Jimi, Shoreham, and the Parakeets

 

(Jimi Hendrix - died 18 September, 1970 - 50 years)

JIMI, SHOREHAM AND THE PARAKEETS

She knew he wasn’t to blame for the birds. At least, not in the other areas of Britain, but here, in Shoreham Village, maybe – just maybe.

She’d met him through, Peter, a road manager for the group Pink Floyd who had lived in the village. His daughter, Naomi, born in

Shoreham went on to be a famous actress, but it was her dad who had brought the guitarist down to Shoreham to see what an English country village looked like.

Peter and the man had been sitting outside the George pub, in what she could overhear as arguments about music. The man that

Peter referred to as, Jimi was very exotic for this part of Kent, even in the 1960s.

She lived across the street from the pub, in Church Cottages, and would sometimes lie in her room with the window open listening to the lives of folks relaxing at the bar. She knew Peter well and so had followed the two men up to the Cross (at a distance). When they got to the top of the hill, Jimi brought out a cigarette that smelled strange and began to smoke it. Peter told him he didn’t smoke.

Jimi must have said something funny because she remembers laughing – although she hadn’t intended to.

“Who’s there?” Shouted Jimi.

She popped her head over the hedge and smiled.

“Come sit,” he said in his American accent.

Peter smiled too and said the three of us should sit and look at the beautiful village below. Jimi asked if I played the guitar or any musical instrument and I told him I didn’t.

“What do you do then, kid?”

That’s what he called me, ‘kid’.

I told him I was saving up to buy a budgie.

“You like birds?”.

I nodded. I spent another hour with them. Then I told Jimi and Peter I had to be back to eat with my family. Jimi said he enjoyed our talk and I’ve got to be honest so did I.

A week or so later, a delivery was made to my house by Peter, it was two parakeets in a beautiful cage. The card said: ‘They ain’t budgies, but they’re just as pretty – Jimi’.

I saw a photo of him in the News of the World, and I realised his name was Jimi Hendrix.

On the 18th of September, 1970 – they announced on the news that Jimi had died in Notting Hill, London.

I let the parakeets go that day. I released them to be with Jimi.

The birds are still here. They are still flying around the village – scores of them.

And as I watch them squawking in the sky, I’ll always remember my friend, Jimi Hendrix.

bobby stevenson 2020

Shoreham, Kent

Most of her 94 years had been spent in this beautiful little corner of the world. The rear of her property looked up to the Cross on the hill above, and now that most of her days were spent with resting in bed – she found this a favourable view. In the Spring and the Summer months, she watched the little birds and then the wild geese as they came to visit in her back yard and the fields beyond.

It hadn’t always been this way. In her younger, vibrant days she had worked on the farm, and later in the Cooperative shop on the village High Street.

She had been born into a place that had meant the most happiness and therefore, had never wanted to leave. She had been married for a short time, there had been no children, but she had accepted that fact and moved on with her life. Her husband had always wanted sons and daughters and had eventually found a family with his second wife, in Hastings.

In all her 94 years much of it had been spent looking from her window on to the passers-by and their changing tastes and fashions - and as the older residents had aged and passed on, so the village constantly invigorated itself with newer, younger dynamic families. Most of these folks now worked in the city, and as such spent much of their time commuting. She had been lucky. She had found everything she needed within reach. Not many had had that chance.

But the main thing that preoccupied her thoughts was the magic in this little haven. Her great grandmother, a woman who had been there at the opening of the Co-op shop - in the same year that Queen Victoria had died – had always told her the same sentence over and over again, ‘Shoreham finds you, you don’t find Shoreham’.

She had always wondered what that had meant – but it wasn’t about the likes of herself or her family, it was about the souls who thought they had discovered this hamlet by accident - a lucky accident – but an accident all the same.

Yet she knew the truth. They came here incomplete, or sad, or single, or unhappily married, or sick, or healthy, or hopeful, or lost – and they stayed long enough to put things right in their lives. To find that special person, or to lose the wrong one. To beat the depression or some disease or another. To raise a family, or find a new one. To see the end of loneliness in the company of new friends, or to find a confidence when it was lacking.

Whatever their needs, Shoreham grabbed them as they passed by, then dusted them down and didn’t let go until the time was right for them to move on.

She had seen it time and time again – enough to know that it wasn’t a fluke but a certainty - a miracle.

It was a truth that not everyone came to the village searching for something, but most of them did. They just didn’t know it.

