poppycock

the nostalgia issue

Contribu-torsGEORGIA TAYLORwriter & photographer

Georgia is co-founder of Poppycock and loves writing about Grimsby and Grannies.

DARCY SUMMERTONwriter & photographer

Darcy is co-founder #2 of Poppycock and enjoys a good cuppa and a choccie biccie.

FRANCESCA YOUNGillustrator

Fran is a BA Fine Art student at Loughborough University and has kindly drawn up some beautiful illustrations for Poppycock Zine.

“I like to draw older people because they have such interesting faces, the lines and wrinkles show lives lived and I find that beautiful. I like to use a lot of vibrant colour and an expressive style to make the images almost a celebration of age.”

SPECIAL THANKS TO:

Mr Mont Summerton

Mr Malcolm Bird

Mrs Muriel Johnson

our interviewees

FIND US ONLINE:

www.poppycockzine.com

Twitter @poppycockzine

http://pinterest.com/pop-pycockzine/#

LUKE PEARCEweb designer

Luke is a Nottingham Trent Student studying Graphic Design with a passion for web design. He has created a well thought out website to coincide with the zine.

Editors note

This first issue of Poppycock stemmed from our love of the elderly and the tales that they tell us from back in the day. With a massive focus on youth culture in today’s society, we want to celebrate the older generation and the interesting lives they have lived.

We have sat down and chatted with close friends and family to discover the journeys that have shaped their lives.

Real stories and personal accounts feed us with incredible content that is beautiful and touching.

First of all we speak to ode Uncle Mont, a 92 year old ex prisoner of War soldier who has witnessed more than Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan.

We also chatted to 103 year old Muriel Johnson about living through two World Wars and her views on society today.

And then we sit down with Malcolm Bird who lived in Nigeria when the British Empire ruled Africa. He tells us some magnificent stories about tribes, spirits and living on the other side of the Equator.

That’s a lot of poppycock!

Georgia Taylor

Darcy SummertonIn memory of Old Uncle Mont who sadly passed away during the creation of this issue. May he rest in peace and his memories and stories live on.

WARBOY

PRISONER OF WAR TALES FROM ODE UNCLE MONT

DARCY SUMMERTON

World War Two commenced in 1939 and ended in 1945 after the lives of around 25 million soldiers had been taken, including 5 million prisoners of war. It was the deadliest military

conflict in history. Ode Uncle Mont, a soldier and prisoner who lived to tell the tales, sat down with his great niece Darcy Summerton to give her a real insight into what the war

was really like and the stories only imaginable in the movies.

DS: First things first, was it optional to go to war or did you go on your own back?

OUM: Sort of optional me darlin’. Before I went in the army I had a reserved occupation as a corrie shafts man. Torrance, the manager at the colliery told me dad, he said “tell your lad he’s in a reserved occupation as a shafts man”. All my mates had joined the forces and had all been called up from Worthington, so I naturally joined and volunteered as well.

DS: And I bet you wish you hadn’t have gone?

OUM: Well I did for a period but latter when the war had done, I was still in the forces for another 12 months. I was wishing when

I’d finished that I had stayed on in the forces and done another seven years. I wasn’t married at the time. I didn’t get married for another four or five years after.

DS: What was it like after the war? Was the general mood quite low in the country?

OUM: Well I tried to avoid all that. When they took off rations, chocolates and sweets and all that, me, your Grandad and two scotch lads, Jock and John, from Newbold, went to see a film at Derby. We went to see a film with Ronald Reagan in, the film star, we bought a lot of chocolate then we came back to Melbourne got washed up and went to the clubs. Then got a taxi back to Worthington and then they walked

back to Newbold. So sort of went back to normal really.

DS: What was it like being a soldier? Were people very respectful of you?

OUM: I think if you behaved yourself you were alright, it’s when you got in with the common crowd you’d get into trouble quickly, which is what happened with civilians. It was like goats, there was a leader and then everyone else automatically followed him. And that was that. I got on all right on me own and no one bothered me. And your granddad never bothered with gangs, he just had one mate and that was it.

DS: How old were you when you went to war?

OUM: Twenty. I didn’t see much; I was abroad for only two months and then I got took prisoner.

DS: Where were you when you got caught?

OUM: Just outside Tobruk in Libya with another 39,000 men - took more or less at the same time. We were surrounded you see. I was a newcomer, only there for two months. I was held captive for three years; In Italy for 18 months and then in Germany for another 18 months. Italy capitulated, packed in, and then the Germans took all the prisoners in Italy over to Germany.

DS: Did you have any contact with your family as a prisoner?

OUM: Well we could send letters home. They all didn’t get home though. Some got parcels. I think I got one - cigarettes from Rhodesia, which is now Zimbabwe.

DS: We all know now about the concentration camps, but at the time did you have any idea what was going on?

OUM: It was all kept under wraps yet I wasn’t far from one, Auschwitz. Not far from that y’know, not far from Dresdon. I never had a radio but I expect some of the other lads did.

DS: Did you have to work as a prisoner then?

