My Story No 6: Synchronicity - Featherstone Rovers - St Katharine Docks - Normanton Grammar - Sheila.
Synchronicity (German: Synchronizität) is a concept, first introduced by analytical psychologist Carl Jung, [1920] which holds that events are "meaningful coincidences" if they occur with no causal relationship yet seem to be meaningfully related.
November 1963. Colin is ten years old, he has no concept of education, let alone a grammar school one. On the IQ, scale his score was not good. On the emotional intelligence score: sexually abused by the babysitter, beaten up, attacked with a knife, a man asked him to hold his penis, bitten by a dog, to name few, he was even lower. No, surprise when he failed his eleven plus and arrived at North Featherstone Secondary Modern. The headmaster said, on day one, ‘think of a trade, plumber, joiner, bricklayer…learn as much as you can, there is more to life than rugby’. Electrician was my trade, dad had taken over granddads (electrician at the pit) job on the side and I already knew the difference between a live wire and a neutral, no-way was I going that route. I still love playing with electricity, ‘that’s an interesting statement’, I just said to myself.
Every Thursday evening, after school, Colin went to the scout’s hut in Green Lanes, opposite the working men’s club, his grandads local and the chip shop. Colin wasn’t really scout material, but they had a disco. After rugby, Colin’s passion (it still is) was dancing…
Northern soul is a type of mid-tempo and uptempo heavy-beat soul music (of mainly African American origin) that was popularized in Northern England from the mid 1960s onwards). I loved it and would dance week in, week out. My love of Northern Soul extended, into my mid-teens and the Mecca Locarno ballroom Wakefield. On stage, one week; Junior Walker on his knees, lying flat, saxophone screaming as he sings, I’m a soul man, with his All Stars. Every Thursday was soul night, bus, or lift, there and last bus home. Being big for my age, no-one questioned me when ordering a pint, not really for the alcohol, just a refueling and rest stop, before hitting the floor again. The dance floor was full of pure magic, cool dudes, gliding over the ballroom floor, sassy lasses, jiving with them, up, down, over the shoulder. I always danced alone, I would focus on their feet, legs and hips yet, at the same time, try and copy their moves. Slowly the rhythm began to flow and away I went. I also went to another soul disco, Tamla Motown heaven, Sunday afternoons, in Castleford, old cinema, opposite entrance to station, loved it. I spent every summer in Bridlington [Brid] from seven to seventeen, we had a caravan on Southcliffe. Just south of the harbor entrance is the Spa Theater, a magnificent Victorian ballroom with balconies, bars and .... A Northern Soul day every Sunday from lunchtime onwards. Over 18's only but no one questioned me. I discovered leather soled shoes could glide over the parquet floor, I was truly in heaven. One Saturday, I was leaping about to, 'All right now, baby baby, it's all right now'. Paul Rodgers, Simon Kirk, Andy Frazer, and Paul Kossoff, were playing live six feet in front of me. The little-known band, 'Free' had just released what would become one of the worlds most played songs, Wriggles Spearmint chewing gum theme song even. I just had to dance, still do. Its how I met my wife …
30th December 2015, Colin is 62, Osho Leela, a spiritual retreat, Gillingham, Dorset. I had just spent Christmas with mum and dad in Bridlington. The live in a bungalow, one-mile walk from the harbor and Spa theater. I had driven there in my old camper van, Peugeot Boxer, 1990’s (still have her). I wanted to dance, for the new year, but the Spa was shut for works. Of course, Osho Leela will be having a long weekend of dancing heaven. They are full... except for camping or a camper-van. I have a long history with Leela, as it's know, that's for later.
