Dunkirk Revisited

This week sees the 85th anniversary of the evacuation of the British army from Dunkirk, so I thought I'd repost my father's account of his experiences there, which I originally published in 2017 after Christopher Nolan's rather air-brushed film had appeared. As usual I've lightly edited it, but it's substantially the same post.

Dunkirk

Before the War
(bike: probably a Phelon & Moore Red Panther)

Following the release of Christopher Nolan's film, and now the 85th anniversary of the actual events, there has been a revival of interest in that curiously mythic event of May/June 1940, the evacuation of Dunkirk; perhaps the "hardest" Brexit imaginable, and the epitome of the British love of a magnificent defeat. As it happens, my father was at Dunkirk, and in his final years I managed to persuade him to commit to paper his vivid memories of this and the rest of his military service as a Royal Signals despatch rider, which spanned the entire war, from France, through the Western Desert, and finally to India and Burma, eventually arriving home from Burma on VE Day. As an independent agent, criss-crossing the landscape from unit to unit, an observant DR necessarily got a wider-perspective view of the war than the average soldier. I have extracted here the chapter describing his experience of Dunkirk in its entirety.

Chapter Four (Dunkirk) from: Memories of a WW2 Despatch Rider, by Douglas Chisholm.

Got back to base one evening to find Bill Asher had got a fire going with a dixie boiling ready to brew some tea. I took off my gloves and respirator and hung them on a gate post - suddenly there was a loud whooosh and a big bang, the fire and dixie went up in the air in a cloud of ashes and steam. I dived into a ditch on top of someone who beat me to it - there were twigs and leaves falling from the bushes on to my face, presumably from bullets or shrapnel. After a short while it quietened down and I went to get my gloves and respirator; the gloves were stitched to the gatepost by splinters of wood and the respirator was cut to ribbons - the haversack was in shreds and the carbon granules were dribbling out of the canister. I had to find the Quartermaster to sanction the issue of a new respirator; I don't think he was very pleased, it probably meant a lot of paper-work! I kept the gloves as a souvenir.

Riding through a village I caught up a convoy of French horse-drawn vehicles, guns, etc., when we were jumped by several Stukas who started bombing and strafing. Soon there were dead and wounded horses all over the road, some trying to gallop away with overturned wagons.  The noise was horrendous, the screams from the planes as they dived, bombs, machine guns, horses screaming, French running in all directions. I was in a ditch trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, when a Frenchman joined me saying over and over "Oh, mon Dieu!"; he had a nasty gash on his wrist and had no field dressing so I bound him up with mine.

Another time I worked my way to the front of a column of vehicles to discover they were stopped by level-crossing gates. I sat there for what seemed hours, keeping a watch for unfriendly planes; I folded my arms along the handlebars and rested my head on them. I felt so tired, the next thing I knew I was lying on the road with the bike on top of me. I had fallen asleep!

Riding through places that had been bombed was hairy, there was broken glass, wooden door frames with large nails sticking out, roof tiles, bricks, all very unstable and liable to cause punctures.  I soon realised that being on a bike was not the best way of knowing what was going on all around, it was difficult to hear any but the loudest and closest noises and impossible to see what was happening behind, so I began to stop occasionally and listen; I also watched carefully the actions and reactions of anyone, especially if they were paying close attention to the area behind me. If there was any sign of unwelcome activity I got off the road as soon as possible, parked the bike, and  moved swiftly off the road at right angles to the direction of approach of the problem.  I fully agreed with the lesson rammed home by the instructors at Prestatyn: "the safety of the message is the most important thing", as that also implied my safety!

One raid resulted in me being covered in white dust which I assumed to be chalk.  It did not come off very easily, so I must have looked a strange sight. Later I caught up with some of the section just after dark. Occasionally it became as light as day, someone was firing parachute flares which hung in the sky for quite a while. I went into a small room at the rear of a building and in the dark managed to find a vacant space between some of the lads already asleep on the floor.  I thought the floor felt a bit bumpy, but a chance to get some sleep was most welcome. At first light I went outside, to discover that the room was a coal shed, and I was now covered in a mixture of chalk and coal-dust.