OUM: In Italy you didn’t work because the British Government

Uncle Mont has lived in his house in Melbourne, Derby since he was 28 years old

paid for your keep. In Germany if you didn’t work you didn’t eat! You had a job so I worked in a brickyard and then I worked in the copper mine.

DS: Tell me about some of your jobs as a soldier?

OUM: I had to walk a good five miles in the morning at half five to the Coppermine, all walking up hill, it were like walking up Breedon hill for about 500 yards all through pine trees. When I got to the top there was electric wire there and a building with all the tackle for washing the stuff that came out the Coppermine. There was Gerrys shuttering up, carpenters with an axe and bow soar. There were eight of us mixing bloody concrete - 100 ton a day. I didn’t want none of that, so I volunteered to go into the mine. You went down in at ground level so didn’t have to go up that hill. We mined everything, copper, zinc - the lot!

I only had one day doing that because during the night, the Russians started getting near us. The next day was May the 8th. The day it was supposed to be finished. During that day we were in no mans land, we were all around the wires with bloody tanks firing, things getting knocked out, and there was a truck, small 15 underweight vehicle which was lodged in a stream that ran near us.

A bloke got hold of the radio fiddled about with it and heard Churchill’s

speech. May the 8th. The war is finished.

During the night the Russians took over, the next day we were galloping through Schrozberg, ransacking houses just like them.

DS: How did you get home after that?

OUM: There was three of us, we

had bikes, took em of the Gerry’s. With the Russians on looking they daren’t refuse. We biked to Kornwestheim during the night and I cornered this school. It was full this school was of German people, mothers and sons and daughters, all kids. Then we said we’ll not stay here we’ll go and knock the bloody gaffer up. He spoke English the schoolmaster. He says “I hope your not going to wreck anything”, he spoke better English than me! So we dossed down in his kitchen till the next morning and then we left everything alone - no bother.

Then we biked through Kornwestheim, we got on the back of a tractor and I remember a Greek Cypriot who was with us, Peter Lucas his name was his English interpretation (couldn’t pronounce the Greek one). He fell off his bike. He was a barber by trade, he taught me how to cut hair with a razor and comb. His head had a deep cut anyway, full of gravel, in the dark and I had to draw it all out.

There were three French people on this tractor that were people who volunteered to work in Germany. Now when they got to the Yankee point, they wouldn’t let them through. Well of course we went sailing through, the first meal I got was with the yanks, I had a whole chicken. Not just a leg a whole bloody chicken. We all did!

Then we boarded a lorry, when they collected quite a lot of us, and then they took us to Poland, to Kraków. And from there we got a Curtis 47 plane to Reims in France.

After, we got deloused with the Americans. All the Yankees clobbered on to this Lancaster. Twenty of us at a time in the Lancaster to come to England and then we landed at Leighton Buzzard. I went to a place called Aylesbury for a couple of nights and then from then home.

DS: Tell me about the ring you gave up for…

OUM: It was in Kraków. I flogged it to a chap on the last night when the Russians came for two loaves of bread. And he kept that ring, it was a gold ring that George Woodall gave me, white gold with a Kimble cut diamond in the middle. It had been some various places to hide it. He said when we got back “If I’ve still got the ring, if we get back to inland England together, I’ll give it ya back.”

We stood there waiting. The arm was bought down and he was behind and we were on different bloody planes. But nobody would swap you see. All superstitious. I never got it back.

The bloke was Greek Cypriot but he lived in London. He was a gold medallist hairdresser, got all the qualifications; he was a bit of a lad. Short, dark curly hair and a marvellous barber, yet all he was was a coalman in war, but he still kept that razor. How he kept that razor the whole time I don’t know. He actually got a job as a barber in the Lakehouse in Germany; he could get anything he could. That’s how some were you know - in there.

DS: What’s you greatest memory from the war?

OUM: There was an incident where I sabotaged a machine. We’d just been inoculated this particular day and I was making fancy bricks for ovens. I went to where we made the clay, where they ground it up and they shoved it through what they call pucks. Clay would come out and then they’d also have another one, which made it finer still. Anyway I found a big piece of chain with links and I slung it in and cleared off and it busted the case and there was no chance of renewing that so they knew somebody and done something wrong. So they had the army and

Uncle Mont drawing of soldier and friend, William Murphy (1944)

the civilian police come. I stood at the back of this queue and then they questioned everyone and everyone were being ignorant. Then when they finished it they said, ‘Zwei dunkelhaarige Männer” – two dark haired men. Me and the bloke next to me. “Off mit ihnen morgen“ - off with them tomorrow. So we were being accused but not proven. If it had been just the civilian police, Gestapo, they’d have shot us if they found out we’d really done it but the army stepped in and they took over. They said “it’s our job to look after these guys” and then they sent us to this Coppermine. The man who went with me in civilian life was a cinema projector, Jeff Jennings his name was. That was that.

DS: What food did you have when you were a prisoner of war?

OUM: The first place I went to, this brickyard, I thought they had been in the field and scooped all the cow muck up and put it on our plates. It were like spinach but looking down it looked like bloody cow muck. I ate it but there was some bloody grit in it. That’s all you had.

