Zarzuela: A Taste of Life

By Geoff Taylor

This book is (mainly) a conventional life-story, written in a deliberately conversational style that has you believing youre with a friend in your local Pub or enjoying a lengthy stroll on the river bank.
Yet once the book has you comfortably snoozing, an outrageous passage of humour and sarcasm has you hoping for more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Sep 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781514463161

Geoff Taylor

Born to middle-class mediocrity, Geoff Taylor fumbles his way through life, in fifteen countries on three continents, like a cross between The Born Loser and Lucky Jim.

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ZARZUELA

A Taste of Life

GEOFF TAYLOR

Copyright © 2015 by Geoff Taylor.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2015914268

ISBN:      Hardcover               978-1-5144-6318-5

                 Softcover                978-1-5144-6317-8

                 eBook                     978-1-5144-6316-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 09/01/2015

Xlibris

800-056-3182

www.Xlibrispublishing.co.uk

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CONTENTS

ONE—In the beginning…..

TWO—Outbreak of war

THREE—Serious school

FOUR—Don’t call me, I’ll call you

FIVE—Life outside the orange

SIX—22546571 Gunner Taylor SIR!

THE TIES THAT BIND

SEVEN—down to earth with a bump

EIGHT—Our old enemy

We Brits and our enduring love-affair with the spark plug.

NINE—new career, Korea

TEN—Peace, of a sort

ELEVEN—good old Blighty

@SUM(THE ARCHERS)DOT.COM

TWELVE—somewhere in the South China Sea

THE RELUCTANT HERO

THIRTEEN—further education, but now I’m teaching

FOURTEEN—first taste of power

FIFTEEN—back to Kodak

BUILDING TWO-EIGHT-O

SIXTEEN—the Big Apple and the Windy City

SEVENTEEN—bye bye USA, hello Australasia

EIGHTEEN—ohio gosai maas, Eastman-san

NINETEEN—and the rest!

TWENTY—Oh Goodness Gracious Me!

THE CHILDREN’S HOUR

TWENTY ONE—at last, I’m in command

TWENTY TWO—it’s the property, stupid!

‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘WE’RE GONNA AC…CEN…TUATE THE NEGATIVE’’’’’’’’’’

TWENTY THREE—Entrepreneur! who me?

NODDY & BIG-EARS IN NEVER-NEVER LAND:

TWENTY FOUR—Saved by the bell!

DALLAS EAST

TWENTY FIVE—A new line – Oficialdom

TWENTY SIX—What Now?

GUNG HEI FAT CHOI

TWENTY SEVEN—Back to Blighty (again)

TWENTY EIGHT—a whole lot of old stuff.

MONEY FOR OLD ROPE – if it’s Georgian old rope.

TWENTY NINE—Whigs and Tories.

I don’t know him but I know his letter box.

THIRTY—Our French expansion.

"Raiders wage secret war on metric signs.

ONE

In the beginning…..

IS THE TYPICAL life merely a frantic stumbling from one crisis to another? Shakespeare must have thought so: his ‘Seven Ages of Man’ has his hero veering along, a cross between Lucky Jim and The Born Loser. Perhaps a would-be biographer can make of this a template for his work: locate in time each of the significant crises - as Velasquez would have sketched in the main characters and features of his paintings - and then simply fill in with sympathetic background all the spaces between. A crisis doesn’t need to be something dangerous or even unpleasant since any crisis can also be an opportunity that becomes what you make of it. Churchill was possessed of the ‘balls’ to turn most of his life crises into major or minor triumphs. But then he was a Churchill: Marlborough Man.

I know well my own crises:

•  1933. Being born. One of the happier crises - had it not happened I don’t know how I would have coped. So mark one as ‘positive’. It was April 11 - double April Fool.

•  1936. My parents apparently - I wasn’t informed of it officially at the time - got divorced. A ‘negative’? Yes, but with some ‘positive’ character influences.

•  1942. ‘Evacuated’ for the second time, some would say pushed off, to a foster parent in the Surrey village of Englefield Green.

•  1950. Major crisis: ran away. It seemed to be the only way to get un-evacuated. After all, the war had been over nearly five years.

•  1950. Joined the army. No apologies for two crises in one year. It simply happened that way - 1950 was a busy year for me.

•  1952. Sent to the Far East - the Korean War then Hong Kong and all that.

•  1955. GOT OUT, PHEW! There’s no other way to put it.

•  1960. Graduated from Birkbeck. Not a big deal today but back then it meant you were in the top 3% of the population to get any degree. That same year I returned to the Far East.

