Inkwell Serenade

Dedicated to the memory of my oldest friend, Tony Smith (Sept 1944 - Dec 2022)

This is dedicated to Tony’s memory, to my godson David Smith and Anya Smith, to my dear friend Tom, who knew Tony from our time together in the sixth form of Ealing Grammar School for Boys, to Ralph for his expertise on birding, and to John Williamson (JW) whose notes I thankfully made use of.

Looking back on the life-long friendship between Tony and I after the end of his life and nearly seventy years of friendship, I can see more clearly now what drew us together. We were both only children of marriages which in different ways, were unhappy and unsettled; but really and fundamentally, it was the world of nature and birds he so readily and enthusiastically shared with me, right from the earliest days of our friendship.

This enthusiasm and love of nature he never lost, however restricted his personal circumstances later in his life became. Living out his last few years in the Clarence House care home, Mundesley, it was wonderfully situated right on the Norfolk coast, overlooking the sea and of course, birds. His binoculars and telescope were never far away from him. Right from the start of our friendship, he expanded and enriched my life enormously.

It was the very first day in Ealing Grammar School Boys, for the new intake of eleven-year-olds. We were called 1 alpha. All 31 boys were allocated to rickety wooden desks with a hinged top that opened to allow textbooks and notepaper to be stored inside. We were all given a small used ink-stained wooden pen with an italic nib, pencils, an ink-stained wood ruler, notebooks, and a few textbooks. In year two, our class was called two classical, and one of the textbooks was Caesar’s Gallic Wars, which we would have to translate with great difficulty from Latin into English.

On this very first day, however, our teacher set out the rules and procedures we had to follow. In modern parlance, I suppose it could be called an induction. ‘You boy,’ he said, pointing at me, ‘Fill the inkwells’ And so I became the inkwell monitor for the class. I was handed a pot of dark blue ink with a lid, and an ink-pourer, a bit like a small teapot with a long, thin spout. Each desk housed an inkwell right at the front, and a hollowed oval ledge on which to put pens and pencils. My inkwell was completely filled with pellets of ink-stained blotting paper. I soon discovered that it was true for most of the other boys in the class. We all wore the school uniform, short grey trousers, cotton socks, white short-sleeved shirts, black blazer, a diagonal striped black and white tie, a black school blazer, and black toe capped shoes which I always failed to polish to the required dazzling shine. I hated short trousers; it was so humiliating, everyone’s knobbly knees showing.

Boys were allocated desks in alphabetical order. My desk was quite near that of a boy called Smith. I obediently started pouring ink into each boy’s inkwell. Once I got to the desk of this particular boy, I stopped. He was in the back row of the class, and looked especially subdued, almost cowering underneath his desk. For some reason, I stopped and when the teacher wasn’t looking. I whispered: “Peter”. “Tony” he replied. Maybe I sensed a kindred spirit. I dutifully filled all the other inkwells of the other boys, but at the break between classes, we found ourselves next to each other at the tuckshop.

The tuck shop was a thing of wonder. You could buy enormous red gobstoppers for a penny, tasting of aniseed, sugar-sprinkled raspberry jam doughnuts, or chocolate treats like penguin bars, Mars bars or Waggon Wheels. You also had to collect your small bottle of school milk, which was always warm, tasted stale and sometimes had gone off. Drinking it was compulsory. It was supposed to be good for you. Many years later, in the early 1970s the Conservative Education secretary Margaret Thatcher, banned school milk, acquiring her nickname of ‘Thatcher the Milk Snatcher’. I’m sure that generation of school children would have been mightily relieved.

At the school dinner 1230-2 pm lunchbreak, this new boy and I exchanged a few more words. This new friend Tony first told me about birds and bird watching. It seemed he went ‘birding’ every weekend, which must have been a perfect release from what we both soon discovered felt like the prison of our lives at home, and school. School dinner was loathsome. Right through the morning, you could smell the stale rancid stench of stewed cabbage or sprouts, boiled to near extinction in huge vats of boiling water, wafting through the classrooms from the kitchen. All boys had to line up in a disorderly queue by the kitchen serving hatch. The dinner ladies would ladle school dinner on your plate, with tasteless boiled cabbage, two dollops of cold lumpy mashed potato, and a couple of thin strips of beef containing plenty of inedible gristle, chewy lamb, or a strange substance called spam. School dinners were not a nice experience, better to be avoided.

