"I too have an old but still-going-strong pair of nylon socks. I had two pairs of grey ankle socks from Marks & Spencer as part of my school uniform in 1962 - so they are not quite so old as the ones featured). I hated them and refused to wear them until a few years later when I discovered they went under boots to keep my feet really warm. They survived many years of boot-use until I emigrated to Australia. I have been wearing them regularly ever since and one pair has just finally worn out. The other pair still have few years life left in them!

Nylon was the most amazing thing of my childhood - always fresh looking, no ironing, easy to wash and dry. To me it represents the end of the war years and the start of the "You've never had it so good" era. Wonderful stuff.

Now of course I mostly wear natural fibres -how the wheel turns!"

"I would like to share with you some of the problems that energy crises in Armenia have created. Hot water is extremely rare except when prepared in vats and pails just before use: because there is no cooking gas and wood is getting hard to find, almost everyone relies upon electricity to do the warming, using home made resistance heaters made from a large wooden bobbin with a coil of heating wire around it. These are dropped into the bucket and then plugged into a socket causing the lights in an entire building to waver ominously.

Because of these procedures, the children and adults (myself among them) are frequently parboiled on hand or arm or in worse cases, more extensively. Your story of the water heating apparatus of the 20's finally explained a tale my father told me about the horrible death of his elder sister. He was the 8th child of 16 and all of these lived except for two: my father's immediate brother, ho died of scarlet fever and my father's eldest sister, whom he never knew. She had died at three: climbing up to look into the boiling wash tub, she had fallen in and died of her scalding.

My daughter is also three and it is the memory of my own burns and my unmet aunt's end that keep me frantic on wash days protecting my daughter from the dangers real and imaginary".

Bahar Ibrahim from Nigeria wrote to us describing the history of the Sudanese Zaghawa Nomad this century.

"Two generations back, probably put us at the beginning of the century, the era of Zaghawas such as Sennin Hassan, and Dawsa Ferti. The sociocultural fabric of the Sudanese province of Darfur was purely African and Afro centred.. any form of Arabism was only the recitation of the holy Quran, or to communicate with the immigrant Arab tribes in the extreme South Eastern Darfur.

It was the era of originality, when people lived and died by the will and grace of Edo which is "Allah", but also in the guardianship of the sultan, the master and defender of their realm. For the Zaghawas as well as for the other people of Darfur there was no place for Arab culture or Arab language in their realm or nomadic and sedentary domains.

In prayers they sight EDO (Allah) as the same as Prophet Mohammed, and Allah's name always comes as a mark of greater spiritualism and devotion, beside paying homage to all the souls of the fore-fathers and the bounty of all their decendants.

Sennin Hassan and men of his class were great adherants of Africanised Islam it was customary for them to use the services of Islamic healers and wear charms, prepared by most revered "fekis" or malams mostly from Fur land in the South, or Wadi Land in the West.

The coming of the British though greatly shaked and changed their political life, did not affect the Socio-cultural life of the Darfurians, Zaghawa nomads in particular. For forty years (1916 - 1956) the British ruled the Darfur as part of their Sudanese territories but they have never attempted to belittle the Darfurian culture or impose their culture upon the people of Darfur. They allowed Darfur to evolve and develop naturally. The British established the fundations of the modern education, though without careful consideration to the peculiarity of the Darfurian culture and languages as they did with the South ...

They allowed Jailaba Arabs to dictate the language and pace of education in Darfur as the rest of the Sudan. Sennin Hassan and his generation were not part of that educational policy but they were not oblivious of the new development which later had dire consequences. Reluctantly they sent some of their children to the only school established in the area at the time. Those their children were the peers and age mates of "Feki" Ibrahim. It was a generation which was bewildered... But it was also a generation which had no freedom to reject any form of education. My father's generation was bewildered, because they were constrained by ignorance and illiteracy.

The indifference of the British let their Jellaba assistants in to fill the gab with their own Arabic way of education. As time proceeded, Sennin Hassan's generation was also disappearing and with them some of the most original and valuable of the Zaghawa nomadic culture. Feki Ibrahim's generation which by now getting used to Jailaba Arab way of doing things was increasingly taking over.

The British disengaged from Darfur and Sudan generally towards the middle of the century. My generation was born at around the same time. The general nomadic way of life was being diluted gradually and some times compulsively with Arabised norms. Africanised Islam and general Darfurian culture have been stigmatized by the Jellabas as synonymous with primitiveness, and superstition, and should be ignored and side-lined in the scheme of things. This undeclared policy was aimed at watering down any call or attempt for Darfurian cultural renaissance, or recognition or empowerment of any thing non Arabic in Sudan.

While our grandfathers experienced physical enslavement by the Arabs, our generation experienced the cultural cleansing. It was our generation who was forced to leave the nomadic way of life in the Zaghawa land, and migrate to towns and urban centres, where Arabisation has firmly taken roots and engage in non nomadic activities such as: petty trading, or hawking, working in restaurants or running laundry shops etc. Our return to the ancestral homeland, became a remote possibility if not total impossibility, as by now whatever animal wealth we had has perished, as a result of either neglect or natural and enviromental disasters.

The Arabised authorities effectively withheld any form of services or assistance to Zaghawa nomads in their fight against environmental disasters, as they did with other indigenous groups such as the Fur, and the Massalit farmers, because that will ensure their migration to towns, and other Arabised areas. Zaghawa culture and language had effectively been made irrelevant and later completely became insignificant even in Zaghewa social gatherings".

David Olasupo Faranpojo from Nigeria remembers the death of Chief Obafemi Awolowo in 1987.

"I remember that it was during my century which is the twentieth, that Chief Obafomi Awolowo, the first Premier of Western Nigeria and the Asiwaju (leader) of the Yorubas, died in 1987 at the age of 78. The juxtapositioning and appearance of numbers 7 and 8 in his date of death and his age were an unusual concidence.

Two months earlier, at his birthday ceremony, on March 6 1987, he had declared the gathering as the "celebration of his death". And as expected the statement baffled everybody at the party including his wife and children. It was like Jesus Christ predicting His own death.

He meant it. On May 9 1987, he was found dead in his bedroom. He had already gone to the bathroom to clean up but later went back to his room.. The family waited for him for prayers in vain. When the door was forced opened he was found on his bed with smiles.

The Chief was highly respected and was generally known for his frankness, honesty, unpretentiousness and thoroughness. His moves could easily be predicted at all times, because he always stood by his convictions.

His death was considered in Nigeria, as one of the most surprising events that took place in this century.

One of his instructions to his people long before he died, was that nobody should mourn his death. His death meant joy and happiness.

Terry Barnett, former Fellow of the Institute of Health Service Administrators remembers when there was no antibiotics and tuberculosis was rampant in the UK.

"At the turn of the century, tuberculosis was rampant in Great Britain. It was then known as the Great White Plague and over 40,000 people died from it in England and Wales. A high proportion of them were in the prime of life. The number of people suffering from it then was over a quarter of a million. The problem was compounded because there were only about one thousand five hundred sanatorium beds available and of these only 500 were in sanatoria where treatment was given without any charge to the patient. In short sanatorium treatment was for the wealthy.

Post Office staff were especially susceptible to tuberculosis because of the bacteria-laden dust floating around sorting offices. Under the leadership of Charles Garland, a Post Office Sanitorium Society was formed. This society co-operated with the Hospital Saturday Fund and others to build a sanitorium for workers at Benenden in Kent in the south of England. It was opened in 1907 by a member of the royal family. It was intended to be the first of many sanatoria for the working population.

The sanatorium at Benenden was one small contribution towards a desperate national need. For a subscription of only a half penny a week, workers could be insured to cover the full cost of such a treatment without recourse to charity.

Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was most impressed with the establishment of the sanitorium and the wonderful service it gave. He said that the example and experience of the sanatorium at Benenden had been the inspiration behind tuberculosis clauses in his 1911 National Insurance Act. This act produced a service for patients with tuberculosis, including the building of sanitoria nationwide for 15 million workers.

The need for workers to create sanatoria of their own receded as town councils built them for their citizens. Charles Garland of blessed memory and the Post Office Sanatorium Society had shown what could be done and how to do it effectively. Their place in the health chronicle of the twentieth century is assured.

Today it is difficult to realise that diet and rest in a sanatorium offered the only hope of curing the disease. This state of affairs continued until the arrival of antibiotics in the late 1940s.

Tuberculosis in the 1950s became a rare disease in the United Kingdom. Now, however, it is on the increase - especially among immigrants. But that is a story for the 21st century which will also make mention of strains of TB resistant to antibiotics".

Helen van der Pyl from Venezuela remembers as a child listening to great music on the family's first hi-fi.

"Among all the tragic tales we are hearing from prople who have suffered so much during this volatile century, I have a very pleasant memory from my childhood in Venezuela. It was, I believe, in 1956 that my father came home one day with a new hi fi set which was for "stereophonic" sound. It sounded very sophisticated and actually professed to bring "the sound of a real orchestra right into your living room". He had also bought a record called Sound in the Round, and in great wonder we sat in the living room and listened to a train chugging from left to right before our ears, and horses in a race galloping from right to left across the room: you could hear them approaching in the distance on the right, until you could practically see them right in front of you kicking up the dust and then disappearing to the left over the horizon. And yes, we had a full orchestra right in our own home: violins and percussion on the left, trumpets in the middle and cellos and basses on the right. It was amazing!

I was only 9 at the time, but I vividly remember many a proud playing of this record by my father for different friends, and each time I used to close my eyes and SEE these things happening before me. It was a great time in the history of music enjoyment".

George Scales from Essex in England explains how farming has changed for him during his lifetime, prompted by our week called Working the Land.

I was born in 1921 and lived through an era when UK farming was little more than a peasant's existence. Between the two World Wars, the UK had a "Free Trade" policy. Cheap food imports helped keep industrial wages down and so give British merchandise an export edge.

The main food exporting countries, with big climatic advantages, swopped their cheap food for "Made in Britain" tea-sets, cutlery and iron ships (and a lot more besides). With meat, butter, wool, sugar, and grain being imported at below the cost of UK production, the country's farming went to the wall. Less than 30% of food was home produced, compared with 82% today. As a consequence, ditches filled, hedgerows encroached well into fields, farmhouses, cottages and farm buildings fell into disrepair, and until the clouds of war began to roll, many Essex farms around us were offered rent free to avoid dilapidation.

In our village: Peldon, near Colchester, 53 aces of land was sold for £2 per acre, and a chicken farm with a well built house, a range of buildings and 42 acres, in the village of Little Wigborough, did not sell when offered for £450. That same property today would make around £350,000. But to get the country's farming back into full production, took three decades.

Looking back now more than 60 years since I took a job as a farm worker on a well-run, mixed farm of 374 acres, it is hard to believe that people would willingly do what we did, and for the amount we were paid.

Parsonage Farm, in the village of Messing had cows, sheep, pigs and a team of seven Suffolk Punch horses. The farm also grew a wide range of different crops. Before the wide use of chemical sprays and artificial fertilizers, the livestock provided the manure for plant food. The farm had a staff of twelve, including the boss and his son Alan, but needed one extra for harvest.

My job was to load the harvest wagons. A continuous chain of six wagons kept the thrashing machine supplied. The seventh horse "Prince", was the trace-horse, to help pull the full loads off the fields and onto the hard road. The loads were 3 meters high, and each sheaf had its place, so that those unloading were able to feed a steady stream to Alf, the head horseman, who fed the sheaves into the thrashing drum. When the drum stopped at 8 p.m., all the stock had to be seen to and the horses rubbed down and fed, and more than 200 sacks of grain had to be carried into the barn on our backs.

Today, my nephew Pete (also in a 10 hour day) with our combine, cuts and thrashes more than we were able to manage in a week, and our sole employee Terry, gets the equivalent of 1,250 sacks of wheat (per day), dried and stored. Such has been the advance of farm technology.

Going back is not an option. It would be impossible to get Europeans to put the physical effort in that diversified cropping demands, and would no doubt contravene an EU regulation, to expect people to work "up to their eyes" in mud knocking, topping and loading sugarbeat in cold, wet winter months, which we accepted as normal.

Having said that, I have to say: I did not find the work or the hours unreasonable, and working with horses was enjoyable, whereas driving a tractor, for me, was boring.

Vernon L Stephens from Louisville, Kentucky in the United States has sent us a very vivid account of his own experiences:

I am a disabled manic-depressive who served half of a career as a psychiatric social worker in public mental hospitals in Kentucky.

In 1904 -- as I learned in the course of my social services-- my maternal great grandmother Iris Innis Blackburn arrived in a 'prisoners' traincar at Central State Hospital near Louisville, then a converted plantation specializing in farm produce by inmate labor, a 'funny farm' that was lucrative for Kentucky and in particular for the politically-appointed Superintendent of the 'Asylum.' There Iris worked until 1914, and the scant records on her suggest that she was interned at Eastern State Hospital for having been rendered 'redundant' by tuberculosis, that is, unable to do the farm-work any longer. When Iris died in 1939, with a 'rotten' tubercular leg, the persisting psychiatric myth was that her 'dementia praecox' (schizophrenia) caused her T.B.

I arrived to work social services at Central State in 1975 -- seventy-one years from Iris's 'asylum'. I was rather pushed from my profession by suicide attempts I made in 1988, and began, eight-four years after Granny Iris, to be on the 'consuming' end of services from Central State. My hospitalizations are all instigated by Louisville police, who characteristically find me in some rapture or fury and assess that I am, using much over-interpretation, dangerous.

Now Granny Iris was given a life-imprisonment, but I can make my hospitalizations quite brief -- in the order of one or two weeks -- by being utterly submissive to the clinical staff, who in their turn can be about as capricious as they desire. I must say that I am seldom manhandled there, but the abuses against me more take the form of fallaciously warning folk outside the hospital that I am some kind of menace.

