In 2018, after some thirty years of false starts, I started writing something that, for lack of a better word, I have been calling a memoir. In 2020 it arrived at 1976, the year I went off to university. COVID arrived too, and in the middle of lockdown, I needed a device to be able to write anything at all. I decided to write 100 words a day for 100 days: The Southampton Hundreds. I GOT TO 80.
1: We are standing at the bus stop, dad and I. Between us on the ground is a battered and ancient trunk. God only knows where it came from. Some bloke at the pub? Someone’s attic. It’s brown, with wooden ridges across it that may once have had leather on them. In it are all my worldly goods, such as they are. I am off to Victoria Station to get the coach to Southampton to start at university. How am I going to get this thing on and off the bus, on and off the train and on and off another?
2: We are all on a coach going down the M3 and my misbegotten trunk is underneath me somewhere. We all seem to be male, nervous and bluff, though I don’t see how we can be. It feels exactly like a school excursion. The only thing anyone can think of to say is ‘So what ‘A’ levels did you get?’ and I have no more conversational imagination than anyone else. Eventually someone pipes up with ‘So what’s Southampton like, anyway?’ No one has any idea. There’s a silence that lasts until the motorway finishes and we don’t start to find out.
3: I unpack all the records, and the stereo Phil S. passed on to me. I put the trunk in the trunk room with all the other trunks, and then I am at a loss in my tiny room. The halls are segregated, floor by floor, so my male corridor mates in the shared kitchen pause long enough from reciting Monty Python sketches verbatim to say hello and tell me what ‘A’ Levels they did. I feel compelled to tell them I am a vegetarian and to prove it by eating some muesli with a strawberry flavoured Ski yogurt mixed through it.
4: The first night at university, in the student bar in the halls of residence. I feel strangely at home, but adrift. In the student union bar I stand with my pint in my hand, turning this way and that towards conversations I’m not in.. Someone materialises at my shoulder with an olive green crushed velvet t-shirt, and mischievous eyes. “You look like you’re worth talking to,” he says, “can I buy you a drink?”
“Well I don’t know,’ I say, “what ‘A’ Levels did you get?’, and he sprays a mouthful of beer all over the person next to me.
5: “So when they ask me about my ‘A’ levels I tell them. And then they kind of lean in towards me, but they can’t say anything, because I don’t ask them.” I am in awe, but it does mean that we can hardly ask each other what bands we like, so the conversation sags slightly, until over the third pint he reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out an exquisitely constructed joint. “Let’s start as we mean to go on.”
In the morning the sink in my room is blocked. The caretaker just looks at me: he doesn’t even ask.
6: We are standing at the bus stop, dad and I. The trunk was sent on ahead: that’s the only thing that makes any sense, even though sending your trunk on ahead is straight out of Jennings and Darbyshire. It must be a battered suitcase between us, that we used to take to the Isle of Wight on our holidays. Dad carried it on his head when we had to walk the three miles home from Hersham Station in 1966. I whined. Kevin kicked me. Mum lost her temper.
The bus comes. ‘Good luck, son,’ says dad, and slips me a tenner.
7: Do I look like I’m worth talking to? I have a great mass of hair, which is either cavalier ringlets around my shoulders, ironically, given my levelling leanings, or an airborne Zappa frizz, depending on how recently it has been washed: so it’s usually ringlets. A lazy beard, rings, black nail varnish, an embroidered black velvet waistcoat, a t-shirt with medieval sleeves, covered in golden heraldic hippy lions. A gold and rose tasselled scarf swishing from a belt loop. Blue desert boots. Hanging around my neck, on a small varnished piece of wood, Arthur Rackham’s Alice is discomfited by the caterpillar.
8: It’s my birthday not long after I arrive. Some of my new friends give me Absolutely Live by The Doors. My girlfriend A. comes down from home. We’ve been together for about two months. She’s made a montage for me, (she’s an art student) with drawings of sinewy Earthsea dragons and contact photos of me, and her, and her soppy black spaniel Jasper, who I’ve rather taken to. She has quite possibly ridden down on the B-roads on her Honda 70. She’s my first ever actual girlfriend and though having an actual girlfriend is kind of massive, I am distracted, semi-attentive.
9: Phil S. and some other friends from school come down for my birthday too. There is a photo of everyone in the student bar looking quite jolly together, but there is a tension in everyone’s eyes because there’s no kilter. My new friends are perfectly friendly, but my old friends feel, rightly or wrongly, that they are there on sufferance, and act accordingly. One new acquaintance, pale, bland, with an ethereal afro, provokes an old friend almost to violence just by existing, and though I understand, objectively, (he is annoying) I am embarrassed, and relieved when they have gone home.
10: A few days in I write to dad, in a regulation anodyne way, not really saying anything. He writes back, and I read his letter as I sit in the empty laundry watching my jeans go round and round. “Thanks very much for your letter, son. You’ll never know how glad I was to receive it. It isn’t much fun sitting here on my own night after night…” I can barely take it in. What is this? The U-boat captain in my head is screaming “DIVE! DIVE! DIVE!”. I screw the hatch shut just in time, heart thumping, mouth dry.