Ever resourceful, after a few days of school dinner torture, Tony suggested taking a walk in the nearby Walpole Park. He had persuaded his mother to prepare a packed lunch of a cheese or ham sandwich, with an apple. I soon persuaded my mother to do the same. This was wonderful. It provided freedom from school dinners and for ninety minutes, freedom from school itself, and we could talk in an unfettered way. I soon discovered that this actually meant listening to Tony talk. I didn’t mind this at all. I was nervous, anxious and tongue-tied. I had nothing I could think of to say. Tony didn’t have this problem at all. He had the world of nature and birds to talk about, and never stopped.

Our routine at School was soon set. We would go to the nearby Walpole Park at lunchtimes, and he would point out all the birds he could see, mallard ducks, tufted ducks, moorhens, grey herons, the occasional great spotted woodpecker, or blackcaps, nuthatches, willow warblers, green finches, very occasionally a Kestrel, willow warblers and so on. Every day was new and every day fresh birds would appear or disappear.

To me, they were just birds. I didn’t get any particular sense of wonder or excitement from them. However much I tried I never seemed to be able to identify them, but he would know them instantly. For Tony, birds and nature was another world, his real world in which he fully became alive. For both of us, the humiliations and indignities of home and school life dragged, but at weekends he had a continuously available escape to the free, unfettered world of birds and nature.

Tony and I would go to Walpole Park most lunch-times and pass by the large pond where Tony would identify the ducks, and the other birds flitting around in the trees and overhead. We had already stocked up from the tuck shop, chocolate treats like mars bars or waggon wheels, and our packed lunches. He seemed to know an enormous amount about birds; he was a walking, talking encyclopaedia, and talked in a nonstop flow, with endless enthusiasm. I wasn’t very observant and knew nothing about birds. For me, there was no sense of wonder or enthusiasm. For me, they were just part of the dull urban background furniture of life. But for Tony they were creatures of wonder and beauty. He had a photographic memory and could recall all the details for each bird, its markings, where he had first seen it, its migration habits. At that stage I didn’t even know that birds migrated let alone their routes.

Sometimes at lunchtime we went to the ABC café, which was near to the school. Smuggling in our sandwiches in a paper bag, we’d surreptitiously eat them over our three pence cup of tea. We gradually found out a lot more about each other. We both with adolescent fury said we hated our mothers, and didn’t think very much of our fathers, both of whom conspicuously failed to wear the trousers in their own house.

Sadly, for them, and for me, my parents were in a constant state of war with each other, or in an uneasy peace between wars. Another war always to me seemed about to erupt. Later on in our friendship, Tony confided that it was the same with his parents, constant bickering. We discovered we had another thing in common, the awfulness of our parents. Much later on in life, when my step-daughter was going through her own traumatic teens, I finally discovered that in adolescence, seeing one’s parents as awful and terrible was entirely normal.

We had learned to survive the stresses of unhappy childhoods, but in very different ways. Tony was openly defiant, defiantly forging an independent path for himself through his love of birds. He had first become passionate about them, from the age of seven or eight. He got to know what bird was where through the birder grapevine, a phone call from a birder friend, or a postcard.

Whenever he got news of a bird through the birder grapevine, and despite his parent’s protestations, he would walk out the door of his suburban house in West Greenford, get a bus or an older friend would pick him up in a car, and off he’d go to wherever the birds led him.

The ABC café was a haven for us, and we got to know each other fairly quickly. We found out what our birthdays were pretty soon. We were both born in the latter stages of the second world war, he in September 1944, and me in March 1945. We both hated Greenford, a suburb built between the first and second world wars, on the outskirts of North West London. Our houses were in long anonymous suburban streets, on parades of identical houses. The sense of uniformity and dull grey urban monotonous sameness was deeply oppressive to both of us, seeping into our bones.

