Monday. Start the week

Slightly Unwell

The author is slightly unwell. Back next week, Deo volente.

The Bikini

Remembering last week childhood days of gruesome clothing and swimming gear in particular, I was reminded of an incident that occurred many years later while I was a freelancing photographer.

I was commissioned to join a film crew for a few days and to write an illustrated piece about it for a magazine.

On location, I found the very young and gauche Second Assistant Camera trying very hard indeed to behave like a veteran. This was quite obviously for the particular benefit of the girl playing the part of a student model. It was comical to watch him hovering near her whenever he found an excuse to do so.

However, there was something he did not know: although the director had auditioned for a teenage girl the eventual girl, who appeared to be a shy seventeen from drama school with her innocent, wide-set eyes, was in fact an extensively-practised 22-year-old. She was a very busy model girl.

We were all turning in for an early night in preparation for an early start the next morning. I was in my room sorting my baggage. The door was still ajar. I caught sight of the girl as she walked past toward her room. She was followed by the young assistant. They halted at her bedroom door.

I heard her say, ‘You wanted something?’

‘No! Yes! I mean, look, love. A little word in your shell-like ear. About these scenes tomorrow. The Bikini scenes. Now, there’s something you won’t know about filming in Bikinis.’

‘Oh? Really?’

‘Yes. You see, Bikinis, in your actual camera, well, they show a bit more. . . you know what I mean? Yes? Mm? So, what you’ll have to do tonight is to, um, remove the, um.’

‘Oh! Really? I see,’ she said.’ Well, I think you’d better show me, don’t you?’ and I heard her door gently opened, and then closed.

He still looked surprised at breakfast.

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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010

Growing up – 2

Some boys stopped doing it when they grew up. The rest of us carried on. The occupation? Practical jokes. Like making apple-pie beds for your enemies.

The apple-pie bed became impossible with the arrival of the duvet. It thrived in the years when beds were a matter of an undersheet, a top sheet and a couple of blankets. And possibly an eiderdown. If you're under 40 it'll be news to you.

What you did was as follows: while your victim was out of the way you went to his or her bed, stripped it, folded the bottom-end of the undersheet backwards to the pillow end. This turned the bed into a small bag.

When your victim approached their bed, weary and ready to flake out, it looked like a very innocent bed and if you were listening closely behind the door you would hear a very satisfactory thunk! as their feet hit the bottom of the bag and then a great deal of cursing as he or she started stripping the bed and remaking it.

But it was risky. Playing the joke on delicate aunts could get you anything from a quick whack on the bottom to a week’s foreclosure on sweets.

Nowadays we have the duvet. The duvet possesses its own sense of humour and needs no help from practical jokers, old or young. It slides off in the middle of the night. It swivels round so that it is resting across you instead of along you. If you hang on too tightly when you turn over you end up like the sausage inside the sausage roll. Most comical.

The big joke on boys at the beach were those horrible bathing costumes. The beach holiday in the 30s and 40s was wonderful but, on reflection, we boys did suffer ignominy. Sensible swimming trunks did not exist. Not even the sloppy shorts of today, which are quite bad enough. We of the 1940s had to climb into something that completely covered the chest, the back and the legs down to the knees. It hung there by means of shoulder-straps. Some were made of wool. Yes, wool. I knew mothers who actually hand-knitted them for their darling sons. Their daughters, too.

Imagine coming out of the water on a chilly day and having to run up the beach to mum and dad with an icy cold, heavy and sodden woollen sack hanging and slapping against your body. Older boys were frequently made to wear the variety that incorporated a ‘modesty skirt’. This was simply a separate flat panel that stretched across from the front of one thigh to the other; its purpose was to hide the terrifying fact that you were a male of the species.

I recently found an old black-and-white snapshot of me, aged about fourteen, wearing one of these.

I promise you, it no longer exists.

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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010

Growing up

I have been asked to write something about my experience of growing up. There are those who will tell you I never did, and I can’t argue with that. After all, can a fully adult man sit at his computer flying a fake aircraft? Consider.

At the age of six or thereabout I happened to see my father handing over his wages to my mother and for the first time I saw real life. He drove London Underground trains not because he liked driving trains but in order to keep us alive.