Refugees heading west away from the Germans were a big problem, they came in cars, buses, horse-carts, on horse-back, bicycles, prams, wheelbarrows, just walking, all spread right across the road going in the opposite direction to what we were going, and threading through the crowds was hard work. They were a sitting target for German bombers and fighters who just flew up and down the roads unchallenged. So some of the sights along the way were not very pleasant. Gradually, mixed in with the civilians I saw occasional khaki uniforms, they had no weapons or steel helmets, just mixing in with the crowds. Sometimes as the result of a raid there would be groups of bodies, men, women and children pulled off the road, perhaps under some trees and left there. After a time I suppose we just got to the stage when it became the norm and no longer felt involved in something over which we had no control.

During one of these strafes I felt a thump on my right leg just below the knee. That night when I took off my boots the right sock was caked with blood,  whatever hit me had gone through the very thin skin on my shin almost to the bone. Luckily I had a spare pair of socks and the wound was not painful and it healed quite quickly.

During the early days we were riding quite deep into Belgium, but slowly it seemed that we were not going so far, and units were moving west. We recrossed the French border near Poperinghe. As we moved back deeper into France I was detached from the Section, to work with a captain with several trucks with wireless and other equipment. The captain seemed to be in a bit of a flap, got his map out and said, "Go and see if we can get to this location along these lanes". I went and took a look, and told him, "We can get the lorries through, and there is no sign of enemy activity". Off we went, it was a bit tight in places, and when we arrived at the spot pointed out by the captain I got a roasting because the overhanging trees and bushes had scratched the paint on some of the lorries!

Soon the columns of refugees thinned out and there were practically no civilians, but more and more uniforms, some I didn't recognise, all without rifles. They took up the whole width of the roads, so it was easier to get up on the verges and have a bumpy but quicker journey. For the first time there were lorries heading in a northerly direction packed with British uniforms and looking lost. I kept getting asked, "Is this the way to Dunkirk?", and when I'd helped they went off in a hurry.

We began to see mixed groups of men from various regiments and different arms walking in the same direction as the lorries had gone, a fair number still carrying their rifles.

I was attached to a major with a wireless truck. As the messages came in we'd go off to find a unit, occasionally on return to our starting place someone would be waiting with a new map reference, always further north or north-west. The fields alongside the roads (which were on raised banks) were being covered with water, to make it more difficult for Jerry tanks. If bombs or shells landed in the fields up went fountains of mud and water.

One night we slept on the edge of a field under a hedge with the bikes out of sight from aircraft. We were woken at first light and told not to start the bikes, but to wheel them to the edge of a railway line, then at intervals carry the bikes over the tracks without any metal touching the lines, wheel the bikes a considerable distance, before being allowed to start up. We never found out why. Up to that time I had been wearing over my battle-dress a Barbour suit, it was warm and waterproof and although it was fraying on one leg from battery acid spillage caused when I'd fallen off a few times, I liked it because it was ideal when sleeping outdoors. But about this time an infantry officer advised me to stop wearing it because, being a greeny-grey colour, some of his chaps might mistake me for a Jerry and take appropriate action, so I dumped it.

While riding it was difficult to be aware what was going on all around - apart from the engine noise, trying to ride against the flow of men and trucks took a lot of concentration. I found that watching the column coming towards me gave early warning of a bombing or strafing attack; the column peeled off the road on either side like earth off a ploughshare. A Jerry fighter came towards us at ground level followed by a Spitfire. To stop the Spit from firing the Jerry flew straight along the road just above our heads - to our delight the Spit got his propeller under the Jerry's tail and slowly pulled up, forcing Jerry to climb or have his tail cut off. They climbed, one under the other until Jerry levelled out, the Spit followed, a short burst of machine gun fire, the Jerry tipped on his nose and crashed into a flooded field, burying the plane well past the cockpit. A great cheer went down the line of men who were by now back on the road, heading north.

Our next move was to the house of a smallholding just off the road. We could now see the cloud of black smoke hanging over Dunkirk and watch bombing raids on the town. The columns of men no longer needed to ask the way, all they had to do was head for the smoke. They were by now very ragged looking; occasionally a company of infantry would march by in good order, but not often. There was abandoned equipment everywhere, in fields and side roads.  I was amazed to see a field full of artillery and big ack-ack guns, it looked like hundreds of them, many of them had their barrels pointing to the sky, but the barrels had the ends blown out like the petals of a flower.

One night I was riding through a small village and was slowed down by an M.P. with a torch: there were hundreds of infantry men lying in the market place in orderly rows as if on parade - three ranks in perfect lines. I could only assume they were one of the Guards Regiments taking a rest before marching on.

