Sergeant Spectre's Lonely Rubber Soul

or All About The Girl

A novel by Gareth Calway © 2025 

https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/track/a-hard-days-night

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi5QpR3r5tc

Can you tell the difference between this record and the original sounds? 

for Emma

Chapter One Think For Yourself         6

Chapter Two In My Life                 28

Chapter Three Nowhere Man                59

Chapter Four Wait                 79

Chapter Five Run For Your Life         116

Chapter Six Girl                       150

Chapter Seven Norwegian Wood             179

Chapter Eight I’m Looking Through You    201

Chapter Nine The Word                 221

Chapter Ten You Won’t See Me    239

Chapter Eleven Drive My Car              273

Chapter Twelve If I Needed Someone        301

Chapter Thirteen Michelle                   318

Chapter Fourteen What Goes On               339

Chapter Fifteen Day Tripper                370

Chapter Sixteen We Can Work It Out    383

 

Entry Groove

In the 20th Century, the Ancient One, who keeps returning every 700-1400 years to straighten us out, came to Earth and worked through several channels. The Beatles was one of those channels. I want to tell you about that in the natural medium of our age: a novel, that ‘secular in outlook, rational in method’ mode of  storytelling in which God, along with romance and the age of chivalry, is dead. (As the un-Enlightened Abbé said to the French Revolution, this ‘Novel’ form is inherently atheistic, insisting on individualism, critical doubt and bourgeois realism.) In a novel, the weary God Man might in Reality be resting His mind on a celestial divan somewhere between the fourth and seventh planes of God-realisation but a novel’s prosaic testament is that He is sleeping by the roadside in an Indian ditch. The Everything in the Nothing; the Love in the space between us all; the Charity in the cavernous gap between the She’s Leaving Home generations; the Hope in the bullet-headed bang-bang black hole of Kennedy’s demise. And because of the habits of a lifetime – the ancient habits of lakhs of lifetimes, for those of an Eastern disposition – I will take the ditch-eye view, paging the darkness under an uncomprehended bedside Light, taking the whole Indian rope trick as real. But the shadow foreshadows the Sun. Some of you might remember me ten years ago performing this novel (then called ‘Incense and Insensibility’) face to face from a soapbox on the Royal Mile (I’m not sure anyone stopped to listen past the word ‘God’) and wonder why I have now been booted upstairs through a glass darkly into a blinded Apostolic Chapel.  Is it because the Fringe Committee think the Word on the street is safer hidden away in a temple or because they can make more money out of me that way?  Shoot me if I know.       

         

James Spectre, Edinburgh, August 2025.

Chapter One

Think For Yourself

Once upon a time, it was Sixty Years Ago Today… 

November 22, 1963. Cindy adds the last biscuit, straightens a wayward edge, then secures the pack. She adds the pack to the box and begins assembling another. Some firms do this by machine now but Wally Pratt’s is a family firm and does everything the family way. Her back aches but it’s only twenty five minutes to tea break. They’ll be warming up the wireless soon.

Tea break soon. Thank God it’s Friday. She nips each biscuit off the conveyor belt with practised fingers - these are the ‘rich tea’ type so they take longer. She repeats this process until she has a full box. She fastens the box neatly with masking tape. One more box and she can start on the tins.

Tea break soon. A week is a long time in politics, but it’s an eternity in a job like Cindy’s, at Wally’s Family Biscuits in Somertown, North East Somerset. Last Friday she was doing exactly the things she is doing now, in exactly the same order, looking forward to a night on the town in Bristol. Monday morning followed like a black hole. Tuesday, like a hole in a darn-less stocking. Wednesday night had been slightly different from usual because That Was The Week That Was - David Frost’s “SHOCKING AND SATIRICAL LOOK AT THE NEWS” - had been interrupted and actually taken off air by BBC governors. Cindy prays it will come back. It is the only good thing about Wednesdays. Thursdays she loves because it is payday. Hope day.

But she lives for Fridays. Friday is Heaven’s Gate, the Way Out of Biscuit Factory Hell. To Saturday Heaven.  

Now Friday is here again, regular as the clocking in machine. She is usually within the one minute late you are allowed before pay is docked; sometimes within the two minutes which cost you quarter of an hour. She once lost an hour’s pay through being fifteen minutes late. 

Tea break soon. Cindy sighs. The Prime Minister believes in family firms like Wally’s – but has probably never been in one. He is called Sir Alec Douglas-Home (‘Home’ to rhyme with the ‘tum’ in ‘tumulus’) and he went to Eton with all the other double-barrelled rugger buggers still reading the World War Two news on the front page of the Torygraph - in its monastery font – and watching All Our Yesterdays on TV. Last week Sir Alec Douglas Home (or should that be Sir Alec Douglas Whom?) renounced his title, five days after taking over as leader of the landed interest and as Prime Minister of the British Empire. He did not renounce his old school tie, imperial wealth, officer-class, Piccadilly club, pedigree, privilege, inheritance and generation though. Cindy daydreams about going West to America where the President is a young man with filmstar looks planning All Our Tomorrows. A young man whose smile seems to whisper, “Have hope. I have come to help you. We shall overcome the solidified might of the old world’s ancestral hatreds and wars and pessimisms and replace it with a new brotherhood on earth where the young of all nations will sing as one. A hope like ours can never die.” 

Tea break soon. The big wireless is turned on for the 3 pm news, its valves getting hot and bothered under the oak cabinet. Cindy pauses over her last box of biscuits as the BBC voice gathers power... 

And then that bolt from the blue. 

PRESIDENT KENNEDY HAS BEEN SHOT!

For once, the news wakes her fellow workers from their torpor. The toil is turned off. Tea breaks out. Wally Pratt, Managing Director, wonders what’s going on, but then that’s not unusual. He comes down to find out; lingers with his employees in his famous apple-cheeked family way, rosy face puffing at his trademark Hamlet cigar. ‘Churchill’ they call him behind his ample back: ‘always ready to make a speech and stand behind you in a crisis’. In the case of the actual Churchill, they accept the venerable old custodian of our finest hour needed rather more than  that successfully to prevent ‘the end of civilisation as we know it’ but in wannabe Wally’s case they really mean it. He allows them five extra minutes, frowning slightly. Then he nods at the foreman and, gradually, chatter and the machinery rolls again. 

And Friday 22 November 1963 restarts, regular as the clocking in machine. Except John F. Kennedy would never see Friday again. Kennedy, the handsome face of change and hope. The distant chance – somehow, somewhere - that there could be more to life for Cindy than Wally’s biscuit factory all week and her ‘little America’ of Bristol, if she was lucky, on a Saturday night. A new wilder West brought to her over the Atlantic waves in the wax grooves of pop records on rock and rolling ships and smuggled through the Atlantic ports to transform her bedroom; the milk bar juke box; the world. And, for a barely tolerated maximum of 45 minutes a week, to poppily transform the BBC’s ‘Light’ Programme.

The hooter goes for the end of the normal day. Cindy packs up, discards her overall. She and Margaret share a ciggy before Margaret’s overtime starts. “It’s such a shock,” says Margaret.

“Not to Wicked Stepmother Mary it won’t be,” answers Cindy bitterly.

“Your mum? Why not?”

“She’s not my mum. She’s been saying that Kennedy has it coming since he got in.” 

“But he was so gorgeous, not like a politician at all. Our lot are all Victorian grandfathers. Those who aren’t in bed with the Russians.”

“Profumo wasn’t in bed with the Russians, Margaret. He was in bed with Christine Keeler. It’s her that was in bed with the Russians.”

“Same difference.” 

The big, battered wireless is turned down, shaken to its core valves about Kennedy. “But surely even your mum will be sad?”

“Stepmum.”

“Do you have a personality clash with her or Something?” 

“No. I have a personality. She has a personality clash with everyone in the Universe.”

“Ha! She’s a Scary Mary isn’t she? Wasn’t Kennedy one of her heaven on earth brigade?”

“Yes. But her idea of a Catholic is someone who doesn’t believe the wicked world can be saved or even improved. Which is why she hates the Jews. Or made beautiful, which is why she hates the Italians. Or turned into art, which is why she hates the French. Or organised into something nearer the Ideal, which is why she hates the Germans-“

Margaret giggles. “Blimey, Cind, you’re wasted in this factory. You should be on That Was The Week That Was. You’d soon put the world to rights. I always said you was the brightest kid in our school.”

“Yeah, that’s why they expelled me.”

“Their loss. I bet your mum’s dead proud of you and your bright ideals really.”

“It’s ‘ideas’ Margaret. Unlike you immigrants from Bristol, we don’t add an ‘l’ to any word that ends in a vowel.”

“All right Taffay!”

“I hope you’re not accusing me of being Welsh!”

“Well, you are Welsh! Aren’t you?”

“Only by posthumous birth (Monmouthshire was England until 1956), step-marriage and step-breeding. I’m as Somertown as a cider apple now.” 

Margaret takes a suck at her ciggy then blows the smoke expressively sideways. “A funny kind of cider apple. Your bright ideas are ideals, Cind. There’s lots of mothers round here would give their right arm to have a… bright idealist like you in her family.”

“Not mine. Stepmother Mary doesn’t believe the world can be put to rights or made more beautiful. Or started again and made into a Brave New World, which is why she hates the Americans. Or-

“Stop it, Cindy. I can’t keep up.”

Cindy put on an Irish brogue. “Or graced with eloquence and whimsy, which is why she hates the Irish, especially the big-talking American Irish” then got serious again.  “Like Kennedy.”

“Even if they’re Catholic like her?”

“Especially if they’re Catholic like her. Look, when we were little kids who believed in Father Christmas, Stepmother Mary told us she was from Nazareth. Then when she started getting flak from fellow Catholics for being Jewish, she said she said she was Renaissance Italian. Then when people asked how come an Italian’s got blue eyes and fair hair, she said she said she was German Irish and her uncles fought on opposite sides on the First World War. Until they changed sides when Hitler signed a pact with the Pope to protect the nuns. She was brought up by nuns and hates them. ‘Pillars of salt and vinegar. Nazis in black.’ Hasn’t stopped her trying to raise me as one.”

“A Catholic?”

“A nun.”

“I can’t see her getting far with that,” scoffed Margaret, into Cindy’s flower-like laughing wickedly made-up eyes.

“No, she’s having more success with James.”

“She’s raising James as a nun?! But he’s a boy!” 

 

“So was Jesus, Mags. Now as well as the stereotypical-hysterical-feed-you-to-death-Jewish Mother who is nevertheless a combination of Italian Virgin Mary and English Mother Church, she’s a lapsed Welsh Catholic who hates Catholics even more than she hates the Welsh.”

“But she is Welsh!” a helplessly giggling and rather confused Margaret protested.

“Exactly. And hates it. But not as much as she hates the Jews which she shows by pointing out how successful they always are and how much she admires them. In her religion, the Welsh are the lost thirteenth tribe of Israel who didn’t prosper in adversity and defeat, who didn’t move heaven and earth to make the best of a bad world, who just stayed in one exiled place – Wales, a small, serially conquered Bible-bashing nation next to a big world power on the Celtic fringes of a lost land they used to occupy – and endlessly whined and harped about it in their sing-song pidgin English. It’s how she explains all the St David Old Testament hillsides and sheep and Psalm singing and chapels called Bethesda.”

“She does have a bit of a Jewish nose,” says Margaret uncertainly.

“She won’t be sad about some big shot Irish yank getting it anyway. It just proves her world-view.”

“World view?” asks Margaret, blowing smoke and giving up.

“In the SM’s case, that nothing is ever going to get better.”

Margaret frowned. ”It’s getting better all the time isn’t it?”

“It can’t get much worse! Stepmother tells me optimism is like having spots. You grow out of it.” 

Margaret, not for the first time, gives way before Cindy’s extraordinary precocity. Like Shakespeare’s Juliet, or George when he joined the Beatles, Cindy is 14, two years’ younger than Margaret; but she got the job – “if you’re old enough to be expelled for smoking, you’re old enough to pay for your keep!” insisted Stepmother – because, like the girl in The Sound of Music and the Her in I Saw Her Standing There, she looks “16 (going on 17)”. 

“Why d’you call her Stepmother when she’s your real mum!”

“A real mum wouldn’t tell me to grow out of my dreams.” Cindy sighed. “Well Kennedy’s grown out of his now.”

“I still can’t believe he’s dead.” Margaret inhales sharply, releases the smoke in a long slow sigh, then hands the big Bristol filter-tipped to Cindy. Cindy watches the flame as it burns away at the tobacco, dropping ash and bits of paper onto her sleeve. Her thoughts are elsewhere.

“Penny for them,” says Margaret.

“Dollars,” laughs Cindy wryly. “I was wondering what will happen in America now.”

“You think too much, Cindy. Leave politics to the old men and live a bit. You’ve got a lot going for you – half-decent looks, decent money-”

Cindy accepts the compliment of ‘half-decent looks’ in the spirit in which it was given (grudgingly) but objects to the imputation of wealth. “Not after Stepmother Mary’s taken half it in rent-”

“ -Johnny and his motorbike, places to go-”

“And nothing to wear! I’ve worn the same brown skirt on our last two dates!” 

A hooter sounds and they turn back inside.

“Colston Hall again tonight?”

“Not two weeks in a row. Johnny’s pretty flush now he’s got his apprenticeship but he isn’t made of it. Anyway, last week was crap.”

“I thought you saw The Beatles!”

“We did.”

Margaret screams. ”NO!”

“I’d been looking forward to it for weeks. That sexy guitar. That sexy beat-”

“Those dreamboat looks, those fab suits and boots, those choirboy voices-”

“John singing Anna like he’s singing it right to you, out of millions-”

“‘All of my life I’ve been searching for a girl who loves me like I love you!’ Well look no further, Johnny baby. I’ll love you like a mother!”

“Not like a mother, Margaret! And they don’t do that one live. That’s strictly for the bedroom.”

“Paul n George ooing and ah-ing, hair tumbling and head-shaking. Ringo hitting you right on the spot. Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!”

“Yeah. Except they didn’t. We got half an hour of screamers. Wetting themselves, being sick, jumping up and down like a whore’s drawers. I could have slapped the one in front of me-”

“Had Paul got over his gastric flu? I’ve been so worried about him.”

“Well he was there.”

“Who sang A Taste Of Honey with George?

“John. He sang A Waste of Money. He was right.”

*

Another town, another concert, another thrash through I Saw Her Standing There, From Me To You, All My Loving, You Really Got A Hold On Me, Roll Over Beethoven, Boys, Till There Was You, She Loves You, Money, Twist and Shout. Another thirty minute long screaming climax. 

Another round of the same old questions. 

The Beatles face them with one cheeky grin, one wacky accent, one Goonishly-raised eyebrow-concealing fringe. They do not answer as John, Paul, George or Ringo but as Beatle, a bundle of North country mischief greater than the sum of their sizeable parts.  

When they finally meet the Beatle-deposed King of the Fifties in 1965, Elvis will address each of them, collectively, as ‘Beatle.’ Dylan, a fellow Prince of the Sixties, will only meet them by individual appointment. Both Americans are wary of what Jagger called the ‘Four Headed Monster’ (jealous perhaps of a One for All his own gang never quite pulled off) that has turned the world. Even the thirty-headed press is no match for their Liverpool rock n droll.

“Do you like topless bathing suits?”

“We’ve been wearing them for years.”

“Are you a mod or a rocker?”

“A mocker.”

“What do you call the hair?”

“‘Arthur’. No more questions about the hair.”

“How did you feel when they named a night club after it?”

“Proud. Until I saw the nightclub. We’ve answered these questions a thousand times already. ‘When are you going to get a haircut, George?’”

“When are you getting to get a haircut, George?”

“I had one Yesterday. I answered that question Yesterday.”

“When are you getting to get a haircut, John?”

“Tomorrow Never Knows. Maybe in 1966 when I play a soldier in a film about how I won the war.”

“Do you mind it when people imitate you by wearing Beatle wigs?”

“They’re not imitating us because we don’t wear Beatle wigs.”

*

That was Mocker John, the ‘Funny One’. (Except they were all The Funny One.) Pre-Beatle British Beat was rarely even Grammar-school bright, let alone the Wit in Witgenstein like this. Elvis couldn’t think on his feet, or for himself, like this – ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker did it for him and trousered half his credits for the service. Though he was the Original rock and roller (“before Elvis there was nothing” as John declared and they were definitely his followers in their choice of artform) he was never original in the way the Beatles were. Elvis pelvised from inside the box; the Beatles came from there then thought themselves magically outside of it. The Stones were clever enough to do the same – Jagger wittily, Jones mystically, Richard musically, Watts jazzily, Wyman menacingly – but tended not to; too laid back on their rock and rolling bed of groin to want to think too much and instead developing Elvis’s Black and Blues into a body dance high art of their own. Only Dylan matched the Beatles’ witty originality and ability constantly to re-think every aspect of their art and careers, endlessly to re-create themselves; not just the fabled Lennon-McCartney trail-blaze but Ringo’s carefully thought out drum-scapes and that extraordinary George-led pilgrimage into Indian music for example. It was how the Beatles’ and Dylan’s fused, and in some ways competing, mind forces redirected and defined the Sixties, as commemorated on their homages to each other on the covers of Pepper and John Wesley Harding. But the Fabs usually managed to apply that trail-blazing British mind with a smile, a Goonish laugh and a heartlifting tune – and without being nasty; not always the case with their Old Testament Prophet-like American alter ego.

*

“John, the French are still not sure about the Beatles. What do you think of them?

“O we like the Beatles.” 

“When are you going to America?”

Paul cocks an eyebrow. “When we’re Number One there as well.” 

“British acts die there.”

George beams his crooked-teethed grin, his voice ration-thin. “They should have done their apprenticeship in Liverpool.”

Ringo rocks an Elvis pelvis. John joins in, “We feel so lonely we could die.” Everyone laughs.

“Aren’t you afraid of getting shot?”

John can’t help himself. “More so in Dallas than other places!”

*

Would that laughter-pealing stage-lit beaming Beatle brightness elude the comprehension of the petrified old misery that had just shot Kennedy’s star into a black hole? wonders Cindy, back in her Somertown bedroom.  Would the ancient gun-barrel trigger-unhappy darkness find the Beatle High Noon too high to shoot down? Her heart, beating to the music, says Yeah yeah yeah. Almost everything in Council House Number Nine (outside her starry Beatle-postered bedroom) and quite a lot of the gunshot-buzz in her own bee-hived head tells her No. Use your mentality. Wake up to reality.

She refuses to believe that reality. She shakes her head and stretches her eyelids wide. She, along with her beehive hairdo, has a new story. She applies the eye shadow like a cover girl artist to bring out the brilliance of her eyes. She purses her mouth for a heart-red happy lipstick kiss. She is making herself up. As a Beatle. 

In the mirror, she sees a sixteen-year-old girl gaze back at with house-coal eyes under that heavily fringed beehive. I Want To Hold Your Hand is playing very loudly on her hire-purchased record player. Her parents are shouting up the stairs at her. Her father which art not in heaven is a shop steward who had a good National Service rising towards sergeant, until his class roots pulled him back. Her Stepmother Mary was born giving orders and has a general chip and pip on her shoulder, which includes her fury at Mr Sargent, the older man next door, grabbing the wartime Sergeant rank her National Service man turned down.  Mr Sargent is now foreman over ‘Our Father’ the shop steward and the Jews are somehow responsible for this; as they are for the whole Beatles’ Zionist-conspiracy managed by Brian Epstein and crash-bang-walloped from behind their awful din by Richard Starkey. (Whose family surname is from the Shetland Isles if anywhere and isn’t even his original family surname anyway – his grandfather changed it to Parkin and neither Starkey nor Parkin is remotely Jewish but you try telling Stepmother any that that…) Or if not the Jews, the Irish. (She is on more secure ground with Beatle origins there: “We’re all Irish” as Lennon delightedly will tell a waiting and overjoyed Dublin airport crowd.) She barks out her orders.

“You are NOT going out!”

“Just you try to stop me!”

And for two more years, this is exactly what her parents will do.  They will try to stop her. And they more or less do stop her, as they have always done. And they have a lot of Help. The fortress cavity walls of her council estate bedroom; the steely kitchen sink surrealism of the kitchen sink; the hidden meaningless of the council estate hearth (bricks covered with plaster, then wallpapered with brick-effect wallpaper)- and the council estate job she does at the biscuit factory – and the boy-centric Key Worker estate Grammar school from which she was expelled – and the wannabe Sergeant class at the council estate bus stop sniping ‘I know what I’d do if that Cindy was one of my mine’ – and the government – and the monarchy – and the Empire – and the police – and the legal system – and the class system – and the tyranny of Standard English Behaviour – and behind all this the Standard English Army – all hold her in thrall, for all her screaming. She can’t get out. 

But don’t you know it’s gonna be… ALL Right. The Beatles can get in. They get in everywhere. 

They even get in the Times. (Though they still can’t understand what it’s saying about them.) 

Ted ‘Hampstead’ Heath, the former Lord Privy Seal and Secretary of State for Industry, Trade and Regional Development, current President of the Board of Trade and the bright old voice of the Tory Future can, but he can’t understand why the Beatles are in there and neither can he understand their ‘peddy weck’ accents. He implores them for the Good of the Nation to Speak Up. Beatle-suited Lennon loosens his tie and drolls, “I won’t be voting for Ted.” And a generation follow (Beatle) suit. 

*

The Rolling Stones gang up outside the council estate living room of Council House No 9, Homeway, Somertown, striking lasciviousness slouches in their outlaw cuts and career pantomime of working-class toughness. (The Neanderthal Stones debuted at the arty Marquee in London. The moptops forged their Orpheus tonsils and dole-queue escape guitar lathes in the cellar furnace underworlds of Liverpool and Hamburg.) Hit me with your panto stich Mick: “Well, I’m a king bee, buzzing round your hive…” They are from a much better area than this council estate – Brian is from Cheltenham and Michael, a schoolteacher’s son, met Keef when Michael was on his way up from Kent to the London School of Economics and Keef was on his way up from Kent to art school. They are wearing the Black hats the Beatles have left on the peg or rather turned star-bright and irradiated with their inner light; the heavy-hearted enticing Shadows the Rolling Sisyphus Stones are left standing in. They are letting their posh Grammar School trousers down as usual. They don’t want to be Middle Class. They want to be Upper Class! They swing on the gate and practice shocking new curses – like ‘Fuck Me!’ – and spit their cocaine cola into the privet hedge and finally – to the horror of Mrs Sargent’s grey rinse brigade meeting at no 8 –do their (big, show) business in the petrol garage forecourt at the bottom of the road. Cheltenham Old Boy Brian Jones– keeping down with the Joneses – and Mick ‘the Prick’ Jagger and the rest huff and puff like big bad wolves at Cindy the girl from Council House No. 9 who watches them enthralled from her bedroom window. “I can make honey baby, let me come inside…” They pouff like a big girl’s blouse too and she likes that too but she’s not sure why. 

But the sticks-n-Stones never get into the council estate living room of No. 9. After a while, they yawn and clear off through the open fields and back to southern suburban bohemia and hang around the charmed rear entrances of the aristocracy where they do much better. Within a year they are aristocracy themselves, to the bad manner and servants born, Jagger’s brilliant Dylan-bright society satires telling stories that wouldn’t be out of the place in the Telegraph (though performed with a rock and roll circus that wouldn’t be out of place in a zoo) while King John Lennon – who met Paul at a north country fete – is still angsting like a guilty working mother about having to employ child minders. 

