Carl Halling Home Page

Introduction to Carl Halling Home Page 3

About Me

Carl Halling. Born West London 1955. Christian artist (actor, singer, guitarist, songwriter, writer).

Singer on "A Taste of Summer Wine" by James Hughes/Carl Halling, with the London Swingtette. Samples of currently available CD can be heard at: http://myspace.com/swingtette

Please read below for: 

1 Spawn of the Swinging Sixties

Introduction:

These two pieces set the scene for the entire work to follow, a kind of experiment in memoir writing with a spiritual core. Both deal with my childhood in London in the 1960s. The first was adapted from a Christian testimony dating from 2002, and published at the Blogster.com website on the 1st of February 2006, the second from an unfinished short story penned in the mid to late 1970s about a close friend from Bedford Park where I lived for some thirteen years between ca. 1957 and 1970. Once known as "Poverty Park" despite having been London's first Garden Suburb, Bedford Park is now a famous conservation area of the Southfields ward of Acton, west London. It was initially published at the Blogster.com website as "Wicked Cahoots" on the 15th of February 2006. Definitive versions of both works were created with further minor variations in July 2007, and then again in December.

Born on the Goldhawk Road

I was born in the autumn of 1955 close to the undistinguished source of west London's Goldhawk Road and my first home was in Bulmer Place near Notting Hill Gate. My brother was born two and a half years later, by which time my parents had bought their own house in Bedford Park in what was then the London Borough of Acton, and suburban west London was marked by a homespun simplicity back then that we can only dream of today. By '63, with my brother and I safe in South Kensington’s French Lycee, social change was in the air, though in truth it had been for some time, especially in Britain and the USA, at least since the rise of rock'n'roll, and youth culture, whose watershed years were '55 to '56, but for all that England in '63 was still apparently in black and white, and the first shaggy-haired beat groups fitted quite snugly into this innocent time of Norman Wisdom pictures, of the well-spoken presenters of the BBC Home Service, Light Service and World Service, of coppers, tanners and ten bob notes, tuck shops and tuppeny chews. I was an articulate child, cheerful and sociable in an idyllic world, although I went on to become a tearaway, both at school and at home, what you might call hyperactive today. Still, I managed to pass my common entrance exam, necessary for entrance into British public, which is to say private, schools, and so become Cadet RNR no. 173, at Pangbourne Nautical College in the September of 1968, officially a serving officer in the Royal Navy aged only 12 years old. In early 1970, we left Chiswick for good and took up residence even deeper in suburbia, where I remain to this day...a suburban dreamer if ever there was one...

Wicked cahoots

When he made
his first personal appearance
in the dirty alley
on someone else's rusty bike,
screaming along
in a cloud of dust
it rendered us all
speechless and motionless.
But I was amazed
that despite his grey-faced surliness,
he was very affable with us...
the bully with a naive
and sentimental heart.
He was so happy
to hear that I liked his dad
or that my mum liked him
and he was welcome
to come to tea
with us at five twenty five...
Our "adventures" were spectacular:
chasing after other bikesters,
screaming at the top
of our lungs
into blocks of flats
and then running
as our echoed waves of terror
blended with incoherent threats...
"I'll call the Police, I'll..."
Wicked cahoots.

Photos: 1950s

2 A Child's West London

Introduction

"From a Child's West London", the second and last of two pieces based on my childhood in the west London of the 1960s, is not so much a story, as fragments taken from spidery writings with which I filled four and a half pages of a school style notebook in what is likely to have been the year of 1977. However, before being published at Blogster.com on the 10th of March 2006, it was comprehensively edited, before being given a new title, and subjected to alterations in punctuation. Certain sentences were composed by linking two or more sentences from the original piece together. Mild grammatical corrections also took place, mild because I didn't want to alter the original work to the degree of making major ones. So, the first draft was carefully doctored, while retaining the spirit in which it was penned in '77. Finally, the name of the protagonist was changed from "Kris" to "Carl". In July 2007, I prepared a first "definitive" version of the piece which involved my making a few additional very minor alterations. Further corrections were made in December.
With regard to the content of the story, I see it as essentially moral in keeping with my Christian faith. The "Carl" character is a likable scalliwag, gaining with enviable ease the affection and trust of the older Wolf Cub boys as well as the Cub leaders, of Margaret Jankel and Mrs O'Brien, of Nevine and many other school friends. And yet, he makes a conscious choice to abuse the trust of others, including Robert Graham, and his Bedford Park friend/rival, also called Robert. By doing so, he creates a feud between his family and Robert's, where they had previously been close, and were thankfully to become so again. He aggressively asserts the superiority of certain Pop groups, and takes part in street fights which result in injury and suffering. Pretentious as it may seem, I like to view him as a symbol for the changing times in mid-sixties Britain, as the old post-war Albion with its sweet shops and bomb shelters, short trousers and ovalteenies yielded by degrees to a new, less innocent world with a Beat music soundtrack.
All the incidents depicted in the tale definitely took place, although certain mild inaccuracies that my '77 self may or may not have included have to be taken into account. What's more, a certain amount of exaggeration crept into my writing in the the very last section. For example, "hoodlum" is far too strong a word to use when referring to a few small boys causing mayhem in a quiet west London suburb. At least, I think it is...

Snapshot 1

I remember the 20th Chiswick Wolf Cub pack, how I loved those Wednesday evenings, the games, the pomp and seriousness of the camps, the different coloured scarves, sweaters and hair during the mass meetings, the solemnity of my enrolment, being helped up a tree by an older boy, Baloo, or Kim, or someone, to win my Athletics badge, winning my first star, my two year badge, and my swimming badge with its frog symbol, the kindness of the older boys.
One Saturday afternoon, after a football match during which I dirtied my boots by standing around as a sub in the mud, and my elbow by tripping over a loose shoelace, an older boy offered to take me home. We walked along streets, through subways crammed with rowdies, white or West Indian, in black gym shoes. "Shud up!" my friend would cheerfully yell, and they did.
"We go' a ge' yer 'oame, ain' we mite, ay?"
"Yes. Where exactly are you taking me?" I asked.
"The bus stop at Chiswick 'Oigh Stree' is the best plice, oi reck'n."
"Yes, but not on Chiswick High Street," I said, starting to sniff.
"You be oroight theah, me lil' mite."
I was not convinced. The uncertainty of my ever getting home caused me to start to bawl,
and I was still hollering as we mounted the bus. I remember the sudden turning of heads. It must have been quite astonishing, for a peaceful busload of passengers to have their everyday lives suddenly intruded upon by a group of distressed looking wolf cubs, one of whom, the smallest was howling red-faced with anguish for some undetermined reason. After some moments, my friend, his brow furrowed with regret, as if he had done me some terrible wrong, said:
"I'm gonna drop you off where your dad put you on."
Within seconds, the clouds dispersed, and my damp cheeks beamed. Then, I spied a street I recognised from the bus window, and got up, grinning with all my might:
"This'll do," I said.
"Wai', Carl," cried my friend, "are you shoa vis is 'oroigh'?"
"Yup!" I said, walking off the bus. I was still grinning as I spied my friend's anxious face in the glinting window of the bus as it moved down the street.

Snapshot 2

One Wednesday evening, when Top of the Pops was being broadcast instead of on Thursday, I was rather reluctant to go to Cubs, and was more than unusually uncooperative with my father as he tried to help me find my cap, which had disappeared.
Frustrated, he put on his coat and quietly opened the door. I stepped outside into the icy atmosphere wearing only a pair of underpants, and to my horror, he got into his black citroen and drove off. I darted down Esmond Road crying and shouting. My tearful howling was heard by Elisabeth, the 19 year old daughter of Mrs Jankel, the philanthropic Jewish lady whom my mother used to help with the care and entertainment of Thalidomide children. Helen Jankel expended so much energy on feeling for others that when my mother tried to get in touch with her in the mid 70s, she seemed too exhausted to be enthusiastic and quite understandably for Mrs O'Brien her cleaning lady and friend for the main part of her married life had recently been killed in a road accident. I remember that kind and beautiful Irish lady, her charm, happiness and sweetness, she was the salt of the earth. She threatened to "ca-rrown" (crown) me...when I went away to school...if I wrote her not...
Elisabeth picked me up and carried me back to my house. I immediately put on my uniform as soon as Margaret had gone home, left a note for my Pa, and went myself to Cubs. When Pa arrived to pick me up, the whole ridiculous story was told to Akela, Baloo and Kim, much to my shame.

Snapshot 3

The year was 1963, the year of the Beatles, of singing yeah, yeah in the car, of twisting in the playground, of "I'm a Beatlemaniac, are you?"
That year, I was very prejudiced against an American boy Robert Graham who later became my friend. I used to attack him for no reason at all, like a dog does, just to assert my superiority. One day, he gave me a rabbit punch in the stomach and I made such a fuss that my little girlfriend Nevine wanted to escort me to the safety of our teacher Mademoiselle Brachet, hugging me, and kissing me intermittently on my forehead, eyes, nose, cheeks. She forced me to see her:
"Carl didn't do a thing," said Nevine, "and Robert came up an gave him four rabbit punches in the stomach".
Robert Graham, pronounced in French like Gramme the unit of weight, and that's how I used to refer to this new boy, was not penalised, for Mademoiselle Brachet knew what a little demon I was, no matter how hurt and innocent I looked, tearful, with my tail between my legs.

Snapshot 4

By the end of '63, I was frequently involving myself in arguments with people who tried to say that some secondary Beat combo or another was destined to swamp the Beatles. No, I disagreed. Only one new group truly roused my interest, though not immediately for I was disappointed by a rough and sullen performance of "Not Fade Away" on Top of the Pops, having heard so much about the Rolling Stones. Public opinion, however, swayed me, and discussing Pop music at the end of '64 with some of the new breed of English roses with their mini-skirts, kinky boots and Marianne Faithfull tresses or Twiggy crops, the Rolling Stones were my new favourites. I loved the martyr Mick, bathed in light with surly, ever-defiant lips, surrounded by his frenzied slaves.

Snapshot 5

Bedford Park was a semi-Bohemian, artistic quarter of London on the outskirts of a rough district of the western suburbs, Acton. Therefore, my boyhood surroundings were half Boheme and half hoodlum. The hoodlum influence was stronger than the artistic, which could account for the frequent street feuds, stone and stick and dirt fights that took place, and the day I stole magazines out of my neighbours' letterboxes, and mutilated them, before putting them back, and the day I informed my best friend's mother, from one end of the street to the other that "Robert was a _______ _______". Those words caused a long and furious confrontation to take place between Robert's mother and mine on the doorstep of our house...
Frightful day, which I regret...even to this one...

Late 1950s

3 Gambolling Baby Boomers

Introduction

"Gambolling Baby Boomers", the first of a series of seventies-themed pieces, tells how I came to be conditioned by my environment in the early 1970s after leaving Pangbourne College, a traditional British public school of military kind situated near the little Thameside village of Pangbourne in Berkshire. I'd been a boarder there between about the 9th of September 1968 and the last day of the summer term, 1972. It was first published as "Genesis of a Gentleman" at Blogster.com on the 10th of March 2006. In July 2007, it was subject to further minor variations, which persisted until the April of the following year.