Any remark or picture remotely connected with sex or the related regions of the body was out of bounds at home. All was unexplained and came only in scrappy hints and unreliable guesses of school chums. Ignorance of how it all worked caused bewilderment and embarrassment. My single most shattering revelation as a young child is now reduced to a comic memory. It comes later.

There were so many little hints. In the quick scanning of my older brother’s magazine, tucked not quite carefully enough under his mattress, I discovered what a woman’s body looked like.

The ultimate signal that adolescence had arrived came to me as a shock. For weeks afterwards I thought I was suffering from some unspeakable disease. In the local Public Library one day I discovered a book that gave me the facts. Quite possibly I ran out of the place crying Yippee.

School ended at fourteen and, like all other 14-year-olds, I was allowed to wear long trousers. Knee-length shorts were thrown away.

I became an apprenticed mechanical engineer. A curiously satisfying incident gave me my first actual feeling of becoming adult. I cycled home at the end of my first week with the engineering company, walked into the kitchen and handed my mother my first earnings.

There. I was now a man. I was doing exactly what my father did. I was helping to feed us all.

A real girlfriend materialised. Girls had already intrigued me while I was at school; organised events like the annual Hertfordshire Schools Singing Championship meant that we occasionally mingled with girls in their crisp summer uniform of pleated skirts and pastel shirts and ties, their shirtfronts in many cases curiously and pleasingly urged outwards in a way that stirred me deeply; it was delightful.

Then I came to know and actually to speak to girls, and excitement grew. But the tightrope-walking experience of having an actual, a real and publicly-recognised girlfriend, was, I suppose, the ultimate declaration of adulthood. It came when I was just into my twenties. I had little idea of how one should behave beyond being nice. Polite, generous and nice. But, yes, I really was a man at last. I knew all there was to know about life. Oh, yes.

I suppose I felt much the same one morning at the age of nine. I had been taken by two girls, one a year older than I, the other a year younger, down to the little fishing-port beach in Cornwall early one holiday morning. They had told me, with immense excitement, that they wanted to show me something. I wondered about this. Lobsters? Buried treasure behind the rocks?

Their parents and my own were probably still asleep. We had their blanket permission to run around the village and beach in the mornings, so this was all aboveboard.

They led me round the beach into a very small cave, our cave; barely a cave, in fact, more a dent in the cliff face. But it was our cave.

They told me to sit down and watch. I watched, dazed, as they peed in unison into the sand. When their little demonstration was over I wanted to shout for delight. The thing that had puzzled me for ages about girls was explained at last. I knew how girls do it! I knew! I knew! I could tell the boys!

I was ready for my breakfast.

They were not. ‘Wait!’ said the older girl, tidying her dress and sitting down beside her sister. ‘Now, show us how boys do it.'

Mercifully, the rest is a blank.

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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010

Reflections

Photography being the quirky thing it is, all professionals have stories. A photographer I shall call Dave told me this one.

He was once commissioned by an international arts magazine to photograph a collection of figurines in the Arts Museum of a European city which I think should also remain anonymous. It was to be done on a day when the museum was closed to the public.

He arrived, and was shown to the room by the curator. The figurines, some six inches high, were stunningly beautiful, arranged neatly under a large glass dome-like cover. He saw immediately how he would photograph them. Flash, reflected off a white sheet. A nice, soft light.

He thanked the curator and asked him, ‘-The cover - shall I lift it off - or would you rather do that yourself?’

The curator gaped at him. ‘The cover? Oh, no! The cover must not be removed on any account. The cover must remain at all times.’

He turned and left.

It was just one of those things that the professional has to put up with. But it was a big problem. The cover was reflecting the windows and the figurines were partly obscured. Also, any gear he used in front of the glass would be reflected. And, naturally, flash, even indirect reflected flash, was out of the question.

But, somehow, he must make a roll of pictures.

There was a way.

He went out and bought a huge roll of black paper and some strong adhesive tape. He borrowed a ladder from the curator - having explained how he was solving the problem - switched on the lights and, four hours later, all windows were blacked out so that not a hint of window was visible in the glass. The figurines were laid bare. He switched off the lights. There was just enough daylight for photography filtering down from three small skylights.

Shooting would take half an hour. He'd get the paper down, set off to the airport and hope for a flight home.