11: Several of my new friends come from westwards, starting at the eastern end of the Chilterns, making an arc through the Cotswolds to Bristol, Bath, and down into Devon. We are in Hampshire, after all. Far more striking to me is how many of them come from public schools. I had never expected to meet anyone from a public school, ever, to the extent that I’d realised that public schools actually existed, with real people in them, outside the pages of How to be Topp or Jennings Follows a Clue, both of which I inhaled once and can’t quite exhale
12: I am also mildly surprised that people who go to public schools are not hee-hawing nincompoops, but actually quite pleasant, amenable and ordinary, or as ordinary as you can be when only the most grammared, groomed and squeezed get to be at university in the first place. Thankfully one of my new chums is reassuringly ruddy faced, with a district commissioner air about him. One day, while I am in mid-rant about the parasitical upper classes, he rounds on me and calls me an ‘armchair pinko’. He’s absolutely right, but just Blimpish enough for me to dance out from under.
13: I walk along the corridor and from some distance I can hear and feel ‘Next‘ by the Sensational Alex Harvey Band playing on the reel to reel tape player in my new friend’s room. I walk in and several stoned people regard me. Being stoned doesn’t seem to improve anyone, but I join in on principle. When the joint gets to me I am as likely to wave it around while expounding as smoke it, while the others watch its movements, mesmerised, until it goes out and someone bangs on the door and shouts out ‘turn that down, will you?’
14: I have arrived, I think, with the arbitrary intention to do Modern History and Politics, but I soon switch just as whimsically to Philosophy and Politics, which several of my new friends are doing. I soon realise that I am not especially philosophical, if that means endless circular discussions of the ‘What is is?’ conundrum or whether, if you were in the French Resistance and were tortured by the Nazis, it would be ethical to lie to them. ‘I’d probably just betray everyone as soon as I saw the Anton Diffring lookalike with the duelling scar’ I think to myself.
15: Sociology is more particular. Perched on the edge of his desk, the tutor has his feet on his chair while laying a proletarian amount of Old Holborn along a blue Rizla. He licks along the paper and rolls it it up : a strand of tobacco lingers in his wispy Pete Townshend beard. “Ok, let’s get started,” he says, ” THE AFFLUENT WORKER AND THE THESIS OF EMBOURGEOISEMENT. I assume you’ve all read it. Who’s got something to say?” There is a silence so long and so deep that the world seems to stop turning completely. His roll up goes out. “Anybody?”
16: I don’t spend much time in the shared kitchen. At some point a pencil sketch of a carrot appears on the door of my room with ‘Bugs Veggie’s rabbit warren’ written above it. I ignore it, but one of my new friends sees it when she comes to visit. I’m out, but she tells me later that she burst into the kitchen, and ‘told them what a bunch of pathetic wankers they were. You should have seen their faces!’ In this room she tells me a great secret and I keep it. Then I move rooms, to a friendlier floor.
17: We get the bus into the town, or ‘the city’, except that there doesn’t seem to be one. The bus goes through a huge park, alongside another, and seems to end up nowhere. There’s a medieval gate in splendid isolation and some bits of wall behind railings, and a lot of postwar stuff. It’s like the new housing estate in Molesey, expanded to make a universe, with the same long history made invisible, obliterated by the Luftwaffe, or preserved by the council. There’s quite a good record shop tucked away behind some stuff, opposite a carpark. That’ll probably do.
18: I don’t write dad any more letters. I just take my washing home, drink tea, chat about not much and don’t tell him anything about what I get up to in Southampton. When I am home A. comes to sleep over, and dad, as ever, is fine with that and leaves cups of tea outside my bedroom door, announced with a subtle cough. Years later he tells he didn’t approve at all really, but didn’t want to spoil it for me as he was just happy that I had found someone, (like he found mum, he didn’t need to say).
19: I have read in NME that people who are social secretaries at uni go on to manage bands or record labels. I ingratiate myself, fantasising out loud about my rockist career to come, with the bloke who organises the bands at our halls: but after shifting a lot of heavy furniture from the dining hall so that The Vibrators, a minor first wave punk band, can play, I evaporate. A little later I walk past him and some of his cronies, and I hear someone say ‘Oh look, there goes the new social secretary’. I walk on, shoulder blades touching.
20: We seem to have just missed out on a decade’s worth of excitement, and to be looking back beyond it, Ray Davies style. AC/DC play in the student union, to four dozen apathetic students, some of whom unwisely throw the odd bottle, and a few local lads. Deafening, bludgeoning and pure vaudeville. Two weeks afterwards we are helpless before Max Wall – the cadaverous soul of variety. Later still we sit frowning seriously through Krapp’s Last Tape.
Then Bill Grundy interviews the Pistols. We don’t even see it, but now we have a circus to revel in: spit and sawdust gratis.
