1959: Mr McGill and Sherry
Mr McGill smoked ‘Du Maurier’ cigarettes. He lived in an ultra fashionable modernist house that was open-plan, clean cut, geometric and beautifully light. Overall Mr McGill wore his affluence as easily as his stylish cravat; he was racy without being flashy; above all, he was perfectly suave. He spoke with poise, assurance and loads of sophistication. Mr McGill worked in the new world of advertising and marketing. Design was his thing.
Mr McGill was elegantly mirrored by his wife. She had long raven-black hair, wore strong red lipstick and profiled her curvaceous womanly figure in the clinging sweaters that even anticipated the sexiness of Ms. Quant. Mrs McGill was, by now, entirely used to the good things in life. She also understood design: the interior decoration of their home had nothing to do with the past.
I listened to my parents exchanging chit chat with Mr and Mrs McGill. Mr McGill even reproduced the sentence, ‘Do have a Du Maurier.’ but he said it in such a funny way that everyone knew he wasn’t really offering anyone a cigarette. I continued to listen as Mr McGill described the pleasures of driving around in his brand new Humber. He intended to tour France in his new driving machine.
Then I heard Mrs McGill say something that caught my attention: she was referring to her daughter – a daughter who was called ‘Sherry’. Up until that moment I imagined that girls were only called Angela or Susan or Diana or Elizabeth. But here was a girl called ‘Sherry’. The strict conventions of naming were shattered. People could have great names or strange names or romantic names. And then something else was revealed: Sherry was away at art school. She was an art student who was ‘going through an abstract expressionist phase.’ Mrs McGill pointed towards some of Sherry’s paintings. ‘They express her feelings,’ said Mrs McGill. Hot colours swirled across Sherry’s canvasses. I was quietly transfixed. I had no clear idea as to how paint expressed feelings. (Underneath its all in thought words might do a better job.)
And if one surprise wasn’t enough, Mrs McGill announced something I would never forget: ‘Sherry,’ said Mrs McGill, ‘has a theory about why we are so drawn to the sea and why we like swimming.’ She paused. I had never heard someone use the word ‘theory’ in this way before. ‘She thinks that we all evolved in the sea and that we only came to land by accident. So when we are in the sea we feel as if we are back from whence we came. We feel at home.’
It was the idea of holding a personal theory – outside of all the school-books – that was so powerful. Somehow it was touched with the allure of taboo and the spirit of freedom. I did not realise that I was standing on the threshold of a kind of liberation.
1964: The 4:12 train from Basingstoke
Each day of the school term I took the train from Fleet in Hampshire to Basingstoke; I then walked half a mile or so to the school, and, in the late afternoon, once the school day was over, I took the train from Basingstoke back to Fleet. In a way, it was quite a thing to take the train to school; most of the other boys arrived by bus or on foot. (It didn’t pay to be too different at school – but a little difference was always a good thing.) After a while, of course, I had learned all the names of the stations between Waterloo and Basingstoke and between Basingstoke and Southampton. The announcements made over the loudspeaker by the British Railways man made it well-nigh impossible not to learn the names. In fact, I found it both appealing and re-assuring to listen to the rhythm of the announcements and the predictable naming of the stations:
“The train arriving at platform 2 is the 4:12 stopping at Hook, Winchfield, Fleet, Farnborough, Woking and all stations to Waterloo.” They were a good set of names. Hook reminded me of Peter Pan’s Captain Hook; I knew that there was a famous airshow at Farnborough; But Brookwood … well Brookwood had a mental hospital … I felt a curious fascination about Brookwood – although I thought it best never to go anywhere near the town. Lunatics were scary. (They were too different.)
I liked the British Railways trains. The compartments were always comfortable and I felt secure on the fading velvety seats. I liked watching the angled threads of rain streaming down the almost opaque windows; I liked the warm homely fug in the compartments during the winter months and I liked the bright cheerful framed posters that decorated the compartments: the posters sang the praises of places like Torquay or other English coastal towns. And I liked watching the express trains racing through the stations en route to the big city or to the farthest reaches of the West Country.