Never mind. That’s one of the reasons the Beatles get into the council estate living room of No. 9 through the front door. Benign charladies smile and say how the moptops haven’t let fame go to their heads and don’t they look smart in their suits. Oh they’re smart all right. Beatle John hangs out of the bathroom window now for a laugh and Beatle Ringo puts a ringed hand up through a hole in the roof above the chimney pot. “Why don’t you wave?” says one charlady. “Don’t like to,” demurs the other – and then waves anyway. And the Boys – as always – wave back. And everyone beams at Love’s cheeky choirboys and their loveable Liverpool lip. 

They’re in! –and whatever Cindy’s stepmother at Council House No. 9 says about the mutability of pop, they’re in for good. They move in at No. 1 and No. 1 leads straight up the garden path to all the other numbers. They have all the keys and they know how to use them. They start with the girl’s bedroom – in the heart-shaped wardrobes and drawers and in all her secret places – and then on to her little brother’s bedroom and then they slide down the banisters to the family living room and granny parlour and then they slide up the banisters in a whooping foursome to the bathroom and landing and gradually work through the whole house, even under the parental mattress. Even the shed, with its slugs, snails and puppy-dog horror tales, and the locked attic, with its crepuscular secrets. They get in under the beds and stairs clattering around with the mops – which they wear on their heads – and the washboards – from which they wring exquisite music – and in and out and in and out of the bathroom window and they hang out in the kitchen pecking at the girl’s pretty cheeks while she cooks, angel-cheeping all the time like four beautiful blackbirds. They are the Kings of the doll’s house. And of all of the other dolls’ houses. They get in everywhere, from Morecambe to Wisdom, from Maggie and Pam to Dusty and Helen and the London Palladium, from the gutter all the way up to Buckingham Palace. They get in and in and ever further in and then when they are all the way in, guess what they do?  

“The Beatles want to hold your hand but the Rolling Stones want to burn down your town,” pontificates Tom Wolfe. 

The fool.

It was the Beatles who burned it down.

*

Their January 1963 biggest-yet five-date world tour of Scotland in sub-zero blizzards between January 2 and 8th, ending in Glasgow, was a bit like the non-event in Paris that would start world Beatlemania in 1964: the lull before the weltsturm. On the Helen Shapiro tour which followed, a telegram arrived onstage at the Cavern Club on 19 February announcing Liverpool’s finest had just reached Number one with Please Please Me. The news was greeted with silence by a Cavern faithful who knew this was the end of their exclusive rights to Liverpool’s greatest export. Whereas Love Me Do had flip-flopped up and down the hit parade peaking at 17, Please Please Me established the pattern of the Beatle future. A song showcase on Thank Your Lucky Stars. Rave reviews. Airplay. Liverpool sales figures gone Nation-wide. Number One.

That next tour with Americans Tommy Roe and Chris Montez, whom they replaced at the top of the bill, ended in March, with the January snow still piled in the streets; and with the April release of From Me To You. The Mersey was the new Thames; that British beat Sound signed up by London promoters as all the other Liverpool groups (most of them Epstein-managed with the notable exception of the Searchers) rode the Mersey tide to the top of the charts. By the summer, the BBC was offering the Beatles a fifteen week series Pop Go The Beatles.  Beat Monthly, mostly about the Beatles, was launched and The Beatles Monthly Book followed.  In June, ABC screened an all-Liverpool edition of Lucky Stars (Summer Spin) with the Beatles beaming all over it. The Moptops’ debut LP Please Please Me broke with tradition by showcasing 14 hit songs rather than the one hit single and a pile of forgettable fillers with which artistes usually conned the public out of their hard-earned cash. 

In 1964 there would be five tours, four of them to the world; a box office world-conquering feature film; two chart topping albums and four monster singles. In a word, (world) Beatlemania. In 1963, Britain had this happy madness to themselves: you can still hear it canned on those first two albums like the “tinned Beatle breath” the Americans started selling each other in 1964, only on these 1963 albums the breath is both eternal and actually theirs; not to mention pent, bated, panting, heavy, fast, whooping and breathless. The Fab Four line up: four lead vocalists, three top lead vocalists, a top drummer and three top guitarists, the lead guitarist a better guitarist even than the yin/yang double act guitar-driving the whole and increasingly writing the songs, effectively meant you were buying four albums in one, four double A side singles in one. The sense that they were always potentially four different acts as well as the irresistible Fab Force was there in the 1963 Beatles break up story George denied with his “We know that on our own we would be useless.” Yes, he would eventually change his tune at the end of seven years of that scintillating creative tension because all things must pass indeed, even Beatlemania, but not for an awful lot of years longer than pop acts were expected to, including by the Fabs themselves; or most groups (less sublimated by that All For Four and Four For All principle) can stand. 

At the start of the 1963 summer residences in British holiday spots (Margate, Weston, The Channel Isles, Llandudno, Bournemouth and Southport) in July, they record She Loves You (after singing it in Great Yarmouth the night before), their fourth single, a tour de fab force on three guitars, thunder drums and four joy-fused voices that embodies the peak of British Beatlemania just as All You Need Is Love will embody the peak of Summer of Love live satellite-broadcast World Beatlemania four years later. They also finish recording With The Beatles but delay its release because the first LP won’t stop selling. In 1963, it never does and it will only lose its place at the top of the UK LP charts at Christmas when With The Beatles out-sells it for an old One Two to the Album charts for Christmas.

In August 3, they play their last Cavern Club set in Liverpool. The historic venue, like Liverpool itself, is now too small to hold them and soon all but the large theatres Epstein is booking will be too small not just to hold them but to keep them safe. Next year not even Britain will be big enough to hold them and after 1965 no tour venue in the world will be able to keep them safe. Soon they will look nervously at each other to see which one has been shot whenever a loud bang is heard onstage and they’d been jostled and endangered by crowds many times before an ‘insulted’ little Hitler (Marcos) arranged for them to be kicked and punched by his conscripted fan club in a Philippines airport in 1966. Meanwhile, back in 1963, as Autumn closes over the first Beatlemania summer, they make their first foreign tour – typically, nine frantic concerts, plus radio and TV appearances, in one week, to Sweden – and record I Want To Hold Your Hand, the song that breaks them in America, a British act that can finally Beat the world (and a British Invasion following behind them…) 

They fly back from Stockholm on 31 October to that first and unexpectedly wild Beatlemania homecoming – hundreds of screaming fans, many sporting Beatle haircuts; the girl-screams drowning out the jet engines; a hundred reporters and photographers all jostling for a piece of The Boys. Then in November there’s that infamous Royal Command Performance – with Scouser John threatening to say “I’ll just tell them to rattle their fuckin’ jewellery” - and With The Beatles selling half a million copies in a week and the rock and rolling Twist And Shout EP selling 250,000. And their own I Want To Hold Your Hand finally displacing She Loves You at the top of the charts (en route to the top of the US charts in 1964) like a harbinger of the way the world would soon be taking Britain’s beloved Beat boys away…

They finish 1963 at Numbers One and Two in the Christmas singles chart (I Want Hold Your hand disputing the top spot with She Loves You; a Christmas 1-2 feat only ever repeated by themselves at the height of their 1967 comeback with Hello Goodbye and the Magical Mystery Tour EP) and Numbers One and Two in the LP charts (With The Beatles and Please Please Me) while topping the bill for the annual Royal Command Performance. 

*

Cindy is walking past some boys kicking a plastic football outside No. 7. The ball makes scuffing and skidding noises, and occasional metallic thumps against a Ford Anglia, a workman’s van (Marley Tiles), a three wheeled Robin Reliant and a bookmaker's D type Jaguar visiting his poor relations at Number 4. The ball rolls to her high-heeled toe and she pokes it back, acceptably off target in those unreconstructed days for a girl. She is dolled all the way up from fishnets and sparkling shoes to badger eyes and beehive. The beatnik sloppy-Joe sweater and tight trouser-pants of the year before are buried now at the bottom of her wardrobe, though their untamed beatnik spirit remains in the way she moves. It is the breezy northern soul of British Beat: jangling, factory-gate, dock-breezing, chunky: fresh-chords striking off a cheeky boy-guitar and a huge warehouse-echo drum. She seems to move to that young, innocently smirking beat. She is a teenager with money to spend on suddenly ultra-available teenage clothes – and she knows how to spend it. 

“Hi gorgeous,” whistles panting London-born Mick ‘the Prick’ Price, from No 28, just that bit older and more cynical than the others. She acknowledges Mick’s homage with a wave of an American girl-group fingerless glove and a sizzle of nylons. And smiles. And walks on by. 

The rest of the boys don’t get it. Like Pelé, they “live for football, only for football”, especially the girl’s Sweet Baby James. Me. 

Cindy doesn’t see me but she knows I am there at the edge somewhere, skulking in the shadows as usual, biding my time. 

The George of the group.

  

Chapter Two

In My Life

Hello, Edinburgh! If you’re there. Is there anybody going to listen to my story All About The Girl?

No, over here. Yes, it’s me, your invisible narrator, your MC with the magic wand, waving at you in the dark. Waving or drowning? I wonder. Waving what? you ask. (If you’re here.) A warm gun. A loaded Mark Chapman Revolver. Bang bang. Shoot shoot. Blowing blue meanie daylight through the Bible of Beatlemania onto his own centre stage obscurity and our beloved Beatle into a black hole. Like all the other WannaBeatles biographers and tribute acts I want to hold yet also bite the hand that feeds me. Semi-detached suburban narrator Mr Bungalow Bill to the rescue. A Nowhere Man living in a Nowhere land making all his Nowhere plans for Nobody. A dark horse running on a dark racecourse, a little short of breath and very long of odds. Welcome to my bunker. Welcome to my black hole.  Welcome to my L’Appelle du Vide. I want the world to come together over my show and I get twitchy when it doesn’t so get out your mobile phones and set the camera to spotlight. You may have to shoot me. Shoot me.

I’ve always had to support my artistic ‘career’ with a day job so embarrassing I’m not even going to tell you what it is. Did someone shout ‘teaching’? Good God no!   That’s what Stepmother wanted me to do. I’m never going to tell you but what I do for a living isn’t QUITE as embarrassing as doing a job your mother wanted you to do, if only so she can tell you how much better she’d have done it herself if her cheated generation/gender/class had ever had the chance. Have you ever been at any kind of social event with off duty teachers? No you haven’t because they’re never off duty, they’re always telling you about how impossible the job is. ‘Hello How are you? Right. Enough about you. Did I tell you I’ve got this Head who never supports her staff, a deputy head who never does his job, a year head who never supports her colleagues against the kids, a pupil in my class who never stops talking…’ … 

All right, I present “On The Beat” for my local radio station, (‘With Our Very Own Lonely Hearts Club Phone-In And Fab Force’s Favourite – ‘Send Us Your Beatles Requests’) and a guest detective talking about crime in the area (‘Evening all’) over all of which Babel I preside as ‘Detective Sergeant Spectre’. It’s not who I am. It was never what I wanted to do. It was never who I wanted to be. But who I am and want to do-be-do-be-do never got seen by enough people. My fleeting hits have been like a politician who is appointed Shadow Minister never the actual Minister. My art has never set any national agenda or showcased my word in any spotlight in which the world can see it. You won’t see me. You’re looking through me. You’re probably not even here. I’m a voice in a wilderness. My vision-in-a-dream gift of tied-tongues (‘if I forget thee, oh Jerusalem, may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth’) is (as one of my previous shows was called) Wasted On You Lot.

Apologies about the lighting plot. I’m afraid my lighting man comprehended it not and, though he was happy to sort it at the last minute, for half a monkey and a packet of hooves, I’d already just been stung for an unexpected £150 for previously unmentioned ‘performance insurance’ (making my warm up/pre-show breathing exercises today a race down and up a 1 in 4 Edinburgh gradient just before showtime) so I said we’d make do with this old reading lamp I found backstage. (wheeze)

*

On with the story! This is a double bildungsroman; the coming-of-age tale of a teenage girl on her magical-realist mystery tour through the Sixties, who goes missing at the end of the decade. And of her younger brother, Me, narrating the whole thing from a Wannabeatle stage here at the Edinburgh fringe 60 years later.

Somehow, that “white-hot heat of technological revolution” – and all its attendant revolutions – is now sixty years ago, as far away from the new Now as Queen Victoria’s last days were from the Beatles. At the time, and for quite a while afterwards, the Sixties felt like an eternal Now further ahead than any Now had ever been. It was another country; a decade in which there was a great deal of progressive discontent (and a great deal to be progressively discontented about) but in which there WAS a Society (led by a gifted meritocracy of talents drawn from all classes across many fields and in which the old Etonian rulers were Yesterday’s Men) free school milk; government Acts to eradicate child and adult poverty; Acts to promote safety at work; Acts to promote racial harmony and gender equality; workers’ rights; a functioning national health service (not broken at every level by the health business); public ownership of major industries; social security; full public transport; community singing; full student grants; no tuition fees; Richard Burton, the son of a miner and a barmaid, playing Hamlet at the RSC;  Glenda Jackson, the Birkenhead daughter of a bricklayer and a cleaner, getting to RADA and the RSC, John, Paul, George, Ringo… (Harry, Harold, Alfie, Vic, Joe, Frank, Billy, Glenda, Mary Q, Cilla, Lulu, Sandy, Twiggy...) and a whole band of working-class smart Alecs, born in the darkest days of the Second World War, conquering the world with glorious upbeat music, working class heroes of a fairy-tale coming true. 

This is fairy tale in sixteen chapters. Each chapter is named after a track of the Beatles’ Rubber Soul album released, overtime-late (along with a separate double A side Christmas Number One single, the generosity of genius, added here as two bonus chapters) on December 4 1965. In fact, one of the hidden meanings of the show is revealed if you read the chapters in the order they play on the album rather than the order they are performed in the show and printed in the novel, beginning with Drive My Car and ending with Run For Your Life. Rubber Soul was a moment where two Beatle trajectories crossed at their highest point: the collective studio-artistry of a still-live rocknroll act. Eight days later the greatest popular band of all time – with 1,466 gigs and counting under their belts and over four years of studio recording left - performed their last ever live British concert tour date at the top of the global singles and albums charts for the third Christmas in succession: in front of two houses of 2,500 people; in Cardiff.  This curiously charged moment (on Sinatra’s 50th birthday) provides the fairy tale centre piece of the story.

The fairy tale is narrated by me costumed as Detective Sergeant Spectre and one of its nine abandoned titles was Detective Sergeant Spectre’s Lonely Rubber Solo (a nod at critical theorists who assert that artistic creation without an audience is some kind of barren self-pleasuring and also at those novelists who evidently agree.)  Not an actual policeman. I’m a writer-performer, as you can see (or could if there were any lights). A professional artist who does it for love rather than the money that can’t buy it (in fact who is paying for it rather than being paid.) An artist with a vocation and without an accountant. Looking for his soul rather than selling it. A detective of the murder mystery of life. More PC Plot than PC Plod, PC Plotting the Beat at the scenes of the crime. Detective Sergeant Spectre and his lonely rubber soul is metaphor for the artist I AM if I can only find an audience to art on.

Is there anybody going to listen to my generation gap story all about the girl? That remains to be seen. And, in the present set up, sans lights, probably not by me. Or you. If you’re here.

*

Council House No 9, St Jude’s Road, Homeway, Somertown, where Cindy and I grew up, was Beatlemania and England winning the World Cup Final. Stepmother Mary and Absent Dad’s lifelong Welsh-English Anschluss of accents could never agree on anything – gass mosk, wasps (to rhyme with asps) were two of the biggest father and mother tongue-twisters we inherited – and Cindy and I grew up pronouncing ‘Homeway’ like it was the German ‘Heimweh’, the longing for home.  4, Snob View, Fernwey, Hybris, Somertown was ‘Pepper’ and British teams bringing home the European Cup and Cindy Leaving Home but coming back for Christmas. (We grew up pronouncing Fernwey like the German ‘Fernweh’ the longing to be elsewhere.) ‘Hiraeth’, (a uniquely powerful Welsh word for a uniquely powerful Welsh feeling that combines the German ‘Heimweh’ and ‘Fernweh’ at once, of which more later) 13 Graveside Villas, St Jude’s Road, Milltown, in Cwmcysgodynomarw (the Valley of the Shadow of Death) was ‘Abbey Road’ and losing all of it. 

The Beatle gospellers always pontificate about ‘Pepper’ as the peak, the incredible high before the comedown that (in ‘Prince’ Philip Larkin’s words) “couldn’t get down”. And they talk, more accurately, of ‘Abbey Road’ as the end and consummation of it all. The dreamy, matured perfection they achieved in their sleep. But it was the hindsight-corny Billy Cotton wakey wakey Beatlemania that waved the wand. Those World Cupping Liver-cool lads laughing their way through black and white interviews attempting to comprehend the channel of light their musical air raid was playing across all our darknesses. In those magical Northern accents. The rags to riches fairytale before Cindy left…

*

(cough) Just catching my breath. Sorry… (cough)

If there was light, you’d see a wonky NHS spectacled Lennon-visioned smart Alec from the working-class Grammar school era, who tells it as he sees it. Abrasive (cough) but reliable. Truculent (wheeze) but objective. Unsympathetic, maybe, but, like an old Dock Green police sergeant, I stand up in court. Evening all. And I remember the Sixties like they were Yesterday. 

Apologies to those of you expecting a fab foursome. My guitarists split yesterday (“musical differences, personal differences, business differences” ie they wanted to be the star; we hated each other and we weren’t making any money) so in a slight change to the brochure, I’ll just spin the old vinyl (out of its original wrappings) drum along behind my toy Ringo kit and talk over. (If you let me, I will go on about vinyl like a Biblical scholar saying ‘you’ve got to read the Gospels in the original and on the original papyrus to really hear them’.)

Most of the vintage vinyl concerned – this pile here – was my big sister Cindy’s faithfully sustained Leaving Note to me in 1967: her complete 1962-1967 collection of Beatles records fanned out across my bed like a kaleidoscope, the 12 singles, 12 Eps and 7 LPs. Parlophone green wrappings for the singles after the first two (red). Yellow and black labels for the albums. This other pile is the next 10 singles and 5 LPs she parachute-dropped me (like Field Commander Cohen parachuting acid into diplomatic cocktail parties) every Christmas and birthday after that. All You Need Is Love, Hello Goodbye, The Magical Mystery Tour EP; the two 1968 singles on Parlophone and then all the late period Apple stuff, 1968-1970 – black wrappers for the singles and Granny Smith green/ white Apple labels for the albums. 

The sound may surprise some of you. It’s called ‘mono’ and it’s what they used and the only playback they listened to until 1969 (ie the Yellow Submarine LP, Abbey Road and the two final Number Ones: Get Back and The Ballad of John and Yoko.) It means you get the whole band all together rock and rolling down the middle in a delicious trebly blend and you don’t get Paul’s big bass bouncing like a rubber ball all over and off it and the psychedelic guitar and vocal effects somewhere to the far right of your ear instead of right in your third eye. And that wax-warm crackle accompanying the glorious music is the groove. 

Oh those once omni-played and now sadly under-streamed Beatlemania albums.

‘Please Please Me’ winks its raw, dazzling record of a cheap colour-photographed Fifties-looking band that knows the stage like the back of its guitars taking to the new enchantments of the studio like a duck arse to water: the mirror opposite of the Let It Be project.

‘With The Beatles’ freezes me still in its dazzling cool-six-week-snow Black and White Christmas of 1963, Beatle magic stretching away beyond the past and future. The Christmas Present I never had. 

‘A Hard Day’s Night’ beams up at me under that Beatle fringe like a lost innocence, the Beatle girlhood She was leaving behind. Every album is our family album; my childhood and her youth on record. The fairy tale which Big Sister Cindy told me at bedtime (and which I Imagined she was still telling me after she’d gone) to make up for the fact Stepmother wouldn’t let me stay up to see the Fab Four for real on Ready Steady Go with Beatle-fringed Cathy MacGowann. The fairy tale that was so much better than my kitchen-sink real life under Stepmother’s regime of her always having to win and me always in inconsolable tears for hours because “you’ve got to keep children on a tight leash or they’ll take over.” “But I’m not a dog and anyway Special is a dog and she’s-”. “Right that’s it, upstairs to your kennel! Whack.” The fairy tale that could wave a magic wand over the doghouse of Council House Number Nine, with the car lights to somewhere else strafing my Night Mare ceiling and a freight train to Fairyland chuffing along at the bottom of our road…

Once upon a time there was darkness. The repeated hitting of a metallic object: at first without rhythm, then attaining rhythm. A train-rhythmic bell-beat of hard docky places. 

 

“Beat music. Music of the beaten. Only we weren’t beaten. We beat. Where are we going fellers?”

 

“To the top, Johnny, to the top.”

 

“And where’s that fellers?”

 

“To the toppermost of the poppermost.”

 

The beat was seized from the heart of darkness and brought in chains down rivers of blood. It was worked to death on slave plantations but it wouldn’t die. It sang, it swayed, it rocked. It came back to haunt the harbours of Slave City. It was unloaded in the cargoes. It broke out of caverns and warehouses, off wharfs and docksides, out of ships from America. It scraped its feet across concrete. It ran wild in young bloods and cool cats in the corridors and cul-de-sacs of Liverpool...

 

“We quarried the beat from metal and stone.”

 

“We called ourselves the Quarrymen.”

 

“We hammered it into life and shape.”

 

“We called it – The Beat-alls.”

 

The Beat-alls in Hamburg, November 1960. Hiding their light under a bushel. And the light shone faintly in the total darkness.

 

John ‘Winston’ Lennon (born 1940) – not yet the legend Beatle John Lennon – nor the post-legend John ‘Ono’ Lennon-  is leaning against a dockside pillar. He is wearing a beetle-black leather jacket and leather jeans. He looks hard as nails and sharp as nails but inside he is crying. 

 

Paul and George – teenagers (born 1942 and 1943) are in his vision, which is blurred because it is dark and because he is not wearing his glasses. Paul is whistling, buoyant as always, even though a Hamburg sailor’s cigarette lighter blacked his eye on stage last night. The bruise goes with the leather casing and counterpoints the cherub looks. 

 

German seagulls are screeching outside. The Fab Force is being hammered out in adversity, under the low lights of Europe, in a beer keller. 

 

The Beatles are Made in Hamburg as much as England. And that means quality. The yellow submarine was a U boat on acid. A generation wearing Sergeant Pepper’s Kriegsmarine Surplus after the Salvation 8th Army won the war. A Goon voice cackling I Am The Wireless, amid a lorra nonsense that makes much more than the sense they learn yous in school. 

 

John is thinking about giving it all up. It is too hard, too cold. There is too much iron in his soul, too much iron everywhere. Some of it will kill Fifth Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe – Paul’s predecessor as John’s soul-mate and Beatle bassist – on April 10 1962. 