21: I meet someone somehow and we bond in a pale, consumptively innocent kind of way over literature and poetry, as our intellects mash wildly against each other. We sit up till all hours being poetic. She has a boyfriend at home called Dave. Dave comes down to visit: he is a bit of a lump. She can’t live without Dave and drops out to be with Dave. She sends me some of her poems, and I give her my honest opinion of them. I visit her once above her dad’s chemist shop in Oxted, but it’s frosty and that’s that.
22: I am sitting in the student coffee bar, and on a plate in front of me are three custard tarts, which I demolish. “Nothing succeeds like excess, eh Pete?” says a new friend with a shock of deep red Celtic hair, sardonically. I realise that I haven’t offered him so much as a bite, and as a distraction I ostentatiously rip through the NME crossword in five minutes flat. He instantly christens me The Electrick Guru, which delights me even more than when he called me Aquila the Hun a few weeks before. I adopt it. It kind of sticks.
23: Someone has a car, and although Southampton is an architecturally ravaged remainder of itself, unblemished attractions surround it. Alfred holds up his sword in Winchester. We drive into the New Forest and pick mushroooms that won’t do anything. One day we drive for two hours to Chesil Beach and walk out along the clattering shingle to Portland Bill. It’s all bright and shiny, but cold and windy: we huddle together as if we are on an album cover. On the way back we stop at a pub in the New Forest: the locals stare at us, silent, till we leave .
24: A. comes down again. It feels wrong somehow, and to escape the feeling all I can come up with is to break up with her: I watch, relieved, as she trudges away across the campus. But then I work myself into a lather of maudlin angst for several days, listening to One Year by Colin Blunstone umpteen times, before writing to her to say that I was wrong, I didn’t mean it, I’m so sorry, let’s get back together. She writes back, guardedly, saying Okay then, but it makes it hard to trust you entirely if you can do that.
25: One night some local lads hang about threateningly at the student union building, not being let in to the bar, and giving off a ‘Stitch this, student wanker’ air, without quite doing anything. This is way too much like being stopped on the way home from school by Steve Dawkins and Danny Griffin for my liking, and as we walk back to hall, they follow us. The tallest, most solidly built and unflappable of my new public school chums stops and mollifies them while we walk ahead. He catches us up.”Ah, they’re alright,” he says, “they’re just a bit chippy.”
26: My green shirted friend has the jump on most of us because he listens to The Stooges and has the Ramones album. One night there are huddles of concern: he is tripping, is away and travelling bereft. He is just this side of gibber and adamant that he has to go up to London to see his girlfriend. Tall unflappable public school friend H. drives us up the M3 in his Morris Minor: hallucinating party in the front seat, me in the back, leaning forward, left hand tightly gripping the passenger side door handle the whole way, just in case.
27: We eventually pull up outside the girlfriend’s house. We sit there for a bit. ‘No, it’s no good, I can’t see her like this,” he says, agonisedly, so H. and I exchange looks and we start back again. We pick up a hitch hiker: what the fuck are you doing? I hiss at H. as we pull over to let him in. Sorry, force of habit, he says, grimacing. The hitch hiker is Dutch, polite, scraggly and after listening to the berserk chimneys coming from the front seat he says that here will do thanks. We are halfway across Chiswick Bridge.
28: On the way through Richmond we are pulled over by a police car. Oh this is just too much, says H., now starting to look noticeably ashen. But he summons up some officer class politesse and it was only a flickering rear light, and miraculously our man just smiles politely at the policeman and doesn’t say anything surreal. Two hours later, in the dead of night, we get back: our man disappears into his room for about two weeks, and then emerges, as right as rain. From now on we know him only as ‘Syd Barrett‘, much to his delight.
29: While he’s closeted away there’s concern, because none of us really know what to do if he never comes out of the room or his head, and we confer in the corridor or the bar or outside his room, rather pointlessly. One day in the corridor, Ari and I, not quite friends, are conferring. Up to now we’ve fenced, she warily, me uncertainly. Now, as we exchange vaguenesses about him, there’s a shifting of focus, an infinitesimal jump cut, a scratch, and there we certainly are, both turning to look down the corridor, forty years or more into the future.
30: There is no television. There is probably one somewhere but we don’t seek it out. At home the television does everything, so instead we hoover up Titus Groan. It is so rich and indigestible it completely makes up for my thin vegetarian pizzamuesli diet. Falling away from ornate music I fall into John Fowles and spend hours in people’s rooms ignoring all attempts to engage me while I race, theatrically, at breakneck speed to the end of The Magus, which I am completely taken in by. I close the book and adopt an expression that combines transcendence with self satisfaction.
31: We are all about to go home for Christmas. A. has a sideline where she collects fist sized round stones and paints them so that they look like sleeping smiling orange white marmalade cats, and then varnishes them. I browbeat her into making a whole lot of them for me to give to my new friends as Christmas presents, apart from the ones I give the tankardy things with sculpted faces on them, from the tiny pottery near Phil S’s house. She does this unenthusiastically, even I can see that, but I am shoring up something, something I am making.
