A Dog Called Soddy

Easter 1966 saw me and my girlfriend (we were married the following year) staying with some friends in a lovely little place in the north east of England. This couple had a dog, a very scruffy grey and white mongrel which they had named Soddy, on account of the fact that it would attempt to engage in sexual intercourse with anything of any gender. Male, female, table leg, your leg, anything.

The trip by coach to their hamlet was long and tiring, followed by a drive around the countryside with the friends and a few drinks at a club before retiring to bed for the night. Needless to say, we were very tired. My bed was a double put-you-up sofa in the front room of their small house whilst my girlfriend occupied a single bed in a small back bedroom. Our friends had the front bedroom and Soddy the dog had his place in the kitchen. The kitchen was at the back of the house and at the end of a hallway running from the front door where the stairs to the upper floor were situated.

Eventually my girlfriend and I found out which were our correct beds and I left her to sleep whilst I went back downstairs to the front room. It was probably about one in the morning by this time and I lay on my back looking to the large window in front of me covered by dark red floor to ceiling curtains, and tried to get to sleep.

As I started to drift off I was suddenly awakened by the sound of Soddy whining in the kitchen. After some minutes I got up and went to see what the problem was with the dog. He was lying with his head between his two paws in the kitchen facing down the hallway to the front door and stairs. Despite me trying all my dog threats and pleas to shut up and go to sleep I took him by the collar and dragged him down the hallway, thinking that maybe he wanted to be upstairs with his 'mum and dad'. As we got to the foot of the stairs the dog's hair on the back of his neck stood up on end and he glared at an old armchair which was placed at the foot of the stairs. As soon as he got to the chair he shot up the stairs and disappeared. I thought no more of it and went back to my bed in the front room.

No more than ten minutes later the door to the front room opened and a visibly frightened girlfriend crept in saying that "something is breathing at me out of the wall in the bedroom." She snuggled down into bed with me and we tried to get off to sleep.  Some minutes later as we lay side by side trying to get off to sleep I was suddenly aware that her breathing had stopped and this of course threw me wide awake. I lay for a second or two listening to her then became aware of something staring at me from the curtains covering the window in front of me. It was two Eurasian eyes. They had red irises and were slightly curved upwards at the outside edge. I too stopped breathing, then told my girlfriend to go to sleep as there was nothing there.  She started to breath again and after a few seconds the eyes slowly evaporated into nothing.

The following morning the four of us met up for breakfast in the kitchen. I mentioned to our friends about Soddy's antics the previous night. They looked around for the dog, but it was nowhere in sight. I told them that he had shot upstairs after looking in a very scared way at the chair. We all went up to their bedroom and there was Soddy lying under their bed flat to the floor. He had never done this before, and in fact had been chastised more than once for trying to get into the room in the past. Soddy came down with us looking very happy to see us all once again.

Before I went on to tell them the rest of the incident from the night before I told David to go into the kitchen with my girlfriend whilst I went into the front room with his wife, where we both related to them what we had see whilst lying in bed. Bear in mind that my girlfriend and had not discussed what had happened to us in bed the previous night.

I told our friends wife what I had seen, then the four of us got back together and the two friends compared the stories my girlfriend and I had told them. What my girlfriend and I had seen was identical, Eurasian red eyes in the middle of the curtain which eventually faded to nothing.

When I told them about Soddy and his antics in the kitchen and at the foot of the stairs David said, "That's strange. That chair used to belong to my grandmother, and in fact she was found dead in it some years ago."

So that's the story, as it happened, no embellishments, no additions, no explanations.

The Star Ferry - Hong Kong

The Star Ferry runs from Hong Kong to Kowloon. It was started in 1880 and seems to have changed little since those first days.

My only trip on it was a round trip back in 2005. We took a morning sailing over from Kowloon to Hong Kong to visit the Stanley Market on the south side of the island, and then back again in the evening. A memorable experience.

 If you ever go to Hong Kong then I insist you take the trip! 

Hong Kong is something of a culture shock for the first visit. I had taken a three hour train trip from Guangzhou on the mainland to Hong Kong. At the time it felt rather like going by Tardis from the 19th century to the 21st century in less than half a day. The station at Guangzhou was crowded liked no other station I had ever seen. All the signage was in Chinese, so that was fun, trying to buy a ticket. Fortunately the railway staff were fantastically helpful and after purchasing the ticket we started to make our way down the wide concourse to the appropriate platform, offering our tickets to the first ticket collector we came across.  It seemed strange to see that there were very few people making their way to the track or platform, and the ticket collector explained why.