•  1965. Met Frances: ’nough said!

•  1967. First son.

•  1969/71. Second son. Quite sufficient thank you.

•  1976. Quit my nice safe job voluntarily for, probably, all the wrong reasons. From here on it’s you against the rest Boyo!

•  1989. Back to the UK and severe culture shock.

•  1997. Failed to make a second career in politics. Oh well!

Fourteen ages of one man - twice that of Shakespeare. But if you believe, as I do, that a large majority of his plays were written by Christopher Marlowe then he left an awful lot untold. After all, Marlowe was a 16c adventurer and the first 007.

*   *   *

There have been many claims of pre-natal cognisance, memories from the womb, but my first memory at the advanced age of three is inspecting my parents’ house in South Kenton upside-down. Upside-down because I insisted on looking at it through my legs - more fun that way - while kneeling on a wooden seat at the bottom of the garden. Legend has it that I also broke my thumb around this time by falling off the same seat.

It wasn’t much of a house: semi-detached in a collection of ‘avenues’ and ‘crescents’ in South Kenton named collectively after the Lake District. Ambleside, Grasmere, Windermere, Rydal - you know the sort of thing, very 1930’s. Mine (ours) was Derwent Gardens. I say it wasn’t much as my father couldn’t really afford to buy any sort of a house: he was a middling accountant with the Express Dairy Company. My mother’s mother, my beloved Nana Wynter, bought it for them. My mother had been christened Sadie Justina and her family two generations back were the Tyrells of Northamptonshire - Burton Latimer to be exact - where they had held sway since at least 1470 when an ancestor, Sir James Turrell, had been Speaker of the Commons. His nephew, also Sir James, allegedly organised the murder of the Tower Princes on behalf of Richard III. In the course of four hundred years Turrell (pronounced Tirell) became Tyrell and my great-grandmother was a younger daughter – Lady Jane Tyrell.

Decades later, towards the end of the ’60’s, I called on one of Eastman’s customers in Auckland where the proprietor’s name was also Tyrell. Over a beer or two after business was done I asked him if he had been born in New Zealand. Oh no, he said, my family came out when I was a boy from Cambridgeshire. He knew more of the Tyrell history than I, telling me that a contemporary, Lord Tyrell of Avon, had been President of the British Board of Film Censors - his signature appearing prominently at the foot of every ‘licence’ granted to a British film. (I subsequently learnt that this President of the Board had been born in Sri Lanka or Zimbabwe or somesuch, and had chosen the name Tyrell at random!!)

Nana was one of those quiet, unassuming women who none-the-less have characters of steel. Her first husband, my grandfather, was a musician and became an orchestral conductor. Shortly after the Armistice in 1918 he departed suddenly for Africa, leaving Nana with a small daughter and virtually no income. Nana had to learn typing, get herself a job, and keep the two of them. (A decade and a half later, as Nana recounted it, she suddenly found herself sitting opposite him on a Bakerloo Line train heading out of Baker Street. They left the train at different stations without either acknowledging the existence of the other.)

The 1920’s saw the birth of the female Secretary (an occupation previously denied to most women) so this is what Nana trained herself to be, and eventually worked for James Wynter the Managing Director and son of the founder of Times Laundries Ltd. She married his younger brother Noel. Their father, David Wynter, had started a small commercial laundry called Greenhill in Harrow before the turn of the century. Buying up other suburban London laundries, including the Richmond, he soon had a capital-wide concern which he renamed Times Laundry. In 1947 it was purchased and absorbed within Initial Services. But David Wynter’s real claim to fame, if that is what one can call it, was to found the British branch of the Swedenborg Society. Emanuel Swedenborg was an 18th century Swedish philosopher and mystic who claimed to have gone to heaven, spent his time there taking copious notes from God and others, and then returned to earth to write about it. I still have three British first editions of his works (1788/9) and in the mid-seventies, after a visit to the British Museum, found myself opposite the Swedenborg Society’s premises in Great Russell Street. It’s a late-Georgian/early-Victorian house with one of those grand sweeping staircases leading to the first floor. Ascending timidly I was suddenly looking at a full length portrait of David Wynter. An icy secretary emerged and asked me what I was doing there so I told her I had come to look at my great-grandfather’s picture - I left out the step. She was duly humbled.