He was getting out his gear when the door opened and a small man in overalls came in, carrying a workbox. He placed this on the floor next to the glass dome. Then, with Dave staring at him, unbelieving, he embraced the dome, lifted it off, placed it gently on the floor, took a feather duster from his workbox and began dusting the figurines. He looked up and gave Dave a crooked smile.

That’s professional photography for you.

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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010

Blue Blurs

High-qualty luggage with yellow-and-black gaffer tape wrapped round it says absolutely nothing about your tastes in luggage design.

But it’s jolly handy. Take the farrago in Reykjavik.

The photographer and I had just landed at Reykjavik and seen our luggage wheeled out to where several buses were standing. The person at the desk told us to join the queue beside the bus being loaded. We hoisted two each of the photographer’s cases of paraphernalia (he never let these out of his sight), went out and stood in the queue for the bright blue bus.

The loading of luggage was almost completed. The job done, the horizontal door was slammed shut and a man by the passengers’ gangway holding his clipboard began ticking off each passenger as they boarded.

When it was our turn he walked away to attend to other matters. We wondered about this but waited patiently.

Then the engine started, the door slammed, the bus moved off and we stood gazing after it.

I shot back to the desk person. ‘Our bus,’ I said. ‘It’s gone with our luggage’.

She looked over my shoulder, smiled and shook her head.

‘No, sir! You have not missed it. It is due to leave in a few minutes.’ She pointed. ‘There it is.’ And there stood a red bus, now revealed by the departure of the blue one and being loaded.

‘But - the blue one?’

‘The blue one? Oh, that is an American group on a ten-day tour round Iceland.’

Relative to Australia, Iceland is small. But when you see three weeks’ baggage vanishing into its distances it becomes vast.

At this point memory fails me. Some sort of investigation occurred, I think. The next I remember is that we were in a taxi, telling the driver to follow the route of the blue bus. He seemed delighted to obey and we shot off, eyes skinned for anything blue.

Blue is a popular colour in Iceland. Many houses have doors and woodwork picked out in blue. Its small fishing vessels pulled up along its beaches are often bright blue. I was sweating hard and sitting on the edge of my seat, gripping the back of the seat in front. Blue blurs were flashing past our windows.

We had been bounding along for some ten minutes when the image of school buildings and a splash of blue paintwork went streaking by.

‘Stop!’ I shrieked.

It was an irrational decision. For one patch of blue among the dozens already passed we could be making the search more difficult than before. He stood on the brake, stopped and reversed for a few yards and there, being unloaded in the yard, was the rear end of a blue bus. Luggage was being taken into the building. We ran through the gates and into the building and started burrowing in the pile of exceedingly heavy and colourful baggage. I had no idea that baggage could be quite so heavy and colourful.

Then ours, with its startling bands of broad yellow-and-black gaffer tape plastered all over it, shone out from all the rest. We gave hoots of delight and began dragging it all out.

We became aware of an elderly American couple, standing quite still and looking at us. We gave them a smile. They smiled back and told us to have a nice day.

Which, by then, is exactly what it was.

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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010

R F Dagnall and Inflatable Dinghies

‘Now, watch out. That casing’s going to blow apart. OK?’  I stood clear. The youngish shirtsleeved man was holding a length of cord attached to a white, barrel-sized cylinder. He gave it a sharp tug.

There followed the sound like that of an enormous beast breaking wind, and the cylinder flew apart. From inside there appeared a swiftly-growing vertical black pillar supporting a bright red tent. This was surrounded by a black ring of inflating black rubberised canvas.

It was an inflatable liferaft for ships and aircraft and it was my first day at a new job with the RFD Company in Godalming, Surrey.

Moving to a new job was old hat. By the time I was 30 I had moved to six, so I was experienced. Each of them had been either the learn-it-in-a-day sort or requiring knowledge which, to some extent, I already possessed.

But moving to this one was different: I knew absolutely nothing about the subject. It was an entirely new field. And I had to write about it.

I had accepted the job because I was becoming bored with the current one. Although it was thirty miles away from home and meant moving house it required the writing of technical stuff about the design and maintenance of lifesaving equipment. Liferafts, lifejackets. Things that saved you from drowning. And this, I felt, would be good. I would start learning from day one and work hard at learning the lot. I was enthused. I might even have rubbed my hands.

My girlfriend and I had just married. We moved to Guildford. Much nicer than Hendon, we found. A detached house, just completed and situated at the end of a close. This, we knew, was going to be good.

