Judith Johnson
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Wedding on a Shoestring

30/6/2013

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PictureCutting the cake!
We popped down to Hastings today to see my Mum, and did some shopping en route. As I sipped a latte, I had a leaf through the Times and read the piece entitled Billionaire rants at media over hobbit wedding insults. I have no axe to grind with Sean and Alexandra Parker, who are entitled to have the marriage ceremony they choose – but I thought I would offer an alternative -   a wedding on a shoestring, which was a very happy occasion and kicked off a  marriage which has so far lasted, through its inevitable ups and downs, for 33 years!
 
We got married in 1980. We had shared a home in Islington for several years by then. We just decided one night that it was time to get hitched, shook hands on it, and wasted no time in putting our plans into action! We got in touch with the Minister of Capel Kings Cross, a Welsh Congregationalist chapel on Pentonville Road, to fix a date. We were invited to  attend two services at the Capel, and shared a very friendly cup of tea afterwards in the basement with the regulars. We then got on the blower (no mobiles or internet!) to invite our friends and family. We didn’t get round to printed invitations! We didn’t have a large income  – Martin was working as an actor, mostly theatre, and I was working as PA to a  theatrical agent in the daytime, and waitress/barmaid/box office evenings at the Kings Head Theatre Club round the corner. 
  
I already had a wedding ring – Mum had given me her original wartime ring when I was fourteen when Dad bought her a new one – and an actress friend of mine gave me an intro to a number of rag-trade contacts she had. I found a pretty dress at a trade price of £10, and a pair of cream shoes at Chapel Market in Islington. A friend who shared the house with us French-plaited my hair for the wedding and I had no make-up – I was 23 years old and had been a teenager in the 70s, at which time young women didn’t go in much for cosmetics! My sister Caroline (pregnant at the time) was my matron-of-honour and wore her own flower print dress.
 
We put on a spread, again helped by friends and family, in the basement of our rented house. We bought a home-cooked ham from Chapel Market, sliced meats and quiches from the nice sandwich-bar near my work place off Baker Street, and made ratatouille, potato salad, and other party foods at home. My in-laws (and Martin!!) spent the evening before the wedding cooking chicken portions while I went out to Joe Allen’s in Covent Garden with my sisters and mother for a girls’ night out! Mam and Aunty Olwen brought the wedding cake up from Wales. The local pub lent us glasses, and we bought the wine and beer wholesale. We had sparkling white for the toast. In those days, champagne wasn’t available discounted at supermarkets. 
  
A friend drove us to the chapel and back, so no wedding-limousine needed either! The orders of service were printed by my father-in-law, and in a typically generous Welsh gesture, given to us gratis by his employers Ty John Penry Press of Swansea. My boss at the time kindly offered to take the wedding photos.
 
Friends and relatives travelled up from Wales, from Spain, from the USA, and if anyone had looked up at the large first-floor window of our flat, it must have looked like a tightly-packed goldfish bowl! A hundred and twenty guests sat with their paper plates and cutlery on their laps or squeezed together with new friends and drinks in their hands.
 
Many people said to us afterwards that it was the best wedding they’d ever been to – relaxed, friendly, and great food! By 9pm there was a good-natured singing stand-off between the English and the Welsh which ended with most of the guests de-camping to the Prince Regent opposite, and by the end of the night, when Martin came up to our bedroom after a last look round the flat, he found me (in my bridal chamber as ’twere) surrounded by
late-stayers, still laughing and chatting!
 
I think, as I recall, my parents gave us £150 towards the wedding expenses, augmented on the day by my sister Liz, who, following Catalan tradition, cut the bridegroom’s tie into pieces and took them round on a plate, selling bits off to the guests.
 
We hadn’t planned a honeymoon as such, but we did have two Persil tickets. These were an offer, very unusual in those distant days when buy-one-get-one-free was unheard of, whereby you saved up tokens from packets of Persil washing-powder, and sent off for a Persil ticket. This enabled you to have two rail tickets for the price of one to anywhere in the UK. 
  
Martin thought we might take our bicycles to Inverness. His Dad had been there in the war and Martin remembered him saying it was flat. So, after spending a day clearing up after the party, we got on our bikes (sit-up-and-begs with no gears), wearing walking boots, with cycling capes and army-surplus rucksacks, and waved goodbye to our housemates. Apparently, they told us later, they had only just been able to conceal their mirth until they  closed the front door. We caught the night-sleeper from Kings Cross, spending the first night of our honeymoon on bunk-beds, and waking to see the purple heathery slopes of Scotland!
 