32: I am not sure what happens in Southampton at the weekends. I am so often at home, and to be there is either my room or out, and so often out is on the back of A.’s Honda 70 to The Roundhouse in Chalk Farm. Lindsay Kemp’s Salome. Or The Stranglers. She has painted the the back cover of Rattus Norveticus on the back of her leather jacket and I am constantly angling to wear it. But tonight the Jam are on first, and after that nothing else matters, however much the Stranglers thud and posture in a blizzard of gob.
33: H. says that before we met he was in the cafe and overheard me remotely demolishing an unsuspecting someone who had said something that had got up my nose somehow “It was hilarious,” he says, “and so theatrically out of proportion. Talking of which, you know Chris? He did a theatrically out of proportion impression of you yesterday: it went something like this.” He launches into a pantomime of sniffing, head scratching, nose picking and ear clearing, with some hand waving and knee jiggling thrown in, then sits back. I go very quiet, swallow, and look out of the window.
34: I talk other people down from trips now and then. It’s always tedious but I enjoy feeling wise and necessary. Eventually I try some acid myself: it’s a bit of a let down: or a relief. The furniture stays just furniture and so on. Some heightened, sharpened colours. Every traffic sound on the way to a Logic lecture in the morning is adamantine. In the lecture I now suddenly understand everything about logic and its algebraic conundrums. It’s a revelation: but by lunchtime it’s all a blur again, and I leave it there, in the mist, with the other hallucinogens.
35: In Ari’s room there is a stack of l.p.s on the floor. There is a stack of l.p.s on the floor in almost everyone’s room, but this stack has at the front Slow Dazzle by John Cale. He looks out from the back cover, leather jacket, hooded stare, and in his hand, revealed, is a silver heart locket. He’s not the loving kind. Behind him in the stack Kevin Ayers is louche, Brian Eno is cerebral, the New York Dolls are camply debauched. I bang on about Gissing, Orwell or A.S. Neill, but the theme is more general: us existing.
36: Two of Syd Barrett’s friends visit from High Wycombe. Glyn, feline and muscly; Mac, skinny blonde bespectacled. They are good value, with the same cheerfully unconcerned Pinterishness that Syd performs. One night after the pub Glyn takes exception to something I’ve said, and turns on me. His eyes are dead and it’s suddenly much more Pinterish than I am up for, until Mac breaks the threatening spell:
“Hey’d I tell you I went to see Iggy Pop at the Rainbow last week?”
” N0,” I say, turning to him, relieved, ” how was it?”
” It woz great. I gobbed on Iggy’s leg.”
37: One night there is a party somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, apparently, and we all pile into a car to find it. We drive out of town and down boondock roads along the edge of a river mouth. It’s as black as Newgate’s knocker, and cars pass us in either direction, as do knots of bikers.”This is getting a bit Helter Skelter, isn’t it?” someone says, and we stop by a lonely phone box. A passing car stops. “I wouldn’t go down there,’ says the driver, “coppers everywhere – something kicked off apparently.” We turn around, relieved beyond measure.
38: We go on a demo in London. It’s about x. Then there is a meeting of the entire student body to debate whether we should occupy the admin block because y : the Vice-Chancellor argues against it because z but it’s a foregone conclusion that it’s going to happen, just for the lark of it. So we spend some nights ‘occupying‘ the building, fooling around, drinking, and playing an epic game of Monopoly. I take shifts ‘guarding’ the front door but nobody bothers to come: and then we go. ‘Fucking repressive tolerance,’ hisses a newly minted Marcusian as we troop out.
39: A day or so into the occupation, feeling inadequately revolutionary, I volunteer to go out in the loudspeaker van to inform the good people of Southampton of our action. The next day I am in the passenger seat of the van, with a script: I grab the microphone and hear my voice booming out apologetically. “Students..er…action…vital…resist…um…education”
The good people stare at me with blank hostility and I sink down into my seat. After a couple more mumblings the driver has had enough. “Oh for god’s sake, give it here then,” he says, and berates the good people with brutal efficiency.
40: Somewhere in the last term there’s something that catches something in me like a reverse ratchet. I click jumpily downwards until one day we are in a philosophy exam and I just sit there. I am aware of my friends’ concerned glances at my impassive non-writing and I feel bad about distracting them: but I just shrug, shake my head and sit there until the last half an hour, when I rouse myself and write a parody of ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter‘ that ends “They seized the false philosophers, and ate them, one by one.” Then I walk out.
41: The faculty are very understanding. They’ve seen it all before: it’s 1977, and they teach philosophy. They don’t criticise, or delve, or suggest counselling (there isn’t any), but just say ‘oh dear, well never mind then,’ in slightly more elevated language and tell me that I can simply resit the exam at the start of the next year and carry on regardless. So I am excused to stay on for the summer and hold the share house we have lucked into, while the others are doing those summer things, to prepare for this resit, which I already know will never happen.