My world was very narrow and constricted. It was going to and from school, and that was just about it. I didn’t have any interests or hobbies. Tony’s life was different. He’d tell me about his birding outings to places like Slough reservoir. He had a kind of magical enthusiasm in painting word pictures which could spring to life in front of your eyes. To me, it seemed surprising and a little odd to go to the reservoir. Why? He explained that lots of wading birds and ducks would land and feed there. Occasionally, he told me that a ‘rarity’ would be blown off course on their migration routes.

He’d also got to know other birders, one of whom, Pat Sellars, was older and had a car. His life at weekends was incomparably wider than mine. As we got to know each other, he’d tell me about bird reserves on the North Norfolk coast at Cley Marshes, or at Portland Bill where there was a lighthouse, and to which birders would flock, especially if a rarity was spotted. It was a world I had never heard or dreamed of. It seemed to me to be a world of exotic freedom, from the oppressive rules of home and school.

One of the first catch phrases I heard him declaim was ‘Balls to the lot of them’ He really meant it. To begin with, it simply meant getting out of his parent’s house at every opportunity. Over time, I learned that what this really meant was that birds came above everything. At Ealing Grammar School, it meant bunking off school if necessary to go birding, but without telling his parents or the teachers of course, what he was up to.

This was clearly a dangerous game, but he was always very persuasive and found ways to ingratiate himself in such a way that he wasn’t expelled, and usually got away with a ticking off from his teachers, or ‘could do better’ comments in the annual school report. His parents, especially his mother, sternly disapproved: ‘Anthony, this isn’t good enough, you must DO BETTER.” Much as this annoyed him, this didn’t distract him in the slightest. What on reflection, I don’t think his parents or family began to realise, was that actually he was doing brilliantly at what he really wanted: freedom, nature and birding.

Tony was totally different from me. Just like the birds he loved; he had already spread his wings. Tony simply put birds first, and the triumphant logging of a ‘tick’. Personally, I didn’t really see the point. Why make more lists? But Tony loved it. He had a Walpole Park tick list, one for his garden, one for Slough Reservoir, and so on. As his birding horizons expanded, so did his lists.

One of his regular haunts he’d tell me about was Cley Marshes in North Norfolk, or Portland Bill, a former lighthouse, where he’d sleep in a cheap bed bunk. I longed to go there myself, but was still chained to home command, where my mother would have freaked out at the very mention of it.

And so, we struggled through grammar school together, every year marked by its episodes of laughter and school boy disaster. From being a ‘nice boy’ trusted by teachers to be responsible, I had, possibly inspired by Tony, become a bad and naughty boy. In the fourth year, the class had discovered a secret cubby hole under the wooden podium used by the teachers at the front of the class by the board on which teachers could scribble their notes. One day, egged on by the class, I ventured to dive into it and hide there for the next lesson. I was mid dive, legs in the air, when the teacher came in early! Catastrophe! I was marched to the headmaster’s office, received ‘six of the best’ with the cane, and expelled from school. This was later changed to a week’s suspension, faced at home by my angry and puzzled parents. Suitably chastised, I put in two years of good behaviour, and arrived by the skin of my teeth in the sixth form.

In the sixth form, Tony and I found we had similar interests, and took English and History together. We both enjoyed English. Some parts of the syllabus went over our heads like drearily reading through the mandatory study of Shakespeare, each line more boring than the previous (sorry, Shakespeare!). In the first year of the sixth, we studied poetry. It covered Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the Neville Coghill translation, which we quite enjoyed. We also covered Wordsworth of course. But the poet who caught us both by surprise was Gerard Manley Hopkins. We both fell in love with the soaring eloquence of his phrases and imagery. For Tony, the Windhover was a revelation. The poem actually names the Falcon, and describes it in ecstatic language. It reminded him of seeing birds he called raptors or marsh harriers, soaring over the landscape of Cley marshes in North Norfolk. He had also by then seen plenty of falcons as well.

“I caught this morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn-Falcon, in his riding of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding, high there, how he hung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! Then off, off forth on swing, as a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend….”

The worst thing one could do was to display the slightest note of enthusiasm for anything taught in the school. It was to risk the worst insult of all from the other boys: he’s a swot. So, we took to talking about Hopkins as our private passion in our lunchtime walks in the park, where there was no fear of overhearing….