The late 20th century witnesses this diaspora all over: mental patients have left the hospital for the tenderness of the inner city. It is an immensely lonely existence to be hereby 'the community eyesore,' friendless as cracked cement with dirty bubblegum all over it. I find the discipline of taking my medicine and paying my medical bills surmountable if austere, but many in my cohort of cast-out psychotics backslide to death in back-allies or life-in-prison.

We thus come backward 200 years in American mental health. I think the coming century and the coming millennia will simply repackage our people of sorrows in this cheapest, most-avoidant way.

Marek Svoboda wrote to us about his experience of having to leave the Czechoslavak Socialist Republic in 1962, and growing up in a totally new country.

I carry both a British and a Czech passport. I was born in Ceske Budejovice, or Budweis in German, a regional market town in Southern Bohemia, presently lying in the Czech Republic but in 1962 it was in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.

In 1967, when I was five years old, my father was working as a radiotherapist in Sweden and my mother had taken me and my sister there to join him. He had taken this opportunity to work temporarily in a capitalist country during a time when Czechoslovakia was becoming politically more liberal and Dubcek's Prague spring was around the comer. Nobody expected that the Russians would intervene to put a stop to this impossible dream of "communism with a human face". By August 1968, two days after he had returned home, Warsaw pact forces had invaded Czechoslovakia and Soviet T-52 tanks were parked in our street, in front of our house.

My father wasted no time in deciding what to do. Our visiting Swedish friends gave us a lift to the railway station in their niini. By early next morning, on 22nd August 1968, we crossed the frontier with Czechoslovak-Austrian by train. The Soviet forces had left the border open, presumably in order to rid themselves of any future troublemakers. We left peacefully, in the dead of the night with only our clothes and some pocket money our friends had given us.

By September, we were living in a refugee camp or lager near Vienna and my father, a life long Anglo-phile, was applying for political asylum in England. By the following month, we were all beginning a new life in a high-rise council flat in rain- soaked Stockport, Manchester. I remember my sister and I used to run down the hill into Love Lane, to buy liquorice allsorts at the newsagents for Id. a packet.

In the next twenty five years I was brought up and educated in England. I became a barrister and eventually worked in the City. My family settled down in Hampshire and now would never leave their adopted home. But I remained a Central European at heart. In 1993 1 returned to Czechoslovakia, by then a free country, to work for an international law firm advising foreign companies on inward investment.

I don't know whether my story says anything meaningful about East-West relations in the 20th century and their effect on the ordinary lives of Europeans. I suppose that my own life has been shaped by political change, in particular the height of the Cold War and the fall of the Iron Curtain in the late 1980's. But, sadly for me this experience is not anything which ordinary people in my country - who have been forced to live in a sort of coccoon under communism for almost half a centrury - can relate to, let alone easily comprehend.

In this sense at least, my life may reflect one basic truth about this cenuiiry, the fact that more people have become migrants or refugees than ever before, whether voluntarily in search of a better life or hounded out of their country as the victims of political regimes or genocide. On the one hand migration and exile may bring freedom and a new life, but on the other they may also create a feeling of alienation and rootlessness in the very sould which those who are fortunate enough never to have had to leave their home can find it difficult to understand".

Patricia Flower sent us her memories of the early part of this century. We decided to choose an excerpt which gives an insight into the clothes that children and adults wore at that time.

A great many more clothes were worn in my early days, mainly owing to the lack of heat in houses. It was very cold indeed upstairs in winter (it was a four- storied house) as fires in bedrooms were only lit if someone were ill. I can remember one very cold winter that the face flannel froze to the bathroom basin! We all wore layers of clothes which made everyone look very bunchy. As children we wore in winter, a woollen vest, then woollen combinations, two pairs of knickers one flannel and one cambric, two petticoats, one flannel and one cotton with lace and then a dress, covered perhaps by a pinafore when playing. Some undergarments were omitted in summertime. High black button boots were always-wom out-of-doors and when I was about five, I was allowed the button hook to fasten them myself.

Mother, however, always had a lot of common-sense and she refused to wear the tight corsets worn by all women. She told us that when she was having her wedding dress made, the dressmaker was in despair; "But Miss Moody" she cried, "how can I fit your dress if you do not wear corsets!"

Instead of putting her two little girls into petticoats when we were aged between a year and three years or so, she and Aunt Minnie made some garments they called 'crawlers' for us which were something like the clothes that toddlers wear to-day. When machine knitted garments came into the shops, Mother bought sets of boys' woollen knickers and jerseys for us. Later, an all-in-one kilt and jersey was on sale and as we grew older we wore these comfortable and practical dresses. One day, when going shopping we met the Vicar's wife. Seeing the 'Kilties' she exclaimed in horror "Oh Mrs Long, I always thought that they were little boys!"

On Sundays, everyone went to church in the morning and best or new clothes were worn. Hats, of course; one never went out without a hat and gloves. My father wore a silk top hat to go to church or'business as did all the professional men and the brushing and ironing of the silk hat with a special curved iron was a morning task. The greeting of all the friends and neighbours outside the church was always a social occasion and I vividly remember the walk home with smells of succulent roasts issuing from the houses (cooked by the maid, of course). At week-ends the bell of the muffm man could still be heard and we would beckon him for muffins or crumpets fresh for tea.

In the First World War clothes had to change, especially for women. Skirts became shorter, as women worked in factories and drove cars for officers. Black stockings were still general though, in cotton or wool and it was not until the twenties that pink silk (or artificial silk) became the fashion. 'So modish but so mud-splashed' as a poem in the 'Daily Mail' called them. During the War the streets looked dreary and sad as nearly everyone wore black for their loved ones killed in thousands".

Anna Farnham is a writer, photographer and videographer based in Pardubice, Czech Republic. She grew up in Summerville, Oregon, and this is a memory of her childhood.

I grew up in the mountains of eastern Oregon, where my family lived off our large garden, our cow and flock of chickens. I was always aware that I could not see like other people, but my parents never let me make much of it. Most of the other children in our hollow were boys, so when I ran slower or fell down, it was more often blamed on my being a girl than my being legally blind.

When we entered school things changed drastically, and generally for the worse. I was in the first generation of "integration," a haphazard experiment thrusting disabled children into regular schools. My feisty temper got me into all kinds of trouble. The teachers were not excited about disabled children being added to their burden and many tacitly supported schoolyard harrassment. Recess was a daily battle to outrun the bullies and my burning loneliness. The few friends I had deserted me when they were threatened with the same outcast status.

My grades were not that good. I made "satisfactory," when I was lucky. Because of the difficulty of that time, I don't remember very much of my school years but, strangely, I remember one day in the fourth grade well. I was ill for a few weeks and came into class the day of a science test on rock identification. I was actually pretty good at geology. My father was into it and we would sit around in the high-desert in eastern Oregon and find quartz and basalt and granit. The teacher placed the rocks we were supposed to identify under a pane of glass three feet down. My good vision is at about three inches and there was no way I could even see the rocks, let alone tell what kind they were. I told the teacher this and she said, "Well, I guess I will just have to fail you."

The next year I had to leave that school. They would no longer take children with disabilities and there were no laws to force them to. Fortunately, I was accepted by another school some 30 miles away in another town. I rode a special bus there for three years, four hours per day, in order to continue my schooling.

When the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990, it was no less than a revolution in my world. The guts of the new deal were that people with disabilities could go to any school and have any job, based on the same qualifications as everyone else. Suddenly, over night it seemed, things changed radically. Campaigners gave lectures on our "new rights" and I went into school armed like a lawyer. It wasn't easy but for once it was all possible. I could get accomodations for exams. I might have to threaten, to square my shoulders and pretend I was as big as the teachers and adminstrators, but I could what I needed to read and write. I got into computer classes and learned to type and my grades shot from average to the very top.

I have known many other children of the first integration generation and I have never known one who had an easy time of it. I have even known those who say they wished integration had not been tried, that it was too hard on us. I cannot agree. Last spring I graduated first in my class from a prestigeous private university in Wisconsin, after four years of scholarships. I don't say this because I am proud but because this happened because of ADA, a revolution for 15 percent of the population of America, and one that set off a series of similar revolutions around the world. When I look at the pictures of people in wheelchairs demonstrating in Washington, D.C. I know exactly what that was all about. Aside from the freedom that came with assistive technology, like the computers I type on and the tape recorders that read my school books, ADA was the single most important event for people with disabiliies.

I have travelled extensively in Europe, the former Soviet Union and Africa since then. I have found people with disabilities all over the world just coming out of the shell of isolation, from a blind mathematical genius in Siberia who beat the Soviet school system, to cooperatives in Africa, to mobility and rehabilitation summer camps in the Czech Republic. I have been to some places, like Germany, where little has changed, where people with disabilities are still excluded from regular state schools. There is still a lot of struggle but we have seen more progress in the past twenty years than people with disabilities have seen in perhaps the entire history of the world. There are still many problems in America. I now live in Europe because I can not get around in America because there is little to no public transportation system, and with my very low eyesight I can't drive. But I have become a professional photographer in newspaper journalism and am currently finishing up my first documentary film.

Alex Cleland was born and brought up in India, and was a tea planter. He has written a book of poems called 'In Sunlight and In Shadow'. Here is a poem about Mr Cleland's memories of Assam:

TEA PLANTER

In the vast and fertile valley of Assam
Where the Ahom kings held sway,
The Brahmaputra River burst its dam,
And annually swept their crops away.

Wild head hunting Nagas, once circumvent
Were unruly, and no longer kept at bay
And the dread Anopholese mosquito's intent
Multiplied, spreading malaria and decay.

Now in that Ahom dynasty, fate decreed a change,
As journeying round the squally southern sea
The first tea planter, with his China Clipper came,
Loaded with a highly prized cargo of tea.

Carefully carrying seed and stock
Of that plant'Camelia Sinensis',
From Canton to Calcutta!s dock
To be shipped up river in parenthesis,

To float to Pandu, via Neamatti Ghat,
Across to Tezpur's northern bank
Also to Doom Dooma and the Sadya frontier tract
And on to Lakhimpur's most eastern flank;

The cultivation of tea went forging ahead.
Converting jungle into rich plantation,
And right across all borders duly spread.
By removing rank and rotting vegetation,

Constructing factories and hospitals and schools,
In exchange for rewarding profit and medication,
To draining old malarial infested pools
By careful research and scientific propagation.

To recruiting labour with their tools
From distant Orissa and Behar.
And placing clerks on office stools
From nearby Bengal and Alipur-Duar.

Now all went well for a while
As British housewives across the sea
Welcomed their 'cuppas' with a smile,
And put the kettle on to make more tea.

But not for very long, as greed
Was just around the comer stile,
And with the grasping hand of covet need
Came also the tentacles, of avarice and guile.

Here enters merciless cut-throat competition
From thug city businessmen of jaded reputation;
Submitting writs and endless petition
To improve their lot and falsify position.

By reducing the salaries of staff in the east
And enhancing their own with prodigious leap,
Tbus raising the price by sixpence at least
Of a pound of tea that once was cheap.

The auctioneers have made it clear
That only those who outbid the bidder
At London's Mincing Lane, or Calcutta!s Dalhousie Square,
May expect to gain the cup that cheers.

That is the rigid rule in England and India
And it's not on the wane I fear!

Pat Callaghan has written a memoir of his childhood in rural England called 'Meet Me At The Lamp-Post. Here is an excerpt describing the terraced housing he was brought up in:

Living in such close proximity continually brought people into contact with each other. The 'Row' had only one entrance, and exit, the one down the back from 'New Street. The one along the bottom of the gardens was seldom used by adults. It was impossible, therefore, to leave, or return, without passing windows or people standing in doorways or on the path, so you automatically acknowledged each other's presence or made some comment about the weather or other pressing topic. The residents were always having a chat or gossip as they went to the 'lav', pegged out washing, fetched coal in, chopped sticks or pottered about in the garden. This almost continuous contact between families nurtured relationships which were difficult to develop in other types of housing, many of which make contact virtually impossible. It did not take long for people to find out if someone was ill or needed assistance, which was soon forthcoming. Sticking together and helping when needed were a hallmark of the 'Row' and similar communities. Much of the contact was incidental, and for the most part, families kept themselves to themselves, respecting each other's privacy. This was essential, acting as a buffer zone between each household and the rest of the community, into which a family, or individual, could retreat when the need arose. This did not prevent families knowing other people's business or secrets, some of which were thought to be of the 'family only' type. It is amazing how quickly a savoury piece of gossip spreads, despite the purveyor insisting it is confidential and should go no further. Relationships were not always cordial, however, and human nature being what it is, were not expected to proceed on an even keel all of the time. Rows occasionally boiled up, precipitated, more often than not, by trouble between kids or an adult 'picking' on a kid. The flash point was often a petty dispute fuelled, and escalated, by disparaging comments. If kids only were involved, a fight often ensued and that was the end of it, unless the defeated party arrived at home, bloody and dishevelled, or ran home straight away to 'clack'. Sometimes such disputes were solved amicably by adults from each side but occasionally the dispute continued with parental blessing, which put it all at a more serious level. The parents involved 'shushed' their respective offspring into their own homes, delivering a salvo of verbal parting shots as they did so. I can never remember a dispute finishing with physical violence at the adult level but on occasions tempers got fairly hot and could have got out of hand.

Dr A H Chapman from BAHIA, BRAZIL has sent this reflection on life in Brazil. The opinions he expresses are his own, and not those of the BBC:

In 1965, at the age of 41, I moved from the United States, where I had lived my entire life, to Brazil. I had a Brazilian wife and 3 Brazilian-born children they needed their large extended family, and I am an adaptable person, and so we made the move. It has worked out well.

