Memories: A little side track

[anotherbanana]

Genoa

When I was a young man and foolish and being returned to the YouKay to complete my education, we sailed, my mother and I, into Genoa harbour aboard a stately Union Castle liner, my mother to return to the bosom of her family whilst my father packed up the African paradise which took both our souls, and whilst I was stuck in Grimellington Houseofshit Pubic School.

Now the seafront at Genoa was an old fashioned place designed for sailors and their needs but my mother wanted blankets and from Genoa, so we went in search of blankets, not alone, but accompanied by the master-at-arms who was a man who missed his family on long voyages and had kids of my age and was not after my arse nor my mother's (well, she never said anything), but who gave me a much treasured model of HMS Cossack set in a painted, plaster sea.

And it was hot in Genoa so we went shopping, the three of us, at dusk, through the seafront where the sailors gathered, as did the ladies of the night. Being fifteen years of age and intensely curious, I noticed things, like the come-ons from the whores on Seventh Avenue (actually Lampedusa Street).

Particularly, one very elderly lady, of enormous stature, who touted her wares, shall we say, from a wooden stool, all her wares, nothing left to the imagination. The master-at-arms laughed when he saw my curiosity and said that she had been there when he was a lad and that I should never touch raddled meat, which expression I did not fully understand 'til later. But my mother seemed glad for his intervention.

We bought blankets which I still have though what to do with them I shall never know.

Twenty years later, returning to Libya via Genoa where a filthy ferry awaited, my new wife and I took a stroll through the sailors' quarter and what did we find? Same stool, same old crone but not dated by a day. Was it her, was it her sister, her cousin, her daughter, her grandchild? I shall never know, but, by then, pompous fart of a husband, I told my new wife of the ways of the ladies of the night and sailors and she was shocked as she was innocent of such things (well, wilfully blind as Belgians are, where such things are not seen). And she hurried us away as if not willing to engage, but I would have liked to share a glass with this old crone, to discover her life, her hopes her dreams.

Instead I became bourgeois and had bank accounts and mortgages and people judged us by the size of the car and the house and the dinner parties.

But now, Leonard Cohen wise I will rise and be ANGRY