My father, Bert, was a qualified accountant but in spite of this retained his slight cockney accent. His father, who died before I arrived, had been a house painter in Islington. But his mother, Minnie, was a character - what the French call un numero - and presided regally over her family of three girls and a boy. Two of the daughters, Flo and Doris, preceded my father and remained more or less ‘Lunnon’ but the youngest girl - Winnie but known as Tinker - became a secretary, married her boss the MD, and ended up with a six acre farm in Sussex. When well into her sixties Grandma Minnie married a second time to Pop Matthews, who elevated her entourage to the dizzy heights of suburban Pinner where they dined out to a great extent on Pop’s niece Jessie - a well known West End chanteuse and friend of Noel Coward. I never met Jessie Matthews but in the ’80’s admired her in the Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson series on television (she played Wallis’ mother).

So my parents’ diverse union should have produced a strengthened offspring: lad from working class background who betters himself and gets into a profession: aristocratic lass in straightened circumstances: Michener would have been proud.

Both Bert and my mother, Sadie, were talented pianists. Maybe this was their mutual attraction, I don’t know. With my mother it was purely a hobby but Bert paid for his lodgings whilst studying accountancy by playing in a contemporary band at London’s Cumberland Hotel in the 20’s. Years later I realised that piano skill, like that of riding a bicycle, is never lost. In 1970, having just left a long spell in hospital after losing an eye to cancer, my father flew out to Hong Kong for a visit with Frances and I and his grandson Gregory. At the time I had quite a nice little Broadbent baby grand: defying the loss of an eye and his 70 years, my father sat down and played fluently by ear - something that I, despite quite a long training at the piano, never mastered.

While we lived at 2 Derwent Gardens, Nana, or Elizabeth Wynter to identify her precisely (Topsy to her second husband and my father), lived less than a mile away in Preston Road and it was there that at three-and-a half I joined a kindergarten called St Gabriel’s. No memories of learning anything substantial but one mini-crisis: the children’s lavatory at St Gabriel’s, a large Victorian mansion, was an outhouse next to the coal store. I managed to mistake the two and pulled the door closed behind me. The sheer terror at three-and-a-half of being in total darkness, stumbling around on lumps of coal and unable to find the latch is still with me. But I must have enjoyed or at least gained something from St Gabriel’s for within a year I moved to the local junior school of which I remember absolutely zilch, not even what the building looked like, although family legend has it that at three-and-a-half I was reading newspapers. St Gabriel’s has a lot to answer for.

It must have been a somewhat unusual divorce that separated my parents. It’s always been a source of regret that I didn’t question any of my family in later years, before they died, about the details: the little I came to know I must have been told but I have no memory of where or when. Today the offspring of a broken family would be questioning vigorously and relentlessly from the age of about ten but in those days one went in awe of any older generation and, anyway, by the time I was ten I had been evacuated - an evacuation that didn’t end until 1950.

Apparently my father was given custody of me, the only child, so I must assume my mother misbehaved in some way. Yet I have distinct memories of several Aunties, lady friends of my father to whom I was introduced including one who ran a sweetshop. No wonder I remember her!

In spite of this, the dominant presence in my young life at that time was Nana Wynter - my maternal grandmother - and her surrogate at Derwent Gardens, Auntie Gertie. Gertrude Abbott was a spinster lady of indeterminate years and a friend of Nana’s since childhood. She guarded her less-than-awesome bosom from the lecherous gaze of all mankind with a Victorian lace choker and had a mother - Mrs Abbott - of truly impressive age who lived in a Home for Gentle Women. Auntie Gertie arrived, like Mary Poppins, out of the blue to be my father’s housekeeper: her salary paid, I suspect, by Nana. It was Auntie Gertie who escorted me daily the length of Grasmere Avenue to St Gabriel’s in Preston Road and later to the junior school. But Nana arranged weekend outings as well as regular-as-clockwork lunch at her house on Tuesday’s. Lunch - my favourite beef casserole with carrots and tomatoes, then Queen Pudding - was invariably followed by a trip on the Metropolitan Line to Baker Street and ninety minutes in the News Cinema, adjacent to Madame Tussauds. Pathé and Gaumont News plus cartoons: a teenage Sinatra wowing the bobby-soxers at the start of his career. The Metropolitan Line then was a system of some awe: it went all the way to Amersham and Rickmansworth, hauled by a marvellous double-ended electric locomotive built like a small passenger carriage. Of course I missed the real heritage significance of Baker Street. It was here, in about 1863, that the very first underground railway in the world had been born. It ran from Paddington to Caledonian Road via Baker Street. Even as late as 1937 the occasional steam loco could be seen on what became the Inner Circle. All of this came back to me years later in 1977 after I had joined Monsanto in the USA. Taken to lunch one day by colleagues in Saint Louis at a chain of restaurants called Victoria Station the lobby was decorated with an absolutely genuine enamelled Bakerloo Line platform sign from my birth town, South Kenton. I almost offered to buy it - the sign, not the restaurant.

