#they were FAKE HUSBANDS for decades like he made a cane just for jack but had dipper consult to make it unique | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

davidastbury · 4 years ago

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Victoria Railway Station

They must have been away from each other for a while - perhaps days; perhaps a college term - and boy are they glad to see each other. The hugging isn’t enough; they have to lean back and look at each other. They might be seeing changes - after all, they have been involved in unshared experiences. Along with time studying he will have spent time with friends - mixed friends. They will have talked about their lives, their backgrounds, their parents, even their relationships. They would have laughed together and enjoyed each other’s company. He might have liked one of the girls - who knows?

Soon they will share edited versions of ‘catching up’ and the mild surprise of his different hair length, use of unfamiliar words and oddly cautious smile will melt away along with the irritating smell of hotel soap.

Mr. Rahmani .... for Rochelle

Mr. Rahmani was one of our first asylum seeker friends. He left Afghanistan with his wife and large family and was trapped for a year or so in Pakistan. It was there that his heart condition became critical and he had bypass surgery. Then onwards to Germany and finally England. Pat met him in the local housing office where he was being allocated two adjacent apartments (on a dreadfully run-down estate; the local authority had 550 empty flats and were happy to take a block booking from the government to cover the rented accommodation for the newest refugees).

Mr. R was a very grand person; at least sixty years old - iron grey hair and wise, green eyes. He wore tailored grey suits and silk shirts and walked like a monarch. In fact he had been the governor of a huge chunk of Afghanistan. The people in the housing office, normally off-hand and impatient with their clients, jumped up and fussed Mr Rahmani offering him a chair and being creepy-crawly attentive.

So we became friends. He came to our house many times and we visited his twin flats nearly every day. We had long conversations about the collapse of order in his home country, the demise of the Iranian Shah, the opportunistic Soviet invasion, the Western mischief - all that stuff.

The important aspect was that we were the only friends he had at that time, and we did all we could to ease the difficulties of settling into normal life in this country - helping with his appeals, filling in endless forms for this and that, buying household items, finding school places for his younger children and college applications for the older ones. They had all previously attended the best private schools - his eldest daughter was a gynaecologist and a son was a civil engineer. And it was all done with good humour and cheerfulness. We enjoyed being with them - and honestly, how on earth would I otherwise have met such an interesting personality?

But it’s the little things that I remember best. Once, when admiring his suit, I gave him a cane handled umbrella and he practiced walking with it - and to complete the ensemble I presented him with an overcoat, I’d hardly ever worn it as it made me feel self conscious - it was expensive and it had been foolish to buy it - but it was superb on Mr Rahmani! Elegant Herringbone - three-quarter length, maroon satin lining - and - slim black velvet collar! He was delighted - as if it brought back the memories of half forgotten simple pleasures.

He sailed through the tribunal appearances - the immigration judges knew a big player when they saw one - and once that was settled he told me that he would be taking his family to London. It was at that point that he very movingly said - ‘For what you have done for me and my family, you will go to Paradise!’

Lunchtime on the Terrace

Creased Frenchwoman nearby, sucking on a cigarette. She calls across to a woman at the next table - and what a voice - 24ct Edith Piaf, hoarse, raucous, scarred by decades of shouting and sour wine.

I half close my eyes and Paris is everywhere; eating my watery soup with a heavy spoon; a saucer of cream for the pussycat; a livre de poche on the table and I’m up for anything - love, cheap brandy, dodging grape-shot at the barricades, waving my hat at the garçons and ripping up cobblestones.

The Moorcroft Building ... (Miss Jean Turpin, 1963)

Fake Roman - solid, dependable. Built by the dignitaries who put up the money for the construction of the Manchester Ship Canal. Now (1963) in the worthy hands of the Chamber of Commerce. It sits in splendour, facing the town-hall, the Portland stone facade sparkling like a sugared biscuit in the thin English sunshine. Most memorable of all - and anyone who knew Manchester at that time will agree - was the sight of the amazing curved doors. Two gorgeous, stainless-steel segments - slid back by the porter each morning - following the curvature of the doorway, allowing entrance via an inner plate glass revolving door.

A commercial bank on the ground floor and a warren of rented rooms up above. Numerous names on the brass plates - solicitors, actuaries, surveyors etc had sets of rooms and throughout the day people arrived and left - red faced business men rolled in from late lunches, export clerks carried stacked files, barristers scuttered along in their striped trousers.

Just entering this building inspired reassurance and confidence - the people there would look after your pension, your lump-sum, your annuity, your trust-fund!

Miss Jean Turpin worked in the first-floor office of Meadowland International Finance, as private secretary to Mr Harrop the Northern manager. She was a sharp and disagreeable woman living out the last years of youthfulness and moral constraint. She nursed a very widespread anger - none were spared; except Mr Harrop, who was actually afraid of her. She was amused by his nervousness; the way he squirmed and apologised when asking her to do something - or his habit of peering round her door - it made her imagine that he was undressed, or he spent the day in women’s clothes or stood naked at his tape-recorder, dictating the complexities of an irrevocable letter of credit to the rotating spools. But her thoughts mostly focused on Mr. Latimer, who delivered the contracts every afternoon. She had plans for Mr. Latimer - although he was unaware. He was another mild mannered man, inoffensive and soft spoken, divorced (but kept the house) nice to his neighbours in Cheadle Hulme. Jean Turpin would watch him lay the folders on the long table at the window, each one neatly labelled, paginated, with supplementary documents attached and she would plot his seduction ... the light suggestive humour, the teasing, the ‘knowing’ look, the coaxing, the accidentally-on-purpose touch, the slide beyond the point of no return - and then the fury of her unleashed nature. Poor Mr Latimer would no longer gaze furtively at the legs of the prickly Miss Turpin; nor would he share randy chat over the garden fence with the Jack-the-Lad man next door - nor would slipping between the gorgeous segments of the stainless steel doors ever be the same again.

