“The little things you say and do …”



SGM remembered

1946 – 2021



[PM]


To begin with – a brief anecdote:
A hospital ward in North Manchester, late 1960s.  A body is carried out of the kitchen, a man supine with a knife apparently sticking from his chest, the lifeblood oozing over his t-shirt.  Screams and panic among the young nurses in attendance.  And then to everyone’s amazement, the body comes to life and with a cheeky grin pulls the knife from under his armpit and reveals that all was a joke.  This was SGM in his heyday; prankster and attention-seeker extraordinaire. Jumping Jack Flash. Key words – his exuberance and good humour – which stayed with him throughout life, ensuring that his agenda stayed second to none.
 We could also mention Uncle Keith and the exploding cig / the banger tied to a length of string and suspended from our bedroom window / summoning the fire engine illegally to Mike Rice’s house.  See Janet for more stories!

A life of 5 passions and 2 loves.
To begin at the beginning…
v Born the same year as the NHS, 1946; the first of 3 siblings to Margaret and Frank Murphy, followed by Janet and Paul.  At the age of 5 or thereabouts his life was saved by the NHS when on a train ride to Edinburgh he ate a meat pie which gave him salmonella and saw him whisked off to Monsal Isolation Hospital in East Mcr for several weeks.  A dramatic lesson that life is pretty much a game of snakes and ladders.  Did the enforced isolation at this time explain his later flamboyant personality?  Over 60 years later the NHS came galloping once again to the rescue, following Stephen’s serious head injury occasioned by a backwards fall.

   The 1950s saw his 1st passion; football – especially Man U, which stayed with him for life.  Memories of newspaper cut outs of Eddie Coleman, Tony Dunne, Albert Quixall, Bill Foulkes and Harry Greg and Bobby Charlton and Duncan Edwards stuck to the wall of the attic, which he occupied as a child.  And 1958 brought the horror of Munich, followed by United’s rebirth in the 1960s, and their European triumph against Benfica.  SGM stayed loyal throughout.  As a schoolboy he distinguished himself by playing for the Junior School 11 – somewhere there is a faded newspaper photo showing him and his pals lined up behind the ball on the occasion of a local amateur Cup Final, which sadly they lost.


  A child of the 1950s – and so of rock n roll, his 2ndt passion. Elvis, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry – and Stephen’s own favourite, Buddy Holly, with his nuanced, lyrical brand of good time rock:
                       

                        The little things you say and do
                        Make me want to be with you.
                        Rave on! It’s a crazy feeling
                        And I know it’s got me reeling…

 My biggest childhood crime was sitting [inadvertently you understand] on his 78 rpm, shellac copy of Great Balls of Fire and reducing it to smithereens.  Later, Janet did similar terminal damage to Stephen’s copy of the Stones Volume 1 LP when she left it on a hot office radiator…  His original LPs from that era include the Fabulous Style of the Everly Bros and an Elvis album [a gift from Marina?] – probably still there among his record collection.

 His love of music continued into the heady days of the 60s – the Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan and beyond to country, reggae and folk.  In later years he learned the tin-whistle - having discovered it was invented by a resident of Coney Weston [Robert Clarke in 1843] and bought eagerly by Manchester’s 19 C. Irish immigrant community.

v The 11+ led to grammar school – 4 years of turbulence and rebel without a cause - culminating in expulsion at 16.  Expelled for forging absence letters for his pals – it says a lot for his burgeoning literacy skills that he could pass a letter off in the style of an adult parent.  Maybe they should have promoted rather than expel him?  He got his own back a few years later by going to university to read English and American Literature; goodbye Just William and hello William Faulkner.  He told me of his days of truancy down on Shude Hill Market, North Mcr – where he discovered the imported sounds of Howling Wolf and Muddy Waters – with edgy titles such as Smoke Stack Lightning and Got My Mojo Working.  Dangerous men with dangerous songs. As he told me later, “At that age I didn’t even know what a smoke stack was, I just knew the music was somehow important.”  Certainly more important than irregular French verbs and quadratic equations, which is what he should have been poring over.

