We also wish a happy birthday to four Facebook friends. They are James Geraghty, and Susan Carroll who live in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland: Loretta Milner who lives in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England: Anna Manyam (Sheila’ cousin) who lives in Singapore. Enjoy your special day, birthday celebrants, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.
My song today is ‘Goodbye, Sam, Hello, Samantha’. Sir Cliff Richard is a British singer and actor who made his professional debut in August 1958. His discography consists of 47 studio albums: 7 soundtrack albums: 11 live albums: three-stage showcase albums: 17 mainstream compilation albums: 7 box sets: 8 gospel compilation albums: 46 Eps, and 146 singles. Like Mick Jagger, Tom Jones, and a few more musical stalwarts, the man goes on and on, and shows no sign of flagging in energy.
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I remember Cliff singing this song, and I also recall a time in my courting youth (late teens), when I had started to desire the ‘Samanthas’ in my life more than the ‘Sams’, with one exception. No, don’t get me wrong. I have got to the ripe old age of 78 years without once ever been tempted to part my hair on the female side of my head, or to push my loose ends down the left-hand side of my trouser leg. I can also reassure all my female followers that the only thing attached to me that ever went limp was not my hand!
It has become more fashionable since the New Millennium to witness more cross-dressing between the sexes, more multi-sex loos, and in general much more multi-sex lives. I am not sure whether it was Boy George or David Bowie who got the young thinking ‘anyway, which way’ will do’, but they certainly have got a lot to answer for. In my youth, an independent woman with a Christian name they never liked would simply change her name by deed poll. I know that while homosexuality was largely frowned upon by society in general, that a few ‘suspicious spinsters’ would often be known by Christian names that both suited and sounded either male or female (Leslie and Lesley: Alex: Billy and Billie: Bobby: Ashley: Charley and Charlie: Chris etc. etc).
In fact, although I am not as much abreast about changes in the law these days since I left the West Yorkshire Probation Service in 1995, I do know that society has currently made it as easy as possible for almost any person to do whatever they want to do, with a little account of their action. Indeed, any man who likes viewing the private parts of females in partial undress can now engage in such activity without the slightest risk of police prosecution. All a man needs to do today is declare themselves a woman and thereafter the whole of society must consider them a woman, and allow them access as a woman to all places allocated specifically for ‘women only. To do otherwise is to blatantly discriminate against their individual and human rights. The same is true in reverse sexual identity declarations, but somehow, I cannot imagine many women wanting to take swift advantage of catching men with their trousers down unless they harbour secret designs on the poor man!
I once dated a young woman twice who had decided to change her name before she had entered adolescence. The year was 1960. The young woman was an only child and had been called ‘Samantha’ at birth. Her Father was called Sam and her mother was called Ethel. It had been decided prior to her being born that if the baby was a boy, it would be named ‘Sam’ after its father, and if the infant was born a girl, then the preferred name would be modified to that of ‘Samantha’.
While her mother always called her daughter ‘Samantha’, her father immediately shortened it to calling her Sam in the privacy of their own home before the Christening cake had a chance to go stale. One way or another, he seemed determined to have another ‘Sam’ in the household. Before long, the shortening of ‘Samantha’ to ‘Sam’ started to be used by other family members and best friends at school, and by the time she had reached thirteen years of age, everyone who wanted her to acknowledge them when they called her name, would get no response unless they gave her the title of ‘Sam’. Needless to say. her father encouraged the rapid extension of this colloquial name change, and he probably viewed it as representing the closeness of bond that he shared with his only child.
I met her for the first time in a café I regularly attended in Cleckheaton called the ‘Mucky Duck’. You could not possibly imagine a café owner naming his establishment such today, could you? The ‘Mucky Duck’ served the best pie and peas in West Yorkshire, and everyone went there when they were down in the town, and a bit hungry. The upshot of this first brief meeting was an arrangement to go to the Picture House (that is the cinema for all you under 60 years old) midweek. When a boy and girl arranged a first date in the 1950s, if the girl was really desirable, the boy would meet her outside the Picture House (alone) at the appointed time and buy both tickets. If in any doubt, however, an arrangement to look for the young woman and her friend inside might be made by yourself and a mate.
Samantha was too attractive a young woman to meet with a friend, and with the prospect of a full two hours sitting alongside her on the back row of the Picture House in pitch darkness, meeting her in a foursome never once entered my mind. Our first date went down a treat. She was talkative and responsive in all the right ways towards any courting advances I made without considering them as me taking liberties. I took her home by bus and left her at the front door of her parent’s house with the agreement that I would see her at Cleckheaton Town Hall the following Saturday night for the weekend Rock and Roll dance.
She was a lovely young woman who told me that she was determined to become a dancer on the stage, She also unashamedly admitted to being ‘a daddy’s girl’ through and through. She held such admiration for her father, that she never discouraged him from shortening her Christian name to ‘Sam’. She and her mother were more like younger and older sisters and she probably wanted to stay as close to her father’s affections as she could.
Except for her overclose identification with her father, Samantha was as independently minded as a young woman might be in 1961. She not only adored her father, but she found it natural to seek his advice in all things. As things were to turn out, my relationship with Samantha was shorter than most of my brief relationships, as I usually went out with the young woman about four times before politely ending it before either of us got emotionally attached to the notion of a possible marriage. With Samantha, however, two dates were to prove quite sufficient once it became obvious that her father would continue to be too intrusive a bystander not to seek to interfere with any plans we ever made.