I had scrounged a mug of tea from the crew of a Bofors gun when a twin tailed plane came into sight from the north, they got off several clips of shells before the plane veered away and disappeared. I said "I reckon that was a Lockheed Hudson, one of ours". They said for them every plane is unfriendly.

In training, Sherwood Forest (no, really)

In France

(bikes: BSA WD M20)

By now the journeys were getting shorter and more frequent, so every opportunity was taken to get a few minutes sleep. Petrol was obtainable by syphoning it from abandoned vehicles, the bikes stood up to the rough treatment very well. During one trip along a cinder track I suddenly found myself on my back, the bike several yards away. I hadn't heard a bang or seen a flash so I stayed where I was. Nothing happened so I checked myself over, my right elbow was very sore and the battle-dress sleeve torn and frayed a bit. Just below the elbow was a large graze, so I checked the bike - just a bent footrest and brake lever and that was that. I saw some RAMC blokes, they had a look and told me that I'd live and asked if it hurt?  I said no, and they said, "It will now", and they rubbed some sort of gel into the graze and I was sent on my way.

Digging a slit trench one day we unearthed boxes of .303 rifle ammunition in very good order, but dated from WW1, just about eighteen inches below ground.

A group of Artillery men stopped for a rest on the verge near us and I saw they were concerned for a young officer who had his great coat slung over his shoulders and looked "all-in". I went across and asked if I could help and noticed that a piece of shrapnel triangular in shape, each side about an inch and a half long was wedged vertically in the brim of his steel helmet, just in line with his eye, so I said, "That was close".  He said he wasn't worried about that, then showed me his right shoulder which was a mangled mess of blood and bandages. There was nothing I could do, and after a while they resumed their trek to Dunkirk. Later I wondered if they were the survivors of a group of four Bofors guns I had watched being bombed, machine-gunned and knocked out in a field earlier that day.

The sound of gunfire was gradually coming nearer and we seemed to be increasingly inactive, then one day the major said we had finished our job, we were to destroy the wireless sets and vehicles and make our own way to the beach at Dunkirk. I didn't fancy walking what seemed quite a way to the smoke cloud, so I rode to the outskirts of the town, then drained the oil out of the engine, set the throttle to high rev's, kick-started the engine, and set fire to the petrol tank and walked away.

It was evening by the time I got onto the beach, there were groups in trenches dug in the sand, others seemed to be wandering around aimlessly. Some were wading out to sea hoping to get on one of the small boats that came in as close as possible.  I took off my boots and hung them round my neck and got to the water's edge, realised it was low tide and decided to wait until the tide was right in, then I wouldn't have so far to wade in order to get on a boat.

I walked up and down the beach for a time wondering if I would see anyone I knew, but no luck. There were lorries that had been driven out as far as possible at low tide, so at high tide they formed a jetty which gave easier access to the boats. I made myself a hole and tried to get a few minutes sleep, but air raids on the larger boats waiting well out to sea made it difficult.  I watched one raid and was sure I saw one bomb go right down the funnel of a destroyer which seemed to explode in slow motion. When the smoke cleared there was nothing left.

At high tide there were bodies being washed ashore so I gave a hand to drag them above the high tide mark. Two torpedoes suddenly hurtled up the beach clear of the water, their propellers sending up cascades of sand and water - we backed well away until I suppose the compressed air in their motors ran out, then they just lay there, like a couple of stranded fish.

A rumour went round that we should make our way to the East Mole at dusk, so I thought I'd give it a try. It was dark when I got to the mole and we were marshalled by a group of sailors into single file and then told to move along, there seemed to be hundreds of French soldiers just standing there watching, it was very eerie. Once on the mole we realised why we were in single file, great holes had been blown in the concrete and these had been bridged by planks about two feet wide and we could hear the waves about twenty feet below. When we got on a solid piece of mole we were told "wait, make way for wounded".  Some were on foot others on stretchers, when they passed we moved on again. Finally some more sailors helped us onto a slide made from planks and we slid down quite a distance and landed on the deck of a ship. We were told to spread ourselves round the ship. I got my back against a rail of some sort and sat down. I woke up to the fact that we were moving so dozed off again. I vaguely remember hearing a machine gun on the ship firing, and thought that everything must be under control, so went back to sleep.