DS: Did you lose much weight then?

OUM: I did yes but then after a while I put some back on. When I was at the brickyard I felt fit. Then after a period at the Coppermine I went down to about seven stone six pounds; but then again I’m not grumbling I got home didn’t I.

DS: Did you ever hear of anything in the outside world-any news?

OUM: No, no, no. There was an Irish priest that used to come from the Vatican City in Italy. He used to tell us what news he had from the Itais.

DS: Were a lot of prisoners ill treated and tortured?

OUM: A lot were ill treated me duck, particularly the foreigners. The Russians were ill treated because they weren’t in the Red Cross. The British were and the Gerrys were so they respected each other. In some cases during the wartime it didn’t matter because most prisoners were shot because it took time up and men up to guard em or to put them back to where they wanted em to go. There were cases of that where they were just bloody shot and buried.

DS: I heard that you tried to escape – is this true?

OUM: If I’d have had some clothes I probably could have done. I walked back to the camp; I had to give my self up in the end. Me and a chap called Dougie, I forget his other name, went to get bread and we had to leave our other mate because he got an ulcer at the back of his leg. Got a whole in his thigh you could get your fist in, full of puss. We had to leave him so then we buggered off.

We saw a chap in the field with his wife and his daughter, I don’t know what they were doing along the land but we went to em and flogged em everything I’d got on for bread; shirt, bloody socks, vest. I’d only got me underpants, shirt on and boots when I’d finished. We had something to eat with them. They had a big basin, I can see it now that big basin on the stove and they had big chunks of bread and they were dipping it in this olive oil. There was tomatoes floating in it and it tasted like celery. They never

spoke English, but we understood their son was a prisoner of war in England. We had vino, pink stuff it was, and then we set off back. We’d had a lot and we went in this straw covered hut thing, I think its where they used to dry the dates or figs.

We lay in it. I think I was drunk I must have been. I went to sleep and when I woke up, it were all pink on all the straw. I thought I was bleeding. I woke Dougie up and said “Dougie Dougie I’ve spewed blood up!” He said “get off with ya, its wine you’ve been sicking up in the night in your sleep.” When we got back to the place we’d left, Snowy, me mate with the leg, wasn’t there, they’d all gone. They’d been picked up by the Italians who hadn’t capitulated, the black shirts they called em. They’d been surrounded with Gerry’s and black shirts and took back to camp, made em take your shoes and walk barefoot back to camp them blokes did.

Me and Dougie stayed out all night and phew, it was cold during the night and you couldn’t get water. It were a job to find water to drink and we decided to go back to the camp ourselves, I don’t know how many miles it was, it was quite a long way. We were wasting time. We had no maps no nothing.

DARCY SUMMERTON

Muriel is 103, to make it clear just how uncommon this age is, her birth year doesn’t even appear on my iPhone.

Putting this into perspective is rather mind boggling, this woman has lived through two World Wars, experienced the grim reality of life after it came to an end in 1945 and has since lived through eras in which through the powers of fashion and music, the world as we

knew it (or, I have read about) changed.

I enter Muriel’s house with deep anticipation. I remember going into this same house as a child and noticing the sheer detail of

collectables and memoirs covering each inch of her bungalow walls. The treasure chest, as my Grandmother calls it.

We start with having a little chat, veering off into the specifics of what my University course entails, Muriel tells me to move the teddy bear off the chair so I can sit down, his name of which, I

cannot remember. I soon discover that her father and brother used to play for Grimsby Town, and, making sure I don’t miss anymore detail, I click the record button on my iPhone, something which at

the time seems to me utterly wrong.

Then I listen intently, transfixed and hardly muttering a word as Muriel reels off facts and information about her fascinating life.

GEORGIA TAYLOR

STORY OFTHE CENTURY

Top: Pots that Muriel has collected over the yearsBottom: Hats that Muriel has made herselfRight: Muriel’s wall of plates

“I was born in Freeman Street, the market on Freeman Street. There’s some council houses there, it was a Chapel, my Grandfather came from Stoke and was the Port Missionary for the whole of Grimsby.”

“He used to take his drum and pipe band down dock on a Sunday, cause they used to close it. We had a lockout in 1901, so he had to collect money to feed the starving children ‘cause there was nothing. There was no dole and things like that, there was nothing, they were starving. He used to go down there with his drum and five pound and they used to feed them in the morning. They used to go and give them tea and whatever it was they were giving him, bread and dripping or whatever it was, it was only plain stuff and then at night they gave them a hot meal again and they fed them at the Church. That was when the strike was on, and there was nobody going out fishing and they didn’t have anything.”

The fishing strike evidently had an effect on the population of the dock town. “Me Mother said her Mother used to be ever so mad sometimes ‘cause she used to go home and say ‘I’m sorry I haven’t got anything for you love’ ‘cause me Mother had six brothers and sisters and there wasn’t a crumb in the house and I used to say ‘don’t tell me about it.’” The sound of Muriel’s laughter echoed the room. “Kids they don’t realise today how lucky they are.”

