I cannot think of my grandfather without remembering the eels in the bath.
After my father died, my mother, my brother Dave and I went to live with my grandparents in their house in Buckhold Road, Wandsworth. It was 1959 and I was 8 years old. As my mother was the youngest of 11 children, I had lots of aunts, uncles, cousins etc. Every now and then, on some occasion, there would be a large family gathering. There was a piano in the front room and Grandad would bash out a few songs on it, his speciality being “I’ve got a luverly bunch of coconuts”. Everybody would sing, various aunts or uncles would do their party piece and at some point there’d be a conga line around the house – I even remember it once going out into the street and back – I came, I saw, I conga’d etc – and all on only a few bottles of brown ale. No big drinkers there but plenty of best of British jollity. My Grandad was a real working class conservative – a big Winston Churchill fan. A former Army Cook in the First World War (excused front-line service due to the size of his family) and a Tiler by trade, he cultivated his garden, took snuff and looked after his wife, the stoic and calm bearer of 11 babes into the world. There was a mystery around who his father was. His mother was a housekeeper at some aristocrat’s house in Kensington. She was dismissed when she became pregnant. My mother’s eldest sister, my Auntie Ann, who has since passed away at the age of 96 – still in charge of her feisty, gossipy and good-natured personality – was always convinced that Grandad was born the “other side of the blanket” and consequently we were all descended from the nobility, don’cha know. Indeed she always was very elegant and held her little finger out while drinking tea – always out of a cup, never a mug, my dear. But she could also do the “Knees up Muvver Brown” like nobody else. Ah those were the days. And then there were the eels...

One Friday I came back from school to discover that the bathtub had become a temporary home to about half a dozen live eels. They lay there piled on top of each other in shallow water. They were long, black and slimy and I was a schoolboy so naturally I picked them up one by one to guage just how slimy they were, holding them up in the air for inspection and letting them slide through my hand back to their companions. What that says about me I don’t know but I was rather fascinated with these rather ugly creatures. They weren’t so popular with the rest of the household as Friday night was bath-night but Grandad was looking forward to stocking the larder with a few jars of jellied eels for Saturday tea. On Saturday morning the unsuspecting eels were transported in a tin bucket to the table in the garden, where in a short space of time they were chopped up into small round sections ready for jellying. Actually, the finer, gory details escape me now and I begin to suspect that first they were put whole into a saucepan and cooked before dissection. Boiled alive or bashed over the head first? I'll never know and for the sake those of a squeamish nature (including myself) I shall pass on to the next episode.

Some years later I had another eel encounter with a number of much larger specimens. They lived in a sacred pool in a village on the island of Ambon in the east of the Indonesian archipelago. The village consisted of about 30 or so wooden houses. brightly painted, well kept, surrounded by small gardens and abundant tropical foliage. On the narrow, yellow earth streets cloves were set out on plastic sheets to dry in the bright sunshine. The village had grown up around the sacred pool where the children splashed about, women did the washing, men sat around and smoked clove cigarettes and, upon request from the rare tourist would feed raw eggs to the sacred eels.
They would slice off the top of the egg and hold it just below the surface of the water. The eels, some of them almost 1.5 metres long, would emerge from the far end of the pool where a large and ancient tree cast deep black shadows on the water, slither up to the proffered egg and snatch it from the man's hand with useful looking teeth.

I was reminded of this scene not so long ago, while checking news on the website of the English-language Indonesian newspaper the Jakarta Post. There I learned that armed gunmen had raided the small village of Soya on the island of Ambon and had killed 13 villagers and destroyed the old wooden church dating from 1928. In 1989 I had visited that church the day after the sacred eels incident. I had been taken there by a schoolteacher I had met at the bus station in Ambon town who promptly asked his superiors for permission to take a few days off to show me around the island, tourists there being something of a novelty.
All the time he was proudly explaining how the Christians and the Muslims there lived happily together, helping each other build and preserve their places of worship.
Only a few years later Ambon was the scene of some ostensibly inter-religious fighting during which the town centre around the harbour was completely destroyed, and thousands killed. The reasons lie in the complicated historical relationship between the Ambonese and Indonesia itself. It's not for me to go into that here - nor could I claim the necessary expertise -but it seems to me that, as in so many conflicts, it's the ordinary people who just want to get on with each other and their lives who are forced into violent situations by political machinations.
I well remember the polished warm wood smell of the church in Soya, the peaceful little village and the open friendliness of the people.
The German writer W G Sebald, who lived for most of his adult life in Norfolk, England, once showed an interviewer a sepia photograph of a young Bavarian boy who would later return home mentally disturbed from the First World War and commented „That was before he knew. That’s what I find so frightful. The incapacity to know what’s coming around the corner.“ The photograph was a presence in Sebald’s last book, Austerlitz, published shortly before his death in a car crash. He didn’t know what was coming around the corner either.
None of us do.

And when I look at the photos I took in Ambon in 1989, I wonder about the fate of the people in them, like the woman on the right selling dried fish on a stick.

To see a gallery of more photos of Ambon click here.......