The thing that struck me, and still strikes me as being most radically different between the United States and Brazil is the marked similarity in black-white race relations. The State of Bahia, a vast area containing about 14 million people, in which we settled, represents Brazil at its best in this respect. On the street, and in the stores, you see black mothers hauling along one or two light-skinned, or even blond-headed, children. White boys and black girls, and vice versa, stroll along hand in hand, in an evolving racial synthesis that has been going on for more than 450 years. In America, if a couple of black families moved into a neighborhood, the white families become nervous, sell their homes to black families, and move out. That simply doesn't happen in Brazil. In neighborhoods, whether composed mainly of houses or apartment blocks, white owners would be surprised if 'block-busting' estate agents approached them about selling their homes because a few black families had moved in. They would at first have difficulty in seeing :what the estate agents were driving at. Brazil is no racial: paradise, but the differences between Brazil and the United States are so great that at first glance it seems to be.

There is no such thing in Brazil as a "black accent;" there are regional accents but no racial ones. In America a black person can usually be identified on the telephone or elsewhere, by his accent. School desegregation has never been a problem since schools always have been desegregated. Racial prejudice in the police force is not an issue since about half of all policemen, in all parts of Brazil, are of mixed race.

How do they do it? Gradually, and it took me about 20 years to realized this, I grasped the basic reason was intermarriage. It's hard to be racist when your aunt or your brother-in-law is black. From the very beginning, the Portuguese intermarried with their black slaves in Brazil. There are very high rates of death in childbirth in this tropical country, and a man who lost his white wife often married his slave paramour; when he did so both his wife and all children he had, or would have, with her automatically became free, and also, by Brazilian law and custom, became equal heirs with the children of his first wife, The shortage of white brides was great, since about 70 percent of the persons arriving from Europe in Brazil were men. This process had began in Portugal, for during almost 500 years Portuguese sailors and traders had been coasting down the western shores of Africa as far as present Nigeria, and had been bringing back black concubines who soon became black wives. Marriages of white women to black men (often the heirs of men who had married slave women became common about 100 years after the Portuguese settlement in Brazil began. And all this is still going on among the free Brazilians.

The handmaiden of tolerance is peacefulness. No other geographically large, populous nation has solved its basic problems so peacefully. Independence from Portugal was achieved with almost no bloodshed and emancipation of the slaves with none at all. This is in marked contrast to the bloody wars by which the Americans and the Spanish-speaking Latin American countries won their independence and the tragic war-stained process by which American slaves were freed

No wonder the Brazilians have a saying, which they half believe "Deus e brazileiro - "God is a Brazilian."

First Chief Minister George Kaltoi Sigari Kalsakau of the New Hebrides now know as Vanuatu sent us this account of his life.

"My full name is George Kaltoi Sigari Manulapalapa and family name is Kalsakau. I was born on 14th September 1930. I am the son of Paramount Chief T. Kalsakau - the first educated Ni-Vanuatu to become Paramount Chief. In 1945 I was enrolled at Iririki District School and in 1947 I worked as a clerk for Rev Dr. T.J.K.Jameson of Paton Memorial Hospital for the Presbyterian church.

Then on the 1st of August 1953 1 enrolled in the British Division of the New Hebrides Constabulary and in September I was sent to train at ROVE Solomon Island Police Training School in Honiara, Guadalcanal. The police recruit training school ended in February 1954 and the M/V Malaita took me to Sydney N.S.W. I I was stationed at Penrith Police Training School to observe and learn about how the Australian Police and Military officers carry out their duties when Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth 11 made her official visit as the queen of the United Kingdom. I did my observations and stayed there for a day and helped the staff of the Police Training School in preparing 20 000 sandwiches which were packed inside 21 wooden boxes then loaded onto 2 trucks. I traveled with it to the N.S.W. Police Headquarters in Sydney then from Penrith to the main capital city which was about 60 km.

By the time I arrived with 21 large boxes of sandwiches which was about 1am., The city roads and parks were full of people waiting to see the queen. There were millions of people and it was a great day for everyone in Australia and they gave her a great " welcoming". The queen was also happy and I myself was pleased to have been there to witness that special occasion.

On 23rd June 1955 1 married Miss Tounipala Leirea, aged 22 daughter of James Feandre Nanine of Loyalty Island, LIFOU.She was the first qualified female teacher who was trained at the Ballentine Memorial Secondary School, Taelainavesi Suva Fiji and to the Nassau Teacher's Training College. She taught at the Fila Island primary school and British Police Preschool. She became the first woman to become a civil servant as clerk in the British National Service, PORT VILA. We are happily married with ten children:-

I started training the policemen in the British Division of the New Hebrides Constabulary until the first police officer arrived from the United Kingdom by the name of Supt. O.F. BOWER in 1956. He had been transferred from I HongKong Police Training School to PortVila. I, Sergeant G.K. Kalsakau was then sent to England for training. I was actually the first Ni-Vanuatu (Melanesian) to train in the UK. I arrived in England on April 1959 and I went to All Arms Drill Wings Pirbright followed by Metropolitan Hendon Police Training School and Colonial police Officers course at Hendon College. I returned to Port Vila on 9h April 1960 and the Western Pacific High Commissioners stationed in Honiara sent a telegram to promote me to the first rank as SUB. INSPECTOR OF POLICE and a congratulation message.

Jehovah Almighty God spoke to me through a senior Detective Superintendent of the Sri Lankan Police Force by the name of Kodituwakku Benjamin L.V. de S. On 10th Jan 1975 when both he and I were attending a police training course. He came up to me and asked to read my palm. I had never met him before until the Police course which commenced on the 6th January 1975. So I showed him both my palms and he told me this " God has written on your palm that in three years time the people of your country will elect you as their Prime Minister". I laughed at him, then he said "mark my words because it is written in your palm. You will keep that position for a year. I then left not really taking what he said seriously.

I was in charge of the police Headquarters for commandant of police. I served the people of Vanuatu for 25 years in the British Division of the New Hebrides Constabulary. I resigned on 14th October 1977 to go into politics. Then on 29th November 1977 general election Vanuaaku Party boycotted the elections so the other parties followed the law and we established the Union of Moderate Party in which I was appointed First Chief Minister of Self - Government of the New Hebrides. The two High Commissioners of Great Britain Mr. Sutton and for the Republic of France Mr. Eriau officially appointed myself on I 1st January 1978 at Port Vila. They handed over the Condominium Joint Government at Port Vila the Capital of Vanuatu. This was exactly three years later as predicted above".

Mr Stan Brodnicki from Switzerland remembers life in Poland after the end of World War I.

"I was born in 1926 but it feels as if it were at the end of the last century. With hindsight, my world, the small world of a child, belonged more to the 19th century than to the 20th. It was the singular world of the Polish landed gentry who lived, one could almost say, in "splendid isolation", on their country estates where social structures, customs and mores and the way of life was much as it had been fifty or even a hundred years earlier. My very first home was Wielowies. This 850 acre property was located some 7 km. from the more extensive 1300 acre family estate Wielka Koluda where my paternal grandparents lived. My father had bought Wielowies in 1922, shortly after returning from military service in two consecutive wars.

During the First World War, he was compelled to join the Prussian army. He served as second lieutenant, and participated in the dangerous ammunition supply convoys to the famous battle of Verdun. He was also involved in the German military action in what later became Yugoslavia where he nearly died of dysentery. Political settlements at the end of the 1st World War liberated Poland of the three neighbouring powers, which had deprived it of independence for over 100 years.

However for the Poles, fighting was not yet over. The now communist Russia was posing a continued threat. The Polish leader, Marshall Pilsudski, conceived a strategy, which seemed good. It was to help the Ukrainians gain independence from Russia and thus create a safety buffer between Poland and the new Soviet Union. A deal was made and the newly created Polish army, (mainly cavalry), moved into Ukraine. It quickly gained the upper hand and, chasing the enemy, reached the main city of Kiev. Father's regiment entered the city triumphantly on horseback.

Unfortunately, the Ukrainians never lived up to the agreement failing to put up an army, which would support the Poles and take over control. The Russians, thus relieved, made a surprise attack on Poland from the north and, finding little resistance there, advanced up to a suburb of Warsaw, right across the Vistula river. The city put up a desperate fight trying to stop the enemy crossing the river whilst the main Polish army raced the long distance from the south to stop the invasion. It eventually succeeded in cutting the enemy from its supplies and reinforcements. The Russians retreated. The stakes had been enormous.

With Poland invaded, the whole of Eastern and Central Europe was potentially threatened by communism. Germany itself was on the brink of a revolution. This victory was later remembered as the "The Miracle of the Vistula River" people attributing it to an intervention of the Virgin Mary in saving Warsaw and Poland.

I used to enjoy listening to father and other veteran officers of this most colourful war, exchange reminiscences. It had been a highly mobile war, fought largely on horseback, with spectacular cavalry charges, lances and sabres in action, the last war of this type to be fought in Europe. Back from these endless wars, with a bullet wound in his leg and decorated with the cross "Virtuti Militari", my father was past the age of starting university studies. Thus, with the help of my grandfather and a hefty loan from the local sugar manufacturing company (in which my grandfather was a major shareholder), he bought a country estate called Wielowies, got married and started normal life.

As a girl, my mother was less exposed to the war though it marked her in two different ways. Like many other young ladies of all social levels, she volunteered for the Red Cross to serve as a nurse in a field hospital. There she was exposed to hardship, blood and the suffering of badly wounded soldiers for whom there were few medicines and lack of anaesthetics for painful operations. The transition from a highly protected life to this environment of horrors was hard and must have required much courage. Courage she never lacked in her later life".

copyright © 1997 by Stanislaw Brodnicki.

David King from Canada reflects on growing up in India.

" As I look at my children and see their quality of life in today's world in Canada, I wonder which quality is better; the one they have today or the one I had growing up in India.

Yes, I was born and grew up in India. I belong to the small and diminishing community of Anglo-Indians. My parents were teachers in an old, very respected, boarding school (Barnes High School in Devlali). Since it was a boarding school, far from any cities, we had most of the faculty living on campus. That gave us an instant group of friends - other teachers children!

My memories of growing up were of clean, fresh air, friends and games that we invented or modified. We had few toys - teachers were not very well paid, certainly nowhere near the value that they gave to their students - and so were necessarily innovative. And we had a blast!

My best friend was Chris Lal and we were inseparable. He moved to Australia and I still have the last picture that he sent me, holding Timmy his dog. Chris was killed in a motorcycle accident. He'll never know that I still miss him.

We moved from Devlali to New Delhi. The big city was different. Fewer friends. Asphalted roads. Vehicles. New Delhi in those days, was green, clean and safe. How different from the city that it has become today - crowded, dirty and unsafe.

My sister and I went to boarding school in Lucknow. La Martiniere was a school with a long history behind it. Discipline was tough and tight and administered ruthlessly. Today the western world would cringe at the brutal treatment that was handed out.

The warden at my school welcomed us with a brief speech which can be summed up as: "We expect you to break the rules. We expect you to be smart enough not to be caught. If you're caught, take your punishment like a man." It was really a very fair approach. And a delightful challenge. Of course, not all the administrators of this system were fair and just. Some were bullies, others sadists. We learned to cope. We learned about injustice. We learned to stand on our own two feet and take what came our way. And we're none the worse for it.

Twenty-five years later, here in Toronto, Canada, I have met up with others from my school and the trademark influence of our years there is a fierce loyalty and love for the institution. We are none the worse for all the rules and discipline and punishments that we were at the mercy of in school.

I've had the opportunity to travel to a few parts of the world and everywhere I've gone people ask me how I got my name, how it doesn't 'sound' Indian. I am proud to tell them that I'm an Anglo-Indian. There aren't too many of us around, certainly in India.

My parents made sure that I had a good education - La Martiniere College, Lucknow and St Stephen's College, Delhi are two leading educational institutions in the country. They prepared me for life.

As a single parent and relatively new immigrant to Canada, I've told my children that I will do my best to give them an education and a foundation for life. By the time they are working and out in the world, they will not be able to say that they're Anglo-Indian. We'll be proud Canadians. But in my heart, deep down inside, I'm a proud Anglo-Indian".

Helena Kalinina from the Ukraine reflects on the changes she has seen this century.

"Thus, my century begins somewhere around 1960s - in my perception, of course. In this connection I can't help mentioning the rock'n'roll culture and how it all began in general.- The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Doors, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, and the list can be continued endlessly. The situation now is quite different, but at that time it was a natural response to the problems of our century: it was like an abscess that suddenly broke and resulted in a new wave. It was a protest, a desire for something new, a spiritual consolation (for some). At first criticized by an older generation and causing indignation and condemnation, this wave seems to have almost spent its force now. But still, it is an important milestone. Particularly in our country it is the time when people could talk almost freely, or at least try to. I would like to mention the brightest example of the time when people were allowed to talk - Victor Tsoy. The words from one of his songs: "Our hearts need a change, we are waiting for a change" became the slogan for thousands of young people in our country. He was on the crest of the wave and in the hearts of people of all ages.

After the USSR had collapsed, our century gave us a few years of miracles, seen with a naked eye. A flow of import products flooded our markets, and soon we could observe a great many of kiosks that crowded our city. At last we saw with our own eyes things that we only had heard of before: Pepsi, chewing gums, lollipops, yogurts, etc.; everything in a bright package - who could have ever thought of it?

For the youngsters' hungry eyes it was a shock. It took us some time to get used to all this splendors. And I think that the generation of our parents was just as shocked as we, children.

I consider it necessary to mention one more acquisition of our time that has a great influence on our minds. I mean different religions and cults that became accessible to every person not a long time ago. Now we can see a lot of books on cults and traditions, and everyone is free to practice any religion he wants (at least in our country). Along with orthodox faith, Buddhism, Confucianism, which we know as almost classical religions if we may say so, there's a wide range of others, which may seem exotic to our hungry eyes: Zen Buddhism, shamanism, books by Carlos Castaneda, that reveal quite a new words and show a new path.

Those are in no way new books, but we have a free access to them now, that differs this time from the previous periods. We are given a chance to change our lives for the better and it all lies within our powers. For me it is one of the greatest features of our century.