So how many children were in Muriel’s family? “There was eight of us, my mother had ten children but two died and I was the oldest. I’m the only one living now.”

“I remember both World Wars, I remember standing and seeing the 101 when it came over, we lived on Columbia Road when we came back to Grimsby, we lived away before the War and we came back ‘cause the War was coming and my Father thought me Mother

had better be at home so she’s got somebody cause she knew nobody. It was pretty grim, but we stood one night and we was to go under the door in the living room, and we used to go sit in it or sit under the table, and this particular night, my Dad, he used to stand outside and my Mother and the baby and I were in the cupboard and I know I felt, I was frightened ‘cause I would’ve only been about four or five and me Dad came in and said ‘come and have a look, come and have a look’, and he picked Gus up; me younger brother and my other brother and we went to the door and I can remember feeling sick, and I looked up and I’ve never had a feeling in me life like it, but

I thought my stomach was gonna swell out,

there was just this horrible monster, it was this great long thing like

a sausage and all you heard was this dreadful

hum, oh it was awful.

I’ll never forget it. It was a Zeppelin.” I later researched into what this was, as I didn’t want to cut Muriel off mid sentence, turns out, it’s a type of ugly German rigid airship. “It came straight over and my Father said ‘just look at it’ and it was going hmmmmmm. Oh it was horrible. I was scared. And blimey Gus started to cry, he didn’t like it and my Mother said ‘bring them back in.’ You know that little Chapel on the sea front, near Sea View Street, there’s a Chapel that stands back. They were aiming for that, the Soldiers had come up that week artillery and they killed everyone, they bombed it. Oh it was terrible. I was terrified.”

By World War two, Muriel was in her twenties, just a little older than me. “Yes, I’d got Wendy, my Daughter. She wanted to go to Sunday school with some girls so I let her. I’d never let her go

anywhere before but I thought ‘alright she can go she’s got to go sometime’ so I let her go. She hadn’t been gone ten minutes then the alarm went off, I think they were testing it, but of course I got on my heels and ran all the way up Weelsby Road to bring her back. But it was a false alarm. It was frightening, because the woods were bombed, and you see when they were coming over we got the warning and then we had to wait while they came back before we could go in the house again, ‘cause they were going wherever they were going bombing on the Humber, and the fires after the bombs were dropped....oh it was terrible.”

We then start rambling about tea and coffee and water. I tell Muriel I don’t particularly like tea and she looks at me like I am from another Planet.

“When I was born, while I was there, they had what you call these mummas, come from Egypt and all other places. You’ve heard of mummas haven’t ya? Oh yeah, they didn’t speak they used to come every year and a company looked after them and the whole family came and they used to live on the sands and used to give these shows on the sand and that was how they lived. They said the people had been deserted, the people who looked after them, they’d gone back to Egypt and left them and they didn’t know what to do so they had a conference and they decided to let them sleep at the Chapel on the floor and they could feed them, but they had to go out and do services and that. One girl there had just got a baby, she’d only just had it and she heard that I had been born so she said could she come see me and my Mother, ‘cause she’d got a baby and she was only about a week older than me, and she took her into the bedroom and she was dressed in swaddling clothes and she said that I was dressed wrong, it was all wrong and could she dress me like I was ought to be

dressed, so she did.”

My knowledge of Swaddling clothing was minimal, so I asked Muriel what it entailed.

“All your feet your bound up, but I mean all that hassle. Bet it hummed a bit. Anyway the mumma said ‘what are you going to call her?’ So my Mother she said ‘Muriel’ so she said ‘oh will you call her after me’, so my Mother replied ‘what is your name’ and she told my Mother her name was ‘Adell’, so that’s how I got my second name. Anyways they got in touch with the authorities in London and they made all the arrangements and they shipped them back home, but what an awful thing to do, I mean we don’t realise it do we? My mother said it was pitiful to see them. But people are cruel to each other aren’t they. Me Mother used to say my Father said ‘think of your responsibilities’ ‘cause she used to say ‘they haven’t got anything’ so she was giving it all away but we had nothing. But they got this famine thing, they got that up, where they brought the food in from London on wagons to feed the children. It was a terrible predicament, it’s a good job we’ve got dole now a days int it. I know it’s a bit degrading but there.”

Muriel seemed intent to reflect the lack of money available in her younger days, yet she was always positive. “We was always alright, we always had decent clothes and that. We didn’t have any holidays, we didn’t have luxuries but we were always well fed and my Mother was a good cook, she could make a meal out of nearly nothing, and we always had plenty of food to eat but we would never dream of going on holiday.”

“Anyway we managed alright. You used to get a penny a week pocket money and we thought we had the World, not like kids are today.”

I asked her if she had been on

holiday since, “Oh I’ve been on holiday since, yeah but my first holiday, my mother had a sister who lived at Doncaster, we used to go there. Couldn’t afford to go on holiday.”