Although I went along with Samantha’s wishes and called her ‘Sam’ to her face, whenever we kissed, I could never imagine kissing a 'Sam’, and so it was always a ‘Samantha’ I held in my arms. On the evening of our dance date at Cleckheaton Town Hall, the experience I had before the end of the night was enough to convince me that there could never be anything serious between me and Samantha while her father still cast his parental shadow over his precious daughter.
While it was not unusual for Samantha to ask her father to choose the best film for us to go to on our first dates, it was a very odd request for any daughter to do in my eyes. There were two picture Houses in Cleckheaton that were located across from the Town Hall, and, they stood next door to each other. One was called the Palace and its sister was called the Savoy. Consequently, as the movies changed at each cinema weekly, there were always two films to chose from for all patrons.
I never forgot that one of the films being shown that week was called ‘The Angry Silence’ with Richard Attenborough in it. Alternately, we could see ‘Carry on Constable’, a comedy with Sid James and Kenneth Williams in it. At the time, I had become locally famous by getting my name in the national press, having recently been appointed the youngest Textile Shop Steward in Great Britain on my 18th birthday. ‘The Angry Silence’ film, was naturally my preferred choice of movie to see as it concerned the power of trade unions at the time and the ‘sending to Coventry’ after a strike, of one of the workers who had dared to cross the picket line. Such trade union practice as sending strike breakers ‘to Coventry’ after the men had returned to work was common practice from 1960 onward within the trade union movement. The practice involved giving the ‘silent treatment’ to the strikebreaker and refusing to treat him with civility thereafter. Such men who had crossed the picket line would invariably move on to another job where their history as a strikebreaker was not known and hopefully would not shadow them.
On the night in question after I had met Samantha outside the Picture House in Cleckheaton, she told me that she had asked her father’s advice regarding which was likely to be the best film to see. Because her father believed all trade unionism to be wrong, he had naturally recommended the ‘Carry on Constable’ film to his daughter as ‘suitable viewing’. I had not told Samantha about my recent appointment as the shop steward at the firm of my work. Put bluntly, she was too attractive a young woman to dump before being given another chance, and a large part of me (the revenge side of my character) wanted a part of Samantha that her beloved father would never/could never consider his right to have.
So, we arranged to meet at the Cleckheaton Town Hall for the Saturday Rock and Roll Dance everyone attended the following week. I decided to meet Samantha outside the Town Hall as I did not know if her father had got wind of my trade-union activities during the week since I had first dated his daughter, and I had no intention of getting into any serious discussion with him by calling to his house to collect my date.
The evening started well, and without her father hovering in the background as a fun-spoiling influence on his only daughter it looked like it could even get better before I walked her back home at the end of the dance. Samantha was very receptive to my romantic advances, to the extent that not once before we left the Town Hall to walk home that night did she mention her father. The dance date held out more promise than I had initially hoped for at the start of the evening. However, within minutes of leaving the Town Hall to walk my date back home, I soon concluded that it would be easier chasing an ant up a gum tree than ever getting Samantha out of her father’s sight long enough to kiss her like she deserved to be kissed, completely guilt free.
We left the Town Hall after the last dance and I had intended to walk her home to Heckmondwike, three miles away, before walking home another three miles toward Hightown after I had dropped my date safely home outside her front door (where no doubt dad would still be waiting up for his daughter in the lounge while his wife did some knitting in bed).
The upshot was that I never got the opportunity of seeing my hoped-for plans materialise, and of making ‘ My Samantha’ know how much more womanly it was possible to feel once she had stopped perceiving herself as being a ‘Sam’. Had we walked the three-mile journey home, I felt sure that Samantha would never seek her father’s advice before mine ever again! It is surprising how much the power of love can change the world of a romantic couple in so short a time and distance?
We had not walked down the dozen or more steps from Town Hall door to the pavement outside before I was obliged to acknowledge that I had only been on two dates with Samantha and already her father was winning 2:0, She was known as ‘Sam’ now and while ever her father remained alive and breathing, no man would ever witness the emergence of Samantha ever again, however briefly.
It was only when we got outside and were walking down the Town Hall steps hand-in-hand when a nearby car honked its horn. It was Samantha’s dad who was ‘just happened to be passing, and as it was near the midnight hour and the ending of the dance, he decided to wait five minutes and offer us a safe ride home instead of walking three miles in the dark. I could not tell him that I wanted to walk three miles with Samantha in the dark. As ordinary people did not own cars in those days, and although it was only a Morris Minor papping its horn at us, the presence of the private car was enough to make its presence felt. With regard to a few of my mates looking on, it still made me stand out like a person with two heavily bandaged sore thumbs at a fashionable bowling alley who had just landed in the gully again!
The strange thing was that the young woman just could not see how odd it was, and how possessive it looked for her father to want to protect his 17-year-old daughter from every possible danger imaginable. I politely ended our continued relationship after that disastrous night. No prize for guessing the general drift of my last statement to her. “Go home to daddy, Sam, and look me back up whenever/if ever you are prepared to become Samantha again!”
Love and peace
Bill xxx