And now we live the last year of this century. Should we take a look around to consider the progress made during this period of time? Or should we stop and think - is it really as good as that - our civilization? Has anybody ever counted the number of artificial things the century brought along? Is not it excessive? Sometimes I feel overfed by the industrial products and substitutes. I do not underestimate the progress, but can not we make it without causing so much harm to everything around us? When I consider our century from this point of view, it seems to me a quintessence of human stupidity. We think that we are eternal and the Earth is everlasting and is going to endure all our whims. Will this state of things last long? That remains to be seen.

What future keeps in store for us? Maybe, that is the sorest question of the end of this century".

Mike Bird who now lives in Mongolia emailed us about his impressions of some of the things that happened while he was in Malawi and Mozambique in the early 90s.

"I arrived in Malawi in 91 and left Mozambique in 95 having seen and participated in some amazing changes in the region. When I arrived, Hastings Banda was the undisputed and extremely autocratic ruler of Malawi and had been for over 20 years. By the time I left he was on trial for his life. In the meantime there had been a referendum on the system of government, followed, a year later, by multiparty elections that Banda lost.

I went to Africa to work on the programme of assistance to Mozambican refugees in Malawi. Many had been there for 10 years and there seemed to be no prospect of them returning home, but I was involved in the wave of repatriation that saw a million Mozambicans return home. I was also an election monitor in the first democratic elections ever held in Mozambique and involved in the programme of reconstruction that followed the end of the war and the return of the refugees. When I left Mozambique, people were bringing in the best harvest in nearly 20 years and the country had come back to life.

During the 4 years I spent there I was also involved in the relief effort that followed the worst drought in Southern Africa for 50 years. It was a time of change for the whole region with Nelson Mandela winning the election in South Africa and Kenneth Kaunda losing in Zambia.

One of the reasons that I think these events are so important is that the quiet revolution in Malawi and the peace process in Mozambique, which led to the return of refugees and democratic elections, are both over- overwhelmingly positive stories in a continent that is so often associated with tragedy. Another is that both events speak volumes for the courage and good sense of the ordinary Malawians and Mozambicans involved. The transition in Malawi from dictatorship to democracy happened slowly, quietly and with hardly any bloodshed. The peace treaty in Mozambique, once signed, was not seriously breached once. The Mozambican refugees returned home with a minimum of assistance and got on with rebuilding their lives with no fuss and little help. I was lucky enough to be there and watch it happen and even play a small part in the process"

George Iliev was born 20 years ago in socialist Bulgaria. He spent the first half of his life in a socialist society under the supreme rule of the communist party, which was the driving force behind anything that was or was not allowed to take place. It was the only party in Bulgaria and everybody called it “The party”.

"My first memories of the party were the small poems I had learnt in kindergarten about it’s role in leading the people to prosperity and protecting them from the threat of capitalism and imperialism and which usually wound up by saying how lucky we were to be born in a socialist country. The party was a part of everybody’s life – one had to have the local party secretary’s consent to move to another city, go on a trip to Western Europe or have a new job. A neighbour of ours was allowed to visit her brother who had fled to West Germany only after she had declared that “the filthy traitor” was not her brother any longer. My aunt had not been allowed to study law because my grandfather had had 10 hectares of land – before the nationalization, of course; and to become an associate professor of economics, she had to apply for party membership first.

The whole economy was centrally planned and often wrongly planned; everybody had a job and people worked negligently because even if one was fired, the state had to appoint him/her again to another job. When shopping one had to be very careful not to irritate the shop assistant with special demands because the latter would simply not sell you what you wanted. The shop assistant would often not bother to serve the customers at all and keep reading a book, let’s say, despite their protests. The shops seldom sold goods imported from outside the Soviet bloc. We had bananas only around New Year and people lined for hours to buy a ration of several kilos because they were so rare and exotic (while no one of the ruling party had bothered to arrange their import). When I was little I thought that winter was the season they became ripe and when my brother went to France in the summer of 1989 (just before the fall of socialism) and brought me back 5 bananas all the way from there, I was astonished. How could I have known that they got ripe all year round.

The TV programs were boring. There were only 2 channels broadcasting predominantly socialist films and party conferences and people made special aerials to be able to watch TV channels from former Yugoslavia which was then the most westernized state among the socialist countries. There was of course Russian television and Russian newspapers, and students studied Russian from 3-rd class onwards to university. My family used to take in a Russian newspaper (“The Pravda” – e.g. the truth) because it was deemed a kind of a socialist obligation but hardly anyone ever read it.

The party controlled all the information and it was dangerous to listen to western radio broadcasts. I remember that once an acquaintance of my mother’s had given her a slip of paper with the frequencies of western broadcasts in Bulgarian and when she came home she locked the door before turning on the radio. It was forbidden to speak depreciatingly about the party and there were people who had even been jailed for telling jokes about the Prime Minister or the secretary general of the communist party. There was powerful propaganda against the west; the United States were pictured as a threat to world peace and an enemy to the working classes around the world. Pupils’ textbooks told stories about the starving children and the oppressed workers of the US, ruled by evil capitalists and about the skyscrapers where people lived crammed for space, while the really oppressed and crammed for space were the citizens of the Soviet bloc, living in small flats in 10-20 storey buildings. Periodically people had to work on Saturdays (without being paid) in so called “Leninski subotnik” in behalf of the country’s prosperity. The party banned all Christian holidays because atheism was the main policy, so there was no Christmas – only New Year’s Eve and party holidays. It was bad for one’s career to be seen in church, as well. Socialism as a whole was a system of uniformity: all people were almost equally paid and worked equally little; pupils had to dress uniformly – the main item being the red scarf without which one wouldn’t be let to go to school. And predominantly people were equally suppressed.

That is why everybody was happy with the fall of the regime in 1989 and everybody felt for the first time free to speak, to vote, to travel abroad, to live wherever one wanted. The change, however, was coupled with a severe economic crisis: there were first the lines for basic goods, then there was the unemployment and the rising poverty, and the inflation reined in only after the introduction in 1997 of a currency board. Most of these things were unseen under socialism before and older people started craving for the security and equality of the past, be it at the price of their personal freedom. That was because they had seen only the negative side of the changes that had taken place. And though I think I have been lucky to have lived under two different systems and to have witnessed the advantages and disadvantages of both in my 20 years, I don’t think I would want to live under socialism again".

Norman Lee from Singapore recounts how the public bus system has changed since his childhood.

"When I was a young boy of about 6 years old, my father used to bring me to the main shopping district, Orchard Road on Saturday mornings to visit the bookshops. Cars in Singapore were already expensive then, so we relied on the public bus system to bring us to our destination.  

I have many memories of the bus journeys that we took. On certain sectors of the route where there were fewer bus-stops, the bus drivers almost never resisted the temptation to speed. I liked being in speeding buses then, as I particularly enjoyed the wind blowing onto my face. However, that was about the only aspect of the journey that I liked. With the less than satisfactory suspension systems of the buses then, I always found myself bouncing up and down in my seat, and I always had to be careful that I did not knock my head against the windows.  

I also wondered how my father could fall asleep on the bus after a morning at the bookshops. I always found it difficult to close my eyes, no matter how tired I was. Everytime the gears were changed the bus would jerk forward. It was easy for me to close my eyes when the bus was cruising, but when I was just about to enter dreamland, the bus would stop, and I would be shaken from my slumber by the continued jerking action of the bus as the gears were changed up. As it is with bus routes, there were numerous bus-stops along the route, as well as numerous signalised junctions, which meant that every few minutes I would be woken up. Very soon I gave up the idea of sleeping, and instead spent my time looking at the scenery outside the bus. I soon found myself very familiar with the bus route, and became the envy of my friends.  

As I moved up the education system, I found myself becoming increasingly reliant on the public bus service to be able to get to school on time. As the years passed by, those jerking buses were also gradually being replaced by Swedish buses that had better suspensions, and had automatic transmission too. I was always grateful to be able to catch forty winks on the bus after a tiring day at school, as it gave me the necessary energy to greet my mum with a cheerful "Hello, Mum!". After I entered the army to do my compulsory two-and-a-half years of military service, I always found the naps that I took on those one-and-a-half hour long journeys most refreshing, after a tiring week of training. I could lean on the walls of the bus, and dream about the fun I would have during the weekends, without having to worry about getting my head knocked around.

Yet, with the hot weather here in Singapore, the bus companies, in an effort to provide passengers with comfortable journeys in the heat, air-conditioned buses have become the norm. While I am always pleased to travel in one when the weather is really uncompromisingly warm , I really miss having the wind in my face as the bus speeds through the roads. Nowadays, when I feel the stress from my studies at the University, I sometimes go on a trip on bus service number 30 which, on a particular sector of its route, provides a spectacular view of the sea in all its splendour, which never fails to lift my spirits. As I take in the sights, I so long to be able to smell the sea as well, yet I cannot, because the bus is air-conditioned.  

Nevertheless, public transport here in Singapore has come a long way from those days of bone-jerking journeys. Although I am not able to smell the sea on that bus route, I don't really mind. Because the buses are air-conditioned, I am most pleased to see that those bus drivers who have unceasingly plied their routes all these years in the heat of the tropics, along with the heat from the engines, are now working in better conditions. I am happy that the bus driver can enjoy the same cool air as his passengers, while continuing on his day's journeys".

Susanna Rowat from England tells how medical science has given her nearly thirty six extra years.

"I am in my sixty fourth year and every day since my twenty eighth birthday has been a bonus. Very few of those days go by without a personal glance at what was undoubtedly an extremely traumatic, but at the same time, an unbelievably enriching experience; an experience I would not have wished on my worst enemy, but one I would not willingly have forgone myself; an experience that changed my perceptions of life, and helped to make me what I am today.

In the late fifties and early sixties great strides were being made in medical research to combat tumours previously untreatable. It was my good fortune to be in need of such treatment, at a time when there was a high profile in the medical journals, with much publicity being given to the development of chemotherapy and its effects on malignant tumours.

My children were born between January 1960 and September 1964 in one nursing home and I was nursed by substantially the same team on each occasion. So I was well known there, perhaps notorious would be nearer the truth as my visits had become known as ‘Mrs R’s annual holiday on the National Health!’ Nursing staff in rural Somerset, some of whom were ex pupils of mine, were not, in those days, on Christian name terms with their patients. When the fifth baby arrived, a month before my 28th birthday, I was unable to ‘bounce’ back after a hemorrhage. My doctor and the nursing team, knowing me so well, were concerned. Fortunately I had a doctor who was very aware of what was going on at the frontiers of the medical world, and who eventually realised he might have on his hands a patient with a condition most doctors had never seen.

It was decided I should have a small operation. I had been in hospital before but had never had an operation and I was scared. Imagine the scenario: Nick approaching his first school term, Lucy two and a half, Adam a year and a bit and four week old Clive. My second child, Bridget, carried hydrocephalus and spina bifida with her to an early grave. My mother, herself with two children under fourteen, came to Somerset to collect the Clan and take them back to Cambridgeshire. When, a month later, I was called back for a second operation I had a premonition this was going to be a prolonged process and I faced the prospect of having to organise a long term solution for the children. However by this time, although I still knew nothing of the seriousness of the condition assailing me, I was beginning to feel very unwell and was loosing weight fast. I found it difficult to concentrate my mind on any problem. The results of the second operation told the doctors that Choriocarcinoma, an invasive and hitherto untreatable tumour of the placental tissue which they had feared, was a probability.

After many tests and x-rays, and a long talk with a compassionate hospital doctor, I learnt a little of the problems facing me. The strange and wonderful thing was that I stopped being afraid, even at the beginning, when the information was rather sketchy and the future very uncertain. Giving a name to the condition made it easier for me to cope. For me there is strength in knowledge and that was certainly demonstrated in this case. Coincidentally, the weekend I was given this devastating news, The Observer Magazine (3rd December, 1964) published an article on Choriocarcinoma and the new sterile unit that had recently been opened in Fulham Hospital (now part of the Charing Cross Group) to treat about one in a million women of childbearing age. The magazine was brought to me in Yeovil hospital and I have it still!

My move to Fulham was swift and peppered with unforgettable memories; the sadness of not being able to be at home for Christmas; the ambulance driver, delegated to meet the train carrying me from Yeovil who couldn’t understand why he had to meet a train at Waterloo for a person coming from ‘The Oval’; the journey, a couple of days later, to the old Charing Cross Hospital for a particular test when another ambulance driver took me through Regent Street to see, for the first time, the Christmas lights, and my terror as, with traffic roaring on either side of us, we seemed to fall into the ground... actually we dived through an underpass...but to a country girl who had never seen an underpass before, and was not feeling brilliant, it was a traumatic experience. I spent Christmas in Charing Cross and remember little of the time except the valiant attempts of the staff and Friends of the Hospital to alleviate my abject misery at being parted from my family.

In those early days the treatment was experimental and very hazardous and it was vital that patients did not become resistant to the only two drugs then available. Because we were very vulnerable to all infections we were nursed in sterile conditions in the purpose built addition isolated from the main hospital. It was a lonely time. Meals were microwaved to near destruction: letters and newspapers fed through an autoclave oven were sometimes forgotten and disintegrated. Can you imagine the sheer frustration and sadness as a long awaited letter fell to pieces as the envelope was opened? However the staff were totally dedicated and became more to us than family...for they took the place of all our loved ones; they had infinite patience and time to sit and talk to us. They sympathised when we were down, shared our letters, our anniversaries, our joys and our sorrows. They were our lifelines to the outside world.

I didn’t see my three younger children for more than six months. Two spent the time with my parents and the baby was looked after by a wonderful foster mother. The eldest, Nick, went to live with a sculptor and her family and began school at the right time and in the right place. He was brought, occasionally, by my husband to ‘visit’ me in London and they viewed me through the window of my room. It was far better than nothing but I did so miss the physical contact.

