Ivor the Humber Box

Sometimes, the re-enactment world is more bizarre than even the general public think it is . Sometimes, the re-enactment world is bizarre to the re-enactors themselves.
Granted, there are several different levels of re-enactment for many eras, and for the 1940s, people who recreate various aspects of it range from the hardcore living historians, to the swing dancers, to the 'promenaders' who dress in anything from approximations of imagined impressions of wartime apparel adapted from anachronistic items, to those whose attention to detail would call up the expression 'more wartime than wartime' in order to pose on the platforms and ride the steam trains at various railway events. Let us not also forget the battle re-enactors and the military and classic vehicle enthusiasts who may or may not match their obsession with having the vehicle spot on to the last cross headed bolt with their own appearance when driving or displaying the ever-demanding cash and petrol guzzling mistress.

The 1940s weekend at Haworth, West Yorkshire is a place for people- watching. Haworth, usually more famous for the Bronte Parsonage, the Bronte Tea Rooms, the Bronte Antique Shoppe , the Bronte Mauseleum and the Bronte Toilets goes all red white and blue bunting and criss-crossed masking tape windows every Maytime around the date when Victory in Europe was declared in 1945. The steep cobbled mainstreet is closed off so that various jeeps and trucks and staff cars, gleaming Austin 7s, Ford Populars, sleek Vintage Rolls Royces can prowl and purr and prink while a thousand seamed stockinged, fur-stoled, killer heeled, rather less than svelte Rita Hayworth wannabe lookalikes pose beside them to the click of a thousand camera shutters.


There isn't much to do apart from looking at the shops , queuing, (but then queuing always was and always shall be a way of life in England), then finding a vantage point such as the raised seating area outside of the Black Bull pub, from which "Winston Churchill" with his obligatory bowler hat and, just in case anyone is in any doubt of whom he is meant to be, a cigar the size of a baboon's cock between his teeth, drawls the Victory speech accompanied by what appears to be some kind of strange furry animal but is in fact someone impersonating Queen Elizabeth (wife of George VI- the one who stayed in London during the blitz and was pleased when a bomb dropped on Buck House so she could hold up her head in the East End- Mum to our current monarch). From such a place the comings and goings of the crowd can be observed, the puffed up Military Police, blowing whistles you really yearn to shove somewhere dark, telling people to get out of the way. This is often a difficult thing to do because women get their heels stuck fast between the cobblestones and cannot move until men in hobnail boots which have absolutely no grip whatsoever on the slope slide gingerly to rescue them.

Bottlenecks occur as the shuffling crowd heaves and suddenly comes to a standstill when two small groups , one travelling up hill, the other down hill stop to talk to each other, or someone stops dead to take a photo of an old pram containing a life-like baby doll in a full suit gas mask that some poor bloke sweating in Home Guard Hairy Marys and a fat woman with very swollen ankles ,curlers hanging out of her turbanned head-scarf, and a dead ferret with six legs slung around her neck are pushing up and down the hill as if it were a broken down Austin 7.

A cold wind wuthers off the moor and people shiver. The real Yorkshire people bound up and down the hill like sheep dogs in a Hovis advert, the visitors complain bitterly about backs and feet and legs and varicose veins. They hang around the ENSA stage, which someone, as usual, has put by the steps of the church so no one can get through to the steps to the car parks to get out. You are trapped by the nightmare strains of a ukelele and a George Formby impersonator. The crushing crowd and the smell of mothballs, the feel of old fur on your neck (you hope against hope it hasn't got fleas) the puckered lips of old ladies smacking your cheek or worse, mouth, as they shriek that you remind them of some long dead flame , all combine to give you a panic attack. Clouds bank up blackly and the jeeps , those who do not know Haworth Moor weather, scramble to put the canvas on the tilts.

A group of German SS joke around , their black uniforms sinister. What they are doing there, promenaders portraying Axis troops in an English village reliving Victory in Europe Day, has been a cause for concern and question for years, but they are allowed to come. It helps bring home what the war was about. At least that is one way of looking at it.
Attention this year is diverted from them by the Japanese bloke, dressed in full Eastern Theatre uniform, with his wife in traditional kimono , obi, tabi socks and pattens, the whole geisha works. No one complained at the incongruity, the inappropriateness, the total lunacy- instead they all wanted their photographs taken with them. And the Japanese soldier and his lady complied with never ending patience and miles and miles of white toothed smiles.