We hadn’t planned anything much (the confidence of youth!) or booked ahead – we stayed in bed and breakfasts as we cycled round Loch Ness. It took us almost all of the first day to get the first six miles to Drumnadrochit, battling against a ferocious wind funnelling up the Loch in our direction. And it wasn’t flat (Martin disremembered!). But we were also extremely lucky – that week in early March was mostly fine, whereas the week after our return brought heavy snow.  
  
I have to say that we had a great wedding and honeymoon, and I’ve never felt the slightest bit of envy about anyone else’s. And since we had our wedding in central London, it meant that for most of our friends and family, it was possible to attend without taking precious holiday time or needed money to travel to a foreign destination.

We didn’t have a wedding-present list – 1980s consumerism and Thatcherist ideals were yet to come, and we were grateful for the modest gifts, some of which have worn out now, but many are still with us. We have a very nice Norman Rockwell plate from an American friend, and a pair (Lion and Fish –Leo and Pisces) of water-pistols from another New Yorker. To this day, we haven’t used them as weapons – so far, so good!

Picture
Cycling round Loch Ness
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Annie Maltese and the Kia-Ora Cafe

15/6/2013

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PictureAnnie & Padre Emilio - family photo kindly supplied by Rita Marcangelo
We Johnsons have always been partial to a 'greasy spoon'. During our years in London we had our favourites: the Angel Inn, Islington, where I used to drop by for a take-away rock cake on my cycle-ride to work, Dinah's Diner in Covent Garden where they served-up Desperate Dan-size portions, and, last but not least, the wonderful Alfredo's, off  Islington Green, (sadly now closed*) where Vince and his wife, always welcoming and cheery, did the tastiest breakfasts ever. Martin's stag-night began at Alfredo's, with egg, bacon, beans, mushrooms, chips and a half bottle of Bollinger! 
  
When we moved to Powerscroft Road in Hackney, we were delighted to find the Kia-Ora  Cafe at the bottom of the road. It was owned and run by Annie Maltese, already in her seventies then.  Annie was tiny, but a real London character, and no push-over. If any workman, however big and burly, was heard to swear, she would immediately order them out. "Oh please, Annie, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to swear, can't I stay?" I recall hearing one
beg, "No, out you go, I won't have bad language in here." We discovered to our delight that Annie was actually aunt to the aforementioned Vince of Alfredo's. 
 
Annie had white hair and a bit of a stoop, and the dark eyes and slightly hooked nose of her clan.  Her father had emigrated from his home village in the region of Emilia Romagna to London at the turn of the 20th century and had met and married Annie's mother, who was working in a grocery in Clerkenwell, part of the diaspora community who lived and worshipped there.  Annie had a faded wedding photograph of her parents proudly displayed in the cafe. She recalled that her mother had every week rolled out pasta on a table with a broom-handle, and had once come dangerously close to dying after a splinter from the handle had worked its way deep into her arm. Annie's father used to wheel a barrow all the way to Billingsgate to buy huge blocks of ice for making ice-cream back at the cafe.  
 
Annie and her brother had been lifelong Arsenal supporters, and had regularly gone to matches before her brother had died some years back. They had run the cafe together, and when Annie's brother passed away, relatives had exhorted her uncle, Padre Emilio, to move in and help Annie to carry on with the business.  Padre Emilio, a Roman Catholic priest, had been on the verge of retiring home to Italy after long service in England.  
  
So Padre Emilio had taken up residence, and greeted customers courteously, with black beret and cigarette-holder, making coffees and teas at the counter while Annie served at table, in her bobble-hat if it was cold weather. Although Padre Emilio had lived in England for over four decades (he was interned in the Second World War on the Isle of Wight with other Italian residents, including Charles Forte of the famous catering family), he still had a pronounced accent. He helped out at the local church, taking Mass when the priest went on holiday, and he grew tomatoes in tubs on the cafe roof, once proudly giving us a tour of his 
tiny garden.

Flo held sway in the kitchen, and would smile warmly whenever you encountered her on your way to the outside toilet. She fried mushrooms straight from the cardboard trug without washing them. so occasionally you might find a tasty morsel of fried manure on your plate! Once she knew jam roly-poly was one of Martin's favourites, she would save him the last portion as soon as she saw him come through the door at lunchtime.
 
I had a theatrical agency at the time which I ran from our house, and at Christmas time, where my West End colleagues invited their clients to lunch at The Ivy or L'Escargot, my actors were booked in for Christmas lunch at the Kia-Ora. You could not have found anything, in my opinion, more charming than the Kia-Ora 's Christmas Lunch. There were carols playing on the cassette-recorder behind the counter, fairy-lights rigged around the mirrors, Christmas cards on strings, and Padre Emilio serving his home-made wine with a starched white tea-towel over his arm.
 