The Nautical College, Pangbourne

Pangbourne was founded in 1917 as Pangbourne Nautical College, originally preparing boys aged ca. 13 to 18 to be officers in the Merchant Navy, and then the Royal Navy.
I joined in September 1968 as Cadet Carl Halling RNR. I was only 12 years old, making me probably the youngest serving officer in the entire Royal Navy at the time. The college was still known by its original title of the Nautical College Pangbourne, but by 1969 this had been abbreviated to Pangbourne College. However, the boys retained their officer status and spent much of their time in full naval officers' uniform. What's more, naval discipline continued to be enforced, with Pangbourne providing the hardships both of a military college and a traditional English boarding school. In 1996, she became fully co-educational.
The Pangbourne I knew had strong links to the Church of England, and so was marked by regular if not daily classes in what was known as Divinity, morning parade ground prayers, evening prayers, and compulsory chapel on Sunday morning. If you missed any of these you would have been seriously punished, although not necessarily with the cane. I was however beaten on numerous occasions although with never more than four cuts, or swishes of the cane. I was heavily disciplined from my very first term in fact; but I'd like to go on record as saying that I'm indebted to Pangbourne for the values it instilled in me if only unconsciously. They were after all the same values that once made Britain strong and great; and yet, by the time I joined Pangbourne, they were under siege as never before by the so-called counterculture. While failing to fully understand the implications of the cultural revolution of the late 1960s, I passionately celebrated its consequences, and took to my heart many of its icons both artistic and political, Che Guevara being a special idol of mine for a good amount of time.

This Glam Rock Nation

In the summer of 1972, it was mutually decided between my poor dad and those directly responsible for me at Pangbourne that I leave after a year in the fifth form and four years in the college itself.
My parents, brother and I had moved to a largely working class suburb some dozen miles from the centre of London at the turn of the decade, which made me something of a fish out of water once I was finally freed from Pangbourne. After all, I was no longer either in west London where I grew up, nor at the boarding school that had been my whole world for four long years and where I'd formed some of the deepest friendships of my life.
1972 could be said to be the year in which the seventies really began as the excitement surrounding the alternative society and its happenings and be-ins and love-ins and free festivals and so on started to fade into recent history. As for me, I couldn't wait to get to grips with the dismal new decade even if for the first two years, I'd despised the rise of the new commercial chart Pop and its teenybop idols. I was of the school of Hard and Progressive Rock...Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Yes and so on. But I was changing. For better or worse, this was going to be my decade. In late '72, I saw former Bubblegum band the Sweet on a long-forgotten teenage programme called "Lift off with Ayesha", and with all the passion of a recent enemy I fell in love with their new tacky camp image, all eye-shadow and silver stack-heeled boots. Several months later a certain Rock chameleon appeared on the chat show Russell Harty Plus in January 1973 with his eyebrows shaved off and my devotion to the strange culture taking over the land making even former skinheads want to look like Charlie George or some other flash dressing hard man became total. So many popular songs of the era were like football chants set to a stomping Glam Rock beat. It was was the golden age of the long-haired boot boy and every street seemed to me to be pregnant with menace in this Glam Rock nation, as if the spirit of Weimar Berlin with its unholy mix of violence and decadence had been resurrected in stuffy old England. It was a terrible time to be young; but I of course loved it, lapped it up.

In late '72 I was launched by my dad on an intensive hothouse programme of self-improvement. I studied various martial arts at the Judokan in Hammersmith, west London. Among my fellow students were shaggy-haired hard cases who may have been influenced by the prevailing fashion for all things eastern, what with the cult of Bruce Lee and so on. Some of them had feather cuts. I also went to swimming classes at a local baths. I had a fierce crush on one of my fellow swimmers, she looked a bit like a Skin girl with her cute short haircut, but my heart wasn't in the swimming, and one of the teachers told me so, wondering why I was wasting my time even turning up. She had a point. I learned how to play basic Rock guitar from Gary Verth, a kindly soft-spoken man who taught Rock guitar from his little house near the Thames in suburban Surrey, and who looked so square with his short back and sides and baggy dad-style trousers; but he loved his Rock'n'Roll. He taught me the basis of the Rock solo, which involved going up and down the Blues scale in whatever key you chose. I was as lazy as they came, but I probably learned more from that man about the guitar than anyone, with the possible exception of a Pangbourne friend called Steve, whose songs I stole with their simple chord progressions...C, A minor, F, G and back again to C and so on. And then there was Deep Purple's "Black Night", whose simple bluesy riff I'd once played to a pal at Pangbourne, at which point the kid turned to whoever else was present and announced something: "Hey guys, we've got a natural here!". Also through home study and with the help oflocal private tutors I set about making up for the fact that I'd left school early at 16 with only two GCE (General Certificate of Education) exams to my name; at ordinary level, of course, which is why they were called "O" levels. Then in late '72 I joined the London Division of the Royal Naval Reserve as an Ordinary Seaman, attending classes once a week on HMS President on the Embankment. At some point soon after this, some of the older ratings, Able Seamen perhaps, or Killicks (Leading Seamen) made some remarks about my looks, implying that I was the new shipboard pretty boy or something. I think this came as a surprise to me, but I was flattered rather than offended, as if a seed of narcissism had somehow become implanted within me in late adolescence. The effect this had on my healthy development as a normal male human being must surely have been disastrous.

The Innocence of pre-Movida Spain

The dreamy, introspective aspect of my nature became increasingly marked in 1972-73, and I fantasised about fame and adulation as Rock or movie star as never before, and so throughout '73 built an image based on one of my greatest Glam Rock idols, spiking my hair like him, and then even peroxiding it at some point. Given this over-refinement, I didn't really fit in in my new home town at first, unlike my brother who was far more suited to the area with his strong London acccent and laddish ways, and he wasted little time in becoming part of a local youth scene. However, I came into my own in Spain, or rather Santiago de la Ribera on the Mar Menor near Murcia, where the family had been vacationing since about 1968. I think it was towards the end of my summer '73 holiday that I finally started to be noticed in a big way by the local youth, most from either Murcia or Madrid, and so la Ribera became vital to me in terms of my becoming a social being among members of both sexes. A group of us became very close and remained so for four summers running. Spain was such a sweet and friendly nation back then in the relatively innocent early seventies, and the youth of La Ribera as happy and carefree as I imagine southern Californians would have been in the pre-Beatles sixties. It was really a great time, and probably signalled the start for me of a lifelong love affair with the Spain and the Spanish people, indeed with Latin and continental Europe as a whole.
In the early 1970s, everything seemed to be mine for the knowing, for the tasting, for the taking. It was a time of constant, frenetic change and I greedily eyed the fruits of a revolution that had been all but bloodlessly waged on my behalf in the sixties. I was soon to feast on them...never once considering the welfare of those fated to follow in my wake, to come to maturity in a world in which baby-boomers like me had lately gambolled like so many senseless, sensuous fauns. Pity their poor souls.

Pangbourne, 1972. Photo: Peter Kingsford.

4 Innocence in Hamburg

Introduction

"Innocence in Hamburg", the second piece in a series of seventies-themed writings takes place in 1973 and 1974 in a variety of locations. Among these are London and its suburbs, the French city of Bordeaux, Murcia's Costa Calida, and the port of Hamburg, current capital of the German province of Schleswig-Holstein. It was first published (at Blogster) on the 26th of March 2006 as "A Dandy in the Land of Blue Denim 1". Allowing for further minor corrections, a final version was published at http://carlroberthalling.blog.co.uk in January 2008.

Toilers of the Thames

1973 was the year of my first voyage as an Ordinary Seaman with the RNR onboard the minesweeper HMS Thames. Late in the summer it set out for Bordeaux in Gironde in the south west of France. I was just seventeen years old.
During the trip I made my best-ever RNR friend in the shape of a fellow OD Colin who called me only a few years ago from his east London home to talk about old memories by which time he'd become a Chief Petty Officer. I also became quite friendly with one of the most unlikely pair of cronies I ever came across in the RNR or anywhere else. One half of the partnership was Jimmy, a tough-talking but essentially kind-hearted working class loner and ladies' man of about 23 who was rumoured to be a permanent year-long resident of HMS Thames. The other was a far older man, possibly in his mid thirties, but just as wildly convivial as Jim even though he boasted the super-posh accent and patrician manner of a City stockbroker or merchant banker.
Jimmy took me under his wing with a certain intimidating affection: "We'll make a ruffy tuffy sailor of you you yet!" he once told me, even though we both knew that that I'd never be anything other than the most pathetically effete sailor in the civilised world. There was one occasion below deck during some kind of conference when, after having been asked by an officer what I thought of minesweeping, I replied that it was a gas...another when the ship had been prepared for a major manoeuvre and everyone onboard had retreated to their respective allotted positions, when I was found wandering on deck in a daze only to casually announce that I was taking a stroll. Incidents like these made me an object of good-humoured banter on the part of Jimmy and others, which only rarely verged on the menacing.

The crew spent its final night together in a night club in the port of Portsmouth, although it might just as easily have been Plymouth. The main attraction was a limp-wristed drag queen who tried desperately to keep us entertained by singing cabaret style numbers in a comic falsetto, and telling bawdy jokes in a deep rich baritone, only to be savagely heckled. At one point she turned her attention to me, or rather I think it was me. I was trying to hide at the time, it being one of those rare occasions when I was wearing glasses and I hated the look of myself in the cheap horn-rimmed specs that were the only pair I had in those days. A very close friend of mine from Wales, Rob, once told me I had those kind of short-sighted James Dean, Marilyn Monroe eyes that appear to stare into a person's soul. This supposed gift notwithstanding, myopia always made me feel somehow defective, incomplete; so I refused to wear glasses except for when I really needed them until I was well into my thirties. "Ooh...you look pretty, what's your name?", the cross-dresser might have trilled. "Skin!" was what some of the sailors bellowed back, this being a nickname of mine, perhaps as in "a bit of skin" or something. It's all a bit of a blur to me now.
Before too long, the bearded sailor seated next to me had collapsed face down onto the table with a thunderous crash. Only a short time earlier, he'd performed the theme from "William Tell" on his facial cheeks while I held the mike for him. I'm not certain whether he ever appeared as a musician in public again, but he was certainly a star that night.

A Dandy in the Land of Blue Denim

Back onshore, I resumed my growing passion for louche and shady music, art and culture. Some time in 1974, however, I turned away from what I now saw as the old hat tackiness of Glam Rock, convinced that Modernist outrage had nowhere left to go. Instead, I turned my devotion to the more stylish glamour of previous eras and particularly the twenties and thirties. At some point in '74, I started using hair cream to slick my hair back in the style of F Scott Fitzgerald, sometimes parting it in the centre just as Fitz had done. I also built up a new retro wardrobe, which came to include a Gatsby style tab-collared shirt, often worn with black and white college-style tie; several cravats and neck scarves; a navy blue blazer from Meakers; a fair isle short-sleeved sweater; a pair of grey flannel trousers from Simpsons of Piccadilly, a pair of two-tone brown and white, or "correspondant", shoes; and a belted fawn raincoat straight out of a forties film noir.
As the seventies progressed I became more and more entranced by the continental Europe of recent times, and specifically its leading cities, as beacons of revolutionary art; and of style, luxury and dissolution. Certain key eras became very special to me, such as the 1890s, known as the Yellow Decade in England, and the Mauve in the US, Belle Epoque Paris, Jazz Age New York, and Weimar Republic Berlin.
There were those cutting edge Rock and Pop artists who appeared to share my European love affair, such as Sparks and Manhattan Transfer, and Britain's own favourite lounge lizard Bryan Ferry. Much of the latter's work with his band Roxy Music was haunted by the languid cafe and cabaret music of the continent's immediate past. What's more, some of Roxy's followers sported the kind of nostalgic apparel favoured by Ferry himself, but they were rare creatures in mid-seventies London. As for me, I wore my bizarre outdated costumes in arrogant defiance of the continuing ubiquity of long hair and flared jeans. In 1975, I attended a concert at west London's Queen's Park football stadium in striped boating blazer and white trousers, while surrounded by hirsute relics from the Hippie era. The headliners were my one-time favourites Yes, whose "Relayer" album I'd bought the year before; but my passion for Prog Rock was a thing of the past. I'd moved on since '71, that is, towards far greater love of darkness and loss of innocence.

