Week 31 2013

Tendring Topics……..on line

Grandfathers

          Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, was born on 14^th November 1948.  I well remember hearing the official announcement of his birth on the radio. My 24 year old wife Heather and I had been married for two and a half years. We were living in a bungalow just off the Norwich Road in Barham, three or four miles north of Ipswich. In the autumn Heather had been diagnosed as suffering from laryngeal and pulmonary tuberculosis.  She was confined to her bed and we were waiting to learn when she would be transported to a sanatorium at Nayland near Colchester..  There she was to spend more than a year, a period punctuated by six weeks in Papworth Hospital, where she underwent life-saving but  disabling surgery (thoracoplasty) involving the removal of eight ribs. This permanently collapsed her left lung allowing it to heal.

Visiting Heather in Nayland Sanatorium in summer 1949.   Patients having thoracoplasty were expected to lose a stone in weight during the surgery, which involved three operations with rests of a fortnight after the first and second. They were therefore required to put on a stone beforehand.  Heather was taken to Papworth for surgery a day or two after this photo was taken.  It is my only photo of Heather in which she appears to be 'plump'!  

In November 1948 we had our own worries and. I can’t pretend that we were particularly interested in the royal birth. I do though remember the BBC announcer telling us, with a plummy accent (BBC radio news-readers all spoke posh in those days!) that Her Royal Highness the Princess Elizabeth ‘has given birth to a Prince’.  I remember thinking - and probably saying to Heather, ‘Fancy her giving birth to a prince.  I thought that members of the Royal Family had babies just like the rest of us!’

             Heather was discharged from the sanatorium ‘cured’. Despite her subsequent lifelong frailty, four years later she gave birth at home, to the first of our two sons. They, in due course, gave us three grandchildren, two boys and a girl.  Heather died at the age of 82, three months after our diamond wedding anniversary.  She had lived to see all three of her grandchildren grow through schooldays and adolescence and  graduate with good degrees at universities.

            Now, the baby prince who was born while Heather was waiting to be transported to the Sanatorium is himself a grandfather.   His grandchildren (I have no doubt that he’ll have more!) will have privileges ours have never known – but they certainly won’t have the freedom to choose their careers, their friends, their partners and their paths through life that ours have had.  I hope that if, like me, he reaches his nineties, he will be as proud of the progress of his grandchildren as I am of mine.  

My grandchildren!

           The youngest of my three grandchildren has just celebrated his thirtieth birthday. This means that they are all beyond the first flush of youth and are making their way in the adult world.  I very much hope I’ll remember their birthdays, and that they’ll be pleased to receive my birthday greetings of love and good wishes for as long as I draw breath.  Here they are on the left – Chris, the oldest, Nick the youngest and Jo in the middle, with just a year dividing each of them, as they were years ago when they really were grandchildren. Below, now young adults, they are with me on the recent occasion of the family wedding of my son Pete (Chris and Nick’s dad and Jo’s uncle) and Arlene Esdaile.

        

All three are graduates (their grandma and I were both proud to leave school at 16 with our General Schools Certificate and Matric. Exemption!)  Jo is the real intellectual.  She is already an M.A. and an M.Sc.   She has been working as a Social Worker seconded to the Renal Unit of a large  Sheffield Hospital and  she has now been accepted for a Ph.D. Course studying clinical psychology at Sheffield University.  She’s a beauty too;  it’s really not fair

 on all the other girls!

            Chris has been teaching English in Taiwan for almost a decade. A few years ago he was named ‘Teacher of the year’ by the educational organisation employing him.  He speaks Mandarin like a native and I notice that on his ‘Facebook’ page he now puts messages in Chinese calligraphy!  He graduated in Fine Art and has produced pencil portraits of family members using old photographs as references.  One of his drawings of his grandma as the school-girl of 15 that she was when she and I first met, almost reduced me to tears when he gave it to me.

Heather Gilbert (destined to become Heather Hall) aged 15 – drawn over 65 years later by her grandson Chris!    

I wrote about grandson Nick’s career in this blog a few weeks ago.  He graduated in Photography and after rising to the very top in the European Travel Agency, has founded and is the Managing Director of his own International Tourism Consultancy (www.SE1media.com) He has a charming Belgian girl-friend, Romy Cywie, who has been welcomed as a member of ‘the family’ (I now make a point of remembering her birthday too!)   Can you wonder that I am proud of my three grandchildren?

The Prince of Wales will be very fortunate if, at my age, he has a family as warm, as united and as supportive as I have.  I am only sorry that their grandma isn’t here to enjoy hearing about their activities and appreciating them all as much as I do.

 

St George of the Exchequer to the rescue!

           Interest on mortgages for house purchase is at an unprecedentedly low level.  Good news for borrowers but not so good for those of us who see our life savings entrusted to banks and building societies. Those savings are steadily decreasing in value as inflation outstrips interest rates. It also means that monthly mortgage repayments are low. They are within the capacity of a great many would-be home owners.  However, financial institutions have recent memories of being saved by government bale-outs from bankruptcy resulting from by unwise lending. To prevent a recurrence they are demanding much larger deposits – perhaps as much as 20 or 25 percent of the total loan required – before granting mortgages.   These are beyond the reach of most young people, particularly those who (thanks to the government’s policies) are already burdened with tens of thousands of pounds of student debt.

