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Oliver Cross: Gainsborough revisited and a birthday in Scarborough
Woodhouse resident Oliver Cross talks about a visit to Gainsborough and a birthday trip to Scarborough.
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When I was a lad...
At the weekend I went with Lynne to revisit, as a sort of growing-up exercise, the first house I can remember, in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire.
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I seldom think about, let alone talk about, my childhood or indeed anything much before last week, but I've decided, following my recent 59th birthday, that maturity requires I take the longer view.
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I need to get my childhood story sorted out because one day soon, one of my grandchildren might be doing a school project, or, more likely at the rate they're growing, a doctorate, on life in the olden days and I won't be able to get much beyond waffling about how you could have a fantastic night out for half a guinea (or three sevenths of a euro as they call it now), and still have change for a nacho.
Anyway, the first house I can remember is still there, in a row of semis so very similar that I can't pick out the one in which I took my first step or said my first word or tamed an abandoned baby rabbit or played destructively, with my pals, in the half-built house of a bankrupt builder who was eventually driven so mad that he turned up outside the semis shouting incoherently and armed with a loaded shotgun and had to be taken away.
The house was on Causeway Lane, which was (and still is) at the very edge of civilisation. After the handful of semis, there was The Dyke, a big mound of earth which acted – and some years didn't act – as a flood barrier, and after that there were The Marshes, our first introduction to the concept of infinity.
The lane, which, after the houses ran out, was unmade and unused apart from the odd tractor, ran alongside The Marshes, which were really an enormous flood plain and one year the flooding coincided with freezing, so we celebrated by tramping for miles in our wellies over thin ice, and thank heavens the Health and Safety Executive wasn't there to spoil the fun.
The lane ran between two drainage ditches, which were also called dykes – it occurred to me even then that it was strange to use the same word to describe two contradictory things, a mound and a cutting, but it's taken 40 years and a return visit to think of a possible explanation, which is that in the flatlands of eastern England, any Dutch-inspired dug object is called a dyke, for simplicity's sake.
At the end of the lane was, and is, nothing. It runs along until it hits the high bank of a bend in the River Trent then stops. The Trent is not a friendly river; as a child, although not overburdened with safety advice, I learned that to even stick my toe in it would mean instant death in its fierce tidal currents.
Which was about all I knew of boundaries; the marshes, dykes and lanes around me had no limits, they were for exploring and, the Trent excepted, seeing how far you could go.
Best of all was that, on the other side of the Causeway Lane semis, was a municipal rubbish tip, which is still there, although they now call it a landfill site, which, given that it's still unfilled after 50 years, does raise certain municipal-efficiency questions.
Still, it did give us great joy because, in the late 1950s, they were clearing out equipment from recently-disused Lincolnshire wartime airfields and scores of airmen's flying masks were discarded on the Causeway Lane tip.
After fighting back the rats and giant flies, we recovered the masks, stuck them over our faces and ran around all over the dykes and marshes with our arms outstretched, Spitfire-style, making aircraft noises.
Nobody died.
The farce is strong with this one
For my 59th birthday treat, Lynne took me for a night to a hotel in Scarborough, with a ticket for an Alan Ayckbourn's 1970 play (I swear I've started going backwards), How The Other Half Loves.
This was at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, where Ayckbourn has launched most of his brilliant plays and my feeling was that Ayckbourn, being quite a lot older than even me, might not have a lot of years left writing and directing plays, and we should get in quick.
This was exactly the mistake I made when I went to see Ken Dodd at the City Varieties in Leeds about three years ago. I thought it might be my last chance to see a truly great variety star but I've since found, with Ken Dodd still popping up at every theatre which will have him, or at least doesn't physically lock him out, that there was really no need to hurry.
Actually, he is booked to appear soon at the Futurist Theatre in Scarborough, which should really be called the Pasturist Theatre because this season's acts also include Cannon and Ball, Jane McDonald, Roy 'Chubby' Brown and, in an innovative new production called Chuckle Trek – The Lost Generation, the Chuckle Brothers.
And I'm sorry if I sound a bit superior and dismissive of these venerable acts, who really must be seriously good to have filled big theatres for years and I bow to no one in my admiration for the Chuckle Brothers.
Or Alan Ayckbourn; it's just that I've been putting off talking about him because you might want to know what the play was about and I'm not sure I can manage it.
I mean, it's a relatively simple, easily-understood farce of middle-class manners; it's just that when you try and explain it, it comes out like The Matrix.
Deep breath… there are two couples, one older, one younger, who are linked by minor adultery, office politics and a chain of misunderstandings.
Both couples, living in different houses, co-exist on the same theatre-in-the-round stage at the same time and, through Ayckbourn's faultless verbal choreography, they hold loud conversations with each without the dialogue leaking across the invisible barrier between the houses
Then a third, rather hapless, couple get involved and are invited, on successive nights, to have dinner with both couple A and couple B. This leads to a scene where both dinner parties are conflated, so events in two houses and two days are presented simultaneously on the same stage, with the third couple straddling time and space and trying not to forget their lines because, with a construction as complicates as this, one fluffed line could bring the whole thing crashing down
It was very funny, though.
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Tuesday 07 February 2012
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