At dawn I got up and had a look round and realised that although it was a civvy ship it was manned entirely by the Navy, then I was amazed to find that it was the ship in which I had sailed from Southampton to Le Havre - the "Tynwald". I think we docked at Dover and were surprised to see flags and banners waving and women offering us tea and sandwiches. We were hustled quickly on to a train waiting in the docks (we were not a pretty sight!), and off we went. If we went slowly through a station people ran alongside the train offering food and cups of tea, we were puzzled by all the flag waving and cheering, having just been chased out of France.

We arrived at Winchester station and were lorried to the Kings Royal Rifles barracks, given two blankets, and shown into a barrack hut where I got down on the floor and sank into a peaceful sleep.

After Dunkirk

Dad died in 2008; he was 89, just one month short of his 90th birthday. He was never one for going on about the war – "swinging the lamp", as they called it –  but he had a terrific album of photographs taken by others in his unit which, as a young boy, I stumbled across in the bottom drawer of a bedroom wardrobe. I regularly used to open it up and pore over the photographs. I would insist on knowing all about the who, where, and what of those mainly benign images, and Dad would reluctantly revisit the not-so-distant past, no doubt redacting his memories somewhat for my childish ears. For boys of my age, born in the 1950s, WW2 occupied a similar place in the imagination to that held by Star Wars, say, or even Lord of the Rings for later generations. It must have been hard for our fathers to have reality and fantasy constantly brought together in such a potentially "triggering" way, as we would say now, in the form of comics, toys, and their own children running around the streets and woods playing "army".

When they realised they were getting too old to look after themselves, my parents moved from Hertfordshire to Norfolk, in order to live in a mobile home in my sister's back garden. For the sake of some company, Dad joined the local branch of the Dunkirk Association, where men of like age and with a shared, unique experience could swing the lamp a bit over a cup of tea (men in their eighties tend not to drink pints). This was how he found himself at the epicentre of one of the darkest chapters in the Dunkirk story, the massacre of captured British troops of the Royal Norfolk Regiment by the SS at Le Paradis. This terrible story can be read here.

Talking with these Norfolk veterans, I think, shifted something in his perception of his own wartime experiences, rather like realising – fifty-five years after the event – what a close-run thing it had been at times, not just nationally, but personally. For the first time, he began reading accounts of the war and attending Remembrance Day events in chilly Norfolk village churchyards. He asked me to find him a copy of this painting by Charles Cundall, which he'd seen on TV:

The Withdrawal from Dunkirk, June 1940, by Charles Cundall

I bought a print of it from the Imperial War Museum, which he had framed and hung over his bed. Shortly before he died, he said to me, "You know that painting of the beach at Dunkirk? It's not quite right, you know. Those great big clouds of black smoke? I'm pretty sure they were blowing the other way." Dad's memory being what it was, right to the end, I'm sure he was right.

Twyford Down III

When it finally comes time to sequence a book, I have found that making some very small prints that can be dealt out onto the table like a pack of cards is a good way to kickstart what can otherwise seem a daunting task. Twenty-four 7 cm square photos fit nicely onto an A3+ sheet (13" x 19"), for example, which can then be cut up. That way, just two or three sheets will provide a booksworth of prints.

Spread out like this, a lot of things immediately become clearer than they ever would by repeatedly shuffling through a stack of larger prints.

Straight away, you start to see duplicates and obvious pairings for facing pages, and by constant critical scrutiny and re-ordering of the deck the rhythm and shape of a book sequence starts to emerge. The obvious pairings give way to better ones, and the stand-out images start to determine the key points around which the sequence will be hung, as if in a gallery: there's no point in blowing all the best stuff in the first few pages, or keeping it all to last. It also exposes the gaps: there will be missing pictures you need to go back to the files and look for, or even go out again and take. There may not be enough scene-setting images, for example, or too many taken at the same time of year, or in the same place from the same vantage point, and so on. A book, like an exhibition, invites a narrative, even when it's just a book of landscape photographs. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find it.

You might say all this is a waste of time and effort, of course.

For a start – and setting aside the stark fact that hardly anybody will ever buy or handle a copy of your book – hardly anyone other than fellow practitioners appreciates that the contents of a visual book will have been (or ought to have been) arranged with this sort of care and attention to detail. But, in a way, that's the whole point: a well-sequenced book should simply feel right, and be a pleasure to page through. It's not unlike the care someone might take in preparing their appearance – clothes, hair, shoes, accessories – for a big night out; in the end they should just look good and appropriately dressed, no analysis required. People only really notice when some clueless dork like me has turned up to collect the Nobel Prize for Blogging wearing hiking boots, jeans, and a tie-less, un-ironed shirt. What? Why is everybody whispering?