Take to the Sky

It was while I was sitting Spanish "O" level in June 1974 in central London that I became deeply infatuated with a pretty slim Dutch girl called Maria. She didn't look Dutch, in fact, with her tanned complexion and long dark brown hair, she was Meditteranean in physical appearance, and even had the name to match. It was probably Maria who first approached me, because I was so unconfident around girls in those days that I would never have made the first move. Over the course of the next few days, I fell ever deeper in love, but I didn't have the courage to make my feelings known to her. This was so typical of me, to assume an attitude of diffident indifference when confronted by something or someone I truly desired. So, once we'd completed our final paper, I allowed her to walk away from me forever with a casual "I might see you around", or some other cliche of that kind.
For a week or thereabouts, I took the train into London and spent the days wandering around the city centre in the truly desperate hope of bumping into her. One time I could have sworn I saw her staring coolly back at me from an underground train, possibly at South Kensington or Notting Hill Gate, just as the doors were closing, but typically I was powerless to act, and simply stood there like a lovesick loon as the train drew away from the station. In time of course, my infatuation faded, but even to this day certain songs will recall for me those few weeks in the summer of '74 that I spent in hopeless pursuit of a woman I didn't even know. They include Sweet Soul standards, "I Just Don't Want to be Lonely" by The Main Ingredient, and "Natural High" by Bloodstone, with its pathetic lines: "Why do I keep my mind on you all the time, and I don't even know you, why do I feel this way, thinking about you every day, and I don't even know you..."

Later on in the summer I found myself once again in Santiago de La Ribera by the Mar Menor or little sea, this being a large coastal lake of warm saltwater off Murcia's Costa Calida in southeastern Spain, and the summer of '74 was one of the most blissfully happy summers I spent there. Every afternoon, we used to meet on the balnario or jetty facing our apartment on the Mar Menor which was more or less deserted after lunch, that's myself and my brother, and Spanish friends both male and female, to listen to music and talk and laugh and swim and generally enjoy being young and carefree in a decade of endless possibilities. To some youthful Spanish eyes back in '74-'76, I appeared as an almost impossibly exotic figure from what seemed to them to be the most radical and daring city in Europe, which of course London was. I played up to my racy image to the hilt, where in truth I was barely less sheltered and innocent than they were. All this was to change with Franco's passing, and the birth of the so-called Movida, which could be said to be the Spanish and specifically Madridian equivalent of London's Swinging Sixties revolution. During the Movida, Spain set about sophisticating itself to the extent that on my last vacation in La Ribera in the summer of '84, it was I who was in awe of the local youth rather than the other way around. They'd become so intimidatingly cool, dancing their strange jerky chicken wing dance to the latest New Pop hits from Britain. By then of course most of my old friends had vanished into their young adult lives, and my time as the dashing English prince of Santiago de la Ribera had long passed. I was yesterday's man, and I was sad about it, but I couldn't expect to be chased forever. Some people have to actually grow up.

An Innocent in Hamburg

I returned to London in late summer '74 with a deep tan and hair bleached bright yellow by the sun, and hanging long over my ears and down over my forehead. Within days I found myself on HMS President, moored then as today on the Embankment near Temple station. This entailed my passing through Waterloo mainline station, which wasn't tourist-friendly as it is today, with its cafes and baguette bars, but a dingy intimidating place complete with pub and old-style barber. There I was I was accosted by a hoary old Scotsman, a former sailor who kept going on about how good looking I was. He even told me that he loved me; but he was harmless...just a sweet lonely old guy who wanted someone to talk to for a few minutes, which I was happy to do and then move on. It was all very innocent. I even went so far as to agree to a meeting with him the same time the following week, not that I had any intention of keeping it.
Only days afterwards, HMS Thames was on its way to Hamburg, second largest city of Germany and its principle port. Once we'd arrived, one of the NCOs, a Chief Petty Officer I think advised me not to wander alone in the city. I duly fell in with a group of about three or four, and on our first night ashore we set off on a voyage into parts of the city such as the red light district St Pauli with its infamous Reeperbahn, the so-called "sinful mile" which is lined with restaurants, discos and dives, as well as strip clubs, sex shops, bordellos and so on. On St Pauli streets and in St Paul bars I saw things I'd never even suspected could exist. It was all in such stark contrast to the pleasant outer suburbs to which a coach trip was organised at some point during our run ashore. We ended up in a park where I had my picture taken on a bridge by a reporter for the Surrey Comet; then a group of breathless giggling schoolgirls asked me to be in some photos with them. I of course said yes, ever happy to oblige, and it was a bit of an ego boost for me, as if I needed one. On the way back to the ship, one of the sailors remarked that I'd been a hit with the Hamburg teenyboppers, while another snapped back that it was only because I was blond and blue-eyed, Teutonic-looking in other words. Whatever the truth, there was something deeply moving about these sweet suburban girls and their simple unaffected joy of life, especially in the light of what girls barely older than they were subjecting themselves to in the sad lost northern Babylon of only a matter of miles away.
 

5 An English Seaside Town

Introduction

This third story in a series of seventies-themed pieces was built in February-March 2006 from scribblings committed to a notebook in 1978-'79, and concerning events that took place in the summer of 1974. I adapted it word for word, although when it came to some passages, I selected crossed out words or series of words rather than those I'd chosen in the late 1970s. What's more, certain sentences were formed by fusing portions of the original sentences together. The structure of the story has been altered, and the punctuation changed and greatly improved on; and I edited out words, sentences, whole passages.
The principle character was called Kris, not Carl, in the first version. However, all the other characters have kept the names I originally chose for them then, which is not say that they were the names of the real people on which they were based. These have completely vacated my memory.
As far as I know everything depicted in "Seaside Town" actually occured; although, given that I was writing in '78 or '79 about things that took place some five years previously, the original conversations would of course been quite different to how they turned out on paper. What's more, some exaggeration may have crept into my writings, particularly concerning the quantities of alcohol consumed by my character, although I doubt it. I have no recollection whatsoever of the events of the last nineteen lines of the story, which leads me to believe that they were tacked on for dramatic effect in the late '70s.
The story as a whole takes place in "a certain English coastal town" which I'm pretty convinced was Lymington, a port on the Solent in the New Forest district of Hampshire. However, it was initially published as "An Old Pangbournian in Old Bosham" on March 3rd 2006, Bosham being a small village situated three miles west of Chichester, West Sussex, on an inlet of Chichester Harbour. Why I changed Lymington to Bosham I can't say for sure, but it may have been a genuine mistake on my part. What is certain is that "Seaside Town" was based on real events, rather than being a genuine fragment from a memoir.
Morally sensitive readers will discern intimations of eventual disaster in the borderline dipsomania of the protagonist Carl which given his tender age, is necessarily in its earliest stages. My story however is as much a little slice of history from a simpler age as anything more serious, and one which I hope will serve as an entertainment as well as a morality tale. It finishes on an upbeat note, at the beginning of yet another spell of pleasure-seeking for Carl, and yet as I recall I actually ended the night jumping into the filthy oily waters of the town harbour.
The definitive version was published at Blog.co.uk on the 6th of January 2008.

In an English Seaside Town

The remainder of 1974 was a bizarre and frantic segment of Carl's life. In July, his father made yet another effort to tame him, by sending him on a yachting course in a certain English coastal town. The owner of the yacht was an old Pangbournian, who also ran a sailing school. Carl stayed at a guest house owned by Mrs C-C, one of those wonderful elderly widows that inhabit our so English sailing towns all along the south coast, always charming but slightly aloof, immaculately spoken, calm, kind and considerate. There he met Jules, a Belgian boy of about twenty years, Mr Watson and his son Alan. None of these four were on the same course, but they nevertheless became very close. Alan liked to listen to the older boy's theories on music, fashion and life:
"Hey Carl, do you think if I put brilliantine in my hair, I'd look like Ferry. Now Ferry is totally smooth."
First day Carl discovered who was on his course: there was Colin, aged 28, who was cool, tall, dark and moustachio'd, wearing large and dark-framed specatcles, viewing Carl's whimsicality with considerable suspicion; but vaguely sociable, Reg a genial old boy of about sixty, Bill and Peg, a thoroughly agreeable married couple, and the Captain. That evening, Carl and Colin, a man who had struggled from alleged want to the positon of an urban executive, had dinner together. Mr Watson and Alan were dining in the same restaurant:
"Look at that boy," Colin said, nodding as discreetly as he could in Alan's direction, "such a smooth complexion".
Carl made them laugh, dressed in blazer, flannels and white shoes with hair elegantly brilliantined, stuffing pieces of bread into his pockets like an impoverished student. He also made the Captain laugh the next day:
"Take the helm, Carl," the skipper ordered, "steer 350."
"Mmm...this is nice," Carl cooed, "what a lovely day, I like this."
"Oooh, you thing," the Skipper joked, for which Carl booted him up the backside, which made the Skipper titter with delighted disbelief.
Next day, Carl lost his temper with Colin, who had goaded him for wrongly plotting a course. The Captain's pupils, after an initial briefing, were expected to discover how to navigate for themselves:
"Oh shut up," Carl bitched, "let's see you do better!"
"Ooh, you thing!" the Captain interjected, with even more glee than before.

