Spring 2023—Winter 23/24
by
It’s a new year, and a new collection of Whistable Whistler columns from the pen of CJ Stone. We also have to welcome a new editor, Eve Chataway, who took over from Cheri Percy in the autumn of 2023. I’m happy to say, there’s been no diminution of quality. The paper remains the same lively and colourful mix of news, reviews, stories and images from our vibrant little town as it always was.
To read the complete editions please go to: https://www.brightsidepublishing.com/whitstable-whistler/
Enjoy.
Spring 2023:
I went to see my friend Jon. He lives in Canterbury now, but he used to live in Whitstable, on the Grimshill Estate. He had to move because of bullying by his neighbours.
He had shared the house with his dad, David Elliott. David died in 2019, but there will be people in Whitstable who will remember him. He was a larger than life character. Jon says that often, when he went into town, the shop workers would ask after his dad.
“Are you David Elliott’s son? He’s such a nice man. He always cheers me up when he comes in.”
He’d been a British Rail worker but had taken early retirement when the railways were privatised. He liked to drink in the Ship Centurion when Armin was the landlord. They were two of a kind. Jon says that he was always particularly cheerful when he came back from a session at the Ship.
I only met him the once. This was at the care home where he spent his last days. I was taking Jon to visit.
There was a meeting in the common room. The vicar was there. David was talking to the vicar at the top end of the room. They were both standing, as if on ceremony: David with his back to his chair, the vicar before him. It was like he was holding court.
David was holding on to the vicar’s hand, shaking it warmly, his huge mitts entirely enclosing the vicar’s normal sized fist. He was looking the vicar straight in the eye and declaiming loudly in a voice suffused with wry good humour. He had a patch over one eye, which made him look like a pirate.
“I’m a hundred years old you know. I might not be around next week.”
This wasn’t what I had expected. I knew that he had dementia, but in this room full of lost, lonely and confused people, he shone out like a beacon.
It is true that what he was saying wasn’t actually true, in the strictest sense of the word, but he said it with such verve and confidence that it didn’t matter somehow.
I attended the funeral. Bernadette Fisher, who was a councillor at the time, told a wonderful story. She said that David and the councillor, Ashley Clark, had been fighting against a development on Duncan Down. One day someone had cut the wire fencing that surrounded the site.
Ashley and David were sitting on a bench. Ashley said, “whoever cut that wire must have been an angel.”
David opened up his bag to show a pair of bolt croppers. “You might be sitting next to an angel,” he said.
David’s ashes were scattered by the Maunsell Forts in the estuary. Jon had hired a boat and various friends and family attended. Just as the boat was about to leave a robin hopped on board. Someone said that robins mark the presence of the spirits of the dead. It was like David had come to say his goodbyes.
Summer 2023
I first met Sue Goodrum when she helped my family at our Mum’s funeral. She’s a celebrant.
I was impressed. I liked the way she spoke. There was a tenderness there. She was respectful without being solemn. She asked all the right questions. I felt that our Mum would be well served by this stranger we had elected to take a role on this most intimate of occasions.
At the funeral I gave the Eulogy. At a certain point I stumbled, sobbing over the words. I could feel Sue “holding the space” beside me. That’s a cliché, but it is also true. I could feel Sue’s physical presence there, holding me up, offering me strength, while I recovered my composure.
After that we became friends. I wrote an article for a national magazine about this new trend for using celebrants at funerals. I consulted with Sue. I asked he how she became a celebrant?
She’d gone to a funeral about 15 years ago, she told me. It was a man who had died in his early 60s. He had played in a band and worked in a garden centre. She was surprised by the atmosphere. She had expected it to be mournful, but it was not. It was light. There were lots of young people there, followers of the band she thought.
The celebrant – a humanist, she later found out – spoke about the way the man had died. There was something in the way he spoke, some quality in the words and in the way he articulated them, that brought the deceased to life. It was as if he had a real presence there at the funeral. It touched her heart. She was excited by it. She decided it was something she needed look into.
She was a social work manager at the time. She took a course in Totnes in Devon, and that was it. She gave up her job and became a full time celebrant.
Aside from this, she is also involved with running Whitstable’s Death Cafe. She is aided in this by Trish Flynn, a local artist. The event takes place every 2-3 months at the Umbrella Centre.
According to the website a Death Cafe is a place where “people, often strangers, gather to eat cake, drink tea and discuss death.” That might seem like an odd concept, but, having attended one, I can say that it felt very natural. Death is one of those subjects it is hard to bring up in polite company. It’s great to have a dedicated space to discuss this most difficult of subjects amongst friends and strangers (and strangers who become friends).
The tea and the cake are optional. There is a surprising amount of laughter, given the subject.
Sue says, summing up the philosophy: “It’s a space for people to talk without an agenda;” adding: “I always feel a lightness afterwards, as if something has lifted.”