*

Remember that Beatle date, Edinburgh. (And

glad you could find the venue, assuming I’m not just talking to myself. – Note to self: the contemporary human condition, right there. – Yes, you’re at my Beatle Fringe show about global celebrity. A nonstop Scream” The Guardian; “A long long long lunch hour of darkness” Three Weeks. "Sergeant Spectre's Lonely Rubber Solo" Playboy. “James is a compulsive liar and all the depictions of his family are fictitious. We all get on like a house on fire, especially the dog. We think it’s high time he started telling stories about something else.” His Mother. 

Critical theorists who tell us how to read novels generally substitute their own mind game for the artist’s, the former fiendishly clever without being wise and the latter a lot more fun and having at least some relationship with lived experience.  Some Fringe reviewers do the same. I had one who spent eight paragraphs arguing with his mother and then a conclusion accusing my stage set of tormenting him with childhood phobias. It wasn’t my fault he had a problem with dolls’ houses! But I will make two observations. Readers who aren’t academics (that is, most people who actually read and discuss novels, from schoolchildren up to book groups) tend to treat your characters and events as if they’re real or relate in some fairly direct way to ‘real life.’ Only those who’ve been recently trained in novels as a University discipline or as a profession talk about the ‘text’ like it’s nothing to do with anything but itself. So when Special’s unpublished shaggy dog story of a critical guide-   “All About The Grrrrl”  - claims “I am the Grrrrl it’s All About” I want to say “No you aren’t, Special. Cindy is.” (Cindy being infinitely more real than anyone in my ‘real’ life.) But the theorists will say Special’s dog-eared ‘reading’ is equally valid to mine. And that I’m not allowed to say “No, this is my life, experience and point of view that’s being turned into complete fiction here, Special, not yours.” Upon which, theory will insist I don’t actually exist outside these pages. But then nothing does.  As a cartoon George Harrison put it in a cartoon film “It’s all in the mind” and though Paul’s pretty nurse in Penny Lane feels as if she’s in a play, she is anyway. Instead of chasing and deconstructing the shadow of a shadow, why not turn to the Light? ‘Real life’ as it really and vividly exists to the mind is where most non-campus readers live and as far as posterity is concerned, however much I’ve played around with the facts, there really were factory girls and secretaries and a generation gap transformed by a fabulous rags to riches real-life Liverpool fairytale called the Beatles which illuminated mine and millions of lives all over the planet.  Semi-detached suburban unreliable narrator Mr James, though now so self-conscious he can hardly move as he is pissed on by Tolstoy’s vividly real-ized dog, can reliably tell my unreliable reader that much. Just as heavy progressive soul-searching pioneer George could translate abstruse and extended Hindu texts on the mayavic nature of the material world into a catchy three minute popsong but still translate  theoretical art into a Liverpool 

wisecrack: “Avant garde a clue”. 

*

 

Beatle George is a very old guitar head on very young very thin shoulders. He is too young to be playing all night concerts on speed. Far too young to be with that John Lennon but George hero-worships him. Don’t we all? Beatle John’s a scream. Goose-stepping around the stage Hitler-saluting the Hamburg underworld as the band rock and writhe and “mach schau” to the music. 

 

Beatle Ringo (the eldest, born 1940) is a star in both Hamburg and Liverpool already, with his own fan club, drumming for the natty-suited resident Keller outfit ‘Rory Storme and the Hurricanes’. Only Hamburg, the wacky Liverpool of Germany, could have a house band named after the Hurricanes of twenty years before. Only Liverpool, the wacky Hamburg of England, could send them over. 

 

Last summer Ringo was drumming for the Hurricanes at Pwllheli Butlins. Not long before that he was at the local steelworks. In some ways, hammering those drums into high art, he still is.

 

When George joins, they start going places, places outside Liverpool, like the Oasis Club Manchester. 

When Ringo joins, they will rock the world. 

They swap the leather jackets for suit jackets. They comb the Elvis hairdos down into the Astrid Kircherr fringe. They’re the Yeahverlybrothers! 

Touring with Roy Orbison! And then suddenly – Yeah! – Roy Orbison is touring with them...

Cavernous drum! Great clunking guitar solos! 3 cool cat choir! Whoops of joy in four part harmony! A HAND… FULL… OF… PERFECT… NOTES. 

 

Holding hands that wash dishes, hands that cup faces. Hands flung at diamonds, hands ringed with dreams, shake-it-up baby faces, sweet little teens. Anything that you want. 

 

We. Can. Do!

 

There are places I remember.  Peterborough, Norwich, Slough, Glasgow, Abergavenny, Aston, Middlesbrough, Newcastle, Leeds, Great Yarmouth, London...

Paris...

 

“John, the French haven’t made up their minds about the Beatles yet. What do you think of them?”

 

“Oh, we like the Beatles.”

 

Windsor…

 

And which one are you?” asks Her Madge.

 

“I’m the one with the big...”

 

“Oh!”

 

“… fringe!”

 

“Oh haw haw haw!”

Sydney...

 

Nice feller Sidney.

New York, San Francisco, Detroit….

 

“John, there is a Stamp Out The Beatles movement under way in Detroit. What you going to do about it?”

 

“We have a plan to stamp out Detroit.”

 

A blizzard of camera flashes, freeze flashes of fame. Beatlepus Rex. Conquering the planet. Saving the city. And Getting the Girl. 

 

Everywhere. 

 

For three screaming years. 

 

Even Nowhere. 

Or Somertown, as it’s known round here.

*

Cindy’s fairy tale came true. They stayed at Number One that first Beatlemania Christmas until that magical mystical snow with BEATLES written in it melted and the decorations came down three months later. Ushering in a decade that lost the plot but found the music. Where proper kitchen sink Northern Novelists Stan Barstow wrote Coronation Street and Billy Truth (Keith Waterhouse) wrote the Daily Mirror. Where the novel became the prose-poem and the two minute popsong became the Book of Revelation. Where Bookends made a Bridge over troubled water. Where the Cowboys and Indians changed places. Where fashions were as fabulous as the food and architecture was Mother’s-Pride-concrete-disposable-instant-cake-frozen-steak-plastic-AWFUL. Where technology burned white hot, the railway age finally ran out of steam; where a Beatle Marseillesaise got to Number One all over the world and a Concorde flew. 

 

Miami Beach BOAC. BEA-tle Europe. ThunderBEAtles are go, tracking revolutionary grooves around the far-out black holes of inner and outer space. 

 

Jades and ladlespoons, may I introduce to you the ever renewing Act you’ve known for all these years? The Beatles Broadcasting Corporation. The Get Back Home Service. The Inner Light Programme.

 

A long and increasingly psychedelic road. Through John Lennon Airport. Paul McCartney Space Station. George Harrison Inner Light Railway. Ringo Starr Magical Mystery Charabanc Tour…

*

The name is Spectre. James Spectre. Your reliable narrator. And I’m voicing this over a sample of Live and Let Die. By the Beatles without John, George and Ringo. And with Linda. 

Nowhere Man at your service, bam bam bam, pounding the British beat on his No 9 rubber soles, policing the gunpowder plot, looking for clues at the scene of the crime. 

What? How reliable a narrator am I? (bang bang!)

Well, as a minor local celebrity, I was once appointed judge of “The Sack Race In The Park” between teams from local Supermarkets. I fixed it so the Co-op won, because of their founding ideals of a better, fairer society.

I’ll leave you to judge me from that.

*

And from this. I fell for that urban myth pedalled by a Canadian Nazi via my Stepmother’s milk of human unkindness (and her covetous racial stereotyping of that nose and those rings) that Ringo is Jewish. As Ringo says in the official autobiography “You know what it’s like, you dream things, or your mother tells you things so you come to believe you actually saw them.” So one of my themes in this show is to passionately defend Ringo’s Jewishness against those who hated him for it. Even though he’s as Liverpool Irish as the rest of them. Even though he pointed in an interview about the Canadian Nazi attack on him that he isn’t Jewish. I just thought, those Nazi bastards are making him deny his starry heritage.

*

How can you laugh? (If you did.)

*

I’m Down, Edinburgh. I’ve got a feeling we all are. Love all seems like an Illusion again. Even though it isn’t. The Blue Meanies repeatedly tried to Kennedy-King shoot it, 1963, 1966, 1968, to a cartoon soundtrack sometimes enchantingly opposed by, and sometimes actually provided by, the Rolling Stoned. And, in the end, the Blue Meanies succeeded. If the Seventies was a delayed Sixties for the masses, it was also a long retreat from the fraternite of its Revolution. By May 1979, the Harri-Krishna Macca-Lennonism of God Is Within You Without You and All You Need Is Love was increasingly past its Seventies hypermarket sell by. And it was certainly shot by December 8 1980.

If you can remember the Sixties, you weren’t there and I remember them as if they were Yesterday. (All my troubles. Blue school meanies in my blue remembered hills. Primal screams in my strawberry fields. A bullet in Kennedy’s head.) But everyone remembers where they were when Kennedy was shot in 1963 – everyone except Lee Harvey Oswald – so by definition they weren’t there. They have an alibi for the crime of the decade. 

Whodunnit, then, Edinburgh? The Mob? The KGB? The CIA. The BBC? BB King? Matt Busby? Doris Day? The entire population of Cuba?  Maybe everyone needs an alibi for a crime the cops still haven’t solved.

Let’s test a few. 

“Mr John Wit-genstein Lennon of Strawberry Fields, Liverpool, can you tell us where you were?” 

“I was with the Beatles at the Globe Cinema in the High St of Stockton-On-Tees, Durham, Your honour.”

“Any witnesses?”

“Mark Chapman. And the entire teenage population of County Durham.”

“Sir Mick of Dartford? Where were you?” 

(Yawn) “I was pretending to be the devil in a now yawningly over-played 50-year-old publicity stunt?”

“And did you kill Kennedy there?”

“I killed all the Kennedys.”

“Why?”

“Because like it was like good for business.”

“You had accomplices!? The other Rolling Stones?”

“Yeah. Especially Brian.” Sir Mick inhales something that isn’t good for his voice so he will be giving it up rather quicker than his guitarists. “Maybe not Keef. Keef’s a bit too Welsh. Especially about girls. And anyway he was unconscious.”

“But this is awful! You and the other Stones but   maybe not Keef are the devil who killed the King of the new Camelot! Even Brian?”

“Especially Brian.”

“Ah but are you just saying that because you got five Number Ones in a row and six in all when Brian was guitar-leading the Stones. And only two in all after you’d kicked him out?”

That stadium sized mouth opens in cartoon protest.

“And none at all after you killed him?”

“That’s not fair! I weep for Brian. He is dead. And I didn’t kill him, I killed Kennedy. But you killed him too because we are all the devil. So you should have a bit more, you know, Sympathy…”

*

There was that famous acid-headed acid-stomached never trust a policeman, postman or post-graduate hippy conspiracy theory that Paul (still headlining and rocking the world at 83) died in 1966 and was replaced by an establishment ‘straight’ but no-one ever mentions that every member of the Rolling Stones except Brian Jones was abducted by aliens in the same year. You can usually tell. The replacement Mick (just a giant brain and an enormous penis stadium-beamed down from the cold and distant planet Economics in a wrinkled humanoid mask and Tina Turner’s dancing shoes) never plays maracas or contributes anything instrumental to the total groove: he is a thing apart. The old blues Keef was imprisoned inside a picture frame in a loft and meant to age and decay horribly because of decades of debauchery and drugs while the replacement would remain ever youthful in the public eye; only Keef’s mesmerising devil-crossing blues riffs confused the aliens and they hid the ‘picture’ Keef in the loft instead. The real Mick notices this from time to time and rejoins him and there is great joy in heaven and earth; there is high tide and blue grass and the pantomime Mick is no more. The real Charlie Watts still rocks the band from the planet Jazz and has even recruited the alien imitation Charlie to his own 100-piece jazz band there.  The real Bill Wyman and the imitation alien Bill Wyman are both so absent you can’t tell the difference.

*

Absent Dad’s alibi for the Kennedy murder is that he wasn’t there. He was Vividly Present Dad, aka, Corporal Punishment 5432154321543215432154321 British Bulldog 123 reporting for duty, Sah! in Stepmother Mary’s bedroom, clouting me across the room. 

“You’ve just placed yourself at the scene of the crime, Dad.” 

“What does that mean?”

“My head is still ringing with that blow through the head and your hand is all over the scene. Kennedy never recovered.” 

He pouted like he did when Cindy forgot his Absent Father’s Day card in June 1967.  “Why take it out on me? I was only obeying Stepmother’s orders” 

“The Nuremberg defence. Guilty as charged.”

A better lie is that he wasn’t there because he was doing 24/7 overtime at King’s, lathing the threads that held Harold Wilson’s white hot technological revolution together. After all, that’s where he usually wasn’t. Except on special occasions, like when he shot Kennedy.

*

‘Hidden Meanings That Aren’t Bleddy There’ was Absent Dad’s Answer to the Sixties Quest. It wasn’t even interesting the first of the billion dreary times he shot me through the head with it. It’s ordinary boring ‘real life’ in the material world that isn’t really there, however material and manifest it may appear. It’s the hidden meanings that really are. But Absent Dad was neither here nor there. So where was he? 

Well he certainly wasn’t with us. He’d disappeared into the generation gap. Cindy and I could never decide if he was just trying to avoid Wicked Stepmother Mary or the backlog of ‘Vait until your varter gets home’ punishments he carried out, as Suddenly Vividly Present Dad, like her duty Korporal Punishment, the rare times he was. It wasn’t our fault she was missing her Grimm fairy tale childhood in Nazi Germany. It wasn’t our fault she thinks she was smuggled out of the Black Forest in a Hitler-signed first edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales in 1939 then arrested as an enemy alien. I put it to you Dad that you were too busy capstan-lathing the threads that held Harold’s white hot technological revolution together, when you weren’t stewarding the Union shop floor or DIYing yourself in, to ask yourself who you were doing it all for.”

“Well who was I doing it for?”

“Lee Harvey Oswald, you Kennedy-murdering bastard.”

*

To be fair, Dad was here on Thursday nights with a wage-packet to spend on wallpapering over the cracks in the family home and he was here on Saturday afternoons to drive us all round the bend to Longleat to give our dog Special a run in the grounds of what she clearly regarded as her very own stately home.  And on Sunday afternoons, after hiding behind the then-broadsheet Daily Malice and the family roast, he was there to wave us off to Sunday School before Wicked Stepmother Mary put him to bed. And on special occasions, like the day he shot Kennedy, he carried out Stepmother’s punishments. 

And, once or twice a year, he was the Bonfire Knight wizarding the fireworks and banishing the dark all evening and better still, every December 25th, when he was Father Christmas, he would land his magical reindeer on the roof and come home for the whole day...

*

Christmas morning 1963. The Spectre children have hardly slept. After hours tossing and turning, waiting to catch Present Dad as The Ghost of Christmas, they peer around the door of the small living room, its neatly wallpapered walls and ceiling a magical garden of petticoat-crepe violet, pink and primrose. There is the warm scent of earth and pine. The Mother Mary gifts are piled up under the tree like fairytale treasure. The lights on the Eden-green tree radiate a sapphire ruby, gold, frankincense and myrrh happiness so intense it hurts. 

Santa lives. I’ve got my presents after all, even though I’d been told that I was too naughty (Stepmother’s word for ‘boy’) to get them this year. And over them, like a wand, like a halo, hovers the ghost-smile of that unstinting all-forgiving Mother Mary who used to come in night after night after night after night after night and sometimes have to return repeatedly half the night without any sense of her own cares and fatigues, her unconditional love shared and somehow increasing with all the other impossible demands on her, to sing me gentle lullabies, heart-pierced, heart-lifting songs that seemed in some unique way to be about me and her, sending me off into a lost age of Golden Slumbers. Mother Mary is back. Absent Dad is Present. We have spent the day playing laughably silly shout-for-joy family games like Hunt The Slipper where Dad’s slipper is hidden in plain sight (like on a Christmas card-loaded mantelpiece or a shelf full of matching gaily-wrappered Book Club Books) and we have to find it, entranced by its defamiliarized everydayness. The rest of the year we’ll be playing Hunt The Father and the slipper will be part of Suddenly Vividly Present Dad’s Corporal Punishment routine but that’s another day today, as unreal and other dayish as the ‘real world’ will seem ten years later when I’m tripping. Both parents are as wide-eyed and excited as their children, and everything is lying before us like an unopened gift...

*

If 1963 was the Ben Nevis of Beatlemania; 1964 was the Everest. And they’d only packed for a picnic in the Mendips.

 ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ entering the American charts at No 43 jumps straight to Number One selling one million copies by Jan 10 and 10,000 more copies each hour in New York alone by the 13th. All of the Beatles 1963 singles and both albums swiftly follow up the American charts. (January)

 The Beatles’ residency at the Paris Olympia covered by top US reporters (January)

 Beatles arrive at John F Kennedy airport to a reception that made even Beatlemania in England look reserved (February)

 Iconic premiere appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show three days later watched in the studio by 728 frantic teenagers and on screen by 73 million Americans, the largest ever TV audience (February)

 The Beatles conquer America in February 1964 on the back of ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’), then conquer Australasia (an even wilder welcome than America, not to mention the Netherlands, Denmark, Hong Kong and Sweden (I told you not to mention the Netherlands, Denmark, Hong Kong and Sweden) on the back of two more Number One albums, four Number One singles and their film, ‘A Hard Day’s Night’.

 The Beatles are simultaneously at Numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 31, 41, 46, 58, 65, 68 and 79 in the American Hot One Hundred (with two more to come a week later) and Numbers One and Two in the LP charts with their two 1963 albums.  

 ‘First’(technically the second) American tour (24 concerts from San Francisco and the Hollywood Bowl to New York and New Orleans and, yes, that emotional bullet hole they were filling, Dallas, August- September) 

 I Feel Fine the global Christmas Number One –their fourth global Number One of the year.

 ‘Beatles For Sale’ the second world Beatlemania Number one album of the year.

Or if you want all that global power and glory expressed in a musical shorthand, listen to the opening crash chord of the Hard Day’s Night album. From the triumphant seizing of faith by the throat at its start to its dying fall that never dies.

*

“Is this the same hotel room we had last year?”  asks gig-speedy Beatle George, sucking a post-concert ciggy and Coke like alternate teats. He is living very fast and when he dies young he will have extracted more from his Formula 1 sixty three years than most would from a slow Boycott hundred.

“I can’t even remember what city this is,” drolls Beatle Ringo.

“Bristol,” says Beatle George, sucking harder.

“We haven’t been in Bristol since 1963!”

“We haven’t been in Britain since 1963! Mind you, we have been to Sweden – twice – France, America- twice- and Australia.”

“The British fans say we’re neglecting them.”

“How do you know?”

“They keep writing to me. ‘On your fourth trek around Blighty this time last year, Ringo, you were earning £300 a night playing I Saw Her Standing There, From Me To You, All My Loving, You Really Got A Hold On Me, Roll Over Beethoven, Boys, Till There Was You, She Loves You, Money and Twist and Shout all night every night with no nights off.’” 

“John getting the last word as usual with Twist and Shout.”

“And Paul getting the first with I Saw Her Standing There.”

“They need it, bless them, only being rhythm and bass guitarists. If they didn’t do so many of the lead vocals, they’d fade into the background. When you’re the lead guitarist and the sole drummer like us you don’t need to make a song and dance about it.”

“It’s why we’re the Quiet Ones.”

“I’m the Quiet One, George. You just can’t get a word in, even though you do have a Lot to Say. Especially about the sound.”

“The sound is terrible again this tour. If we were ever the Mersey Sound – and I don’t think there ever was a Mersey Sound, that was just the critics – it’s now more like the scream of jelly babies. I have enough trouble slowing down my Mersey accent so that people can understand what I’m saying without having to shout through jelly babies as well.”

“You see, you’re not that quiet. Even JohnnPaul shurrup and listen to you when you talk like that.”

“I’m fed up with us not being heard, Ringo. Especially in some of these tin pot places we were booked into six months ago. Brian insists on us honouring every single engagement on the original terms even though we were now way ahead of the original top-of-the-billers.”

“He’s a man of his word. It’ll pay off in the long run. I like that about him.”

“I like that about him. He’s good and he’s gold at the same time. Like us. But I need a day off.  It’s been a Hard Year’s Night.”

“The British fans may be seeing less of us but that doesn’t mean we’re not still working our Beatle boots off somewhere else. Where will it all end, George? I’m 24; I’ve been in this group since I was 20 years old.”

“What I’d have given for a childhood like yours! I joined when I was 13, Ringo. 8 years behind the microphone, man and boy, strapped to the lead guitar, Hamburg night; Cavern day. I was there before Brian and the suits. I was there when you were doing a posh ‘residency’ in a North Wales Butlin’s with Johnny Storme and the Hurricanes.”

“What I’d have given to have just the one job. I was in Hamburg with Johnny Storme and the Hurricanes as well. And in Hamburg with you lot any time you needed a top drummer with a fan club of his own.” 

“Two jobs! Luxury!”

“I was in the steelworks when you joined the Beatles. What I’d have given for a sleeping bag on the floor behind the stage.”

“I’m 21 and I’m exhausted. You had a life before. I’ve been a Beatle for two thirds of my life. 13 years behind John and Paul, man and boy, lashed to the amp. It’s the hardest job I’ve ever had.’

“It’s the only job you’ve ever had.”

“You can’t talk to a Beatle like that. Last in, first out, Ringo.” 

“I bet you leave before me!”

*

Or soon after. But that’s five years hence, as they attempt to Get Back to the Cavern, back to when their live rock and roll was a raised rooftop above anyone else’s.

It’s Tuesday 10 November 1964. Wintry but not as wintry as Sweden in October 1963 when Beatlemania was playing two houses technically ‘supporting’ local band ‘the Phantoms’ in a secondary school and getting wintry reviews from the Nya Wermlands Tiding who perceptively called the Beatles ‘corny’, ‘terrible’ ‘out of rhythm’ and ‘of no musical importance whatsoever.’ The rest of Sweden begged to differ on all counts. In Stockholm they all but dragged George from the stage. 

“That journo should have reviewed them. You couldn’t hear anything else,” moans Beatle George. “And it was the same again tonight.”

“What did we play tonight?” drolls Beatle Ringo, whose main function on this tour is to respond to John and Paul’s count-in with a drum charge not wait for them to start themselves, as did temporary Beatle Jimmy Nicol recruited for part of the Australia tour.

George looks at the 1964 Beatles British tour set list, now history. Twist and Shout; Money; Can’t Buy Me Love, Things We said Today, I’m Happy Just To Dance With You – wonderful singing on that one, I thought – ” 

“Great adenoids, George”

I Should Have Known Better, If I Fell, I Wanna Be Your Man… Very fierce tonsils on that, Ringo. A Hard Day’s Night. And-”

“Great title. Who thought of that?

“You did, Ringo.”

“It should be the next single.”

“It was the last single. And Long Tall Sally. Paul getting the last word just as John got it with Twist and Shout the year before. 

“They need it, bless them…”

JohnnPaul, the endless comedy-musical double act around which Ringo’nGeorge rock and roll, like the right atrium, right ventricle, left atrium and left ventricle of a beating heart, four for one and one for four – is in fact at this very moment in a different hotel (to help fox the fans) writing considerably more of the Beatle plot than it used to. 