            That’s .where George Osborne our Chancellor of the Exchequer rides in like a knight in shining armour, to save the situation.  He is going to lend those eager young couples the money they need for their deposits.  He started the scheme on quite a modest scale but is now proposing to widen the scheme to include purchasers of existing as well as new properties. Prospective home buyers will need to have saved no more than five percent of the money they hope to borrow from a bank or building society. This, he hopes, will not only help those who want to fulfil the Conservative dream of a nation of home-owners, but will also encourage developers to build and thus help Britain out of recession

And perhaps it will – eventually. Immediately though it has increased the demand for houses from those who, thanks to Mr Osborne’s generosity (with our money!) can aspire to home ownership.  It will take many months at least for any building programme to take effect.  In the meantime market forces will ensure that house prices once again rise above the rate of inflation until the bubble bursts and we have yet another financial crisis. This time the government has been warned by the Institute of Directors (hardly ‘loony lefties’!) of the probable results of their policy.   But, of course, ‘Nanny knows best’ and the government will continue pursuing the chimera of ‘Home Ownership for All’. Surely a time in which ‘no-one can expect a job for life’ is not one in which young people should be encouraged to get themselves into long-term debt.   What is needed is not affordable homes to buy but publicly owned houses to let at affordable rents, such as local authorities provided in the century prior to the advent of Thatcher/Blairism.

           It doesn't appear to have occurred to Mr Osborne that if loaning most of the deposit money required for house purchase was too risky for the banks and building societies, it might be too risky for him too.  Perhaps the thought would have crossed his mind had he been taking risks with his own money, rather than ours!

  

Week 37.2011 20.9.2011

Tendring Topics…….on line


‘I think that I shall never see, a poem lovely as a tree’


So claimed American poetess Joyce Kilmer. I think that she was comparing chalk with cheese. What is indisputable though is that trees have inspired poets through the ages. They enhance the appearance and charm of the countryside, mop up some of the carbon dioxide that is produced by human activities and help to prevent soil erosion and flooding. They provide a safe haven, breeding ground and food supply for myriad forms of animal and plant life, as well as shade, recreational facilities, fuel and building materials for we humans.



In my back garden are two apple trees (in blossom) a damson tree, a Japanese winter-flowering cherry and four silver birches.  I do try to practise what I preach!

 Between 1974 and 1980, while I was Tendring Council’s Public Relations Officer I remember that the Trees Working Party, under the chairmanship of tree enthusiast Councillor Malcolm Holloway, was one of the Council’s most successful working groups. Completely non-political, the Working Party encouraged tree planting as a condition of new housing, commercial or industrial development, and helped to preserve existing trees on public land by enlisting volunteer spare-time tree wardens throughout the district to report acts of vandalism and to water local street trees in times of drought. I recall that we organised a children’s essay competition on the importance of trees to humankind. This was judged by the editor of the East Essex Gazette (now the Clacton Gazette) and certificates and small prizes were presented to the winner and runners up. The Dutch Elm Disease epidemic was at its peak during the late 1970s. The Working Party made the public aware of this threat to the English countryside and encouraged replacement of diseased trees. At that time the Council had a ‘tree nursery’ on land beside Holland Brook near the Thorpe-le-Soken sewage treatment works. On it ‘tree whips’ were grown into saplings ready to be planted out in public places. This received publicity both in the local and regional press and on tv.

The Silver Jubilee of the Queen’s reign occurred during those years and I believe that Chairman Malcolm Holloway was the first to coin the slogan Plant a Tree for the Jubilee! that was later widely used nation-wide. If he were alive today I am sure that he would be delighted by the fact that the Woodland Trust intends to plant six million trees in Britain to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee next year. The biggest proposed tree-planting project is for a 4,600 acres area in Leicestershire, but there are other less ambitious schemes planned throughout the UK, which at present is said to have proportionately the lowest area of woodland of any country in Europe.

I wish the campaign every success. I wonder though how it will fit in with the government’s determination to speed up the granting of planning permission for new development by watering down local authorities’ already limited powers of veto, and creating a presumption of approval for proposed development. This it is hoped will lead to more homes and more jobs? I have a feeling that woodland will not be allowed to stand in the way of developers’ profits and that, despite lip service to ‘localism’ the government will override local objections to wholesale tree felling.

In this connection I was interested to learn from a national newspaper that three government ministers, the Chancellor of the Chequer among them, while endorsing the government’s relaxation of planning legislation nationally, are strongly supporting local protests against unwelcome development their own constituency areas!

NIMBY!

Unemployment

The latest unemployment figures – another 80,000 jobless during the past three months bringing the total number of unemployed to two and a half million, seem to have come as a total surprise to the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Regular readers of this blog will not have expected me to be surprised. Drastic cuts in the public services are just beginning to have their effect. There will be worse to come.

Nor was I surprised to note that the Private Sector had been quite unable to find work for those made jobless in the Public Sector. Much Public Sector work is contracted out to private consultants and contractors. What’s more, the Public Sector provides an environment in which private firms can thrive and make their profits.