Two days and eight hours of driving later, campervan parked, I am sat in the refectory, at Leela, about to have two hours rest before the dancing begins. A loud commotion, by a woman at the table, next to the bay window and door, leading onto the garden, draws my attention, she announces, "I need a first aid kit, I’ve twisted my ankle crossing the lawn and I need to dance in two hours". If, 'I need to dance' didn’t prick my ears, 'I need some strapping' was pure déjà vu . A man called Jimmy Williams and Featherstone Rovers, flashed before my eyes. 'I'm your man', I quietly screamed to myself. I walked over to her table, with lots of kind souls offering healing, love and Lavender. I could see from Sheila's face she was not to be messed with. I detected a Brummie accent. I politely explained how a man called Jimmy Williams had shown me, in addition to electrocuting me, how to get onto a rugby pitch (Universities cup final 1974) two hours after twisting my ankle getting off a coach. She gave me her attention; I took a chair. ‘may I inspect your ankle’, I inquired. As I lifted Sheila’s foot onto my knee, and cradled her ankle, I had a strange sensation in my second chakra, which I ignored as she was just, ‘not my type’; vegan, strong, loud, wrong shape and an accent I didn’t like. Next problem: not a drop of elasticated strapping, any size -not even the thin stuff for fingers- could be found. Just before leaving home, for Brid, I had installed a 24v solar panel, two 200ah 12v batteries, a heater, microwave, and an inverter. I had my full electricians (my trade remember) kit bag in the van. She accepted an invitation, was not put off by the stale tobacco smell and sat on the edge of my bed. Imagine a camper with twin beds at the back, fill in the gap with a double bed and you have it. I need to cradle her ankle, her left knee over my right thigh as a degree of resistance is needed. A red layer of electrical insulating tape was applied, down the inside of her lower leg, naturally smooth and silky, mid-calf , as tape would slip easily, around the sole of the foot, just forward of the heel and back up the outside, a letter U looking front to back. This is repeated four times, each time the tape, half a tape width closer to the heel. Blue tape is applied around the lower leg, like hoola hoops with the leg inside. Black tape is now applied to the inside of the lower leg, similar to red tape. This time as the tape goes under the foot, it is pulled tight, as if pulling your little toes upwards (It is creating a new, temporary tendon) and back up the inside of your lower leg. Repeat four times, again moving back towards the heal each time. More blue hoola hoops. It did the trick; we danced for two days solid, we married two years, to the day, later. Sheila died two years and two months after we married, 27th February 2020, from colon cancer. I can feel her presence right now. Another co-incidence, my son, Chris, fell in love with Northern Soul, he met his wife Claire in a soul club. His wedding included a Northern Soul night. Om
I digressed, where was I? If you want something to stand out, italics and highlight is one way; here is another..
Aged ten, Colin stuck out like a sore thumb, in a scout’s hut, opposite a chip shop, in Green Lanes Featherstone, leaping about to, ‘I’m a soul man’. The three lads opposite thought so; the first one, pushed him, the second one, kicked him, as the third one, he discovered moments later, was the ‘Cock’ of South Featherstone School, went to punch him. Colin intercepted the punch and drove (rugby term, meaning pushed backwards, forcibly) him against the wall. The other two retreated. The music stopped, the dancing stopped and the scout master, nice man, intervened. The three lads were removed, and the dancing continued.
I would normally pop across the road for a bag of chips, loads of scraps and tomato ketchup, before walking home, but I felt anxious. It wasn’t unusual to be bullied by complete strangers; came with having a famous dad, this time I knew, there more was to follow. The scout master drove me the quarter mile to home, 17 Alexander Road. As we rounded the bend, just before home, there sat the three lads. My heart was thumping, knees shaking as his headlights caused them to jump standing. They stared at us and walked away.
Three weeks later, North v South Featherstone U13 rugby match. Colin is technically U12 but no team for his year. He plays well and the North lads win. Colin leaves alone, for the half mile walk home. Three lads are waiting… The next day, Colin takes his dad the see his school headmaster. They sit in his office, Colin speaks, ‘Headmaster, please ignore the black eye, cuts and bruises, but there has been a big mistake. You see, I was meant to go to Normanton Grammar School, and something must have gone wrong’. The head growled at me while looking at my dad, ‘then come first or second in the end of year exams and you get to retake the exam’. My dad looked at me and smiled. I came second. I reminded my, 90-year-old, Dad yesterday and he said, ‘Oh yes, I will never forget your words that day’.