But hotel walls do not division make. As Lennon described the four of them working – “None of us reads music…. A melody idea may come first or an idea for the lyric may be first. (John’s lovely melodies from If I Fell through that meletronic trance suddenly doodling and hypnotising itself out of the left field in the hallucinogenic middle of Flying to the stratospheric Because should not be overshadowed by Paul’s or his own rhythmic-harmonic genius) … We noodle around with the instruments until we get a tune set that fits the words we want to use.” When you’ve flown in (from Auckland) on a plane rumoured to be carrying a germ bomb together on 26 June to play two houses of 4,000 people on the South Island of New Zealand on the 27th and then flown back to Australia to do four shows in two days together in Brisbane before flying back together on 1-2 July to appear on Top of the Pops and play A Hard Day’s Night together in Lime Grove Studios London before immediately crossing to Rediffusion’s Television House to tape an interview about the Hard Day’s Night film together about to premiere at the London Pavilion on 6 July where you host together the great and good in identical dicky bow suits and then attend the northern premiere in Liverpool on 10 July (a triumphant homecoming for all four at once and forever) it will take more than a decisive shift towards Lennon/McCartney as the main composers of the group’s  music to shake that ‘together’.  

The nonstop Beatlemania 1964 show goes on at the top of the bill and off the end of various piers, radio and TV studios all through another packed summer, supported by, among others “a new and unknown London group” called The Kinks – Ray Davies explaining at the microphone that it was “our turn now” and Lennon wisecracking, “with us no-one else gets a turn” and another (then) called The High Numbers “The Who?”- not to mention making the landmark album and film Hard Day’s Night and starting a second album all before the big American tour.

On 6 October– returning from the tour and to the album, taping of Eight Days A Week and experimenting with various openings and closings of the song, John starts strumming a distinctive guitar rift which will deliberately administer amplifier feedback and become the global 1964 Christmas Number One I Feel Fine.  On 8 October at EMI studios they start arranging and recording Paul’s venture into blues (traditionally segregated as ‘race’ or Black Music) composition “She’s A Woman” an unexpected fanfare of September 11 (9/11) 1964 in Jacksonville, Florida where they will refuse to play a segregated audience. On Thursday 15 October in Stockton on Tees again (the first time since Kennedy’s assassination) they are asked about their voting intentions on the day Harold Wilson beats Ted Heath finally to become the first Labour prime minister for 13 years.  Lennon, not allowed to say, says “I won’t be voting for Ted.”

Having, in effect, three lead guitarists, one ‘lumbered with bass’ (Paul), another chafing charging chastening howl-and move ‘what kind of solo is that?’ with rhythm (John); and three musical leaders bursting with ideas, not to mention the star percussionist rock and rolling in the cowboy gun silver bullets into the chamber with exactly the right drumscape for each song (I told you not to mention Ringo), was just four of the interlocking engines driving the band. And if anyone out there disagrees, you’re looking down the fully cocked Cowboy and Indian quadruple barrel of a Revolver that’s been loading since 1962, blowing your mind since 1966 and reached for the sky with Abbey Road in 1969. 

*

All I wanted in 1964 was With The Beatles because I hadn’t got it in 1963. Because with the Beatles it was always Christmas and never winter. Just as it would always be the Summer of Love with The Lonely Hearts Club Band four years later. A Beatles record cover was the icing on the cake; the Christmas wrapping that kept unwrapping.

I was 1964 going on 1963. With The Beatles still peered at me out of the window of the record shop on the stony stepped river-bridge of Somertown just as it had all through the previous snowed-in December of 1963. This year, Beatle Christmas 2, I knew my Walk-to-School-Best-Friend-Bernard down the road was getting A Hard Day’s Night and Beatles For Sale the new LPs – as well – just like he’d got With The Beatles just like he’d already got Please Please Me and She Loves You and From Me To You and I Want To Hold Your Hand. (Stepmother said he was Spoiled.) But I still wanted With the Beatles because in 1963 I’d been 

Without The Beatles. With The Beatles was the one I didn’t get the Christmas I turned Mother Mary into Stepmother Mary by ascending that big boy snake pretending to be a ladder. It’s the one I lost forever. It’s the one I’ll still be seeking for – and won’t get to get what I’m after – until the day I die. 

I still see the cool classic 1963 Astrid Kircherr cover; those fabulous black and white Beatle faces artily lit from one side; still feel the 1963 cars scattergunning the slush of a mile-long compacted gutter snow-mountain up my bare legs. With The Beatles! With The Beatles! Even though I’ve ‘bought’ ‘it’ many times since: on vinyl, cassette, CD, I-pod, MP3, legal and everything except illegal downloads, I don’t want the reproductions, the remasters. I want THAT LP. That Old Master. That ever-Christmas. 

In 1964, pretty much every house on the estate got A Hard Day’s Night or Beatles For Sale for Christmas 1964. Except me. I was still in 1963, clutching Without The Beatles. The only reason I’m still stuck in 1969 is because I am still stuck in 1963 and the only reason I’m still stuck in 1963 is because I was never there. 

Special got her usual Mendip hill of gift-wrapped treasure including “How Much Is That Doggie In The Window and 12 Other Great Doggie Songs” by the Mike Sammes Singers and “The Art of Dog-Realisation” by a Dog Guru who found it easier to raise a soppy bulldog (roaring all night for England while the neighbours are trying to get their human babies to sleep; biting those babies’ faces in their prams while the dog owners are telling you how friendly the reeking-mouthed fleabag is and using their neighbour’s garden and pavement as a latrine) than a human child because pets are the children who never grow up; they might mount your lap and sniff your privates in company and assault the postman and milkman but they never mount the existential challenge of blanking you with a ‘who is this colossal bellend I used to adore” pimpling their once baby faces; Absent Dad got “A Canadian In London” (the poor man’s “An American In Paris”) to go with his more personally prophetic “A Bristolian In Cardiff” and Stepmother Mary got “Adolf Hitler’s Favourite Flower Is The Simple Edelweiss” by the Teutonic Baron Knights.

Cindy and I got Top Six. Can You Tell The Difference Between This Record And The Real Sounds?  

Yeah, we could.

 

Chapter Three

Nowhere Man

It Was 60 Years Ago Today. 1965. Yesterday moves a bit nearer Tomorrow. Winston Churchill finally surrenders to the grim reaper and is given a Queen Victoria-sized State Funeral that felt like The End of Civilisation As We Know It. The Americans send troops into Vietnam. Wilson (setting a precedent Blair disastrously failed to follow) refuses to send even a token regiment of Britons behind them. Young America tries to do likewise. Churchill’s famous V sign is on its way back in the hands of the peaceniks, in the fairground mirror of the Sixties, reflected yet reversed. West Ham win the Cup Winners Cup, just as they will – with a little help from their friends Banks, Cohen, Wilson, Styles, Charlton J, Charlton R, Hunt, Ball, win the World Cup a year later. Capital Punishment is abolished for a trial period. The Race Relations Act outlaws racial discrimination in public. It continues, like a dirty habit, in private. NO BLACKS NO DOGS NO ACTORS NO IRISH signs begin to disappear from landladies’ windows. Stepmother Mary’s own version, minus the DOGS, will remain on display on the technicality that she’s not actually a landlady and expressing a private opinion rather than advertising rooms. NO HIPPIES, NO QUEERS, would come about a year later (and NO FREEDOM NO FUTURE NO FUN about a decade after that.)

Last summer, world famous celebrity millionaire universally loved achingly gifted Beatle John cried out to a Beatle-oblivious world “Help, I need somebody.” Now, in December, he is singing, with a lot of help from world famous celebrity millionaire universally loved achingly gifted effortlessly harmonising Beatle brother Paul and George and Ringo, that he is a nowhere man in a nowhere land singing all his nowhere songs for nobody. In this, if in little else, they certainly have a rival at last. 

Bob Dylan’s legendary voice seems to sing from a black hole at the heart of the Universe (as Beatle George admiringly put it in 1964.) This is a major new influence over the Boys’ greater attention to words and their essays into folk and acoustic on their latest releases, but it remains true that even when singing folk-throated desolation about black holes at the heart of the universe, the Beatles will always do so from some sunny whole that fixes (and eclipses) the hole. 

Because, even if (and it’s a big IF) their fellow questioners the Who, Hendrix and Dylan give more convincingly ideological visions of the Answer they seek, it was The Fab Force who found it even before they looked, their whoops of four-part joy lighting up the Cavern long before they lit up the world or started to put it into words. This is heaven, they seem to sing, nor are we out of it. John's cry of desolation - like the rising primal screams in three part harmony at the start of Twist and Shout – like even the chaotic meditation of Revolution 9 – are always in tune/time/harmony and in some unexpected and revolutionary new key, with the spheres, Ringo beating out from their heart. When Beatle Paul writes his Answer to Nowhere Man next year – just as he wrote I’m Down as the companion to John’s Help – he will call it For No One. And it will be for everyone.

*

Did I hear a murmur of agreement in the dark there? 

*

At ten to four on Friday December 10, 1965, Cindy Spectre lights another cigarette and leaves the factory early. Smoking is not outlawed in these days but still carries an outlaw air around with it “Aren’t you worried about the example you’re setting your fans?” the chain-smoking press ask George Harrison. “If we said we didn’t smoke we’d be putting on an Act,” retorts George.  They are, of course – putting on the Act we’ve loved for all these years. But the Act’s real. Until the new kind of smoking they’ve taken up as their latest joint venture since A Hard Day’s Night reveals another.

Cindy walks home from work under the willows of the riverbank towards the meadows, smoking her way between the puddles and pram tracks of the drizzle-troubled paths, sometimes driven into a diversion into the open fields. Dusk has fallen already and the paths are deserted. She speeds up into the dimly lit concrete section skirting the wooden fences of the estate, darts through a gap in the houses, takes the new zebra crossing over the main road into the shopping precinct and up the gentle hill. She turns into a yellow gate in the privet hedge and up to her own door at Council House No 9. She takes out a key, lets herself in and runs upstairs to change. 

And Factory Girl becomes Fran The Fan, 1965. She checks her Beatle fringe and Beatle eyes in her Beatle mirror. “So I’m not allowed to go out in my new skirt unless I wear Stepmother’s old coat over it. But how can I go to the concert in this … pumpkin.” She tears it away from her expensive new finery like a dead skin from a chrysalis. “And if I go out and leave the coat under a hedge, the old witch will dock me a month’s wages for losing it.”

She looks up from her single bar heater at the ice patterns on the inside window, the filigree-lace of a frosted spider-web, and shivers. “I’ll also freeze to death. These new skirts are fabulous to look at but I need more between my nethers and a December night than a pair of Mary Quant tights.” 

St Mary Quant, the slayer of Stepmother Mary’s St Michael. Quant’s skirts allow a girl to run for a bus as fast as a leggy youth. (Says Quant at the time and Andrew Marr later but Dear Old Aunt Agatha – Christie – was less convinced and some female voices were rejoicing by 1970 in the reverse liberation of the Edwardian maxi-skirt: “the miniskirt will not return, gentlemen; we have learned for five upwardly mobile hem-raising years to walk like a cowboy, sit like a side-saddled nymph and bend over like a cowgirl. We won’t be doing it again.” Bloody spoilsports was my 14 year old reaction in 1970. But for 15 year old Cindy in 1965 the miniskirt is a leg up out of the mundane. Stepmother can’t keep up with that. Anymore than her life-petrified 5 feet 2, the tallest girl in her school at 14 but never reaching any higher, can keep up with Cindy’s 5 feet 6; anymore than 5 foot 8 peaking Dad will be able to keep up with my Midwich Cuckoo Sixth Former’s eventual extra four inches of six feet. It’s not just that we had more food and health care than our Thirties/ war-blitzed/ postwar rationing-stunted parents. Mother Mary was eight miles higher than Stepmother in the same body. It’s that we reached for the sky above Penny Lane and the only time THEY did that was to surrender. And, in any case, rationing was still in operation for the first two years of Cindy’s life and continued as a national habit for much of her Fifties childhood and in our house until 1979. After heavy industrial man was made redundant in the Eighties, eating the same diet and drinking the same nightly gallon only without working it off the next day in mines and mills, and replaced by Fat Bloke; and worked-to-the-bone factory and home char woman joined him with a duvet figure and a ‘Family’ hamper of crisps and fizz on the groaning scales, the Elvis pelvis and miniskirt lost some of its unisex appeal. Cindy’s austerity-starved generation on the other hand grew up with tomboy figures.  It was another gap between the generations. Stepmother Mary knew that St Michael was a Very British Establishment way of packaging a Jewish archangel as a Christian saint and Cindy didn’t. And Stepmother didn’t even know who Mary Quant was. 

Cindy walks across the room, stiffly, admiring the long open-mesh legs she – unlike her ash-haired stepmother – can fly at the wind. “Blimey, I even fancy myself in this.” She trips over the discarded coat in her long red leather boots and laughs. “It’s like learning to walk all over again!”  

She yells through the floorboards, “And this time I can do it without parents!” 

She digs out With The Beatles, smiles fondly, places the needle above All My Loving and lets it drop. The crackle of anticipation before it starts is like a little return of Beatlemania. She moves a little more freely as All My Loving plays. Even her parents liked that one. It put a smile all over their silly old faces. 

Also, if she is honest, which she is, this music makes her feel less embattled. More able to negotiate a smooth escape from the house. Dylan, Donovan, Them, The Animals, The Who, The Yardbirds and all the other Times are changin’ protest songs she launches like arrows against her parents have the opposite effect to that which she intends. They antagonise Stepmother Mary and ‘sadden’ Absent Dad (when’s he’s there), fair enough, they deserve it, but they make her feel like giving up too. It’s been a hard day, and there’s a big night with Johnny ahead, and the last thing she needs is a generation growl and a hard night. What she needs is a heart-lifting Beatle tune. To send her over the generation barricades, on a free and loving Yes. 

She Loves You. I Want To Hold Your Hand.  And I Love Her. 

The Virgin Mary’s free and loving Yeah Yeah Yeah. 

She lies on the bed with her eyes closed, letting the music play over her like the warm bath she didn’t quite get earlier (the water heater was on economy). I will send all my loving….  Johnny Churchill never wrote letters like that. He never wrote letters. It wouldn’t kill him, just once, to try. Where is Johnny taking me? A thought strikes her, a sharp poison dart of anxiety. 

Nowhere.

Suddenly, her heart fails. She is tired. The whole effort required to make herself irresistible is too much. Does this revealing skirt really bring out all the love she hides? Is it worth the parental Inspection?  ‘Why not just stay home, stay in, have a long weekend out of the firing line? Wear what I like then. Make a bold statement of freedom from behind locked doors....’ 

Downstairs, her father is – as it happens – reading about just such matters in the paper. Stepmother is knitting furiously. He looks up. “Mare, there’s something wrong with the paper,” he says. 

“What?” Clicking her needles.

“Look.”

She looks. 

“It’s the same broadsheet size as the Daily Malice but the – the layout’s all wrong – and it’s in a different language.”

The SM drops a stitch, curses, begins knitting together the wool again, the needles wands in her hard hands. “A different language?”

“It’s not telling me what to do. Or rather, it’s not telling me what I ought to tell Cindy to do. It’s trying to make me think!”

“What!” snaps the wicked Stepmother. She is bothered and bewildered. Her domestic spell unravels. 

“See for yourself.”

She reads. “The number of exposed knees to be seen has been rising steadily – or more often bumpily – since the end of the summer. Skimpy skirts and the obligatory white boots to go with them are everywhere. I cannot be the first to wonder why so many girls have rushed to follow this fashion undeterred by the coldest early winter weather for 20 years. But I think I have found the Answer-” 

(No, not that one.)

She organises the newspaper into its proper order and snorts. “Joe you silly ass! Look!”

“December 4 1965? Isn’t that today?”

“Not the date – the name.”

Her husband gasps. “The Guardian! They’ve delivered the wrong bleddy paper!”

*

The Headmaster told student teacher Mr Rafferty there was no place in Somertown Grammar for ‘Beatleniks’. But there was a place in every heart as far as the girls were concerned. He read them poems about women making themselves up in front of the looking glass. 

‘No vanity’s displayed. 

I’m looking for the face I had 

Before the world was made.’ 

Cindy stands up and tells the mirror. “I want to walk into town past the groan ups and sheep in women’s clothing and mice in the man-traps of their week-without-ends and sing out at the top of my voice, ‘Look at me! I am the young generation! Fearless and fabulous and free! I want to sing rainbows and drape them in the caps of sad old men. I want to make them stand up straight and smile. I want to hear them say, You’re not like your stepmother are you, love? I want to skip from pillar to lamppost shedding flowers on everything. I want to let my hair down! I want to let my stepmother down! I want to go out as I am!’”

Cindy opens the door, wide. “JUST YOU TRY TO STOP ME!”  she yells into the living room as she storms out.

And this time they won’t. 

* 

Friday December 10, 1965. 6 pm. The Beatles are on an unmagical misery tour bus. They can no longer hide, behind a 4 headed joke, how sick they are of touring a schedule of scream factories. Only their road crew and their future anorak-biographers have any idea where they came from yesterday (Birmingham) or where they are going tomorrow. (The Astoria, Finsbury Park). They only know that on Sunday, at least, at last, they will be in Cardiff, at the end of a long and winding road.

*

Cindy is on the drearily familiar green single decker to Bristol. It is crowded with people returning from work or going out for Friday Night. It chugs along country roads between greener hills and bare hedges. The bus makes slow green progress through Monmouth-rebellion stone villages, alongside large inns and fields, constantly held up by corners and zig-zagging oncoming traffic. The winter rain sweeps against the window, greying everything. It is unusually cold, even for December.

Cindy is sitting on the carpet-seat next to a man with a briefcase balanced across his knees. The briefcase has his initials – WL – engraved in gold. The whole bus smells, strongly, and comfortably, of tobacco. Smokers obediently occupy seats at the rear of the bus, as the notice requests them to, but the rebel smoke goes where it likes. The man is pretending to read last Saturday’s Daily Malice, found under the seat, but is actually reading the heavily contrasted black and white lines of her new ‘Op Art’ skirt artfully designed (by Mary Quant) to fall four inches above her knees. Designed for the female gaze, like all fashion, the shockingly high hemline nevertheless hooks WL’s male gape. His family problems in Cardiff and his business in Bristol tomorrow disappear. His ulcer stops troubling him. It’s the loveliest – and only – four inches above the knee he’s seen in twenty years. Cindy smiles and goes on reading Dr Jones’s Guardian. 

She laughs at the memory of its purchase. Dr Jones went to the shop and explained, with an irony lost on the newsagent, that The Forger’s Gazette was not his newspaper of choice.

“Forger’s Gazette?”

“I mean The Daily Malice. I do not want it anywhere near my house, please. I wanted the Guardian.”

“And what about The Forger’s Gazette?”

The teacher gritted his teeth. “Just my Guardian please. And my wife’s Woman.”

“Your wife’s woman!?”

“And the boy’s Beano. Thank you.”

Forming an elderly and irascible queue behind, 

Stepmother said was going to make a hell of a lot more of a fuss than that. My God, she was going to give that newsagent a piece of her mind. “They’ll all be sorry by the time I’ve finished with them. I won’t be satisfied until I get that cheeky long-haired little monkey newspaper boy the sack. He does what he likes! His fringe is so far over his eyes, it’s like talking to a hedge. I know what I’d do if he was one of mine!” 

“He is one of yours, Mum! He’s James!”

She ended up quarrelling with the newsagent and cancelling the papers altogether in a fit of pique so now Absent Dad didn’t even have a forger’s gazette to read in the evenings. Eventually she would climb down and re-order, despite the ever-worsening service thereafter. Cindy snorts with laughter and returns to the Guardian.

“...I think I have found the Answer.” (No, not that one.) “The real point about very short skirts, white lace stockings and pantomime boots, despite the coldest winter weather for twenty years, is that they separate the girls from the women. Hardly any woman over the age of 25 will dare to wear a dress with a black circle and dot directly over the stomach, with holes fretted Henry-Moore like in the most improbable places, and with the skirt hem ending four or more inches above her knees!”  

A middle-aged woman behind them in a tired twin piece and plastic pearls snorts in contempt – “they’ll be wearing them six inches above the knee next!”

“Hope so!” Cindy announces. 

She lights a cigarette. She’s spent the week in overalls, dowdy as virtue, and she’s not going to apologise for the vision these new fashions have made of her. She is hoping Johnny will make a move this weekend. She needs that ring on her finger.  

*

Meanwhile, back …

“Hidden meanings that aren’t bleddy there!” Absent Dad is paper-chasing a story about Bob Dylan in yesterday’s back pages to crow over with his wife. Today’s Daily Malice (Friday’s) has not arrived. Again.

Stepmother is knitting, watching the last Briton being hanged on television. “Let him have it!” she yells.

Cindy is missing somewhere with that Johnny Churchill again. 

The Beatles are not on the radio – even they go missing sometimes.

Special is having a laborious poo in her front room litter tray.

“What meaning isn’t there?” I ask, looking up from my book.

Nobody answers. 

Another rip roaring Friday Night In at No. 9, No. 9, No. 9…

*

Cindy wakes to find the bus stuck in Friday night traffic, the Bristol rush hour. She yawns and absorbs the brake-lights, streetlamps, the treasure chest rubies, greens and blues of the Christmas displays, the brilliant department store windows flooding the wet pavements like a star-bursting American movie. All this makes Somertown’s display seem what it is: a candle on a damp hay-bale in the middle of a muddy field.

She’d kill for a lady-pint (a half) of Courage. She fumbles for her England’s Glory matches and 20 pack of Nelson. The spurting sulphur and smoke catches in her nostrils as she lights up. The flame extends her eye shadow for a moment, and the blue smoke wreathes around, increasing her mystery. She laughs, remembering how her sometimes over-literal little brother James set light to his ‘indestructible’ socks and then the contents of the garden shed believing the word ‘safety’ meant they wouldn’t. Cindy knows fire isn’t safe. That’s why she wants to play with it; wants wheels of it.

 

The Spirit of Bristol sculpture hoves into view. “Bloody modern rubbish,” snorts the bus driver.

“It’s an eyesore it is, mun,” says Mr Willy Larkins sitting next to her, his accent sounding a bit foreign. “I mean what’s it supposed to be?” 

Not foreign. Welsh. 

*

Liverpool (pwll, Welsh for water) and Welsh accents are very different but equally un-English, Celtic, dreamy, impetuous, Irish-facing, musical and sing-song (it’s all that Rain in the throat). Cindy’s Welsh accent gets stronger in response to his. 

*

“A star,” muses Cindy, looking at the statue, “stretching silver arms in all directions.” 

Mr Larkins looks at it again, through her eyes, noting the fellow Welsh received pronunciation tinkling subtly in his yers (sorry, ears). “Well, if you put it like that, love. But it looks more like a cooking foil scarecrow to me.”

She smiles at him with those bewitching eyes. Eyes like the heart of a rose. Like poetry. Cindy could have told him how enormous an effort it took to appear effortless. “To be born woman is to know – Although they do not talk of it at school – That we must labour to be beautiful.” Only Mr Rafferty did speak of it at Grammar School.  Until they sacked him.

