It was 1961, and I had just had my eight birthday. This year, our family holiday was not going to be at a resort where there was an NUM or TUC conference which Dad was expected to attend, but for some reason the parents had chosen to rent a holiday cottage in Cornwall, a coastal village called Porthtowan. There was me and my brother and I remember that sister Sue came with us (though I’m thinking she would have left school by then), but not Sister Judy who was working that summer.
We took trains for the journey, of course, and it was quite an eventful one for me. At one particular stop or change of trains – Bristol, maybe? – I managed to get my hand trapped in a train door as it was being slammed shut. Or just one finger, I think. I was a bit of a whinger and a crybaby at the best of times, and this wasn’t the best of times. My ravaged finger defined the rest of the journey for both me and my poor longsuffering family, though at the same time I was intrigued and fascinated to have a finger totally flattened and devoid of nail.
I remember little about the cottage except that it was on a hill; it may have been a bit primitive because I remember Sue crying a bit in the night about having to stay there, or maybe it was about having to share a bedroom with Allan and myself. But during the day she was her usual bright and cheerful self. She made friends easily, and I recall that she made a friend of a neighbouring holiday maker of the same age (18?) called Linda. I have a memory of Linda coming to our cottage, and she and my sister getting themselves ready to go down in the evening to the local cafe. This involved (and here my memory particularly vivid – I imagine my eight year old self open mouthed with wonder at the bizarreness, as I still am, of the way ladies often choose to clothe themselves) putting on hooped petticoats under their dresses, for that ‘flared’ look, I presume, in dancing whatever dances one danced in 1961.
I think that the cafe was probably the only communal building that there was in Porthtowan (apart from maybe a kiosk or two at the side of the beach to sell ice creams and holiday paraphernalia) so I think we probably all went down there, every night. They had a jukebox. Did I know about jukeboxes before then? I don’t know… but I do know that I was endlessly fascinated by this one and the up to date singles it was playing. There were bits of Elvis I suppose, and I certainly remember hearing ‘Hello Mary Lou, goodbye heart’ (Ricky Nelson?) but the song that really got to me(and I bet you wondered if we were ever going to get there) was sung by a deep voiced woman, with a mournful sound from the very start – series of doleful ‘woe woe woes’ – who knows, perhaps I felt it befitted my tragic finger episode. Oh and I was a sucker for those ubiquitous syrupy strings that pop production used back then, which to my infant sensibility added to that tuneful dolorousness. And this song seemed to be played more than any other that week. How did the teens dance to it, I wonder?
So it was that Helen Shapiro’s ‘You Don’t Know’ became sort of the internal soundtrack of my holiday. (if we ignore a slight detour into Rogers and Hammerstein – Mam and Dad took us to the cinema in Redruth to see the garishly colourful cinemascope musical ‘South Pacific’ so that we came back singing stuff like ‘I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair’ and giggling about the fact that somebody had been called ‘Bloody Mary’). How far an eight year old processes song lyrics I’ve still no idea: was I at all aware that this little miserable pop ballad was about someone who had dared not reveal their love for fear of it being rejected? Probably not. but I know that the delicious sadness of the sound stayed with me, and as soon as we returned home, I asked Mam and Dad if they would buy me the record of one of their Saturday shopping trips. What can I say? I was the spoiled youngest kid: they always obliged.
Before we leave this little episode, some more about Helen Shapiro. I may have fixated on her more than I realized, because I remember being taken to see a film called ‘It’s Trad Dad’ – a loose story linking together several music performances -where Helen Shapiro and Craig Douglas were the ‘protagonists’ who introduced the different turns. In this sad confessional I will reveal another vivid memory: me standing in a primary school playground suddenly realizing that the best thing in the world I could imagine owning would be a machine that allowed me to watch ‘it’s Trad Dad’ over and over again. (NB belatedly, I have my wish).
Helen Shapiro, you may be aware, started her career very young – wasn’t she 15 or something when she recorded ‘walking back to happiness?’ Since those pop career days, somewhere in the seventies I think, her life took an interesting turn, and one which for me, you won’t be surprised to learn, I rejoice: she found Jesus! Having been brought up in the Jewish faith, she considered herself now ‘a completed Jew’ or ‘a Messianic Jew’ and from what little recent googling I’ve done, it would appear she continues to work and perform within that context and with that sense of mission. While for me, in the mixture of musical memories which is my head, she’ll always be that girl of the deliciously doleful woe-woes (and forever linked with hooped petticoats), I’m glad that she found a love that she wasn’t afraid to reveal or ‘give away’. No longer the ‘one way love affair’ that breaks the heart. Quite the opposite.
[Autobiographical postscript: in the mid 1970s I went back to Porthtowan on my own for a few days, and camped there. I found ‘Heather Cottage’ again (done up nicely); there was a cafe there but no juke-box just slot machines; there were some surfers on the beach. It was a rather miserable few days, and I think my tent leaked. I may have sung a couple of verses of ‘You Don’t Know’; if I didn’t I should have]
Going for a Song 