That evening, Carl organised an informal get-together between the sailing and the yachting people. Present were Carl, Colin, Jules, Alan, and four or five other sailing men, including Gareth, the course whizz-kid.
"He comes alive in the evening this boy," said Colin, "summoned by an alcoholic deity."
"I'm not an alcoholic, Colin..." Carl replied.
"You drink three pints to to my one," Colin countered, "so you've certainly got potential."
"Nonsense, as I was saying, Gareth, how long have you had long hair?"
"What...long hair? What's that got to do with anything...is my hair long...I don't know anything about that."
"Do you realise twenty years ago with your hair as it is, although it's only just surpassing the ears, you would have been hounded, persecuted, beaten, for being a deviant, a freak, are you trying to ignore that?
"And you would have been accepted?"
"Oh yes," said Carl, "knife edge pressed flannels, blue blazer, white V neck pullover, open neck shirt and cravat, a bit sporty, I suppose, but utterly acceptable."
"How safe!"
"Safe? That's something I never am, safe."
"Well, quite frankly, I think you look ridiculous"
At this statement, Carl burst into laughter. His laughter was like no other, shrill, unearthly, it violently assaulted the quiet clientele of the soft-carpeted yacht club, a laugh that seemed to emit from the hideous depths themselves.
Gareth, fighting to contain gleeful hysteria and thus conserve respectability, had gone a redder shade of tomato, and Colin quivering with laughter hid his face in mock-shame:
"I disown him," he gibbered, "he's insane, insane."
Gradually the hilarity subsided:
"How do you get those bracelets on your wrist?" Colin queried.
"Easily," Carl boasted, exhibiting his arms, "I have very slender, graceful wrists."
"Let me see..." Colin whispered, and Carl gave him a bracelet. Soon that bracelet was being passed around the entire group, each member attempting, often with great difficulty to put the bracelet on their own wrist. Presently, the bracelet was back in Carl's possession, and with horror, he observed that it had been mutilated.
"My bracelet," he cried, "how could you all! I entrusted it to you and you've twisted and bent it."
The group stared at Carl, not knowing whether to look sincerely sorry or merely laugh at his distress, and settled for a nervous cross between the two. After a moment spent in this atmosphere, Jules dispersed it by requesting to see the injured bracelet.
"Let me see eet," he said, "I weel try to feex eet."
Carl handed him the bracelet. Everyone was hushed as the Belgian contemplated it, touched it, turned it round, rattled it, and finally, with considerable calm, placed it on the floor. He scratched his head, as if trying to settle on a decision, which resulted in his extracting his shoe. Carl, trying to preserve his cool, took a cigarette from his case, a cigarette which, once lit, fell from his slim white hand as a crack like a tree struck by lightning echoed throughout the thunderstruck clubhouse. Carl's eyes were suddenly attracted from the fallen fag to Jules, who was raising his right arm, at the end of which was one shoe, profuse with studs, and bringing it to the ground with all his strength at regular intervals. It took Carl some time before he knew what the reason was for all the secretive sniggering that went on around him: his bracelet was the victim of these vicious shoe attacks which were supposed to be rather brutally persuading it to revert to its original shape.
"Oh come on, it's not funny," he moaned, reaching out to take the bracelet which a grinning Jules held out for him. He stared woefully at the shattered remains but oddly enough, the bracelet had not disintegrated, in fact, had not altered from its original, slightly misshapen state.
"Eet ees all right, Carle," Jules suddenly chuckled, "I was eeting ze floor wiz my shoe, not your brezlet."
Carl looked at Jules, looked at his bracelet, looked at the other lads, then his eyes started to sparkle, his throat to gurgle, and then it all escaped:
"Hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi..."
"I'm not with him!"
"We'll get thrown out!"
"He's insane...in-sane!"
As the stunned salts recovered from Carl's falsetto assault of high-pitched shrieks, he told them:
"Come on, drink up, lads, let's go where the action is, let's go and find a party or something!"
"No, it's not worth it," said Gareth, "we're having a good time here. You're a real laugh Carl, just as long as you don't go too far. We might as well stay"
"Not me. I'm getting outa here. Need a change of atmosphere. Who's coming?"
"Yeah...might as well." Colin volunteered
"Me too..." the boy from Belgium followed suit.

As the ink-black of night seeped through the crystal-like clarity of day and dyed it a dark colour, another day died away...
"Lonely, isn't it?" Carl suggested.
The others agreed. They headed along the main road. Carl did his manic laugh to each car that roared by often standing right in its path of travel.
"That Belgian girl in your group is nice, Jules isn't she?"
"Oh yes," said Jules, "eef only 'er farzer weren't wiz 'er all ze time."
"Hey, who's going for a walk 'round Bosham town?"
Colin and Jules volunteered, and the trio turned a corner.
The girls were blonde, standing in a sea of darkness. Female company was exactly what Carl and Jules needed.The Dutch courage of numbers gave vent to a number of groundless verbal coquettries, mainly coming from Carl. The two girls followed this trail of littered pleasantries to the water's edge and then persevered onto a pier. Carl followed them, an unlit cigarette in his left hand.
"Can I have a light, please?" he said, looking intently at one then the other of the two young ladies; one was slim and petite, the other was tall and thin, wearing shoulder-length blonde hair. "Well, shall I stay here or go and join my friends?"
"Stay here," mumbled the smaller of the two sweet Cockney sparrows almost inaudibly.
"Pardon?" said Carl and both girls answered by smiling coyly. There was a minute's pause.
"Well, I'll see ya then," Carl finally said.
"Yeah..."
As the trio moved down the street, the two girls followed.
"Why don't you turn around?" Colin suddenly said.
"Why?" said Carl.
"They like you"
"Really?"
"Course they do. If you can't see that, you're more short-sighted than I thought you were."
At this, Carl turned around.
"There's a predatory look in your eyes, girls," he said.
"Yer wha'?"
"Oh, not to worry. Wha's yer names?"
"My name's Julie," said the waiflike one, "and this is Sue...what's yours, baby?"
"Why do you call me baby?"
"'Cos you look like one," they both answered.
"I happen to be all of eighteen years old!" Carl said with mock indignance.
"Are you eighteen?" Sue asked.
"Tha's right, why, don' I look it?"
"We fought you was abaht twen'y..."
"Really? Well I'm eighteen and my name's Carl"
"Wha's your name?" Sue asked Jules.
"My nem is Jules..."
"Where are you from?" Sue asked Carl.
"London. Why?"
"You sahnd Ameri'an or somefing."
"Well, I am half-Canadian."
"Oh, that would explain it," Julie resolved.
"Why," Carl went on, "where do you girls come from?"
"We come from London as well, south."
"What are you doing down 'ere?"
"We're spendin' a few days on 'er dad's boat," Sue said, pointing at Julie.
"Has your dad got a boat?" Carl said, with vague suprise.
"A yacht! Not just any old boat. Don' come from any old family, I don'."
"She's a cute one, she is..." said Carl.
The three males once again continued on their path and the two females once again followed, this time, more clamorously, in fact took to kicking a can at them to make their point.
"I weesh Colin were not 'ere," Jules whispered into Carl's ear.
"Why?"
"Colin's presence is disconcerting them."
As soon as Jules had finished talking, the two girls turned a corner:
"See ya, then!" they shouted.
"Bye, girls!"
"Bye, Carl darling!"
"I wonder where zey went?" said Jules
"I shouldn't worry about it, you've got your Belgian girl"
"'Ave I?"

Came the second to last day and a trip for both the yacht and the dinghy party to the Isle of Wight. Carl was determined to get to know some of the girls on the course a little better. He asked Alan what he thought about some of the female monitors:
"How about Jane, for example?"
"She's too old for me. Why she was ten years in the WRNS."
"She's always nice to me."
"Sally's a pretty girl."
Yes, Carl liked Sally and determined to talk to her on this little excursion. Lunch was in a Yarmouth public house where slender men in double-breasted reefer jackets, flannels and sailing shoes would go between sails. Some wore white trousers, some wore R.A.F moustaches and some even wore bow ties; their ladies dressed in slacks, large navy-blue pull-overs and silk scarves. In the evening, they would all be in full evening wear.
Back in port again, cutting across a nearby lawn, he met the natural and rosy-cheeked Sally:
"Hello." She said with a smile that brought beauty to a face which was free of glamourising paint.
"Hello," Carl answered, where are you going?"
"Back to my room."
"Oh...hey, apparently there's a get-together tonight, you know, a few drinks, a bit of dancing, a lot of laughs, are you going?"
"I don't know, I..."
"Oh, go on. I'm going..."
Sally looked at Carl, dressed in sweater and brown cords and sneakers, his yellow-brown hair ruffled, and thought: what a sweet chap.
"Well...okay," she said, "I suppose I'll go...uh...this is where I turn off."
"Oh. Well..."
"See you tonight then."
"Yes, bye...hey wait! Do you know my name?"
"Yes, of course I do, Carl, bye!"
"Bye, Sally!"

Back at the guest house, the clock struck five and Carl was all-a-spruce, taking tea with Mrs C-C, who would have been deeply outraged if anyone suggested that Carl was anything but a kind, courteous and thoroughly likable young man, who had but one fault, forgetfulness. She was supposed to charge for each packed lunch forgotten, but never did in Carl's case, even if he was the only one who ever forgot his lunch. It must be said, however, that it was difficult not to be thoroughly likable in the presence of this distinguished, well-preserved and attractive middle-aged woman.
Carl and Jules and Colin set out together for the dance. On the way, they stopped in a pub.
"Half of bitter!" Colin ordered.
"Half a shandy!" Jules ordered.
"Double scotch!" Carl ordered and then ten minutes later, "double scotch!"
"Nothing for me!" Said Colin.
"'Alf o' shandy!" Jules ordered.
"Pint of bitter!" Carl ordered ten minutes later.
"Come on Carl, let's go." Colin said.
"We mus' go," Jules said.
"Drink up!" Colin ordered. "We don't want you in a disordered state before the dance, do we?"
Carl swallowed his pint and the three departed. Arriving at the lieu reserved for the evening's festivities, they sat down at a communal table. Carl's blue spotted eyeballs slid from side to side in an effort to register Sally's exact position. They found her, sitting next to a slim, smart but casually dressed young man with light blonde collar length hair and beard. He got up and approached the pair.
"Hello, Sally," he said, with a slightly reproachful look in his eyes.
"Hello," she said, slightly taken aback, especially as he was no longer the sweet, tousle headed gamin of that afternoon but a world-weary and rakish looking youth.
"Do you want a drink?" he asked.
"Er, no thanks," she said, "but I will have one later on."
"Okay then," the disappointed youth said, and he turned around and made his way to the bar.
"Double scotch!" He ordered, and then ten minutes later, "double scotch!"
Sally appeared to be less and less able to back away from her admirer's nose, leading the way below two amorously lit little eyes and above two fatuously cooing lips. Carl took a large slug of the weighty liquid that lay in his glass thereby emptying it. Then, he decided to step in and putting the glass down made straight for the couple.
"Oh hello, Carl," Sally said, suddenly looking up with a grateful smile whose sun-like radiance quickly darkened as soon as the youth's apparent drunkenness dawned on her.
Tapped on the shoulder and led away by Gareth, he was taken, across the room and seated next to Captain Aubyn-H at a long table populated entirely by the latter's set.
"Hello, Carl," the Captain said, "you look a bit excited...fancy a drink?"
"Yes. Pint of bitter, please."
"Pint of water? Right."
Mainly for the benefit of Gareth, who was sitting opposite him, Carl filled the room with his manic laugh, which was greeted by looks of intimidated derision.
"No, Carl," said Gareth, "you're just not funny this evening."
"Not funny? If I ain't even funny, then what am I?"
Carl got up, rather slowly, and walked, just as slowly and wordlessly to the door, opened it, then stepped into the warm summer's night...where there were no dreams of romance just around the corner of one lonely seatown street. Tonight everyone had abandoned him. Tonight there was nothing.
"Carl!" A boyish voice was heard. "Carl, it's me."
Carl's sad eyes looked behind him to be faced by a soul-cheering sight. He suddenly felt warm all over.
"Alan, it's you."
"Where ya going, Carl?"
"Alan, it's not where am I going, it's where are we going."
"Sorry."
"Listen, brother, you and me is gonna find a party even if it takes all night!"
"Well, I...I...I better ask my old man first. I think he's expecting me back at around eleven."
"Tha's fine, jus' fine. Le's go'n find daddy!"

6 The Sweetness of Wrens

Introduction

An early draft of "The Sweetness of Wrens" was published as "A Dandy in the Land of Blue Denim 2" at Blogster.com on the 21st of April 2006, since which time it's undergone much modification, a final version being published in April 2008.