The morning journey to school had an entirely different character to the one in the afternoon. In the morning I was under pressure to complete my homework on the train; and the anticipation of school was OK because, in the main, school was fun. But it was a constrained version of fun. In contrast the afternoon journeys allowed just about enough time to commit and enjoy varies acts of delinquency. There wasn’t much point in being a boy unless the rules and regulations of life were ignored or over-turned. It was just one of those things.
One autumn afternoon, I, along with my schoolboy companions, hatched a plan to experiment with fireworks. We decided to have our own firework display in one of the deserted carriages. We would do this whilst on the train home from Basingstoke. Little by little we acquired a dozen fireworks with names like ‘Mine of serpents’ or ‘Molten volcano’. Our ‘piece de resistance’ was a large rocket. (Rockets were all the rage. Telstar was on the airwaves and everyone was going to the moon.) So, on one afternoon at the end of October, six boys armed with one large rocket and a number of assorted fireworks chose the most isolated carriage and found a deserted compartment. Time was short so we first wedged the rocket into the small rectangular sliding windows that the designers of the British Railways carriages had placed above the larger carriage windows. The front of the rocket stuck out towards the moving countryside and the long wooden tail pointed back into the compartment.
‘Right,’ said the oldest boy. ‘It’s ready’. Another boy lit a match and held it against the blue touch paper. Just for a second we all caught our breath. Suddenly the rocket let out a searing jet of bright fire that sprayed all the way to the back of the compartment and scorched the door. The rocket ‘launched’ itself and sped across the fields – never more than a few yards above the earthy ground. In the bright autumn sunlight it was scarcely visible; it snaked its way onwards – but soon it had disappeared, disappeared completely. However, the inside of the compartment was not only singed and slightly burned but also filled with a pungent intense blue grey smoke – a smoke that refused to disperse. It hung there like the unshakeable shadow of guilt. Of course, we, the boys, fled the scene. Who was to know if a guard might happen along? Who was to know if an officious grown-up might discover the pyrotechnic remains and report them? We all got out at the very next station. As we looked at each other we wondered what to do with the remaining fireworks. And then one of us, in a moment of studied reflection, nicely anticipated the future by declaring that what we had done ‘was not rocket science.’
1973: Basingstoke/The Dark Side of the Moon
There was once a pub in Basingstoke called ‘The Bass House’. It was a new kind of pub – with just one huge bar and a lush carpet in dark red and gold. Those who frequented The Bass House were a real mix of people – and we all knew that Basingstoke had nothing, absolutely nothing, going for it. So, we made the best of that nothingness; we were strangely free; we had no image to sustain. I must admit that living in a Basingstoke council house with my brother Roly, a dissolute Frenchman called Philippe and an austere Austrian called Heinz was to be one of the very best times of my life. Liliana was there too as was Debbie.
Most evenings we’d go to The Bass House. Sometimes up to 25 of us, friends and acquaintances, would congregate there; we’d pull together tables and form a great big circle – and lose ourselves in talk and dreams. The jukebox was enormous and sparkly and ’70s modern – all chrome and shine-on-you-crazy-diamond. And the song that we played over and over again was the Floyd’s ‘Money’. Money was on Pink Floyd’s LP ‘The Dark Side of the Moon‘; it had been released in March 1973, and had become an instant chart success in Britain and throughout Western Europe.
The years went by: 30 of them in fact. Then someone decided to release a special 30th anniversary edition of ‘The Dark Side of the Moon‘. I bought it and decided to wrap it up and give it to someone as a present. But when the day came I couldn’t bring myself to give the ‘special edition’ record away. I gave the person a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label whisky instead. The whisky bottle came in a bright pillar-box red tin. The tin had ‘Johnny Walker Red Label‘ written on it; it had a velvety interior. Perhaps it was a kind of tactile version of the whisky. Who knows?
I’ve still got the Pink Floyd 30th Anniversary LP. And it is still wrapped in beautiful gold wrapping paper. It has never been opened. The 30th Anniversary edition has itself remained untouched for 20 years. I want to leave it to my twin grand-daughters. They are still not three years old – but they already like moving to the music. (Oh – and I gave them the blue vinyl version of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Hackney Diamonds’ LP for Christmas. )
Go Ask Alice 