If you would like to come along to any future gatherings, please contact Sue: suejgoodrum@hotmail.co.uk, 07837 649836
Autumn 2023
It was one of those strange summer days we’ve been having of late. Sunny at first, then increasingly gloomy, soon it began to spot with rain. I was lucky. I made it to Gerry’s house in time. There was a flash of lightning, a clap of thunder and then the heavens opened. The rain rattled on the patio roof and became the backdrop to our conversation.
I’ve known Gerry Atkinson since the mid 2000s. We created a book together: a collection of Gerry’s photographs with an introduction by me. Called Shades of Other Lives, it consists of photos of people’s front windows, taken at lighting up time around Halloween in Whitstable. It’s a luminous book. There’s a sort of inner glow which perfectly reveals the mystery of the town.
When did she come to Whitstable, I asked? It was in 2006, she told me. She came to visit Sue Goodrum (see above) and has been based here ever since.
She’s from Chingford, she tells me. “You’re an Essex girl!” I say. “Yes, my friends are always joking about that.” We both agree it’s shorthand for being working class.
Her grandfather was a forest keeper in Epping Forest. Her dad was born in the Queen Elizabeth Hunting Lodge, where the Queen used to stay when she was hunting. Her mum was Irish.
She trained as a photojournalist and then completed an MA in Photography. She tells me about a project she was involved with. Called “Feeling Blue” it focussed upon people with complex mental health problems telling their own stories and led to a major exhibition. “It was about breaking down the stigma of mental health,” she says.
She’s travelled widely and has lived in a number of countries, including New Zealand and the Philippines. There’s talk of going back to the Philippines for an exhibition of her work. She has friends all over the world who follow her on social media.
“I’ve always been very lucky,” she says. “I’ve got lots of friends. I’ve always made friends wherever I go.”
Her most recent large project was called “Our Work Of Art: With These Hands”. It focussed upon people with age-related illnesses, including dementia, finding solace and expression through art.
She holds an exhibition every year in the Museum Gallery with a number of other Whitstable photographers. They call themselves the Monument Group, after the pub where they used to meet. This year it will take place on 16th-23rd of October.
There’s a monthly news post on her website, and a series called Whitstable Postcards. Her and I have often talked about the possibility of creating another book together based upon this, as a celebration of our town. I wonder how many people would buy it?
We spent a pleasurable few hours together, eating cheese and drinking coffee, after which I left to catch the bus. It’s was sunny by now, not a cloud in the sky. A perfect English summer’s day.
You can see Gerry’s work at www.gerryatkinson.com
You can buy Shades of Other Lives here:
Winter 2023/24
We’re sitting in Dan’s back garden on this unseasonably warm October day. The garden is long and thin, blocked off at one end by a set of bins, with a few wooden garden planters lined up against the wall on one side.
There’s also a barbecue made from an old beer barrel cut in half. He got the barrel from the Labour Club next door. The Labour Club owns Dan’s house. He is their tenant. The house is made of wood. It creaks like an old sailing ship at sea.
Dan has a habit of taking on projects and then sharing them on social media. That was how I first heard about his train set. It started during the pandemic. He’s a conductor for Southeastern Trains. There was a reduced service and he was kept on standby for much of the time. Not able to go out, not able to pop next door for a drink, he took to watching old shows on ITV4. It was only when he noticed that the reruns of Minder were beginning to repeat themselves, and realised he’d seen the whole lot, that he thought he should start doing something meaningful with his life.
That’s when the Facebook posts started. He was showing every building as he put it up, every new piece of track, every new engine he bought. It seemed so apt. He’s a railway worker and here he was filling in his time making a rail network of his own. I was intrigued and wanted to see.
He led me upstairs to take a look. As he got to the top of the narrow staircase he went down on his hands and knees. Once I was on the same level I saw why. The door was blocked by track and you had to duck to get in. The room was entirely filled with the model. It was all at waist height, built onto raised boards, stuffed into every spare space.
He stood in the middle and was pointing things out. “There’s the bridge, the church, the farm, the tennis courts, the army base, the tower block.” He got the buildings from the internet, he told me. He was printing them out and sticking them to pieces of cardboard cut to shape.
He showed me the little Tardis in the middle of the bowling green, with a tiny Dr Who standing close by, and the UFO hovering above the windmill on top of the hill in the corner. His friend Pippa’s little boy, Norton, made that for him. This was the family that he bubbled up with during lockdown. It was these two, and the train set, that stopped him from going mad.
The set was finally finished in February 2022. Since then his Facebook posts have been filled with other things, but his second bedroom and its contents will remain, as a testament to those interesting times when he was isolated from the world and forced to create a whole new world of his own.
About CJ Stone
CJ Stone is an author, columnist and feature writer. He has written seven books, and columns and articles for many newspapers and magazines.
Read more of CJ Stone’s work here, here and here.
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