The Superstar Spirit

In 1975 aged nineteen I became a student at the technical college, Brooklands which lay then as now on the fringes of Weybridge, an affluent outer suburb of south west London. In semi-pastoral Brooklands as in my beloved Santiago de la Ribera, I learned to be a social being after years of semi-seclusion, first at Pangbourne and then in deepest suburbia as a home student. The Brooklands Disco was a special sphere of play for me and they were  regular, perhaps even weekly events. On one occasion early on in Disco night I got up in front of what seemed like the whole college and delivered a solo dance performance to Bebop Deluxe's fiery decadent "Fair Exchange" possibly with white silk scarf flailing in the air to frenzied cheers and applause. On another, a triad of thugs who I suspect may have gatecrashed the Disco only to see in me the worst possible example of the feckless wastrel student strutting and posturing in unmanly white took me aside once the music had stopped clearly intent on some form of ultra-violence; but I stood my ground, insisting that despite what they may have thought I was just as straight as they were. Apparently convinced of this, after a few threatening words they promtly disappeared into the crowd. I was becoming as addicted to attention as if it were an actual drug, and it may be may that the only thing that saved me in the long run from completely destroying myself was the fact that despite my deepest wishes, I never became an actual superstar. But despite constant displays of flamboyant self-confidence, those who tried to get to know to know me on an intimate level found themselves confronted with a desperately diffident and inhibited individual. I remained a shy suburban boy at heart

1975 again...and my music, swimming and Martial Arts sessions were no more, but the private classes continued mainly with Michael, a quiet slim young man with darkish curly hair who lived alone but for a family of black cats in longtime Rock star haven Richmond-on-Thames. A musician as well as an academic, he went on to play drums for a fairly successful Contemporary Folk outfit. Michael exerted a strong influence on me in terms of my growing love of European literature and Modernist culture. He had a special feel for French Symbolist poetry, but it was the less known literature of Spain that we studied together, from the anonymous picaresque novel "Lazarillo de Tormes" (1554) onwards, and embracing Quevedo, Galdos, A. Machado, Lorca, and others. He was also an early encourager of my writing, a lifelong passion that was ultimately to degenerate into a clear case of cacoethes scribendi, or the irresistible compulsion to write creatively. In consequence, I was not able to finish a single cohesive piece of writing until well into the eighties, when I managed to complete a short story and a novel. Both have since been destroyed but for a few stray fragments.

All I ask is a Tall Ship

I made no less than three sea voyages in 1975, two as a civilian and one with the RNR, as well as spending a week with them docked at the Pool of London. The first of these was Destination Amsterdam via Edinburgh and northern France on the three-masted topsail schooner TS Sir Winston Churchill of the Sail Training Association, now known as the Tall Ships Trust. Based in Portsmouth and Liverpool, the TST was founded in 1956 for the character development of young people aged 16 to 25 through the crewing of traditional tall ships, originally Churchill and the SS Malcolm Miller. Among my shipmates were, apart from my 17 year old brother, press-ganged like myself by a dad determined that we wouldn't become spoiled rotten by an increasingly degenerate Western lifestyle, several young men from Scotland and the north, some recent recruits to the RN, and a handful of older "Mates" who'd been given authority over the rank and file of we deck hands. In overall authority was the elegant, distinguished Ship's Captain, who also happened to be an alumnus of my own alma mater, Pangbourne. It was an all-male crew, and I was quite well-liked, if only at first before my popularity cooled. I kept a few buddies though. One guy in particular stayed a good friend after we'd tried to impress a couple of girls together during a brief stay in France; St Malo, I think it was. He was a little baby-faced southerner with long dark hair worn shoulder length like the young Jack Wilde. I'd boldly put my arm around the one I fancied, Martine, and she'd got upset. Then, wandering around a little later in a mournful daze and desperate for Martine's address, 'Jack' gave it to me after she'd scrawled it on a piece of paper either for him or one of the other lads. I was drunk with relief for a while, just walking on air, because there was the danger of me coming down with a serious case of lovesickness had she become lost to me forever. I got on OK with a few of the others, and some were merely indifferent, but 'Jack' was Churchill's true prince.
Serving on the Churchill was hardly a luxury cruise. There were storms which saw seamen sprawled all over the deck being violently sick attached to the ship only by safety belts. On more than one occasion, we were turfed out of our hammocks in the middle of the night to help trim the sails...something I never too part in, which can hardly have helped my reputation. I did climb the rigging once though, and that was just before we came into the port of Amsterdam, with dozens of us manning the yard arms, again attached only by safety belts. The Dutch metropolis was marked by the kind of open sexual license I'd witnessed only the year before in Hamburg, although without the same sinister vibrancy. I can remember a kind of perfunctory weariness about the decadence of Amsterdam. Today as then I'm sure the sad De Wallen red-light district is filled to the brim with hundreds of little illuminated one-room apartments, each with a single woman sitting in clear view of onlookers playing her lonely trade. As for Edinburgh, just before setting foot in the city for the first time, one of the lads, dressed to the nines himself in the trendiest seventies gear, all flared slacks and stack-heeled shoes no doubt, warned me not to go strutting about Edinburgh town centre in a flashy boating blazer. I completely ignored his advice of course, so, waltzing some time later into an inner city pub in broad daylight wearing said blazer and blue jeans tucked into long white socks, a grinning hard man with long reddish curly hair asked me if I was from Oxford. Perhaps he was aware of the Oxonian reputation for producing flaming aesthetes, but I doubt it. I think he just took one look at my jacket and thought: "Who's thus flash ponce askin' tae ge' hus heed kecked in?", or worse. It may have been touch and go for a while as to whether he was going to inflict some serious damage on my angelic English face, but in the end he left me be. He may even have liked me. The unlikeliest people did in those days.

The Tears of a Woman

Within a few short weeks of our returning to London by train from Edinburgh, my brother and I were setting sail again, this time towards the Baltic coast of Denmark via Germany's famous Kiel Canal as part of what is known as the Ocean Youth Club. While we were once more supervised by "Mates" under the command of a Ship's Captain, the OYC was more like a cruise than a trial by water as in the case of the STA, utilising modern yachts rather than traditional tall ships. We wasted little time in recruiting Simon, a nice young guy from Wotton-under-the Edge in Gloucerstershire we'd actually first met on holiday in Calpe in Spain some decade previously, as our closest friend and crony. Soon after setting foot on Danish soil we got talking to two girls who, as might be expected, had natural light golden blonde hair. Our efforts at romance were wholly innoxious, despite the reputation Scandinavia had for progressive sexual attitudes in the '60s and '70s. Later, the Captain, a lovable bearded larger than life true character who had a weakness for the music of John Kongos good-naturedly reproved us for keeping our dates to ourselves. He was one of those older guys who took to me, sensing the warm heart beneath the cool foppish exterior, but I think he may have misunderstood the situation, which had something of the innocence of the fifties about it. A rather less than sweet and innocent incident took place towards the end of the trip, which saw me in pursuit of a pretty German girl, Bettina. I was crazy for her, and she clearly liked me too, and yet I'd senselessly dumped her for the sake of a night of drunken idiocy with my brother and Simon, perhaps expecting her to run after me or something. Suddenly, overtaken by sickly pangs of remorse, I set out to find her, and at some point during my search, while walking along some kind of wooden pontoon I lost my footing and fell fully clothed into the waters of what must have been Kiel Canal. I wrote to Bettina, but she never wrote back, and I can't say I blame her. To this day I can't understand what possessed me to ignore her so callously, just in order to tie one on with the boys which I could have done any night of the week. Self-sabotage was fast becoming a speciality of mine.

It was later in the year I think that I took my friend Brenda, one of the London Division Wrens but originally from the north of England, to a dinner dance at London's Walford Hilton Hotel. At some point we were joined there by a couple of Brenda's close friends, a fair, bearded man in a suit, and his dark, extrovert wife. The husband was one of those deeply gentle men I came across from time to time in the 1970s. They weren't all bearded; but I can think of some who were, such as the madcap ship's captain described above. What united them was that they behaved with special protectiveness and affection towards me, and I've never forgotten them for it.
Early in the evening, Brenda became incensed when a group of older seamen started teasing me from their table, which didn't bother me at all because I knew these guys, and they meant no harm. Military life after all, is fuelled by this kind of humour. But Brenda insisted that their attitude stemmed from the fact that I was "better than what they are", as she put it, possibly in imitation of their London accents. She'd been taken in by my appearance, which made me more dangerous by far than they, not just to others, but to myself. With them, what you saw is what you got, and if it wasn't always pretty, then at least it was honest. I didn't see much of Brenda after that night, in fact on only one occasion I can clearly remember, and she seemed a little sad and distant. I had long sideburns at the time and I can remember her expressing some distaste for my Teddy Boy image as she saw it, perhaps sensing a certain new coarseness, Teds being the British equivalent of 1950s juvenile delinquents. How horrified she would have been to see me two years from then as a full-blown Punk with cropped hair and a safety pin through my ear.

It was only a matter of weeks after returning from the OYC trip to the Baltic that I sailed with the RNR to La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast of France,and then shortly after that I was with the RNR again, this time in the Pool of London, subject of a famous British crime film directed by Basil Dearden in 1951 and referring to that stretch of the Thames lying between London Bridge and Rotherhithe. In order to reach my ship, I had to board some kind of launch with a group of other seamen, one of whom, a strikingly good-looking blond seaman of about 30 I knew only by sight, had taken unofficial charge. Once we were all safely aboard, it was the turn of our self-appointed leader to join us, but as he stepped off the launch, he somehow lost his footing and slipped into the Thames beneath him. Within a matter of minutes his heavy clothing and boots, helped by a vicious current, had dragged him beneath the river's surface and he was lost. Soon after returning to London, I told my mother what happened, and as she wept the tears of one who instinctively knew what those who loved this poor man must have been feeling at the time, the true appalling tragedy of the incident hit home and I ran into the bathroom and sobbed my heart out myself. Thinking back on it, a line from that beautiful song "How Men Are" by Scottish singer-songwriter Roddy Frame comes to mind: "Why should it take the tears of a woman to see how men are?"

A Gosport Discomaniac

Still in '75 I attempted to pass what is known as the AIB or Admiralty Interview Board with a view to qualifying as a Supply and Secretariat officer in the Royal Navy. This involved my taking the train down to HMS Sultan, the Royal Navy's specialist training centre in Gosport, Hampshire, where I spent three days attending various examinations and interviews intended to assess my potential as a future naval officer.
On one occasion early on in the long weekend just before one assignment or another, I was primping in the mirror putting the final touches to my toilette when one of the guys I was sharing a dormitory reminded me that I was at a naval base not a fashion parade. Something like that anyway. Whatever it was he said, he wasn't going to be coming along with me that night to the disco, or any night for that matter. He could stew back at Sultan for all I cared. Two guys eventually did agree to accompany me on one of the nights we spent at Sultan, but they didn't really seem all that keen. As things turned out I was left alone at a Gosport disco dancing with a pretty young woman with shortish blond curly hair and the unusual name of Shiralee (Indigenous Australian for "burden" or "duty"). A little later I accompanied her along a busy main leading back to Sultan, with several cars sounding their horns as I kissed her good night, only to discover that Sultan's main entrance had been locked and was now being manned by an armed guard.
If the young man nervously trying to reach someone in authority within the training centre on a walkie talkie was wondering exactly what kind of person returns to base dressed to the nines after a night's disco dancing when he was supposed to be in the midst of three days of gruelling tests and interviews that were vital to his future career, then he gave no indication of it. He did however eventually make contact with someone in authority within the base, and I can remember passing through an officer's mess soon afterwards and briefly exchanging pleasantries with its airily affable occupants. Being English gentlemen of the old school, they kept their actual opinions of me to themselves. It may just be me, but I can't help thinking that had I returned to Sultan that night before being locked out, I might have been in with a better chance of passing the AIB, that is, as opposed to failing it, which I perhaps rather predictably did. Ay, every inch the superstar.
     

 

7 My Future Positively Glittered

Introduction

"My Future Positively Glittered" consists of two previously published pieces in slightly modified form, these being "My Future Postively Glittered", now divided into two sections ("Global Village Soul Boys" and "Hardly a Wunderkind"), and "Summer's End" (now "Summer of Fittleton"), whose first drafts were published at Blogster.com on, respectively, May 26 and May 29, 2006. In September of the same year, a further piece, "An Evanescent Friendship", which had been first published at Blogster on the 10th of June 2006, was added. Final corrections were made in January 2008.

