Sunday afternoon. It has rained most of the morning. I won’t be going anywhere today. I have been sitting in the kitchen, looking out of the window watching the starlings flying to and fro. The rain doesn’t seem to bother them, they are still chattering away to each other. I just put the clock back by an hour, I forgot last night, so that means it will be dark by 5.00 this evening. I haven’t written anything for a few days, so I thought I’d make the effort to write something to pass the time. I am listening to Astral Weeks by Van Morrison, which is probably my favourite album of all time, although I haven’t played it for a while. What prompted me to give it another listen today was a broadcast on BBC Radio 4 a few days ago which a fellow Van fan recommended. It was presented by the journalist Laura Barton and anyone who has read her articles in The Guardian will know that Laura is a big Van fan.
The programme was about the relationship between music and language. One of the examples she cited was the phrase clicking, clacking of the high heeled shoes in the song Madame George. That line resonates with me as well. Van is popular for many, many reasons. I think one of the reasons is, that through his lyrics he is intuitively able to tap into what Jung or Freud might call the collective consciousness. In many of his songs he recalls his own childhood & teenage experiences. I am thinking of such songs as On Hyndford Street, Take Me Back, A Sense Of Wonder, Cleaning Windows, Cyprus Avenue and many more. Wherever in the world people listen to Van’s words they can relate to them because we all have similar childhood memories.
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| Our Street Now. |
The street where I grew up in the 1950’s & early 60s was called George Street and wasn’t too dissimilar to Van’s Hyndford Street, except I think we had nicer gardens out at the back. I wish I had a photo of the street from the 1950s to show you, but all I could find is a modern picture from an estate agent’s website (See photo). Anyway, it was a working-class street of mainly terraced houses. There were only about two families in the street that had a car in those days. That meant that without any traffic all the kids could play in the street, which was ideal. Everyone in the street knew each other. These days people sometimes don’t even know who lives next door. There was a row of lime trees down our side of the street which was very pleasant.
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| Hopscotch |
In the long summer evenings, all the kids would be out on the street, playing football, or cricket (using a tennis ball rather than a cricket ball, because of the danger of smashing a window!) There were lots of traditional games as well. The pavement often had hopscotch marked on it with chalk. Boys played marbles; girls were more into skipping. There were games which involved singing as well, such as, The Big Ship Sails On The Illy Alley Oh. The girls did most of the organising of the games. Queenie O Coco, Who’s Got The Ball? was one, I’m The King Of The Castle, You’re The Dirty Rascal was another. There was another one called Fox & Hounds where all the kids would line up on one side of the street and then charge across to the other side before being grabbed. You could go on and on about memories of street life.
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| Factory 1929 |
To get back to the point of this story. In the radio programme Laura Barton said that the line ‘clicking clacking of the high heeled shoes’ reminded her of the sound of stiletto heels on rainy concrete paving slabs. Well, quite near our street, on Queens Walk was a factory called Symingtons. The workforce was about 95% female. It started in the Edwardian era making corsets. During the second World War it made parachutes. By the 1950s it made all sorts of underwear. Anyway, every morning hundreds of women and girls would come traipsing along Oundle Road at the top of our street to work at this factory. The pavement was tarmac and the high heel shoes left hundreds of tiny pock marks on the soft surface,, and that is what the image of clicking, clacking of the high heeled shoes means to me.
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