I was in isolation for the greater part of six months, becoming physically very weak but managing to maintain a mental robustness...most of the time. Twice I faced desperate setbacks and felt myself going downhill and losing contact with everything. But eventually the drugs began to conquer the tumour and slowly I recovered. Today, even after a second trauma, a malignant tumour of the thyroid, I am as fit as many 63 year olds.

While I had all the attention, my husband had an invidious time, being unable to talk to his colleagues who froze when cancer was mentioned, for it was not a subject for discussion then. During the time I was in hospital Richard Dimbleby, the broadcaster, died but had been one of the first people to talk publicly about his cancer. I passionately believe he did everyone a tremendous service, for he removed some of the secrecy and stigma of the disease. And today I have a friend going through chemotherapy whose young twin daughters took her to school as the subject of their ‘show and tell’ lesson! Nothing could be further from the experiences my family had in the sixties.

As the taboo of talking about one’s fears is being removed, diagnosis can be swifter and far more effective, to the inestimable benefit of all. Chemotherapy has extended so many lives, and although still not an easy option, is a great deal less unpalatable than it was in its infancy in the fifties and sixties.

Linked to the delight at my survival is my undying gratitude to the medical teams, researchers, nursing staff and ancillary personnel who have made it possible for so many of us to have the chance to be happy for so many extra days of our century".

Anand Doraswami, wrote to us about the changing face of Bangalore - a city in India.

"My name is Anand Doraswami. I am 56 years old and I live in Bangalore, one of India's fastest growing cities. I first came to live here 44 years ago after my father retired from a government job in the capital, Delhi. The government had offered him a new assignment for five years in Bangalore. We lived then, and continued to live for two decades after his final retirement, close to his place of work.

Although it was not far from the heart of the city, it was a newly- developing neighbourhood. The road on which we lived was the boundary between the western and eastern parts of the south of the city, but because the eastern part of the south had only then started coming into existence, there were few houses and practically no traffic on the road. What little traffic there was consisted mostly of city buses going to their depot for the night and funeral processions going to the crematorium or the cemeteries. We lived near the northern end of the road. The bus depot was down the road from our home, and the last destinations of human beings just beyond the bus depot at the southern end.

The road had been conceived as a splendid avenue, two carriageways separated by a broad walkway in the middle in addition to the pavements on either side. I used to cycle up and down the road during the day and in the evening my sisters and I strolled along the dividing walkway. Sometimes we climbed the little hillock beyond the cemeteries. From there we got a panoramic view northwards of the city, and could also saunter through the botanical garden in which the hillock is set.

Bangalore was then a haven for pensioners, unique among India's cities as a place whose climate was pleasant practically the year round, and somewhat smaller, quieter and less developed, not to mention slower-paced, than India's metropolises. Our road was called Hanumanthaiya Road after the Chief Minister of Karnataka state, but because of its double carriageway it was, and still is, popularly known as Double Road. Over the years it grew into one of the important arteries of traffic from the south of the city to the central and northern parts. As Bangalore developed rapidly, first as an industrial centre, especially for federal government-owned industry, and then as India's information technology capital, Double Road developed even more rapidly. Houses were turned into offices or came down to make way for custom-built office blocks, the traffic on the road multiplied by leaps and bounds, and the road ceased to be a pleasant promenade.

I now live on the southern side of the botanical garden and have to pass through Double Road on my way to work, to visit people or go shopping. The dividing walkway has shrunk from six metres to just over a metre wide, and it is fenced off so people can't walk on it anyway, even if they are unwise enough to consider doing so. I ride down the road on a motorcycle, wearing a mask to filter out automobile exhaust fumes. The traffic is unmanageable because like me so many others ride motorcycles and scooters since public transport is woefully inadequate.

Over the last few months Double Road has become more than double trouble. A flyover is being built from its northern end over a bottleneck, a narrow half-kilometre-long road that connects it to an important junction on the way north. It takes off just north of our old home, now itself turned into a warren of some ten shops and offices. When completed the flyover will ease traffic congestion over this bottleneck. For the present it sadly reminds me of the road I once knew and loved and that is now no more. There is no place to park on the road even without the encroachments of the flyover construction work. If one wants to turn around after finishing some business on Double Road one has to go to the end of the road and take a detour. The whole scene is symbolic of the chaos that has been urban growth in Bangalore and many other cities in India".

Cliff Robinson emailed us from New Zealand about his experience of having two children who were born handicapped.

"Marita was born on 8th Feb.1967.As was the custom of the day I was celebrating at the Manukau Hotelwith workmates. My father tracked me down and said "Strike me pink, Cliff,there's something wrong with that child of yours!" So off I went to the Mater Hospital where a stern-looking specialist informed me that my child was microcephalic.

Microcephalics could have been visitors from outer space for all I knew .I had no idea that it meant having a small brain. The kindly, well-meaning but misinformed Catholic nursing sister advised us to leave the little one with them to care for her in one of their homes. Marita's mother wanted this to happen but I did not so we took Maria home.

On 15th October 1969 John was born in the same hospital. It was the same nursing sister who gave the same advice.(We had been assured that the chances of having a normal child this time were 99.999% but the dice had fallen against us once again.

This time John's mother rebelled and refused to take John home so off he went to the Home of compassion. He nearly died. Three weeks later his mother agreed to take him home, but the decision never really sat easy with her. She had a recurrence of an earlier schizophrenic condition and took off never to be seen again.(Virtually).

Eventually I ceased work as a marine engineer to look after the babies full-time still do, 25 years later. I have a small government grant. Tony, a handicapped Maori lad, lived with us for 7 years when he was small. Times were hard. It was difficult to bring up three handicapped children on my own. I had no help, the neighbors treated us like lepers.

Eventually they grew up and I thought it would be a good idea for them to see the world. So with little money and grim determination we have backpacked through India, China,Japan,Thailand,Malaysia,Vietnam,Indonesia,Australia, the Pacific Islands,Sri Lanka,USA, Mexico, Canada,Argentina,Uruguay,Brazil,South Africa, Zimbabwe,Morocco,Spain,France,Portugal, Italy, Egypt,Israel,Jordan, England and Ireland (where we met the children's mother again).

Marita and Johnny's world has expanded enormously. What a contrast if they had been left in an institution and forgotten about! They have met the Pope and worked in Mother Theresa's home in India and also helped in handicapped centres in Samoa and the Cook Islands. We have seen handicapped people living in appalling conditions in some countries. In one Pacific nation a boy was tethered to a post like an animal.

Here In New Zealand handicapped people are condemned to the bottom of the economic scrap heap for the term of their natural lives. Their jobs in sheltered workshops are repetitious and poorly paid ($NZ20 per week) Fancy being surrounded in a world awash with materialism and being unable to participate. My son and daughter are beautiful people- so much can be learned from them. I hope the 21st Century will see handicapped people set free all over the world.. "

If you would like to contact Cliff email him at: tom@pl.net or write to him at 4 Albert St, Kelson, Auckland NZ.

Daniel Batty from the UK tells us about his life and cities.

"Throughout my life, I have traveled to interesting urban areas; Hong Kong and Tokyo at the age of about twelve. At the age of eighteen, after my A-levels, I travelled around Europe with five school friends. We visited Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Munich, Venice, Rome, Florence, Genoa, Nice and Paris - the holiday of a lifetime containing a mutiplicity of memories. The friendliness of Amsterdam contrasted with the alienation of Berlin. Berlin seemed alienating to me, yet also liberating. Prague had a ghostly element to it, the fog descending over Charles Bridge, vampire-like prostitutes on the corner of the square; the waterfront in Venice; getting drunk in a claustrophobic hotel room in Paris; pasta in the port area of Genoa, so salty you were soon drenched in your own sweat, Florence might have been Death Valley . . . we baked in Florence . . . a crucible at the foot of the valley; sleeping in a huge tent in Munich, the equivalent of youth hostels in Germany; Rome in the evening.

Between the ages of 14 and 18, my parents were living and working in America. America, according to Joel Garreau the writer of Edge City, has been responsible for the redesign of the urban area in the 20th century. Los Angeles is described as having a property that promotes the spontaneous emergence of financial districts at its boundaries, or within it . . . a process of random agglomeration so little understood. If we are to believe the theorists, this is due merely to probability. If a meteor is flying through space there is a specific probability that it will collide with another meteor. Seemingly, it is believed, the same stochastic processes work in cities.

Another writer, Mark Davies, has described the self-destructive growth of Los Angeles - an image of a city literally tearing itself apart from within. Expensive residential areas - the homes of film stars - are built in areas known for their fire corridors, which periodically are reduced to ashes with the onset of forest fires. A 'Mediterranean' climate has been a historic home for cities, and the forces of nature constantly achieve their equilibrium through low frequency but high intensity events. Every twenty five years or so, Hawaii sends Los Angeles a big wet kiss in the form of a tidal wave. Just when seismologists thought they were getting to grips with the earthquakes in this region, a new kind of compressed fault line was discovered and a paradigm collapsed.

London seems also to be changing constantly. The dirt and the waste is a continual expression of creative destruction within any urban area - something similar to the very forces some economists attach to business cycles seem also to occur in cities. Yet London changes for the individual also.

When I first came to live here, I was fascinated by the energy, the sheer amount of information colliding together and synthesising itself almost naturally. Nowadays, London can take on two roles; it can form part of the background, detached and impersonal, shimmering in the background. Sometimes, however, the opposite is the case. London becomes personal and you can feel it in your bones. I was walking across Waterloo Bridge with two friends of mine just the other Saturday. It was the first day of Summer and barely a cloud in the sky. We looked across at the cityscape, down towards the City and Tower Bridge, then down towards the Houses of Parliament. Soon we would be in the city and the perspective would change. We would be like rats in a cage of our own choice. And everywhere above and around us would be populated by others. I had walked across that same bridge - Waterloo Bridge - a few weeks earlier. It was 11 o clock at night and it was raining. There was an aggressive thundering of a taxi passing by us with its light on . . . we tried to hail it but it just kept driving. I can remember no cityscape, I can remember being angry with the taxi driver, and I can remember the lights of the cars, the darkness. London had turned on us. Asked which of the two experiences of Waterloo Bridge was my favourite would be a redundant question. Neither / both - what's the difference? Both are part of the city life. Both are as important".

Shelley Burke from the UK tells us her experience of 'Having A Baby'

"I had my daughter in November 1997. I was 33 and had not expected to be a mother. I have been with my partner for a long time but we have never married and I never thought we would settle down in the conventional sense. Then we both decided we wanted a baby and so Clare was born.

She was born on the 13th floor of Guy's hospital at dawn and I literally watched the sun coming up as I pushed her out. She had the most peaceful birth imaginable. We had brought Christy Moore tapes to the hospital and she lay in her crib looking at her new world and listening to Christy Moore. It was very important to us to give her a good welcome.

She is 18 months old now and I have been surprised to find I'm a really good mother. I'm typical of my generation in that I had very little contact with babies before I had Clare. I have always been preoccupied with work and with politics. My ability to engage with this creature has been a revelation to me. It's a whole new dimension to my life".

Ruth Smith tells us about her memories as a child......

"My name is Ruth Smith. I'm 97 years old. I live at the Daughters of Israel Geriatric Center in West Orange, New Jersey. When I was five our family lived in Brownsville, then a rural section of Brooklyn, New York. A motorcar was rarely seen on our street. When a motorcar drove slowly through, we kids jumped up and down yelling, "Get a horse! Get a horse! Get a horse!"

All kinds of business, buying and selling was done with horses and wagons which stopped on our street before going on. One driver shouted, "Long Island potatoes, two cents a pound!" People came and bought. One wagon was loaded with a heavy sharpening machine. The driver shouted, "Knives! Scissors!" Housewives hurried out with knives and scissors to be sharpened. It cost five cents each. A junk man came with his horse and wagon. His sing-song melody was, "Rags, bottles!" We brought out empty bottles and rags, battered pots and pans. He took everything and paid a few pennies for it. Every house had a Singer sewing machine which worked with a foot treadle. My big sister Minnie sewed all our clothes.

Our street and our house were never wired for electricity when we lived there. The street was lit by gas jets, shaded by round white glass covers. These lights were on top of high round metal poles through which the gas pipes ran. The lamplighter came every evening. With a long metal rod he reached up into the glass covers and lit the gas. Houses were lit inside by gas jets sticking out of the walls. A fancy screw handle was turned to admit the gas which was lit by matches.

The first time I saw electric lights was in the fifth grade in school. The teacher pushed a button and the classroom was filled with a bright clear light. We were amazed by this sudden miracle. There was a long, drawn out sigh of admiration...."Ah-h-h!"

Peter Wood tells us about his diet as a Prisoner Of War for two and a half years in Italy and Germany after being captured at Tobruck during the Second World War.

"Did one really think so much about food for so long a time, all the time? Yes, one did. Could one? Yes, one could, as even a brief glance at "A Wartime Log' will confirm. This is the really depressing thing- in the end life comes down to food, and food only.

Religion, sex, politics, art - they are all subsidiary to, and dependent on, grub. ln the era of the well stocked Supermarket we do not recogiise this, but it is inescapable. My "Wartime Log" testifies to it on virtually every page. When the Arnericans liberated us supplies appeared as by a miracle and I wrote:

'I came back to the room where everyone was bashing what they had left of their bread and Red X parcel. I cooked up a smasher: A third of a tin of chopped pork, 3 large slices of bread smothered in fat and fried, and then a fill up on bread, marg, and treacle ... the evening stew rolled up thick enough to stand up a spoon in .... The amount, if not the quality, of food that I have dreamed of for nearly 3 years has at last come true. Tomorrow's meals are barley porridge for b'fast, spuds and liver sausage for lunch, M & V stew for supper. Bread is said to be ad lib. And anyway I've not a WHOLE loaf, AND I haven't to mark off the day's ration of 4 slices.....Gertre has just said we're consuming 10 DAYS' GOON RATIONS in 3 DAYS, with a half roll of cooking fat each tomorrow. It's unbelievable. Food, food and more food, with the old K ration to follow. I keep on chuckling to myself as I realize what this means'. '

Disgusting, isn't it. And yet I'm not a greedy person. To understand it, of course, you mast have been on low rations for a long time, so that at the end of a 200 yard walk you feel dizzy and have to sit down. Our diet had been chiefly turnips: one medical authority, I remember, calculated that to absorb the necessary quantity of vitamins one would have had to consume a hundredweight per day of this vegetable. I still regard turnips with considerable distaste".