The entrance exam, re-take, was at the grammar school. The lower-school, it was in the library on the first floor. Scary; I remember one question from the maths paper, ‘how many centimetres in a meter?’. No idea, I looked at my 6-inch ruler, ha ha, 15cm is half a foot, so 15 cm should be half a meter. Oh dear. The bit that got me in was the English paper. I was given an essay to write, entitled, My weekend.
Two weeks earlier Colin had sat in an English lesson, for once listening to every word. Miss Higgs, tall, attractive, skirt just above her knee, said; "today we will look at an, Adjective Clause, last week I explained what an adjective does in describing a noun. This week on step further, I will explain; An adjective clause, also called a relative clause, will have the following three traits: One, It will start with a relative pronoun or a relative adverb. This links it to the noun it is modifying. Two, it will have a subject and a verb, these are what make it a clause, and three, it will tell us something about the noun and this is why it is a kind of adjective." Colin thought about this for a while, he put his hand up, something he rarely did, and said, ‘Miss, is this what your trying to say: Colin ran onto the pitch, the evening mist gathering, as the temperature fell quickly. The grass felt soft, glistening in the floodlights, which gleamed, from their perch, high on the roof of the stand. He was to be greeted by a thunderous roar from the crowd? Colin always was a fast learner, he just needed good teachers.
Two years earlier, Colin had been on a school day-trip to London. Buckingham Palace, Houses of parliament and the Tower of London. The coach was parked in East Smithfield, he must have walked through St Katharine Docks to board the bus home. Below is what Colin wrote (digitally enhance but same story) in his entrance exam. The scary bit comes at the end.
“My Weekend. Friday, and home from school, seconds before, 4pm. Dad is waiting; car packed, sleeping bags, food, bright yellow waterproof jacket and trousers, fill the back seats, as I climb into the passenger seat. We arrive on the quayside, Bridlington harbour, two hours later. We eat fish, chips and mushy pears, wrapped in old newspaper, with a wooden fork and our fingers. We step onboard a grubby, but solid feeling, motorboat, moored at the end of a pontoon in the centre of the harbour. I climb down a short flight of steps into the saloon with wooden floor and lots of brass, a chart table, wheel and instruments. Forward of the saloon, over a thin, nine inch high step, in the floor, through a heavy door, is our cabin. Bunk beds, with a canvas cloth, hanging over the sides. I pick up the end. A man shouts, ‘lee cloths, you tie yourself into bed with them’. I drop my sleeping bag and duffle bag on the top bunk. Opposite is a door, ‘that’s the heads’, the man shouts again. ‘its where you shit, shower and puke’. I’m dressed in yellow oil-skins, life jacket and hooked onto a steel ring, sat in the cockpit as three men sort the lines. The sound of twin, 300 horse power, Perkins, diesel engines made a throaty sound around the harbor, echoing off the outer walls, as the tide was still low. We bounce across the waves as we power into the North Sea, I remember the lighthouse at Spern Head, mouth of the river Humber with its characteristic, Fl W 15s.Oc RW, light sequence, away on our starboard side. Across the Wash, lights of Great Yarmouth, casting a haze of light pollution above the town. Below decks, into my sleeping bag and fall into a deep sleep for four hours. It’s 0500 as we enter the river Thames. The captain points out the sunken ammunition ship at the entrance to the river Medway. He says, ‘still full of live ammunition, it would destroy every window in Southend if it went off,’ Southend Pier is to starboard. We continue up the Thames, the tide now in our favor. We pass cargo ships, liners, docks, more docks and then Tower Bridge, gleaming like a jewel in the crown, comes slowly into view as we leave Greenwich behind. Out boat is tied to a buoy, its, 0800 and two hours before the rising tide allows us sufficient water to go through the lock into St Katharine Docks, where we will moor. We catch a train to Wembley to watch rugby and spend Saturday evening, walking across tower bridge, stopping to gaze at the Tower of London in all its glory, before a meal in the docks. Early night and sail back to Bridlington on Sunday.”