Also, it's quite unusual for anyone actually to page through a book sequentially, front to back, page by page. They'll open it at random, home in on those standout images – oh, I like that one! – and may just glance at the "filler" that doesn't immediately hold their attention. Besides, it's a fact that for left-handers like me it's simply natural to hold a book in your right hand, and let the pages fall from your left thumb starting from the back: to page from the front is simply too awkward. Don't believe me, you righties? Try paging through a substantial visual book from the back without creasing or dog-earing any pages – or even dropping it as the weight flip-flops in your left hand – and you'll see what I mean. These are great arguments for the virtues of the PDF flip-book, of course. [1]

So, unless you're going for some "creative" scrap-book style layout (my advice? Don't...), the really crucial decisions are all about the facing pages. The traditional-but-bland layout for a photobook is to have a single image on the right-hand side, faced by a blank page on the left, possibly with a caption on it or a running title at the top of the page. This looks elegant, saves a lot of effort and handily doubles the page count: convenient if you only have a small number of candidate photos. More interesting, though, I think, is to have at least a few well-chosen pairings of two facing images, and this can often best be achieved not by careful thought but by playing around with those little prints laid out on the kitchen table. Otherwise, how would you ever come up with that serendipitous placing of X next to B, when X next to Z had seemed so obvious at first?

Some variations in image size can engage the attention, too, and, if you're really going for the narrative approach, why not have the occasional page with a couple of small images as a sort of punctuation? In the end, a book is not a portfolio, and visual interest will trump absolute image quality nearly every time. Unless you're thinking of spreading one picture across two pages, with the result that some of it vanishes into the central "gutter"... Again: don't; just don't. It works in magazines, but virtually never works in a book. You can trust me on that one...

But, hey, why listen to me? Go and make your own mistakes! I've got sequencing to do.

1.  I put a lot of effort into sequencing this one, for example, one of my first serious attempts at bookmaking, following my exhibition at Mottisfont Abbey in 2003/4. Whether it works better as a hard-copy book or as a flip-book is an interesting question.

Twyford Down II

The picture above is the earliest in my current retrospective Twyford Down "project". Somehow it looks a bit ancient, too, in a painterly kind of way. By around 2010 our children were both young adults leading independent lives, so weekend rambles were becoming more frequent, ambitious, and wide-ranging. What, you've never tried dragging a tired toddler or sulky teen across a muddy field? In particular, I had begun to explore the area around St. Catherine's Hill and the Hockley Viaduct, an abandoned Victorian railway structure near Winchester that had become semi-derelict. Standing on the viaduct one day, I realised you could see into the Twyford Down cutting and, as I happened to have a telephoto lens on my camera – then a 12 MP Canon 450D – took some pictures. This particular one was taken in March 2011 standing on some high ground on the opposite side of the M3.

A lot of the photographs made around then were consolidated into a Blurb book, England and Nowhere, that I put together in 2016 (also to be seen in higher resolution on Issuu here). Naturally, I've taken a lot more photographs in the subsequent decade, with higher resolution kit as well as a more practiced eye and more sophisticated processing skills. So, in addition to the wide format photographs described in the previous post, I've been making some more frame-friendly square photographs. I have always enjoyed the challenge of composing within a square – not as easy as it might look – which started for me back in the days of film when I was lugging around a hefty Mamiya C330 as my "serious" camera, and subsequently when I discovered the pleasure of using lightweight old folding cameras like the Agfa Isolette. You can really get down to the essence of what works in a picture by grappling with the constraints of a square frame, and cropping a square out of a rectangular image is not unlike going over a piece of writing and cutting out the superfluous verbiage.

Out of about 300 candidate image files I have now made about 60 squares, of which I'd say 40 are top quality, by my standards at any rate, and the remainder are B+ images, perfectly good enough to be used as linking and scene-setting images in yet another Blurb book sequence, which is where all this is inevitably heading. I think a 20% hit-rate is about right, and there's probably nothing more in there to be extracted, especially given the inevitable repetition of working such a small area over many years.

Here are a few of them, in no particular order. They're not spectacular, in landscape porn terms, but true to the patchwork spirit of the place, and it's undeniable that the clouds up there are often quite something. The fun part of finding the pictures is pretty much completed now, and the hard work of polishing and sequencing has yet to begin.