So in 1962 he passed from grammar school to St John’s College of Further Ed – where you could grow your hair, wear jeans, meet girls and embrace the 1960s. With 3 A-Levels under his belt he got a place to study English at UEA – a rare achievement in the mid-60s for a working-class kid to get to university, thence to teaching and his 3rd great passion – a love of English Lit, which he taught throughout his adult life, becoming in the process a Head of Department and an NUT Rep.  He was an avid reader of just about everything – novels, short stories, poems of course, but just about anything else that came his way, including leaflets and pamphlets and flyers, which he was always quick to punctuate and correct – a comma here, a missing apostrophe there …

[His close friends at this time included the inimitable Mike Rice, a Longsight window cleaner whose bizarre exploits deserve a volume of their own.  Suffice to mention the occasion [at a party held secretly while our parents were away] when he managed to fall through a glass door in the living room, miraculously sorted so that our folks never even found out. And some years later when, at a Wembley rock concert starring Little Richard, Mike Rice managed to fall off a balcony and had to be rushed by ambulance to hospital.  I believe it was Janet who had to inform Mike’s long-suffering wife.  SGM was much drawn to larger-than-life characters such as Mr Rice – later friends included Big Trevor, a chef at the Northern Hospital where the bro worked briefly as a student and where, with Big Trev’s connivance, he pulled off the bloody knife trick already mentioned.  And, from Ipswich, a fellow teacher – the Machiavellian and much loved Rick.]

Also Stephen’s lifetime love affair with East Anglia – his 4th passion – where he and the family moved in 1979 – and where he stayed for the rest of his adult life, bringing up Adam and Nathan [with Marina] and then Ellen and Aidan [with Tracy].  His love of obscure hamlets and villages, tracks and trails, seascape and landscape and East Anglia’s big skies.  The mysteries of Dunwich and the coast from Kings Lynn and Cromer down to Felixstowe and Colchester.  A love of maps and charts and manuscripts and old churches, abbeys and castles – along with the postcards and cuttings and memorabilia that he collected along the way. 

Which leads to Stephen’s 5th passion – a love of rambling and exploring the countryside, including the woodland around Prestwich, where we grew up.  This was a passion our Mum referred to [dismissively] as mauling; “Our Stephen’s gone mauling again!”

His exuberance for the world of nature echoed GM Hopkins:

                        Glory be to God for dappled things –
                        For skies of copper-colour as a brinded cow;
                        For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
                        Fresh fire-coal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
                        Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow and plough;
                        And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

 Like Hopkins, Stephen was intoxicated as much by nature as he was by language.  A supporter of the National Trust and a walks organizer for the local Ramblers – who remember him with great affection and humour, and have promised to raise a glass in his name.