And from her little window on the High Street, she had watched them find it and had taken comfort in their happiness, and their newfound lives.

Now from her bedroom window, she watched as the geese came to the field beyond the trees.

Those beautiful birds waited on her to close her eyes for the very last time, and then they carried her soul, to that far country where she could rest.

bobby stevenson 2020

To all those who found it. x

Woodrow

Here’s the strange thing, no one was ever really sure when Woodrow moved to the village. You must remember him? He lived in that little cottage at the top of Mill Lane. His lounge window faced on to the High Street and was always full of jolly trinkets.

You see if you asked a neighbour when they remember Woodrow coming here, they’d say – ‘Oh, he’s always lived here’, and someone else might have uttered – ‘I think he moved to Mill Lane last Christmas or was it last month?’.

It’s not as if he was a mysterious soul, far from it. He was always the life and soul of every party. And if you looked back at photographs, he would be there.

Everyone had a Woodrow story, and every one of them was as different as they were strange. 

I’ve got two stories concerning the man. The first was probably around the time of the great storm. Some trees had blown over every way a person turned. It had been the storm to end all storms, at least that’s what the little man in the grey suit had told viewers on the television.

Mrs Hathaway had been walking her dog, Silver when the first of the gusts had hit the village. The wind had spooked Silver, and the lady found herself chasing her beloved friend through the trees behind the Cross. She had just turned into a dark part of the woods when a small oak fell in front of her and had caused a break in her arm. Now it wasn’t just the pain; it was also the fact that her bone was sticking out at a funny angle.

Woodrow had heard her cries which had been carried by the wind. He had run up from his house to see who was in trouble. There in front of him was Mrs Hathaway lying almost face down in the mud.  And that was the way I found the two of them, with Woodrow trying, in the most gentlest of ways, to ease the lady into a less painful position.

“We’ve all seen the wrong end of problems,” he’d say. “There ain’t no one in this world who doesn’t have concerns. But it’s how we deal with them. That’s what’s important. That’s what makes you who you are.”

Woodrow was my pal, and my mentor and my everything at the time, I was barely ten, and I guessed he was so old that he had probably been to school with God.

I asked him once how old he really was, and he just chuckled some and said he was just a gnat’s hair older than his teeth.  Then he’d laugh so hard and loud and long that I could hear his tummy rumble, and which point he’d say, ‘well…excuse me, little one’.

Woodrow carried Mrs Hathaway all the way down the hill, took her to her house and then fetched the doctor on the High Street. They were friends forever after that night.
“All we need to do is lend a helping hand now and again.”
Woodrow wasn’t wrong.

The second story was perhaps a little more strange. Woodrow had a box on top of his fireplace and he seemed to polish and care for that thing as if it was his child.

In the same year as the great storm, my Grandad passed on. I went up to the Cross by the hill and sat. I guess I started talking to my Grandad – I knew wherever he was, he’d be listening.

It was right then that Woodrow found me. He said we should get down off the hills as it was going to rain heavy. It started just as we got into Woodrow’s house. 

My big pal went over to that special box of his, and he seemed to put something in a little box and then he handed it to me.
“Take this little one. Keep it safe. It’s a small bit of the magic that I keep in that box over there.”

I asked Woodrow what in it and all he said was, “It’s a little piece of hope. That’ll see you through all the bad years. Don’t look inside. Never look inside, or else it’ll fly away.”

You’re going to say I’m crazy but I kept that little box with me all my life. When I was at college, or in a job, or my proposal of marriage – and especially the birth of my child. Every time I needed a little piece of magic, I’d hold that little box and wish for the best.

When Woodrow finally gave up the ghost, I went back to that special little village. His family said that he had left something for me. Guess what? It was the big box from the fireplace.

I went up the hill to talk to Woodrow because I knew he’d be listening just like my Grandad. I’m sure I heard him say to open the magic box. So I did and guess what was in it? Nothing. It was empty.

I smiled. I also opened the little box which had been with me all my life. It was empty too. What Woodrow had given me was hope and belief in myself and my life.

No bigger gift than that. Thank you Woodrow.  Thank you kindly.

bobby stevenson 2020

One Day You Will Even Make the Onions Cry

There is a little village in the South East of England; perhaps it’s yours, maybe it’s mine. Perhaps it’s a little hamlet with a Cross on the hill above it. Who knows?