In case you can't read it at this size and reduced quality, the engraved stone in the first picture reads "THIS LAND WAS RAVAGED BY G. Malone, J. MacGregor, R. Key, J. Major, D. Keep, C. Parkinson, C.Patten, M. Thatcher, C. Chope". Some of those names will be very familiar to Brits who were politically-aware in the 1980s and 90s. I've no idea who erected the stone there, at the very edge of Twyford Down overlooking the motorway – it's very nicely done, and reminiscent of the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay at his garden at Little Sparta – but it has since fallen over (or more likely been pushed over) and broken into several pieces. So it goes... But should anyone propose any further encroachment onto this land I'll be dusting off my protesting hat and signing up with the Dongas Tribe.

Twyford Down

I doubt that Twyford Down is any longer a name that invokes much by way of association, but in the 1990s it was the scene of prolonged protests and their violent suppression by the police and private "security". The cause was the proposal to excavate an enormous passage through the ancient chalk landscape adjacent to Winchester, in order to accommodate the M3 motorway. My protesting days were over by then, having transmuted into an all-consuming combination of nappy-changing and long days at the office, but it was a big deal at the time, all over the news, and saw the beginnings of an environmental movement in Britain committed to direct action. It also saw a curious alliance between the local landed gentry and camped-out nomadic "crusties".

Ancient history now: the digging got dug, regardless, and the motorway has been bypassing Winchester for decades. If there's some kind of traffic jam at the Winchester turn-off, what most people see as they gaze out of the car window is this:

More often, though, it will be some variation on this, as they speed through:

But above the cutting Twyford Down survives, permanently separated from St. Catherine's Hill by this uncrossable river of traffic where there once was a shoulder of chalky downland, although still linked by a single footbridge (you can just about make it out in that driver's eye view). For us, it became a place to take weekend walks, and I have recently begun to collate and edit the many photographs I have taken there. A wide format seems to match the expansive, rolling feel of the place.

It's still a magical place, an elevated plateau bearing a patchwork of flinty ploughed fields, chalk downland grazed by cattle and sheep, and at its southern end a golf course, where the presence of the motorway and nearby Winchester fade away into insignificance, and you can hear the songs of rival larks rising ever higher above you.

Winchester from Twyford Down

St. Catherine's Hill, the M3 cutting, and Twyford Down from the south

Twyford Down as seen from the Itchen Navigation water-meadows

Only Five Leaves Left

Once upon a time, only labourers, style-conscious inverted snobs, and impoverished eccentrics used to roll their own cigarettes. Smoking tobacco was an unremarkable and universal habit – not to smoke was the unusual choice – but the way you did it was a strong marker of social status. The men digging a hole in the road or laying bricks on a building site would be smoking "rollies" along with their ultra-strong and super-sweetened tea; anyone else bought their twenty cigarettes – or, back then in post-War austerity Britain, sometimes just ten – ready-made in a packet. [1] Unless, of course, they smoked cigars or, worse, a pipe: both vile and antisocial habits capable of clearing a room, the pipe strongly associated with (male) teachers and academics. As I have remarked before, to open the door of any teachers' common room at lunchtime before the 1970s was like opening a fire-exit to Hell, allowing a multi-branded fug to billow out in a suffocating, toxic pall.

For everyone, though, from brickie to Oxbridge don, your choice of brand was an early form of consumerist self-expression: I can't think of any other single product stocked in such diversity and with such attention to distinctive packaging as tobacco. Cigarette packets and tobacco tins were little masterpieces of exuberant graphic design and typography, boosted by dubious advertising slogans and tempting collectibles for the young in the shape of cigarette cards. For hand-rollers a two-ounce tin was a permanent, decorative, and air-tight pocket vault in which to keep your half-ounce refills of tobacco, rolling papers, and perhaps even some filters or one of those hammock-style rolling gizmos for the hopelessly cack-handed.

In Britain, the brand Rizla dominated the market for hand-rolling papers. To the extent that – like Hoover or, um, Durex – the brand was synonymous with the product. You asked for a "packet of [colour] Rizlas", where [colour] was your choice of three: red for standard weight papers; green for standard weight papers with two corners cut off to enhance rollability; and blue for a lighter weight of paper, the nimble-fingered sophisticate's choice. There was also an orangey-yellow for the unspeakable liquorice-flavoured variety, although why anyone ever thought those were a good idea is beyond me.

