Usher and Witzenfeld

The other evening, I watched an old episode of "Silent Witness", the series about a forensic pathologist, the episode where a teenaged boy is bullied and eventually hangs himself. The breaking point came when graffiti were scrawled on walls with legends like "Malcolm is a Wanker". In my class at Grammar School (the composition of it remained moreorless unchanged for four years, that's why I can still recite the surnames of most of the boys in it), I remember two boys in particular: Usher and Witzenfeld. John Usher was irritatingly well-groomed, he had immaculate hair and a school uniform made from the finest cloth. He was well-spoken, self-confident, neat, hardworking and the pet in particular of our Geography teacher, "Dag" Tomlinson, probably because the boy drew such perfect maps. John Witzenfeld was in many ways the opposite of Usher: he was gauche to the point of clumsiness, he was scruffy, he wore heavy boots instead of the shoes that most boys wore, and he was a plodder. For all that, Witzenfeld was likeable and Usher was not. And Usher never stopped teasing and taunting Witzenfeld. All kinds of insults and snide remarks, personal and hurtful, against which Witzenfeld seemed to have no defence. He simply hunched his shoulders, lowered his gaze and took it.
The Geography teacher, Dag Tomlinson, hated me as much as he loved John Usher, and he tended to be openly critical - overcritical in my opinion - of any shortcomings in Witzenfeld's work. Maybe that was why I became John Witzenfeld's natural ally. Not a close mate, mind, because it's not a good idea to get put in the same pigeonhole as a "loser", but I always let him know that as far as I was concerned, he was ok. As for Usher, I had nothing to do with him. He was a snob, and would have turned on me too (my school uniform was definitely out of the bottom drawer, frequently consisting of handmedowns or trousers and jackets I had grown out of), but I was made of sterner stuff than poor Witzenfeld, quick to anger, quick to fight, and much cleverer with insults and banter than anyone else in my class.

Mrs Grice

I was into phatic communion long before I knew the name for it. Phatic communion describes those verbal interactions which have no intrinsic value, but are used as a kind of social lubricant between passing strangers or slight acquaintances. In Britain, the utterances are typically about the weather:
"Turned out nice again", "Nasty nip in the air this morning", "Lovely day isn't it?". "Looks like rain ", etc. I leave you to supply the equally pointless responses.
Which brings me to Mrs Grice, one of the dotty ladies of my natal village. Whenever she saw me, she would exclaim, and I mean EXCLAIM, in a shrill north country accent: "Ee, Jackie, 'e 'as grown!". lingering on the last word to squeeze the last drop of drama from it. It irritated me, not because she was making a statement of the bleeding obvious - I turned into a beanpole as I approached puberty - but because she called me "Jackie". Jackie was no name for a toughie like me, who was on his way to fight Redskins or root out Nazi spies or save the world from the evil things that came out of the graveyard at night. So, as a defence, I decided to be the first to speak, and I deliberately mangled my phatic utterances, eg, "Good morning, Mrs Grice, lovely day of the weather for the week of the year, isn't it?" And the old bat would smile and agree with me!
Triumph!
And then she'd add "Ee, Jackie, 'e 'as grooooooooooown!"
Sometimes you just can't win.

Donnington to Wellington

Distance, just under six miles. Route: Donnington-Trench-Hadley-Haygate-Wellington. This was the bus route that served my little Shropshire village of Hadley. It's sixty years or more since I rode a bus on that route, and indeed the route probably no longer exists since they superimposed the overblown new town of Telford on the area. But I can still remember some aspects of it. 

First, there were in fact two bus routes, the local one, which ran what they called "Utility" buses, very simple affairs with bum-numbing wooden seats, because there was a war on, as people constantly reminded each other; and the longer Midland Red route which went from Newport, via Donnington and Wellington, to Shrewsbury the county town.

Secondly, even us little jockeys were proud of the fact that EVERY stop between Donnington and Wellington was the name of a pub. I can't remember them all after such a long time, but they included the Barley Mow, the Britannia, the Bush Hotel, the King's Head, the Cross Keys, the Summer House, the Buck's Head and the Cock Hotel.

This blog entry is just an excuse to post pictures of the two wartime buses and three of these memorable hostelries. Oh yes, and before you ask me, in my salady Salop days, I downed a pint in most of them.