It was the most surreal thing I have seen in years. What was also surreal is that I knew I should express disapproval as I usually do with the presence Gestapo, but somehow this smiling couple was symbolic of something more than old enmities. I felt sort of ashamed that I had ever objected to these very friendly chaps doing the Nazis- the leader, when I got talking to him, I have always turned my back on them in disgust before, turned out to be a car park attendant in Blackburn and his politics to the left of Trotski, and their representation of 'what might have been' extremely accurate. The Jap was showing part of his country's history that he was not proud of, but we cannot erase it, and neither can he, and to see him and his wife confront it in this most unlikely place was at once humbling and a lesson in what courage can really mean. It has caused me to rethink a few things, including my own arrogance.




We go down the hill to talk to the military vehicle friends and are offered a ride in Ivor's Humber Box , done out for 8th Army Desert Rats, that won best wartime vehicle in last week's show. Ivor has not done the Haworth procession before, neither has Brandon in the big Dodge 6 wheeler. After the procession is shepherded down the hill and directed to turn around and wait in a narrow side road that no one has measured to see if large Dodge trucks can get down, never mind turn around and wait as instructed, Ivor is beginning to regret deciding to show off the Humber. Brandon defies the MP and drives past the end of the lane. A message comes across John's walkie Talkie that Brandon is lost.

The parade starts. By the time it gets to the top of the mainstreet, and Ivor realises that he is supposed to drive down the 1 in 4 cobbled gradient behind a jeep which is having difficulty with its brakes, through Kami Kazi crowds leaping in front of him with cameras, crowds that will not stand back far enough to allow all wheels to run over cobbles and not feet. We get to where we started and Ivor whistles with relief. Then he is told to do a second circuit. He wails that he is sure his brakes are now shot, but he does it, swearing that no way will he go around a third time. Twice with no casualties was a miracle, three times would be pushing it, not to mention the cost of the petrol. And no one does.

The old blue and cream bus disgorges its cargo of evacuee children clutching gas masks and teddy bears. They get better at looking like bewildered waifs every year. I think I know how they felt as we head out for the car park and home as it begins to spitterspat with moors rain, my opinions and nerves in tatters, not quite knowing where to go in my thoughts of what is right and what is wrong from here. My world, yet not my world. 'They have this thing called Spring in the country, Mum. They have one every year.'

Awakening 2- The flying solar plexus.

Sometimes the soul is so saturated with something undefined: beauty, love, longing, that it becomes one with the air, like a cloud of midges or a field of swelling barley , a crack willow trailing pale new fronds into the music of a brook. My solar plexus is habitually heavy with accumulated dread, but at this moment it soars on the warm air currents and anyone would expect it to drop right out of the sky and splat onto the hard tarmac runway like the proverbial pound of strawberry jam. The idea of the soul as a pollen -laden bee, or a throbbing Lancaster bomber bumblehumming , finds a frequency whose tune almost convinces me that it actually does exist.

How else can I explain the Eureka moment of revelationary understanding that when one is young and is stirred by quickenings of knowledge of love, and longs for that capacity for love to be so filled with love that it brims? I remember imagining a time when my inner and outer world would be one huge Elizabethan May Revel, where some magic potion swapped on the tongues of faun kisses merges the spirits of lovers, and one of those lovers would be me. Or more, the part of the duality which was me would not be able to be distinguished from my imagined Lover.

There are times in life when that love does grab the guts and twist them to ecstatic pain- the birth of one's child, the birth of anyone's child come to that, a friend's pain shared and eased, a long tailed comet moving across the sky, a blood red moon, an untamed sea, a tree in full bridal blossom, the earthy dampness of a fresh dug grave. Always however there is a beautiful yearning for something undefined that drags and strains like a line on a kite. There is a hope, nay, a certainty that at some point in life, that yearning will be fulfilled. We have to believe that, don't we, because if we do not believe it, it cannot happen. Ever.

We left the Aerodrome on Sunday afternoon in convoy of a Half- Track, a Diamond T, a Rio towing a wartime Jeep and an old British Army Landrover, with our 1943 Willys Jeep and trailer after a weekend of glorious sunshine and relaxed enjoyment. We took the convoy through the centre of York. People waved and cheered. We waved back. Out of the city we rumbled along the country lanes that cut through fields of oilseed rape whose scent filled our faces, and whose delicate yellowness bathed us in reflected light. Chestnut candles lit the way through green tunnels. The wide sky over the vale of York met the ridge of the purple moors, while the white horse of Kilvington galloped like a shining destrier from another dimension on the distant horizon, beyond the ubiquitous patchwork of the crop fields that tugged at the essenses of time and my spirit's self imposed boundaries.