I asked Muriel what she used to do for fun during the War. “We used to go to the Wintringham Road, they had a ball there. The Town Hall had ball’s, and little dances at the Wellington on Wellington street, Johnny Walker he had that. And he had a formation team, you know formation dancing? And we all used to rush to the Television, it’d just come in, to see him dancing. We had to make our own fun, ‘cause as I say none of us had a lot of money.”

Having a husband in the Royal Air Force meant little actual time spent together as a couple. Muriel mentioned that when her husband was in the RAF he was unlucky with leave. “He left 3 months before Wendy was born and he was posted abroad and I didn’t even know where he was, all the time he was away. And when he came home I said ‘where have you been?’ He said, ‘all letters were censored so I couldn’t tell you’ but he said to me ‘I’ve been to Abyssinia’, I said ‘what you been doing there?’And Haile Selassie, he was a terrorist wasn’t he, they were fighting him. So I wasn’t very pleased.”

“Wendy was 14 and a half months before he saw her, he’d never seen her. They don’t care about people, if they get a good worker they’ll keep them.”

“When I left school I went to Langdons Commercial and Private School for typing and book keeping and it was off Victoria Street, where the cinema used to be. Across the road there used to be a shop called Costello’s the ladies outfitters, and above that was a dance hall. And down the bottom there was a dead end, up from that was Langdons Commercial School and it was

a Dutchman who ran it, he was Dutch but she was English, funny little fella. But we learnt shorthand typing and book keeping. It’s usually a year’s course and then after that I got a job, I went to work in Ticklers offices, on Pasture Street. Nice people to work for, and then from there Johnny came home and he said ‘you’ve got a cottage in Scotland, pack your job up and come straight up’, ‘cause he was always off somewhere. Anyway we was right at the top of Invernesses, and I couldn’t understand a word they said, they were so broad. Anyway I thought that’s nice, first time we’d been together since we’d been married, ‘cept for holidays when he just came home for weekends. Anyway, we’d been there four weeks and Johnny came home one lunchtime and said, ‘I’ve got my clearance papers.’ I said ‘WHAT’, Johnny said ‘I’ve got my clearance paper’s’, I said ‘when?’ ‘Day after tommora’, and he’d gone.”

Looking around Muriel’s house at all the fascinating pieces she has gathered over the years, I was intrigued as to where it all started off.

“I don’t know. Wendy started my collection off.”

We then gathered around a coffee table and started searching for a small box, one in about a hundred of little ornaments covering the wooden surface.

“She got it from New Market Street, a picture house called the Hippodrome, the flea bug they called it really, ‘cause when the kids went there they came back with flea’s. They didn’t use to bite you. And I would say ‘you’re not to go anymore.’ Anyway there was this little shop and this man used to sit there and it was absolutely filthy, and he used to have all this junk in there. Anyway Wendy and Alexander and my cousin they started getting sixpence a week and

they thought they were marvellous, they thought they was well off for pocket money so Wendy went and found this little pot for me.”

“There’s all sorts on here.”

We continue to search for the collectable item. I noticed a little silver duck sticking its head out from all the other pots. Muriel then asked if I wanted to go see a painting of her husband which was hung in the dining room, of course I did, and what I saw was a man in uniform staring back at me.

“The man who painted it, he was a Royal Academy man. He had pictures hung there, and Johnny sat for him and the man said, ‘I’m sending it to your wife.’ And I didn’t know anything about it and this great big crate came, he’d made this crate and he had put this picture in it. When I opened it, it was all hung with chains to keep it straight. Anyway it was nice of him wan’t it. His medals are up there, with his BEM, cause they stopped the BEM you know, soon after Johnny got decorated.”

“He got the British Empire Medal, for his tour of his service, he stayed behind, they asked for volunteers during the evacuation of Narvik in Norway, it was cited on a frozen lake, had a ship full of people and they bombed it and it went down with all the people and Johnny was on it as well but he wasn’t there that night. They asked for volunteers to stay behind to destroy all the important equipment that they’d got and Johnny and another man offered to stay, until, he said ‘all of a sudden the Germans suddenly spotted us, they put arrows in the snow showing where they were going.’ He said ‘it was terrible.’ But anyway they got away and he got decorated. We went to Buckingham Palace.”

“I went with him, he was in army uniform and he came on the stage. We weren’t with the recipients they

went in another door, there was a quadrangle and you go through another door and it was all pink velvet stage curtains and gold chairs. The Soldiers came in there and they were announced by a flunky, it was ever so impressive. Not like it is now where she just stands on a floor and sticks a pin in ya. It was her Father who was on the throne, King George. Anyway, that’s how he got the BEM, devotion to duty.”

I asked Muriel her opinions on technology, and how she reacted the first time she saw a television.

“Well I don’t know, took it for granted. It was ever so small. It was wonderful really but I mean it stopped all other entertainment didn’t it?”

“Like today with kids and mobile phones, it’s a good thing for the kid but on the other hand I think it’s dangerous. When they have these things in their bedrooms, laptops, you’ve got to be very very careful. I know it’s nice to have all these things but...”

“We didn’t imagine we would have all this stuff. All we had was a grammar phone, when I was 21 my Mother and Father bought me a grammar phone about this big. I used to buy records every month. I was very keen on classical, fairly classical. I didn’t like pop, I liked opera.”