Witches, they are, thinks Mr Larkins. However much we think we control ’em. Like in ‘Bewitched’ the highlight of his early Saturday evening TV schedule where a witch does the housework with a magic broom and works her spell over domestic America. Including in the bedroom, no doubt, though that’s quite rightly left to the imagination, behind the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door. But when her husband complains the neighbours might spy her magical choring, she makes him open the door she used to open by magic, just to make the point. And of course the husband relents... 

His daydream is suddenly made real as Cindy smiles at him. What a lovely girl!  Could do with something like her in the Cardiff office, instead of that old battleaxe Bertha Watkins. Something to take the chill off a Monday morning. Funny how you can sit next to a pretty girl – a complete stranger – on a bus and feel at home in the world. The traffic has now been at a standstill for ten minutes. A couple of passengers get up and ask to be allowed off as they’re almost there anyway. The bus driver shakes his head and the conductor points at the sign that warns against speaking to the driver and says that no-one can get off until the bus stops. 

“But it has stopped,” complains the woman in the two-piece.

The conductor shakes his head, “Sorry, love.”

And there you have the Britain of 1965.

Cindy and Mr Larkins sit on in companionable silence. The warmth of the heater blows up over her face. She dozes.  Cindy doesn’t realise until the bus lurches forward that she has been dozing against the man’s shoulder. “Oh, sorry,” she says.

“Don’t be,” he sighs.

The bus excretes its load of passengers amid belching diesel fumes and city noise. It’s very cold at the bus station. And wet. Cindy feels the damp cold  biting her legs like she’s wading through a country stream. She climbs the steps onto the number 7 bus, seats herself as near to the heater as possible and waits. Hurry up, she pleads. The day’s been too long by half already. The driver’s waiting, the engine fires into life and waits, farting its fumes everywhere. And here’s the conductor at last. Everyone settles for the journey back out to the outskirts Cindy came through an hour ago. She picks up a zany magazine from a seat. A student rag mag. A revolving poem called Liturgical Detergent. The poor print starts dancing away from her eyes. Perhaps it is designed to. She gives up.

20 kangarooing minutes later, they wide-swing into Corbenic terminus. Cindy steps off and walks swiftly through into Tyburn shopping precinct. She clocked off work, early, at 4.00 pm (Margaret punching the clock for her ten minutes after she’d Elvised the building). It is now 7.05. Tyburn Avenue is deserted after another busy Friday. The hard cases/tarts are not out on the precinct yet. She grins. It’s hard as nails here. But it’s still a thousand times better than where she was Yesterday at Council House No 9…

*

… “Shouldn’t you be saving for your future like the other girls?” nagged Stepmother, taking her three pounds of flesh from nearest Cindy’s heart. “We can’t keep you forever.”

“You don’t. I pay you rent and plenty of it. Dunno why – all you do is save it.”

“You should be saving yourself. For Mr Right.”

“I thought I’d try being in love first.”

“You can’t marry on love. You need furniture, crockery, a grandfather clock-“

Knock knock. Who’s there? It’s Mr Noman the Insurance Man, selling his Faithful Joe and Mary (aka Wicked Stepmother and Absent Dad) a hundred new premiums against Rationing and the Blitz. We are his best customers. Everyone else knows the War is Over. 

Mr Noman is making himself comfortable at the table, ticking an idiot sheet, when a Wilson Government advert comes on the TV about kids crossing roads home from school safely. The final frame is a beaming boy with his shirt hanging out, collar half way up his face, mudded from tousled hair to unlaced shoes. A Government voice-over says indulgently. “Here he is – safe and sound!” And the mother beams love and hugs him. I am genuinely shocked the mother does not smack him for messing up his clothes. It took me years to realise that the Kick Me Hard sign she stencilled onto the back of my jumpers with a steam iron wasn’t part of the school uniform.

Yesterday-Cindy says hello goodbye, tousling my hair.

“I’ve just combed that!” snaps the SM, wielding the comb again. She gets the crisp Hitler parting back into place just as the door opens. 

Corporal Punishment’s home early! He’s not doing overtime and he’s not looking himself. He must be ill. He looks more like Work-weary Dad. 

“I saw you looking out from behind the upstairs curtains. Why didn’t you wave to me?” Work-weary Dad asks of Cindy. 

“I wasn’t there,” says Cindy. 

“Yes you were. I saw you. In our bedroom window.”

“What were you doing in our bedroom?” demands the SM.

“I wasn’t,” says Cindy. “It must have been my real Mum.” 

A gasp. Work Weary Dad darkens into Corporal Punishment 5432154321543215432154321 British Bulldog 123 reporting for duty, Sah! 

Mr Noman the Insurance man says, “Well, I must be going.” The Two Week Christmas Row starts early. Special starts howling. A plate is spun. A wedding photo gets thrown and smashed. A mirror cracks from side to side.

“Don’t fight,” I plead, eyes on the world window of the telly, “look, it’s the Beatles!” 

“Time I wasn’t here,” says Yesterday-Cindy and leaves. Corporal Punishment looks like the light in his day has gone out. I’m A Loser sings John and Paul on the TV, in faultless fifths. In a rerun of 1964’s British Invasion, The Beatles have just performed live to a record 73 million people on the Ed Sullivan show, eradicating American crime figures for the only twenty minutes in US history. I’m a Loser without those qualifications. But as soon as the music plays, I Feel Fine.

WILL YOU TURN THAT BLEDDY RACKET DOWN!

What? 

TURN THAT BLEDDY RACKET DOWN!!

It’s not a racket; it’s The Beatles!

Corporal Punishment 5432154321543215432154321 British Bulldog 123 reporting for duty, Sah! gets up from his cooked tea, accidentally pulling the plastic checked tablecloth up with him and upsetting the cutlery into a backward fill Beatle Ringo would be proud of. Special jumps up and starts barking. Her yowl hammers my eardrum and daleks my nose in a demoralising nausea of dog breath and pandemonium. I fling up my arm to protect my hearing and sense of smell and catch her jaw. She (having learned the procedure) runs whining to Stepmum. Dad glares at me. 

I turn the radio down. 

“This is going to hurt me more than you,” sighs Corporal Punishment 5432154321543215432154321 British Bulldog 123 reporting for duty, Sah! thundering absently through the cutlery drawer for the wooden spoon.

“Or the dog,” I answer, and get a major clip across the lips from the SM.

Corporal Punishment brandishes a huge wooden-handled meat knife.

Stepmother pales. “Joe, that’s capital punishment! He can’t have that yet.”

Corporal Punishment corrects his mistake just in time. I receive the wooden spoon, six times. I am tonight’s serial loser in a house full of losers. The British bulldog of victory grins throughout, thumping her tail in her basket, and afterwards licking her privates. I am made to apologise into her reeking breath and pat her soppy back as she does so. 

The presenter of the Light Programme announces that we are about to hear – very quietly -last year’s Christmas No. 1. I mime an electric razor around my baby chin very quietly then air-guitar John and George’s driving double lead with the wooden spoon. Very quietly

And guess what. I Feel Fine... 

 

*

Friday Night. The tall door of 11 Percival Crescent, Corbenic, Bristol, England, Great Britain, Europe, The World, The Universe, Space, Nothing, swings inward and Aunt Rdognas’s face fills the black hole behind, wreathed in smiles. The warmth of the hallway seems to come from her Comfortable print-frock and lumpy cardigan. It reaches out and envelopes Cindy. Aunt Rdognas’s frock hem is as uneven as the rag mats arranged like tigerskin rugs along the hall. The lino and the wallpapered walls reflect the heat of the industrial strength coal fire she has stoked in Cindy’s honour in the grate. Cindy is drawn into this castle of love out of the cold and rain. 

Aunt Rdognas beams. “So lovely to see yow! Go on in and put your feet up by the fire and I’ll bring you a cup of tea. Pat! Here’s Cinday!”

Uncle Pat is smoking Virginia roll ups, reading the Mirror, his navvy’s corduroys redolent of work, tobacco and Scrumpy. He is having a tar-strength brew before going down to the Red Hart for an evening of rough cider and mayhem. “Lucinda!” he rasps at Cindy in his Irish brogue.  And offers her a roll up. Her surrogate Dad.

*

Half an hour later, Cindy is in a Corbenic Council Estate callbox, granules of smashed glass crunching under foot, a thick odour of tobacco disguising the stench of piss. She is reporting her safe arrival at Aunt Rdognas’s via the Sargent’s phone to Absent Dad, who is now out doing another extra shift to pay for a holiday we would never take because he spent it redecorating a front room he hardly saw. I am in the Sargents’ garden, nursing a sore backside and getting my ball back, when Mrs Sargent summons me in to take the call. 

I tell Cindy how the row had ended.

‘You know where you are with Dad,’ she says.

I knew the routine. “Where?” 

“Nowhere!” 

“But he’s like a father to me!” 

Cindy laughs. “Yeah! Absent!” 

It is our regular joke. 

“Say hi and love to Aunt Rdognas and Uncle Pat” I say as I hear the pips go.

“Theirs to you too. Bye James-” 

I put down the phone and my whole world dies. 

John and Paul lost their Mother Mary so they sang their hearts out to her. They were carolling that Something; that soft touch; that hidden meaning; that Yeah you; that Hand they wanted to Hold. They called her Girl and Michelle and Julia and Lucy and bought diamond rings for her and worked it out until all the fussing and fighting finally came together. ‘She’ was everyone’s Mother Mary then. And even when George – the group’s full Liverpool-Irish Catholic to Paul’s half-Catholic and John’s half-Irish – joined in, calling her Krishna, still our hearts all joined in the chorus. It was only when they started calling her Yoko that we lost interest.

*

Uncle Pat was a good surrogate Dad for both of us, when he wasn’t at the pub. Which was Not Very Often. Aunt Rdognas was definitely the Mother that Cindy Never Had – always there for her – but mine was Cindy. The problem being that Cindy left home and (unlike me)  never looked back. No matter how many detailed blurbs I hand out, and cram into my Nowhere novels and shows, of the way she looks, the way she acts, the colour of her hair, I can’t find her. 

She’s Not There.

 

 

Chapter Four

Wait

Cindy wakes up in the box room of Aunt Rdognas’s 11 Percival Crescent, hears the distant jingle of a milk float turning into it from Blanchefleur Drive and wonders where she is. Is she late for work? She is already jumping out of bed and scrabbling for clothes as she realises. She’s at Aunt Rdognas’s!

She snuggles back under the starched white cotton sheets. They are not as instantly warming as Stepmother’s new pink toe-clinging bri-nylon – and there was an old cricket bat under the mattress which she’d had to move in the middle of the night. (Some boyish prank effected by Johnny doubtless.) But these sheets feel – stately. And she herself feels like a lady of leisure now in her Saturday morning glory. She stretches out, hearing the springs groan beneath her along the big old brass bed. ‘Princess Lucinda will receive you now,’ she laughs.

The bed joins in, sawing away at volume and Cindy puts her hand over her mouth. The walls of Percival Crescent, like the rest of Corbenic, are paper-thin. Aunt Rdognas will think she’s got Johnny in here with her. Aunt R’s always thinking that anyway. She takes her chaperone duties with Victorian seriousness. She is the woman who put the V in Regina and the C in Aunt. “Get that ring on your finger!” If the emblem of the middle classes is delayed gratification, the emblem of Aunt R’s working class is just – delay.

December sunshine streams through the thin curtains. Cindy pouts. Nothing on earth could persuade Aunt Rdognas to join Uncle Ex-Pat at the Red Hart last night, not after Johnny Churchill dropped by on his motorbike. An evening with the three of them playing rummy and crib and drinking schooners of Aunt Rdognas’ Bristol Cream was as good as it got after that. Johnny could hardly kiss her goodnight at the garden gate as they leaned against his bike trying to avoid Queen Victoria’s gorgon glare from the window. An Englishwoman’s virtue is her castle! And then he’d driven the motorbike into the neighbour’s hedge and caused a bit of an argument with the Morgans. Still, Cindy charmed them – she could always do that – which was just as well because Johnny couldn’t charm anyone. Except Fay Morgan the girl next door and any girl he wanted, come to that, with his moody motorbike looks. Not the best end to a frustrating evening.

Still, Aunt Rdognas had excelled herself with the spam sandwiches and Co-op instant coffee at regular intervals –a bit of kissing time – and the sherry and Woodbines she’d showered over them had gone down a treat. Not to mention that crazy river of Shakespeare Aunt R started spouting after the fifth sherry, about where the Queen of the Fairies sleeps- 

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,

Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,

With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine. 

About as good a night in as a girl could wish for. Except she wanted to go out. And tonight she and Johnny were going out for the evening to Bristol City Centre. Even dreams could come true there – in fact, anything could happen. But let’s not get carried away. She made up her face and tried not to remember Aunt’s R’s dogma: lucky in cards, unlucky in love. Cindy grinned. Which was one luck better than Stepmother Mary’s at any rate.

*

That Big Friday Night In was Aunt Rdognas’s Answer to the Sixties. As much idea of the Something happening here as Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park but her repressiveness, like his, free of Aunt Norris’s nastiness because at heart, at some level, in tune with its Molly-Blooming Eat Drink and Be Merry Because Yesterday We Died party! Party! Beat. On the contrary, Wicked Stepmother Mary/ Aunt Norris’s Answer to the Sixties went something like this.

(1963) “She Loves You Yeah Yeah Yeah!”

“No she doesn’t.”

(1964) “A Love like Ours Could Never Die”

“One hit wonders.” 

(1965) “We Can Work It Out.”

“No we can’t.”

 “The Beatles are at No. 1 for Christmas for the third time in three years...”

“There won’t be a fourth.”

(1967) “The Beatles are at No. 1 for Christmas for the fourth time in six years.”

“There won’t be a fifth.’

(1970) “Mother Mary, speaking words of wisdom, returned for Christmas saying with piano-ringing certainty that there will be Answer, standing right in front of me... IN my Aunt Rdognas… 

“Have you been taking drugs?”

*

Saturday Night out in Bristol at last! Most of the girls work from 7 am until lunchtime, enjoying the feeling that they are getting a whole day’s pay for five hours. Then they meet the factory men for a booze-up before football. Then, while the men are herding into the terraces like Somertown Saturday market animals between breeze blocks and railings for the poor man’s Greek Theatre (complete with a drunken Chorus defined by but unable to influence the action), the women sober up, clear up, wash up, and make themselves up for Saturday Night, Sunday Morning. 

Cindy hasn’t. Cindy works overtime Monday to payday (Thursday) instead and gets away from Stepmother as early on Freya-Friday afternoons and as many weekends as she can. Bristol rocks. It is still making up for the dark Thirties and Forties when you couldn’t get a drink in the city at all. And you had to hurtle down unlit country roads towards the Black Out, with the engine off to save petrol, too blind drunk to notice you couldn’t see where you were going. 

But Saturday afternoon Christmas shopping in the Haymarket without Johnny – he is at the football – is more crowded, violent and goalless than Ashton Gate. She keeps hunting all the way up to Clifton and the shops near the University, where the posh crowds have paraded since the Slave Trade. Whatever she’s looking for, it isn’t up there either. Then she has to wait an hour for a Corbenic bus home – three full double deckers leave her standing – and wait ten minutes in the ticket queue just to stand in the aisle like a needle in a haystack of Christmas shopping, most of it not hers. As the bus goes back through the Centre, she reads a poster for a coming attraction at a posh theatre in Clifton Village or Bath Spa or someplace: Waiting For Godot. A play where nothing happens. Twice. She knows the feeling. And in the rush to get off at Queen’s, she breaks a heel on her lovely new shoes. 

Aunt Rdognas gives her a home fire and a high tea worthy of the Grail Castle, a spread that keeps spreading. Jam tarts from the Co-op. Enough sandwiches to feed India. Tea poured from a horn of plenty. A grail of cherry brandy. 

Another double decker into town and Cindy is out again. Saturday Night in Park Street is swinging as usual and the Centre itself – the old riverfront entirely covered now by a precinct fronted by a statue of Neptune that no-one seems to approve of – is swimming in booze. It’s VE night every Saturday, where Hitler-surviving-never-surrenderers make love not war. A woman with a Vidal Sassoon hair-crop staggers by and falls over. Two others giggle as they try to pull her up. Then they also fall over, kinky boots and coloured tights akimbo. Everybody is laughing. 

All except Cindy. Johnny came on a bit strong after his fifth pint. 

“Don’t, Johnny.”

“Why not?” 

Manfred Mann’s recent autumn hit If You Got To Go is lulling her across the loudspeakers. She can feel Johnny’s hard lean body against hers in the shadows of the dance hall and wonders why not herself: this new soft bra does not provide the passion-killing body armour of the old.  But Johnny doesn’t have a rubber on him and Cindy still hasn’t gone on the Pill, as some of the girls at the factory were now calling it. That was for posh women wasn’t it – and wasn’t it expensive? No, they said. (And yes yes yes to their boyfriends later.) And the previous Wednesday, after a long overtime shift, and four years after the Pill became officially ‘widely available’ she’d actually gone to Family Planning.  And waited and waited and waited. While the Light programme played Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?.  No, she snorts, because I’ll still be here. She dozes off in the warm waiting room...

*

She wakes up to the Sound of Music. How embarrassing – was she actually snoring? No. The Mary Poppins opposite is not looking at her.  She yawns. She waits. She forces herself to stay awake, flicks through the old magazines and finds one dated Wednesday December 8 1965. Today! She reads that miniskirts have been reclassified from children’s wear to adult wear by British Customs – so that Harold can tax them. She sees Ian Brady and Myra Hindley safely arrested for the Moors child-murders and that Kenneth Tynan has said the first ever ‘fuck’ on the grown up telly. There will be a truce in Vietnam this Christmas. The children of the Sixties are safe to roam free and aimless as a Help plotline and climb every mountain. 

Aren’t they?

She looks up, hearing her name at last. Her family doctor, Dr No, will see her now. She enters nervously, takes a seat and after a few hums and hems pops the question. The Pill. He looks at her sternly. “Are you married? Engaged?”

She shakes her head. “No. But I’m not applying to live in the Middle Ages either.”

The doctor’s three chins start to wobble pompously. “Young lady, I have to tell you this new pill is not for…” 

“Women?”

“I was going to say children. You were born…” he squints at some earlier doctor’s illegible scrawl “January 30 19-.” He can’t read the 50.

Phew.“1946. Not Yesterday. Even if it feels like I’ve been waiting out there since –”

”You’re nineteen and unmarried. Whatever this Government in its permissive wisdom thinks it’s doing, I do not intend being a grubby Pandarus for-”

“Tarts?”

“Well, as you’ve mentioned it...”

And that was as a 19 year old, one conceived on VE night itself rather than VE night plus four! The numbers games teenage people played. Born in 1950, she had been 16 in 1963 applying for the biscuit factory job; 19 today applying for the Pill; 18 in the Colston Hall bar since 1962, still 13 on the bus or train coming home. It was her actual age they rarely believed, her precocious natural bloom Dolled up to the nines. But her 15-going-on-19 hadn’t worked today.

Did she want another appointment? They asked her on the way out. No, she said, rehearsing what she was going to have to say to Johnny now. 

*

Because like a fool, or a man, she’d lost her rubbers on the bus – and rubbers were not so easy for a girl and boy to come by. That was still all right, as long as she could get Johnny to give her that ring. But they’d been out together all afternoon in the Haymarket and nothing doing. She’d even lingered by the jewellers and been especially nice to him at the back of the cinema. (Mary Poppins – he might at least have pretended they were actually there to see a film she would like, rather than to, you know… - but the Alfie trailer was Michael Caine: gorgeous.) But still nothing.

He slurs again, his hair hanging in rat’s tails over his face. “Why not?”

“Because you haven’t got a rubber, Johnny – and I haven’t got a ring.”

The magic moment he’s supposed to say. “Haven’t you? Then what’s this” And wave her an imitation diamond engagement ring in her eyes like a spell.

“Haven’t you?” he growls. “Then what’s this.” He paws at her, an animal.

She lowers her head. What if he gets nasty? 

*

Johnny had tried to find a barber’s that was still open but nowhere stayed open much after 5.30, not even here in the big city. So they went out to the dance hall and Johnny kept drinking like it would take his mind off the other thing. But of course it didn’t. It just made him angrier about not getting it.

“If we were engaged?” –

“What do I want a ring through my nose for? I’m not a pig.”

“And I’m not a slut. Johnny – you take that back or I’m going home.”

“You want to fucking tie me down.”

“I want a night where you give yourself to me completely, and give your love...sweetly, a night to treasure for the rest of our lives, just like you, Johnny. But – well, let me ask you just once. And then I promise never to bring it up again.”

“What now?”

“Will you still love me tomorrow?”

“Always the heavy questions. Always planting your fat arse on the back of my motor bike. Why can’t I be-”

“What?”

“Free. Streamlined. Winged. Ride my bike where I like, baby. I’m not giving up my freedom just for something I can get anywhere. Just so I can slave in some factory and bring my money home to you-.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Trying to control me with- ” Here he grabbed her and she fought him off. After a while, he went very still. “Right. Sod this.”

And off he went. And now here she was in Bristol City Centre, on a Saturday night, all skimpy dressed up with no ring to go – except back to Aunt Rdognas. And they had tickets for that Beatle concert tomorrow in Cardiff.  She checked her purse. Did she have them or him? He did. 

No, here they were in her hand. She felt a sudden cold fear. They weren’t going to that concert then. Their ‘engagement’ concert. It wasn’t their concert anymore. He was going to leave her. 

She got on the Number 6 bus, seeing driver Jimmy Drake through tears. Jimmy’s look was kind but guarded. He didn’t want to be accused of casting a spell now it was dark – a young white woman had made just such a claim two years ago, and another last week had asked him to show her his tail.  Rosa Parks may have sat down in the front of a Montgomery bus ten years before, but in Bristol the ’63 bus strike cast a bigger shadow over Jimmy.  He has as much chance of being seen for himself as a black man has of becoming President of the United States.

“Tickets?”

“Single all the way, please.” Her voice broke completely now as she sighed it. The conductor looked concerned as he took Cindy’s fare but he remained guarded and said nothing. 

The bus was almost empty. The crew changed, the two going off duty glad to avoid the abuse that the late shift would soon be getting. The new crew got on, looking like they’d rather be enjoying a Saturday night of their own, but consoling themselves that they were at least getting double time for it. She looked up. Another black face looking at her with sympathy.

“I’ve paid my fare already,” she said. Then bit her tongue as she realised he was a gentleman in a suit, not a conductor in bus uniform. That was always happening in Bristol. For every hundred West Indian labourers, based in St Paul’s, there was some well-heeled African prince at the University. “Sorry.”

The man’s face broke from its frown of concern into a beaming smile. Then he was propelled to the back of the bus by the vehicle moving off. He sat down a few seats behind her, opening his briefcase, studying a paper and looking anxious about his stop. Two girls got on and found his presence hilarious. He grinned, bore it, and got off soon after, bowing to Cindy as he left.

Cindy’s tears added a broken pavilion of splendour to the city framed in her window – everywhere people were having balls she wasn’t invited to. Everywhere people were going the other way, out into night town, not back into herself and Aunt R’s Big Night In. 

