Love

"All love ends in bereavement"
wrote CS Lewis reflecting on the death of his wife in "A Grief Observed"

Anthony J Sargeant comments - Some who grieve may find this short book helpful

Love

"All love ends in bereavement"
C.S.Lewis (from 'A Grief Observed')

A reflection on the use of ‘story’ to tell the truth. 

My Grandmother used to say “are you telling me a story?”

meaning “are you telling me a lie?”

“Telling stories” has a bad press!

And yet there are true stories and there are stories that tell the truth

In a novel “Mourning Roby” by Helen Dunmore, Rebecca the young mother who has lost an only child is told, “sometimes the real story doesn’t tell you the truth.”

Anthony J Sargeant

My First Car by Anthony J Sargeant

My first car was bought from the brother of a friend of mine for £30. It was a 1936 Ford 10. 

I completely overhauled the 4 cylinder side valve engine, grinding in the valves, replacing piston rings, big ends, and on two occasions stripping down the rear axle to replace broken crown and pinion gears in the differential.

My car was repainted by hand in maroon with black mudguards which looked very smart.

For an 18 year old it was great to have a car and to be mobile. I had passed my driving test first time within 6 months of my 18th birthday. I had actually learnt to drive on my fathers 1953 Ford Zephyr which was a big beast of a car but it was thought prudent to take the test on something more modest and so a sit-up-and beg 1949 Ford Popular was borrowed from a friend.

At that time annual MOT tests had started to check basic safety including brakes and lighting of older cars. The only way the Ford 10 would get through such a test was by taking it to a somewhat shady garage underneath the arches in Peckham where the testing standards were less rigorous than perhaps they should have been (also it was run by somebody my father knew).

Nevertheless the Ford did sterling service. Taking four us to North Wales climbing on one occasion and more domestically getting me to rugby matches and even home again in pre-breathalyser days, as well as other social occasions.

With four of us in the car the trip to North Wales and back to London was uneventful except for a number of punctures – perhaps five or six. These were caused by the pinching of the inner tube in the repaired split wall of the outer tyres. In those days it was common practice to glue a reinforced rubber and canvas patch on the inside of the tyre to cover such splits – today you are not allowed to repair even a small nail hole if it is in the side wall. It side wall repair sounds incredibly dangerous but then cars were much slower. Even if a tyre burst you were unlikely to be going very fast and even in those pre-seat belt days you might survive.

The major safety problem with the car was the brakes. The hub brakes were controlled by four steel rods radiating from a central position under the chassis connected directly to the pedal (no hydraulics). It was however extremely difficult to balance this mechanical arrangement and as a consequence the car would veer to one side or the other on braking, which tendency was more serious if the veering was to the off-side and into the face of oncoming traffic. 

The handbrake which only operated on the rear wheels was also ‘difficult’ and on occasions when parking on hills I was forced to ‘lean’ the car against a lamppost so that it did no run away.

Like all Fords up until the 1960s it only had three forward gears which made for less than nippy performance. Then there were mechanical trafficators which popped out from the door pillar when activated …. sometimes, but sometimes didn’t, leaving one to make flailing hand signals.

Instead of an electric motor the windscreen wipers were driven by the suction created in the inlet manifold – all very well until the engine was labouring to climb a hill when the suction fell and with it the speed of the wipers to dead slow – giving little visible on a dark rainy night. 

Then of course there was an electric starter motor which would occasionally get the engine going if the manual choke was carefully adjusted – but more often than not would not and so it was out with the manual starting handle inserted through a slotted hole in the radiator grill.

On two occasions I damaged the crown and pinion in the differential in the rear axle and had to strip this down and replace them with units bought from car scrap yards. 

The first time was the consequence of taking a right hand bend at the bottom of Beckenham Place Park on an autumn day when there were wet leaves on the road. The car spun 360 degrees in front of an oncoming truck but fortunately spun back to the left eventually hitting the nearside kerb. The side impact on the rear wheel broke the crown-wheel inside the differential.

The second time was when on my way back from a seven-a-side rugby tournament in Gravesend I failed to stop at a junction and was hit sideways on by a Mini driven by a young possibly uninsured driver whose father agreed to accept some money – not too much – rather than go through insurance. I had a car full of friends and we were lucky not to be seriously injured. So another trip to the scrap yard for replacement parts.

When I owned the Ford 10 I was playing 1st team rugby every week during the season and would drive to the more local games - which was fine. What was less ‘fine’ was driving home afterwards. Rugby was a very social sport in those days and we would often consume a lot of beer (perhaps 8 to 10 pints of bitter) in the club house after matches and still drive home. It was in the days before breathalysers and real awareness of the dangers of drink-driving. Looking back it is amazing and lucky that we survived unscathed – not to mention innocent third parties – the alcohol compounding the effect of the car’s poor brakes, lights, windscreen wipers and trafficators. Oh Dear – the folly and irresponsibility of youth!

Anthony J Sargeant

A ‘Proustien’ moment – Back to the Future by Anthony Sargeant

Travelling back in time did not require any elaborate machinery, no specially adapted De Lorean Car, no blue police telephone box, no Time Machine.  Only a visit in 2013 to ‘Paddy’s’, the famous butcher in Much Wenlock, was needed. There on an autumn morning my wife bought me a tub of real beef dripping with thick brown jelly at the base. Spread on hot toast and salted at breakfast the next day I was transported back some sixty or more years to a maisonette in Worsley Bridge Road in the 1950s enjoying the unctuous by-product of the roast beef which we often had for Sunday lunch. 

