Tricia McGill--on Rock and Roll

I’ve been watching a series on our Aussie National TV station about the early days in Cilla Black’s singing career and it brought back so many memories. Some younger people might not be familiar with Cilla, but guess you’ve all heard of the Beatles and The Rolling Stones. You’d have to have been living on another planet not to have heard of them. Anyway, back to Cilla. I was fortunate enough to have lived through the early days of Rock and Roll. I say fortunate as I don’t think any music has matched up to those glory years of the late fifties and 60s.

When I first attended dances at my local town hall in my teenage years we mostly did a sort of shuffle around the floor as in those days it was strictly ballroom dancing and who could do the foxtrot or tango—certainly none of the young men I danced with. But then Rock and Roll came on the scene in the form of Bill Haley and his Comets, and the like. My cousin, who was also my best friend, and I began to excel at dancing this new-fangled Roll and Roll. I can still remember how my brothers, all much older than us, laughed at our antics. Little did they know how this new ‘craze’ would catch on. It spawned some of the greatest rock musicians ever. Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, and let’s not forget Elvis. I can still recall vividly the first time I heard Elvis on the radio. My cousin and I were enjoying a refreshing drink during a break at the dingy little dance club we went to twice a week, when the announcer came on to introduce this new singer who was sweeping all before him. I still get that same old tingle up my spine when I hear him singing Heartbreak Hotel. 

Now I think about it I was so lucky. I saw so many stars live in their early years as performers, including Bill Haley and the Comets, Frankie Laine, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Eddie Fisher, Matt Munro. Probably a few of them are long forgotten but there are two groups who are well known even today. We would go to the local market Saturday morning and buy the records of our favorites. Those round plastic things that apparently are coming back into fashion by the purists. I think I had every record made by Frankie Laine and stupidly left most of them behind when I left England. 

Moving on a few years, and I met my husband, who shared my musical tastes. How we loved to rock and roll the night away. I met him many, many years ago on Christmas Eve at the Tottenham Royal, a dance hall. I Googled it and it doesn’t exist anymore. Pity, as it was a wonderful venue.

Getting back to Cilla. My husband and I went to a dance hall every Saturday evening and the manager there got a batch of tickets for a Beatles performance and I was lucky enough to be included in the select group who went along to a local theater. To be honest I can’t recall one song the Beatles performed as the screaming from besotted girls was so loud they could have been playing rubbish. But then one of them introduced Cilla, and I can still see this girl standing there singing her heart out. I believe her first hit was ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’. Well anyone with a heart had to fall for her then and there--and many did--and remain fans to this day.

We also went along to see one of the early Rolling Stones performances. From memory it was at a Boat club along the River Thames at Richmond. It must have been a huge place with rafters as some boys stripped their shirts off to hang from the rafters. I was an arm’s length away from this skinny bloke called Mick Jagger as they performed on the stage and who would have guessed that 50 odd years later he and the Stones would still be a household name.

I do hope my reminiscences have brought back some happy memories for others.

Tricia McGill’s books can be found either on her webpage: www.triciamcgill.com

Or on her Books We Love page: http://bookswelove.net/mcgill.php

The Story Behind the Story by Gail Roughton

As a reader, have you ever read a novel that seemed so real you could smell baking bread, feel the heat of the sun beating down on your head, hear the roars of a crowd? If you’re a confirmed reader, one who always has a book going (usually one in each room), you almost certainly have.  Because it’s those moments, those scenes, those books, that make reading so much more than a pleasant diversion and turn a casual reader into a book addict.  Those moments, those scenes, those books—they take readers to another world, another place, another time and introduce them to characters they feel they know, folks they’d like to sit down with over coffee.  Or beer.  Depends on the time of the day, I guess.

So here’s the Sixty-Four Thousand Dollar question.  How does a writer write such scenes, such books?  Not that I’m saying I do, mind you.  I’d like to think so, at least occasionally, and I know that while I’m writing, I myself am in another place and time. But not because I’m using my imagination to create them.  Because I’m tapping my memory to reproduce them.  Not exactly, of course.  Not the actual moment, the actual event.  I want the feel, the flavor, the taste, of that memory.  And I want it to come through to the reader.  But even more than that, I want to put that memory into words that I can take out and visit with whenever I so choose. Bet you didn’t know that, huh?  That basically, writers are selfish people who in the final analysis, write for themselves and not for others.  Which isn’t selfish at all, really, because by doing so, they create those scenes that turn readers into book addicts.

In other words, there’s always a story behind the story.  Always.  My “darkest” work came from a real-life ordinary moment.  In a law office.  In my early twenties, I worked for a lovely, lovely gentleman, an older attorney known to all in Macon as “the Judge”.  One day the phone rang, I answered like a good little secretary and explained that the Judge was currently out of the office, might I take a message?

“This is Jim Smith (not really, I don’t remember the real name, it was a long time ago) at Riverside Cemetery.  Please ask him to call me at xxx-xxxx.”

Okay, I was in my early twenties but I was possessed by the devil on occasion even then.  I wrote up the call and under “About” added:  “Has a vampire in one of the mausoleums and would like him evicted.” 

The Judge came back, read his message, went “What?” and we all had a good laugh.  But the idea never left me, the idea that this would be an hysterical short satire, a “Night Court” sort of satire, wherein the poor vampire had to defend his right to live in the family mausoleum.  I mean, his family paid for it, after all, for the use of dead family members.  By what legal remedy would you evict a vampire?  He’s family.  And he’s dead.  Sort of.