“I had a lot of Kathleen Ferrier, she was a lovely singer but she died very young. I had her record I think I wore it out. Sheep safely grazing, she sang that, oh it was gorgeous. Then there was, what was the other one, Muriel Brunskill. I liked her, I had all her records.”

I asked Muriel her thoughts on today’s music. “I sometimes put the radio on, I’ve got a thing down there with music on. I don’t like pop and things like that. I like things a bit more serious.”

I had heard from my Grandmother that Muriel was a keen pool player, only to give up at the age of 93 due to a bad shoulder. I was interested to learn how she became involved with the sport.

“I was in hospital for a bit, then when I got better we used to meet at the hospital on a Tuesday and we used to go to Birds Eye and we used to play it. Then another time we’d go and play Boules, it was quite entertaining.”

“I remember the first time I went to play Boules, I’d never had a boule in my hand before and we were playing and all of a sudden all these men were stood watching me and one of them said said ‘by you’re a good player, you’ve been at it a long time.’ I said ‘it’s my first time!’ It’s funny how you take to it, it’s good exercise until I put my shoulder out. But I haven’t just sat about and done nothing ya know.”

She then leads me into her bedroom and pulls out her hat collection, all of which she made herself. She had made the majority of them through clothes which were no longer of any use. Obviously up-cycling and re-cycling is not just a modern day fad.

Muriel then turned to my Grandmother and asked, “how’s Peggy?” Peggy is my Grandmothers friend. Peggy is 84. Muriel laughed and stated; “That’s nothing.”

GEORGIA TAYLOR

Malcolm centre with two African Officials either side

STORIESFROM

AFRICAMalcolm and Betty Bird are 79 years old and lived in Nigeria from 1953 to 1960. During those years they experienced what life was really like in Africa when the British Empire ruled the country. Malcolm talks in-depth to Darcy Summerton in the cosy front room of

his home about the friendships he built, the sights he witnessed and the happiness he found on the other side of the world.

TRIBES & TRIBULATIONS

“The general background is that we were in Nigeria. I worked for the Government it was then a British colony; it was part of the empire. My job was concerned with sleeping sickness, which is a very deadly, and exceedingly dangerous disease carried by the tsetse fly. My job, in various forms, was concerned with researching into the tsetse fly and getting rid of the tsetse fly. So it meant we were living in very remote places and we were sort of living in a camp. It was sort of a permanent camp where we were doing research, which was miles from nowhere, seven miles from a proper road. When I say a proper road it wasn’t a tarmac road, it was a dirt road. But there

was a track there from seven miles into the bush just outside a little village called Ugboighen. We were very happy there. The people were extremely friendly and we got on very well with them. This was true everywhere. In experience, British officials were always treated with the greatest of respect and friendship, and we never had any bother. No one ever did.”

“We were living just outside this village, in this camp, and to get to the outside world we had to pass through the village. We couldn’t possibly get outside without going through the village we used to drive through. There were rows of house on one side, rows of houses on the other and the track went through between. So one day, we went off

to visit some other Europeans, the British people, who were living perhaps 30 miles away and we went and we spent the evening with them. We then drove back and by the time we got back it was pitch black. We were driving through this very high forest and then came to the village and lying across the road at the entrance to village was a log. One of the young men from the village was there with the log and a paraffin lamp and a gun - they all had guns, home made guns. They were called Dane guns. They used them for hunting.”

“Anyway I switched the headlights off so that he would be able to see and immediately I did that because he recognised our truck. So he quickly moved the log out of

DARCY SUMMERTON

Image of Betty, Malcolm and their nanny (1955)

the way and waved and we went through. And Betty and me said to each other, ‘what the hell was he doing?’ It was very strange. So the next morning I enquired and somebody said, ‘well he didn’t know you’d gone out.’ And I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ What it transpired was that every night they set a guard at the entrance to the village and then the young men took it in turns to be the guard so that no one could get to us. There was no way you could get to us any other way, you couldn’t go round the thick bush, you couldn’t have possibly have got to us otherwise unless you wanted to really struggle. They said, ‘somebody might harm you’ and we said, ‘who would harm us?’ ‘Ohhhh that tribe down the road… you can’t trust them!’”

“Tribal hatred was unbelievable. They didn’t trust each other. The tribe down the road who were very friendly to us wouldn’t have done us any harm but they had to be sure. It was very moving how they were concerned for our safety and we had no idea that they were doing this, but every night young men would sit there with these guns and set off an alarm if anybody, any unpleasant people turned up. I can’t imagine who.”

Q&A

DS: Did you ever witness any tribal conflict?

MB: NO! Not while we were there.

DS: Was it controlled?

