Teach your children well? : 1960s-1970s : vegetable-free adolescence, Camberley

 “How often do you wash your face?” asked the doctor.

“Like how?” I responded, uncertain about what he was enquiring.

“You know, with soap and water,” he clarified.

“Er, never,” I replied truthfully.

“Why not?” he demanded.

“Because nobody ever told me I needed to,” I said, somewhat embarrassed.

The doctor regarded me pitifully, imagining I must belong to a tribe of itinerant gypsies or have been raised by wolves. To the casual observer, my suburban home life appeared quite normal. Scratch the surface and you would have discovered that my parents had given me few of the ‘life skills’ that are supposed to be demonstrated to children. On this occasion, my mother had sent her teenage son to the family doctor in Frimley Road because his face had become progressively covered in spots. But neither she nor my father had ever instructed me how or when to wash. Once a week, I stood under the water in our modern home’s shower cubicle. If my face became wet while shampooing my hair, I merely dabbed it dry with a towel.

The doctor wrote a prescription for a liquid called ‘Phisohex’ which came in a large green bottle. After a few weeks washing my face twice daily with this cleanser, my spots magically disappeared, following more than a decade of cheeks shamefully having been untouched by soap. Did my mother acknowledge this shortfall in her parental duties? Of course not. This was but one aspect of her ‘hands-off’ approach to childrearing. She had enjoyed a good post-war education at Camberley’s girls’ grammar school in Frimley Road where she was likely taught conventional housekeeping and domestic skills in preparation for marriage. She was goodlooking and always dressed immaculately in the latest trends. Her parents had raised her and her two sisters impressively. So where had her own parenting regime gone awry?

Most of the basic skills I developed – writing, reading, arithmetic – I learned from books and television rather than parental instruction. However, one ability that proved impossible to appropriate in that way was tying shoelaces. As a result, at junior school, after ‘PE’ (Physical Education) lessons that required us to change into slip-on plimsolls, I always had to seek out my cousin Deborah in the year below mine to ask her to retie the laces on my shoes. Once I progressed to grammar school, my skill deficit became more difficult to hide. The mandated school uniform required black lace-up shoes. My mother acknowledged my ‘shoelace’ issue but, instead of simply demonstrating how to do it, she bought me slip-on 'Hush Puppies' shoes for school which resulted in regular disciplinary action. Finally, I had to draft an embarrassing letter from my mother to the school, asking for her son to be excused from the dress code due to difficulty finding suitable lace-up shoes for his high in-step feet.

Like many 1960’s housewives, my mother regularly cut out recipes from magazines and stuffed them in a kitchen drawer. She was particularly proud of a plastic box with transparent lid holding two rows of Marguerite Patten recipe cards that she had sent for to ‘Family Circle’ magazine and which I was tasked with keeping in correct order. She loved making cakes and had a sweet tooth that probably promoted the development of diabetes in her later life. However, her skills with main meals were limited and she preferred to rely upon ‘instant’ foods like fish fingers that were heavily marketed to ‘busy’ housewives at the time. This was probably why I remained as thin as a rake during my childhood, despite teenage years spent scoffing two bowls of cereal both morning and night.

I had been a regular visitor to the family dentist on Middle Gordon Road due to the dreadful state of my teeth. Even at a tender age, I was being gassed for extractions. On one occasion, the stern dentist accused me of not brushing my teeth sufficiently firmly to prevent decay. I resolved to use the state-of-the-art electric toothbrush in our family bathroom with greater pressure during twice-daily cleanings. I returned to the dentist six months later, only for him to inform me that I had rubbed away most of the enamel from my remaining teeth. The outcome of his ‘advice’ was merely more extractions. Not once did this dentist question my mother about her children’s diet. Even if he had, she would have been unlikely to respond honestly.

My mother had an inexplicable lifelong aversion to vegetables. Only the humble potato would accompany our meals, usually in the form of Cadbury’s ‘Smash’. Carrots? Never. Peas? Nope. Broccoli? Unseen. There were other foodstuffs we never experienced – spaghetti, yoghurts, condiments, rice – because my mother had a preference for jellies, custard and blancmange, but it was the lack of vegetables that must have impacted our health growing up the most. I never understood how, despite the piles of women’s magazines around our home, she somehow studiously avoided taking their practical advice regarding suitable family diets. Such behaviour could have been excused earlier in the twentieth century when literacy and knowledge were less prevalent, but surely not by the 1960’s.