Sarah hadn’t set out to be a writer; in fact, when she was at the village school, she found that she had difficulty in reading. Everyone else seemed to understand the words, but not her.

Probably later in life, she would find out that she had some little mix-up in her head, which stopped her fully understanding the way words behaved. She didn’t see what others saw but then again, didn’t we all?

So she started to write down the words, one at a time and traced them out with a pencil. She got to know their shapes and meanings. Soon she was putting two words together, and finally, she was writing whole sentences.

By the time Sarah was twelve summers old, she had become a gifted writer, a very gifted writer indeed.

She wrote little essays in school, which she would proudly read out to the class. To be honest, even her teacher smiled in admiration.

By the time she was twenty-two, she was writing for a newspaper in the big town next to the village and she loved her job.

One day in the autumn of 1939, her editor took them all into his little office, offered them cups of tea and then mentioned that there was a war coming.

“It will be our job to keep the people informed. It will be our job to tell the people what they need to know, and to keep their morale high.”

And that is what they did.

In this little village, of which I speak, which may or may not have a Cross above it on the hill, hard times hit. This little group of houses lay right under the path of the bombers flying overhead. So much so, that it would later be known as the most bombed village in that area.

Every single building was wounded in some way, as was every single heart.

The folks at the newspaper kept their promise of telling the people the stories and keeping their morale high, but there was a limit. The government man who visited their offices from time to time would instruct the editor on what could and what couldn’t be printed.

So one evening, Sarah hatched a plan. She started to write little stories of the village and how it had been before the war. They would include some real characters and some that she had made up in her head but had wished that they had lived in her little hamlet.

These were little stories which brought smiles to peoples’ faces, or perhaps a tear in laughter or one in sadness and with the help of her editor, she managed to print off enough sheets to put one through every letterbox in the streets around her house.

At one end of the High Street, lived an elderly woman who inhabited a big house with empty rooms. No one came to visit, and her own contact with the outside world was Sarah’s little weekly stories.

So one summer’s evening, the old woman lay in wait, and as Sarah came up the path, she opened her door.

Admittedly it startled Sarah at first, but the elderly woman invited her in for a cup of tea. She sat Sarah down and told her that her writing should never stop, unlike the war that was happening in the city over the hill.

Sarah smiled, and then the old woman said something that stayed with Sarah for the rest of her years.:

“One day, probably when I am long gone, you will be a great writer, and you will make even the onions cry.”

Sarah leaned over and kissed the old lady on her head.

“Thank you,” said Sarah.

When Sarah eventually wrote her book after the war, about writing her little stories in a village in the south-east – a village which may or may not have had a Cross on the hill above it – she dedicated the book to the old woman and what do you think was the title of her book?

‘One Day You Will Even Make The Onions Cry’.

bobby stevenson 2019

Once Upon A Shoreham Village Fete

It happens, it happens to everyone, doesn’t it? You tell a little white lie and it blows out of all proportions, it runs away and starts a life of its own. It gains a wide circle of friends (more than you have yourself) and then the lie grows so gigantic that it sends you a postcard from somewhere. Think I’m exaggerating? Okay, maybe a little. See there I go again, lying. Perhaps in your favour you would have to say that it was done for the best of all reasons – trying to cheer people up.

If Alison hadn’t been ill that day, or at least if she hadn’t been recovering from a night out in the village, then Jane wouldn’t have had to take Alison’s place; so, if anyone was to blame it was Alison and her obvious drink problem. Okay, that’s another lie, Alison doesn’t have a drink problem. She had only been at the Mount to taste the wines, and had forgotten to stop. But the result was the same, Alison was lying in her bed promising the universe that she had drunk wine for the very, very last time in her life, and that not only was she going tee-total but she would attend church regularly and help the people of Africa – if the universe would only stop her blinking head from hurting as much as it did.

All that was beside the point, for it meant that Jane was now required to fill her best friend’s shoes. When she had agreed to help at the Fete meeting all those months ago, it hadn’t seemed like a possibility, and so Jane was happy to nod her head when they asked for a deputy for Alison. It made them sound like a couple of cowboys.

The Shoreham Village Fete was full of all the usual bits and pieces; music, vintage cars, a bar, a tea room (run by the children and their mums) and the always present ne’er-do-wells, who turned up once a year to promenade around the school ground.