Summer of Fittleton

Throughout '76 I gradually sidelined the previous year's olde worlde elegance in favour of a far more casual look inspired by the decade of Brando, Presley and Dean. Occasionally I'd relapse, but for the most part I affected the classic uniform of red windcheater, white tee-shirt and straight-leg jeans as worn by Dean in "Rebel Without a Cause". His death had come a week to the day before I came into this world in late 1955, seen by many as Year Zero of the Rock'n'Roll era. I can remember one time in particular that I dusted down the old dressy image. It was in the dying days of the famed long hot summer of '76, and I wore top hat and tails and my fingernails tinted bright red like a ghost from old Berlin to a party hosted by a friend from Brooklands. It was mid-September, and I know this to be an absolute fact because I was supposed to have been at sea at the time, on the minesweeper HMS Fittleton. I think it was only a couple of days afterwards that Fittleton capsized and sank to the bottom of the North Sea following a tragic accident involving another larger ship, the frigate HMS Mermaid. It resulted in the loss of twelve men most of whom I knew personally, given that only weeks earlier I'd spent a few days on Fittleton with more or less exactly the same crew.
HMS Fittleton had been accepted into the RN in January 1955, although she wasn't actually named Fittleton (after the Wiltshire village) until almost exactly 21 years later. She set sail from Shoreham in Sussex on the 11th of September 1976 with the intention of reaching the port of Hamburg on the 21st of that month for a three day Official Visit, but never arrived. On the 20th she took part in the NATO exercise "Teamwork" 80 miles off the Dutch coast in the North Sea, after which she was ordered to undergo a Replenishment at Sea with the 2500 ton frigate HMS Mermaid, and it was during this exercise that the bow waves of the frigate inter-reacted with those of the sweeper to cause the two to collide.
For some reason I'd earlier decided to opt out of the trip by pleading sickness. It was a decision that came to haunt me...despite the fact that had I taken part in the RAS manoeuvre I'd almost certainly have been assigned what was known as Tiller Flat duty, as had been the case on many previous occasions during exercises of this kind. This would have put me below deck, making escape difficult although not impossible. In other words, I may or may not have survived the accident. Of the twelve who didn't survive I knew three quite well, and they were all men of remarkable generosity of spirit and sweetness of disposition, what I'd call natural gentlemen, and it broke my heart to think of what happened to them. I so wanted to comfort my shipmates for their loss, to bond with them and be part of what they were going through. I wanted to have survived like them. I went over it all again and again in my mind, until I drove myself almost insane with regret and grief. Once more I'd taken the easy way out, but this time it wouldn't be so easy for me to forget or explain away.

Global Village Soul Boys

The totemic year of 1977 was a far darker one than those coming before it. It was after all marked by the Punk uprising, a musical and cultural movement which could be said to have fatally disabled Rock's uneven progress as an art form with its savage DIY ethic, which, fused with an extreme and often horrifying sartorial eccentricity produced something utterly unique for the time. From its London axis, and yet with roots in the US, it spread like a raging plague throghout the year even infecting the most genteel suburbs. At first I remained unaffected, although I'd long incorporated elements of the Punk sartorial revolution into my own image, such as short hair, small-collared shirts and straight-leg trousers, but this indifference had entirely evaporated by the end of the year.
Dressed in an anti-hippie style of my own devising, I started attending a long series of parties in various parts of trendy west London throughout '77 as one after the other of my old Pangbourne pals hit 21. Of all of them I was perhaps closest with Craig, by then a budding oil tycoon, but they were all very dear to me, and still are. After all, we went through alot together. Craig shared my passion for the London party life and clubs filled to the brim with the fashionable and the beautiful. One of his closest friends was a fashion designer from the north of England who forged cutting edge images for some of the most powerful trendsetters in Rock music. Soon after the start of the year, Craig had ditched his tired old velvet jacket and flares combo in favour of supercool drainpipe jeans and winklepickers. Within a short time I too was sporting winklepickers, in fact, a pair of cream-coloured lace-ups which became my pride and joy. I went on to supplement these with black slip-on shoes with large gold sidebuckles, imitation crocodile skin shoes with squared off toes, and a pair of black Chelsea boots with cuban heels, all excruciatingly pointed. By the spring of '78 I think I'd junked the lot as a means of sparing my feet which had already started to be disfigured by this evil footwear, or so I imagined.

For a man such as I haunted by a sense of inadequacy born of the obscure suburban roots I loathed, the trendy London look was interchangeable with Punk. Certainly like Punk it was adopted in defiance of the still ubiquitous Hippie, but it was married to a love of Soul rather than primal Garage Rock. It was common among the so-called Soul Boys, although I was not to discover this until later in the year when I started hanging out at Gravesend's Woodville Hall while at Merchant Navy college in nearby Greenhithe. Through one of the guys at college I found out about the Global Village night club under the Arches near Charing Cross. As well as a smattering of Punks and Punkettes, the Global was something of a magnet in '77 for working class kids who favoured the Soul Boy look, and who came from as far afield as Dartford and Kingston. It consisted of such elements as the wedge haircut, often streaked with a variety of tints including red and green, brightly coloured peg-top trousers or straight leg jeans, and winklepickers or beach sandals. The Soul Boy wedge was allegedly also favoured by certain followers of Liverpool Football Club who'd discovered a taste in '77 or thereabouts for European casual sports clothing while travelling on the continent for away matches. So, the Casual subculture was born, together with a passion for designer sportswear on the part of the working class youth of Great Britain and beyond which exists to this day. It is visible in every high street and shopping centre across the land.
For the greater part of '77, it was the Soul Boy look I aspired to rather than Punk. However, Punk began to seduce me from about January onwards, once I'd realised just how fantastical its sartorial vagaries actually were, and by the end of the year I was a devotee, remaining so until well into '79, when I defected to Mod Revivalism. But that's another story.

My Future Positively Glittered

By the summer I was working as a sailing instructor in Palamos on Spain's Costa Brava, while living alone on a caravan site. After a few months I lost my job, but stayed on in Palamos for several months, idling by day, while engaging by night in a constant almost Sisyphian round of alcohol-fuelled festivities in the city's bars and discos. It was as if I was driven by an unquenchable thirst for whatever lay just beyond my reach, a thirst possibly related to the desperate longing for fame as actor, writer, or Rock idol, that began to characterise my life from about the mid-70s onwards.
In '77 I was still ill-equipped for my ambition, given that few if any actors become truly succesful on the strength of their looks alone, which is surely why there are so many more truly beautiful male models than actors. I certainly had the looks, but little else. I'd not yet appeared in a single play, except for a handful at Pangbourne which had provoked some praise, and not a little hilarity. My roles there consisted of two elderly women, one of whom had to remain completely mute for the few minutes she was required onstage. This was in Max Frisch's black comedy "The Fire Raisers". The other was as a maid in a one-act play by the so-called Chelsea Shakespeare George Bernard Shaw called "Passion, Poison and Petrifaction". I also played a society beauty with short hair like Mia Farrow conducting some kind of illicit relationship with one of my best friends, Simon Miles, who went on to found his own cabaret club in the nineties called the Cupboard. My only male role was as an effeminate psychopath called Alec, in "The Rats", a little known Agatha Christie one-acter. In short, I was hardly a National Youth Theatre wonder kid. I'd written a few songs, but my guitar playing was still lamentably weak. My voice was good though, and incredibly versatile. In general though there was little proof up to this point in my existence of any real ability of any kind on my part. My future positively glittered before me.

Incident in Ostend

My final voyage with the RNR, destination Ostend in Belgium, came towards the end of the summer. My best RNR pal Colin was sadly not onboard, but other friends were, such as Adam, a tall red-headed man of about 26 a little in appearance like the charismatic British actor Edward Fox, with a trace perhaps of Damian Lewis. That's how I remember him anyway. His early life had been marked by one tragedy after the other, and his warm and courtly manners masked a troubled inner life which he kept almost entirely to himself, together with the fearlessness of one who had little to lose. I remember a time when for some reason a drunken sailor started threatening me in a bar, and Adam placed his slim yet powerful body between me and my would-be attacker saving me from what might have been a vicious beating.
I can imagine that back in '77 there must have been those who wondered how two such refined and mannerly men such as Adam and myself were apparently content to serve as humble naval ratings. I'm thinking in particular of some of the young guys of a certain RNR Division liaising with us to and from the port of Ostend in Flanders, Belgium. There was one incident when some of these hard young seafarers were grouping in an Ostend street intent on fighting some locals who'd offended them in some way. Adam and I stood back from it all making it clear we had no intention of joining in, and one of their number, a waiflike young sailor of about 16 or 17, previously something of a pal of ours, turned to us with a look of utter confusion on his beardless face and said: "What's wrong with youse guys?", before joining his pals for the gathering riot. Adam just didn't see the point in fighting unless it was absolutely necessary, but he was anything but cowardly as I've already stated. What's more, according to what I observed and what he himself told me, he was more than averagely successful with the opposite sex, unconsciously imbued like me with the poisonous playboy values of the times. Yet, for his own reasons he chose conceal such toughness and virility as were so clearly his beneath a mask of gentlemanly reserve, and even languour. This secret fortitude would eventually see him being commissioned as an officer in the Royal Navy, which had been his destiny all along. But not mine. My time with the London Division, RNR came to an end in late 1977 with an incredibly positive character report, for which I remain grateful to this day. The RNR did all right by me and I honour them for it, and if military life had never been for me, it's a part of who I am whether I like it or not. My life story would be all the poorer without it.

Photos: 1978?/'79?

8 Gilded Youth at the Guildhall

Introduction

An initial draft of "Gilded Youth at the Guildhall" was published at Blogster.com website on the 1st of July 2006, since which time it's undergone considerable modification. The inclusion of the second versified section of "The Woodville Hall Escapists" is a fairly recent development. It was first published separately and in longer form as "Woodville Hall, Gravesend, 1977" at Blogster. It had been based on the bare essentials of an autobiographical short story written in 1978 or '79 while I was a student at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. A definitive version of "Gilded Youth" was published at Blog.co.uk in February 2008.

The Woodville Hall Escapists 1

In late 1977 I joined the former Merchant Navy College in Greenhithe, Kent, (which had merged with the Thames Nautical Training College HMS Worcester nine years earlier) as a trainee Radio Officer. I formed several close friendships there; but closest of all was with Jasbir, a lovable hard nut of about 18 with a thick London accent who'd been born into nearby Gravesend's large Asian community. Jesse as he was known certainly knew how to handle himself, but he was loyal and soft-hearted towards those he liked and trusted, and for a time we were inseparable.
It was through Jesse I think that I started going to discos at Gravesend's Woodville Hall, depicted in the piece below. There young Punk and Soul Kids would meet every week or so in late '77 dressed in escapist fashions which stood out in such bizarre contrast with the drabness of their surroundings. English suburban life in those days didn't include such modern day distractions as mobile phones, DVD players and the world wide web, and was dismally uninspiring as a result. Little wonder therefore that it gave birth to Punk and other outlandish youth cults, most of which are still in existence to some degree to this day.
I used to nag Jesse to be nicer, not that he wasn't...he was one of the kindest guys I've ever known...but he had a habit of talking tough which intimidated some people. As things turned out, I was the one who quit college first, even if he did follow me not long afterwards, which caused Jesse to wonder I'd been such a prig in the first place. I didn't have an answer...