Much of my childhood during weekends and school holidays was spent at my maternal grandparents’ adjoining house where I helped prepare ingredients for their meals. Instructed by my wonderful grandmother, I would sit on the backdoor step with a bowl between my knees, shucking peas from their pods. I would use a peeler to remove the skins from various vegetables whose names I did not know. I would carefully place dozens of apples in rows within cardboard boxes, separating each layer with old 'Daily Sketch' newspapers before carrying them into the recesses of the house’s darkened larder under the stairs. My grandmother loved to make jams with these fruits, for which I carefully wrote out white adhesive labels carrying the manufacture date and type. Bizarrely, none of these vegetables or jams were ever served in our own house next door.

From the day she left school at twelve until the day she finally retired, my grandmother worked in fruit and vegetable shop ‘H.A. Cousins & Son’ at 11 High Street on the corner of St George’s Road in Camberley. During all those decades, her ‘sales assistant’ job never changed, standing all day on the shop’s bare floorboards, putting requested items in brown paper bags, weighing them on old-style scales against combinations of various brass weights, calculating the cost in her head and then the correct change to return to the customer.

Shop owner Mr Cousins would daily travel thirty miles to the fruit, vegetable and flower markets in London at the crack of dawn, returning with a van of produce to sell. Once a day’s stocks were sold, that was it. Any produce left over would be given to the shop staff. My grandmother regularly brought home quantities of all sorts of fruit and vegetables which she shared with us, though my mother always refused the vegetables. Thankfully, she did accept the fruit which became the sole source of my necessary five portions per day.

Cousins advertised its shop locally as “by appointment to Staff College” (Sandhurst Royal Military Academy), providing “Dessert Fruit and Flowers for Dinner Parties, etc.” Its upper-class customers and Sandhurst’s foreign residents necessitated it stock a variety of exotic fruits, the excess of which ended up in my family’s fruit bowl. Visitors to our house in the 1960’s were shocked to see pineapples, mangoes and lychees on our dining table, delicacies that I enjoyed as ‘normal’ long before their availability in supermarkets.

My mother insisted that fruit always be eaten covered in sugar, her favourite ingredient. Cups of tea required two spoons of white sugar, coffee two lumps of Demerara sugar, stewed apples or pears served frequently as our dessert had to be sprinkled with granulated ‘Tate & Lyle’. Even when I visited my mother in her final years, she would buy in a banana to offer me (she refused to eat them), accompanied by a plate of sugar in which to dip it. Thanks, mum. Banana yes, sugar no.

When my grandmother reached the statutory retirement age of the time, we all went round to her house for a little celebration of her departure from a lifetime of work on Cousins’ shop floor. She was pleased to be able to retire before Britain switched to decimalisation in 1971 as she feared metric calculations that no longer involved farthings, florins, half-crowns and guineas. Months later, the shop asked if she would return and work part-time because it was short-staffed. Of course she agreed. In total, she clocked up more than half a century working for that one employer in that one location, a 400-metre walk from her sole marital home.

In 1976, on arrival at university, the bulk of my Surrey County Council grant had to be paid in advance for one term of accommodation and three meals per day within college. Having never taken school dinners and rarely eaten out in restaurants, I was unfamiliar with the canteen system where you line up and tell the kitchen servers which food you want. I hardly recognised any of the foodstuffs on offer and would often merely opt for two identical desserts, skipping main courses entirely. Most intimidating were twice-weekly ‘formal dinners’ lasting an hour, during which more than a hundred students remained seated at long benches in the huge dining room to be served by staff a succession of courses completely foreign to me. The table places were laid with radiating lines of various cutlery, none of which I knew their specific purpose. My fellow students seemed to find all this ‘etiquette’, including ritual table-banging and foot-stomping, perfectly normal because 90%+ of them had grown up around such ‘practises’ at elitist private schools. I often avoided these ghastly events and sat in my room munching a packet of biscuits.

My parents having never taught me how to use cutlery, I had developed my own system whereby I always used my right hand to hold the fork. Only when I had to cut up some food would I transfer the fork to my left hand and then simultaneously use the knife in my right hand. The rest of the time, I placed the knife down on the table. Nobody had ever corrected me. Not until sitting in that university dining room, surrounded by loud toffs with posh accents and double-barrel surnames, did I have to learn to eat holding the fork in my left hand. To this day, my default way of eating is to grab the fork with my right hand. Old habits die hard.

