Photograph
James Young, Lionel Wise
2024

Alan Wise was always planning to write his memoirs but never quite did.

All we have is some notes like these ...

To Jim Young, August 2011

"Before anything happened, our world was grey. We took buses through a city still unknown to us to buy blues and jazz and never realised it was not built in black until they started cleaning the buildings.

"Really I preferred the Beatles and the Stones and the Kinks and Bob Dylan and Donovan, just like any other kid. But as you were my friend and we had to seem intellectual and anti - hippy we bought John Coltrane and Chet Baker and great Blues like Leadbelly that only now do I appreciate. I preferred the movies really, but music was the scene most available."

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"When i was 13, my nerves were bad and I began my 40 years on Valium. The origins of my illness were in World War 2, I see now.

"In my own home, three healthy boys were made ill by the memories which were then still fresh to my father.

"The world was not a place to relax in. To sit and swim or go fishing or any of those things. No, it was full of dangers and pitfalls and people that wished you ill - a tense and anxiety-filled world. His parents had been Jewish, but he kind of despised it I think because he felt they had been victims. Sometimes he would behave like a Nazi himself. But then he would cry and threaten suicide. I did not want to be him."

more follows later

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