Cindy cried as far as Bedminster, then pulled herself together. She repaired her mascara in a small pink hand mirror. She looked like Dusty Springfield now. She smiled – at least she didn’t look like Stepmother Mary. She felt unexpectedly okay. A future without Johnny seemed more real with every fare stage towards the black hole south of Bristol that loomed through the windscreen ahead. The familiar stops came and went. Parson Street, Lovers Lane… where she’d got off with Johnny once. Nowhere Lane now. She needed a smoke, so she staggered upstairs. 

She was glad she had. A gang got on soon after. They were smoking – downstairs in spite of the regulations – and were soon singing, shouting and pushing each other around. The Pakistani conductor was having a go at them, which they all thought was hysterical: Pakistanis were famously passive, easy to tease, forbidden by their religion to fight back.  But this one had finally had  oho h. ‘Christ, rather him than me,’ she thought.  If racial prejudice was now illegal in public, they hadn’t told this lot. Corbenic boys formed the hard core of City fans and took no prisoners. Even Johnny was wary of them and he stood with them on the terraces in his leather jacket every week. 

Where is he now?

*

Johnny is in the Cornucopia, drowning his frustrations in Scrumpy; rough cider at its Somerset-apple best. He and his mates are still discussing the afternoon’s game. A folk-rock group is plucking away, the pretty singer gamely belting out The Carnival is Over and getting much more of the audience’s attention than the guitarists or their earnest folk harmonies. The guitarists dream of a Fairy Godmanager turning them into Donovan and Dylan. Meanwhile, they rely on the girl’s pretty voice/face/smile for bookings. (Tell me about it, Joni Mitchell might jazz-sing a few years later: a better singer, guitarist and musician than Dylan, and his brilliant equal as a poet, so why never as the troubadour of their changin’ times…?...) 

Johnny listens to the guitars interweaving in a warm glow of cider-apple cheer, a whole Somerset summer in his hand. He never listens to the words of songs much anyway (he rarely listens to what women say at all) and certainly not tonight: he watches the singer’s mouth. Something about a last goodbye. Everybody is yelling, the ship-like interior of the pub a fug of heat and smoke. It has a shabby ‘Captain’s cabin’ snug and a shabbier Bristol mariner bar from which, they say, luckless seamen were once pressed onto the slave ships and sent to kidnap even more luckless Africans for shipping to the Americas. But they’ll say anything after half a gallon of Scrumpy. 

There is a street sign up on the Cornucopia pub wall, bearing the legend BLACKBOYS HILL, stolen by student wags from the top of what the formal maps of the city just call ‘Whiteladies Road.’ BLACKBOYS HILL exists only in the popular imagination. So Whiteladies Road actually leads to a Blackboys Hill that  - at least according to the City Fathers - isn’t there, like those ‘Hidden Meanings.’(“The Sixties wasn’t a rip off,” Lennon will say of this sort of phantom reality later “It was a love-in.”) As ‘not there’ as the slave trade that built this elegant Georgian city, or the black blood at the heart of Sixties music. But it’s definitely here now in the Horn of Plenty.

The cracked varnish of the beams and floorboards blends with the antique Guinness-coloured carpet. The ‘modern’ land maps and sea charts which cover the walls – put there at the end of World War 2 – are nicotine brown-black. The band stops for a break and Johnny offers to buy the singer a drink.

“I’d love a babycham,” says the girl. 

“Babycham?”

“Champagne cider, a Sixties folk drink for Sixties folk,” she says, repeating the adverts she does for her vacation job. “They make it in Yeovil.”

“Cider for babbies!” roars a bloke in the scrum at the bar. “They makes it down Yeovil! You’ll be drinking wine next John.”

“Wine’s for girls,” growls his quart-jug quaffing companion. “And cu-cunt-“

“Now, then. Language!”

“Cuntinentals. This Scrumpay keeps addling me verbals…”

“Achoooo! Ugh!” A momentous sneeze along the bar. A mountain of red flesh on a stool.

“Very kind. Thank you. I’m Cathy by the way.”

Johnny is charmed by the girl’s accent, which is educated and not like the rootsy voice she uses for the songs. One of these students then. He wonders what a student life is like. Like school into your twenties, surely – only, by choice? Or maybe a place to meet girls like this? 

“The trouble with Scrumpy, especially when it’s fresh, is it’s like drinking apples fresh from a tree,” peals the girl. “It goes down like a mountain stream but you end up forgetting your way home.”

“So – you’ll have a Scrumpy with that and forget you aren’t going my way then?” flirts Johnny. “I’ll see you home, don’t worry.” He tries to do a Sean Connery wink with his eyebrows but does Soooty and Sweep instead. 

“God, no. I’ve got to sing Dylan in a minute. Can’t be muddling up all those heavenly words.” 

“Achoooo! Ugh! I likes a pint of warm orange squawsh with a brandy in. That’s what you wants for a cold,” wheezes Jelly Roll Mountain on his plastic-seated barstool. The cushion top is flattened and the barstool is straining under the weight. Johnny tries vainly to get out of snot range by pushing against the scrum of people behind him. 

There is a sudden rasp of a football rattle. The Bedminster Bard gets up for the interval spot, wearing a City scarf, which gets him a cheer. It does not guarantee the audience’s attention for more than two seconds, though, he knows that. He'd seen Brian Patten in Liverpool, the other slave city, recently and they were banging beer glasses and stabbing out cigarettes into the tender heart of his love poems before he’d got to the second button of the poem-girl’s blouse. He announces the title-  Away At Cheltenham – to a second obscene cheer and starts performing at the top of his voice before he loses them.

These sad drunken pie-gobbling blokes,

Some so drunk they can’t even light their fags,

Some so stupid they are yelling

SERVE YOU BLOODY RIGHT

YOU BLOODY FAT UPPERCLASS TOSSERS

- At players as proletarian as they;

Some so fat they can’t get out of their seats to applaud the goal;

Desperate All Our Saturdays for this moment,

Lonely by radio or in the defeat-dumbed crowd

Hanging on to something we can’t even name

Until it comes.

Victory.

Feeling it now, hanging like fruit from this terrace roof,

All those years of squandered points,

Missed sitters and chewed off fingers

Finally coming good.

Citizens of the sixth largest city in England

With a vibrancy second to none

And for once it feels like it.

We’re going up, we’re going up, 

We’re going...

Bristol’s going up.

This is my goal.

This is where the red hart is.

This is home…

Thank you!”

There is applause, and a wild chant. Johnny finds himself chanting with the rest, tears in his eyes. He is at the game again, sharing the goal joy with his tribe: the ugly, cheating, chauvinist, farting, belching, horn-blaring premature-ejaculating, churlish, fragmented, vandalising, rat-pack crowd suddenly transformed into a sum the holy opposite of its gross parts. Into a male voice choir of love, at one with himself in a self-affirming crowd: a purgatorial terrace blasted into heaven. 

“This is the New One,” the poet-popstar announces with thinly disguised self-irony and loathing, wishing he had a guitar and an instantly recognisable chart hit intro – those power chords that announce I Can’t Explain, say – to say it about. The bliss of not having to explain what he was performing. The Niagara falls of applause it would guarantee!

Someone is ordering a round at the bar now. Very loudly. A pot bellied beardo chucks a box of matches and a thin boatmast-tall harbour master catches it and says Ta.  A vaguely menacing Irishman raises his glass of Guinness and says to the bard, “Sure, say us a sad one.”  A rich Bristol burr says “You’ll ’ave to go up the Rovers for that.”

“I was up Norf this week as it happens. Not Norf Bristle. The Norf. ‘Sheff-elled.’ (Sheffield.) The Blades.”

“Them cunts.” Jeers.

Bard grins and bears it. In some ways, he prefers the away gigs, especially the northern ones. The atmosphere was even warmer – too warm at times – little beer-fuelled community dramas all evening, but everything kissed and made up by closing time. And in Wales the week before everyone would sing at the drop of a hat, and loved you as long as you were Welsh, or not too English. But nowhere got more raucously familiar than this home fixture. 

“All right my lover?” 

“Lovelay to see you my babber!”

“Cheers, bud.”

“This is for Bobby Moore, John Atyeo” (a few cheers and one apostate call of ‘cart’orse!)’ The Bard lifts his voice above the din. “...George Best, and everyone at the game today. Football is-”

He waits while a few drinkers chant the score. Bloody peasants, he thinks, behind the fixed grin. “John Atyeo,” he ad libs over the chanting. “Never booked. Has he ever even fouled anyone?” Someone pipes up, “NO bud! Unlike Rovers who fouls everybody.” Another adds. “Including their own shorts!” More laughter. The Bard rides it, ad libs “Yep. They haven’t had a clean sheet all season.” Laughter. “I said ‘sheet’ ladies and gentlemen.” A great fart of laughter from the crowd. ‘Bard from Bristol’ sighs inwardly, lets it settle, rattles off the last poem. He’s lost most of them by the end but there are still a few thoughtful faces, nodding. These few clap with real appreciation. Not as a crowd now. He returns the nods. These are who he does it for. But he is waiting for his un Beatable day when they’ll all clap. 

“Thank you. And now, back to the band.”

“Thank Christ for that,” quips ‘Alkie’ (All-key) Cutler and the Bard, grabbing his Scrumpy, raises him his glass. One of them isn’t joking.

Johnny’s heart leaps as he hears the crisp consonants of Cathy’s amplified voice again. “Thanks to the Bard of Bedminster there. Good stuff.”

“Barred from BedminsteR, more like!” roars Alkie Cutler improvising to more sustained hilarity and applause than all the Bard’s carefully constructed verse effects put together. 

Cathy continues to beam, like a nightlight left on half the morning. “And we’re starting our second set with the Bard-”

“Oh no!” roars Alkie.

“ShakespeaRe?” hollers an ancient mariner.  

“The Bard who’s been putting the poetry into pop lyrics from Help to Satisfaction. So put your hands together for Bob Dylan’s Gates of Eden.”

Light applause and a few grunts of “Oo?”. But they are all looking at her now and finding it a pleasant prospect. 

The chilled dry white wine of her voice was all the more beguiling to Johnny after the poet’s yard of ale. As her voice direct-hits the first note, he is caught in the mystery of gender. Or, as a more austere musical scholar might put it, the lascivious pleasings of an easy lay.

 

And yet the football poems have touched him, lifted him above his groin. Their powerful spell broke really after the first one but it is still working away inside Johnny’s head and heart and soul, even as his mind sails down the girl’s beguiling mouth down over the graceful mysterious inexplicable escarpment into to the maddening love-hollow of her skirt and back again. 

That Bard knows his football. That portrait of thousands of people – a whole terrace of peasants – magically transformed by let’s face it, a pig’s bladder inside a sphere of dubbin-soaked brown leather. How that globe being booted over clinging west country turf becomes – is – the world. 

But it is the girl Johnny follows home. 

*

Cindy stays upstairs. She feels much less safe without Johnny next to her – and this disturbs her. But she also has more space. She is her own woman now. She listens to the bedlam drifting up, hopes they get off before the Corbenic terminus, keeps out of sight of the mirror that connects the two decks. A grinning face is reflected, magnified, for a moment and its owner seems about to come up. Then there is an explosion of noise and scuffling. Two of the gang have stolen the conductor’s leather cashbag and one jumps off at some traffic lights. The rest are falling about laughing. One falls off the bus altogether.

The bus conductor wonders if it is worth it. It’s a steady job but he wants to be a paperback driver. The driver tells him that driving isn’t all it’s cracked up to be either – he often wishes he was just handling fares again, even Saturday night ones, instead of balancing a bus load of big city hazards. 

Neither driver nor conductor realises how well off he is: in fifteen years both will be doing both jobs for the price of the same heart attack. Corbenic Way stretches off into darkness. Cindy doesn’t notice that the lights have changed. 

“We’re a railway age technology,” reflects the green traffic light, “lingering on into the car-age from a dead past.” 

“Like a steam ship on a space ship,” waxes the amber lamp. “It’s the end of the road for us.” 

“For us,” winks the redlight in mock-Nazi, a tear beginning to form, “zere is only zer Motorvay.”   

For Cindy there is not even that. Just the unmade path under the ring of hills at the bottom of Bristol. A ring of darkness.  All of a sudden, Cindy wants to be safe and sound in Aunt R’s Fifties front room, playing cards with Johnny, Saturday night or no.

*

  

“Oi! Cunt!”

“What’s want, BastaRd?!”

Cindy opens her eyes. Sunday Mourning. Praise the dawning (as Lou Reed would put it two light years later) White light, white heat through bleached vintage curtains. Children roaring white trash noise. Not exactly Dr Who’s BBC Radiophonic Workshop but maybe a track off their 1968 White Noise album. But let’s not get out of ahead of ourselves. It’s still only December 12 1965 and Cindy hasn’t even heard the future worked out on the Beatles’ Day Tripper yet.

Aunt Rdognas is living in a past nearer the original Jethro Tull than the as-yet-unformed ‘progressive’ folk-blues band that will be named after him. She used to live in St Michael’s Hill, in the heart of Bristol. Her father was a cabinetmaker. His graceful handiwork is immortalised in some prominent furnishings in Bristol Cathedral. That gentleman cabinet maker’s house near the stately Church of St Michael on the Mount Without, up several flights of elegant grey stone City Centre steps and overlooking the oldest part of the City, was flattened by Hitler. The Government compensation for being bombed out was this new bit of ticky tacky terrace on the southern outskirts of the City, an ugly incursion into the Arthurian beauty of Somerset which begins at the bottom of her shabby Percival Crescent; in a pearling stream now choked with sink estate debris. Rdognas’s ancestors are buried in gentry graves in Thornbury just north of Bristol and her father’s people came to Bristol trailing those clouds of prosperity. Rdognas has fallen a long way: married to a navvy who spends his evenings in quest of a Romantic Ireland dead and gone in a cider house called the Red Hart and housing her elegant books and furniture in the most deprived area of England, so deprived they refuse to send any Black or Asian families into it. 

You might think that without that blitzing of her Bristol City Centre house she may have held on to a bit more of her own. But, in the Fifties and Sixties, City Centres were still slumming it in gloomy ex-Victorian wildernesses of war damage, bad air, bad drains, cramped rooms and decay; millions of pounds from the gentrified pied de terres of today. It still seemed a kindness to move people out of the Dead End Streets of City Centres and rehouse them in well plumbed, heated, ticky tacky on the rural outskirts. It was, until the sheer volume of problem families packed into the tower blocks, terraces and tenements (well provided with hot running water, cabled TV and gas) simply reproduced the problem slums of yesterday in flimsier buildings; ‘white trash’ herded together in one huge muddy field without city lights and pavements, choice, variety, excitement, city shops, city libraries, city hospitals or cool city places to let off steam. No wonder the younger generation spent most of their time smashing up the windows of any new build and beating up the build already there. 

Cindy has never been told by Wicked Stepmother about the cabinet maker and the genteel background of her rival, Aunt Rdognas. Aunt Rdognas’s background is one of the thousand dark shadowy Secrets and skeletons the Spectres never talk about. But Stepmother certainly looks down on Rodgnas’s margarine, Co-op instant coffee, sterilised milk, ITV, TV Times, Coronation Street, Heinz, condensed milk Daily Mirror lifestyle, married beneath her to a navvy, from the snob heights of her Anchor butter, Nescafe instant coffee, pasteurised milk, BBC, Radio Times, All Our Yesterdays, Crosse and Blackwell, Ideal milk independent small businessman’s daughter married beneath her to an artisan Daily Mail alternative. 

Yeah, Aunt Rdognas was so common she had kippers, gammon, fried breakfasts and offered guests four courses for Sunday dinner. She has to concede Aunt R’s light and extremely addictive homespun Christmas Cake with its cornucopia of sherry and brandy, enchanted marzipan and fairy icing (and her all year round gypsy barrel of exotic biscuits) are the preferred choice of her children not even her own giant Christmas-over the top peat-black fruitcake with its inch of icing (nor her rest of the year spartan budget biscuits.) And she may even envy Aunt R’s tipsy spirit of hospitality, the sheer volume and variety of what Aunt R serves up, which makes every meal she provides feel like a beggar’s banquet  But in general she looks down on Aunt R’s subjugation with as much satisfaction as she sneers up at the Lurpak and olive oil middle classes.

No olive oil or Lurpak in Percival Cresc. Dogs in descant – volleys of barking, yapping, growling. Sunday morning in Corbenic. Cindy closes her eyes again. She got home all right off that bus and up through the precinct then. Somehow. She gets up and looks at her puffy face in the mirror. Her skin has the pumpkin waxiness of death. Like something out of Mme Tussauds.

Uncle Pat is making tea downstairs. She goes down to join him, glancing into the front room and noticing his beloved cowboy novels piled up on a table next to his armchair.  He read them  constantly, escaping into a world of shoot outs and high noons and endless wide open spaces. And happy endings riding off into the sunset. It was what he did when he wasn’t working or drinking and she would see the same vast poignant library of paperback Westerns on his hospital death bedside table just three years later.  Pat’s nose – normally blue veined and sullen red – is scarlet raw today with an abrasion that has removed the skin. Tom Jones is singing It’s Not Unusual on the radio. It isn’t. 

Pat looks her straight in the eye, pre-empting any question. “Fell over.” The gas kettle boils, and he takes it off quickly before its piercing whistle wakes Rdognas. He spoons in three heaped measures, adds the boiling water and stirs, wrist supple and wiry.  The hairs on it are grey, the skin tired. His face is corpse-thin, an emaciated rubber mask of itself. He puts the sugar into the milk before adding the thick tea. It is a Belfast sink but he calls it a Dublin, for political reasons. The sink tidy in the corner is full of potato peelings and sodden tealeaves dumped from previous pots. Its homely pungent smell along with the smell of the hard, limestone water catches in Cindy’s nostrils. 

“Cup of tea in your hand?” he asks ritually.

That meant just a cup of tea. ‘Tea’ meant a spread.

“You’ve added the sugar first, Uncle Pat.”

“And isn’t that the right way, the way we did it in Drogheda?” 

Irish tea for an Irish hangover. Both industrial strength. But Pat was used to that. Unlike his estranged son Ex-Pat Junior currently on the run from Ex-Pat’s Romantic Ireland Dead and Gone in Swinging Leeds on a management training placement he  ohed to make permanent. But Cindy prefers Ex-Pat’s Romantic Ireland in Exile, even Dead and Gone, to the SM’s Rex Quondam Rex Futurus Wales in Exile That Never Was Nor Ever Will Be. Or the Arthur’s England of AD’s that Never Bothered To Turn Up.  She sips the tea, feeling its warm tar coat her teeth and tongue. Lovely. Uncle Ex-Pat whistles some rebel tune from his IRA days. Those Twenties are long gone but he remembers the misty-eyed soundtrack like it is yesterday, especially after a gallon of Scrumpy. “Those black and tan bastards – four years fighting in the trenches in France and they still wanted more. Well, th’ Broth’rhood gave it to th’m. The land of saints and scholars, Cindy, saints and scholars. We gave it to them, good and strong.” 

Then Romantic Ireland gave it to each other and the dream of a new independent Ireland became the nightmare of civil war, thought Cindy. And the work dried up. The seven lean years came. Uncle Pat begged and starved and worked “like a Black” (only he didn’t say ‘Black’) for a crust, and finally “got caught poaching from the lord of the manor”. That was his story anyway. The truth was a lot more romantic and a lot scarier. His father’s gun, a Wolfe Tone employed in heroic Irish brotherhood struggles against the distracted British Empire in 1916 and then, more problematically, in the bitter civil war that followed in the Eireann twenties, had been handed to him by his father with a deathbed-wish that he, Pat, never forget the cruelties and deprivations of half a millennium of English rule. As Eire was now independent, this ritual Republicanism faded in the less than romantic struggle for subsistence in Drogheda in the Twenties until Ex-Pat came to England after which what Yeats called the ”fine angry mood” ignited up in all its drunken glory at every opportunity. He kept the vintage gun upstairs in his underpants drawer and tried to forget that he’d used it the night before he left Ireland with an empty belly and an unpaid bar bill in that least romantic of causes: to intimidate his brother behind the bar. And absconded on the boat to Fishguard and Bristol to see what there was to see. Like many an ex-Pat, he never went back. He got a job on a building site, still building a ‘land fit for heroes to live in’ as that world stumbled into a second war that would blow it all up again. Another grail lost in another red mist. He met Rdognas in Bristol the night he was drinking through his first wage packet. And her with that piercing dark hair and eye on her, sure he thought she was Italian, she who never left Bristol in her whole life, except that once to visit young Joe in Somertown. Ten years later, during the Blitz, the Government would intern her for three weeks as an enemy alien. 

He occasionally got the gun out in secret, cider-drunk with Irish patriotism, trying to remember the starry rebel song fight for freedom rather than the grubby subsistence-level civil war it had murdered and counter-murdered into; or the shabby concealment of the gun in his running-away bag. The old gun made him feel powerful, centre stage, the MC calling the shots instead of a fugitive hiding in the dark wings of his own show. And at one awful family Sunday dinner in Corbenic, in a furious argument about immigration Ex-Pat wanted to keep the ‘coloureds’ – rivals for his wage-slavery - out of Bristol and England while Joseph, his brother-in-law, my and Cindy’s dad, my hero, insisted that this should include all immigrants, not just the ‘coloured’ ones which Joe understood as a ‘non-racist’ trade unionist anti-immigration position and Ex-Pat as an attack on the Irish. (By ‘non-racist anti-immigration trade union position’ refer the annual union  top brass holiday to Belgium ‘where you can get English food and they don’t Jew you’ and by ‘not an attack on the Irish’ the workplace characterisation of the Land of Saints and Scholars as a Beyond the Pale source of ‘t’ick throoublemaykurs’ who lose their Paddy when you take the slightest Mick’ out of them and whose idea of a class struggle is summed up in that old comradely term ‘an Irishman’s rise’ viz any management concession where you end up working longer hours for less pay. Modern Bristol would handle this differently, inviting both parties to The Slavery Experience at the Tobacco Factory, a drama where the audience are kidnapped off the dock, whipped into the hold of a wave-machined tall ship, injected with dysentery, then clubbed along a road into a boiling hot theatre where they have to build the stage themselves on an empty stomach and then watch a laughing black cast in white face eating a sumptuous meal. But from all of which Ex-Pat was excused by his previous Irish Experience and also given a crust of bread for the interval provided he built the dock and the road to the theatre in the first place.) Meanwhile back, at the Great British and Irish Sunday Roast, Ex-Pat hurled the picture of Joe in his British army corporal’s uniform off Aunt R’s sideboard onto the lino – a testament to Ex-Pat’s customary tolerance and regard for both Aunt R and her brother that it has been allowed to stand there for so long in the first place- and the good family union man in his Sunday best put his clenched fists up as the romantic Irishman started yelling “bastard spawn of Cromwell and the divil” “little Corporal Hitler marching to the jackboots of Oliver’s Army” and swinging drunkenly inaccurate venomous right and left hooks around Corporal Punishment’s appalled face before stopping a fourpenny one from factory Joe full on his purple nose. And, after a profusely bleeding Ex-Pat had been pushed out of his own dining room by an even more disturbed than usual Spectre family, the Irishman slip-sleighed the rag mats in the hall, stormed up the stairs in his indestructible socks and returned with the gun.

