SHINY BOOTS....ROZ

Do you know what that reminds me of?

My grandmother CLAYTON...

Her job as the 'oldest female child' in her Northern working class family was to SHINE THE BOOTS of her father, every day - after he came back from work...

...every day that he came back from the coalface, underground labour - no light - relentless.

He got into a tin bath in front of the fire in the kitchen...and his wife scrubbed him down so that not an iota of the BLACKNESS remained....(these men used to be BLACKENED apart from the WHITES OF THEIR EYES...so MR DABYDEEN if you want to talk about 'the whites of their eyes' in ENGLISH LITERATURE being solely about 'those who worked in plantations' you have got it sorely wrong).

...my great-grandfather was SCRUBBED DOWN by his wife, every single day....so that he would look 'respectable' OVERGROUND...walking down the street....if he wanted to 'go for a stroll' before sleep and then waking again in the early hours of the morning to 'go down the mine'....I have no idea why these SHIFTS were in operation but my great grandfather obviously had the worst shifts available....

...anyway, the boots that GRANDMOTHER CLAYTON cleaned....those boots had to be PERFECT and placed upon the STEP outside of their house - which meant ON THE STREET - because their doorstep opened out onto the street....and she did it perfectly, although ONLY a child (her mother had other things to do - such as deal with many other children).

SHINY BOOTS - eh ROZ?

They conjure up such HARDSHIP for the NORTHERN communities of the UK....

...and yet for the NAZIS that you were in contact with....they conjure up EXTREME FASCISM and COMMUNISM....

SHINY BOOTS and a certain type of boot...the type that GILL gave me to wear around CLACTON...simply showed ID as 'having been in the army'....

I have put boot polish on them now and again...

....however the reason that I don't....'all of the time' is somewhat calculated....

I want to probe this area and i do not want it to be 'swept under the carpet'....particularly not a DRAYLON....DRAKE...DUKE...CARPET....

OTHER NOTES:

i might add that I met that great-grandfather before he died...he lived to a very old age...he used to find it funny to frighten me and my brother with his 'lack of fingers'...he had lost some of them trying to hold the rope of a mineshaft lift...one of his best friends died - the lift crashed.