They are the people who repair and keep litter-free the roads and pavements along which everyone comes to work. They take away and dispose of domestic and commercial waste. They try to maintain law and order. They maintain a healthy and pollution free environment. They make sure that our food is fit to eat and that our restaurants, pubs and cafes are safe places in which to eat it. They care for and treat the sick and injured. They help struggling mothers with young babies and old folk even more helpless than I am!

Did you notice that when ‘the west’ wanted to get Libya on its feet again and out of the chaos produced by months of civil war – nobody said, ‘We must get that casino, those night-clubs and that race course on their feet again to create some wealth‘ or even, ‘We must get the supermarkets, the factories and the oil pipe lines in operation as a first priority’. Not a bit of it. Their first task was to pay the public servants who hadn’t been paid for months. Only when law and order had been restored, and the essential health and environmental services brought back into operation, could they begin to think of getting the private sector enterprises working again. The public sector provides the foundation on which modern society is built. It is not an optional extra. It is neglected at our peril.

Incidentally, just as in Scotland there was none of the recent rioting that afflicted England, neither has there been a rise in unemployment. On the contrary ‘north of the border’ there has been a reduction in unemployment. This is because the devolved Scottish government has embarked on a programme of public works and has thus created much-needed jobs.

This, so our government insists, is the road to ruin. We shall see. In the meantime the Scots may have to cope with increasing numbers of white Anglo-Saxon economic migrants from ‘down south’!


Tuberculosis stages a comeback!

A recent news item on the radio (I think it must have been on the BBC World Service) sent cold shivers down my spine. Tuberculosis, so the newsreader said, was again beginning to become widespread, thanks to the development of strains of the Tuberculosis Bacillus that were resistant to all known antibiotics My own acquaintance with that one-time killer disease that we all thought had been tamed for good, was in 1948. I was 25 and my wife Heather 23. We had been married just two years. During the previous, very hard, winter she had had two or three bouts of what had appeared to be ‘flu. bed rest and aspirin had been prescribed and she had slowly recovered her health, but not her strength, on each occasion. In the late summer of 1948 she had another attack – and this time aspirin and bed rest didn’t help. She had a persistent cough. Her voice became husky. Her temperature was abnormally high in the evening and low in the morning. She perspired heavily at night, had no appetite, had lost her strength and was visibly losing weight. X-ray and sputum tests revealed that she had a severe tubercular infection of the larynx and left lung. The prognosis was not good. She was admitted to what was then the British Legion Sanatorium at Nayland near Colchester. For several weeks her condition deteriorated and I was in despair.


Heather had to gain a stone in weight before she could go to Papworth for surgery. She had just achieved that aim when this pcture was taken at Nayland Sanatorum.

The new ‘wonder drug’ streptomycin had just appeared on the scene. It was expensive and in short supply. It was given only to patients who were very ill indeed but not beyond all hope. Heather fell into that category. Her right lung had never been affected and that made recovery a possibility. A course of streptomycin was supplemented by P.A.S (para-aminosalicylic acid) and the  partial collapse of the left lung by crushing the phrenic nerve and pumping air into the space below the diaphragm, a pneumo-peritoneum (PP). ( How extraordinary that I can remember these medical terms after half a century but can’t remember the name of someone I was talking to this morning!)

It worked! Heather’s larynx healed and the progress of the disease in the left lung was halted.. To complete the healing process the left lung had to be permanently collapsed. This was achieved during an eight weeks stay in Papworth Hospital, then a centre for TB treatment. In three separate operations, each a fortnight apart, eight of Heather’s ribs were removed (an eight-rib thoracoplasty) and the diseased lung collapsed. The operation was a success. Heather gradually regained her strength and her appetite. She was discharged cured (well, as cured as she would ever be) in time for Christmas 1950.


It had been a life-saving operation.  It had also been a crippling one. Heather had, in effect, just one fully operational lung. She had to rest for an hour or so every afternoon. I always had to help her with shopping and with heavy work about the house. ‘Evenings out’ were too much for her. Our guests, for whom she never spared herself, didn't know how exhausted she was on their departure.  When, in her seventies, she developed osteoporosis, the absence of supporting ribs increased the spinal curvature that developed..




Heather happily camping in the 1970s

Heather wasn’t one to moan and groan. She gave me two fine sons who, in their turn, gave us three wonderful grandchildren of all of whom we had every reason to be proud. She was a good and untiring cook, an expert with the needle and with the sewing machine and a great make-do-and-mender! She enjoyed life too though her physical activities were limited. She was hardly an ‘outdoor girl’ but she thoroughly enjoyed the camping holidays that we took every year.

No one could have had a better wife, nor could our sons have had a more loving and supportive mother. Yet sometimes I find myself thinking how different her life could have been had the full potential of antibiotics been realized a few years earlier and she had been spared the crippling operation that had cured her tuberculosis - but at a heavy price!

That is why I experienced a shock when I heard that Tuberculosis was staging a comeback – and that the bacillus had now developed a resistance to all existing antibiotics.