42: In the Christmas holidays I visit Ari at home. Just as I’m leaving Ari thrusts a small something wrapped in tissue at me. I open it on the train. Two matchbox sized sheets of silver, hinged at one corner, thin sheets of bone between them: an Edwardian dance card, on which is written in pencil Lovers come and lovers go / but friends are hard to find / Yes I can count all mine / on one finger.
It makes me smile, and something else, something tectonic, happens in my chest. I know I’m not supposed to mention it, so I never do.
43: One night in someone’s room I open the gatefold sleeve of Blonde on Blonde and take hours to roll a preposterous joint that goes all the way across both discs. Someone takes a photo of me unsuccessfully attempting to smoke it. When The Big Bust happens, the policeman searching his room points at this photo, stuck to the wall and says “Who’s this? We’d very much like to speak to him.” Someone dummies up, but I am as pleased as punch when he tells me this story because, theatrics aside, I have nothing to fear from any such encounter.
44: I move in to the share house for the summer. It’s in Newtown: all long Edwardian terraces with bay windows and low brick walls, rundownish, multiracial, studenty, and raffish. The woman in the house next door stands in the window waiting for custom, looking like she is at the bus stop. We take no notice, and when I discover ‘Sweet Jane‘ one day and play it over and over, and over and over and over again she knocks on the door and says very nicely could I keep it down as she is trying to get the kids to sleep.
45: I know I’m going home in autumn, but also that I’d rather be here. I say to myself that I am dropping out because I need to be back home with A. Also spending summer in the house is Crackle, who was caught up in The Big Bust, and has to stay down and do youth work as part of her probation. I go sometimes with her to the adventure playground, where the youth look at me sideways, if at all. In the rundown New Farm House we show each other some modest affection and are thrown out: dirty hippies.
46: At the very fag end of the year we drive across to Stonehenge for the free festival. I have been here before only elsewhere, much younger, when it was all adventure, and this feels like a half baked rehash of being 15. So I sit, aloof, leaning against the car, transistor pressed to ear, listening to Australia and England at Lord’s on Test Match Special, John Arlott’s descriptive, lyrical burr cutting through thuds from the stage. In the evening some people send up a homemade hot air balloon, which catches alight. It’s hardly anything, but it makes an impression, strangely enough.
47: There’s a crinkly alternative veneer, and if x has been up to London and brought back a bag of y there’s extra excitement, especially if a passing policeman gives x a dirty look and he has to throw the bag of y in a hedge and go back for it at two o’clock in the morning. But we are actually more interested in which pub serves Marston’s Pedigree, or Eldridge Pope’s Thomas Hardy’s Ale, or, our especial delight, Gale’s Horndean Special Bitter. One night a landlady tears me off a strip for swearing and I can almost taste the soap.
48: Ari and I hitch up to town for John Cale. Halfway there we are in a shop buying sweets when I realise I’ve forgotten the tickets. I hitch back and she hitches on. Then I get the train up and the tube to Chalk Farm. There’s a dense crowd outside the Roundhouse: I look around and there she is, waving. John Cale comes on wearing a rugby shirt and an ice-hockey goalie’s mask. He has a bit of a gut, he radiates something ugly. This isn’t the night he decapitates a chicken onstage, but he might as well have done.
49: Crackle’s parents come down for her meeting with the probation officer. I go with them and wait outside in their car. Her mum just looks intensely worried and keeps glancing at me and half smiling, in supplication, as if I’m of some use: while her dad, like all dads, just leans back and squints at me, as if he is looking at me through a large spyglass that he is holding the wrong way round. “I don’t know how long we’ll be,’ he says, ‘You can have the radio on but not for too long or you’ll drain the battery.’
50: In July we go to the Cambridge Folk Festival. Crackle is there, and someone and someone, and x, who’s from Cambridge and will steal books from Heffers to order, or in this instance some of the festival p.a. He has a wolfish grin and is faintly alarming. A. comes too, on her Honda 70, and meets us there. It’s all a bit awkward, and memories of last year make it more so, until the Albion Country Band lead the dance in a big open sided tent, the smell of crushed grass taking us all back in time, smiling, whirling.
51: Ari and I are walking away from Bude. And walking and walking. North Cornwall is enormous. We’ve been camping at Morwenstow, which has a pub, a church and the memory of its opium-smoking poet vicar. We see a faded handwritten sign flapping on a gate and have a miraculous cream tea miles from anything. In the twilight we nearly miss the only bus to anywhere because we are too busy bawling ‘Pretty Vacant‘ into the gloom. The only thing open wherever we end up is a Chinese restaurant that inexplicably has chicken kiev on the menu: so I eat that.
52: We get a long glorious lift across Bodmin Moor and pitch our tent on the sly in the darkness in a caravan park. In the toilets next morning a giant of a man wearing an orange wig with the lining showing through empties a chamber pot into a toilet. His caravan turns out to be next to our tent, and he asks us in for a cup of tea, served by his sister, who has Baby Jane make up and is dressed like a 60 year old Dorothy. We sip the unbelievably sweet tea, avoid each other’s eye, and are polite.