In 1986, my little sister was offered a Saturday job on the till of a small self-serve fruit and vegetable shop in Camberley town centre. She was worried that she would not recognise the produce she would be expected to ring up, since our mother had never fed us veg other than potatoes. By then, I had spent a decade living away from our vegetable-free home and was able to accompany my sister on a ‘Secret Squirrel’ mission to the shop, during which we walked slowly around its one central aisle and tried to identify the varieties of common vegetable on sale. ‘Common’ to everyone else, particularly to our beloved late grandmother, but weirdly not at all to us!

In retrospect, my childhood must have been quite unusual because, although I lacked some basic life skills, I was steeped in other abilities beyond my age. By junior school, I had taught myself to type, to read music and play the piano (despite having non-musical parents). Having recruited me into his business once I could walk, my father taught me how to survey a property, create architectural plans on a drawing board, use Letraset, calculate floor areas and room volumes, prepare client invoices and statements on an electric typewriter, photocopy and make dyeline prints. Meanwhile, my mother enrolled me into reconciling her employer's accounts and calculating its staff's pay packets, pinning and cutting dress patterns to materials, basic knitting stitches, using her sewing machine and threading multiple yarns on her knitting machine. I was eight when typing the forms for my parents' passport renewals, testing my mother's knowledge for her driving test and testing my father for his pilot licence. By the time I started secondary school, I was holding the fort at my father's town centre office, learning shorthand from my mother's discarded 1950's text books and calculating potential profits of deals for my father's new property business. What a strangely un-childlike childhood it was!

… and the award for car-crash Olympic flame live TV coverage goes to … : 2024 : La Premiere, French Guyana

 1995. The evening weatherwoman was standing in front of a wall map of the nation, reading the forecast for tomorrow’s conditions. In her hand were symbols for rain, sunshine and cloud that she went to place on relevant locations on the map. The icons remained there for no more than a few seconds before tumbling noisily to the floor. She bent down to pick them up and attempted once again to attach them to the map … with the same outcome. She soldiered on bravely until her script was completed in front of a wholly symbol-free map, then turned towards the camera with a weary farewell gaze that communicated: ‘why do I have to work with this rubbish technology?’

Was this ‘malfunction’ happening every evening on the Kenya government’s national television channel? I recognised her supposedly magnetic symbols from having watched nightly ITV regional weather forecasts during my childhood in Britain. Perhaps her masters had purchased a ‘job lot’ of second-hand apparatus from a classified advert in the back pages of ‘Broadcast’ magazine placed by one of those lazy UK commercial television stations that had eventually had their ‘licence to print money’ removed by the regulator. Wincey Willis, all is forgiven.

2014. I was lodging in a small town in southern Spain over the New Year. Just before midnight on 31 December, I impetuously took a ten-minute walk from the rented apartment to the main square to observe how the noisy Spanish were celebrating the impending change of calendar. There I found … they weren’t. Christmas decorations strung across the streets were fully illuminated, but not a soul was to be seen. In the town square, you would have heard a pin drop. It was eerie in a community of 15,000 to encounter deafening silence on entirely vehicle-free, human-free streets. Did the Spanish’s ‘reluctance’ to exert themselves (long daily siestas, shops closed during summer afternoons, holidays lasting weeks) extend to New Year’s Eve celebrations? I returned home, mystified.

There, switching on Spanish television, I caught a typically abysmal live variety show welcoming the New Year by parading a succession of uninspiring musicians and poorly choreographed dancers in front of a studio audience. Like so much of Spain’s TV, this circus was fronted by a male presenter whose suit seams were suffering immense stress and a young woman dressed like a high-class prostitute who would obligingly laugh loudly at her co-host’s every witticism. At twelve o’clock, the two of them indulged in Spain’s tradition of gulping down one grape at each of the twelve strokes of the midnight bell. For this, you can buy tiny cans of precisely twelve grapes in Spanish supermarkets.

Naturally, both presenters found utterly hilarious their inability to successfully complete this annual task, sat on their over-high bar stools. Then, amongst all the fake joviality, it became evident that the woman had wet herself and it was visibly trickling down her inside legs below an over-short, sparkly dress. What impact did this have on proceedings? None whatsoever. Everyone involved carried on as if nothing at all had happened. It was yet another of those television moments when you begin to question whether you really did see something THAT ‘abnormal’ on your TV. ‘Entertainment’ arrives in strange forms in Spain (The Inquisitions?) so, for all I know, she was probably invited back the following year.

2024. I have been lucky enough to be in France witnessing the run-up to the Paris Olympic Games. On 9 May, as the Olympic flame arrived in Marseille by boat from Greece, the French state broadcaster launched an online television channel dedicated solely to the impending event. Presently, the flame is passing through 68 of France’s 96 geographical ‘departments’, in each of which it is carried through streets of six or seven towns/villages consecutively by a relay of local volunteers walking/jogging around 200 metres each. In total, by the time the Games commence in July, the flame will have been carried during 68 days by 10,000 individuals through 450 of France’s 35,000 ‘communities.’

