Monday, May 18, 2015

The Great Escape

Today

It's funny how a minor disaster makes people more friendly. Yesterday, although the cause was not minor, it being a person hit by a train, the effect on me was only a 90 minute delay before my train left Paddington.

I and my neighbour, a pleasant young woman of about eighteen, got chatting. We talked about travels and I regaled her with tales of my 1969 hitch-hiking tour. She was especially amused/horrified by my story of our escape from the Algerians.

In My Day

When my friend, Angela and I started on our trip, we had very little experience of anything really, let alone hitch-hiking. We disembarked at Calais and set off heading, we hoped, for the Rhone valley.

Our second lift was with two men who said that they were also heading South and were avoiding Paris. We put our rucksacks into their boot and climbed into the back. When they explained that they were leaving the Route Nationale because of the peage, that seemed reasonable. But soon the roads they took became smaller and smaller.

Angela spoke nothing but English but my French was pretty good in those days, and I became concerned when I realised that our hosts were talking to each other in a dialect I couldn't understand. They spoke regular French to me, and I gathered at some point that they were French Algerians.

It was getting dark and the narrow road was now winding through a thick forest. The driver stopped and the men asked that we change places so that one of us would be in the back with one of them, the other in the front. I didn't like this at all and challenged them. When they wouldn't alter their request I said that we wanted to go and demanded that we have our rucksacks back. I had to push for this, eventually accusing one that he intended stealing our belongings. He opened the boot. We grabbed our bags, ran away from the car and scrambled into the forest as soon as we could.

Somehow we got away from the road and crouched among the trees while the Algerians turned their car round and came slowly down the road looking for us. They did this, back and forth a few times, while we stayed hidden. Eventually it seemed they'd driven away. It was pitch dark by this time so we unravelled our sleeping bags and tried to find a comfortable spot among the undergrowth.

We dozed fitfully. At one time we heard something large crashing about in the undergrowth. Was it the men come back for us? We hadn't heard a car; maybe it was a wild boar. We stayed very still until all noises had ceased.

At last the dawn broke and we emerged onto the lane (that's all it was really). We had no idea where we were and just had to keep walking until we found a main road. After that we became more careful, never being parted from our rucksacks and generally refusing lifts in cars with more than one male.

Given that I survived the experience, I much enjoy telling these tales of my early adventures and they don't seem to lose any of their entertainment value in the telling.

Monday, May 04, 2015

Singalong

Today

One surefire way of getting Carmen to sleep is to sing "Ten Green Bottles" - maybe she finds it reassuring or maybe it's just so dull, but she's usually nodded off by the time we get to five.

Now this is a song that we all know and it got me thinking about these kinds of songs and how it is that they enter our consciousness.

At English Concert Singers get togethers we always sing "And when the Saints" with decorations, and every football club has its song, roared out drunkenly at matches. And we all know "Happy Birthday".

In My Day

There were a number of songs like this which we sang as children or young people, often when we were passing the time, waiting in a queue or travelling in a coach. 

"Ten Green Bottles" was clearly one at the simpler, juvenile end, along with "There Were Ten in the Bed". We sang "One Man went to Mow", adding more and more strange items to his lunchbox and equipment, and "Clementine".

We progressed onto "On Ilkley Moor Bar T'at", much enjoying its gruesome ending (actually, that might have contributed to my wish to be buried under a strawberry plant) and by this time we were able to add harmonies and little riffs. We certainly used to sing these while queuing outside door 2 at the Proms. Our knowledge of anatomy was helped by "Dem Bones, Dem Bones, Dem Dry Bones". There were shorter interludes: "Lloyd George Knew my Father" and "My Eyes are Dim" - these sung to hymn tunes. We  added the more melodic "Kumbaya" and "Michael Row the Boat Ashore".

One strange song was "Green Grow the Rushes". This was sung progressively, like "The Twelve Days of Christmas" and we had scant idea of the meaning, though I think it was religious in inspiration, and it kept us going for a good long time.

 I'll sing you one ho
Green grow the rushes ho, What is your one ho?
One is one and all alone and ever more shall be so.
I'll sing you two ho
Green grow the rushes ho, What is your two ho?
Two, two the little white boys clothes all in green ho, ho!
One is one and all alone and ever more shall be so
Twelve for the Twelve Apostles
Eleven for the eleven who went to Heaven
Ten for the Ten Commandments
Nine for the nine bright shiners
Eight for the April rainers
Seven for the seven stars in the sky
Six for the six proud walkers
Five for symbols at your door
Four for the Gospel makers
Three, three the rivals


Were these songs just a feature of our times and are they being replaced with new ones? I don't know, although these days there are people who don't know "On Ilkley Moor Bar T'at". But at last Saturday's Britain's got Talent, the audience all roared along with "Let it Go" from "Frozen" in much the same was as we roared out our ditties. So maybe all isn't lost: it's just changing.