53: At end of summer Ari comes back for the second year and takes over my room. I leave. She buys me a black corduroy jacket to wear to the interview I have at Kingston Library. A friend from school whose sister lives in Southampton gives me a lift in his mini with all my lps, and when we reach my house he asks me if I want to come and have a drink with him and the lads. I demur hurriedly even though all that awaits me indoors is dad’s incomprehension, and he looks at me strangely as he drives away.
54: In the union bar one lunchtime I am thunderstruck by a face across the room. She is part of my vaguely extended group so that I may fall into a tentative orbit around her, mooning. I make her a diary at the end of the year with a thinly allegorical tale as a foreword. She sends a thank you note with grimacingly polite, thumb-and-forefinger ‘I’m flattered’ noises. Near Christmas we meet up in town: which is to say we trail round some shops while she buys presents for her family and even I can tell I’m being thinly tolerated.
55: I arrive back in Brende Gardens much as I left. I am no more able to explain why I dropped out than I was to explain why I went in the first place. Apart from a brief flurry of ‘how do you expect to get a good job now’ dad lets me be. I go, in my black cord jacket, to my interview at Kingston Library, which seems to consist entirely of being stared at in disbelief. Not so long afterwards I get a Christmas job on the receiving dock at Bentalls, the local department store. I’ve found my level.
56: I go home in one of the holidays, or over summer, and dad tells me that grandad’s printworks, Clare O’Molesey, where he was a proofreader, have shut down because of a dispute with the NGA, and he is now unemployed, with, I immediately assume, no family consideration. I take dad’s side completely, and remake my lineage as 100% Kenneally. Just before I went to Southampton dad had insisted I went round to see grandma and grandad and it had been awkward and odd. I haven’t seen them since and now I won’t speak to any of the Clares for another thirty years.
57: I run into Clive G. somewhere and then visit his spartan house halfway up Kingston Hill, He rolls a joint or two which I smoke even though I don’t really get anything out of it. He is at uni, while I have dropped out, but this is of no consequence to either of us. It’s a very nice house, possibly a squat, and I am back in Brende Gardens, but this doesn’t fuss me especially. After a while he suggests, slightly tersely, that I roll a joint. I make my excuses and leave, and that’s all there is of that.
58: Phil S. has started a record label, and releases a single by the band my old school friends are in: A. designs the label artwork and the cover of the record. They even get a John Peel session. One day I go to the record shop at Kingston station and Phil S. is at the counter with his back to me. I slide backwards out of the door. I go down to Southampton unannounced one Friday and can’t find anyone: I wait on the doorstep in the dark till they come home from the pub. I sob into Ari’s shoulder.
59: Ari drops out too, shortly after sending me a postcard that says, among other things, ‘I hate bleeding students’. Despite having no real reason to go down to Southampton, I do anyway. The World Cup is on, and at the tall unflappable public schoolboy’s semi-derelict terrace house I watch Scotland fail magnificently, He keeps looking at me as if he is just about to ask what I am doing there, but never does. The outside toilet has half a wall missing and I sit and gaze up at the stars. It’s the only time during the visit that I relax.
60: I am in Molesey. A. is in Thames Ditton. We are together. I hardly know what that means, except sometimes a shared love of a particular kind of art-school dance performance pop. Deaf School are claimable, gentle, costumed, and we go to see them at the Roundhouse one Sunday. Chugging home on her Honda we climb away from the river and at the top of Putney Hill the city warmth dies and the cold comes sweeping over us from the parks, the heath, the commons, the suburbs, down the railway embankment into her house and across the green into mine.
61: I get an agency job just across Cow Common, packing fire extinguishers. It’s close, easy and friendly but one day I suggest going to the pub at lunchtime. So then a job way over in Sutton, where they make the ingredients for vending machines. Stirring huge vats of sugar and water with a huge paddle, and adding ‘fruit’ flavour concentrate. Emptying sacks of milk powder down a hopper. Plastic cups in the tea room. A yellowing cutting on the noticeboard about the damage to the Cornwall landscape from mining pottery clay. ‘Take that, environmentalists!’ is scrawled across it in biro.
62: Somehow I get an interview to work in the cuttings library at the Institute for the Study of Conflict. I present myself at their offices in Golden Square, in an oversized suit Kevin has left behind. Despite my music hall get up, it goes pretty well, even when I have no idea where Papua New Guinea is. I get called back for a second interview, and then again to be gently let down. It’s the closest I’ll get to a white-collar job for 30 years or so. Years later I am delighted to find out that it is a CIA front.
63: After the fire extinguishers and the vending machines I sign on, but don’t tell dad. I ‘leave for work’ and then come back after he has left for work. One day dad finds my UB40 on the floor. There is a conversation of sorts, baffled angry running aground on silence. I go for another job and pretend to only have four ‘O’ levels but they see right through me. I miss another interview completely. The agency ring and I hang up on them. I watch from dad’s bedroom window as the postman walks past our front gate again without stopping.
