Where the Halling Valley River Lies, Carl Halling [urban books to read txt] 📗

and four siblings to the Grandview area of East Vancouver.
Many of Grandview's earliest settlers were in shipping or construction work, and largely of British origin. Indeed, Angela's own father was a builder and electrician from the little town of Castlederg in Tyrone, Ireland. While her mother hailed from the great industrial city of Glasgow.
At high school, she came into her own in the Glee Club, thanks to a singing voice of rare beauty and quality. And in time she was able to make her living exclusively as a soprano singer, and many of her greatest triumphs took place at Vancouver’s famous Theatre Under the Stars, which officially opened on August the 6th 1940.
After the war, she hoped to expand her career either in the US or the UK, but despite a successful audition for the San Francisco Light Opera Company, ultimately opted for England, a ticket to sail having become available to her.
And so she set off for the country of her forefathers laden with letters of recommendation from her singing teacher, as well as numerous press cuttings from her brilliant Canadian career.
And within a short time of doing so, she met Pat Cristiansen through their shared profession, and they married in the summer of 1948.
Seven years later, they decided to have their first child, but Angela was repeatedly informed by her doctor she might miscarry. In the event, David breathed his first on the 7th of October 1955.
While his first school was a kind of nursery school held locally on a daily basis at the private residence of one Miss Henrietta Pearson, and then aged 4 years old, he joined the exclusive Lycée Francais du Sud Kensington, where he was to become bilingual by the age of about four years old.
Almost every race and nationality under the sun was to be found in the Lycée in those days... and among those who went on to be good pals of David's were kids of English, French, Jewish, American, Yugoslavian and Middle Eastern origin.
His first two closest playground pals were Esther, the dusky scion of a successful Norwegian character actor and a beautiful Israeli dancer, and Craig, an English kid like himself, and for a time, they formed an unlikely but inseparable trio:
“Hi kiddy”, was Esther’s sacred greeting to her beloved blood brother, and David would respond in kind.
While not a typical Lycée father in his patched canvas trousers, David’s was determined Dany and he enjoy the best and richest education imaginable, and to this end, he worked, toiled incessantly in the tough London session world.
And so that they be distinguished from the common run of British boys with their short back and sides they were dressed in lederhosen with their heads shorn like convicts. These boys would be different. And David certainly set himself apart himself from the outset not least though his physical appearance, whose remarkable thinness was enhanced by long-lashed blue eyes so enormous as to verge on the alien.
He was also the kind of child who'd remove a paper from a neighbour's letter-box on Esmond Road, and then mutilate it before re-posting it…donate a loaf of ancient green bread to another by posting it over the wall…and destroy still another’s brand new balsa wood fence while trying to retrieve a stray ball, going through one rung after the other with a sickly dull thud…thud…thud…much to the hilarity of his close pal Jacko. But the neighbour couldn’t see the funny side.
The era’s famous social revolution kicked in in about 1963, and yet for all that, seminal Pop groups such as the Searchers and the Dave Clark Five - even the Beatles themselves – were quaint and wholesome figures in a still innocent England. They fitted in well in a nation of Norman Wisdom pictures and the well-spoken presenters of the BBC Home or Light Service, of coppers, tanners and ten bob notes, sweet shops and tuppeny chews.
It was in ’63 that Beatlemania invaded David’s world, and he first announced his own status as a maniac at the Lycée in that landmark year; but within a short time, a single new group had started threatening the Beatles' position as David's favourite in the world. They were the Rolling Stones; although an initial reaction to what he saw as a rough and sullen performance of Buddy Holly’s "Not Fade Away" on TV, was one of bitter disappointment.
But before long, he'd become utterly entranced by these martyrs to the youth movement, and during a musical discussion he had in about 1965 with some of the new breed of English roses, who may or may not have been flaunting mod girl fringes and kinky boots, David proudly announced his undying fealty.
One of the girls was a Fab Four loyalist and had the requisite seraphic smile, while another preferred a certain Geordie combo, and acted cooler than the rest, as if these British Bluesmen were somehow superior to mere Pop acts like the Beatles and the Stones. While David felt compelled to ask her a question about her favourite band, while casting aspersions upon the physical loveliness of one of their number, which provoked a flustered response from the apoplectic Pop fan.

During this golden era, David divided his time between the Lycée and his West London stomping ground, and from a very young age, took Judo classes in South Kensington. And it was there that one of his teachers, a former British international who’d fought in the first ever World Judo championships in Japan, once despairingly confessed:
“I always know it’s Saturday when I hear Cristiansen’s voice.”