There was a terrifying tattoo of thumps on the door. I remember Cindy thrusting me behind her legs and Special howling to get out the back window. Stepmother Mary was as white as chalk, shielding the dog, while Aunt Rdognas was screaming and shielding Cindy. I had never been so glad of Dad Real-Manifesting as Suddenly Vividly Present Corporal Punishment, particularly as he wasn’t doing it in my direction. He flung the door aside and, like all the English Tommy heroes in my Victor comics, advanced out to protect his family and the values of a decent law-abiding society. I just had a glimpse of Ex-Pat pointing the gun as the door slammed shut.

I waited for a BANG BANG that never came. Stepmother Mary as ever  retrospectively shielded us all from the enabling knowledge of whatever happened and this infamous family dinner (concluded only by police called by ‘nosy neighbours’ and entering the house through the front room windows) was never openly discussed by any of the participants except Ex-Pat Junior who enthusiastically emphasised how my dad, his uncle Joe,’s national service army training, factory biceps and much superior youth and fitness overwhelmed the old IRB veteran, whose gun in any case was unloaded and long seized up (and quickly hidden in the over-full family skeleton cupboard under the stairs before police and neighbours could see it, though not quick enough to escape my  ‘Commando’ magazine trained bullet headed Saxon mother’s son eye: I would return after Ex-Pat’s death and seize it secretly a couple of years later at the height of Dick the Prick’s reign of grammar school terror over me and even go as far as once taking it in to those corridors of impotence hidden in my conspicuously wrong satchel after he pogromed my gold Parker pen but was still working up to finally taking it out and shooting him with it when we moved to Wales and beyond any potentially instant karmic live and let die ( balls permitting) and where I continued to nurse it in febrile fantasies under the bedclothes every long dark petrified night. And yes, it’s the very blazing limelight-stealing MC gun,  uneasily missed at the crepuscular back of their minds by every Spectre but assumed by each to have been put beyond use or destroyed by one of the others, which I’m pointing into your black cake hole now, Edinburgh, if you’re here. ) Meanwhile back, Ex-Pat Junior’s only subsequent mention of the incident and its emotional impact was a couplet he sent us from Liverpool on a Christmas card years later “IRA gunman shot through the heart/‘It’s ok’ he says boldly, ‘I’m not hurt’...” But I remember Cindy weeping and asking what the point of going to Mass together last night to worship Jesus and Mary and Joseph if this was how they lived the words and pleading that the brothers in law make up and love one another instead of fighting this antique war. Also that all immigrants of whatever race or nation should be welcome surely, like the Good Samaritan? And Ex-Pat, his gun-arm numb and his Cyclops eye black and tanned, muttering “you’re too young to understand the real world Cindy.” Not for the first time, he wished he’d gone West to America rather than East to the old Enemy. Irish Catholics got elected President there. That will never happen in England… 

Yet Ex-Pat is happy this morning, despite the ache in his head and the nag in his guts. Poor, ill, but yes, for the present– happy. No digging today. No pneumatic drills crucifying his old muscles with their jumping and shaking. Tea in bed with Rdognas. A bus into the city for Mass. Then a wee drink at the Naval Volunteer and the Bog End of the Old Duke. Then a wee drink at the Horn of Plenty. Then home for a navvy-sized Sunday roast. Then a long snooze in front of the hot as hell-fire. A high tea of tinned peaches, cream, tarts, buttered fritters, sherry trifle – with half a bottle of sherry – and brandy cake – with a schooner of brandy. And then out for a proper drink over the fields at the local, chasing the Red Hart. And then home, if he could still find it! Sure, they lived well enough. He’d go out in the back garden and look at the day in a minute.

Uncle Pat pulls the knitted tea cosy – stiff with a thousand pourings – over the pot. Aunt Rdognas knitted it herself, in their son’s football colours, to match the football scarves she turns out for various relatives. Red or blue depending on the relatives. City or Rovers: terraces of pie in the sky dreamers, rosettes and pennants cheering red or blue knights to the echo through the long grey afternoon. There is unconditional love in every stitch, whatever the colour. It is all the same to her.

Their son, named Ex-Pat for his father, but with a different saint’s name, St Judas, started work at Queen’s (Queenziz) a large department store in the centre of Bristol. He is making the most of his Catholic school ‘O’ levels, first attending a retail management course in Rochdale and then staying on there as an assistant manager. His postcards line the mantelpiece and give a strictly edited version of his activities. His dream is to be a retail manager and to have a line of suits in his wardrobe. Cindy has always found his grubby white-collar aspirations and lack of spiritual adventure a bit of a turn off. And if Ex-Pat hoped for a young Republican firebrand after his own heart he is disappointed.

Like most mixed marriages, including Paul McCartney’s parents (not to mention our own Mother Mary and Holy Joe) (I told you not to mention our Mother Mary) the Catholic gene at No 11 Percival was dominant. Ex Pat Junior was raised Catholic and Aunt Rdognas, who had once signed up to the Methodists with a temperance certificate now hidden under several family skeletons at the bottom of her wardrobe, then accordingly signed up to Ex-Pat’s holy and apostolic creed of the overflowing cup. Ex-Pat Junior was sent to Faith schools in Bristol City Centre – his ‘outsider’ status, taste of a wider city community and the daily-hammered ideal of an international Catholic mission, accidentally preparing the Way for his eventual escape from the gangs of Corbenic. As his childhood progressed, the positive moral force of the luminous crucifix twinned in eternal benevolence with the statue of the Virgin Mary in his bedroom stood as surrogate parents, when his directionless father and mend-and-make-do mother were fallen too low  to command his respect. He did not see himself digging roads all day like Ex-Pat for an England he (the elder Ex-Pat) despised, drunk on a dream of an Ireland he would never revisit, following, for the want of a penny candle, a red hart into a red mist, a wavering star into a bog. Ex-Pat Junior would earn the money to buy his own light. He wanted to find his own road and his own star. 

And, as childhood became adolescence, and the priests at school and church continued to hammer their daily holy marching orders, their Pat Answers into his calculating brain, even the star of that luminous crucifix began to fade and fall. He would find his own way, away from Ex-Pat and Aunt Rdognas; away from misty-eyed rebel songs about barnabuiles and Kathleens and that “dear old land beyond the Irish sea”; and finally away from this Jesus, Mary and the blessed donkey blind faith. So he stopped going to Mass and confession and started to study the shop windows of department stores. Ex-Pat was too mild a father to ever accuse him of selling his Irish soul for the queen’s shilling, but if he had, Ex-Pat Junior would have told him his soul was going to cost Queen’s a lot more than that. When his peers started growing their hair Beatle-long long long and getting distracted up Blue Jay Way Way Way and/or escaped social deprivation via ‘A’ levels and college (like that bearded-Yoko Lennonist milkman neighbour and gang co-leader he now nicknamed Jesus of Nadareth) he eschewed all ideals and utopias and faiths and causes and liberations except one: the relentless pursuit of self-promotion.  He would get to the top of the materialist mountain with his short back and empty insides and view a world “changed, changed utterly” into all its terrible beauty from there. It would only emerge later that his hippy-free intrepid neo-libertarian scaling of the Satanic mountain in the wilderness of the material world (“all the kingdoms of the world can be yours!” Matthew 8) would have such bearded, longhaired ‘hippy’ free enterprises as Starbucks ranged in competition all along the peaks, and reached (a lot quicker than Ex Pat Junior’s career-mountaineering) by Virgin Airways. 

Meanwhile back, in 1965, Cindy and Pat sit down in the dining room and smile at each other over the genteel porcelain. The heavy oak table holds china ashtrays, Uncle Pat’s cowboy mags; his Man from Uncle toby jug; Aunt Rdognas’s library books – everything from Ulysses to Mills and Boon and The Sun Is My Undoing. And the busily completed crosswords Aunt Rdognas piles the room with.  Poor rooms crammed with good chairs. Aunt Rdognas is as oblivious to the Fifties ‘utility’ of the house and its paper-thin walls that let all the neighbour’s uproar in, cramped rooms – as she is to the football colours. Her front garden is like the grounds of a stately home in miniature, its impossibly sloping lawn mowed fastidiously by herself using a rusty push-mower, her blooming  bushes flourishing in the heavy clay that resists most other flowers but comes out bursting of roses; her privet hedge tended with fierce pride. An Englishwoman’s home is her castle, even if she has to be her own faithful family retainer. A council house castle that is just a step and a barbed wire hedge away from the deep ‘country’ of Somerset.

The long back garden is a little Ireland for Ex-Pat to raise his vegetables and fruit trees, host the various pet hutches and provide roaming rights to the cat and dog. It gives onto a fence and then a long jungle-stretch of overgrown common land. Cindy notes sadly that Aunt Rdognas (as Uncle Pat’s health ebbs away in cider) increasingly manages this garden herself as well, plunging spades, hoes, forks– all neatly stored in the tiny shed – into the soil like a tinker living off the land. Other gardens in her street make similar efforts towards self-sufficiency – a living memory of the war and a nod to the hart-flitting Somerset pastoral that starts on the other side of this last street in Bristol, across a wildly hedged steepsided brook and up a fertile green hill dotted with haystacks, hedgerows and cattle and all less than a hundred yards  away– but Aunt Rdognas’ is the grandest, the most densely planted; in all ways the most cultivated. Hers is the only house in the street whose windows might reflect that juxtaposition of urban wasteland and Somerset idyll by quoting the Bristol poet Coleridge: “that deep romantic chasm which slanted down a green hill athwart a cedar cover” or find such eclectic reading useful in solving a cryptic crossword.  

Inside, the house oozes sanctuary, a dream home half lost in a mist of sun-shafted blue tobacco smoke. Rdognas transforms it from within. Her presence and the oak and china heritage from that town house she owned in the city, which that thief of all hearts Hitler burnt down. The dream of that blitzed Old Bristol civilisation survives here, in this suburban shell of coral render and concrete. An inner stateliness no manor-born duchess or Rolling Stone would ever know.

Cindy and Ex-Pat slurp their strong sweet sterilised milk tea (leaf tea in good china) in companionable silence. Ex-Pat smiles at her. The Land of Saints and Scholars? Ex-Pat is certainly no Saint and not much of a Scholar either but his love of that oft-missed Ireland is infectious and he carries more of both aspects than might appear, at least when sober like this. He is not so much forgiving as unconditionally accepting of general human foibles, his unruly neighbour’s as his own, (with the furious and abstract exception of English Foreign Policy in Ireland since the Tudors); he doesn’t judge (with the furious and abstract exception of English Foreign Policy in Ireland since the Tudors); he reads; his ideas are original, entertaining and stimulating (belligerent when drunk) his speech vibrant, eloquent and poetic (slurred and opaque when drunk.) Above all, he offers Cindy what she doesn’t get at Council House No. 9 and all you need for any house to be a home: Love. They share it now, in its natural, unstated form: a companionable tea-brewed silence. 

Eventually, there are sounds above. Aunt Rdognas Is Getting Up.

“Sure this is the palace we dreamed of, Cindy,” says Uncle Pat, then frowns. “but there’s no need for yous to be doing that.”

Cindy is clearing the clinker from the grate. There is a small cigarette-end glow left of last night’s flames. She can see the Beatles faces framed there, as in a black and white film, each smoking like a stack on a Lancashire factory. “It’s the least I can do, Uncle Pat. Let Aunt R lie in a bit longer. You were saying – your dream house?” Cindy loves these stories.

“It was that. And a lot of the families questing south from the dark heart of the old city thought the same.”

Aunt Rdognas emerges in her bedroom attire like a crazy duchess, wondering where her tea-in-bed is. She goes into a panic of self-covering, like a traditional Muslim caught out of her burqua in public. Even though no male but Ex-Pat is present. “You sit down, Cindy, love. I’ll do that.” She takes over at the grate. 

“I was just after telling Cindy,” – Ex-Pat slurps more tea – “about the estate when we first came here.” 

“A dream of bygone England, it was,” intones Aunt Rdognas, with that faraway look her eyes got at the slightest provocation. “A church and a vicarage around a village green. High concrete lampposts like daffodils shedding yellow light everywhere. The Horn of Plenty – a respectable Inn with a garden. A shining new shopping precinct, a doctor’s surgery, a purpose-built local ( The Red Hart) across the fields, under endless green-blue hills at the end of the day. And regular green double-deckers into the city centre. No barbed wire around the community centre then.” She lights one of the many spills she cuts from old cereal packets. The flame bursts out magically, green, pink, paraffin blue. Cindy watches it, entranced. Its glow joins all three faces. Rdognas sets it in the kindling and sits back on her heels. 

“You could stand there and look at the day and know your child was safe outside with his crisps and lemonade,” puts in Uncle Pat. “Regular folk. Regular work, not like the Thirties.” 

“And no air raids like the Forties. Shining new council houses – oak doors and coal-fires that gave you so much hot water, you had to drain off gallons of the beautiful heart-warming waters down the sink. When we first came here, everything was so new they hadn’t even finished the pavements. Mud glorious mud. You had to push the pram across those fields by the brook to get to the buses and shops. Wild streams pouring off the green hills. And the future stretching up, emerald green and rowan red, like the lanes into Somerset.”

Uncle Pat looks up, “Sure, she’s the voice of a poet on her.”

Cindy protests. “Aunt Rdognas! Uncle Pat! There’s THREE burnt out car-wrecks rusting up that brook down in the spinney, not to mention the supermarket trolleys, dead prams and ashbins. One minute you’ve got Somerset lakes, wild rushing brooks, haystacks and cider orchards shining in the sun – the next you’ve got a two mile unofficial waste tip. The air sings with menace. I was actually scared to get off the bus last night. Even in the daytime just going to the shops here is like walking a gauntlet. The last time James visited, two girls beat him up!”

“Sure, that was the jerkin he was wearing.”

“That was quality wool, that jerkin,” chuckles Aunt Rdognas. “It cost your Ma a pretty penny.”

Cindy had to laugh. Aunt R was her father’s elder sister and saw more than she let on about her sister in law’s un-enlightened despotism.  “It was vomit yellow and orange, and Stepmother had knitted on a jerkin zip and hood like Rupert Bear’s. He’s nine not four. It was like wearing a Kick Me Hard sign round here. The two girls were killing themselves. Woss want you wet fart!”

“I’m sure they didn’t swear.”  

“Aunt! These kids can’t talk without yelling the F word. Not to mention the C word!”

“There’s no need to mention that.” 

“Some of the mums might as well be driving tanks as prams the looks they give you. The new building site is so vandalised they can’t ever finish it, every window smashed as soon as it’s in. Half the shopping precinct is boarded up and some of the words on the metal shutters even make me blush. And the dogs…“

“Will you listen to the little Princess!” mocks Uncle Pat affectionately.

Aunt Rdognas is chuckling. “I’ll knit James one of my winter pullovers. They won’t laugh at that.” This was true; Cindy wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it was the power of the love she knitted into it, rather than the ‘kick me hard’ of Stepmother Mary’s controlling resentment. “Your Mother and father lived here and they liked it well enough, Cindy. Somertown’s making you soft, love. You should have lived through the bad times.” The fire was going strong now. “Come and warm yourself,”

Cindy moves her chair nearer its flames. 

“You mustn’t ask for too much, Cindy,” says Aunt R, “or expect to get it all at once,” adds Ex-Pat. “Happiness takes time,” they agree, smiling at each other.

The Leonard Cohen and Cat Stevens records she will be listening to two years hence will express her inarticulate conviction very much to the contrary. Demand more! And, by one of those eery coincidences that bear witness to our minds and souls being outside time, anticipating events and manifestations of themselves, she would be hearing a precocious and distilled expression of that younger generation zeitgeist this very groundhog Sunday, in just a few hours, like a revelation Beatle-singing in her third ear: “Was she told when she was young that pain would lead to pleasure? Did she understand it when they said/ That a man must break his back to earn his day of leisure/ Will she still believe it when he’s dead?” 

“Where’s me fags, Pat?” Aunt Rdognas goes upstairs to find them.

Uncle Pat continues.” You should have been in Ireland when the black and tans were running the place!” He starts coughing and can’t stop. Aunt Rdognas bangs on the floor then calls down through a floor and two walls. She needs help shifting a heavy oak wardrobe – one of her little treasure-boxes, with a real gift in it for Cindy among the peppermints and almost-real pearls, has fallen down the back. Uncle Pat gets up and pours her tea to take up, doubtless eager to make up for whatever disgrace he is in from last night’s Scrumpy haze. 

Cindy sips another brimming cup with a pre-breakfast Woodbine thoughtfully. “It really is Paradise for these two.” She sighs. 

But Paradise for them (a Grail Castle in a Wasteland) is not enough for her. 

She looks into the fire again, letting its heat pleasantly numb her face, deep into its Beatle tripper day-dreams. The Girls She Could Be. 

The flickering fame-transfigured names of unstable-born London Irish Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O’Brien (Dusty), Glasgow Across the Barricades Catholic-Protestant Marie McDonald McLaughlin Lawrie (Lulu), Liverpool Irish Catholic Priscilla Maria Veronica White (Cilla) – and those working class others without Liverpool and/or Irish Catholic roots- Neasden Lesley Lawson Hornby (Twiggy) and Dagenham Sandra Ann Goodrich (Sandy Shaw) seem to nod and smile out at her. The soul-soaring West Hampstead to West Coast ‘Husky’ Dusty surely the most naturally gifted (and least rags-to-riches but with other troubles to overcome with that gender-transcending voice.) Faces in the home fire to light a woodbine and dream by.

“I should be out on the town with all of them now in my 1965 Mary Quant mini, four inches above the knee, a dedicated follower of fashion. Not hanging insecurely off the arm of Johnny centre of a crowd talking much too loud in the Horn of Plenty hoping whatever ‘She’ he’s showing off to ‘Goes.’ I can’t carry this Wait much longer.” She goes to the front door of 11 Percival Crescent and opens it.  I want a place I can go go go. A place I can GO GO GO. GO NOW.”

She would be appalled to know it’s exactly what her (then recently married to Joe and living with his sister) Mother Mary thought on that very over-scrubbed step a decade and a half before. But it wouldn’t stop her. It’s a stepping stone. She has no intention of stumbling on it. 

 

Chapter Five

Run For Your Life

Cindy clutches her platform ticket at Parson St station and checks train times, again. She can only afford to miss one more. She is thinking of Brief Encounter, Mother Mary’s favourite film. How romantic if Johnny turned up now, at his local station, with an engagement ring and Rachmaninof playing over the tannoy! 

Or was the dream only good if it stayed a dream? How much did she want Johnny really? What did she want? She looks up sharply as a motorbike shatters the Sunday morning quiet. She sees a motorbike and sidecar – a young father on the bike with a little boy behind perilously secured to his waist with a scarf – a woman and a little girl in the side carriage – slowing down at the traffic lights. Heading for a semi-detached life in the suburbs. 

She goes back to her seat. A train comes in, not hers. She goes to the ticket booth to buy a return to Cardiff. She is just handing over the money when she sees Johnny’s face reflected in the glass!

Oh Johnny!

*

The ride to Aust is freezing. The SM’s hand-me-down coat is under a hedge in Somertown – and the borrowed sweater (Pat’s) and thin gloves (Aunt R’s) are hopeless. She is glad to sit in the waiting room with a cup of tea while Johnny arranges for the ferry passage. 

 

The M4 is still a building site. Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s white-hot heat of technological revolution – in this case, a suspension bridge – is not yet in place over the treacherous Severn. It is still – just – the age of the steamship. Three differentially shaped, variously funnelled, steam ferries crossing and re-crossing the ancient deep every day in triple tandem, depositing their Welsh in England and their English in (almost) Wales.  Some of the carloads look like they’ve been waiting here since Henry Tudor won the Battle of Bosworth 

Cindy looks out across the channel. The silver-grey waters and greyish mud flats give way to the banks of cloud, mist and distant grey-green mountains of Wales. 

“Looks like it’s raining there,” she muses.

“It usually is,” laughs Johnny. 

She is standing where a thin American balladeer in an outlaw vest and shirt will wait for this very ferry on this very spot three months later, on his infamous ‘electric Judas’ tour of Britain, between shows at Bristol Colston Hall and Cardiff. In a Barry Feinstein Nowhereland that will be voted one of the top five iconic rock images of all time. Or, as the locals call it, Aust. Cindy will have a poster of it on her wall for the rest of the Sixties. She will gaze at it and never realise it was taken exactly here: its subject brooding, dark, peering skinnily out of a black hole of loneliness.

“Why didn’t you take me that Dylan concert at the Colston Hall?” 

“That suede cowboy word-spewer?! That hillbilly yodeller?” 

“The Beatles like him.”

“I prefers rockers. British Beat.” 

“Then why wouldn’t you take me to the Animals?”

“You can’t take a girl on a date to the Animals,” says Johnny. 

“Yes you bloody can!” she pouts, thinking of Eric Burdon’s curled lip, black Soul in a Geordie sneer, and the (foundless) rumour that Dylan is both the man and the woman on the cover of his new album, Bringing It All Back Home. 

For a while, they think they will have to ride the long way into Wales round Gloucester after all. The line of cars is full of restless motorists with kids in the back driving each other mad, including the sidecar family she saw in Bedminster. This motorbike can overtake everybody though, Johnny giving a thumbs-up grin to each furious father at each futile wheel. 

The passage – all bores and whirlpools – is rough and for once even Cindy feels sick. She does not look her best and this worries her. She makes up in the Ladies, surrounded by seasick oldies all of them over 21. They arrive at Beachy and roar off the top deck of the ferry on Johnny’s BSA. In that moment, she really does love him. It’s like being on the back of a bike with Steve McQueen. Or Bob Dylan.

She leans into the corners all the way down the A48 to Cardiff, a city they both love. Old Cardiff has that something. Like Bristol, London, Florence, Rome, Paris, Troy – it feels like a place where a boy meets a girl, falls in love and they found a city. Somertown, by contrast, like most market towns, feels like a bickering family stopped for a tea break in some fields and it rained so they decided they might as well chuck up a couple of buildings. 

Johnny goes too fast but it’s still too long a journey. A policeman stops them near Newport and lilts that the gwrl really ought to be wearing a crash ’elmet. “We’ll get ’eR one in CaRdiff,” promises Johnny. 

It makes her think. One false move, one missed signal and – BANG. Life is very short and there’s no time. Johnny ignored the latest Nanny State nagging – “at night wear something white”. And it was a fast road and a grey day. She taps Johnny’s leathered shoulder.

“What?” he shouts,” his face hanging sideways to hear her.

“Can’t – this – thing – go – any -faster?” she yells into the wind.

Johnny throttles the engine and grins. 

Attagirl!

*

 

“And a shot of Red X, please Jim,” orders Present Dad, my hero, in the forecourt of Mendip View petrol station. We are going fishing at Shearwater Lake at dawn and I am excited as it is the first time I have gone out with him. (Stepmother insists that Special feels left out and on our return tells us the poor bulldog has howled the house down the whole time we were gone. And so my first was also my last father and son fishing trip. Special will ruin the follow up by belly-flopping into the water, chasing the float, scaring off the fish, swallowing the hook, bolting into the brambles and whining in her throat in an apotheosis of self-pity for the next two weeks. We never went fishing again.  She felt sorry for the fish, explains Stepmother.)    

