From the East Anglian Daily Times
HOW THE SUMMER PASSED...
I study this photograph, which was messaged to me last Tuesday, just before the funeral. I’m guessing that it was taken one summer in the mid 1970s. Back then, we weren’t all taking pictures of each other the whole time, were we? Especially not in our places of work. For many of us a camera, if we had one, usually only came out on high days and holidays.
The photo unlocks a 46 year-old time-capsule.The building pictured, was a popular Colchester restaurant called Bistro 9. For much of my 20s, I was the kitchen porter and washer upper there. I also hoovered both restaurants, upstairs and down, cleaned the bogs, and lugged wine deliveries up to the storeroom. One of my specialities was removing spilt candle-wax from the carpets, using newspaper and a hot iron. That was the day job. Night-times and weekends I was the singer in a band. That’s me in the photo with the messy blond hair, wearing the chef’s spare white jacket and some ghastly flares. I must have been doing a filthy job that day to have donned those old lionels.
My workmates, pictured here look bright and cheerful, just as I remember them. Being mostly in our 20s, we sometimes hung out together socially, sharing our laughs and confiding our youthful heartaches. The tall girl standing in the doorway, at the top of the stairs is Lis. She listens to Radio 4 while she preps the veg in a shed just out back of the restaurant. Sitting on the steps (centre) in the white hat is Marcus the chef, a great bloke and my very good mate. We worked together for five years. He’s a keen cricketer, a rabid Beatles fan and an incurable prankster. If I’m looking slightly uneasy here, it’s because, typically, Marcus has slyly clamped his hand on my inner thigh and I’m struggling to stay still for the shot.
Sitting in front of Marcus, hands clasped together and smiling is Penny – our cute teenage starters-and-puddings cook. She’s a farmer’s daughter from the Blackwater estuary. Within a few short years these three people, Lis, Marcus and Penny will all be running their own successful restaurants. On the left-hand side, the dark-haired girl is Lou. She’s Penny’s horse-mad younger sister, currently assisting Marcus in a job which we called middle-kitchen. The girl with the long dark hair (far left) is Gill, a part-time waitress:very bright, keen on poetry and possessed of a sharp wit.
Lastly, next to me, in pigtails and a russet dress, is Kate the downstairs waitress.
She and Gill attended Colchester County High School for Girls together. Kate, recently graduated with an English degree from Lancaster University, is a thoroughly good soul who, among much else is destined to become a great teacher.
Unseen in the pic is Jane, who’s taking the photo. She attended the County High with Gill and Kate, but having married young, now has two children and is waitressing part-time. This happy picture is also a snapshot of my generation at the outset of our adult lives.
What happens next? Lis, the tall girl who chops the veg becomes a restaurateur. First she gets a van and starts selling late-night food on campus to the hungry students emerging from gigs. Then she saves up and gets her own restaurant on East Hill, Colchester. Penny, with the curly hair, later buys the Bistro. She keeps me on and we carry on working together for years. During this period, I sometimes take time off to make records or write my first book. She always takes me back.
Not sure what her sister Lou does now, but the last time I saw a picture of her, she was still on a horse. Gill, following some teaching work, goes to Sicily where she marries a professional pianist. Marcus the chef moves over to run his own restaurant in Halstead. Kate the downstairs waitress, soon embarks upon her long and distinguished teaching career. So, what about that unkempt kitchen porter wearing the chef’s spare jacket -- possibly following a recent water-fight? Well, after a lot of messing about, he becomes John Boy Walton, the chronicler of this group’s times. These were the lovely, hard-working young Essex people with whom I shared my threadbare 20s.
Lis Barber the girl in the doorway, died a couple of years back. Marcus the chef was taken by Hodgkins disease, 40 summers ago. Gill and Lou, I haven’t seen for some years and Penny Campbell runs an immortal food pub called The Crown at Messing. I’m still in touch with her. Kate Nevard, in the russet dress, moved to Wivenhoe in 1979 ‘temporarily’ – like me. Also like me, she never left. Her funeral was last week. The church was packed with so many people, myself included, whom she’d either taught, befriended or helped in some way. These roots go deep. As do my affections. How cruelly time passes.
Picture by Jane Wilson (who became a solicitor)
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