I learned all that I needed to learn about the operation and plunged into the writing of maintenance manuals and booklets. Technical authors who are newcomers to a subject usually do a good job because they instinctively write from the new user’s angle. I gathered I was conforming to type and giving satisfaction. I engaged a secretary. Very efficient, she was.

And then I discovered something else.

The representative for one of the design agencies I used was keen and anxious to please. One morning we had just completed a briefing when he invited me to have lunch with him at a small restaurant in the village.

Now, this will sound ludicrous: in fifteen years of working life I had never been invited to a business lunch. This might of course have been due to bad breath or some unpleasant habit of which I was unaware. But here I was, here he was, and off we went.

It was pleasant in the little, low-lit room. Quiet and inoffensive music, a scattering of customers, brisk waiters, crisp linen. My host asked which wine I would like, red or white. I did not know. I had tasted wine now and then when pressed by those older and wiser than I, but that is all. Tentative halves of cider on holiday had been my limit. I chose red and wondered how it would taste.

I liked it.

Conversation grew more relaxed. Surroundings became evanescent. The pudding was delicious but I couldn’t remember choosing it. We ended the meal and, on the way out, I had the impression that I was not having to put any effort into either propulsion or steering. Tables simply moved apart as I approached, the carpet slid backwards at every step, the doorway to the street widened as the tide upon which I floated carried me through it. I had discovered what it is to be slightly, pleasantly, drunk.

The work continued but a few years on I found I was becoming stale. And it was probably noticeable. Something was wrong. I was using one of the knacks I had developed, the ability to write fairly clear prose. But little else. And wasn't there something better for me to do? I knew my work was suffering. I needed a new scene.

I asked for an assistant, someone who would be able to move into my chair and do the job as well as, and preferably better than, I had managed. I selected a delightful chap with a fine moustache who, comically, turned out to have been an RAF Wing Commander. From nine ranks below and for the next few months I introduced him to the products and their individual requirements, watched him carry it all with ease, and resigned.

I told a knowledgeable acquaintance in London I was available for anything that he happened to hear of.

One Saturday morning he rang.

‘I think I’ve found exactly the sort of thing you’re looking for.’

‘Wonderful! Not too far away, I hope?’

‘Well -’

‘Ah, I see. Miles away up North, I suppose?’

‘Oh no. Nothing like that.’ He left a nicely-judged pause.

‘India.’

And if you've forgotten what happened then, scroll back to March 8th, 'New Arrivals'.

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NOTE: I’m grateful to our very good family friend from Guildford days, Roger Lake, for sending me a Surrey Advertiser cutting announcing an exhibition to be held next year in Godalming Museum, presenting the story of R F Dagnall and the history of the RFD Company. It seeks contributions from all who once worked at RFD. It was this cutting that prompted me to write about my own few years with the company.

For those who won’t be able to manage Godalming, here is the gist of a cutting from the magazine Flight for November 1942. It is their obituary for Reginald Foster Dagnall. He was born in London in 1888. He developed a fascination for the design and construction of small airships. In 1920 he formed his own company, RFD Ltd, Godalming, in the design and manufacture of pneumatic dinghies and barrage balloons. He died on November 16, 1942. The company later amalgamated with the Beaufort Company and is now RFD Beaufort.

Bonfires

Bonfires have always held a fascination for me. The lighting, the re-lighting, the coaxing and stoking, the sheer excitement of being in complete control. Lovely.

We had one a couple of years ago. I was in my armchair at the time and control was not quite complete.

I was watching the one-o’clock News and eating cheese and dry biscuits. The news was tedious. Real life is so much more exciting.

Like the thin coil of black smoke rising from the top of the set. Now, that was news and reasonably exciting.

I was alone in the house. My wife was on the bus to the city to do shopping. I wrenched the mains plug from its socket and spent perhaps one minute in trying the instinctive ways of putting fires out but to little effect, abandoned them and concentrated on the now obvious solution: getting the set outside.

Smoke does so get in your eyes. Black carbon-rich smoke from fired-up plastic is a great tear-generator. But worse was the weight of this set. It was an old cathode ray tube type and, having got hold of the thing and started lifting, I knew within seconds that gravity was winning fast. I dropped it on the stone hearth, grabbed the phone and called the Fire chaps.

