Grandpa Stead, the Brave
When you're 235 feet up a ship’s mast above a raging sea, hanging on to a lump of wood and being thrown from side to side by the heaving iron ship underneath you, I reckon you can call yourself brave.
My grandfather Charlie Stead (pronounced 'Sted') did that for a living. He was ship’s carpenter in the Royal Navy in the late 1800s. His ship was the HMS Comus, a three-masted barque, fully-armed, with coal-powered steam engine. She was commissioned for service, with 19-year-old Charlie on board, on October 23rd, 1879. He served on her for four years and for much of the time in the South China Sea.
And if some bit of rigging up one of the three masts got itself wrenched out of gear, he was the one who went up there to fix it.
I learned a little of the sort of man he was from my mother, the second of five girls in the family, whom I remember pestering for stories ‘about when you were a little girl’. One of these was about the mornings he would go into the girls’ room when they were small, load as many of them as he could manage on arms and shoulders and amid their shrieks of laughter and pretended terror go flying down the two flights of stairs with his feet seeming to slither over the edge of each stair, then into the morning room where he would dump them in a heap on to the big, plump sofa.
My own memory of him was a man in his middle fifties, a Plymouth Brother of the most exclusive strain, patrician, gentle, funny, quietly-suited, slightly portly, wearing a snow-white wing collar and tie and a Homburg, with a gold watch-chain and pince-nez.
I have those pince-nez now; one of our granddaughters used to like trying them on. I would tell her they did not fit her but she could not agree. On a top shelf in front of me I have his tattered, marbled-cover diary.
When he left the Royal Navy he was known all over Ramsgate both for the soundness of his work as a builder and decorator and for his charity of character.
In Ramsgate he would move the family from one house to another, re-fitting and decorating each one, inside and out, and then put it up for sale. The final house in Hollicondane Road he built himself and there the family grew up and lived until they were well into adulthood. Whenever I stayed with them as a 7 - 10 year-old he would take me to his workroom. It smelt of wood, paint and turps and whenever I smell those things now they remind me of his precise gilt lettering on half-finished black shop fascias leaning, drying, against the wall and smaller oak-grained panels for genteel Ramsgate front gates and on bows and sterns of ocean-going ships.
The signwriter in him could be seen in his handwriting; every letter, every quick note, was written in copperplate script. It was something that I admired. I wanted to write like that myself but I knew I never would. For as well as being a stammerer I was left-handed and no left-handed man on earth could possibly get anywhere near that beautiful right-sloping script.
One memory is of a visit he made to us. Someone suggested a trip over to the Ruislip Reservoir, a quiet place surrounded then by green pastures and reached in an hour or so on the 158 London Transport Bus. We went, and Grandpa, having selected the best of the skiffs from the little yard, helped us both on board and took charge of the oars. After pulling for some ten minutes, slowly and rhythmically, he began to recite the whole of the 23rd Psalm. I hear his voice now, quiet, as though he was thinking aloud, the words beautifully enunciated. The lake was silent; sheep grazed by the shore, and we listened.
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley
of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil:
for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff
they comfort me.
Within weeks of that visit he became ill and in the middle of the morning on October 26, 1936, the telegraph boy knocked on the Venetian-red front door of our new Bushey house. My mother opened it and took the little yellow envelope. The boy touched his cap and left. The telegram said, simply, ‘Father much worse. Chris.’ He died the next day, aged 76.
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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010
A fairly big surprise
In October 1943 I became known by a number.
I was called to enlist in the Royal Air Force. I stood in the queue of volunteers listening to the numbers being dished out to the men three or four ahead of me and worked out, with sudden joy and a rush of confidence, that my number would be palindromic.
I never ceased to brag about it afterwards. I suppose it was because here was something about numbers that I could actually understand. Once, when I bragged about it, I was within seconds of getting a fairly big surprise.
It happened in Calcutta just after the telling-off from my new Commanding Officer about getting lost on the road from the city (see post at January 4th). I left his office that morning, committing to memory the name, number and location of the unit in which I was now employed.
The place where I would actually be working was a few hundred yards down the Barrackpore Road (for that was its name, by then securely fixed in my head). I was told that the entrance had white gates.