MB: No it wasn’t controlled we had no means to control it. It was because we said “YOU WILL NOT DO IT.” This is one of the remarkable things about the British Empire, not just in Nigeria but in many other countries. We didn’t have any power, see that place where we were living was called Kukuruku that was the name of the tribe. Now Kukuruku covered

about a million people and had a district officer ran by one man. Sometimes he had an assistant district officer so they’d be two British people running it with five African policemen who were also from Kukuruku. They had one rifle each and five rounds of ammunition each - that was the military power that the district officer had. He had five policemen that belonged to a local tribe and he didn’t have a gun. But… it’s very hard to explain, it’s something that has gone forever but the British influence was such, that the district officer only had to make a rule and it was obeyed. But he had no power to enforce it. We had no military power there at all. But he would call the tribal council together and he would say that he had heard that there was arguing going on about the ownership of the land and he would say, “Now, I don’t want any trouble. You understand? No trouble!” and they’d all say “yes sir”. And there wouldn’t be any trouble. But if there had been, there was nothing he could have done. This was the amazing thing.

DS: Why do you think they obeyed that?

MB: It’s impossible to explain really. British, and I’m not talking about any other European nation, British reputation was high. They just accepted it. Everything we said as being right. And one of the things they used to say, this was the houser people in the north of Nigeria, they used to have a saying that, “before the British came it was impossible to walk safely out of your tribal area” - because if you went out of your tribal area the other blighters would kill you. “Since the British came, it was safe to walk from one end of the Country to the other carrying a bag of gold.” Now that wasn’t our saying. That was what the houser people used to say.

It probably goes back to the very beginning. The formation of the

British rule in Nigeria when at the beginning of it, it was trading. We traded on the coast. In the very early days it was slave trading. We didn’t capture the slaves. The Africans captured the slaves. They fought other tribes, captured the slaves and sold them to slave traders who then took them over to America and so on. Those days had gone.

DS: So the British were the people who stopped the slave trading?

MB: Yes without any doubt inside of the country, it was stopped on the coast because the British navy stopped it but they couldn’t stop it inland because they took the slaves across the dessert, but we stopped that finally. Actually we never did stop it. It still goes on to this day. Certainly went on while we were living there. Occasionally they’d find people being taken in but long since the days of people chained together walking along, they were taken in lorries across the Sahara desert and sold to the Egyptians and the like.

DS: Were there many white families where you lived?

MB: No white families at all. They were forbidden. British people were not allowed to settle there. The reason was because British families had settled in places like Kenya and Uganda and so on in the east side of Africa and it had caused trouble. There was tension over who owned the land. So when Nigeria was opened up, a chap called Lou Guard, who was the first Governor, said there will be no British people settling here. British people may not own land, you could rent land from the local tribe but you couldn’t own it. All of us had to carry around with us the laws from Nigeria and I remember there were books, we had a set.

WHITE MESSIAH

“We were living in a different place, a place called Katabu, which was quite different to the place previous with the guard and the village. Katabu was hundreds of miles further north, the drier area not the rainforest. It was a little village at the bottom of a cliff and on the top of the cliff had been built many years before a research station. We were living at this research station and I’d converted it into a training school for young African employees and government employees.”

“One day the Fulani came down. The Fulani were a tribe of nomadic people who lived with their thousands of cattle. They used to travel from north to south and south to north following the rain. During the rainy season, they’d be up in the north and as the rain dried out they moved further south because that is where the grass would be. They were very very popular with the British and vice versa. Anyway Kutabu was on their route north and south and every year they moved north and south they’d pass by Katabu. If there were Europeans, British people I mean by that, living at Katabu, they always called in some of the old men and would come and want a chat. This particular year we could see them coming from the top of the cliff about 15 miles and what you saw was the white which was the cattle, hundreds of white cows which were gradually moving towards you. We knew the filanee were coming.”

“In due course they arrived and they camped some distance away. Then all these old guys appeared and the first thing they were excited by is they heard there was a white boy here, Andrew. Was this right? Yep. So Andrew was produced and they were duely astonished, he had red hair and white skin. Boy o’ boy was this pretty miraculous. They admired

Andrew. And then they said we have a problem and they’d hoped we could solve it. The problem was they were terribly constipated. Now all Africans are rather like Victorian English people. They seem to be fixated on their bowels. Constipation is something that bothers them. They weren’t really constipated medically at all, but they like purgatives. ‘Could I help?’ Well we had a medical store at Kutabu and in there was a gallon tin of caster oil. Tasting Caster oil is the most disgusting thing you can imagine. Anyway I gave them all half a tumbler of cater oil which was enough to give diorehhea to an elephant. Anyway they all swigged this down with great glee and off they went. And they all came back the next day, ‘ohhh the medicine was wonderful, oh it was fabulous.’ It would not have been proper for them to give me a gift in return, that would have been quite insulting but they gave us a shilling for Andrew instead. And we’ve still got the shilling.”

SURREAL ENCOUNTERS

“This was yet another place we lived where we lived just outside this African town called Gboko. It was quite a nice little town we used to have a lot of fun with the locals. They had a tennis club in the town, we had a tennis court where we lived which was homemade. It was just gravel and what not and we had a lot of fun playing them. We had a good relationship with the town and the people in it. But the house we lived in, Betty’s father had lived in it in the 20s. It was called the Tennis Court House that was the official name for it. Somebody had built the tennis court many years before. The net was made out of fishing net, sourced from the local river not far away.”

