Mike Priestley: Who's Counting?

They didn't go under. They didn't turn to drugs to console themselves. They didn't depend on the State. They battled through, worked hard, did without, raised their families and held up their heads with pride.

Gloria Flynn's mother was one of them. She was born Ada Brown (later to become Ada Bradshaw) and, if she had survived, would have been a century old two days before Christmas.

Mrs Flynn wrote from Brighouse with a tribute to her mother, prompted by the anniversary of her birth. In its way, it's a typical story of its time and holds some important lessons for younger people...

"She was born into a typical South Yorkshire mining family, having four brothers," writes Mrs Flynn. "Times were hard and sad, as she recalled seeing her father's body brought home on a flat cart, found drowned in the canal after being missing for two weeks.

"At 12 years of age she went into service at Liverpool - a real 'Upstairs, Downstairs' existence. When she reached 18, she and a few friends came to work in the mills in Bradford. She settled here and eventually brought over her brother, sister and mother."

"She later married and had her daughters in the 1930s, a tough period for all. Extra cleaning jobs starting at 6am helped put the girls through High School.

"At 66 she succumbed to a major stroke, living on for five more years without speaking to us. Now as I near that age and take tablets daily, I think about my precious Mum.

"We were brought up in a back-to-back in West Bowling, a close-knit community. Now we three sisters are semi-detached suburban, all mod cons, drive cars, have foreign holidays, etc. etc.

"Thank you, dear Mum, for everything. You deserved a well-earned rest."

And thank you for sharing your thoughts with Who's Counting? readers, Mrs Flynn. I'm sure it will have prompted many of them to think about their own parents and the lives they led in what was a very different age.

l I appreciate that funerals and burials probably aren't a subject you want to think about too much in the first Who's Counting? column of the New Year. But I'll try not to be gloomy. Promise.

It's a fact of life that most people, as they grow steadily closer to the end than to the beginning of their life, find themselves thinking about what sort of a send-off they'll get when their time comes - and how close it might be to the sort of send-off they'd like if they could stage-manage it themselves.

That isn't morbid. It's perfectly natural. You can wonder about death while still enthusiastically embracing life and having no intention of departing it for many decades to come.

What prompted these musings was a newspaper report the other day about an Essex farmer, John Acton, who makes his living not out of farming but out of burials on his land.

A seven-acre site where crops used to grow is now dotted with more than 200 saplings, each one planted at some time over the past 21/2 years to mark the grave beneath it.

Mr Acton was quoted as saying: "For a very competitive price you get a guarantee of a grave that will never be disturbed and the satisfaction of helping to create a beautiful landscape where people can walk and enjoy the trees and the flowers."

It's a thought I find rather comforting: that out of an individual's death and decay can come the nutrients to create the building blocks of a tree which could survive for centuries and, in its turn, nurture other plants that grow in its shade. It's the nearest thing to immortality most of us are likely to get, I reckon.

I Don't Believe It!

So here we are in 1999. Happy New Year. Or perhaps I should call it a Stroppy New Year as we continue to feature your grumbles and mine.

Actually, the first gripe of this year continues a theme started last year: the sort of music which now dominates the schedules on Radio 2. It's not to the liking of quite a lot of Who's Counting? readers. They think that the music they like - proper music, with well-crafted lyrics, impeccably sung by the likes of Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra and Vic Damone - is getting short shrift these days.

And some of them have taken up my advice to write to the BBC bosses to tell them what they think.

The replies don't seem to have been very encouraging. But I do get the impression that the Beeb is getting a bit worn down by all this criticism.

Take the reply, written on December 10 by Beverley Thompson of the Information Department in response to a letter of complaint by Mr George Roberts. It runs to five fat paragraphs - very polite, although the gist of them can be summarised as "Tough!"

A week later, in response to a four-page letter from Mr Marjorie Kang, Beverley Thompson could manage only three very thin paragraphs saying more or less the same thing.

The crux of the problem seems to be that the BBC thinks it's a commercial station. The letter to Mr Roberts says: "Radio 2 is in the same position as any other organisation competing for the attention of an audience."

Excuse me! I thought that Radio 2, and every other part of the BBC, was in a special, unique position. It has its funding guaranteed through licence fees. It doesn't need to compete on the same footing as commercial organisations. It doesn't need to stoop to their level.

There's one quote in the letter that I found a bit disturbing. It goes like this: "The station dominates the 55+ marketplace, and therefore it is a fact of life that there will be some losses amongst this demographic in the future as they are given other leisuretime options."

Bet you didn't know we were "a demographic", did you? But that's not the disturbing bit. It's the "other leisure time options" that gets me. Since when has death been a "leisure time option"?

Let's translate. What she means, in effect, is: "The station dominates the 55+ marketplace, so it's a fact of life that there'll be natural wastage in the future as listeners die off". So why didn't she say so?

But that doesn't alter the fact that while they're very much alive, the 55+ "demographic" believe they're getting a raw deal, musically, from Radio 2 and refuse to be convinced otherwise.

Incidentally, while we're on the subject of unsuitable music, a reader has asked how I went on at the Status Quo concert that Mike Priestley and his wife were dragging me and Mrs Mildew off to at St George's Hall. The answer is that I didn't. Everything worked out for the best.

First of all, Mrs Mildew realised, to her horror, that it wasn't that old film Quo Vadis that we were going to see. Then she suddenly developed symptoms very like the flu that's been going around. Well, I had to stop at home and look after her, didn't I? On top of that, Mrs Mike got an ear infection and was advised against letting her ears be blasted by Status Quo's speakers. So she had to drop out, too, at the last minute.

And Mike didn't have the courage to go on his own. So that was that. The tickets went back. Shame for the Priestleys. Not such a shame for the Mildews - but don't tell that to Mike! Mind you, it would have been rather good for me and him to have been seen out together, because there are still people (George Roberts among them) who will insist that we are one and the same.

l If you have a gripe about anything, drop a line to me, Hector Mildew, c/o Newsroom, T&A, Hall Ings, Bradford BD1 1JR, email me or leave any messages for me with Mike Priestley on (44) 0 1274 729511.

Yours Expectantly,

Hector Mildew

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