Hong Nguyen now living in Britain remembers when she and her family escaped from Viet Nam in 1980.

" I am 23 year old student at Newcastle University reading for a Masters in politics.  In 1980 my parents with my sister and myself (then aged 4) escaped Viet Nam.  We left in the middle of the night, nobody else knew except some of my relatives, for fear of the authorities discovering.  Had they known, my parents and all the other families would have been arrested.  We left on a small wooden fishing boat safe really only for 20 people, however on this journey the number was over double this.  Most people having paid all their life's savings, not knowing even if they would survive the journey.  

We left Hai Phong for China.  The boat crashed against rocks twice, and so we stayed in a coastal village in China until the boat was fixed.  However, we unlike others were fortunate, we were not killed when we crashed, we were not taken as hostages by pirates.  From China we reached Hong Kong and there we stayed in one of the many refugee camps for months.  Until the authorities offered us refuge in England.  In April 1981 we arrived in England, we stayed in a house (halfway house I suppose) for a some time, until we were eventually moved to Newcastle.  Here my parents and I lived for several years until my parents, moved down to London where they are now living.  

Although the journey was long, hard and frightening, I consider my life to have been very fortunate.  My parents were very brave in risking their lives, leaving everything they were familiar with, and never really sure if their journey would end in disaster.  Coming to a land where everything was new, language, society, culture.  Not knowing if they would ever see their families again.  However we were very fortunate because we were helped by so many kind people, who  showed us so much love and kindness". 

Jessamy Waite, sent us her account, it is an excerpt from the Report and Chronicle of St Hilda's College Oxford, to be published in December 1999, titled 'In Post-War Berlin.

"Berlin hauptbahnhof!" I heard, early one morning in January 1947, after a long journey from England. I was with my two daughters, Romilly, aged three, Jo, one and a half, and our nanny, an unmarried mother with her daughter Charlotte, also one and a half. My husband, Rex, who was at that time Director of the Allied Air Branch, Control Commission, Germany, was there to meet us wrapped up in his greatcoat because it was bitterly cold. Rex's Batman, Kerridge, drove us to our house in Griegstrasse which had been requisitioned by the British authorities for military personnel and their families. (I have since found out that this house is now considered a fine example of Bauhaus domestic architecture, and is a listed building belonging to the German government.)

We drove through bare, snow-covered streets, past bombed buildings and heaps of rubble. Hitler's chancellery, by the Brandenburg Gate, was totally destroyed. In fact, Rex once picked up a piece of marble there which we later had made into book ends. The people in the streets -- not many about at that early hour -- looked cold, huddled into their overcoats and with hats, gloves and mufflers on top. W e, on the other hand, were able to walk into a new home which was warm, and where two maids and Cookie were lined up to greet us. Erna, 35 and Gisela, 24, had originally been secretaries. But now they had to get what jobs they could with military personnel. Erna spoke excellent English, and we became very fond of all three, a they of us. Cookie was a regular coke and did her best with the rather boring rations we had. Erna and Gisela shared the jobs of parlourmaid and housemaid. I remember how carefully they looked after the furniture and ornaments of the houses German owners, from whom the house had been rented. The house had a large lawn, which Rex soon turned into a vegetable garden as you couldn't buy fresh vegetables in Berlin. I had an American friend who sometimes took me with her to the American forces shop known as the PX. It was much better stocked than the NAAFI (the British shop), and there I could buy coffee and large bags of sugar. Meanwhile, the children went to a kindergarten run for British children by a young woman who was sent from England for that purpose, I would then go for walks with nanny in the Grunewald, a kind of wooded park very close to our house.

Many people in Berlin engaged in barter for shopping. We used to go to one shop in our area where the owner would come up to nanny and say "Privat?" In cautious, questioning tone. Nanny would then disappear into a backroom and reemerge with something for which she had paid in coffee. It might have been an ornament, or glasses, but in any case probably came from the shopkeepers own home. One of Rex's hobbies was photography, and anything he bought would be paid for in Marks. It was not deemed suitable for officers to use barter, but their families did it all the time. It was very curious to go into a department store and pay for a winter coat with a few pounds of sugar".

Leonid Kanochkin from the Ukraine describes the harsh daily life in the Soviet army.

I was called up to the Soviet army in May 1987. I was a healthy man of 18 then. By August 1987 I had become very weak and sick. We got up at 6:30 and went to do our morning exercises. It's good for health but only one "but" -- we often weren't permitted to go to the toilet between getting up and morning exercises. So we were doing our morning exercises as we were dreaming about urinating. Sometimes this dream became true only at about nine o'clock. Then we had breakfast. That's another sad story. There wasn't enough food on the soldiers tables and as a soldier I've always been hungry as a hunter. It's clear that in such a case soldiers should demand good nourishment from the commanders but the Soviet people had, and still have, the psychology of slaves. Slaves would rather solve their problems at the expense of other slaves than dare to bother the slave owners.

So strong soldiers took food from weak ones by force. When we used to go into our canteen and were sitting down at the tables we were all possessed by one thought at that moment: how to catch hold of a better slice of bread and get a better piece of boiled fat that was called meat. On sitting down at table we began devouring like pigs because we knew that in seven or eight minutes we'd hear the order "stand-up!" ( try to finish a plate of soup, a plate of potatoes, four pieces of bread and a glass of tea in seven minutes!) So experienced soldiers ate more nourishing dishes first and less nourishing ones as they could manage. After we were ordered to stand up soldiers would hide unfinished food in their pockets. When sergeants caught them doing this they treated the soldiers as if by doing so they'd lost all their dignity by doing this. Once my sergeant saw that my pocket was swollen. He ordered me to show him what I had. On finding out that it was bread he led me to the toilet and made me eat the bread there. As a result I was glad that I even managed get the bread into my stomach. After the meal there was plenty of unfinished food left in the canteen and the leftovers were carried to the pig farm. There was a special cart for this purpose. Soldiers on duty were harnessed to it, sometimes the soldiers couldn't stop themselves from eating the waste.

Once I got ill. I got diarrhea. So was sent to a military hospital. Soldiers are usually glad when they get ill they hope they'll have a rest in hospital. Sometimes it's true, sometimes it's not. At the hospital in which I found myself patients were treated in a barbarous way. Patients with diarrhoea, for example, stayed in hospital for five days and they were given a lot of drugs and no food! When I was there I was made to clean a toilet about 20 times a day even though it was clean. The doctor said patients with diarrhea should be responsible for cleaning toilets and I was lucky to clean toilets. Other patients with diarrhea had to dig for five days without food. The commanders believed that the only soldiers who suffered from diarrhea were those who used to eat the food from the waste carts. So treatment should become punishment. And this idea was supported by those who called themselves doctors and had vowed to help people and not to harm them. A lot of patients had ulcers on their legs for soldiers were all was being kicked in the legs (strangers visiting might see a soldier's black eye but wounds on the legs and ulcers would be covered). Doctors operated on such patients using a common shaving razor! A pain relief injection was out of the question, so wild crying was often heard at the hospital.

Mathini Streetharan now lives in the USA, but was born in Sri Lanka:

My memory is the century is rough. Being born a Tamil in the Northern tip of the beautiful island of Sri Lanka in the mod 50s, I have a taste of peaceful existence only for a short period. From the early days I knew that during communal tensions, I could be raped,tortured,and/or killed for just being who I am. In 1977, I miraculously escaped harm during such a violence.

When I moved first to UK, and then to USA I was surprised by the speech freedom enjoyed by citizens. You can criticize the ruling party or even the Royal family without endangering your safety or your career prospects. This was different to the experience I had in Sri Lanka. In USA, I was at a demonstration before the White House where Tamils and Sinhalese (Majority in Sri Lanka) were participating. There was the US police to give protection to participants. Both parties demonstrated their views and dispersed peacefully. This made a permanent change in my mind. In Sri Lanka we would have been attacked for expressing their views. I saw that US gave me more protection than the country God chose for me. After 18 years of residing outside Sri Lanka I became a US citizen.

My experience of this century is not same as that of my parents. I found a place where I am free. However, I feel I am a broken link of a extremely long chain of Tamil tradition. My children have not seen my parents, nor seen the places I grew up. They speak a language most of my people in Sri Lanka won't understand. They haven't seen my childhood home or the places I frequented. I don't even know whether I will be able to take care of my father when he falls sick and leave this world. I realize I am luckier than most of the other Tamils in Sri Lanka. I and my family are safe here in USA and my father is very happy for this. History reveals that every war has ended. My only prayer is that the war in Sri Lanka should end before it is too late. So that I can visit them, take my children there and show the land that shaped their mother's personality. My ultimate wish is to go back to the home where my father live and take care of him in his last days. Maybe to live the rest of my time in the same village I grew up and die the same way my mother had, my grand parents and many others had. These are fundamental rights to most people of the world. However, if you are placed a Country that is in war, these are the things you miss.

Brian from the USA sent us this email about the impressive Sears Tower in Chicago.

"When I first saw a picture of the Sears Tower in Chicago, I was amazed. I liked its tall black stature rising up in the sky. It was at one time, the world's tallest building, since 1973. I have liked that building even though I have never been there. When you get on the roof, you have a feeling that you're towering above the city. But on street level, you'll have to arch your back to get a full view of this towering modern marvel. Now it's the second tallest after the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, being dwarfed by a couple hundred of metres".

Harry-Ed from the USA and now living in Berlin sent us his very personal thoughts about the century.

"I've been listening to your station for decades from Berlin, where I've lived the last 15 years, and I honestly used to regard the BBC as the best radio station in the world. I'm a middle-aged black American faggot (but not an expatriate, never having been a patriot), nearly fifty, a passionate composer of electroacoustic music, who has not only witnessed and experienced the miraculous changes which have taken place here in this city (Berlin), but as well endured miraculous attempts to forget much of the horrors which I now accept as normal (I've learned to accept as normal/have accepted as normal), as a child and budding adult in the US, and in my adult life here.

I'm a member of the generation of blacks, raised, "bred" and educated in southeastern USA (N. Carolina, to be exact) in segregated societies. As this century nears its end, there are few among the masses of the US American population who knew what it was like to go to "public" schools, so segregated, so black that the mere thought of a white person on campus provoked hysterical laughter, especially among the white super-members of the society, who would rather have been killed than to have to have been the white individual in question.

I say there are few among the masses because many were killed in Vietnam. I could be dead.

Yet many, perhaps many more, were killed by AIDS. I can no longer name all those whom I once knew who have been struck down by this cultural malaise.

These observations notwithstanding, it's odd to see this century speeding to an end, while no one (white America/the white western world) even casually mentioning the injustices and the legacy of injustice, governmentally-sanctioned enslavement, forced political segregation, social and professional abuse, physical and emotional exploitation, genocide and oppression which was inflicted on enslaved peoples and is still being inflicted on their forefathers (in Africa) and off-springs, throughout the world (in the name of capitalism and democracy).

Shall we all go on into the next century with our fabulous dooms, masses galore, celebrations, fireworks and fears of the millennium bugs pretending it all never happened and that no one really is/was responsible, more importantly, that the US government (your/the world's allies) did not collude with the perpetrators.

Yes indeed, I could be dead, were it not also MY century and had I not taken a share of it for myself and my family of the forgiving. Food for thought?".

Michael Arshad has introduced western railway technology to countries all over the world. He tells us about his interesting career.

"I was born in Pakistan in a small village called Sanda Kalan, on the outskirts of Lahore. At the age of 18 I went to England to study Engineering. I joined British Railways as a trainee Civil Engineer and studied for a Civil Engineering degree at the Northampton College of Advanced Technology, now The City University, London. One of my proudest moments, I will always remember, was the day I saw my name in the list of students on a notice board on a London University wall, who had been successful in their final examination.

I had been working for ten years when I started to have itchy feet to go abroad. I went to East Africa through the then Ministry of Overseas Development and on secondment from British Railways initially for a contract of two years. When I reported to the Chief Engineer of the then East African Railways and Harbours in Nairobi who, after welcoming me, advised me that I had been posted to Kampala, the capital of Uganda. This news came to me as a shock, simply because the Prime Minister at the time, Mr Obote (later became the President of Uganda), had only the week before ousted the famous King Freddie of Uganda and there was a curfew from 7 PM to 7 AM.

I had my wife and little children with me and therefore decided to make a case of avoiding going to Uganda because of the political situation. The Chief Engineer assured me that the District Engineer, Kampala, a Welsh man, was a very levelheaded fellow. He would not expect you to go out anywhere to a dangerous location, and that Kampala was really a safe place to work and this curfew should not be a cause for any anxiety or distress. He was very reassuring and convincing. I was given a few days off to look around Nairobi and the National Parks. We did just that and then caught a train from Nairobi to Kampala that took 24 hours. Travelling first class on those days in East Africa was like traveling in a royal train. You had white table clothes and individual table lights on your table, and a la Carte and table d hote menus.

Whilst in Kampala, we were invited to the President's lodge because President Obote's cousin was getting married. There I met General Amin who asked me why I was walking towards the President. I told him that we had an arrangement to obtain President's autograph, this I said loud enough for President to hear. President beckoned me, and you heard the loudest grunt from the then General Amin. It wasn't long after that Amin ousted Obote; I was in Dar-es-Salam at the time.