To save money, in this time of austerity, the Fete committee had decided to find the big central acts for the day (those who inhabited the centre ground – literally) within the large and obvious talent of the village itself. How hard could it be to procure an act of such breath-taking ability that the village would be talking about it for weeks (or maybe just on the Monday morning)?

It was Elsa Fairweather who had opened the bid by telling the committee that she had once been a ballerina (the truth was that she’d spontaneously broken into dance during the Christmas play at school when she was acting as third shepherd – she had got fed up pointing at the Star and decided that shepherds might dance in times of boredom). She was now twenty-seven years of age and hadn’t done anything so physical for the last twenty years.

Elsa was one of those ladies who tended to get up everyone’s nose – it wasn’t what she did, or said, or in the way she acted – she just annoyed people. Every village has at least one Elsa – it is the rule. Elsa wasn’t a bad person, rather she was just someone who had got off the bus at the wrong stop.

Not to be outdone by her nemesis, Alison had said that she could tap-dance – when Elsa remarked that so could she – Alison had upped the stakes by adding that what she had meant to say, was that she could tap-dance while standing at the top of a ladder. Elsa took a little time to recoup and then opened with another bid, by saying that she could stand on her hands at the top of the ladder while singing the National Anthem.

Jane was sure she could hear Alison swearing under her breath – but there wasn’t enough time to ask her, for, by then, Jane had told the committee that she could sing all the songs from Oklahoma while tight-rope walking across the sports' field.

Alison definitely heard Elsa say an extremely rude word out loud, and one or two of the Fete committee also heard her. Mr Grove’s face went a very tomato red as he fiddled with his cardigan buttons.

Elsa’s husband gave his wife one of those ‘here we go again’ looks and nodded to her to go to the back of the hall. Elsa and her long-suffering husband huddled together in the corner and it was difficult for Alison to hear what they were saying.

That was when Alison came up with a rather neat plan – every few seconds, she coughed, and when she did that, she used the noise to cover the rocking of her chair back a little. Although Alison thought she was being subtle, she had moved her chair back several feet (after a few coughs) and was heading towards Elsa – her less-than-subtle plan being obvious to most of those in the hall.

Never-the-less, the plan worked and Alison was sure she heard, Derek (Elsa’s husband) say ‘you cannot be serious, you know you can’t sky-dive’.

After a few minutes (which just gave Alison enough time to stand up and move her seat – less subtly - back to where it had originally been) Elsa reluctantly gave up and said that Alison should sing the songs from the musical while walking a tight-rope. The head of the committee had asked if Alison had an understudy, and Alison had grabbed Jane’s arm and shoved it up in the air. Jane wondered what harm could it possibly do?

So, when Jane got the phone call on the Saturday morning of the Fete – it was Mrs Bacchus, the stern one who always smelled of mothballs – who had told Jane that Alison was incapacitated (some old illness she had caught on a gap-year in India, apparently) and that Jane (as her understudy) would have to take Alison’s place.

And that is why, on that sunny morning, Jane was dressed in her mother’s old tutu with a tartan umbrella for balance, and getting ready to walk a tight-rope (literally and metaphorically) at the Shoreham Village Fete.

Jane saw two things as she started the death-defying feat – when I say death-defying, Alison had originally said she would walk the rope at 20 feet above the ground (she had actually said five feet but after much tutting from Elsa, Alison had ended up agreeing to that neck breaking height). When Jane (in her tutu) started crying, the committee kept lowering the rope until it was just two feet high. Still high enough to twist an ankle, was how Jane had sold it to them.

So, with all the great and good, and ne’er-do-wells from Shoreham Village watching, Jane managed to move several feet along the rope while singing a Bay City Rollers' song (she didn’t actually know too many proper songs - she had thought of singing ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’ – until the nerves she was suffering from had actually given her that very problem).

The other thing she saw, whilst standing aloft, was Alison at the back of the crowd, (in her sunglasses) smiling. She even had the cheek to wave and stick her thumbs up. To add insult to injury, Alison mouthed the words ‘good luck’. 

Jane was just about to mouth a very rude word back to her when little Barry Smith twanged the rope she was standing on – causing her to suddenly fly across the bales of hay and straight into the bar, ending up with half a packet of Chorizo flavoured crisps up her nose.

There was spontaneous applause from the whole field.
The committee have asked Jane if she can repeat her act next year. Elsa is learning to sky-dive.

(The real Village Fete is on Sunday June 11th, 2017)
bobby stevenson 2017