It was forbidden to go to the platform until the train had actually arrived at the platform and been announced. So we stupid foreigners had to wait, with several hundred others.Notice I didn't say, 'wait patiently' - it seems to be contrary to the Chinese nature to wait patiently. They shuffled and gently pushed into each other and us as we waited. Finally the train arrived and we rushed headlong down the walkway onto the platform and eventually found our reserved seats on a very modern train. Very comfortable and light.

The trip, like all train journey for me, was a boring three hours until we eventually pulled into the station at Hong Kong. As I mentioned earlier, it was rather like going forward in time two hundred years. Hong Kong was just as crowded as the rest of mainland China had been, but the cultural difference was dramatic. As we were only to stay in the city for two nights on business the trip on the Star Ferry came on the second day when we had given ourselves half a day off.

Arriving at the ferry terminal was similar in many ways to the station in Guangzhou, crowded. The main feature however was a large crowd of young people, mainly young women, sat on the pavement outside the terminal. My first thought was that this was a demonstratin, but no, they were just waiting, noisily and colourfully. With tickets in hand we went to board the ferry.  This was something else. From the bright new buildings of Kowloon we walked into a dark wooden tunnel to the fery. The difference was instantainous and dramatic. The floors and walls up to window height were made from dark, almost black, planks of wood, stained by years of use. Windows permitted you to see across the water and to the ferries as they approached the terminal. 

The ferry arrived and we tramped further down a deeply worn gangplank to the ferry, stepping over the gap between dock and boat to find ourselves a seat, though it wasn't necessary really. There was plently of room for us to walk around and see the sights of Hong Kong in the distance and the receeding docks of Kowloon behind us.

The trip didn't take long and we were soon in Hong Kong for the remainder of the day. The trip back was quieter in some respects as people were somewhat queiter, but just as numerous. The lights though were somethign else. No doubt you have seen photos of the sea fronts of both cities, but the real thing is even more spectacular.

To have read in novels of the Star Ferry it was a wonderful experience to actually be on it and making the trip from Kowloon to Hong Kong and back again.

Why Does The World Insist on Changing?

Each day for some five years from the age of almost twelve, I went to school along a path which went first of all through a recently built housing estate, and then through fields leading to a farm. 

It wasn't a big farm, I suppose by standards today, quite small. Jim and Mary, who were the farmers, kept a small herd of cows for milk, and a few pigs whose sty was placed conveniently close to the footpath leading through the farm for schoolboys to lean over the wall of the sty and torment them. They didn't seem to mind though.

 

These are the sides of the main working buildings of the farm. The closest is the roof of the dairy where Mary used to process the milk she got from the cows each day. The large building is a barn where Jim kept a bit of the machinery he used, and towards the end of summer, the hay he had made from the few fields lying beyond the buildings.

As you left the farm there was a rough unmade track through the woods. This is where occasionally if I wasn't quick enough, one or other of the cows would try and tup me over the wall. Became a bit of a game for them, terrifying for me.

 

Of much greater interest in time, and before if I am honest, was the woodland which lay to the sides of the bridge you can see in the photo above. It was a wild place where we played in as kids. And now, some sixty years later on, it has changed. Most of the changes are man made, though not as bad as that sounds. The undergrowth, mainly Rhodedendrons, has been stripped out and replanted with Birch trees. The thing is though, all the other familiar things I knew, the river bends, the banks, have altered. Some of the photos below are of places I knew intimately as a kid. Now, I hardly recognise them.

Some things do change I suppose, after sixty years.

An Englishman Abroad

            Back in the middle of the 1970's my wife and daughter and I decided to go to France for a camping holiday. Our daughter was four years old and we had never been camping before, though I had done a lot as a Boy Scout, but I had never before driven in Europe, with all its peculiarities, like driving on the wrong side of the road, and 'Prioritie a droite' - whatever that was.

            Not only that, we did not own any camping gear. However, not to be put off and having decided to go for it I booked a round trip passage on a Dover to Calais car ferry which included hiring the necessary camping gear from the ferry company at the port of Dover, some 300 plus miles from our home in the north of England. I was a member of a motoring organisation which would, for a small fee, provide us with a small A5 size booklet with the route from home to the area of France we had intended to go to. In the end it turned out to be an absolutely fantastic piece of kit which my wife took to like a duck to water, reading off the instructions well before arriving at a junction or town. Rather like having your own personalised satellite navigation system before they were even dreamed about.