Tony would tell me his own stories of seeing falcons or hen harriers at Cley soaring and sweeping over the marshes, suddenly swooping low and pouncing over an unsuspecting mouse ….Perhaps that’s one of the triggers that years later led me to come up to Norfolk myself, and enjoy all these wonders, and witness the hen harriers swooping as Hopkins had so wonderfully described. We were amazed by the poetic voice of Hopkins, and couldn’t really believe that something as boring and tedious as school could have led to such discoveries.

In the first year of the sixth form, something wonderful happened to me: I discovered two more friends, Tom Lemon and Mike Willcocks, who are still my friends sixty years later. In the summer of 1963, Tom, Tony and I decided to go bird watching together, by a little Suffolk village called Dunwich.

As usual, Tony had intrigued us with a captivating tale, one of the numerous ‘Tone tales’ I grew to know and love over the years. Tony told us there were poisonous snakes, adders, lurking in the woods close to Dunwich, and there was a sign saying ‘Danger, adders bite’. Tony added to the drama, which he was always good at doing, by saying that adders could kill. This made us all feel doubly or triply daring, intrepid adventurers, going where no boys had dare to go before. This wasn’t true of course, but Tony always managed to convey a sense of drama and adventure.

We travelled by train as far as Diss, and then got a taxi to take us to Dunwich. Tony had persuaded his father to lend us a small one-person tent, a relic from his days in the armed forces in the second world, war, which we managed to pitch some yards back from the cliff edge overlooking the sea. We ventured into the woods nearby, and there indeed was the sign saying ‘adders’ bite’! That evening, it began to rain. We discovered the tent wasn’t water proof, and had no ground sheet. We were soaking, and had nothing to cook with. A man who was also camping there took mercy on us, and lent us a small methylated spirit camping stove, and a saucepan. We bought some cans of beans from the village store, and triumphantly eat our first outdoor meal. Tony had brought a tin of Vencat curry powder with him, and stirred in mouth-numbing quantities of it into the beans. The following day, we ventured into the village pub, called the Ship. We bought ourselves a half of bitter each, and felt real men!

An old gent was playing table skittles, which we had never seen before. It consisted of a small plinth on which was a one-foot-high wooden pole, to which was attached some string with a small wooden ball that could be swung round to knock over as many of the nine small skittles as possible. The old Suffolk gentleman showed us how to play it, and of course was much better at it than we were…. Before every turn, he’d say ‘will you go round please’, in his wonderfully expressive Suffolk accent. He invited us to several games, all of which he won hands down. We felt we were deep in the forgotten mists of the English countryside, which for Tom and I, inexperienced and naïve boys for London suburbia, we certainly were. For Tony, it was already a home from home.

Somehow, we all survived the sixth form, after which we began to go our separate ways. We had struggled with our A Levels, but got through. We certainly weren’t ‘Oxbridge’ material. Much to his father’s annoyance, who had also gone to Ealing Grammar and done well there, Tony had barely scraped through, whilst I had scrambled together a moderate set of results, which earned me a place at Reading University. Tom and Mike became trainee solicitors, but once qualified began to seriously earn money, far more than I was able to.

Tony set to work as a front desk clerk in Hanwell Labour Exchange. Over the ensuing twenty years or so, he steadily progressed with many promotions towards the highest echelons of the Civil Service. He was highly intelligent, worked very hard, and was very sociable. He had a natural rapport with people. He was a natural leader, whether this was at work, or his real life outside of work: birdwatching. If a rarity was spotted wherever it was, this came first. He’d take leave at short notice, or if necessary, get a convenient bout of sickness. We were by then lifetime friends, and I was greatly honoured to be God-father to his son David.

When I was eighteen, I took the adventurous step of going on a year leave from university, through joining Voluntary Service Oversees, where I taught English and Latin in the Archibong Memorial Grammar School just outside Ikot Ekpene in Eastern Nigeria. On my return from Nigeria, Tony, Tom, and I got together and decided to go on another birding trip. By that time, Tom could drive, and could borrow his sister’s car. This time, our destination was Cley Marshes on the East Norfolk coast. We seemed much better organised this time. We had a proper tent, with a ground sheet, and a bleuet camping stove, camping plates, frying pans and so on.