Surprisingly few people seem to have realised that these ubiquitous papers were actually a French product in origin, or had worked out that the attractively typographic name "Rizla" placed alongside a large cross (in heraldic terms, a "cross potent") was, in fact, a play on the name of the manufacturers, Lacroix – la croix being French for "the cross" – who made "rice" papers (riz in French). Thus: Riz Lacroix became Rizla + ... QED.

Things changed with regard to who hand-rolled their cigarettes when higher education was opened up to anyone capable of benefitting from it. In the 1960s, many young people from all social classes found themselves temporarily impoverished as students and discovered the advantages of “rolling your own”. As did those who had adopted the fashionable student lifestyle – studenticals? – often funded by "signing on" for state benefits, which in those days were sufficiently generous to be like living on a very modest trust fund. Without this support for motivated idleness, the creative scene in pre-1980s Britain would have been very different.

Aside from the obvious attraction of economy, there was also the anti-bourgeois cachet that hand-rolling seemed to endow, not least in beery, folk-singing, left-wing circles. Nothing, it seemed, said "boycott apartheid South Africa", or "nuclear disarmament" as much as a badly-made ciggie, plus a duffle coat, a chunky-knit sweater, more pints than was wise or necessary, and a boisterous chorus of “The Wild Rover”. Perhaps to some rolling your own signified the unalienated labour of the artisan, but for most it simply gave a vague sense of solidarity with the hole-diggers and brick-layers. All together now... "I spent all me money on whisky and beer!"

© 1974 Fiona Thompson

Then, as the decade progressed, Reefer Madness took a hold on our impressionable young people. Many youngsters who otherwise would probably never have become smokers – the health hazards of tobacco were well-established by the 1960s – became habitual hand-rollers through a desire to take part in the new “underground” subculture. Or at least the part of it that involved getting pleasantly stoned rather than horribly drunk. Why? Because in cold, rainy Britain, cannabis usually came in the form of solid resin – smuggled into the country in improbable quantities from the Middle East – and this was generally prepared by crumbling it into tobacco contained in an improvised sheet made by sticking three papers together, with a rolled cardboard "roach" stuffed in one end. Part of the top torn off a Rizla packet made a handy roach, so the display of a mutilated packet became a secret handshake between members of the Stoner Community, as we'd probably dignify habitual potheads these days.

Other social changes were reflected in hand-rolling, too; subtly at first, then rather less so. For example, for many years a packet of Rizlas had contained a little printed slip that emerged as you came towards the end of the packet which read "Only 5 leaves left"; a nicely-judged and discreet hint, like a polite cough. It was pleasant to think that the guys digging a hole in the road appreciated and deserved this courtesy. However, towards the middle years of the 1970s this gentle nudge was replaced by the blunt imperative, "Time to buy another packet": it seemed that hand-rollers were now deemed too dense to take a hint, and a little bit of poetry and politesse had gone from the world. Then, worse, Rizla started making "king-size" papers, which was embarrassing, frankly, in its opportunistic knowingness, and rather too much like your parents deciding that jeans were quite comfy to wear, after all, and buying a pair in M&S. (For my rant about jeans, see the post Bar Tacked At Points Of Strain).

With such small straws in the wind the full-on late-capitalist consumer society – in which nothing would be sacred, out of bounds, or incapable of appropriation and exploitation – was heralding its arrival. For many of us born before 1960 there was a distinct “before and after” located somewhere in the 1970s that separated what we might call, in Blakean terms, the years of innocence and those of experience, between the three-paper DIY counterculture of army-surplus greatcoats and charity-shop dresses and the commodified off-the-peg youth fashion trends of the High Street. You might say that so-called "punk" was a doomed attempt to regain that lost innocence. But it was already too late for many: those years of the late 1960s and early 1970s had been a massive creative vortex that threw up so much that was new and wonderful, but which quickly went into reverse and became the plughole down which too many "boomers" vanished, their descent sped by drink, drugs, and a stubborn refusal to play by the new rules.

Which brings me to the sad story of singer-songwriter Nick Drake. The poetic and, as it turned out, prophetic title of his first album Five Leaves Left – laid-back to the point of somnolence – is clearly one those nudging insider references that, if you got it (or, more likely, had it explained to you [2]), meant you could feel you were in with the in-crowd. But his tragically truncated life was a parable of the times: the story of how a sensitive, talented misfit could for a short time shine brightly, but never brightly enough to attract commercial success. Many thousands, like me, will have heard and admired “Time Has Told Me”, his track on the cheap Island Records "sampler" album Nice Enough to Eat, but very few went on to buy the album. Quite apart from anything else, for regular teens in 1969 full-price LP records were far too expensive to be a speculative pocket-money purchase; we still lived in a 7-inch "singles" culture. Then, after a couple more commercial failures – and despite the best efforts of friends, fellow musicians, and his record company – he declined into a paranoid, lonely, and ultimately terminal medicated sulk, dying of an overdose of antidepressants, whether deliberate or accidental, while in retreat back at his parents’ house. Sadly, he didn’t even make it to membership of the 27 Club.