Somewhere along the line, the story line ceased to be humorous and it dang sure ceased to be short.  Final product:  The Color of Seven

You can find all my titles at http://bookswelove.net/roughton.php. And there’s a story behind every last one of them.

The Hazards of Dental Hygiene—and tooth extraction, Eighteenth-Century Style, by Diane Scott Lewis

It’s almost Turkey Day! Fun with family, (or arguments) and all that food...stuck in your teeth. In England, where they didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, they still needed to clean up those pearly whites, and the eighteenth century had a unique manner of dental hygiene.

Up through the seventeenth century, dental care was erratic. Tooth extraction was usually performed by barber-surgeons and had a horrific and painful connotation. That pain and irregularity continued into the eighteenth century.

Teeth were hammered loose and jerked out sideways. Sometimes the patient was laid out on the floor with his head between the surgeon’s knees for the extraction of rotten teeth.

To advertise their services as “tooth-pullers,” these barber-surgeons hung rows of rotten teeth outside their shops. That must have been gruesome.

Thankfully the dental field did evolve in this century. Frenchman Pierre Fauchard (1678 –1761) is considered the father of modern dentistry. A highly skilled surgeon, he made remarkable improvements in dental instruments, often adapting tools from watch makers, jewelers and even barbers. He introduced dental fillings as treatment for dental cavities. He insisted that sugar derivate acids like tartaric acid were responsible for dental decay—a man ahead of his time.

In Britain “Operators for the teeth” developed into “dentists.” Samuel Darkin, who practiced in Whitechapel in the 1760’s, advertised himself as “Surgeon-dentist to his Majesty; Families attended by the year.” Several women combined dentistry with other skills, such as the enterprising Madame Silvie who made and fitted artificial teeth. “Those who don’t chuse to make their grievances known by asking for the Artificial Teeth-maker may ask for the Gold Snuff-box and Tweezer-case Maker.”

British surgeon John Hunter penned two important books in this time period, Natural History of Human Teeth (1771 ) and Practical Treatise on the Diseases of the Teeth (1778). In 1763 he entered into a period of collaboration with the London-based dentist James Spence. Hunter theorized the possibility of tooth transplants from one person to another.

The fear of tooth-pulling remained widespread (and without modern pain-killers it was understandable). After her niece’s excruciating experience, Jane Austen declared she would not let Mr. Spence “look at my teeth for a shilling a tooth and double it!”

Basic dental hygiene was little more than a toothpick and wiping down your gums with a cloth. Women suffered tooth loss worse than men due to vitamin loss during pregnancy. The poor also struggled with dental care.

Horse hair toothbrush

They were more concerned with buying food for their family than paying for tooth powders and the newly invented mass-produced toothbrush.

But dental procedures and care gained respect in the later eighteenth century. To avoid the pain of tooth extraction, or the expense of dentures, the art of teeth cleaning advanced.

England’s William Addis (a rag trader) is believed to have invented the first mass-produced toothbrush in 1780. In 1770, jailed for causing a riot, he found the prison method to clean teeth—rubbing a rag with soot and salt over your teeth—ineffective.  From one of his meals, he saved a small animal bone, drilled it with holes, and obtained bristles from a guard. He tied the bristles into tufts in the holes and sealed them with glue.

After his release, he started a business that would manufacture his toothbrushes, and he became very rich.
With the desire for better hygiene came the marketing of Toothpaste and powders. These were hyped as not only keeping teeth clean but in a time of rampant Pyorrhoea and scurvy, useful for fastening in those pesky loose teeth. Toothpowder came in a ceramic pot and was available either as a powder or paste. The ingredients could include crushed bones, oyster shells and pumice. The rich applied it with brushes and the poor with their fingers. 

 

A 1780 receipt for tooth powder:

1 1/2 oz. dragons blood  (not easy to find I imagine)
1 1/2 oz. cinnamon; and 1 oz. burnt alum.
Beat the above ingredients together and use every second day.

Horace Walpole put his faith in alum. He’d occasionally dissolve a lump in his mouth to keep his teeth strong. It must have tasted terrible.

Fauchard recommended using your own urine to clean your teeth—something that was always handy. Another method was bashing the end of a wooden skewer, to render it brush-like: “You must clean your teeth with this brush alone...once a fortnight, not oftener, dip your skewer brush into a few grains of gunpowder...”

Not surprisingly, most of these concoctions and methods did more harm than good by destroying tooth enamel.

Lord Chesterfield warned against the use of these sticks or any hard surface, as they “destroy the varnish of the teeth.” Smart man.

Delicate gold-handled toothbrushes, sometimes with replaceable heads, were included in the cases of toilet instruments for the rich. Toothpicks made of quills were the eighteenth-century dental floss and were kept in pretty jeweled boxes.

Toothpick box

Sounds more for show than practical use.

Fortunately for us, the knowledge and advantage of dental hygiene improved greatly in the years to come.

Sources: Dr. Johnson’s London by Liza Picard, and Wikipedia.

My eighteenth-century characters, strong-willed women, had healthy teeth: check out my website to visit the wilds of Cornwall:

http://www.dianescottlewis.org
http://bookswelove.net/lewis.php