We'll see, soon

     I've always been fascinated that certain phrases and words are uncanny. Two such came to my mind on Sunday morning past as I lay in bed thinking about getting the day started while I watched the first real rain for 60 days pittering and pattering on our bedroom window here in Totnes. 

   The phrase which first stirred me was "We'll see". I remember one day just before my tenth birthday in 1955 - when cowboys loomed large in the play of boys in the Dundee area and beyond - asking my mother if I could have a Lone Star Steve Larrabee six shooter revolver for my birthday. I'd seen it in the toy shop window on Lochee High Street. It was made of metal and looked just like the ones the cowboys used in the western films I frequently watched down at the Rialto Picture House in Lochee. It shows you how our, or maybe just my culture, has changed over the years. I would be shocked and somewhat troubled if anyone I now know was buying his or her child a toy gun, given the horrors brought about by the use of guns throughout the world. Anyway, getting back to my asking my mother if she and Daddy would buy me one of these guns for my birthday. Her answer was "We'll see." Her response was unacceptable. I understood the answer "Yes," and also, even though it was desperately unfair, the answer "No." You could always skulk away and sulk and then forget all about it until another good idea came to mind. I knew that "We'll see,"  really meant "No," but it always tantalised me with its very thin strand of hope.

    As the days before my birthday passed I prayed, (I occasionally did in those days particularly if there was something that I especially wanted for myself), promising the higher power that I would be good for ever and with all the intensity I could muster I willed that there would be a gun waiting for me on a chair in the living room which was where our presents were placed on my sisters' and my birthdays. As I'd guessed, when my birthday came there was no gun for me. I was heartbroken but made the best of showing gratitude for the box containing an electric train set that was given to me. My Daddy got a lot of pleasure from it. He built a table up in the loft and set up the rail track upon it and placed the locomotive and its carriages there. Occasionally he would allow me to play with it for a few minutes.

A Basset- Lowke toy train, "Thanks son!"

     The weeks towards Christmas rolled  by Christmas and I think it became clear to my Mummy that the railway set was really Daddy's toy. At that time, I was, to an extent,  still in the thrall of the Santa Claus fantasy but I was so low about the railway set that I couldn't become enthusiastic about Christmas when everyone was excitedly exclaiming, "It'll be Christmas soon!" And Christmas did soon arrive and lying under the Christmas tree was what looked like a box wrapped in holly berry decorated paper.  This had a label on it which read,

"To Charlie, Happy Christmas from Santa Claus". Inside the box was a Lone Star Steve Larrabee Cowboy's six shooter revolver.

This was the gun, As a kid I thought it was gee whiz but I'm shocked by it  now.

     "Soon" is the other uncanny expression that entered my thoughts as I shook myself into the day in my bedchamber on Sunday morning. As a child when told it would soon be the summer school holidays or it would soon be my birthday, soon could seem such a distance away. I just couldn't bear waiting until the very day I woke up and found the holidays had started or my birthday had arrived and "soon" no longer existed. 

     I've brought this up because here in Totnes at the top of the town where the High Street is called The Narrows there is a shop which has been closed for some time. People seem to be working on it, structuring its interior.  The windows are covered with brown paper and it is not possible to see inside. Placed in the centre of this paper covering is a white paper sign with the word, "SOON" written upon. This SOON sign seems to have been up for months and the shop has not opened and it occurred to me that the sign could be up for all eternity without ever being misleading. Each time I see the sign I am in "the here and now" so it appears  possible that the shop will open soon, though it never is. In this sense "soon" becomes like the word "tomorrow". It is, it seems, a valid notion yet it never comes to be.

We'll see, soon

     As you may have worked out by now Totnes is the Devon Quarter of the City of Dundee, (only kidding, well, maybe not), so visit Totnes, it's a great wee toon and explore the mystery of the Soon Shop.

The Soon Shop Totnes

     In the fullness of time it has opened as Bianca e Massimo and is a popular vegan café.

"A short back and sides ?" "No, just give him a trim."

     It can surprise you how sometimes things don't change that much. In late May of this year, 2011, I retraced my steps and found J.W. Peters, which is a gentleman's hairdresser's shop at the junction of Lochee High Street and Bright Street. The way most places change so quickly these days I was astonished that there was a barber's shop there, and that it also still bore the name,  J.W.Peters. As I peered into the shop window even the interior looked as it had  over 60 years ago with its wooden screen about five foot high which guarded the privacy of the customer having his hair snipped by the barber's long thin steel scissors and that of the other customers who no doubt were sitting waiting for their turn. 
   Although so much had remained the same, the barber was different.  I could just catch a glimpse of the top of  his head above the screen as he manoeuvred around a customer. It was the top of the head of a young man with short black hair,and not at all like the head of the man I have always considered the original J.W.Peters who, when I first encountered him in the August 1950, was a tall young man of about 30 years of age with a full head of blonde hair which had a series of natural parallel waves running across his head from one side to the other. This might sound quite exotic but I remember it as a style a number of men favoured in those times.
     On a sepia day, so long ago, but still so present in my mind, my Daddy took me into this very barber's shop and we sat together on a long bench to wait while the people who had arrived before us took their turn to have a haircut. Nobody sat in any particular order and so it was a puzzle to me then and remained so for a number of years on subsequent visits how people calculated whose turn it was to be seated at the barber's chair. It seemed to me that an amazing feat of memory was being performed. When it came to my turn to be presented to J.W.Peters, the latter rested a short wooden plank on the arms of his barber's chair in order for me, a very wee boy at the time, to have a platform to sit on which would raise me to an elevation sufficient for J.W.Peters to set about his work. Daddy sat me on the plank and returned to the bench.  J.W. Peters wrapped around me something that appeared to be a white cotton bed sheet and tucked it into my collar. He turned to Daddy and asked, "Short,back and sides?"
     " No," Daddy replied, "just give him a trim." I don't recollect much about actually having my haircut but I remember the distinctly sweet, slightly medicinal smelling hair cream which J.W.Peters rubbed into my hair before combing it. I survived all this without undue anxiety. When the ritual was complete,  J.W.Peters turned to Daddy and ascertained whether what he had done to my hair was satisfactory or not. Daddy nodded and I was lifted from the wooden plank and stood on the brown linoleum covered floor. Daddy paid him sixpence.
     That was the first haircut I ever had in a barber's shop and though I didn't really know then or indeed don't today with any certainty just what "a trim" was or is, it is what, since then, I have always asked for when I have gone for a haircut. I am sure it is a sanctified phrase in the lingua franca that barbers have spoken over the centuries. Every time I sit in the barber's chair and the sheet has been wrapped around me, I say, "I'll have a trim, please," and without a question asked, the barber proceeds.