The brakeman cometh (interlude) : In fact the agency ring several times, and I, sitting on the top stair where the phone sits on the landing windowsill, hang up several times: and then don’t answer. They write to me and ask me some questions, and I send the same letter back, altered with crossings out and insertions. I know this is actually a bit mad, but I do it anyway, in a kind of frenzy. I don’t know that it is possible for people who aren’t famous to have a ‘nervous breakdown’ or that this might be what’s happening. It doesn’t occur to me that there’s any help to be had: because there isn’t. Dad has heaved to at a safe distance: it doesn’t occur to me that since he fought at Monte Cassino when he was the same age I am now he probably can see exactly what’s happening but can’t understand why and has no way to help. It doesn’t occur to me, because I may not even know yet, that when the shrapnel sliced him nearly in half below the bombed monastery and he was thrown onto a pile of corpses, still breathing, he had also been motherless for ten years with a father who was not only helpless but loveless. It doesn’t occur to me that things may or may not be occurring to him.
64: I get a job in a magazine ‘exchange’ in Shepherd’s Bush Road. It’s an hour’s ride each way. It’s a bit dingy but I console myself with the idea of turning it into a specialist secondhand comic emporium. One day while I am on my own in the shop imagining this a bloke wearing a raincoat asks if there is ‘anything stronger’. He doesn’t mean a comic, and I realise where things are at. They let me go the next day anyway. I stop for a drink, and that worldly wiseman who goes from pub to pub offers me wisdom.
65: In April I go to the Anti-Nazi League‘s ‘Carnival Against the Nazis’ in Victoria Park. The East End is foreign, unknown to me and most of the 10.000 who march from Trafalgar Square to Hackney. There’s a Chinese dragon weaving through the march and the people in it shout ‘Eat the Nazis! Eat the Nazis!’ Actual East Enders watch from their doorsteps, implacably. Sitting in the park I offer my banter and connection with the new Southampton friends I spend the day with as a defence against the menace of fascism. The Clash play: they want a riot of heir own.
66: A. gives me a book about ‘box art’. It’s the first time I see Joseph Cornell and I realise belatedly that you can make art without being able to draw. We have a gas fire now, so the coal shed is available to tinker in. I tinker. I make a box for a new Southampton friend. I paint the last page of Animal Farm on the glass but it breaks in half on the coach to Wiltshire to deliver it. Glued to the top is a quote from Mimi Parent: “Knock hard: life is deaf.” But what to knock on?
Dad(a) (interlude)
I go to the massive Dada and Surrealism show at the Hayward. I stare reverently at the urinal and the bicycle wheel, and then, after shuffling past nearly everything, I take exception to the general reverence as being un-Dada. I stare at an empty plinth fixedly for half an hour, all the while looking out of the corner of my eye to see if my dada-ness is being noticed by anyone. I walk back truculently through the entire show, against the flow of visitors, but since this is about the most predictable thing anyone could do, and because all the visitors are English, no one takes the slightest notice, and I burst forth into the Brutalist exterior, far more surreal than anything in the actual show, and wander into Waterloo Station, honour satisfied.
67: I go down to Southampton to visit a new friend, on a Friday evening, with no forewarning: her housemate says she is away for the weekend. I walk straight back to the station to go home. as if I have just popped by, rather than having spent two hours on the train. Two Southampton acquaintances are on the platform and ask why I am there. I make up some ornate but paper thin story to explain being on the up platform of Southampton at six o’clock on a Friday night when I don’t live there. They look at me warily.
68: Tall unflappable public schoolboy has his 21st at a Jacobean pile in the Cotswolds. We get the coach down. I hug the toilet, once again, until someone bangs on the toilet door and extricates me. When the party winds down we pile into cars and end up at a cottage in the middle of nowhere. It’s so cold we light the oven with the door open, and then stand on chairs to catch the rising heat. In the morning a kind soul drives me to Cheltenham to catch the coach: everyone else gets stuck in a blizzard on the M4.
69:
Radio 4, round and round through every single day.
Listen With Mother The Archers Farming Today Thought for the Day Morning Story Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Just a Minute Desert Island Discs From Our Own Correspondent Today Woman’s Hour On Your Farm The World at One I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue Gardener’s Question Time Afternoon Theatre Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells My Word! Brain of Britain 1978 The Countryside in Early Summer Time for Verse Letter From America Down Your Way Any Questions? These You Have Loved Any Answers? Yours Faithfully Today in Parliament Lighten Our Darkness A Book at Bedtime Inshore Forecast
70: A. gets a graphic design job and moves up to town, to a bedsit at the very top of a large Victorian house in Chiswick. I arrive and stay. I can’t risk asking: I just do. It’s expressly a single bedsit: the landlady lives downstairs with her children. I have to sneak in and out and up and down the stairs very quietly and if apprehended I am visiting or popping in to drop something off. I leave my bike chained up to a fence nearby until a note appears on it: ‘This is not a bicycle park’.