So Bert and Sadie divorced and Sadie was enjoined to have no contact with me until I should be of age - 18. The law in those days had no time for romance: today it’s different.

*   *   *

TWO

Outbreak of war

MY MOTHER HASN’T been around for a long time, but Auntie Gertie and Nana have taken her place. Most of the time I don’t know where my father is although I do think of him when the electric milk cart turns into Derwent Gardens: maybe he’ll be driving it.

But its summer now and we’re here in Penhryn Bay for a holiday - don’t know when we’ll be returning but this being Penhryn Bay - who cares! Nana’s got a sister, my Aunt Edith, and this is her house with a back garden overlooking the beach. The cliff-top at Penhryn Bay is my idea of heaven. The bushes aren’t tall enough to frighten, I’m six after all, and there are paths along the ridge with plenty of hiding places and steps that let you climb down to the sea. A couple of times a week we walk to the tram stop and ride along the middle of the road between all the cars and then through a long stretch of green meadow to Llandudno where there aren’t one but two beaches (I just can’t understand how one town can have seaside at BOTH ENDS!). Then there’s the joy of riding up the Great Orme in a tiny mountain train. The Little Orme you have to climb on foot which isn’t that interesting. But last week we went on the big train to Llanfairfechan and when the tide goes out there it’s heaven with little pools full of shrimps and tiny fish.

I think they’re going to have to drag me screaming back to South Kenton. Today Aunt Edith found me a hammer and a few nails so I’ve made a crude ‘airey-buzzer’ from scraps of wood - but now Nana’s calling me in and we’re all listening very quietly to Mr Chamberlain on the radio telling us that "…from 11am today this country is at war with Germany."

Nobody asked me if I was ready and willing to go to war. I couldn’t tell you where Germany is. My father has several words of German that he trots out amongst his pals in the pub when I’m left sitting on the steps outside with a lemonade, but it doesn’t explain why we have to fight them. Except that fighting is fun. In ‘The New Adventures of Robin Hood’ Errol Flynn fights the Sheriff’s men by swooping down on them out of the trees, so all we have to do is climb a tree and swoop down on the Germans. How long will that take? A couple of weeks at most? Incredibly, many of the adults agree with me on this: - it’ll be a short war - over by Christmas.

Back in South Kenton everyone’s talking about ‘evacuation’. I gather I’m booked on a boat to Canada which will be fun, but then nothing happens. (Just as well, the boat was torpedoed!) A few more months in Derwent Gardens, nothing happens down here, just trailing up Grasmere Avenue to school and trailing back in the afternoon. But they haven’t forgotten my ‘evacuation’. Auntie Gertie has a sister who lives with her husband in the Leicestershire village of Grooby, a few miles from Coalville. Apparently that’s where we’re going for our ‘evacuation’, Auntie Gertie and I. The sister’s house is gloomy and right on a main road and no fun at all. Half a mile north it’s better, there’s Grooby Pool on the left side of the road and at certain times of the year hundreds of frogs try crossing the road to get into the water. Most of them don’t make it and the road surface is coated with squashed frog.

I’m enrolled in the local school in Grooby and do rather well. The teachers start saying I’m ‘bright’ but for the life of me I don’t know quite what has caused this. All I can think of is an essay I wrote on the subject of ‘My Life’ which came back to me with a little gold star in the corner. It isn’t much really, it would be more fun if all those frogs turned round and squashed some cars! Maybe I could write another essay on the frogs.

This place definitely isn’t Penhryn Bay and the sea must be miles away. I seem to have been here years, but it’s really only eight months: yesterday I got some good news, Auntie Gertie says we’re going back to London. Is the war finished? No-one mentions it but something must have changed.

My father no longer lives in South Kenton but on the outskirts of the tiny village of Seal east of Sevenoaks in Kent. The second surprise is his new wife, my Auntie Harriet. Immediately, I like Harriet. She’s in what’s called the ‘Licensed Trade’, managing pubs and off-licences, so she and my father must have something in common with his affection for the saloon bar. And she’s Irish with the usual fund of great stories: from her I’ve learnt a grand lesson in life - if you can’t be a millionaire at least you can be funny. Harriet is, naturally, a Catholic. So the church is important and never will she hear anything really adverse about a priest, a nun or a church worker. But jokes, yes. Like the Jews the inner strength of the Irish has always been their ability to laugh at themselves as well as others. As Harriet says It’s what keeps us sane.

