Exmoor Lockdown Diary 119 - Another Recollection of Randolph Priddy

I don’t know why I thought of this column sitting at my desk a while ago, but suddenly the recollection of my old friend Randolph Priddy talking about tadpoles came to me and i recalled that I’d mentioned it in a newspaper column long ago.

Here is that column…

A rotund man with a bald head and white beard leaned over and watched the tadpoles. 998 of the tiny creatures swam in unison in a clockwise direction around the pond. Two swam the other way.

“That’s you and me,” said Prid.

Randolph Priddy has been wedged in his grave for some years now. I say wedged because when we buried him in the private, non-Christian cemetery, his cardboard coffin got stuck halfway down the hole – and being cardboard, we didn’t like to jump up and down on it too much.

But he was right about the two contrary tadpoles. As press photographer and journalist, he and I made an odd newspaper duo. We were always getting into scrapes. Prid loathed pomposity and his way of dealing with it was to laugh. So when some top-heavy dignitary came our way laden with self-importance, the two of us would get the giggles with the inevitable result that we’d be thrown out of whatever function it was.

I remembered all this as I stood in the rain on Plymouth Hoe the other day. I was covering the Queen’s visit and I watched as a file of soldiers marched out of the Citadel to form a guard of honour on the road. As they approached the curb there was a sudden burst of noise. It was so loud it made several of us jump. Obviously it had emanated from a human-being, but the scream sounded as if the person was suffering terrible anguish or pain. For a moment I thought a nutter had been let loose in the crowd.

But it wasn’t a nutter. It was the officer barking an order for the marching men to do something or other. Stop, I suppose. 

I wondered about the noise he made. He didn’t have to screech in such a volatile way. He could have done a Sergeant Wilson and said, mildly: “I say chaps, would you mind awfully stopping where you are…”

But he exploded. Because it’s all part of the rigmarole. It’s the Way Things Are Done. And he was showing off to the crowd.

Prid would have dropped his cameras laughing.

He used to say: “There is a man in the far-flung forests of Canada, who is paid to shoot bears. When he shoots them he peels off their bottoms with a knife and the bottoms are brought all the way to England. When they arrive a craftsman hammers out the bottoms into a dome shape, puts a strap on them and tucks a little feather just to one side. And then some other men put the bear’s bottoms on their heads. Then they stand bolt upright outside the Queen’s house. Under the big, heavy bear’s bottoms - all through the heat of the day.”

When you think of it like that, the famous busby looks utterly, utterly mad.

So what was the Queen doing on Plymouth Hoe? She was there to touch a key. And touch it she did. Just fleetingly, but it was enough to please the men in uniform. Don’t ask me what it meant. All I know is that I felt sorry for the young soldier who had to hold this magical key. It wasn’t sort of key you or I would have for our house - it was a blinking great big shiny thing on a wood and velvet plinth. The young man had to stand there, bolt upright (of course), for a long time. After a while I could see him clenching his jaw. Then I saw his arms begin to shake. The guy was in agony. You try holding a big weight without moving for half an hour. 

I guess adrenalin kicked in, because he stopped shaking when Her Majesty arrived. And all his mates and other sundry military figures stood  rigid as ramrods. They looked hilarious. But only to me. I realise I’m the tadpole in a minority when it comes to this sort of thing.

Meanwhile the rest of Europe was getting on with far less important things. Like manufacturing cars. Like making fast new trains. Like endeavouring not to have traffic jams. Like basking in the sun.

But who needs sun and wealth and ease of life when you’ve got magic keys and bears’ bottoms and old ladies in front of whom you must stand rigidly to attention?

Sarcastic? Me? Not a bit of it. I like all this fairy tale craziness. We’d probably be no good at building cars anyway. Anyone remember the Austin Allegro?

There are times, though, when I wonder about it all. I remember Prid telling me about his one visit to a non-conformist church. It was an evangelical rally and there were only two doors out. Above one was the word SAVED. Above the other was DAMNED. Prid said that, out of all the hundreds of people there, he was the only one who exited through the latter. I too, know that I walk among the damned.