On the first night there we went to a pub. We chose to drink cider for some reason. Tom and I had far too much to drink, and I stumbled into the barbed wire by the field where we were camped, spending half the night in a drunken stupor tangled up in barbed wire which I was too befuddled to escape from. In the morning I felt really grim, with my first real hangover. Tony seemed totally unaffected, my first intimation of his enormous capacity for alcohol. Tony took charge of the cooking. It was a proper fry up, using lard, with bangers, bacon, egg and fried bread. By the time it was my turn, the camping gas had run out, so I had instead of fried bread, a slice of white bread, soaked in congealing lard. I threw up the whole morning, and stayed the whole day in the tent doing my best to recover.

In his twenties, Tony developed a legendary reputation for all things excessive, amongst his birding fraternity, who he called ‘the wild bunch’. Indeed, by my rather timid standards, they were pretty wild, and Tony would manage to be more extreme in everything. Every October, he’d go to the Scilly Islands, as did numerous birders. One of his favourite stories was how, on a stormy trip across from Lands’ End on a boat called the Scillonian, the sea was so rough everybody except him was seasick. Just to wind everybody up, he got a half pound slab of butter, divided it in half, and slapped some sardines in the middle, and proceeded to eat it, laughing and jeering at his bilious mates. I must have heard the butter sandwich story a dozen times over the years! He was extreme in most things, including what he ate. I was at the shop at Holt, when Tony gleefully consumed triple fish and chips. If we went for an Indian meal, Tony would order the hottest phaal curry he could find, without breaking sweat.

The three of us stayed in touch throughout our twenties and, indeed, for the rest of our lives. Throughout my twenties, I’d still go up to Cley or Portland Bill with his regular gang of Lester Mulford (now deceased), ‘Ratfinger’ (I never got to know his surname), ‘Bollin’ (Colin Johnson), Wayne Borras (deceased), and other mates who would come along as well. They were wonderful weekends, getting up early, seeing the birds, and adjourning to the pub at opening time, where the rest would glug pint after pint, and then go birding again before dusk. It was then that I began to realise that I simply couldn’t and didn’t want to keep up so far as the alcohol was concerned. It was all a bit much. This was when our ways parted for a while. For me, birding and seeing new places, was wonderful, but drinking to excess, was not. I soon found a way round this. I would order a pint, and sip at it the whole evening, whilst the wild bunch would carry on the drinking session all night to ten pints or so. I went on several early January ‘bum freezers’ with them, sometimes sleeping just in a sleeping bag in a bus shelter, and once inside a public toilet.

But wherever our lives lead us, we constantly kept in touch. Looking back at the view point of my own life as I approach eighty, many of the peak moments in my own life were with Tony.

These memories are mine now, with no Tony or Lester Mulford to share them with. They remain some of the most vivid and precious of my entire life. I remember at Cley marshes, seeing with him the soaring and swooping of the Marsh Harrier. I remember in Kenya, at a narrow rock-surrounded gorge called Hell’s gate, driving alongside a Tawny Eagle as it glided along the air currents of that narrow gorge, seemingly forever. It was a wondrous moment in which I felt suspended in time. I remember witnessing the astonishing Lek courting ritual of the Black Grouse with him. I remember being charged by an elephant in Tanzania, and the engine stalling, scarcely getting under way before it charged us.

Most of all, I remember a magical afternoon on Lake Naivasha, on the foothills of Northern Kenya. Lester had an elderly relative called Mrs Polehill. She couldn’t have been more welcoming to us. She had prepared a pot of tea and buttered scones. That whole afternoon was magical, suspended in time. We saw the yellow breasted weaver birds, flocking round the porch and pecking at the crumbs we had left there. From her veranda balcony we could look down at the waves gently lapping on the shore,

We could see a couple of Hippopotamuses luxuriating in the mud just off the shore. We could hear the haunting cry of a fish eagle, and see some pink flamingos in the middle of the lake. The whole scene was a symphony of sights and sounds. If there is one moment in my entire life when I was simply blissfully happy, this was it. A few months later we heard that Mrs Polehill had been killed in a car crash. One of the remarkable special features of Tony was his photographic memory, especially when it came to recording birding trips. Every trip would receive a detailed write up, including one to Kenya and Tanzania in September 1975. It was a token of our friendship that I and my lovely girlfriend then, Helen, were the only non-birders allowed on the trip. The notes read like a record of a military campaign, which in some ways it was! ' This was just one day and everyday was equally extensive and recorded just as meticulously.

