I look around me now and think to myself. Really think. What have I achieved?
There are so may autobiographies on the shelves of famous successful people but what about us average guys, who hold down an average job, live within their average means and get stuck in older stages of life to find an average retirement income.
I decided to write this because, I am starting to feel old and wasted and not challenged anymore. There must be hundred or thousands of people like me who have few friends and have been through some hurt and pain. Dealing with a crisis of life, death of friends and old colleagues or being told you are too old to get that job if you are over sixty.
I read on LinkedIn of another old shipmate who passed away today and everyone was commenting. Such a gentleman, great bloke etc. I looked him up on Facebook, and he is still there with happy pages and photographs of happy times. I had a tear in my eye. Gone but not forgotten.
I thought to myself, what happens when you die, and your social media pages are still around and so I looked it up and I found out that Facebook introduced a feature in which you can memorialise the Facebook profile of someone who has died. In brief, this means that once a death certificate or similar evidence is provided to the social networking site, the profile of the deceased effectively becomes inactive yet remains visible to their network. If a deceased person's Facebook account isn't going to be memorialized, the legacy contact can have it deleted. Deleting the account means that all information and data will be completely removed from Facebook. If the deceased person doesn't have a legacy contact, only verified immediate family members can request to have their account deleted.
So, over the next few bloggings (is that what they are called?); I thought I would memorialize my life - hope you enjoy it and perhaps gain some inspiration.
My life started in 1959. My mum wanted to call me Clint because she liked the actor, Clint Walker. Norman Eugene "Clint" Walker was an American actor and singer. He played cowboy Cheyenne Bodie in the ABC/Warner Bros. western series Cheyenne from 1955 to 1963. The joke later in life was a misinterpretation of the event and became that she want to call me Cheyenne.
How that would have gone down in my school years and later when I joined the Royal Navy, what would that have been like on the parade ground at HMS Ganges, in January of 1976, I wonder.
As it turned out and so thankful am I, that my dad got his way, and I was named Vincent Gary Taylor. I think perhaps a little Italian heritage came to the forefront of his mind. Now my Dad’s heritage was supposedly traced back genealogically to an Italian immigrant called Pappacino, (if you can believe it); this was reported to me by my youngest sister Sally when she went on that ‘who do you think you are crusade’ a few years ago now. She knows more than I do about my family as does my big sis Christine. Girls always have far more brain power than us males, I find anyway.
I have a big brother as well. Kenneth, (Kenny), often called the ‘black sheep of the family’, I think though, that is only because he fell in love and moved away and families at war with each other will always make relationships difficult. So, I don’t blame his actions to move away and set up his own life with someone he deeply loved.
Every family seems to have one, don’t they – black sheep?
I met up with Kenny, just before my mum died in 2008 and even though we hadn’t seen him for over forty years, I think he reconciled with her although my dad died in 2006 and that episode was closed.
He will have his own story of hurt and pain, I am sure. I still value him as he was and still is my brother. I could have used that relationship growing up, being bullied at Primary School, laughed at for being considered dumb, because I was put in the lowest class at Secondary school – Just an average person growing up.
I grew up in a West London village near West Drayton, it is called Yiewsley. The only famous person who lived there, I think, was the guitarist Ronnie Wood, you know, of the Faces and Rolling Stones fame? Yiewsley is a large suburban village in the London Borough of Hillingdon, England, 2 miles (3 km) south of Uxbridge, the borough's commercial and administrative centre.
Yiewsley was a chapelry in the ancient parish of Hillingdon, Middlesex and I remember Mum and Dad took us to Sunday school as small children. Mum was Catholic and so all those rosary beads and stuff meant something to her. Dad was happier and go lucky and he made her life the same when he was with her.
He took her and us kids out to the local Men’s working club on a Saturday nights – this was either at one called the Ivy Leaf in West Drayton and eventually they would go to the “Irish Club” where similar weekend nights were enjoyed. There would always be a band on and/or bingo for mum - she loved her bingo. I remember taking one of my mates to the "Irish Club" and at the end of the evening the band would always play ‘Amhrán na bhFiann’. Not knowing then that this was a rebel tune written by a co-founder of the original Irish Republican Army (IRA), the song was then chosen as the national anthem by the Irish state has been a source of contention throughout its fraught history. Needless to say, it was not a song to continue dancing to - What did we know?
As kids we enjoyed being with mum and dad, always going on holidays “Up North”; to see granny and granddad in Spennymoor, County Durham, where my mum grew up. We would spend a week in their company and then always go to Morecambe and Blackpool, in a B&B or sometimes in a holiday camp if it was affordable.
Mum used to tell us stories of her youth and how she met my dad. How she was chased by Sandshoe Pete when she worked at the local cinema when she was around sixteen and how she had spoke to one of her brothers who the next day she was told had been killed in the First World War whilst serving in France. She had literally seen and had had a conversation with his ghost. She amazed us with these memories and her life must have been hard growing up in those nervy days, born in 1926, living through two world wars and one world cup so to speak. Living through the age of austerity.
Her parents had lived through the same horrible histories but experienced the pandemic of Spanish flu, which killed up to 50 million people in 1918 and 1919 equivalent I would think today, probably, to be more deadly than our current experience of Covid19 as there were no methods of control, people had to work and families lost loved ones daily.
Dad was Burma veteran and was declared missing in action as the war in the Asian theatre was ending. That’s another story - as a wrong telegram - changed their lives forever after that.
I still have all his medals which I can wear on the other side of mine, which I earned over my twenty-eight years spent in Her Majesties Royal Navy.
Poem
I wrote this poem for someone I once knew briefly and who made me welcome when I moved to Winchester. When I learned of his passing, I wrote this down which can add to any memory of someone perhaps - you miss and loved.
Even after that briefest of meetings or for those that you know are genuine and have an immediate affect on others can count themselves lucky enough to spend part of their life with them.
Brief Encounter
I shed a tear when I heard,
Of the kindest fellow - my world’s now blurred.
Of Joyous pleasures of times we met.
His laugh, his manners, I wont forget.
Such, he always had good things to say,
he brightened up my stressful day.
I listened, a gentleman, so decent, the best.
To know him, love him, all were blessed.
We’ll miss your smile, your gentle ways,
now sleep, dear friend – with God, be praised