In Dar-es-salam, a bridge was blown up and I was left on one side of the river and the family the other. I had an assistant in Morogoro, about 160km from Dar; he used to come out with the best excuses in the world when he was late for work: A cheetah was sitting outside his front door or he couldn't go to his bathroom because monkeys were sitting there.

Mombasa was my best posting. I had a house on the island, less than 5 minutes drive from the office. I used to go to work by a much longer route, along the seaside.

In East Africa, my colleagues would be at work at 1600 hours, if you rang them in the office, and at 1605 they would be at the golf course. They worked hard and played hard!

After about 17 years and having constructed many bridges in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania I eventually called it a day and returned to my old job with British Rail in London. For about a year I was like a cat on a hot tin roof. Fortunately, because I had overseas experience the consultancy arm of BR soon grabbed me. I assisted them here and there but my own office started complaining that I had my own section to run and the consultancy arm were told to find alternative means. It was not long before I was headhunted and offered a big enough carrot that I couldn't refuse.

My consultancy work has taken me to all continents. I have been to China, Hong Kong, Kenya, India, Laos, Lithuania, Malaysia, Malawi, Portugal, Thailand, and Toronto to name just a few.

One of my working proud moments was in Laos where I traveled like Brunel and designed a route for their railway system with a connection from the State Railways of Thailand. The railway track went on the only road bridge over the famous Mekong River and then snaked towards Vientiane, the capital of Laos. When I was called in they had no railways at all and many people did not even understand what a train was.

I have often dealt with consultancy work in more than one country at a time; a couple of hours' flight every week or every fortnight has been fairly common. At one time, however, I had a project in Malaysia in South East Asia as well as in Malawi in Africa. Unlike these days there were no flights from Malaysia to Malawi via Mauritius. I used to go to London on an all night flight and catch another all night flight to Malawi. At both ends I used to be met and taken to my hotel for a shave and a shower and whisked away to meetings, either to chair them or to participate. Thinking back, it is nice to be wanted but this was a bit over the top! Still I enjoyed all the glory.

I am also very proud of having introduced the western railway technology to East European countries, after they received their independence from the Soviet Union. I am presently involved with works in Ukraine, Moldova and other nearby countries.

My success is very much founded on the training I received in my early days with the good old British Railways. I have seen the world and left my marks there. Thank you world for the opportunity".

Liz Crossley has sent us these memories from South Africa.

"As a child I often felt I had been born too late. I was fascinated by the 1920's and 1930's. It still seems to me that there were more radical creative breakthroughs in the arts then, so that a lot of what has happened since seems pale by comparison. I also regretted that I couldn't have been one of those early lady travelers and sensed that by the time I got around to travelling the countries wouldn't look and feel as different from each other as they had at the start of this century. That is what I did not experience, but what I did experience has also proved to be fascinating.

I was born with Apartheid. This form of state-sanctioned, organised and encouraged racism was less than a year old, when I arrived in South Africa. As a result I went to segregated schools, only making any contact with young people of other skin colours very seldom. This was also the case before Apartheid, though my strongly pro-British background and education led me to believe for some time, that the beastly Afrikaaners had invented this perverse system all on their own.

Only later did I recognise the fact that the British had put in place some of the foundation stones for Apartheid, such as the Land Act, which effectively stole land from the African people. If I had been born on a farm, let us say, in Zululand (Kwazulu Natal) like some of my cousins, I would, like them have had much more contact with African children and been able to speak Zulu as they can, or Xhosa, as my mother and grandfather could having grown up in the Transkei. (Now Eastern Cape). But being born into the small city of Kimberley, meant that Apartheid functioned more efficiently than in the country in its aim of separating us from each other and making us foreigners to each other.

City kids were doubly ignorant, as the ruling group usually is of the culture, language and lives of the ruled. African children had to go to schools where they had to learn our languages, English and Afrikaans. We on the other hand were offered no African languages. If one went to a private or church school one could learn French or German and some Afrikaans schools offered Nederlands, but our only other language choice was Latin, which always seemed to me utterly mad, considering where we were living. South Africans of British origin have the definite negative characteristic of not really being where they are, but feeling themselves to still be part of that other world over the sea. My grandmother always talked of England as "home", having been there once with her "home-born" mother as a toddler.

This problematic quality seemed to be more developed in women than in men, with mothers passing it on to their African-born daughters. In some ways, being away from Europe opened up freedoms for women, but the conservative society brought strong pressure to bear to keep them in their place, even thought this was not necessarily in the kitchen, as the African woman now filled this position! But a lot of the things that make Africa a wonderful place to be; the sea, the veld, the natural life, these were and sometimes still are seen as being out of bounds for women.

So, the genteel English woman, who arrived in South Africa had lost her nice ordered home and garden with the roses, but couldn't go out in the veld like her husband and really get to know this new country. Some did, naturally, but the majority towed the line and behaved as they were expected to, limiting their lives in the process. Not being where you are and practising self-limitation, these ways of making oneself unhappy I have seen too much evidence of. Certainly, I too grew up Europe-centred. In fact, it seems to me as if I had to get away from South Africa to be able to see it. I now am an absolute fan of the veld and am in the long, probably life-long process of trying to educate myself in African history and African tradition and culture.

One of my main areas of my late learning is the engravings and paintings of the Khoisan people, which have been of considerable inspiration to me in my art work. I left South Africa in 1973 out of a mixture of the personal and the political. I had always dreamed of travelling and at one point was orientated towards Japan, but decided to come and see Europe first. Prior to my leaving South Africa, I had been involved, like many others in demonstrations. One of the most important, was the sit-in at the University of Cape Town to protest the government intervention in the appointment of an African Professor.

After a few days, there were those who were obviously benefiting from the sit-in, doing a little business, setting themselves in the spotlight etc. At one point, wandering around the building we had occupied, it seemed to me that a lot of people had forgotten why we were there and were following their own agendas. It was at that point that I decided to go back to lectures.

On entering the almost empty lecture theatre, I came to sit next to a "coloured" student. He and I and another student started talking about why we were there and not at the sit-in. He said he had not been there from the start as he didn't trust the "English liberal types", saying that at least he knew where he was with Afrikaaner Nationalists. I understood how he felt and at the same time felt ashamed. The government then started making it more and more difficult to protest legally. One of the new criteria was that one was only allowed to protest on private ground. The Anglican Church offered us the ground in front of St George's Cathedral, Cape Town. We stood in a long row, along the pavement, just within the private sphere. The police men walked up and down in front of us with their dogs, letting them get closer and closer to us each time, till the dogs were virtually at our throats. Then the navy turned up. It was obvious that the "boys" had been given the day off to hassle the students.

The police then maintained they were protecting us from the angry naval cadets, but the dogs continued to get closer and closer to us. At some point some of the students rushed into the church, thinking that would be a refuge. The police followed and beat some of them on the steps of the altar. After this the conditions for legal protest became consistently tighter. When I left the country a group of twelve was illegal, so groups of 11 met to protest at various points in the city.

My father pointed out to me the parallels with fascist states like Nazi Germany, saying that they would pull the net tighter and tighter until it was impossible to do anything in terms of voicing ones opposition legally. At this time I was studying for my teacher's post-graduate diploma and went through the statistics on Education. I was well aware that whites got a better education and got it cheaper, but the hard figures branded the unfairness of the system and its aim on my mind.

I realised that an African teacher of my age and with my qualifications would only get about a third of my salary. That we both got less than our equivalent male colleagues, was also clear. It was a combination of the above experiences and information that made me think that, as a white South African, whatever I did, I benefited from the system. There seemed to me to be no way not to. One of the key thoughts that led to leave with the idea of staying away was that the only way I could cease to benefit, would be to remove myself from the system. Which is what I did by leaving South Africa in 1973.

The twists and turns of my life took me to The Hague, Florence, London and finally Berlin. I was lucky enough to be there for a few years before the wall came down, so that I could appreciate what it meant when it happened. I am not usually one to make political predictions, but when I phoned my friend, who unfortunately was not in Berlin, after had finished the rehearsal for a projection on the Schöneberg City Hall with Roswitha Baumeister, I was in euphoric mood. "Now Mandela will come free!" I declared. It was obvious that this event would cast huge circles.

Now in 1999 one sees that some of the resulting changes have been very extreme and very difficult to deal with for many people. I think particularly of the people in Russia, former Yugoslavia, but still I am convinced that the process of opening and changing is better than the "holding" of the Cold War".

David Liversage was a British boy growing up in colonial East Africa - he sent us sent us his memories of this time.

The little minority I belonged to could not be called unprivileged, and we had no difficulty in adapting when conditions changed. I was one of the children of empire, taken out at the age of three months to Nairobi where my father had obtained a post as agricultural economist for the administration. We lived there until I was almost ten, and I felt Kenya was my home, though as children we only knew people of our own European community and had no real contact with "natives" or anyone else who was not strictly white.

We inhabited a series of houses with corrugated iron roofs that made a splendid noise when it rained and always had three or four black servants called boys, though they were really grown men, They lived in the "boys houses", which was a row of corrugated iron rooms behind the house, which were perfectly salubrious, but not especially attractive. Mother provided a bar of soap every week and expected them to be kept spotless. For some reason I was forbidden to go into the boys houses. I don't remember having any particular contact with the boys. They spoke incomprehensible languages and were there just to be ordered around. Obanda was different. We loved Obanda. He let us ride on his back while he polished the floor on all fours and was always friendly and helpful with a big smile.. Later Mother said she was annoyed by the way we children assumed the right to command and the manner with which we exercised it, but she never did anything about it when we were in Kenya.

At the other extreme was a houseboy whose name I have forgotten. One evening in the darkness behind the house he stopped me over and took my little nine-year wrists in a grasp of iron, while he asked over and over whether I liked him. I assured him every time of my highest esteem and struggled a little, but it was no use. He would not let go. In hindsight I recognize the signs of intoxication, but at that time I knew nothing of drunkenness. Perhaps if I had shouted he could have been scared and bundled me under his arm and run off with me in the darkness to end up as a molested little corpse somewhere, but I kept silence. Suddenly someone went through the back door, letting a chink of light into the night, and he let me go. I never told anybody.

When I was eight we spent two wonderful months on a farm near Machakos while my father was on some working group in India. I was able to ride all day every day on a quiet old Somali pony. They said they often had a man who was wonderful with horses, and they wished he was about so he could teach me to ride; but unfortunately he was shared half a year at a time with another farm, and it was his spell away. Once he appeared and was pressed to take me along with him briefly. It was very brief. He was quite different from the houseboys, and showed me no respect whatever. Apart from occasional curt orders he treated me as entirely unworthy of notice, as I suppose he would a small child of his own tribe. I adapted instantly to his view of world order, but it was not quite what I had expected. Later came a stage when people talked about prep school, but my father was not much for spending money if it could be avoided, and found a school where there was plenty of the all-important commodity, discipline, and where I could stay from morning to dusk. He thought this conferred the advantages of prep schooling at less expense. It was not much different from other schools except that scripture was called "catechism", and the teachers were called "Father" instead of "sir". There was Father Hounihan, whose name I always thought was Father Hooligan. He was a thin sardonic man who took a sardonic pleasure in the error. He spent all his spare time reclining in a veranda chair praying to himself over some beads. Father Devonish was much nicer, and I quickly got over the mistake of thinking his name was Father Devilish. He took us for arithmetic and football. Teaching method was simple. If you did not know what four times nine was or could not recite "sum, eso, est" correctly it was "hold out your hand" and you got a whack with a small cane. I didn't get whacked much as I usually knew. Some were less lucky, and they got hit harder too. I think a distinction was made between boarders and day boys, for there was a limit to how lacerated you could send boys home to their parents. I remember one day encountering a weeping David Plum on the lawn. He showed me his hands, both of them swollen red and blue, and at least one oozing blood. I don't know what his error had been, but I assume it was rebelliousness rather than multiplication tables. He badly needed sympathy. Some boys were required to stand on their knees for rather a long time. It didn't leave any marks.

Almost everybody in the school was English, or at least British, but Big Mango and Little Mango were brown skinned. Everybody respected them but nobody really had either as a close friend, yet to pick a quarrel with either would have been unthinkable and probably impossible. Little Mango played fully integrated with the boys of his age, but somehow had a charmed life that gave him total immunity from all English disputes. Big Mango was bigger and older than anyone else at the school, and I suppose some special arrangement had been made with the Holy Fathers for his education. In hindsight I suspect they came from Goa, or maybe Malta.

There was one other non-English person. It was Kurt. Kurt had fair hair and regular features. His mother was the matron, a thin, unhappy German woman with straight hair in a bun behind. I don't remember Kurt ever playing with us. I suspect he fled upstairs to his mother whenever possible. Once I remarked unnecessarily that he was a German boy, and some trouble-maker went and told him I had said he was a German spy. Kurt appeared and upbraided me with a strange mixture of helplessness and constrained anger. It was hard to reply, for even to call someone a German boy was a sort of indictment in those days. There must hang a sad tale on how he and his mother ended up early in the war years at a school in British Africa.

When I was nearly ten my mother thought I was old enough to take the bus home alone at lunchtime on Saturdays. The buses in those days had two classes. The front part was closed and held a lot of fattish, slightly smelly English women, who condescended. I was soon travelling with another boy, and he showed me how to go in the back part and save some of your fare for other purposes. The back part was open and cooler, and you had to stand up. There were people of all colours who talked to you, and were quite friendly, even interested, without being the least obsequious to small boys. This was something new, and I suppose at this stage my introduction to real life was about to begin. But it was not to be!

After the fall of France Dad thought things didn't look too good and packed Mother, who was American, and us children off to the States. We spent two wonderful months with no school sailing around the Cape on an American freighter. Then a completely different life began. We had no difficulty adapting, but perhaps now, in hindsight long afterwards, I regret that I did not have the opportunity to grow up in the teeming multi-racial society of East Africa".