The scary bit is St Katherine Docks would appear again, by coincidence, in Colin’s life aged 23. His new girlfriend, Kerry lived in Hampstead, literally on the edge of Hampstead Heath, opposite the overground station. One Sunday, we board the train to Liverpool Street, walked along Petticoat Lane, it’s famous Sunday market in full flow. Kerry says, ‘I will take you somewhere interesting for lunch, The Dickens Inn’. We reach the end of the market, turn right into Commercial Road, Aldgate High Street, the Minories, Tower of London ahead, but left into Commercial Road, Royal Mint on our left. A high wall, double, heavy steel gates, hung from stone columns, each with a stone Elephants head, two tusks making an imposing entrance. ‘The Ivory House, St Katharine Docks’ emblazoned on a brass plaque. 'Had I really written about this place ten years earlier', crossed my mind, yet had no memory of the event. We walked into St Katherines, West Dock entrance gate to my right. I looked across the dock. A man on a yacht, looked like me, waved. I stared at him and started shaking, I was scared. I turned to Kerry, only just started dating, and said, "Deja vu! This is really weird, but I just saw myself on a boat, waving back at myself. I have a feeling one day I will live, on a boat, here." At the point of speaking to Kerry, I had never been on a boat, other than a cross channel ferry and the Yorkshire Belle, for a two hour round trip to Flamborough Head. Plus, my fantasy trip in the grammar school exam. St Katherine Docks would become my home, my boats London base for twenty years. I would sail the very journey, I described as a ten-year-old in the exam and lived the very life I imagined as a 23 year old, taken to the docks for the first time and ending up on their history shelves . Just coincidences, surely?
The essay did the trick, one year and one term later than planned...
Colin, age 13, finally arrived at Normanton Grammar school. A new life was about to unfold …
Notes:
St Katharine Docks took their name from the former hospital of St Katharine's by the Tower, built in the 12th century, which stood on the site. An intensely built-up 23-acre (9.5 hectares) site was earmarked for redevelopment by an Act of Parliament in 1825, with construction commencing in May 1827. Some 1250 houses were demolished, together with the medieval hospital of St. Katharine. Around 11,300 inhabitants, mostly port workers crammed into unsanitary slums, lost their homes; only the property owners received compensation. The scheme was designed by engineer Thomas Telford and was his only major project in London. To create as much quayside as possible, the docks were designed in the form of two linked basins (East and West), both accessed via an entrance lock from the Thames. Steam engines designed by James Watt and Matthew Boulton kept the water level in the basins about four feet above that of the tidal river. … [Wikipedia] Today, a flat in the dock can cost £10m.
Carl Gustav Jung. [Wikipedia] Synchronicity (German: Synchronizität) is a concept, first introduced by analytical psychologist Carl Jung, in the 1920;s which holds that events are "meaningful coincidences" if they occur with no causal relationship yet seem to be meaningfully related. During his career, Jung furnished several different definitions of the term, defining synchronicity as an "acausal connecting (togetherness) principle;" "meaningful coincidence;" "acausal parallelism;" and as a "meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved." Jung's belief was that, just as events may be connected by causality, they may also be connected by meaning. Events connected by meaning need not have an explanation in terms of causality, which does not generally contradict universal causation but in specific cases can lead to prematurely giving up causal explanation. Though introducing the concept as early as the 1920s, Just a coincidence but in 1952, Jung published a paper titled 'Synchronicity – An Acausal Connecting Principle', same year Featherstone Rovers, played at Wembley and I was created.
Comments
Post a Comment