Kaisut Desert

Day 2 September 9th 1975

ROUTE

Archers Post -Kaisut desert -Marsabit-Galgaila Desert

North from from Archer's Post through rather flat sandy desert which was broken by occasional hills and rocky outcrops. Vegetation consisted of thorn scrub and a few acacia trees along the dry water courses. There had been some recent rain and the landscape here was much greener than on our last visit. At Marsabit we went through a series of hills covered with dry grassland. North of Marsabit was the Dida Galgalla Desert, an extremely arid region with many black lava flows, and little plant life except thorn bushes and areas of Heskinit grass.....

WEATHER

Very hot and dry . with little cloud. Fresh S E breeze in afternoon.

MAMMALS

Olive baboon (1), Silver-backed jackal (6), African Elephant (2), Giraffe (3), Grants Gazelle (20)

BIRDS

Over seventy species were named each with the numbers observed, too numerous to mention here. This perhaps illustrates his passionate and meticulous attention to detail, and is entirely typical of a life spent in passionate love of nature, and of course birds in particular.

There are so many golden moments I owe to Tony. I remember the slender-winged swallows darting around feeding on gnats at Thompson Falls in Kenya. At that time this was the only place these birds could be found. I remember the cold cascading water at Thompson Falls, and walking on a narrow ledge inside the falls, water tumbling down a foot away. I remember when Tony came out to Mexico to visit me and my late wife Maria Teresa. We travelled far and wide, and saw fleeting glimpses of a white eared hummingbird, by the Guatemala border……

Tony, over nearly seventy years, you were as much my brother as my friend. Many of the most beautiful memories of my life you gave to me, unstintingly, unwaveringly, and with love. Thank you so much, for everything.

Postscript: the scattering of Tony’s ashes

On May 3rd, 2023, David’s wife Anya drove David and I up to Cley Marshes, where Tony had spent so many happy times watching his beloved birds. It is a spot loved also by Elizabeth, Tony’s partner for many years, and who grew to love birds in her own right. Together they had gone on many birding trips abroad. Elizabeth’s ashes had been scattered on the marshes after her death. Tony had expressed a wish that his ashes be scattered on the Cley Marshes, at the spot where Elizabeth’s had been. This final journey to scatter Tony’s ashes was of great significance for all of us. It was a place David knew well from his childhood, and which I had know and loved from an early age too. It was a place he shared with all he loved. The marsh is a haunting place, with its sparse, haunting sea marsh beauty of reeds and lakes and the blended murmur of marsh and birds.

It was a very intense experience for us all. David, Anya and I drove up to the Cley Marshes, to a place Tony, or his spirit in his ashes, had arrived at their final destination.

David took the urn to the place at Cley where Elizabeth's ashes had been scattered and poured the ashes onto the earth. Before David did this, I said the Lord’s Prayer and encouraged us to share what was in our hearts. David spoke of what a great Dad he had been, encouraging him at every step of his life’s journey. I knew that Tony had helped David buy his house, paid for his university tuition fees, and had taken him on a trip of a lifetime to Greenland. Most of all perhaps he had shared his love of birds with him, and had taken him many times to Cley Marshes. David knew the marshes and surrounding towns very well, and in particular the lovely own of Holt, and the bungalow which Tony had there. It felt to me that the spirit of Tony had come back home.

The moment when David poured Tony's ashes into the earth of Cley Marshes felt to me like that moment in Wuthering Heights when Catherine and Heathcliff are reunited for ever in the wild savage spirit world of nature. At that moment Tony's spirit rose up to be reunited with the birds, the sky and the wild geese, or so it felt to me. He is there now, his spirit one with nature. the sky and all human life that lies beyond. As dusk fell and we slowly drove away, I felt his spirit stay in the marshes. It was we who were leaving to continue our lives, but his spirit I knew would stay there forever, united with the marshes and all those souls and spirits who find their resting place there beyond.