I came to the white gates. They had rococo wrought-iron decorations. Could they possibly lead to anything to do with the RAF, I wondered. They must lead to a private house. And if this was a private house it was certainly a big one. I checked the map again. It insisted that this was the place, so I started up the drive.
In front of me, above me and on both sides of me was a seriously big house. Increasingly sure that I was in the wrong place but nevertheless determined to see what would happen, I went up the flight of curved steps to the open double doors, went in, and gazed round.
The height and width and length and opulence of the hall, with its great staircase circling up and up suggested that the architect had just completed the Taj Mahal and had a few ideas left over. Confirmation that this was the RAF came in the shape of a small Corporal sitting at a trestle table behind a large typewriter and two filing trays and drinking tea.
‘Name?’ he asked.
I spelled out the name.
‘Number?’
I told him and let him write it down. Then I said, ‘It’s palindromic.’
He looked up. ‘It’s what?’
‘Palindromic. Same backwards as forwards.’
His eyes moved to the number, forefinger going left to right, then right to left.
‘You’re right.’ He checked again. ‘So it’s - what?’
‘Palindromic.’
His lips moved slowly and you knew that the NCO’s Mess would get the story that night. He held out his hand.
‘Twelve-fifty?’
My 1250 was my RAF identity card. He glanced at it, handed it back, looked at a list, found my name and told me to go through a door in the distant shadows.
It was then that the big surprise popped up.
I stood for a moment looking round at the marble pillars and gilded sconces and said, ‘Who owns this place?’
‘Oh, some Indian chap, name of Tiger,’ he said.
‘Tiger’ meant nothing to me. But the next day it dawned on me that I now worked in the home of one of our language’s greatest poets, Sir Rabindranath Tagore.
It stands there today.
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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010
Rain, aurora borealis, et cetera
Rain and photography do seem to get together a lot. And when it happens it can create anything from expensive delays to helpless laughter, usually providing exquisite lighting effects by way of compensation.
In 1979 I was art directing the Kodak Calendar for 1981 with the photographer Patrick Lichfield. The theme I had chosen was Harrow School and its surroundings. Patrick was an Old Harrovian so knew all its history as well as the nooks and crannies of the ancient hill-top school buildings.
But in the town scenes, too, he worked wonders. One scene I suggested was a night shot in one of the streets, a wet night, with puddles reflecting street lights and so on. It was fixed. Our very young daughter would be the sole figure visible in the middle distance, carrying a red umbrella. For rain, I booked the Fire Service.
The day and the evening came. In deep twilight Patrick found the right viewpoint along the winding, uphill house-lined street to the final sharp bend to the church, its famous steeple and the school itself. He had explained to our daughter exactly where she should walk. One of his assistants picked up noticeable rubbish in gutters and the other knocked on a few doors to ask if they would be kind enough to switch on their front-room lights for a few minutes.
At a minute or so before the fire crew were due it became suddenly very much darker. And then all heaven split down the middle and emptied itself of an ocean. We were drenched in seconds. Cascades rushed down the gutters.
The fire engine arrived.
Oilskin-clad and helmeted, the senior fireman climbed down from the cab. Through the driving rain he came up to Patrick and me, touched his helmet and, displaying a masterly grasp of irony and the understatement, spoke.
‘Evening sir. I, er. . . I don’t suppose you’ll be wanting us tonight, then?
o o o
In Iceland, too, rain knows how and when to fall.
The Kodak Senior Photographer Jack Oakley was the man on this job and we had talked often about the likelihood of the Northern Lights appearing while we were there; a picture of this phenomenon could end up as the ultimate cover picture for the 1973 Iceland calendar.
One evening about halfway through the job I was getting into bed and thought the sky had a funny look about it; did it it presage the Aurora Borealis?
I called goodnight to my nine-year-old charge on the other side of the room.
I will describe events as I remember them, since nothing like it is ever likely to occur again; in fact the story could find its place among the Icelandic sagas.
It had been a heavy day and we were as tired as we had ever been. I dropped off to sleep within minutes of getting into bed.
I was woken by light.