The flash of realisation came- this was it. This is the ultimate point, where everything melts away and what is left is pure abstract . One of those watersheds in life where if you were to die at that moment, like getting to the top of a mountain after a long and arduous climb, and jumping off into the void because there is nothing else, there can never be anything else to match the purity of elation, you would die fulfilled; and if that was the last the eyes of your soul had seen to hold in image for eternity, that would be the best anyone could ever hope to achieve. That adolescent awakening longing, of being loved and loving and becoming Nothingness; Nothing at all except for an explosion of sparkling atoms , a cloud of midges irridescent in the late afternoon sun of an English Maytime.

Awakening

Awakening

May Day, and always I am torn between the Workers of the World Unite memories and the nostalgia for the world that, of course never was, or never was for me, the Merrie merrie month of May in which lads and lasses cavorted in bucolic sexual bliss.

Recent memories are of cold winds and incessant rain leading to localised flooding during May, which also happens to be chocka full of re-enactment events, there being the May Day (International Workers’ Day) Bank holiday at the beginning, and Spring Bank Holiday (the old Whitsun or Pentecost) at the end. In the middle, the various other excuses for regional quasi agricultural or religious fests involving Morris Dancers, May Poles, a lot of Real Ale and Cider consumption and hopefully a bit of old fashioned matchmaking.

The weather has been hit and miss at least for the last 20 years that I can remember, sometimes snow, sometimes scorching temperatures, never predictable.

All looked set to be the same last week. There were few ground frosts this winter, which meant that flowers which would normally be ‘annuals’ went on blooming and ‘came again’ rather than being killed off by Winter cold as any self respecting bedding plant should be. Such plants were blooming when they had no right to be blooming, and such anachronisms were commented on by television pundits, pointed to as evidence of global warming, that some flowers were out over a month before their time. This was all well and good, but the bulbs and corms were neither earlier nor later than expected and the trees bided their time , as did the May blossom which started to froth in the hedgerows on the first of May here- exactly as it should.
When I was young I always associated the beginning of the long hot summers of childhood with the breathtaking beauty of bluebell woods. What more magical experience could there be than to see the carpet of special and inimitable , indescribable azure under the softly greening silver birches; to smell the delicate scent before it comes into sight, to anticipate the squeak of the fleshy stalks when you pull a bunch for Mum, enough to fill both hands encircled around the smooth succulence of the cool peatiness of the bright green stems; to bury your face in the rustling fairy-hats and freckle your nose with the golden dust of enchantment
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They always wilted though, and the blue faded before your eyes, almost before you got them home and into the heavy cut-glass vase that the sunlight threw rainbows at so that they bounced around the walls, and David said they were fairies. Then you felt guilty and sad.

So a few days ago, the trees were still waiting and only the bravest of pioneer bells breeched the earth to signal back to those still below that it was time. Today , once again the suddeness of the Spring explosion took me by surprise, as it has done for the last 40 or so years. I mean, you know that Spring is coming, and you think it has come when the pussy willow pussies, the catkins quiver, the lambs gambol and the daffodils dance all the usual Spring strutting its stuff clichés, but then April flips over into May and the beauty makes you want to swear with the greatest profanities you can muster; it chokes you , overwhelms, drowns you. and there is nothing to do but to cry tears of love and joy and gird up those unexplainable emotions that can only mean that you know that the Earth itself is claiming you as its own.


In the days when ‘Summer is icumen in’ and all the May songs and rituals were made, in the days of the old calendar, May Day was actually on May 11th . Perhaps it is more comfortable for me to think of May Day as the beginning of Summer, rather than the bursting of Spring. That way, the midsummer solstice on 21-22 June does not seem so odd, bearing in mind August is considered the height of Summer. Time is something that has a life of its own, but I feel a need to tuck it up with hospital corners in order to make sense of where I am standing. I need the reference points , whether they be distance trig points high on a ridge on the horizon or a shadow on a sundial on the walls of the Antediluvian Buffalo Lodge on the corner of the street. But that’s just me.

I have no idea if the seasons are changing due to global warming or not, but I do know that throughout history festivals have ended up being in the wrong season and calendars have been hitched up like schoolgirls’ skirts , because the fault was deemed to be astronomical miscalculations. Of course, we have the solar system all worked out now and we know that our systems of time are right now, no need for hitching and nipping and tucking the days and months and seasons. Then of course, throughout history the alchemists, qabbalists astrologers & co all knew they had got it right too.

All I can say with this ramble is that it would be something of a crime to allow the absolute beauty of this May morning to go unremarked, even if there are no descriptions that are new and original. Then they do not need to be. It is there already, inside every one of us that the Earth has claimed and whose chest hurts with the annual thrust of the awakening of the Green Man, the quickening of his sap.