your material and then find a picture in a magazine, take it and the cloth to your durzi and a week later the dress, skirt or blouse was made.

The durzis had a hierarchy - Morsalem on the corner of  Harrington St was considered a burra memsahib's tailor. He made my sister 's wedding dress. He had the gift of being able to cut beautifully but he was expensive (by Calcutta standards) and so was only used for special occasions. Abdul tailor was our durzi from when I was very small and would make lovely towelling confections to be worn in Puri. Not so successful was the towelling bikini that became waterlogged and fell down but he was always generous in letting us see what the doyennes of fashion were having made and in making the same for us. Finally there was the verandah durzi who came and sat on the verandah for a week or ten days and ran shirts and nightgowns and all purpose clothing.

Naughty Desmond stole the verandah durzi away from all the memsahibs and kept him happily employed in Minto Park making ever bolder design in shirts from raw silk and brightly coloured cotton. I  don't think he ever returned to the verandahs of the memsahibs. He made my favourite dress - a black and white poplin halter neck that Desla designed when I said I was fed up of the good girl clothes I always wore. I thought I was the bees knees in the dress which was almost completely see through and was worn with Dorothy's black velvet and fur trimmed evening coat from the thirties.

The Heywood girls would arrive for Christmas with lovely, fashionable clothes that were copied several times over. Nothing was sacred - all designs were up for grabs even thought it must have been intensely irritating to arrive at the races in your new frock and to see at least three other people wearing the same thing. Abdul tailor managed to share the designs and not lose his customers - a rare talent in what was increasingly a game of one upmanship. He was also the recipient of my unwanted 'lost' animals - he would always take the goats that had been rescued from the Maidan and keep them out at Howrah where he lived. I suspect they made a lovely biriani at the end of Ramadan.

All these clothes needed washing and there were no washing machines - just the dhobi. Dubby's mother in law's verandah looked down on the the dhobi ghats - full of sheets and shirts being pounded against stone to loosen their dirt and increase the whiteness. I remember feeling glad that our dhobi did the washing in Mum's bath and hung it out to dry on the roof. He came three times a week - the tropics demand that clothes are only worn once and often changed two or three times a day. Everything was washed, dried and ironed ready to be put away by Abdul bearer. How spoilt we were  - I am sure that the reason I hate ironing so much now is because I never had to do it when I was younger - and as for handwashing - not a clue!

Such a privileged life - such fun. I would love to feel guilty for enjoying the privileges we had but I don't. I knew I was lucky and I enjoyed every minute of it.

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