I don’t mean just ‘light’. It was amazing. Even though diffused by the closed curtains it threw a brilliant spread of pink, orange and red all over the ceiling. I leaped out of bed and dashed into Jack’s room. I shook his shoulder.
‘Jack, quick! Northern Lights!’
In one single movement Jack, ever the professional, woke up, rolled out of bed and pulled his trousers on. He was undoing his camera case by the time I had started back to put something on over my pyjamas. The ceiling was still covered with this unearthly light. The boy was sitting on the edge of his bed, blinking.
I said, ‘It’s the Northern Lights!’
He jumped off the bed and began dressing.
It could not have been more than sixty seconds later that there came a quiet, slow knocking at the door. I opened it.
Jack stood there. Water dripped from his peaked denim cap and trickled, like the anointing oil on Moses’ head, down his beard to the floor. He was clutching his Hasselblad under his waterproof coat.
‘Paul,’ he said, wringing out rainwater from his beard, ‘that was not the Aurora Borealis.’
‘No?’
‘No, Paul. It was sunrise. It is now raining, and with your kind permission I am going back to bed.’
With a certain sadness he turned, and left.
The boy flung himself backwards on to his bed, howling with laughter, pointing at me and screwing a finger into his right temple.
At breakfast they joined forces and put me through the hoop. Oh, they had a lovely time.
Well, I deserved it.
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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010
Pure Greek Honey
Start talking to me about about Greece and you might notice a slight tightening of the jaw. Mine, that is.
The photographer Adam Woolfitt and I had just finished working on Santorini making pictures for the Kodak Calendar. Adam had a call back to London and had to leave a day early. I booked a chopper to take us back to Piræus so that he could get his flight and I a hotel room for myself. I was utterly flogged after ten days of rushing up and down rugged hillsides and looked forward with childish glee to a quiet night in the Piræus hotel and then a few hours of swanning around in Athens before flying home.
At Santorini we were boarding our chopper when a man came rushing up, carrying two large bottles.
‘Wait! Wait - this is for you, please.’
We had met him earlier; he had helped us considerably over the past days on the island yet here he was, making us a farewell gift. He handed us each a two-litre bottle of transparent golden Greek honey, collected from his own hives on Santorini.
Adam got his flight to London. I went on to the hotel.
Over the last fifty years I have had to stay in some nasty places, but this place beat everything. It was very small, very smelly and filthy. In my room a single light bulb hung from the ceiling. The curtains were torn. The bed looked back at me and dared me to get into it. I dumped my flight bag on a stool and went out to find another hotel, but everything was full. I went back, undressed, and crossed the room to the shower. Halfway there, I stopped. Something on the floor twinkled up at me from under the stool upon which lay my flight bag. It was a reflection of the light bulb in a small pool of liquid. It was spreading very slowly on the dull, dark brown linoleum floor.
I went to the stool and unzipped the bag. My bottle had broken and two litres of thin Greek honey had seeped downwards through everything. I had honeyed files, honeyed books, shirts, underwear and shoes. Honeyed everything. My electric razor slithered honeyly out of my grasp as I picked it up, my hair brush was honey-heavy and dripped. Shirts dripped and socks sagged. My emergency loo paper was glued into a solid mass and gifts for the family were soaked.
Wonderful aromatic, transparent Greek honey, enriched by curved shards of smashed glass.
There are some situations that prevent cogent thought. For quite a long time I stood, my slowly-dripping razor in one hand and a sock in the other. Eventually I began picking individual items out of the swamp and laying them out on the floor, one by one. I carried on until the bag was empty. I got the toilet roll from the lavatory, dampened twenty yards or so under the tap, knelt down and began systematically to get the worst off each item.
Eventually, I swabbed the pool of honey off the dark brown linoleum. As I rubbed I was interested to see the brown surface beginning to lighten. The more I rubbed the more quickly it lightened. It ended up bright orange. It dawned on me that I was removing about twenty years’ worth of other guests’ dirt.
At home I knelt by the flight bag and, surrounded by my eager family, described our climbing into the helicopter. As I talked I slowly pulled back the zip. At the words ‘a two-litre glass bottle of Greek honey’ I pulled out a nicely-saturated shirt. I leave you to imagine the reaction.
The gifts survived, aromatic but whole.
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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010