Ruth Cohen who now lives in Israel has early memories of South Africa:

All that is left of my 30 plus years of life in Africa are photos, memories and two posters.

Africa - vibrant and alive and dusty - noisy and a knife in my heart forever twisting and turning. Yet I am not African born - in fact my home is Israel where I, my sister and brother were born and then we came to Africa. My father a Polish Ashkenazi Jew - my mother half Polish and half Romanian - my father was a Zionest coming to Israel with his new bride searching for his dream. He found had work and poverty and when he got very ill and weighed 90 pounds his friends came and stole his few farm implements. He begged his wealthy American uncle to help with a few hundred pounds to buy a tractor, and then he went to the British Embassy broken and crying asking for help - my mother was British - and they gave him a plane ticket to South Africa. 1 am the only one of 5 children who came back home since ny father's death - he always wanted to return but Africa became his life.

We lived in a small dorpie with 2 main streets named after its special mineral warm healing water- Warmbad - Warmbaths. When I was young it was a bathing section with big deep baths and a few pools - then it became a huge industry very expensive with herbs and muds and massages and blacks who could also pay outrageous prices to swim there and not only work there.

My father was an accountant and started his business in an office on the main street - you walked up many stairs to get there - it always smelt of urine no matter how many times it was washed. He was not a racist and as the town was mostly Boere so the blacks came to him to employ him as their bookkeeper for their schools - he was well liked and loved - which I only learnt many years later - and never charged the full price - sometimes working for free.

We were poor then as in Israel - lived in a small house opposite the Boere school - our bedroom had space for 3 beds and a cupboard. We tried to attend the school but soon. had to travel far away to another school in Settlers due to the anti-Semitism. My brother and I didn't understand big words like that but we enjoyed the bus trip and sat in the back with somebody Ashkettle and sang loudly and lustily the pop songs of 1959 "sammy going south" There were a few other Jewish families in Warmbaths and they all attended Settlers school - it didnt even have one main road in Settlers - it was farmland.

As for all the stories about Jews beig so rich - I remember coming into the kitchen one night - all newly washed with my mother on her hands and knees scrubbing away "mummy I feel sick" and vomited all over her lovely clean floor

Sister Marion Curtis has sent us this description of psychiatric nursing in New Zealand in the 1940s:

Daisy was a very surprising patient in the Secure Ward. Her trial for murder had been a sensation because she had dressed as a man and killed her rival with an axe. In prison she had been so violent that she was certified mentally ill, and sent to our Psychiatric Hospital. Even without any treatment she became a different person- kind and gentle to other women who were ill,and she often said how glad she was to help. Others who had been transferred from prison said the same,and I was grateful to one who---rescued me quickly when a new patient had pinned me to the floor. That only happened once, because if there was any chance of trouble we did not go alone. Outwardly that Ward was a miserable place with few comforts and a lot of noise. The clothes were ugly, of tough material, and at night some women had to be locked into single rooms because they would have been a threat to those in the dormitories. I had done my General Nurses Training first, so I was usually on duty in the Admission or Treatment Wards. People who came as Voluntary Boarders could be discharged on request.. Most had been Committed, which means Sectioned, and were resentful or confused. Some truly believed that they alone were sane and that all who were involved in their admission were both mad and hostile. In time, and after talking to the Psychiatrists and Nurses, many came to realise that the Staff were ready to help and cared about them as individuals. Also like me they saw how nearly normal most of the other patients were. The border is narrow between those who can do outrageous anti-social things and get away with it, and those who attract notice quickly and are either Sectioned or arrested. It often depends on whether a person is isolated for any reason, or has a supportive partner or family.

Suicide was still a crime, and the only one where people could be punished by law because their attempt to break that law had ,failed. Most were deeply unhappy and had to be constantly supervised to prevent another attempt. A fortunate few were glad to be alive when they saw what it meant to their family. For severe and chronic depression, a drastic brain operation called Frontal Lobotomy was sometimes done. I was in theatre and saw one performed; some fibres of the brain were divided and this led to improvement in a few cases, but at that time it was not clear how it was effective and it is seldom used now. When I went as Sister Tutor to a modern hospital in the country, there was a contented group of those who would now be described as having 'Special Needs'. Some had Downs Syndrome, but no relative who would give them a home. They each had their own room in a villa which was only locked at night,and they were like a little Colony. The men worked on the Hospital Dairy Farm or in the gardens and the women did laundry or house-work. The standard of their work varied but they did feel that they belonged, and some were sure that they were the real power in their departments. By then patients were paid an allowance to be used by them for clothes and comforts, and nurses made sure they were not being bullied by other patients, nor imposed on. It was before the days of T.V. but radio programmes were enjoyed and there were occasional film shows in the hospital. In the summer small groups would go off with some staff to stay in a chalet at the beach. There were also open villas there for patients who were preparing for discharge, and they were free to come and go, as long as they told the Charge Nurse.

E.C.T., short for Electro Convulsive Tharapy, was used a lot in both the Hospitals where I nursed. It was much more frightening for the patients then because it caused the equivalent of an epileptic fit including a loud cry which others who were waiting for treatment could hear. Now each person is given a light anaesthatic and a muscle relaxant and a slight tremor is all that can be seen. Some patients made a good recovery, and were grateful for the treatment. Other treatments are not used now. There was prolonged narcosis; for about two weeks the patient was heavily sedated and slept for about 22 hours daily. Nourishing fluids and a bath were given in the brief wakeful periods. There was also hydrotherapy which meant being kept in a warm bath for an hour at a time. A canvas cover was tied across the bath so that only the head was free, and there was a control which kept the water at an even temperature.

Doris was treated in a dramatic way. Her devoted husband was a wealthy hotel owner, and had noticed her behaviour was becoming unusual, but the climax came one midnight when she left their hotel, drove to the gate of a large Roman Catholic Hospital, undressed, and carrying a large cross marched up to the main door. She explained that she was Bishop, come to start a Mission,and was promptly admitted to our Hospital. Blood tests and other examinations showed that she had a late stage of syphilis which can lead to delusions of grandeur. A new experimental treatment was to infect the patient with Malaria; it was hoped that several bouts of fever when the body temperature might be as high as 40 degrees centigrade would kill the delicate syphilis organisms in the body. With the consent of the husband this was started. A small amount of blood was taken from a soldier who contracted Malaria in the Pacific and was having a. bout of fever. The blood was injected into Doris and she began to have typical rigors; her temperature shot up while she felt icy cold and shivered violently, then sweated profusely as her temperature came down,and felt very weak. On the days between the bouts she felt ill and tired, but was very co-operative. I think she had four bouts of fever, and was then given anti-malarial drugs and injections. When she recovered her strength she seemed quite normal, and went home. She was such a grateful patient that she invited us all to tea, and it was a pleasure to see this attractive woman, who had come to us so wildly disturbed, quite literally clothed and in her right mind. I realised how drastic her treatment had been when I had mosquito-borne cerebral malaria myself, a few years later.

Male psychiatric nurses were valued and given proper recognition years before this happened to their General Nurse colleagues. The examination syllabus meant hard study, but I enjoyed teaching both the girls and the men, and for the latter it was more likely to be a permnanent profession. Some of the older Charge Nurses in the mental wards had been nurses in the Navy and their patients were well cared for in every way. I sometimes went round the wards at 8 a.m., and the bed patients would be shaved and comfortable, with a fresh lemon drink on the locker. Community Psychiatric Nursing was not possible because there were no specific medicines for the illnesses; there were only sedatives. Some tranquilisers were being started, but there were fears of addiction. A few G.P.s were fine counsellors, but others were not prepared to give up the time required. What was offered was a safe environment where staff knew the delusions and other symptoms were real and cruel for the sufferer, and were ready to listen and give support in whatever ways they could.

Mary Dixon from the UK remembers key moments in her life.

"I was born on March 28/1909, so the family is celebrating my 90th birthday, One of my earliest memories was being picked up out of my cot and carried outside to see something floating overhead, It was a kind of machine with bicycle wheels and wires everywhere, and a man was sitting in the middle with his cap on back to front. This must have been around 1912, and I've had a love of aircraft ever since. (I was three months old when Bleriot flew the Channel.)

Does anyyone rememberr being given rides in a basket on a donkey, on the sand in Scarborough? Another early memory!

I'll never forget the Heavenly summer of 1914, day after calm day of sunshine. It was almost as though the young people of the time were being given something wonderful to look back upon in view of the horrors that lay ahead.

In the 1920's we were fighting the appalling Victorian prudery which still dominated society. There were seaside town councils which wouldn't allow mixed bathing, believe it or not. The, result was that naughty old gentlemen would sit at the windows of their lodgings, binoculars at the ready, focused on the womens' end of the beach. I remember, too, during a game of tennis my partner did something shocking he called me by my Christian name - "Leave that to me Barbara!" Afterwards he grovelled. However, it was a step forward in our relationship, and we eventually married!

After the signing of the Treaty of Versailes, a business friend of my father-in-law's came into the office in a great state of worry. He threw down his hat and said, "Today we've laid the foundations of the next war". How right he was!

I remember as a teenager being invited to a neighbour's house to hear something unbelievable.. This was in Kent, and through headphones I heard a man speaking sixty miles away. I can hear him now saying, "This is London" Compare that with nowadays, when by pressing certain buttons I can hear my brother in England 12,000 miles away!

This will probably go down in history as the Century of Technology, most of it entirely beyond me. Certainly the changes in social customs and behaviour are almost unbelievable, especially the rise in feminism. England has had a WOMAN Prime Minister, and there are even
women bishops in the Anglican Church. What would Queen Victoria have said?"

Andrew Stirling from the UK sent us his account of when he learned to plough.

It was the year 1942. Britain was at war. I had not reached my sixteenth birthday when first introduced to Darky and Star, two handsome horses and beautiful specimens of the Clydesdale breed.

Willie Campbell was farm foreman whose duties were, with the aid of his pair, to plough, harrow, sow and cultivate the fields. He was a skilled and competent craftsman. Darky and Star were young geldings and had been broke in only to chains. They had not felt the weight of a saddle or pulled a farm cart. Like myself they were trainees and in their early apprenticeship.

It was late in May when Willie and his pair were ploughing a steep hillside adjoining the field of seedling swedes where I was engaged. We were in the process of thinning the crop when from beyond the hedge a shout reached us. 'Dae ye want a haud' Geordie, my elderly work companion smiled at me showing his tobacco stained teeth, saying, 'Andy, he's asking you if you want a go. Tell him yes.' I yelled 'yes' into the wind and left Geordie to join Willie and his pair. 'Dae ye ken ocht aboot a horse or plough?' enquired my tutor. 'Not much,' I confessed, although I had worked the harrow horse during last season's potato harvest. 'Well ... Darky and Star are just risin' four and only broken to chains. They've still gie tendered mouthed.'

Willie went on to describe their harness and what each piece was designed to do. Then pointing to the plough he named each part and its function.

'The skimmer takes the dirt frae the top and throws it in the furrow bottom.' 'The dirt' was Willie's expression for weeds and any other vegetation to be unseen after the plough had sliced its furrow. 'The sock, here cuts the bottom and the coulter slices down from the top ... And here the breast plate turns it o'er and lays the furrow nice and neat, just like these,' he nodded and pointed to the sample of his work. 'And the wheel rins on top so you dinna go o'er deep.'

With such crucial information I was entrusted to the reins, Darky on my right and Star on my left. Willie clicked his tongue and the two animals stepped forward in unison. The slack on the draught chains was quickly taken up and the plough immediately followed. I grabbed at the shafts with my rope-reined hands as the implement slid up the hill, the incline being too steep to plough in that direction. At the top Darky and Star wheeled round without either rein or command, Darky elegantly placing himself in the narrow furrow bottom and Star some eight inches higher on last years' oat straw stubble. Both animals paused, Willie further instructed me.

'When we set on, just lift a wee, tae get the sock into the ground. Make sure the furrow turns richt o'er, and keep her stracht ... I dinna wont ony dog leg ploughin' in my field. Country folks look and talk, ye know. Dae ye un'erstoun'!

His tongue clicked again, followed by an encouraging 'Come on Darky, Star.' With his quiet but firm command, all burst into motion. I gripped the timber plough shafts, raising them slightly until the sock was hauled into and submerged in mother earth. The plough followed deepening until the wheel met the soil surface thereby preventing me reaching Hades! I firmly held the shafts level, as near as possible. I felt the coulter slice vertically as my two horse power force eagerly cruised forwards. My first furrow was gouged thick and broad from the field. It rose upwards and slid along the breast plate, rotating in a gentle twist to fall in an apparent single strand, inverted beside its many brothers. The ribbed furrows on my right revealed Ayrshire's rich soil. The movement felt through the shafts was as a helmsman senses a water current against a hand held tiller. I could both feel and hear the soil and stones grinding and scraping along the breast plate. 'Catch a wee,' cautioned Willie as my furrow width shrank an inch. I responded with my arms, hands and body pressing to the right to regain the lost width. Darky and Star strode steadily in harmony, their rhythmic hooves beating a strict tempo. Glints of sunshine reflected off their steely shoes. My dampened shirt was warmed in the afternoon sun.

'Grand' said my tutor as we reached the boundary hedge and I leaned on the shafts until the sock emerged from its subterranean journey. 'Grand' he repeated. 'Now you just carry on wae the ploughin, and I'll attend to your thinning.' We exchanged a manly grin and Willie left me with the final words - 'Now, keep it stracht.'

My introduction to the art and skill of horse ploughing was committed to memory for all times. At any hour I can feel the vibration of the plough; visualise the powerful hind limbs of my pair; smell their sweat; hear the squabbling gulls in the new turned furrow behind me as they fight for delicacies to their diet. My emotions die at the sound and smell of a farm tractor.

I never horse ploughed again, but I kept all my furrows 'stracht'. My tutor was proud and doubly proud of his pair, Darky and Star who had performed with perfect dignity in the hands of the novice plough boy".