Mr Clark's House.
A longish exposure, using a tripod, taken from a window of the house where I was born, in North Street, Downend, Bristol. The autumnal evening scene is bathed in a preternatural lightless glare and there is a thundery haze among the trees. A photograph renders this inadequately of course.
North Street is mainly a street of bay-windowed Victorian terraces. The house on the right is, I think, the only post-war house in the street. Here and there are gaps where older houses may be seen, dating from a pre-suburban phase of Downend's existence, when the road was an unmetalled cart track. Across the road at no. 49, a new owner has thought fit to disfigure such a house by inserting a fake bow window.
Next door, in the right-hand house of this pair, lived Mr Clark. As a boy I was rather afraid of Mr Clark who had the reputation of being "rough" in his manners. Certainly he regarded all small boys as potentially mischievous and was in the habit of bellowing at any he saw loitering near his house. Yet there must have been a softer side to his nature. When I was very young there had been bird cages affixed to the front of his house, in which budgerigars and canaries twittered all day; and he loved the rose trees which filled his front garden. He always wore a cap and, in winter, a muffler. My father claimed to have seen him in silhouette through his bedroom curtains, sitting up in bed still wearing the cap. There was invariably a rose in the button-hole of his jacket, beneath which he wore a waistcoat.
He had once decided to marry and chose his bride, so my mother said, from among the women inmates at Chipping Sodbury workhouse. This wife eventually deserted him. After a lapse of some years he began to pay court to another local woman but passing through Fishponds one day on the bus, Mr Clark had looked down from the top deck and seen his inamorata in conversation with another man. When next she called the poor woman got short shrift. "Bugger off you treacherous cow", roared Mr Clark, "and never darken my door again". Thereafter he remained a bachelor.
I cannot remember whether Mr Clark was still alive when this photograph was taken on Tuesday 16th September 1980. If he was still living he was no longer capable of tending his beloved roses. The front garden in a tangle of weeds and only a few overblown blooms remain. He belonged to the last generation who were truly their own men, forged in a time when it was still possible for an individual's native oddnesses to flourish ...before television arrived to standardise our thoughts, opinions and behaviour.
Mr Clark's House.
A longish exposure, using a tripod, taken from a window of the house where I was born, in North Street, Downend, Bristol. The autumnal evening scene is bathed in a preternatural lightless glare and there is a thundery haze among the trees. A photograph renders this inadequately of course.
North Street is mainly a street of bay-windowed Victorian terraces. The house on the right is, I think, the only post-war house in the street. Here and there are gaps where older houses may be seen, dating from a pre-suburban phase of Downend's existence, when the road was an unmetalled cart track. Across the road at no. 49, a new owner has thought fit to disfigure such a house by inserting a fake bow window.
Next door, in the right-hand house of this pair, lived Mr Clark. As a boy I was rather afraid of Mr Clark who had the reputation of being "rough" in his manners. Certainly he regarded all small boys as potentially mischievous and was in the habit of bellowing at any he saw loitering near his house. Yet there must have been a softer side to his nature. When I was very young there had been bird cages affixed to the front of his house, in which budgerigars and canaries twittered all day; and he loved the rose trees which filled his front garden. He always wore a cap and, in winter, a muffler. My father claimed to have seen him in silhouette through his bedroom curtains, sitting up in bed still wearing the cap. There was invariably a rose in the button-hole of his jacket, beneath which he wore a waistcoat.
He had once decided to marry and chose his bride, so my mother said, from among the women inmates at Chipping Sodbury workhouse. This wife eventually deserted him. After a lapse of some years he began to pay court to another local woman but passing through Fishponds one day on the bus, Mr Clark had looked down from the top deck and seen his inamorata in conversation with another man. When next she called the poor woman got short shrift. "Bugger off you treacherous cow", roared Mr Clark, "and never darken my door again". Thereafter he remained a bachelor.
I cannot remember whether Mr Clark was still alive when this photograph was taken on Tuesday 16th September 1980. If he was still living he was no longer capable of tending his beloved roses. The front garden in a tangle of weeds and only a few overblown blooms remain. He belonged to the last generation who were truly their own men, forged in a time when it was still possible for an individual's native oddnesses to flourish ...before television arrived to standardise our thoughts, opinions and behaviour.