“We lived in this very old house and all of this happened when Melanie was being born or was

Images of friends in Africa, from the family scrapbook

born. Betty and Andrew and the newly born Melanie were living a very long way away, not far from Kutabo in fact, about 400 miles north. So I was alone in this house. And one evening I was sitting there and I heard a woman crying. I thought this is strange. I had a servant with me the other one was with Betty. I called him in and I said, ‘have you got a women out there?’ Now there was no reason why he shouldn’t have if he wanted to have a woman there that was his business, I couldn’t have cared less but he said ‘no.’ Well I said ‘I can hear a women crying.’ ‘No, no women crying’ well I thought that was very odd.”

“A little later on we had another European British guy come to visit, strangely his name was Tony Blair. He was an agricultural officer and he also lived in the same place, he was on his own. Most evenings he came down to my house and we’d sit on the porch and have a glass of beer and talk about this and that and that same night he turned up and I said, ‘have you heard anything odd, a women crying?’ ‘No’ he said ‘you’ve been alone too long imagining things’ and I think, if my memory serves me right, I heard it again the following night. I was convinced there’s a women in distress, she was crying, sobbing bitterly I thought there’s something weird here. I went outside and looked around and nothing. So thought no more of it. I didn’t tell Betty when she came back because I knew she wouldn’t be happy with that.”

“Andrew was then 18 months to two years old and he had a little cot, which was next to what was called a bathroom; but it wasn’t a bathroom, it was a sort of a homemade shower and what not. One night he was crying and we went to look at him and he was all curled up in one corner of the cot, as far from the bathroom as he could get, like a little frightened animal. So we said, ‘what’s wrong?’

and he said, ‘I don’t like that bath.’ So we just shut the door and then he relaxed and went off to sleep. He was alright once we shut the door. So this was very odd.”

“Anyway a bit later I went to a place called Makurdi where the most senior British official lived and I was talking to him about this strange business of the bathroom and the women crying. So he said, ‘oh did you know the house is haunted?’ and I said, ‘no I didn’t know that.’ He said that there was an African officer who lived there and he beat his wife to death in the bathroom. I said, ‘I didn’t know that!’ So I didn’t say anything about it until we left there.”

“I told the story to some Catholic missionaries who were on a mission and had a station near by. We used to spend quite a lot of social time with them, they used to play tennis with us, and they were great fun. So we told them and they said, ‘that sounds nasty we’ll come up and sprinkle Holy water and say a few prayers and drive away this evil spirit.’ And they did that and we never had any trouble after that night when Andrew was scared.”

DS: After this incident did it make you believe in ghosts?

MB: No, Africa was full of that sort of thing so you just shrug it off.

DS: They were very spiritual then?

MB: No they’re superstitious. Strange things happen.

SPIRITUAL HAPPENINGS

“There was another thing that happened back when we were in the rainforest with the village that had the guard on. Every year they used to have a manhood ceremony when the young boys, the teenage boys, would become men. We don’t know what the ceremony was about, we never saw it, but obviously they did something or other and there was a great performance. But if a young man wanted to become a man he had to go through this ceremony before the rains came. It had to be done at the end of the dry season and before the first rain came. You could tell when the rain was going to come within a few days because you start smelling it maybe a week before it came, you could smell the rain from further south where it had started.”

“There was this guy he couldn’t do his manhood ceremony because he hadn’t got the sufficient number of goats or sheep or whatever it was that had to be provided. This was how the JuJu men made

money. They insisted, ‘You can’t do it unless you give me 12 goats or something’ and he hadn’t got enough, his family couldn’t do it. So time was getting on and it was getting closer to the first rain, we all knew it was going to rain soon. He wasn’t getting anywhere poor chap. Everybody else was doing their ceremonies he wasn’t.”

“Anyway it was another occasion when me and Betty went out and drove off somewhere no doubt to spend the evening with other British people somewhere and we were on the way back and the heavens opened. Now when it rains in the rainforest its like 20 people with hosepipes, a Niagara of water comes down. It’s not drizzle its torrential! So much so that to drive along these dark narrow roads, you got your headlights full on, the windscreen wipers going; I and to put my head out of the window to see. Well we thought poor old George, or whatever his name was, he’s had it. We drove and bumped down this road through the forest, there was lightening, flashing, rain teaming down and then we got to the edge of the village and it was bone dry. We drove through the village which was about 100 yards. We drove through the village and then back into the torrential rain.”

“Now you had unbelievable rain everywhere accept in a circle 100 yards diameter with the village in the middle of it and we thought ‘well that’s miraculous! How could that possibly happen?’ Enquiries revealed that they got hold of the very powerful JuJu man who had performed a magic ceremony to stop the rain from falling on the village so that it was still dry season. The JuJu man had people drumming all night to keep the rain away. The next day the young man had his manhood ceremony and his was ok. And then it rained.”

Above: family scrapbook and Malcolm Bird now

DARCY SUMMERTON

A colourful story of life and happiness

Francesca Young