The Woodville Hall Escapists 2

Soon after I'd paid
My sixty
0r seventy pence,
I found myself
In what I thought
Was a minitiure London.
I saw girls
In chandelier earrings,
In stilleto heels,
Wearing evening
Dresses,
Which contrasted with
The bizarre
Hair colours
They favoured:
Jet black
0r bleach blonde,
With flashes of
Red, Purple
0r green.
Some wore large
Bow ties,
Others unceremoniously
Hanged
Their school ties
Round their
Necks.
Eye make-up
Was exaggerated.
The boys all had
Dhort hair,
Wore mohair sweaters,
Thin ties,
Baggy,
Peg-top trousers
And winklepicker shoes.
A band playing
Raw street rock
At a frantic speed
Came to a sudden,
Violent climax...
Melodic, rythmic,
Highly danceable
Soul music
Was now beginning
To fill the hall,
With another group
0f short-haired youths...
Smoother, more elegant,
Less menacing
Than the previous ones.
These well-dressed
Street boys
Wore well-pressed pegs
0f red or blue...
They pirhouetted
And posed...
Pirhouetted and posed.

West Suburban Story

Soon after returning from the Merchant Navy College in December '77, I auditioned for a place on the three year drama course at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in the City of London, which was really what I'd wanted to do in the first place. Incredibly, as I'd already failed two earlier auditions for RADA, Guildhall accepted me for the course beginning in autumn 1978. I was exhilerated; but that didn't stop me sinking further into the nihilistic Punk lifestyle. Having been bewitched by the hairstyle of one of a small gang of Punks I knew by sight from nights out in Dartford in late '77, I decided to imitate it a few weeks later. It was predictably spiked, with a kind of a halo of bright blond taking in the front of the head, both sides, and a strip at the nape of the neck. I have part of a photograph of myself wearing this style with a long Soul Boy fringe at the front, before I eventually had it cut into spikes. By the spring of 1978, I'd shorn it all off into a skinhead.
It was genuinely dangerous being a Punk in 77-78 and you lived in constant fear of attack or abuse if you chose to dress like one. After all, Punk's culture of insolence and outrage was extreme even by the standards of previous British youth cults such as the Teds, the Rockers, the Mods, the Greasers, the Skins, the Suedeheads and the Smoothies. Britain in those days was a country still dominated to some degree by pre-war moral values, which were Victorian in essence, and a cultural war was being fought for the soul of the nation. It could be said therefore that Punks were the avant garde of the new Britain in a way that would be impossible today. This explains the extraordinary hostility Punks attracted.

Close by to where I shared a house with my parents in the furthermost reachers of south west London where suburbia meets countryside I saw Hersham Punk band Sham '69 shortly before they became nationally famous. I already knew their lead singer Jimmy Pursey by sight; at least I think it was him I saw miming to Chris Spedding's "Motorbiking" at the disco one night. This gig took place in a poky hall above a pub in the centre of a large bleak industrial estate, itself surrounded by drab housing estates and endless rows of council houses. I was often there on a Sunday in the late 70s, usually with friends, looking for romance, or just dancing to my beloved Soul. On one occasion that I remember, the Soul gave way to Punk which saw the tiny dance space being invaded by deranged pogo-dancers. I just stood back and watched. I was still a Soul Boy at heart. On another, a Ted revivalist, a follower of classic Rock'n'Roll who favoured flashy fifties-style clothing, tried to start some trouble with me in the toilet. At this point, another Ted who'd befriended me about a year before when I dressed like an extra from "The Blackboard Jungle"...I think his name was Steve... stepped in with the magical words: "He's a mate!". Steve's intervention may have saved me from a hiding that night because Teds had a loathing of Punks informed by their essential conservatism. To them, Punks probably seemed to have no respect for anything. Later, or it may have been before I can't remember, he asked me whether I was really into "this Punk lark" or whatever he called it, and I assured him I wasn't. I may even have added that I still loved the fifties, which was actually the truth to an extent, not that that was the point. The fact is that I lied to him to look good in his eyes, which was a pretty low thing to do to a friend.

On New Years Eve, I took Jesse to a party in swanky west central London. It was one of the last, perhaps even the very last, in a long series of parties I'd gone to throughout '77 thanks to my old Pangbourne buddies, so many of whom were now based in and around the capital. Before arriving at the host's house or apartment, Jesse and I met up as agreed with budding oil magnate Craig, an especially close friend from my days as Cadet C.R. Halling 173. Introductions over, Jesse saw fit to impress Craig with a terrifying solo display of his lethal street fighting skills. "I'm suitably impressed", said Craig, and he was, and Craig was no cissy. We all got on well that insane night which saw me pouring a full glass of beer over my head at one point in circumstances I'd rather keep to myself. What the beautiful student of dance I'd spent most of the evening with thought of a nice guy like me doing a thing like that she didn't say. In the late '70s, I met so many people who might have done anything for me, and yet my overwhelming passion appeared to be the creation of drunken scenes, and a party wasn't a party for me in those days unless I'd caused one...after which, I simply moved on, to the next party, the next scandal. It makes me weep to think of the waste of it all.
Jesse and I stayed in touch until about 1983, and it was because of me that we eventually lost contact. I had a bad habit of doing that in those days. I hope I'm making that point clear.

A Punk Rocker in Fuengirola

In the spring of 1978, I arrived in the famous Costa del Sol town of Fuengirola near Marbella, with the intention of helping to set up a sailing school with a young English guy of about 30 I knew only very slightly. He kindly put me up in an apartment, but as things turned out the project came to nothing. However, I stayed on in Fuengirola, living first in a hotel, and then rent-free thanks to a friend I made in town in her own apartment.
Shortly after that, I was offered the position of front man in a Hard Rock band playing nightly at the Tam Tam night club. I became something of a town character, Coco the Punk as I was known, one of only two Punks in Fuengirola, most of the kids who became my close friends being still in thrall to the Hippie sixties. '78 was my first year as a full-time Punk in fact, and among the objects of my excess were a black wet-look tee-shirt with cropped sleeves, drainpipe jeans of black or green, worn with black studded belt festooned with silver chain kept in place by safety pins, flourescent teddy boy socks, and white shoes with black laces etc. I even had a safety pin, anaesthetized by being dipped into an alcoholic drink, forced through my left ear lobe by a friend. I removed it once it had started to cause my whole ear to throb.
For the most part, it was a summer of love and leisure, of endless lotus eating mostly spent in the town itself, but also at the legendary Campo del Tenis, or nearby Mijas...and even on one occasion each as I remember it, in Marbella, Torremolinos, Puert Banus. I was always short of money, but I could order what I wanted at the Tam Tam, and when I was flat broke I was bought toasted cheese sandwiches and bottles of cold Spanish beer or whatever else I wished for by a very dear friend. One night the charismatic British racing driver James Hunt called to her from out of the darkness of a balmy Andalusian night, before vanishing as suddenly as he'd arrived. Yes, it was that incredible a summer.

I returned to London in September 1978 to take my place at the Guildhall, but by following summer, I was back in Spain; not to Fuengirola though, despite the fact that my friends from the band had wanted me to carry on with them as lead singer throughout '79. I feel bad to this day at having let them down so badly; we were so close as a band. There was something about the Spanish character that resonated with me; I can't say exactly what, but I always got on so well with the Spanish. In my wisdom I'd chosen instead to to go to La Ribera, the little former fishing village in the south eastern province of Murcia. I felt a deep and overwhelming sense of exhaustion as I stretched out on the wooden balnario overlooking the Mar Menor, but I don't recall being especially disappointed by the knowledge that I wouldn't be returning to the Guildhall for the autumn term of 1979. It may have been just the Costa Calida sun that made me feel so burned out. I must have felt pretty let down though, even if only unconsciously. After all, my dream of being a gilded youth at the Guildhall School had only lasted a year before I was asked to leave with no possibility of return.

Farewell Lauderdale Tower

Just before quitting Fuengirola the previous summer of '78 I'd been approached with an offer of singing in the Canary Islands, but I'd turned it down. Who knows where it might have led; but then had I travelled to the Canaries with the band, I wouldn't have gone to Guildhall through which so many incredible experiences came. It would take an entire separate volume to list them all. What I will say is that at Guildhall I was involved with an almost unbroken succession of Rock and Pop bands. Through one of them, Rockets, I was offered the position of lead singer for a guitar player of genius who's played with one of the world's leading Rock superstars since 1990. Through another, Narcissus, which I formed with my mates Robin and Mike, I found only disgrace when our bizarre image resulted in a cacaphony of heckling. For the most part, I was the sweetest and most mannerly of guys of guys, but I had a nasty habit of shooting myself in the foot at the worst possible moments, or shooting my mouth off, one of the two. It was almost as if I was returning to type, the suburban loser, waster, clown, position after all from which it's impossible to fall.
My final band was the '50s revivalist act Z Cars, which even won a tiny fanbase for itself. I was Carl Cool, lead singer and songwriter with a tattoo painted onto my shoulder, Rob was Robert Fitzroy-Square the boy next door with the Buddy Holly glasses, who provided most of the comedy, Dave was Dave Dean, the punk kid with the don't mess with me stare, and Richard was Little Ricky Ticky, the baby of the band at only 18. I think it was Dave who left first, and for a time, the charismatic actor-writer Ian Puleston-Davies came onboard. Ian, Rob and I were also involved in the production of a musical comedy based on the Scottish play, "Mac and Beth", which survived my time at Guildhall, if only for a single performance. It was rewritten several times. There was a version by Michael Praed of "Robin of Sherwood" fame; and another which I wrote only a few years ago, only to come to the conclusion that it was too dark and violent. Most of it ended up in the trash. Somewhere, however, there's a VHS copy of one of a handful of Guildhall performances of the play.

There were emotional scenes at my farewell party held in the depths of the Barbican Estate's Lauderdale Tower and many cried openly because I was leaving. During the evening, a close friend Gill told me to contact the impresario Barrie Stacey, owner of the legendary As You Like It club on Monmouth Street at the start of the sixties. Barrie was well-known for offering young actors their very first positions within the entertainment industry. Her own brother, who'd recently starred in a TV comedy series had received his first break through Barrie. True to form, he gave me my very first paid job in the business a matter of months afterwards. So just before Christmas, I was doubling as Christian the Chorus Boy and Joey the Teddy Bear complete with furry costume in the pantomime "Sleeping Beauty" that began its run in Ealing in west London, culminating at the Buxton Opera House in Derbyshire. Then early on in the new year moreover, the famed theatre director Richard Cottrell offered me the part of Mustardseed in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Bristol Old Vic. Maybe leaving the Guildhall had been the right thing to do after all.
From the Vic era, I offer the following relic from an unfinished tale which I went on to edit and versify. I rescued it last year from a battered notebook I was in the habit of scribbling in during spare moments offstage while dressed in my costume and covered in blue body make-up and silver glitter. While doing so, some of this glitter was transferred from the pages with which they were stained more than twenty six years ago onto my hands. It was an eerie experience.

Along Whiteladies Road

I remember the grey
slithers
of rain,
The jocular driver
As I boarded the bus
At Temple Meads,
And the friendly lady
Who told me
When we had arrived
At the city centre.
I remember
the little pub
on King Street,
With its quiet
Maritime atmosphere
And the first readthrough.
I remember tramping
Along Park Street,
Whiteladies Road
And Blackboy Hill,
My arms and hands
Aching from my bags
To the little cottage
Where I had decided to stay
And relax
In beween rehearsals,
Reading, writing,
Listening to music.
I remember my landlady,
Tall, timid and beautiful...

Photos: 1978?/'79?