Incredibly, Auntie Gertie is still with us as housekeeper and, as far as I’m concerned, looking after Nana’s interests. An interesting situation: the divorce court has ordered that my mother should be denied contact with me until I’m eighteen but they’ve said nothing about my grandmother. So keep contact she does and my father, realising on which side his bread is buttered, goes along with it. Since the time of the divorce, holidays have been more or less evenly divided between my father’s family and Nana. There are weeks in Broadstairs with Nana Taylor (Minnie) and at her ‘chalet’ at Jaywick: and to balance the equation weeks with Nana in North Wales and, for one well-remembered holiday, on a farm near Stratford. Obligatory visits to Shakespeare’s birthplace and Anne Hathaway’s cottage with its marvellous centuries-old mulberry tree blended with the delights of the farm itself: an orchard of Victoria plums on which I gorge and scores of rabbits in suicidal flight around the wheat fields after the harvest, their natural cover suddenly and tragically gone. For months after this I played ‘farms’ with a few lead sheep and plastic trees.

I seem to have landed on my feet again. Pinewood Avenue is what they call a cul-de-sac and at the bottom end, about fifty yards from our house, is a pine wood - well I suppose with that name there had to be, no? You step off the flag-stoned pavement into the wood and suddenly it’s a whole new world with paths covered in rotting pine needles, birds unseen but very much heard, and a small lake with newts - or are they dragons. These dragons are incredibly fast both in and out of the water. And there’s a ‘wall of death’. You can aim your bike down one side of the wall of death and almost reach the top on the other side. Who dug this deep, deep hole in the middle of a wood? Some say it was Hitler with a big bomb but I haven’t seen much bombing anywhere yet, let alone in Kent.

I can’t spend all day in the wood, I do have to go to school. School, in Seal village, is memorable for having one of the oldest Yew trees in Britain. An immense growth, its branches span the whole of the playground and are supported at their ends on tall timbers to create a fabulous covered play area for us.

But across the road in Pinewood Avenue there’s a much more memorable experience. An eight-year-old as I am can be forgiven for getting together with another eight-year-old just across the street: but this is no ordinary childhood friendship. This is Salome - temptation. It’s summer, obviously, for she and I are on her back lawn which slopes upwards towards the pine-wood and we aren’t wearing very many clothes. Salome (name withheld for reasons of propriety) is wearing only a small pair of knickers. We’ve been given a blanket in case it’s suddenly cold and both of us have crawled nonchalantly under it. Suddenly Salome’s knickers are OFF and I follow suit. We’re exploring each other and it’s Very Nice Thank You. As Maurice Chevalier was once reported as saying: Oh, if only I were twenty years older!

I like Kent. It’s a great improvement on Leicestershire. And my father has apparently moved his work down here. He’s now an Accountant for a London firm who have evacuated all their staff to a large country house near Sevenoaks. It’s all very countryside but the best bit is a stretch of rail track within the grounds of this mansion and a small wagon that can be pushed with some effort to one end and then will run slowly, with me in it, to the other end. There isn’t a great view, just endless rhododendrons, but it’s fun.

Yes, this is the country.

*   *   *

THREE

Serious school

ON THE MOVE again.

This time it’s to a completely new family, the Schrõeder’s of Englefield Green in Surrey. I’m not sure what the connection is or why they want me, but apparently they already have three or four other children from London for the duration. My father says he knows the Schrõeders but I suspect Nana has a hand in it somewhere. Quite promising - the house is very large and in a quiet road on the edge of Windsor Great Park. It’s called The White Cottage and the boss is Baroness Dorothea Schrõeder whose brother Helmut is currently Baron and runs their bank. He lives further down the road at a huge Victorian pile called Dell Park (now Anhugraha).

True, there are four other children in residence as well as the Baroness’ son John who is by far the elder at sixteen. Gerald is six and the baby of the group: Marilyn is my age nine, a Jewish girl from Stepney: Stanley is also Jewish and may be related to Marilyn: Teresa has a Scots accent and is apparently related to the Baroness’ housekeeper Mary Murphy. But Gerald’s family includes Alice King, a middle aged lady working as assistant housekeeper to Mary Murphy. And maybe I wasn’t too far out when I figured that Nana had a hand in this. Alice’s mother lives nearby in Englefield Green and was a girlhood friend of Nana in Burton Latimer. Yes, I know it’s complicated but at least it’s comfortable here so maybe I’ll stay awhile.

Ah, Salome! Goodbye the Pinewood!

It turns out that school, too, is an evacuee. Being just nine I can only attend