Love Letters Unfulfilled – Talent Undiscovered

My blogpost on Steemit this week - 

 Title - Love Letters Unfulfilled – Talent Undiscovered

Inspired by the topic on Steemit – Your life in 8 Songs – and by a lady friend – Dee – who guest posted with her story in songs on this blog last week, I started to write, but having more decades on the age clock than most, memorable song after song kept flooding my mind.

So I’m recalling a few most memorable

I suppose it was introducing last week’s post, about my fear of the school dentist’s pedal operated drilling contraption, that triggered the Pam Ayres thoughts on the subject, in her very funny verse & dialect.

Here’s a taster of the words in the first verse –

Oh, I wish I’d looked after me teeth,

And spotted the dangers beneath

All the toffees I chewed,

And the sweet sticky food.

Oh, I wish I’d looked after me teeth.

Funny, yes but when delivered in her broad – is it Gloucestershire accent? -  It adds another funny dimension.

Hear and enjoy the 8 hysterical rhyming verses treat here –

Al Jolson ‘Mammy’

Memorable because when I was 21 I lived with my parents in a converted red double decker bus for 2 years. (It was the subject of a post on this blog, but I can’t remember the title.)

The bus was parked on a garage yard. In a bungalow next door lived Dee ( My last week’s guest poster) with her family. She was a school girl at the time, but her older brother and I became good friends through a similar taste in music – especially Al Jolson.

Derrick had a talent for impressions and he could sing Jolson in the family front room, as good as the star himself on stage.

The voice and the impressive physical delivery – acting the story – down on one knee, arms outstretched, black face uplifted to the heavens – pleading  - 

‘Mammy Mammy, I'm comin',

Sorry that I made you wait. I'm comin’, hope and trust that I'm not late, 

oh oh oh Mammy,My little Mammy,

I'd walk a million miles for one of your smiles,My Mammy!

I have a vivid memory picture of Derrick performing that word for word, in style ,voice, and action.

I couldn’t find a good recording, but here is a re-mastered recording of Larry Parks singing ‘Sonny Boy’ in the Jolson style, and dubbed with Jolson singing the song.

Road to Morroco.Bob Hope.Bing Crosby.Dorothy Lamour

I was called for Army National Service at age 18 in 1944.After infantry training, I was posted to Burma and embarked on the converted luxury liner ‘Monarch of Bermuda’.

They made sure there was not much luxury to soften us. Top to Tail hammock sleeping. The smelly feet getting stronger the nearer we got to the tropical heat of India.

The cinema was usable afternoons, before hammock hanging time, and hearing Road to Morrocco brings that memorable - Phew ! experience back.

Here It is – Pity it’s not in Smelly Vision.

It was only a Winters Tale

I left behind in Blighty my first ever steady girlfriend, and we exchanged weekly letters for several months – SWALK on the envelope – all those kind of lover’s acronym messages.

2 years is a long time for young love to be apart, and so sadly, love withered.

Although’ It Was Only A Winter’s Tale’ is not of that time, hearing it always takes me back to our army tent in Burmese jungle land, and the dawning realisation that my first love, the most impressionable, intense, romantic memory of all, had gone cold, and I would never now send a letter with BURMA on the flap!

. At my age a certain thought surfaces sometimes. That sentence should tell you what it is.

Rita Cooledge and Kriss Kristofferson are two of my favourite duettists. ‘Please Don’t tell Me How The Story Ends’ is about their marriage break up. 

There is so much feeling in the performance that although it shows their love for each other, and they were made for one another, still they must part.

Such are the unfathomable complexities of Love.

 I think the title applies to my story too.

Feeling melancholy now

Goodbye