Travelers’ tales:
The blue t-shirt in Portugal which SGM kindly proffered for me to wipe the sick off the back seat of the coach [the day after I’d naively drunk from the crystal waters of a Portuguese mountain stream] … The kindly Victor and his custard pies…  Me leaving the torch behind in the Daily Mirror tent in Dorset which we had to locate, somewhat inebriated, in total darkness – there was a real danger, as SGM pointed out, that we might unzip and enter the wrong tent… Nathan and his wooden duck, Kelloggs…  The bumpy ride on a 4-seater mail plane from Covilha to Coimbra...  Struggling up that god-almighty hill in Brazov in baking heat; ice-cold beers and two pretty ladies at the top…  The lakeside maul in Slovenia and the irate artist, a man who clearly thought he was Rembrandt, taking offence when I told him how cheap his lakeside paintings were:  “Is not about money!  Is stupid to talk of money!”…  Being flooded by rain and mud while camping in Edale [we’d each bought a new pair of boots from the Army and Navy store on Oldham Street on the way to Piccadilly Station]… The night in Cascais when we took the bathroom door off its hinges to use as a table at our impromptu party ...  The other night in Cascais where, with Stephen barely off the plane, we ended up with my mate Mark in the early morning hours, trousers rolled up to our knees, smoking duty-free cheroots and drinking cold beers in the sea ... The time we missed the plane to Slovenia because one of us decided a pot of tea was essential as we approached Stansted Airport ...  And the time when, in the Silver-Gold Disco, Cascais, my friend and neighbour, Budi [a security guard from Mozambique] casually drew a revolver from his pocket and placed it next to the beers on the table ... The visit to Dracula’s castle, where Stephen caused a startled Japanese girl to scream when he stepped abruptly from the shadows ... And when, as children, Dad took me and the bro to Blackpool on the bus, Father was taken short at Preston bus station where we had briefly stopped.  He instructed the bro on no account to let the bus leave without him while he was in the Gents.  Father emerged from the lavatory minutes later to see the bus pulling out with his two sons aboard ... Talking of lavatories [or their absence], the time when SGM was caught short 2 miles outside Todmorden and …memory fades. And yes – he was the only man I know who once went on holiday without trousers…

Travelers’ tales - and then some.  Journeys with and without maps.

And yes Stephen always stayed fit – trim, vegetarian and a non-smoker- which makes his passing in his mid-seventies seem totally premature and unfair.

The photos that accompany these memories were taken on holiday in Transylvania [sic] a few years back.  The first pic in particular shows my bro in typical pose: walking boots [his love of mauling] and guide book [addiction to maps and reading].

From his 5 passions to his 2 great loves:
Marina, who he met and married in Manchester in the late 60s, a long successful union which gave us Margaret, Adam and Nathan.  Adam is still with us and Marina is enjoying her retirement years in Brighton.

And later, Tracey, with whom he had Ellen and Aidan. A lengthy marriage with many holidays abroad and a lifetime’s memories -including my memories of annual visits to Coney Weston and Tracy’s impressive hospitality and catering!  Many thanks, Tracy.
To Adam and Ellen and Aidan let me say that losing a parent is excruciating – but we are all here to help and support.  If Stephen’s passing has brought us all that much closer, I’m sure he’d be quietly pleased.

And let’s not forget Felicity, who became Stephen’s close and loyal friend during his final years – our thanks to you for your love and support.
…………………………….

Returning briefly to Stephen’s 3rd passion – literature, I’d like to close with a short poem that he himself read at a memorial service in a local church a few years ago.  The poem celebrates tradition and ritual in a small rural community - a village which lost its men young and old to the First World War. There’s a sense that although individual lives come and go, the life of the community goes on forever, as it must.  Stephen loved the poem and I hope you will too.

There are 2 sung versions of the poem; one by Shirley Collins [on her album Anthems in Eden] and another by Maddie Prior [of Steeleye Span].


Dancing at Whitsun

It’s fifty long springtimes since she was a bride,
But still you may see her at each Whitsuntide
In a dress of white linen and ribbons of green,
As green as her memories of loving.

The feet that were nimble tread carefully now
As gentle a measure as age do allow,
Through groves of white blossoms by fields of young corn,
Where once she was pledged to her true love.

The fields they stand empty, the hedges grow free,
No young men to tend them or pastures go see.
They are gone where the forests of oak trees before
Have gone to be wasted in battle.

Down from the green farmlands and from their loved ones
Marched husbands and brothers and fathers and sons.
There’s a fine roll of honour where the maypole once stood,
And the ladies go dancing at Whitsun.

There’s a straight row of houses in these latter days
All covering the downs where the sheep used to graze.
There’s field of red poppies, a wreath from the Queen;
But the ladies remember at Whitsun.

And the ladies go dancing at Whitsun.

[Austin John Marshall]










“Catch, then catch, the transient hour;
Improve each moment as it flies.”
Saint Jerome

                                                                                                                                                     paul-mur@tiscali.co.uk