remembered mud

I have had a bank account since I was seventeen. It was at the Midland in Henley on Thames.
The bank manager was a Mr Mountford.
He was a serious kind of bank manager. Waistcoat, pocket hanky, polished shoes.
He looked the programmes I brought him from my days in repertory theatre to go along with the checks for thirty pounds I would deposit in my account.
He asked me about my wig in Pygmalion and my tap shoes in The Boyfriend.
 He asked me if I could fly when I was in casting on Superman 1V.
He gave me a mortgage based on nothing really.
When I went to America, he wrote me letters about my life there. Funny nudges. The sort you would send a favourite niece.
I think now, that he was a man who would have joined the circus. Had he not be called Mr Mountford. With a Mrs Mountford. And a Badgemore Park Golf club membership.
I think now, that he would have eaten Thai Curries and learned to Samba.

I remember going into his office at 6 Market Place in Henley on Thames.
" Ah, Miss Murray." he would say. " What glorious excuses have you got for me today?"

He is long gone, I am sure.

But now I am back in England, I look at my account which still resides at 6 Market Place, Henley on Thames..and there is one standing payment that has gone out of my account every month for the last thirty or so years.
To CND. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

I went to Greenham Common...I didn't stay there. Oh no. I got a bus down. Held hands with women in muddy trousers and went back back to my flat in Clapham.
( Greenham Common was a woman only peace camp established to protest the nuclear missiles being sited at RAF Greenham Common Airbase in Berkshire.)







































I could cancel my standing order....but why?
I was there. No, I was. Not for long. But I was. No, really, I was.

Mr Mountford may have been quietly amused.