That Market

Image taken from Bilston In Old Photographs, collected by Elizabeth A. Rees, Alan Sutton Publishing, 1988

Iris Rhodes reading at last night's Bilston Voices put me in a nostalgic mood again but not really about anything that fits very easily into my "Childish Things" theme. I've been thinking all day about that market. Of course I cannot be sure how accurately I remember anything about it. It was a long time ago, the old market was pulled down in the early 1970s.
I remember the imposing exterior on the High Street, a high brick front more like a grand church or perhaps a town hall than a place of trade. Two sets of doors led into the long interior with its unbroken brick and high roof with twin rows of windows that ran the length of it. Wooden stalls filled it in a double row with more secure lockable stalls at the sides.
The aisles were wide and the stalls narrow. Inside, on the right and a few stalls down was the stall I always dashed to as soon as we were through the door and even at that age, maybe seven or eight, the stall that drew me was a bookseller. When I was a little older it was where I spent most of my pocket money on cheap science fiction with lurid covers.
As I said in a previous post, nobody would now build anything so wasteful of space or so impossible to heat but it had character which is a good deal more than can be said for the shoebox building that replaced it.
One of my earliest memories is of the outside market that surrounded the side and back of this late Victorian building (built in 1892). The outside market was every bit as fascinating as the inside one. It was a chaotic and random collection of stalls selling everything that could be imagined: cloth, crockery, fruit and vegetables, bric-a-brac, clothes. There was noise and colour and life there. It was a place where a loosed hand took seconds to be converted into a lost child, and that's how, aged four I came to be lost. It's one of my earliest memories.
A moment earlier I had been with my mother and my aunt and suddenly I wasn't. At first it didn't seem so bad, climbing over the wooden carts on which the traders brought their goods into the market, dashing hither and thither among the tree trunk legs of the adults who ignored me totally.
It didn't take long to realise that it wasn't all fun. I quickly found myself missing my mom and when I couldn't find her I started to cry.
And then I was running. Without realising how I found myself on a road that I knew, Dudley Street, and I ran along it. Our house was only a short distance from the end of it and I managed to find it. I dashed inside, past my grandfather and through the living room to sit sobbing on the stairs. I don't know whose relief was greater when my frantic mother finally arrived home, hers to see me or mine to see her.

The 1970s were a grim time for Bilston, with the demolition of some of its finest buildings and their replacement by the squat ugly monstrosities of the day. Now it's all being redeveloped again into something called the "Bilston Urban Village" although the recession seems to have slowed that development almost to a halt. Should the development continue the plans look good, but I doubt it will ever be as good as the town I remember.

DPRK: Prelude in Beijing, Lunch with Mr Liu

When we had all gathered we immediately split up again. Some of us had booked a tour of the Hutongs, the narrow alleyways that are the back streets of Beijing. Others were off to see the Bird's Nest Olympic stadium; others had their own individual plans. Those of us off to the Hutongs were taken by bus and dropped off in a small square where a row of pedal rickshaws were waiting.

First however we had a lunch. For this we were led into what appeared to be somebody's house. I wasn't very hungry so I just had a single bottle of beer while the others ate what seemed to be a very nice meal. As lunch was finishing we were joined by a local guide, a rather loud and confident young woman, and by Mr Liu, a man who though now retired was once a figure of some importance in the world of Singing Crickets and Fighting Grasshoppers. Mr Liu was a gap-toothed and weather-beaten elderly man carrying a rather odd assortment of items. His fame as a breeder of insects was readily apparent from the number of books he showed us featuring pictures of him with some of his prize specimens. Apparently, so our translator informed us, he was also famous for holding a record for cooking dumplings.

He showed us the tools of his trade: a fighting bowl, a living bowl complete with a separate connubial chamber, a long thin feeding spoon, a long flat (yet oddly delicate) cricket pooper-scooper, a long thin brush to encourage recalcitrant insects into the aforementioned connubial chamber.
Most intriguing were a set of miniscule scales for ensuring that the grasshoppers were fighting in the right weight class.
Someone asked, via our translator, how they knew who had won a fight. It seems that they operate not so much a "last-cricket-standing" as a "last-cricket-not-eaten" principal.
As he talked, Mr Liu bounced around the room with irrepressible energy, swooping and leaping like some demented thing. His enthusiasm was manic, his patter at a Gatling-gun speed that taxed the translator's abilities to the full. I felt worn out just watching him.

When he was finished he packed everything away - two ornate earthenware jars containing a grasshopper each vanishing into pockets in a trick worthy of Tommy Cooper.
It was fascinating but when I thought back to it later it reminded me of the last of the Rocky movies. In that film, Rocky is retired and running a restaurant. He is a convivial host, joining in with the guests, signing autographs and recounting tales of his past glories. Mr Liu seemed a little like that; a man who has seen some glory days and some acclaim now endlessly retelling his past for the tourists.
I felt a little sad at the idea.

Afterwards we went back into the square and into those bicycle rickshaws. They pedalled off down the streets and we sat back eager to see the famed Hutongs. I'm not sure what we had expected but what we got was a bit of a disappointment. The route led us through dull grey streets with dull grey walls. We stopped once at a gate but we didn't go through it, just looked at it. Finally we stopped at a market. It was predominantly a small local food market and not terribly interesting though it was, as markets almost always are, a good place to take pictures.