A Family

It’s nice to be in the middle and look both backwards and forwards. Once upon a time there were three generations in that house ... the widowed grandmother, stoical and grumbling, always sitting in ‘her chair’ or occasionally, putting on sensible shoes and best navy blue coat and going to church. She’d lost her brother in WW1.

Then there was her daughter. She had welcomed home her husband from WW2 and they worked as a team - he drove the bus, she collected fares. The optimistic fifties - a much loved couple.

And then there was her daughter. Badly upset by the death of her father - the hurt was deep and she kept it to herself - didn’t mention it at school. Yet she became a bright little star in the mid 1960s - always smiling, rushing about, kissing everyone - like all the female pop stars rolled into one - irresistible in dramatic black polos, leather minis, Quant hair; the lot.

And then her daughter (at this point my only info is FB) - I’d guess in her early fifties. And further guess she’s either a medic or something in caring. Wonderful kindly look, both outwards at the camera and when facing her mother - the sort of face you would like to see if ever you are in trouble.

And then there is her daughter - bright eyed at her own wedding - modern, greedy for happiness.

And then there is her daughter ... a baby.

Russell and the Frog

It was early evening and I was watching TV - probably Popeye or Yogi Bear - when Russell appeared at the side window. I rushed to open the door and saw that he was holding something in his cupped hands. ‘What is it?’ - I asked. He replied - ‘a frog’ - and creating a small crack I was able to see two bulging eyes staring back at me.

He said - ‘I’m taking it home. I’m going to keep him in the garden’.

Russell had been walking home from one of his private lessons, probably music, and had taken the shortcut (forbidden) across swampy land behind the barracks - and there he had come across the frog.

I told him that frogs need to be in their own territory - the place where they lived as tadpoles. Sometimes they travelled away but always came home for the spawning season. That’s where they had to have their babies - even if it meant crossing roads and being killed.

Russell said - ‘I didn’t know this. I’ll take him back’.

So together we went back to the land behind the barracks and to the exact place where Russell had found him.

He crouched down and the frog jumped from his hand and nuzzled his way into the reeds.

And then we walked home and talked about other things.

Russell And The Unexploded Bomb ... for Leyla

My hometown was never on the tick-list of the German bombing department - however, nearby Manchester certainly was. The industrial areas around Trafford Park were badly hit. But sometimes, for unknown reasons, not all the bombs were released and rather than return home and having to explain things, the German aircrews simply dropped them anywhere and headed for home.

For several years after, some of these bombs which had failed to explode on impact, would be accidentally discovered. Russell found one.

We crossed boggy fields to where the ground sloped down to the river. There was the bomb, rinsed by rainfalls, gleaming with the sombre dignity of a beached whale. Perhaps there had been a movement in the soil, or perhaps the field itself had wished to reject this unwelcome foreign body - so there it was, sticking outwards at an angle, wrong way up.

I remember looking at the stencil lettering - which we couldn’t understand - and the long line of numbers. We discussed telling our parents but that would have been boring. Adults never believed us - so we held on to a lot of things - like how we knew that a platoon of Japanese soldiers were living in the woods near our school. They didn’t know that the war was over and they would shoot us if we approached them.

We visited the bomb about three times - and then it vanished. The surface of the field was chewed up with tyre tracks. It had been removed. Russell wanted to learn more about what had happened and against my advice, we knocked on the farmer’s door. I was apprehensive about the farmer recognising me - he had chased me off his land more than once. The door was opened by his wife, who glared at us, said she didn’t know anything about bombs, and slammed it shut in our faces.

So that was the end. Except the memory of seeing it for the first time. And how Russell got astride it like a motorbike and I rode pillion; my arms around his waist, laughing and holding tight and Russell shouting ‘Fuck off!’ and the crows flying to the treetops and the big shiny bomb between our legs.

Mel Brooks said that the words ‘so am I’ characterised his marriage to Anne Bancroft. Whenever she announced an intention to do something he’d call out ‘so am I!’ If she said ‘I’m going shopping’ or ‘I’m ready to eat’ he would tell her ‘so am I’.

And she did exactly the same with him.

Never tired of each other - never wanting to do things separately - never wanting their ‘own space’.

On The Train

She’s thin and she has a cough. It’s a cold night and she’s wearing a T-shirt and jeans; at every stop the doors slide and the heat of the carriage is sucked out. And she coughs ... and coughs.

Coughing means something to my generation. We remember the word ‘consumption’ and experimental ‘open-air’ hospitals for children - and Victorian sanitoriums, set back from the road, places we were told to keep away from - and the signs on buses announcing that spitting was strictly prohibited - and the haggard, lung-sick faces of men in pub doorways - and the hopelessness of broken homes, poverty and early deaths.

There was another side of course - my lot getting to know everything in college. Glib talk about the coughing artists and writers. We could hear the coughing in Modigliani, Beardsley and early Picasso; in the poetry of the Brontës and Keats and all the others. This wasn’t too bad - every genius seemed to cough.

But here we are in 2020 and she shouldn’t be coughing - and all the love we feel is held back - our love is like a flower under concrete and it’s as hard for us as it is for her.

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