Temple Cloud

A few days ago, I went over to see old friends of mine whom I will call Lily and Manly, a couple I have known for over twenty years, before they actually were a couple rather than just two friends I hung out with, and well before their three children were born.  Lily and the youngest child, aged 11, had been working on tie-dyeing T-shirts, so I joined in with that, and chatted with the parents (the two boys weren’t inclined to chat much), and had supper.  I had been hoping to see the oldest teenager (whom I will call Grace), who was out with friends during the day, and arrived home in the early evening.   She needed to go upstairs to get on with her maths homework, but had a bit of time to chat to me first, mainly about how much she hates college.   Grace is halfway through A-levels at the same sixth-form college that I attended and loved, and where my mother taught for a number of years.   I enjoyed studying there, taking four A-levels, a spare GCSE, and (m...

PDB11  and I have recently been reading The Captain’s Apprentice  by Caroline Davison.  This is a fascinating story of two people who led very different lives: Robert Eastick, a Norfolk teenager who in 1856 died at sea under suspicious circumstances after prolonged abuse by the ship’s captain; and Ralph Vaughan Williams, composer and folk-song collector, who in 1905 heard a ballad, ‘ The Captain’s Apprentice ’ , sung by a Norfolk fisherman, James ‘Duggie’ Carter, a childhood neighbour of Eastick, telling the story of a cabin-boy tortured to death by his captain. But it is more than a biography.   It is also a story of how songs and stories mutate over time and are adapted for different purposes.   Vaughan Williams assumed that because the version of ‘The Captain’s Apprentice’ that he heard contained local references, it must have been about a local event.   In fact, as Davison explains, versions of the ballad had been sung on both sides of the Atlantic si...