I smoked my last ever roll-up in December 1989 – one of the few New Year's resolutions to endure beyond February – but what better metaphor for the bitter-sweet melancholy of later-life reflection is there than to realise you have lived long enough finally to have drawn the equivalent of that slip reading "only five leaves left"? With any luck there may well still be a fair few good years left for you, if dismayingly fewer than the original full complement, but – contrary to the blunt metaphorical untruth of that later version of the message – there never was and never will be the possibility of buying another packet, not even for those later generations so obsessed by fitness, diet, and "wellbeing". You might think you can identify as immortal but, as another early 70s casualty and full founder member of the 27 Club put it, no one here makes it out alive.

So we more fortunate "olds" who made it through those youthful years relatively unscathed, whether through luck or judgement, had better take the hint, and make the most of whatever is left in our one and only packet of days, striking each off the calendar with a mindful mix of regret and gratitude, and with the occasional glass raised to the "absent friends" who didn't make it this far. And, perhaps, always with a little background buzz of apprehension that the habits and excesses of youth may yet exact a price that was never exactly hidden in the small print of the contracts signed so blithely with various patient demons so very long ago.

© 1974 Fiona Thompson

1. Thereby hangs a tale. On our first (and, in my case, only) trip to the USA in 1980, I was still a hand-rolling smoker. However, for whatever reason, I thought it would be more appropriate to buy regular cigarettes in America, so at the first opportunity I went into a shop and, in the British fashion, asked for “Twenty Marlboro, please!” The guy gave me a quizzical look, disappeared out the back, and came back carrying two bricks of ten Marlboro packets: that is, 400 cigarettes. It seemed no-one had bought cigarettes in tens in living memory in the USA, so specifying the size of packet required was both unnecessary and confusing.

2. This sort of homespun hermeneutical decoding was the essence of playground folklore. I remember that in 68/69 a local Stevenage rock band went by the name Vinegar Tom. It was explained to me by one of my more hip classmates that "vinegar" = "acid" (true enough), and "tom" (Tom Mix) was rhyming slang for "fix" (it's not), so the band's name meant "acid fix", even though nobody ever took a "fix" of LSD (although Google tells me that "acid fix" is now a type of facial care product). So I was duly surprised when I came across this illustration in a book on witchcraft in 1970:

Others had spotted this name, too, most notably playwright Caryl Churchill. You'd imagine there must be some connection to the rather more successful band Vinegar Joe (launchpad of Elkie Brooks and Robert Palmer) but in fact it seems this was the nickname of a WW2 American general. Curiously, "Grizzly Greediguts" (see Familiar No. 4) was still current as a term of abuse in my childhood.

Canned Keats

A while ago I photographed some death masks on display in Edinburgh's National Gallery. They are extraordinary things, death masks. Despite the inevitable contortions, this closest possible contact with the actual face of yer actual Isaac Newton, say, is uncanny, to say the least. In a way, I suppose, the process is a sort of pre-figuration of photography, with plaster taking the place of photons.

The first such mask I ever saw was William Blake's, actually done in life, when it was reproduced on a flyer for an exhibition at Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum in 1970. It struck me then that it looked as if he were listening intently to some profoundly emotional music; Beethoven, perhaps, but possibly also "Gimme Shelter" (much more my style at the time, and still a chills-inducing touchstone), but probably not our friend M.R.I. Bach. Apparently, though, his expression was uncharacteristically severe, due to the discomfort caused by the process: exothermic plaster on the face (or, um, anywhere else on the body) is definitely something best experienced when dead. No need for straws up the nose, either.

Many of the masks I have seen since give exactly the same impression as Blake's; that is, intense closed-eye concentration on music or some other private and intensely pleasurable experience (stop giggling at the back there). Don't believe me? Check these out. So, looking again at a collage I'd made using my photo of John Keats's death mask, it struck me that something important was missing... Then I realised what it was. Much better!