The smoke was now accompanied by small drips of flaming plastic; our pale beige carpet welcomed them and joined the party.  As I ran outside I noticed that the bottom of one long curtain was well alight. Once outside and across the road I could see the thick column of black smoke rising vertically from the house and words like ‘demolition’ and ‘reconstruction’ floated across my vision.

The Fire Service arrived unbelievably quickly and its crew found me sitting on a neighbour’s low front-garden wall and being served sweet tea by the owner.

There was a charming interlude as the fire was being dealt with. Two ambulances drew up. The driver of the first one checked that I was unharmed, and left. But the other said, almost apologetically, that he had been on his way back to base after attending a little plane crash over the hill. He had heard the alarm and had just popped round to see if he could help.

They’re like that round here.

It was six months before we could return to the house. Rebuilding work had been done, with complete redecoration and refurnishing. With our daughter helping enormously and the whole family rallying round, the entire operation was handled brilliantly by my wife. Me, I tried to look helpful.

In the evening of the day it happened Barbara said, ‘You know what today is, don't you.'

I shook my head. Barbara usually knows these things.

'It was ten years ago today that we moved in.'

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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010

Simple pleasures

Unless you happen to know about the Film Studios there, you’ve probably never heard of the place called Elstree.

It’s a village 15 miles or so north-west of central London. When I knew it in the 1930s it was a truly rural, countryside area, chiefly a place of narrow, twisty lanes edged by tall hedgerows. Today its lanes are still edged with high hedges and you can imagine yourself in deepest rural England. But much building of housing estates has gone on and the hedges today can hide a multitude of bricks and mortar.

Only five miles from our house in Bushey its airfield was the ideal Saturday afternoon bike-ride for a schoolfriend and me. And by ‘airfield’ I mean an actual field with one short landing strip, a well-rolled and hardened strip of level soil. Dotted about were a few sheds acting as hangars.

Within shouting distance there was another attraction, Elstree Reservoir, a wide stretch of water edged by trees and grassland. Small sailing craft and rowing dinghies were always there, in fine weather and foul, with men calling themselves ‘skippers’ and frequently proving themselves to be quite otherwise.

But the reservoir was not for us, in spite of its many attractions for small boys like the deliciously muddy banks and shallow water that made it ideal for sailing one’s model yacht. Compared with dangerous, noisy, daredevil aeroplanes that might crash at any moment, sailing dinghies were dreary and predictable. They moved slowly and went nowhere. (Twenty years later I was to discover otherwise; every year had a fortnight reserved for sailing 30ft sloops on the Norfolk Broads and teaching others to sail.)

Our viewpoint for watching the airfield activity could not have been better. Just off one of the lanes, through trees and on to a grassy space, was the wooden perimeter fence; as I remember it, low and widely-spaced posts with a single rail. We could see the entire field, sheds and all.

With a couple of slices of fruit cake and a bottle of lemonade between us we would flop down onto the grass close by the railings, and just watch. Planes many years old would be active, biplanes that had served in the years of the 1914-18 war. But newer types like the Gipsy Moth were there, too. The racing types, the trainers, all were there. Not many were actually based there; they would arrive and depart mounted on long trailers, their wings folded or removed, and towed by powerful cars.

The take-offs were not exciting. It was the landings that had the attraction and, on our arrival, the wind-sock was the first thing we looked at. There was only one runway, running roughly east-west; when the wind veered it made all the difference to the difficulty of the job. A sudden sideways gust would send these lightweight and mostly canvas-and wood aircraft staggering. We watched the pilots, mostly very efficient, coax their machines with stick and rudder until they were correctly lined-up, then gently sink them onto the strip. We hoped for the less-experienced; they achieved the most wonderfully dangerous landings, bouncing high as they hit ground and continuing to bounce as they raced nearer and nearer to the perimeter trees.

Elstree Airport, as it is now named, is today a busy recreation and training centre. There is still only the single landing strip but now it’s hard and white-lined. Look at the Google map and imagine it as it was, with us revelling in the sunshine, an excellent front-row view, a chunk of Mum’s rich currant cake and a bottle of pop.

Ah, nostalgia. What would I do without you?

(By the way, if you’re interested in the history and development of airfields round Britain have a look at Airport Information Exchange. Very helpful, they are. As their Dave Robinson told me, ‘. . . there's no greater knowledge base on UK Airfields than AiX’.)

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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010