71: I get an agency job in Chambon’s Riverside printworks. I spend my days pushing machine parts on an ancient trolley from one likeable skilled set for life fitter and turner from the Black Country to another. The ‘progress chaser’ has a thin moustache and a tight t-shirt and used to be in the Foreign Legion. He says he will find something ‘more my style’ in the office. Next day, after twenty minutes cleaning ink out of feeder trays with turps and an old t-shirt, I stand up and walk straight out of the gate. The legionnaire is shouting my name.
72: I go to sign on at the labour exchange in Shepherd’s Bush Road and sit in a cavernous room on the first floor waiting. There are some twitchy lads across the room but I don’t take much notice. As I am going down the stairs again a small apoplectic lad bursts out of the door behind. “Who were you looking at? Whatchoo mean screwing me in front of my mates? You want some? I’ll ‘ave yer.” I back away placating, hands out as if I am taking a wardrobe carefully down the stairs. In the street outside I shake uncontrollably.
73: In the bedsit I feel untenable, besieged in my toehold: but outside I can claim what I see. Chiswick High Road, wide-pavemented, travelling, and Turnham Green where I can imagine the Parliament’s army standing around in 1642 while the King’s army stood around a little way off and then went home. Or Kew Gardens, where we can both feel equally cultivated and temperate until the attendant rides his bicycle around at dusk shouting ‘closing time!’. But the bedsit closes in, and as I get into bed she says “Get away from me. You smell.’ and there I am in the armchair.
74: I get a Christmas job in the John Lewis Clearings warehouse in Draycott Avenue, just behind Sloane Square. It’s a round cornered, many windowed, sans serif 1930s utility building. I’m in the lighting stockroom, which has a faded air and fake gilt rococo chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. Everyone is kind. One day I say offhandedly to the personnel officer that I’ll be taking Friday off as I have to visit someone for the weekend. She tells me, not unkindly, how it is that things actually work, and to think on a bit. In the canteen the custard is always free.
75: I’m 21 today. If I have moved up to Chiswick I go home for the day. If I haven’t, I stay exactly where I am. Dad, Kevin and I watch Bonanza and Star Turn Challenge, in which ‘Bernard Cribbins invites the Carry On team (Kenneth Williams, Barbara Windsor and Kenneth Connor) to challenge the News: team (Richard Baker, Angela Rippon and Peter Woods)’. They take turns to play Edwardian parlour games that children are expected to find entertaining. Kevin gives me an onyx cigarette box and chunky lighter. I stare at it. “Well it isn’t every day you’re 21!’ he says cheerfully.
76: What the three of us don’t watch is Arena Cinema on BBC2, featuring Francois Truffaut and Bill Douglas, and their films about childhood. I haven’t discovered the auteur yet and Dad and Kevin wouldn’t be interested if I had. But how strange that just a click away on my birthday, as The Big Match blares, are The 400 blows, and its hero’s ‘tremendous ability to stand up to life and survive’: and Bill Douglas’ Trilogy, so bleak, so hopeful: I’ll see it in Melbourne, ten years from now, and never ever forget it. But for now Kenneth Williams screeches again and I laugh.
77: I buy a Black and Decker jigsaw and decide to make A. an art box . I make a sketch in the notebook in which, in grammar school cursive, I copy out quotes: Orwell, for instance: ‘The trouble with competitions is that someone always wins.’ I go to Southampton for a visit to make it so that it will be a surprise. They are all very kind as I bash away at whatever it is. I give it to A., who immediately says “I don’t like it”. 40-0dd years later I find the notebook and the sketch: she was quite right.
78: On New Year’s Eve I chain my bike up near Victoria Coach Station and get the coach down to Wiltshire to visit a new Southampton friend at her parents’ house. ‘You’d probably best keep your jacket on,’ she says at the door, and I sit unsteadily on a pouffe, alert for gaffes. On New Year’s Day we go to Cherhill, where there is a white horse, but since everything is blanketed in snow, it hardly matters. I perch on the bottom step of the decaying and dangerous monument and pack away for the future the absolute silence that is all around.
79: When I get back someone has kicked the crap out of my bike. I carry it home on the tube. The bloke at the bike shop looks at my poor battered green Peugeot: ‘What a shame: it’s a lovely bike. It’s not really rideable. Can you afford a new derailleur? No? I can take it off and shorten the chain but you’ll only have one gear. OK?’ Later I spot a label on it that says ‘This bike is unroadworthy.’ I ride it just as it is, in top gear, even up Richmond Hill, until it is stolen sometime in 1980.
80: The Southampton friends, new and old, have finished, if they finished, and are largely in London, largely in squats. Southampton ceases to exist. A. and I are living in Brixton in a basement flat. I’m starting again at university, in Hampstead. I scraped in here after scraping out at the college in Bloomsbury where I wore my white winklepicker boots to the interview and hadn’t read any of the things they asked about. I won’t get a grant for the first two years because I dropped out of Southampton. It’s an hour’s ride each way, on my unlovely new bike. I can’t wait.
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