The new TV channel (confusingly named ‘Paris 24’ like longstanding news station ‘France 24’) offers around eight hours per day of live coverage of the torch as it wends its way up hills and down dales through France. The dominant visuals derive from Ronin Steadicam cameras held by two videographers sat facing backwards on the rear of peddle-powered tricycles, filming the torchbearer running towards them. This is supplemented by two scooter riders with lightweight cameras attached to their handlebars, a roving reporter interviewing people with another Steadicam, and two overhead drones. The vision mixer seems to be in situ (in a van behind the torchbearer?) and has a fondness for abrupt cutaways from the torchbearer, often of no more than a few seconds, as if directing an urgent pop music video. A bored male voiceover reads a script extolling the history of the town/village and the name, age and occupation of each volunteer carrier.

The results are often scrappy but make intriguing viewing. The satellite link occasionally fails, cameras temporarily lose their signals under bridges, inside buildings and when scooter riders collide with obstacles. There seems to be no ‘talkback’ facility, requiring camera operators to occasionally communicate using hand signals in front of their lenses. This coverage initially appeared somewhat amateurish, but quickly became addictive for this armchair viewer. What better way to visit so much of France’s rich land than the view from the back of a slow-moving tricycle? I have already accompanied the flame’s journey to mountain peaks above clouds, to caves of prehistoric art, across magnificently modern bridges, on kayaks down fast-flowing rivers and through historical theme parks. Watching the way France has beautifully maintained and restored its phenomenal history helps you understand why the majority of the French take their annual holiday within their country. There is so much to experience here!

Simultaneously, the sheer humanity on view has proven heartwarming in these ‘challenging’ times. Volunteers chosen to carry the flame have been of all ages, visually diverse and many with disabilities they have overcome to participate. One very elderly man with an arm in a sling shuffled along the route more than walked, taking an age to complete 200 metres, but was patiently accommodated. One torchbearer fell to his knees en route and proposed to his girlfriend as he passed her amongst bystanders. The crowds that have attended each stage of the torch’s journey have been huge and enthusiastic, particularly the hordes of children given the day off school to display the results of their Olympic Games art projects. There have regularly been very moving, spontaneous little moments that pre-scripted, sanitised television can never achieve.

On 9 June, the flame skipped out of mainland France for the first time to travel through the department of French Guyana in South America. I was very much looking forward to watching a travelogue through this little-known, far-flung outpost … until it emerged that, instead of coverage being mixed on-the-ground as usual by ‘France TV’ staff, responsibility had been inexplicably handed to the organisation’s local television station ‘Guyane La Première’. Instead of the focus remaining on the journey of the torch, the dozens of torchbearers and the communities passed, its station management turned this potentially historic outside broadcast into a studio-based programme. Had they not read the memo from head office? Had they not watched online the coverage of the torch journey to date? Or had they merely decided to do what the hell they wanted regardless? The outcome was predictably disastrous.

The TV station’s morning broadcasts omitted any live coverage of the flame arriving by boat in the village of Camopi at 0620 and its 1km journey through the town. The usual cameras and drones were on-site but their raw videography was edited down to an inadequate two-minute roundup repeatedly broadcast later in the day. The thrill of continuous live coverage had been completely lost. When the morning studio programme eventually started, it was led by a well-dressed man and woman (Nikerson Perdius and Geniale Attoumani) sat side-by-side at a desk covered in sheets of paper scripts. They appeared so under-confident that the man constantly shuffled their papers while the woman rung her hands. Occasionally, their eyes would meet with a look of ‘what the hell should we do next’. Instead of simply giving us the live feed of the flame, they viewed their role as interviewing their equally nervous two non-Olympic sportsman studio guests who used the airtime to complain about the lack of professional quality sports facilities locally. The studio presentation continued in this style for 90 minutes, repeatedly reading out the times and locations of the torch’s journey as if it were a radio show, but failing to show us more than sporadic visuals of the flame.

Unbelievably, after a break, the same two presenters returned for a further three-hour studio-based show that still failed to provide much live coverage. The flame’s 800-metre journey at 1110 around the huge high-tech satellite launching pad ‘space station’ at Kourou should have provided a great opportunity to appreciate Guyana’s technological significance. Instead, we saw almost nothing of the event because the presenters decided, at that critical moment, inexplicably to reshow the edited package of the flame’s early morning arrival at Camopi. I was moved to repeatedly shout at the television: “what the hell is the editor doing?” Much more important to the station were more endless studio chats with another set of non-Olympic sports guests. Just as bizarre were the live vox-pops with people on the streets who had observed the flame’s progress … instead of allowing us viewers to watch the flame’s progress first-hand.

