So, a very belated RIP then to George Harrison. Been on my mind lately - he was one of the background ingredients of childhood that you can’t quite taste in the finished mix, but the recipe wouldn’t be the same without him.
Some of my earliest memories are of shopping with my Mum in Twickenham. I must have been 3 or 4 - below school age, at any rate. I imagine that my visualisation of the time has been tainted by the peculiar colour palette of early 70s TV and photography, but I recall flows of shoppers towering above me in shiny calf-boots and knee-length dresses, gaudy with turqouise blobs of paisley and violet patterning, colours expoloding everywhere, black post-Mary-Quant bobs brushing over Nana Mouskouri glasses, eternal sunshine haloing those high-up heads. It was a little like being Mr Benn, walking down Festive Road among playing children and smiling adults.
A few of the places we visited stand out in my mind as small worlds of their own - of course there was the toy shop on Church Street, run by an ever-so-nice man who reminded me of Brian Cant, who was himself the nicest man on TV. In fact, I suspect that I thought the shopkeeper truly was Brian, and that is why I used to watch Play Away so eagerly, looking for a clue, a secret sign for my eyes only. Although it was a rare treat to be able to buy a toy from the toy shop, we did visit it religiously every week to make use of the jigsaw library. One of the high-points of my then simple existence was walking home with a new jigsaw to try out.
Also in Church Street was the pet shop. I guess we must have been there to stock up on food for our dog, Disraeli, but for me the reason for visiting was to talk to the ever-chatty mynah bird. And to gaze at tropical fish - a little window on a distant world normally only visited by Jacques Couseau (another TV favourite).
More fish at the fish-mongers on York St. Even more alien. A lot more dead. Scary - the closest a child ever comes to death, corpses staring, eyeballs fixed, nothing moving. But if you turned your back on just one of the creatures, you know that it would be up and dancing and plotting against you. And of course the fish-mongers smelt like no other shop, no other place in the world. It was hard enough to bear for the 2 or 3 minutes taken to select a nice cod, god knows how the mucky-aproned men in wellingtons put up with it. They weren’t like us. Couldn’t be.
Although Mum never ate fish, she would cook it once a week for Dad, Hannah and me. We would sit around a table and tuck in off one plate. I don’t think the fish was really the important part - I’d probably have turned my nose up at fish on its own - but the parsley sauce… mmmmm. I have never tasted anything so perfect in my life since.
Another time we bought prawns for dad. If dead fish were scary, these things were positively terrifying. Aliens from another planet waiting to take control of my body as soon as I let them pass my mouth. I was given one to peel and eat myself. It sat there on its plate for an inordinate length of time - my memory has it pegged at 4 hours, though in the slowed-down spangle-coloured time of childhood it was probably closer to 5 minutes. I was too scared even to cross the room towards it, keeping instead a healthy distance of at least 4 feet between us. Finally, in the battle between cowardice and boredom, boredom won out - I couldn’t face staring at this monster forever, and if Dad had already eaten a load then surely I could come to no harm. Quick as a flash I crossed the room, grabbed it and, paying as little attention as possible, stripped off the skin, legs, beady eyeballs, and popped the pink maggot down my gullet.
There was also a dance school in York Street - a black door alongside the Nat West bank, leading up some stairs to a large dark-floored space. I clearly remember hoping, every time we passed the entrance, hoping that we would be going inside. But it was not until recently that I recalled why - I asked Mum whether she used to take dancing lessons, but no. Why did we used to go there then? Apparently it was from time-to-time the preferred venue of local market researchers, who would corner my Mum, eager to put her feet up, outside, and lead her in to answer questions or try out some new product. Once inside she would be rewarded with a cup of tea, and I would have biscuits to keep me quiet. Biscuits! So that was my holy grail, the reason why the dance school was so special to me. When I think of the regularity with which Rowan demands her several daily fixes of sweet stuff I look back misty-eyed at such an age of innocence.
And finally, back to George (almost). There was a record shop in Church Street. I can’t have ever visited it more than once or twice. I remember it vaguely as dark and musty, the kind of place I would love to spend hours browsing in today (perhaps that was just a trait of early ’70s record shops?) I remember visiting it with Mum to buy Dad’s birthday present - the Concert for Bangladesh album by George Harrison. An incredible artefact in itself - the oatmealy-box in orange and black with starving child, nothing like a normal record. I don’t actually remember Dad listening to it very much, and when I “rediscovered” it during my obligatory Ravi-Shankar phase (when I was about 17) it was strangely unfamiliar despite being the packaging being so well known to me.
The other two George Harrisons, Dark Horse and Living in the Material World, I do remember hearing. In fact, I was so familiar with them that if I were to hear them now they would feel quite empty, detatched from their natural habitat. Dad had a massive taping spree before a trip to Switzerland, and these were two of the albums committed to cassette. Dad allowed Hannah and me to choose one tape each to “own” - Hannah went for the George Harrisons, while I chose the rather more naff Paul McCartney/Wings, although I later changed my choice to 10cc (or was it the other way around?) Whatever, all of those tapes have become associated with continual play and re-play throughout countless car journeys through South-East England, France, Belgium, Luxemboug, Germany, Switzerland, Switzerland, Switzerland. They became part of our mental makeup, although the words never meant quite what they were intended to. For me, George Harrison’s Material World was, quite literally, a world of materials - a 2-D patchwork of fabric, any and every colour and pattern permitted, visually confusing, contradictory, from which escape was nigh-impossible. McCarney’s Jet (which for years Hannah and I though of as “Check”) was another part of this same world, a nightmare landscape of gingham and tartan, so soul-destroying that “if I ever get out of this place, gonna give it all away, to a registered charity”… “if I ever get out of here, if we ever get out of here” sung with such despondency that it was quite obvious all attempts at escape were useless. Ah… the literal out of the metaphysical… “I’m a dark horse, running on a dark race-course” meaning exactly what it said, a song about horse-racing. Somehow, songs were always much more visual that way.
Switzerland is another “thing” that’s been much on my mind lately - from my recent mention of Paul’s Basel-madness, through an email from Nik in Berne pinned to Dad’s noticeboard, to meeting up with Mich from Geneva last night. There is no place in the world as beautiful as the Bernese Oberland in the summer/autumn. Of course, I mean that in exactly the same way as there is no taste more delicious than parsley sauce and no song touches the nerves like one about being stuck in a quilt. But still, it’s been 17 years now, and I long to see the mountains and forests, pick wild strawberries, blueberries (mmmm… heitisturm!), mushrooms, walk on paths where the signposts give distances in minutes not miles or kilometres, build dams in streams of freshly-melted snow, stand inside glaciers and atop proper mountains… this is something I would like my children to experience too.
So, good old George, he found his path to Krisna at last. Ah well. The best obituary I can think of is this cover version by Mark Ribot (from the album Rootless Cosmopolitans - how very apt!). Weep gently no more.