9 Gone the Way of Cain

Introduction

"Gone the Way of Cain" consists of pieces from formerly published writings:
"First Night of the Dream" and "The End of the Century Young" were taken from "Ice Spoke of the Spells of Calm" MK. 1, first published at the Blogster.com website on the 25th January 2007, while "Like Some New Romantic" was originally part of an early draft of "West of the Fields Long Gone" published at Blogster on August 20th 2006. All sections were subjected to considerable modification before being published in definitive form at Blog.co.uk in March 2008, with an entirely new final piece, which is the title piece. It takes up where the previous story, "Gilded Youth" left off, which is to say my arrival in Bristol in the winter of 1980 to appear in Richard Cottrell's production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the city's Old Vic Theatre. Moving into '81, it goes into some details about my tenuous links with the New Romantic movement, and ends with my becoming an aging student at the University of London.

First Night of the Dream

My time in the city of Bristol as an actor with the Britol Old Vic theatre company in early 1980 was restless and unsettled. Initially, I stayed in an elegant little dwelling in the affluent Clifton area to the west of the city centre, much of which was built from profits from tobacco and the slave trade, that is until I was asked to leave by my landlady due to my room being urgently required by a relative or something. At this point, a friend from the Vic who also happened to be the wardrobe assistant generously asked me if I’d like to stay with her for a while. I said yes, but it wasn't long before I'd relocated to a boarding house, also in Clifton I think. There I stayed until it was time for me to return to London.
Among those who appeared in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Vic in early '80 were future Hollywood superstar Daniel Day Lewis, son of the former poet laureate Sir Cecil and actress Jill Balcon, and one of the world's most gifted actors, legendary for the assiduity of his preparation for the roles he's undertaken. Also appearing (as Puck) was Nickolas Grace, perhaps best known for his portrayals of flamboyant British eccentrics both real and fictional, and most especially that of of Anthony Blanche in the 1981 television production of Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited". But the cast as a whole was incredibly gifted and charismatic. Prior to the Dream's first night, I'd been fortunate enough to witness a BOV production of one of my favourite ever musicals, Frank Loesser’s “Guys and Dolls”, with Clive Wood as Sky Masterson, and another future screen legend Pete Postethwaite as Nathan Detroit. I can honestly say that this single show provided me with more pleasure than any other theatre production I've seen before or since. It left me breathless.
The Cottrell "Dream" was lavishly praised, and there was even some talk of its going on to become as renowned as the 1971 production by Peter Brook, whom I actually met in 1979. So much so that it relocated to the London Old Vic in the summer, where it was no less successful than at Bristol. Towards the end of its Bristol run, I undertook a small role in an obscure play by Rainer Werner Fassbinder called “The Freedom of Bremen” together with several other actors who didn’t have overly demanding parts. It was directed in the Studio theatre by Michael Batz, currently the artistic director of Hamburg’s Theater in der Speicherstadt in the city’s historic Warehouse district.
Following my modest triumph in "The Dream", I applied for and was offered the position of sales assistant in Bentall's china department in Kingston-on-Thames, remaining there until just after Christmas. Then, early in the new year I found work as part of the cast and crew of “Satyricon”, based on the original by Petronius, and directed by Peter Benedict. This was thanks to the kindness of an actor friend of my father's, Haydn Davies. Initially an Assistant Stage Manager and percussionist, I was eventually offered a non-speaking role. Soon after this, I contributed to an audio project of Haydn's known as “The Poetry People” with, in addition to Haydn, John Pine, Kay Clayton, and Maria Perry, who went on to become a successful historical writer and broadcaster.

Like Some New Romantic

1981 was also the year in which I became a kind of hanger-on of a youth movement originally dubbed "The Cult with no Name", and whose origins lay in the late 1970s largely among discontented ex-Punks reacting to the increasingly drab uniformity of Punk Johnny Come Latelys. The New Romantics embraced a hyper-nostalgic devotion to various ages which they interpreted as romantic, whether recent times such as the Roaring Twenties, or more distant historical eras, the latter inspiring such stock New Romantic accessories as ruffs, veils, frills, kilts and so on. Several of the cult's pioneers went on to become famous names within the worlds of art, fashion and popular music. They tended be among the most foppish or flamboyant of the earliest adherents, and so stood in stark contrast to the those council estate dandies for whom it could be said that New Romanticism was simply a passing fashion in much the same way as Punk was before it. Its soundtrack was a largely synthesized dance music influenced by German Art Rock collectives such as Kraftwerk and Can, as well as Glam, Funk and Disco. While it was arguably no longer cutting edge by the end of '81, it went on to exert a colossal influence on the development of music and fashion throughout the eighties, and partly inspired what became known as the Second British Invasion thanks to a desperate need for striking videos on the part of the newly arrived MTV (Music Television).
I attended New Romantic club nights at Le Kilt and Le Beat Route among others, and was even snapped at one of these by the legendary London photographer David Bailey, but I was never a true New Romantic so much as a lone fellow traveller keen to experience first hand the last truly original London music and fashion cult before it imploded as all others had done before it. Yet, despite its florid decadence, New Romanticism was far more mainstream than other musical trends which came in the wake of Punk such as Post-Punk and Goth, which plunged Rock Music into unprecedented darkness. For this reason, it eventually evolved in Britain into what has become known as New Pop, and which combined often complex if accessible tunes with a telegenic Glam image. During the '80s I myself inclined to New Pop rather than more esoteric styles ranging from Goth to Indie, and this was reflected by a colourful image so redolent of the decade's infamous frivolity. But this was not the whole story. While I eschewed Goth Rock, I was passionate about many of its primary influences such as the dark side of Romanticism and there was a duality about me which was true of the eighties as a whole.

As '81 progressed, my acting career faltered, and so a family decision was reached to the effect that I should become a mature student at the age of 25. Accordingly, I passed interviews for both the University of Exeter, and the University of London and specifically, Westfield College, situated on the Finchley Road in Hampstead, north London. Founded in 1882 and going on to serve as the model for the University for Women parodied in Gilbert and Sullivan's comic "Princess Ida", Westfield was an all-woman college for more than 80 years, finally becoming co-educational in 1968. She officially merged with east London's Queen Mary College in 1989 to become Queen Mary and Westfield College, until the turn of the century when she was renamed Queen Mary, University of London, while legally retaining the original title of QMWC.
To cut a long story short, I opted for Westfield, and so in the autumn of that year found myself embarking on a Bachelor of Arts degree in French and Drama mainly at Westfield, but also partly at the nearby Central School of Speech and Drama, while resident in a small room on campus. My dissatisfaction with my situation was initially so strong that at one point in an attempt to escape it I auditioned for work as an assistant stage manager, or acting ASM, for my old friend and agent Barrie Stacey. However, I was not succesful. Soon after this fiasco, while ambling at night in what I think was the Swiss Cottage area close by to the Central School, I was ambushed by a group of my fellow drama students, who were clearly thrilled to see me. It felt wonderful to be accepted so unconditionally by them. Perhaps they appeared to my jaded 26 year old eyes to incarnate the sheer carefree rapturous vitality and joy of life of youth.
Before long I settled down at Westfield, in fact came to love my time there, coinciding as it did with the first half of the crazy eighties...last of a triad of decades in the West of unceasing artistic and societal change and experimentation. For me the very early '80s was a time of ceaseless exhilerated hedonism, the poisons fuelling me back then being not primarily, or even significantly, narcotic. Rather they constituted a furious desire for strong sensation within a diversity of fields, the intellectual, the social and the amatory among them, reinforced by industrial strength doses of self-obsession. Furthermore, from around the turn of the eighties or earlier, I began to be motivated by an adoration of early death, as well as those artists who, both gifted beyond measure and exquisite of face and form had gone in search of it. It was my desire to be ultimately numbered among such bedevilled individuals myself, to know such blissful delinquency...
The piece below has its origins I believe in that time, and the "artistic torment" it conveys should be taken with a colossal pinch of salt. The truth is that I was a genuinely joyful and carefree spirit back then, in fact perhaps too much so, with the the result being that I felt moved to seek out the kind of mysterious intensity I felt I sorely lacked and so coveted. It's a cliche I know...but we should all be careful for what we wish for, for when it comes to us as it so very often does, it tends to do so at a terrible price...

Some Perverse Will

I’m a restless man
I am never
Still
I’m always spurred on
By some perverse
Will
The grass is never
Green
No peace here
To find
Some demon
Of motion’s
At work within my
Mind
No bed is too soft
That I won’t
Abandon
It’s sweet calm
And comfort
For a softer
One
I’m a restless man
I am never
Still
I’m always spurred on
By some perverse
Will.

Gone The Way of Cain

The Playboy Philosophy which exploded in the 1960s could be said to have reached its full flowering in the crazy eighties. That's not to say, however, that the vast majority of people who came to maturity in this hyper-hedonistic decade didn't ultimately forge respectable family lives and careers following a brief season spent as flamboyant outsiders because of course they did. Few embraced these neo-libertine values with a the same kind of blind fervour as me...and yet of course there were a good many who took them far further than I ever did. Still, I can't deny that I now suffer from a cruel nostalgia for the trappings of status, security, respectability, things I once scorned, preferring instead to push to the limit as if under some enchantment my notion of myself as a poète maudit like my heroes, a notion somewhat at odds it has to be said with a certain lingering suburban ordinariness. I believed in the role of the artist as a dissolute provoker existent at all times on the verge of ecstasy or despair, of illumination or madness or death and worshipped those who had pursued this wretched anti-existence to the limit. This made me the worst kind of sinner in my eyes, a true prodigal in defiance of everything that makes society tolerable, such as personal restraint and respect for parents and authority. Such violent narcissism as I once displayed has been worshipped by the West for close on to half a decade especially as expressed through such popular arts as Rock'n'Roll and the cinema. A universal obsession with rebellion and sensual abandon is a sign as I see it of a West increasingly given over to neo-pagan values. These are surely the same God-rejecting values that corrupted the antedeluvian world, and which survived the Flood to be disseminated throughout the nations. They spelled the end of one empire after the other, including the Egyptian, the Greek, the Roman. They are epidemic today through the West and beyond, where once they were marginalised as aberrant.
I'd been blessed at birth by every good gift but the most desired qualities such as talent and beauty are among the most dangerous unless submitted in their entirety to God, not least to those who possess them. They are eminently visible and therefore vulnerable, and with more more temptations than most all too often fall prey to Luciferian pride and vanity like David's favourite son Absalom who was physically flawless but morally bereft. Little wonder therefore that so many of them are drawn to the power offered by art, and especially music, the writer of the first song Lamech having been in the line of Cain. Indeed, there are those Christians who believe that the Cainites were the first pagan people, and that they corrupted the Godly line of Seth through a sensual and wicked music not unlike much contemporary Rock. Of course not all Rock music is flagrantly wicked, far from it. Much of it is melodically lovely. While in terms of its lyrics, its finest songs display the most delicate poetic sensibility. The fact remains, however, that no art form has been quite so associated as Rock with rebellion, transgression, licentiousness, intoxication and thanatophilia (an undue fascination with death) nor been so influential as such. To think I once desperately sought fame as a Rock artist myself, and if not as Rock'n'Roll superstar then as actor, or writer, and it was surely a blessing I never gained this pagan form of immortality because had I done so I'd almost certainly have been used for the furtherance of the kingdom of darkness. Once I'd served my purpose I may well have died a solitary premature death as an addict, as has been the fate of so many men and women briefly briefly animated by the charismatic superstar spirit before being cruelly discarded by the Enemy of Souls...