It may seem remarkable that roast beef was a normal Sunday lunch for our family and others like us, when we were, if not poor, certainly having to be very careful with money. I remember at that time often having to hide with my mother and brother and pretend there was nobody at home when the insurance man knocked hoping to collect the weekly payments which my mother did not always have.  But of course the roast rib of beef provided a main meal on Sunday, and then what was left was eaten cold on Monday for the main early evening meal and the remnants were minced up to make shepherd’s pie for Tuesday. But costs and the availability of different meats was quite different. While beef was considered a staple food, chicken was considered a luxury and only eaten on ‘high-days and holidays’ - now it is mass produced and incredibly cheap while a rib of beef would be thought of as a great luxury by today’s working class families.

Anthony J Sargeant

Kellie Castle, 4th August 2004 with Eileen and Patricia by Tony Sargeant

Kellie Castle Gardens - by Anthony J Sargeant



In a corner of the garden

full of straggling roses

scumbled through moss

embedded trees –

a quiet corner

a wondrous sea

of cornflower blue

gently lapping 

in the summer breeze

against a lichened rock

crowned by a chevron

carved stone bowl

overflowing with

wayward  flowers

from long forgot

childhood, unkempt,

wild, unnamed,

bringing peace.

Anthony J Sargeant 1944-1949: ‘Birth to Infants School’ - Memories? False Memory? Remembering Memories?

It is difficult to disentangle real events, real facts, real experiences, real sensations from our ‘remembered memory’, that memory which we successively and unknowingly edit and re-invent whenever we ‘remember’ the past.

So what do I think I remember of the earliest years?  - those years from 1944 until the age of five in 1949 when I started at Elfrida Infants’ School in Elfrida Crescent, just off of King Alfred Avenue on the Bellingham Council Estate in South London.

I have a remembrance of frequent power-cuts at that time. The power-cuts were due to coal shortages for the power stations in the severe winters of 1948, and  1949. It is an often forgotten fact that conscription of young men, not to national service in the military, but unromantically, to the coal mines, continued for some years after the Second World War had finished. These young conscripts were the ‘Bevin Boys’ named after Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour in 1943 - at which time it was realised that the depletion of the labour force in the coal mines by conscripting young men to serve in the military was having a serious impact on the war effort. 

I remember the power-cuts because we would sometimes go round to my grandparents’ house in King Alfred Avenue, where we would sit in the kitchen at the back of the house which still had gaslight. Indeed all of the streets of the Bellingham Estate were lit by gas-lights until about 1950. Only when one got to Southend Lane the ‘modern’ dual carriageway bounding the estate on the southern and eastern side did tall mercury vapour street lights really ‘light’ the streets as opposed to simply providing the dim, but soft and comforting, yellow glimmer emitted by the gas lights – or at least they did until the power cuts extinguished their sharp blue-white glare.

Anthony J Sargeant Tony

‘Suicide bomber or short cut to paradise’ by Anthony Sargeant

Suicide Bomber by Anthony J Sargeant

She left her home,

got on the bus,

to go to work,

or so they thought.

But later when the

news came through

then they knew

that was not true.

Those who love too much

are killed by us,

not on a bus

in flames and pain.

Tony Sargeant,2004

Evolution and Religion

Religion and Evolution - a comment by Tony Sargeant

Natural selection favoured a rather small and inconspicuous group of mammals who would survive by working co-operatively in small groups.

These groups needed to communicate in order to work together.

The better they were able to communicate – the better their chance of survival.

As that ability to communicate developed so did the mammals need to express the need to be part of community – to embed the understanding that the individual was necessarily part of something that transcended its own individual survival 

That transcendent other is expressed in religious terms

Anthony J Sargeant

The Bathroom Sink by Anthony J Sargeant

The Bathroom Sink

What he had done

he did not know.

He just felt 

the unexpected blow.

In place of love and kisses

he bled,

bright red,

onto white porcelain.

Tony Sargeant 2013

A Meditation on Eve and Adam

by Tony Sargeant

Eve is seen as the cause of the fall – the one who succumbed to temptation. 

The one who was prepared to taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge – of good and evil – despite being warned not to – because the consequences would be dangerous and unpredictable – and yet and yet she has the courage so to do.

She has the courage –

And her courage – her curiosity – releases humankind from the womb of dependency.

Releases humankind from ‘The Garden of Eden’ and sets them free 

free to choose

free to get things wrong

and free to get things right.

Free to do good 

And free to do evil.

And all these things will happen because of Eve’s courage.

And the man, Adam?

He is pathetic – a scared little rabbit.

“Oh dear, what have you done Dear?

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.”

Huh! – pathetic!

What the woman has done is to give humankind, female and male, the chance to become fully human. Hallelujah!

And just in case The Man should be tempted to regress to the infantile dependent state – thumb in mouth – as men can do sometimes (lest I should be thought sexist women as well of course) – 

Just in case … an angel with a flaming sword stands guard at the entrance to The Garden of Eden – the womb of life – to prevent humankind climbing back in.

You can see how important that courageous decision was that was taken by Eve.

Unfortunately the men who wrote down this story chose so to do in such a way that subsequent generations of men used it to blame and subjugate women. 

Anthony Sargeant (note the Gnostic Ophite sect regarded the serpent as the source of real wisdom! Also in Judaism ‘the Naasseni’)