Later, he took classes in the somewhat rougher London suburb of Hammersmith. But if he thought he was going to raise Cain there he had another thing coming, given that its owner was a one-time captain of the British international team who'd served as an air gunner with No 83 Squadron RAF during World War II. He later held Judo classes in Stalag 383.
David resumed his Karate classes with him in the early ‘70s, until he got it into his head that he no longer wished to have anything to do with anything martial, precious blooming aesthete that he was.
For all that, though, he was rarely happier than on those Wednesday evenings he attended the 20th Chiswick Wolf Cub pack.
Memories such as the solemnity of his enrolment, and being helped up a tree by an older cub to secure his Athletics badge remained with him for many years afterwards. As did the times he won his first star, and his swimming badge, with its peculiar frog symbol, as well as the pomp and the seriousness of a mass meeting he attended, with its different coloured scarves, sweaters and hair.
And then there was the Saturday afternoon when, following a soccer match between rival cub teams during which David dirtied his boots by standing around in the mud and his elbow by tripping over a loose bootlace, an older cub offered to take him home. So they made their way to the bus stop through underground passageways teeming with rowdy kids, both white and West Indian, all shod in black plimsolls with elastic side strips.
"Shuddup!" shouted David’s new protector,
“Where exactly are you taking me?” David queried anxiously.
"The bus stop at Chiswick 'Oigh Stree' is the best plice, oi reck'n. You be awroigh’ deah, me lil' mite."
David became convinced he’d never see his home again, and so started to loudly wail, his cherubic little face contorted into a hideous mask of anguish ; and as they mounted the bus, faces both white and black suddenly turned towards him in concern, and what a strange sight he must have made, this tyke in distress, surrounded by a bevy of older wolf cubs.
After a few moments, David’s new found friend, his brow furrowed with concern, as if he’d done his frail young charge some unspeakable wrong, assured him:
"Oim gonna drop y’orf where yer dad pu’ y’on."
Then, David saw a street he recognised, and promptly left his seat, grinning uncontrollably:
"This'll do," he announced.
"Wai', Dave!” his friend cried out, “are you shoa vis is awroigh'?”
"Yup!" David replied, as he stepped off the bus, which then moved on down the street and out of his life forever.
There was a point in the mid 1960s when David was dubbed "Le Général" by his form teacher, by which time he’d be found barking orders in the playground to a tight circle of friends. While in the classroom, he’d sit at the back, leaning against the wall with his cronies, while pretending to smoke a fat cigar like a Chicago tough guy.
Certainly he was not above organising elaborate playground deceptions; and one of these involved his pretending to banish one of his best friends, Bobby, from whatever activity they had going on at the time.
Bobby played along by putting on a superb display of water works, which had the desired effect of arousing the tender mercies of some of the girls. They duly rounded on him for his hard-heartedness, but he refused to budge, and of course it was all a big joke, and Bobby and he had never been closer.
If he was "Le Général" at the Lycée, back home he saw himself as the leader of the kids whose houses backed onto the dirty alley that ran parallel to his side of the Esmond Road.
One day, he crossed the road to announce a feud with the kids of the clean alley, so-called because it was concreted over rather than being just a dirt track.
Soon after the feud had thawed, Dany and he went over to pal around with some of the clean alley kids who he now saw as his allies, but there must have still been some bad blood because before long, a scrap was under way and he was getting the worst of it.
“Hit him, David,” his brother urged above the chilling din of the clean alley loyalists baying for his hot young blood to flow, but the best he could manage was to briefly get his antagonist into a headlock. Finally he agreed to leave, and as he cycled off, one of the clean alley kids kicked his bike, so that it squeaked all the way home in unison with great heaving sobs.
If David’s good mate Paulie had been with him on that afternoon in the clean alley, it’s unlikely he would have had to suffer as he did. He lived virtually opposite the Cristiansen family in Bedford Park, but he was from another dimension altogether, a skinny cockney kid with muscles like pure steel who seemed to have been born to wage war on the bomb sites of post-war London. Their wicked cahoots included howling at the top of their lungs into random blocks of flats, and then running away, as their echoed screams blended with incoherent threats of:
"I'll call the Police, I'll..."
And when he’d made his first personal appearance in the dirty alley on someone else's rusty bike, screaming along in a cloud of dust it rendered all the denizens of the dirty alley speechless and motionless. Yet, David’s mum made a point of liking him, and he was always welcome to come to tea with the Cristiansen family at five twenty five:
"Davy", he'd always cry when he wanted his friend's attention, and he'd always be welcome at the Cristiansen household, even though this brought them some condemnation within the