We once asked Annie, when a cafe opened up across the road, whether she was worried
about losing trade . "Oh no," she said, "the more the merrier. I don't care how many cafes open - it brings more people and more business for everyone". 
  
We moved from Hackney over 20 years ago now, and the Kia-Ora is today a Turkish-owned corner shop. I imagine Annie must have passed away, but our family will always fondly remember her - a real Hackney character. Her going-away present to us, a brass plaque of the Lord's Prayer, hangs on our wall to this day.

 *Alfredo's -
http://www.classiccafes.co.uk/Best.html

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Chagall's Windows

1/6/2013

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PictureThe East Window, Tudeley
Whenever I travel, I'm always keen to seek out any local examples of art by Marc Chagall, the celebrated Russian-born Jewish artist. Chagall was not only a painter, but also made lithographs, etchings and designed stained-glass among other things.  He studied art in St Petersburg, from 1907, the year my father was born, at the Imperial School for the Protection of the Fine Arts, and moved to Paris for several years from 1910. His first one-man exhibition was mounted in 1914 in Berlin, and later that year he returned to Russia where, due to the outbreak of war, he remained until hostilities ended. During a long life he lived in a number of countries, including the USA in the 1940s, but his later years were spent in France.
 
Chagall's work included murals for Granovsky's Jewish Theatre in Moscow, and illustrations for La Fontaine's Fables, Gogol's Dead Souls, and the Bible. 
 
I was delighted on a visit to Paris with a school group a couple of years back, to come across a ceiling painted by Chagall for the Paris Opéra, and I also paid an early morning visit to the cathedral in Metz, en route home from a Swiss mountain tour for a party of heart-bypass survivors from Folkestone(in case of any confusion, I was their courier!) to see a beautiful yellow-tinted stained-glass window. Sadly, my recent visit to Tossa de Mar on Catalunya's Costa Brava was just a couple of hours too whistle-stop fast to see his Celestial Violinist at the Municipal Museum.
 
I am lucky enough, however, to have easy access to an outstanding work of Chagall's just a few miles from home at All Saints Church, Tudeley. Uniquely in the world, all of the church's twelve windows are decorated by the artist. The east window is a memorial tribute to Sarah d'Avigdor-Goldsmid, who died in 1963 aged 21 in a sailing accident off the Cinque Port of Rye. 

Sarah was the daughter of Sir Henry and Lady d'Avigdor-Goldsmid, who lived at that time in the nearby Jacobean house, Somerhill.  Sarah herself had been interested in contemporary art, and in fact she had bought the first painting David Hockney ever sold, from his student show. On a visit to Paris in the early 1960s, Sarah had seen and loved the designs on exhibition for Chagall's windows for the Hadassah Medical Centre in Jerusalem. After her death, her parents commissioned Chagall to design the east window in her memory. Sarah's  mother and sister Chloe were Anglican, while her father was Jewish. 
  
Sarah was descended through her father from Sir Isaac Lyon Goldsmid, (1778 –1859) a financier who was one of the leading figures in the Jewish emancipation in Britain. There must surely then have been a social connection in the past with another local notable Jewish family, the Salomons of Southborough, who also lost a beloved child at sea on 28 October 1915 when David Salomons drowned in the Hythe tragedy.
 
Although Chagall took some persuasion by the D'Avigdor Goldsmids to take on the commission, when he arrived in 1967 for the installation of the east window, he was thrilled by the church, and is reported to have said, 'It's magnificent. I will do them all.' He took 15 years to design the remaining eleven windows. He collaborated in this case as in others with French glassworker Charles Marq of Reims. The final installation of the chancel windows took place in 1985, the year of Chagall's death at the age of 98.
 
The Tudeley windows were inspired, said Chagall, by the words of Psalm 8, and in particular verses 4-8:
 "What is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou visitest him?  For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet: all sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field, the fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas."
 
If you are within reach of Tudeley and have never seen the magnificent windows, they are well worth a visit, not only as great art, but also for the opportunity for a quiet contemplative moment in a beautiful countryside setting.
 
Some other opportunities to see a collection of Chagall's work this year include the exhibition Chagall - Between War and Peace at the Musee du Luxembourg in the Luxembourg Gardens on Paris's Left Bank, which ends 21 July, and Chagall - Modern Master at Tate Liverpool, which opens next week on 8 June until 6 October, and which brings together more than sixty paintings and a selection of works on paper from across the world.


 

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    Lifelong bookworm, love writing too. Have been a theatrical agent and reflexologist among other things, attitude to life summed up by Walt Whitman's MIRACLES.

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