            Strangely enough the whole journey to the west of France was fairly uneventful, in fact there are only a few memories of the journey which today come to mind. The first is where we loaded the car in the middle of the night with the camping gear we had hired from the ferry company in Dover, that was fun! Next was watching my wife go green as we listened to the sound of a couple of kids behind her on the ferry who threw up for most of the two hour journey.  I suppose that most parents travelling for the first time with their four year old will be well aware of the 'Are we nearly there yet?' syndrome. Our daughter kicked in with that about ten miles after leaving home. Ah well, only 300 more before Dover.

            The boat itself became known as 'The coffee boat' by all of us from something the little one said, and ferry boat it remained for years after. From Calais to La Rochelle was a little over four hundred miles, by which time the cries from our daughter of 'Are we nearly there yet,' had become more of an anthem than anything else, but we made it, and pitched out tent in a field recommended to me by a colleague who had stayed there the year before.  The morning after our arrival my wife waited in eager anticipation for comments from the little one. We did not wait long. "Teddy likes it," she said. We breathed a long sigh of relief. The only comment I would make about the site is that my colleagues standards were almost non-existent, so much so that the following morning we searched for and found a far nicer place a few miles south of the town, right on the coast. The village was called Les Bouchelours, and was beautiful.  The campsite itself was a couple of hundred metres from the village centre and perched on top of a small cliff with paths leading down onto a long gently sloping fine sandy beach.

            The village had a small bar in the centre of a dusty unmade up roundabout, and there we soon learned that children were welcome and loved by all the fishermen who lived and worked in the village. A glass of red wine, a coffee for my wife and a glass of fresh orange for my daughter would see us off for the day, or welcome us home at the end of a hard day of being a tourist.

            Close to the end of the holiday, probably the day before we had to pack up and leave, we were lounging in the sun on the beach. There were only a few French people on the beach, who like us were enjoying the sun, the peace and quiet and perhaps a picnic. Keeping an eye out for our girl as she wandered around the beach towards the distant oyster beds, nothing really could mar our very pleasant life at that time. Peaceful and warm with only a few others around us. Then of course the Law of Sod came into force. As the three of us were sitting quietly in the sun we were suddenly aware of the braying voice of an Englishman somewhere in our vicinity. He was loud, though he was probably only talking to his wife in the tone of voice which he normally used.  We glanced around us to find the source of this upper class southern English voice and soon saw him coming towards us. He was over six feet in height and skinny with a flying mop of unruly white hair.  Neither my wife nor myself could really believe what we were seeing. It was the cartoon quintessential 'Englishman on holiday'. He was wearing khaki shorts which came to just above his knobbly white knees, and which had probably last seen service in the far east on a plantation. His white cotton shirt was unbuttoned three buttons from his rather scrawny neck, and he wore a cream coloured straw Panama hat. He carried a long stick in his hand, picked from a hedgerow on his way to the beach, and used this as a walking stick, finding his way along the sand. As he came closer I blinked at the sight of his feet and almost choked on what I saw. Open toed sandals and grey short socks. Behind him carrying their days necessities for the beach was his long suffering overweight wife, blood red face and dressed in a multicoloured floral patterned tent, or so it looked.

            As they came closer and closer to our little band of hope on the beach I quickly turned to my wife and daughter and hissed under my breath, 'Don't say a word in English'. They both nodded and sank their faces down into whatever they were doing. The dynamic duo passed us by, and took up camp about twenty feet from us on a patch of unclaimed beach. From the corner of my eye I watched as she started to set up camp for the afternoon whilst he went off along the beach in the far direction to explore what the natives had to offer. The flask of tea came out and was half buried in the sand to prevent it falling over, joined by the Tupperware container of white bread sandwiches and two apples.

            We put up with them for thirty minutes by which time neither of us had said more than two words, but finally we could stand it no longer and I suggested that we abandon our area of peace on the beach and go somewhere else. His voice was loud and he had the braying sound which it appears only the English can create, but the final straw was when he inflicted himself on the French people on the beach and started to speak French. That was it. We had to go.

            Let me give you an indication of how bad it was. I have two very good friends who are French, we've known each other for over thirty years. When we are together we laugh and joke and talk as though we have never been apart, though it might have been two years since the previous time we had met. One of the party pieces is for me to speak French with a very bad English accent. It reduces my friends to tears.  It is from the idiot on the beach where I learned how to speak bad, heavily accented French. It really is bad.

            So, to the Englishman abroad that day on the beach near La Rochelle, thank you for providing me with ammunition to keep my friends entertained for almost half a century.