Surely, the station’s afternoon coverage could not be worse? Don’t underestimate. Whereas the early shift presenters were under-confident, the afternoon team (Tamo Brasse and Charly Torres) appeared supremely over-confident, particularly in their own self-importance, one inexplicably wearing a ‘Tram Tours, Lisboa, Portugal’ tee-shirt. For 140 minutes, they talked and talked and talked with their sporting studio guests. The station’s on-the-ground contributors providing live commentary on the flame’s passage proved professional but were far too infrequently used. By now, my wife was also shouting at the television for the hosts to shut up because, once again, they seemed to imagine they were on the radio and left no space unfilled by their voices, instead of allowing us view the live images and accompanying ambient sound. Ironically, whilst they chatted interminably, a large-screen TV was visible on the wall behind them in the studio, displaying the live feed of the torch’s progress … a visual they and their editor were preventing us from viewing.

In the evening, when the flame made its final journey of the day through the capital Cayenne, these same presenters returned for a further one-hour show. Now with two on-the-ground live reporters, this should have been a more satisfying viewing experience .. but wasn’t. The only reason they talked less animatedly and, instead, mumbled to each other was the absence of studio guests or their possible exhaustion. Suddenly, just when it seemed possible that we might view some uninterrupted live local coverage, the station inexplicably cut to a live feed of the European Athletics Championships women’s 100m semifinal from Italy in which French athlete Gemima Joseph was competing. By now, we were both screaming at the television: “the Olympic flame happens once in a lifetime in Guyana!”. (Incidentally, Britain’s Dina Asher-Smith won and Joseph came second.)

Could it get worse? Yes. The station was now interrupting its live coverage with pre-recorded packages, each lasting several minutes, about preparations for the Olympic flame’s arrival that had already been broadcast within the station’s two daily local news bulletins on previous days. Why choose this ‘filler’ when there is a once-a-century live event happening in your backyard? The icing on the cake for this unmitigated television disaster happened just as the flame was about to arrive at its final destination in the capital Cayenne where, at 1920, it would light the Olympic cauldron in front of a huge crowd. Twenty minutes before that, the two presenters folded their arms and, looking pleased with their performances, bade their audience a final farewell … BEFORE the flame had reached the crowning glory of its journey. Live coverage terminated. We screamed our heads off.

Had these presenters viewed the event as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to show off their chat skills beyond French Guyana on a television channel watched across mainland France? Were their efforts a pitch for some kind of longform chat show? Their station’s mediocre efforts were an insult to the many local volunteers carrying the torch, to the communities in Guyana it passed through, and to the hundreds of Olympic Games staff on the ground who enabled the torch to pass through the landscape. While the broadcasters had sat self-absorbed in their cosy TV studio, the hard work of on-the-ground videographers had been marginalised and mostly discarded. I tuned in wanting to actually see French Guyana and what I got instead were ‘talking heads’ in a studio. It was a disgraceful betrayal of everything the Olympics stands for.

Did nobody from state TV’s Paris HQ phone up and demand to know what the hell their employees in Guyana were doing? We will never know. Will heads roll? Unlikely because employment in France’s public sector is mostly a ‘job for life’. You would have to murder a client to be sacked. Watching television in mainland France, its output is filled with ‘the great and the good’ talking endlessly on studio panel discussion shows about anything and everything. It’s essentially cheap ‘talk radio’ programming parading as ‘television’.

Whenever ‘the system’ screws up in France, there are never apologies, never sanctions. Any problem is passed down to the user, the consumer, the citizen to suffer the consequences. The day after the Guyana station’s contemptuous Olympic flame coverage, ‘France TV’ HQ in Paris suddenly blocked online viewers from watching that local station’s live output. The many Guyanese living in France are now denied the ability to keep up with news from ‘home’, paying the price for their public servants’ failures.

Should you think my criticism is unfair on tiny French Guyana (population 295,385) for its efforts, six days later I watched the Olympic flame pass through Caribbean island Guadeloupe (population 378,561) where coverage by its own outpost of the state television station ‘La Premiere’ proved absolutely excellent. Somebody there had evidently read and understood the memo.

[Sadly, links here to 'France TV' content may not work outside France.]