I have a shiny replica of the Mendip View garage in my toybox. I wonder what the Red X does, apart from adding a regular penny to the fuel price. A few years later so will everyone else.  Dad’s generation disbelieve devoutly in “all these hidden meanings that aren’t there” but they all bought Red X – hook, line and sinker. 

*

Cindy and Johnny roar like Bonnie and Clyde into a record market in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay, the home of Shirley Bassey and Little Africa in Wales. It’s not supposed to open on Sundays but as it’s run by Swahilis – a community at the multiracial heart of Cardiff for 200 years – and as they’re not proper Deacon-directed chapel Christians, the law (and presumably God) looks the other way. Blasphemy comes in very handy if you are working a six day week. Mind you, a few miles north in the valleys they’d be lynched. 

Manhattan is playing at one stall. As a little girl, Cindy always matched the voice of this song with the picture of Doris Day on Absent Dad’s Love For Sale EP and put the black Ella Fitzgerald disc back in the snow-white Doris sleeve accordingly.  She looks at the EP cover now. How that voice transformed Ella’s dear old battered -pumpkin features! Every Time We Say Goodbye plays and desperate tears spring to Cindy’s eyes. Why? Is it these noble African faces, ancestral sadness behind eager eyes? Is it that she always has to say goodbye to Johnny and go back to Somertown whatever happens on their weekends?  (“Let’s spend the night together,” he said once. “How?” she asked him.) Or is it that – at the crutch of the matter – she and Johnny might be saying goodbye soon? She catches her breath, overcome with anxiety. But again also with something else. 

What was it? Relief?

She looks at Johnny laughing with the African stallholder about some Yardbirds single. Johnny looks like a dark angel in that leather jacket. He has a lovely smile. He’s got a bit of money and a lot of bike. (Some men are all jacket and no bike. Johnny has a BSA 750.) He’s going places. And he has that With The Beatles slim dark handsomeness, caught in the monochrome relief of the winter sunshine... She’d be a fool to lose him. She goes to the Ladies across the road to check again how she is looking. She pinches her cheeks hard. She needs some blusher. She needs that ring.

When she comes back, there is a crowd of Welsh girls around the stall and the No 1 single from last Christmas is playing.

She buys me diamond rings you know...

Johnny is talking to the darkest and prettiest of these girls, naturally. They are all over him. He’s the king of the road. 

She has six and eightpence saved to buy a single, and it’s two shillings cheaper here. She was wondering about the Beatles’ new one. It’s a double A side – two No. 1 hits for the price of one ordinary record. That’s what comes of having four star parts, unlike Elvis, say, or even the Stones. It would do handsomely for James’s Christmas present. About time he had a real Beatles single. She pictured him opening it. “Fab–u-lous!” 

But I haven’t even got Johnny’s gift yet. How about some Animals for the animal in my life?

Her eye is suddenly taken by an LP without a band name on it and photographed from an odd angle, four faces suddenly seen afresh and with even longer hair than before. A Vaseline-smeared lens fish-eye view. Three faces vividly present but looking elsewhere: One – John Lennon – staring – short sighted, visionary – right at her, Dylan fashion... Cindy hears the Beatle voice she’s always liked best, the one that dominated the early LPs – achingly open, rasping, rocking, like the guitar on I Feel Fine.  Looking suddenly all grown up and serious and hep, despite the collar upturned to hide the chin fold of his self-styled ‘Fat Elvis period’. And with a Mona Lisa smile. Still the head of the group. (Though, as it turned out, for the last time.) 

The LP is called Rubber Soul and it’s not for kiddies. She looks for the double A side single and it’s not even on it. Generous not to make their public buy the same stuff twice but how good is the album without it? She asks to hear a couple of tracks. They were always progressing, restless, you never knew what they’d do next. 

The stallholder puts on Side Two by mistake and the first track is Ringo. Nice lead guitar from country George but it could be the Help album. Maybe they’ve started repeating themselves at last? She is already looking for something else when Girl starts. It’s telling a story she knows, a story she’s living in. It’s her and Johnny, only with the roles reversed. Not a diamond ring story. A life or death one. She looks at Johnny joshing with the girls. Then In My Life comes on. By the time the needle is half way through, she is in tears. “Johnny!”

There’s something about her voice he can’t ignore. He leaves the three Welsh birds with an ‘I’ll be back’ smile and comes over. “Is this the Beatles new LP?”

“Yes.”

“Weird.” 

“I like it.”

“Too many words.” Johnny has found some rock n roll classics in a discard pile. Sun session Elvis. He is all shook up.

“Johnny?”

“What now, girl?”

“There’s something I need to know. And I need to know it now.”

“Yes, Miss!”

“I’m serious.”

“Great! Another rip roaring weekend at the wrong end of the month!”

“It’s not the wrong end of the month. It’s where we always are. Look, are you going to ask me to marry you or not?”

A Who track about staying single and free has replaced the Beatles’ true romance on the freezing market turntable. Cindy doesn’t hear any of what Johnny says next. The look in his eyes is all she needs to know. She slowly takes his Beatles show ticket out of her purse and hands it to him. He won’t take it. Eventually she throws it at him. The girls pick it up and start screaming. “Take me. Take me!” 

“Oh, for God’s sake grow up!“ she tells them. “You’ve been screaming at the Beatles for three years. Maybe you should start to listen to what they’re actually saying.”

She walks off, crossing the wide city road between smart black cars and red corporation buses. The youngest city in Europe (then) and a shining memorial to them all. You could see every Western style from Gothic Victorian to French Baroque along the avenues and parades – when it stopped raining. But Cindy sees nothing.

Johnny is wondering what to do about the ticket, trying to make his voice heard above the screamers. Cindy’s kept hers so all he’s got to do is turn up at the Capitol Cinema later. If he wants. He looks at the three gorgeous birds in front of him – gliding on the surface of life like sunshine on water – all of them free of all the moods and complications Cindy brings these days. Life looks good for the rest of the day. And after all, he can still be the Prince of Cindy’s Beatle Ball tonight… 

*

Part of her still wants him to. It aches for him to do so. But – and this stuns her – it’s much too small a part.

*

It’s just gone 5.00 pm. He’s waiting outside a pub in the rain when he sees her. He is already drunk. He has been drinking from twelve to four pm and a passerby would assume he is waiting for the pub to reopen at 6.30. He himself assumes so. But he is not. The beer is not what has made him drunk. It’s fury. And the pub is not really what he is waiting for. He is waiting for her.

The light from the wide new plate glass window floods the dark and bounces off her scarlet boots, striking spangles from the buckles and smart leather toggles. The light drains the boots of colour but seems to reveal the spark of excitement they send leaping out at him. There is a tunnel of light spillage all along the grand but unsteadily weaving street. The fairy tale edges of Christmas lights fade into alleys and disappear into the black-hole emptiness above, below and beyond the cold raging waters of the bay. The darkness beyond the street is absolute. It fills his whole mind.

He follows her without thinking. His eye is hooked in that lace-meshed she-devil pit behind her knees. His whole world is black. The city sinks into it like a brilliant jewel into a dark ocean. He wants to stab all his uncomprehended darkness into her. Two girls come the other way in woollen hats and gloves, smiling at him like they know him, seeming to enclose him in warmth. He feels sunshine burst out of his heart like a flower. Only girls can make you feel like that – that life is worth living, that he is a Somebody, living in a Somewhere, making all his Something plans for Someone, capable of making them feel the same. The only warmth in the street is their faces, the only rose their lips, the only light their eyes. Brilliant virgin sunshine on a pool of of black ice.

Or were they smiling at someone else? He glances and they’ve already gone. He shrinks, hawks, spits and turns back.

 

Back to his prey. He is aware of the exact moment she senses him following.

The tune she is humming in her head falters. The rocking dance of the back of her skirt jerks now into a repeating twitch of fear. His excitement hardens. He grips his weapon so hard it hurts. It is well and truly loaded, hot in his frozen hand. His blood is on fire, his heart ice. Run for your life birdy run.  “I’ll Get You In The End.” 

She quickens her pace and he matches it easily. He is gaining on her as she slips into an alley and starts to jog, to run. Suddenly, like a dream, she sees that double-chinned fat man she sat next to the Friday bus with WL on his briefcase, appear at the top, putting a key into a door. What’s he doing there? What’s he doing? She could scream, attract his attention, but she is too afraid to even draw breath. The fat man goes inside, closing the door, cutting off her escape.

Got you! In The End! The hunter grabs his prey. He can’t believe how soft it is. The clothes soft and the flesh softer. So much softness, these dollybirds’ bodies bloom with it, begging for it. He plucks at her plumage, like a rebuke. 

“I don’t want this!” she sobs, screams.

“Yes you do,” he snarls. He stabs her hard, repeatedly. A hot knife.  A warm gun. It Won’t Be Long. When I Get Home. Drive My Car. Here Comes The Son. Wait! for the BANG BANG. Shoot shoot. He is rodeo riding the bullet headed  Bungalow Bill Elephant  before he empties the warm  Blackbird and Fool  On The Hill-assassinating Rocky Racoon  Do It In The Road (Ringo snare-thwack) Gun of his hard seed of death into her, pumping her over and over, drowning her maddening light in his endless dark. Ah ah -

 

*

Except Cindy hits the weapon from his hand. She doesn’t hear it fall. She stamps down with her boot-heel on his foot, feels him lose his venom. Freed from the paralysis of fear, indignation electrifies her. She jerks her knee up into his groin. Twice, hard. She smacks the back of her hand across a rat’s grimace half-glimpsed in the light of the opening alley door. Glares away his hollow eyes, lurches back, slams and bolts the door behind her. 

Gasps for breath.

Looks round, eyes adjusting to the dark. She’s in some kind of cavern. There’s a word in lights, over a door. Toilets. What the hell? 

It’s the auditorium of an empty cinema. She feels something sticky. Blood? Is she hurt?  How much? Where? She staggers into the Ladies to find out.

*

Bollocks, grunts her attacker, groaning in the pitch-black alley, cheated of his BANG BANG shoot shoot season finale climax. 

*

6.00 pm. Sunday 12 December 1965. Inside the Capitol Cinema, Cardiff, the most famous four young men in the world are ‘rehearsing’ one side of their perfectly recorded Christmas single. The world places them on a pedestal and they seem to beam down on it from on high. But the electrifying pluckiness of their Hamburg and Cavern showdowns has gone. For a change, and a laugh, larger than live, on the record, they swap lead and backing vocals throughout – the only time they ever do this on an actual release. 

Christmas has come early for the Moptops for the third year running. They have yet another direct hit at No. 1 in America, Europe, Asia, Australia and Antarctica, where even young penguins are probably evolving fringes in their honour. And they can’t see the point anymore of yelling hits at a cavern of Cardiff screamers. Willy ‘WL’  Larkins, the venue manager, has just heard the rehearsal and looks concerned. “The guitars are sounding a bit heavy, boys.” An awkward pause. “And you’re not going to sing ‘She’s a prick teaser’ in the actual show are you? It’s Sunday and some of the audience are from Cwmcysgodionmarw.” He grins his worried grin. “What’s it called again?”

Beatle doesn’t look up. “Day Tripper.”

“Oh God, is it about drugs?” 

“If it was about drugs, we’d have called it Drugs.  

Willy exits. The Boys are singing –about something being very short – as he closes the door. They aren’t as happy-go-funny as last time and instead of laughing out loud to  the oworld that laughs with them Willy gets a feeling they are sniggering behind his back. 

*

Cindy is sitting in Mr Larkins’ office. She wears a blanket over a nylon overall coat and is drinking very hot sweet tea. The tea is even stronger than Aunt R’s but she still can’t taste it. 

“That’s Welsh tea, that is. Stronger than the coal dust.” Mr Larkin offers her another cigarette, which she accepts with a pale smile. 

“Did you get a look at this man’s face?”

She closes her eyes. She doesn’t want to see or imagine any man’s face. “No.”

Her magic weekend is in ruins.  Mrs Jones found her on the floor of the Ladies, in torn fashion-clothes, shivering. The cleaner draped her in her overall and fetched Mr Larkin. 

“He had a knife you say?”

“I thought you said it was a gun?” said Mrs Jones sharply. 

“I said a weapon.”

“Are you sure you don’t want an ambulance, police?” 

“No!” Cindy says, a little too quickly. “He just caught my hand a bit against the wall.” She holds up a white bandaged hand, cherried with blood. “He only got my clothes… He… shot himself.” 

Willy gapes, shocked, not knowing where to gape. It would be comical if it wasn’t.

“And... Mrs Jones sorted me out. I’m all right, honest.”

“You’re very shaken up,” says Mrs Jones dubiously.

“Another cup of Welsh tea and a ciggy will put me right. I couldn’t face the police questions.”

Mrs Jones replenishes the tea and tuts. 

Cindy shudders. “My Aunt Rdognas reported a sex attack by her uncle once. The police sergeant advised her to dress less provocatively in future. And when her father got to hear about it, instead of protecting her and attacking his brother, he slapped her round the face and called her a slut.”

Willy Larkin looks at a shapely knee protruding with infuriating sauciness from the gap in the nylon overall and nods. He thinks he knows how a policeman would read the situation. Cindy feels as if she is looking at everything through cracked glass. Mrs Jones in her cleaner’s hat without the overall and Mr Larkin’s toby jug face, bucket ears jutting out. All lumps and florid bumps from being knocked about as a kid by his dada – in a way that he doubtless thought ‘never did me any harm’. Mrs Jones and Mr Larkins exchange a ‘this is really serious’ look. And Cindy really is frightened. It was so dark in the alley, it could have been Mr Larkins for all she knew. 

“It could have been anyone,” she blurts out.

All men suddenly frighten her. Given the opportunity, they all have the motive, the weapon. She draws herself back into her seat, trying not to show her fear of this (surely?) kindly middle-aged man.

“What was a nice girl like you doing in a place like that-?” He stops. “Haven’t we met before?” he says suddenly.

She smiles vacantly. “On the bus, on Friday,” 

A different country. The room starts to swim around her. She is sliding off the chair.

“That’s it,” says Mrs Jones, picking up the phone. “We’re ringing an ambulance. Now.”

“No! No!” Cindy is hysterical. In a film, someone would slap her face and her to her senses, the set piece institutional sexism of the period. In real life, Cindy’s distress is too harrowing, too run-for-your-life ragged. It paralyses them. Willy Larkins makes his decision. He takes Mrs Jones aside. “She’s worried about the police. Maybe there’s more to this than meets the eye. Let’s not make things worse.” Mrs Jones frowns. Willy  puts on his spectacles, checks a number, picks up the internal phone and speaks.

After the call, they shove two easy office chairs together and make her comfortable under the blanket. Cindy sobs herself to sleep. She can hear a band tuning up in the auditorium as she drifts off...

*

She wakes up to the Sound of Beatle Music. The four most famous Boys in the world. Nice boys. Visiting her on old Mrs Jones’ request to make everything better all the time. Like they were wheeled out to lay curing hands on ‘crippled’ fans on their first American tour. It’s a fairytale come true but as always these starry moptops manage to bring it down to her very fallen Earth. “Hello luv.”

“Hey look fellas it’s a Gerl”.

“I’ve heard of those.”

“What’s a nice Girl like you doing in a place like Pwlleli?”

“This is Cardiff. You should get out more!” She can’t believe she is talking to them, let alone so cockily. She realises that this fairytale feels more real than her ruined ‘real life’.

“I only said it was like Pwlleli.”

“Very funny, clever Dick,” she laughs. But it was. A proper life-hardened Northern comedian quick on his feet; handling a heckler with ease; not some cosseted primadonna. If he wears his heart on his sleeve, he’s got something up that sleeve you don’t want to mess with as well. This Boy is clearly no manufactured Monkee popstar. He picks up a funny looking instrument from a table and starts playing. Then he sings. His three part harmony is so lovely, Cindy starts to feel (in spite of all the evidence) that everything is going to be all right.

“What’s that?”

“A sitar.”

“What’s a sitar?”

“A guitar on marijuana. Sing along and find out.” 

She laughs. “I can’t sing.” 

“Welsh and you can’t sing!”

“English and you can!

“We’re not English. We’re from Liverpool.”

*

Dublin’s overflow (as my first future failed replacement Father Christmas Dr Magwitch O’ Leary would call it). And on the dreamy Celtic fringe of Wales and the high and low roads from Scotland, not to mention the wider Atlantic world. Otherworldly home of a world-conquering Celtic-fringed Liverpool-Irish music of the spheres. John’s absent Protestant Irish Absent Father merchant seaman Freddie remained resolutely Absent when his abandoned Julia, John’s mother, died – however much John may have needed him then – but reappeared like a bad Penny Black when there was a Beatle John fortune to tap. Yellow Submarine is the deftly-disguised-Liverpool-shanty riposte of the cash-in Mersey-tide single Freddie released, singing his anti-father backside of the story in 1965. Paul’s Catholic Mother Mary – she of Let It Be fame – died and his Protestant father raised him a Catholic in memory of her. George’s parents were full-blooded Liverpool-Irish Catholics and he revisited this holy heritage on his final album Brainwashed and perhaps in his own career-long Indian holy cow version of the Papal bull as well. Ringo was a bit more distantly Liverpool-Irish; homely and homeless; the outsider behind, above and at the beating heart of the in-nest crowd of all, singing Nobody’s Child to his (not remotely Jewish) Mother (laughing at the irony) as a pre-Beatles child and grandstanding Sentimental Journey, an album of standards you could sing to the echo in a singalong Liverpool pub, for her as an immediate post-Beatles adult. All were as down-to-earth dreaming as the city that made them.

*

“We’re all Irish. And we want-”  

“What do you want?”

Beatle puts on a Lord Jagger voice. “I demend Setisfaction! If you don’t want my peaches, honey, please don’t shake my tree!”

She laughs. “Really?”

“I want to hold your hand. But what do you want?”

“No-one’s ever asked me that. Are you asking?”

“I’m asking.”

“I’m answering. I don’t want to end up in a blind alley.”

He plays a soothing chord. But he’s listening.

She looks at him shyly. “I want to get off the council estate where I live, like the people in the books at school. But I also want to take it with me. I don’t want to sweep up at the biscuit factory to the sound of Mary Poppins but I don’t want to be a secretary or an intellectual or a twinset-and-two-piece-civil-servant either. My school reports said I was bright. Until I got expelled. Stepmother says I’m too clever for my own good. Too bright to watch the girls go by dolled up when I’m stuck in with ink all over my fingers, that’s for sure. I want to be like the river, part of everything, reflecting everything, but going somewhere else.”

“Wow. We don’t meet Girls like you in this game much, except maybe Paul who goes out with a posh actress (but even she doesn’t write her own lines.) They’re usually dolly birds throwing jelly babies.”

“It’s the dolled-up boy’s clothes you wear. Why don’t you man up?”

“We can’t afford the paternity suits. Go on.”

“All the things my parents taught me were wrong. But all the ‘right things’ my teachers taught just lead up a suburban garden path too. Your songs say there’s a place where I can go. And we can work it out. But your Help film just wandered all over the place. When are you going to write an anti-war song like Bob Dylan?”

“All our songs are anti-war.”

“When are you going to write a song for Martin Luther King?”

“We refused to play segregated concerts on our first tour of America and won. The difference is, when we sing soul, the world joins in.”

“Don’t get too big for your Beatle boots.”

“But we are. We’re bigger than Jesus now.”

“Shh! Don’t say that!”

“Why not?” 

“It’s blasphemy. You’ll get yourself shot.”

“Is this Alabama or something?”

“Worse. It’s Wales!”

A door bangs somewhere along the corridor, making Cindy jump. 

“Jonah came out of Wales.”

“Shh.”

“Come to Beatleland with me.” 

“The real world in fairytale clothes, with all the princesses still at the top and the peasants all still at the bottom?”

“Beatleland is classless. Or if anything, it’s the Girl next door who’s the princess. The Girl who knows the reason why. The Girl with kaleidoscope eyes. The all about the Girl it’s all about. Either way, you’re no peasant. You’re Cinderella and we’re inviting you to the Ball.”

“That’s all right for now, and for boys. What happens when Peter Pan loses his touch, loses his hair?” 

“It’s now that matters. Make love when the sun shines. Give us a kiss.”

“You really think a kiss will turn me into a princess?”

“Yeah.”

“All I see coming from that is a shagged out   oho f trying to make ends meet. You need more than love in this world.”

“No you don’t.”

“Is that love in your eyes or something else?”

“Love. Love is the answer.”

“But that’s not all. I see… stars. Pop-stars getting into fantasy cars with fantasy chicks. While real chicks like me get stuffed at the end of a blind alley. No thanks.”

“What can I say? You’re lovely. You’ll always be lovely. A love like ours could never die.”

“Would you marry me if I let you kiss me?”

“I believe in kisses before marriage. Lots of them.”

“Do you love me?”

“Yeah.”

“Truly?”

“Yeah.”

Cindy sighs. “And would we wake up to the Sound of Music and live happily ever after? Sleeping Beauty and the Prince?”

“Yeah.”

Cindy rolls her eyes. “Yeah yeah yeah!”

Beatle answers by playing The Word. It is the Summer of Love two years early. It rocks like Everest and it’s got a Wilson Picket soul. The falsetto harmonies are a revelation as are the lyrics, the coruscating George lead, the scintillating Paul bass, the mazy maracas, harmonium, backward filling drums and backing vocals. And John’s high priest of Lennonism lead vocal isn’t bad either. (As always much more his world-Beatling self voicing America in big-mouthy native Scouse, than in the deracinated coke-nasal Yoko wailings of much of his American solo career; always excepting  the rule-breaking  heart-shatterers like the ones the other three covered later and that one for Sean.)

Cindy gets up. “What’s this? You can dance to this!”

Beatle stops playing. “What’s that?”

“Dancing!”

“That’s not dancing. Stop wriggling your ass like Elvis. It’s bullshit. “

“Elvis is all about the pelvis.”

“You haven’t seen him from behind. Like Jaggerwocky then.”

“When Jagger dances, bodies free up all over the world.”

“When Ringo dances, the mind boggles. Let your mind dance.”

“Like this?”

“Sort of. Tch, that overall…”

“What about it?”

“It’s cramping your style.”

“So?”

“So let yourself go. Take it off!”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

Cindy blushes. “I’m wearing a mini.”

“Four inches above the knee? We’ve seen the world. We’ve seen Hamburg. We’ve seen four inches of thigh.”

“Five inches now.”

“So – five inches. So what?” 

“So – this.”

*

So nine inches above the knee shortly afterwards, and twelve by the end of the decade. So goodbye to the Sunday suit and the stupid bloody Tuesday van tmate denim and leather. Hullo Georgie girl unisex satin, psychedelic stripe, polka dot, space module ethnic silver pomegranate. A whole new generation of peacocks demanding Funday Mondays, Ruby Tuesdays and pretty much the whole working week! 

*

“So I’m half dressed up and Beatled to go. But where is this Beatleland of yours? America? College? India?”

“Anywhere but this dressing room.”

“You should try working in a biscuit factory.” 

“You could try playing a Beatles tour.” 

“Yeah yeah. How many performances have you done?”

“Since 1958? 14, 166 by the time we finish tonight. Including this latest mini ten gig UK tour to end a very long year: forgive me if I repeat myself: three tours on two continents; three singles; two albums, all world Number Ones, a feature film, a European tour in June; an 11 date pan-US tour through August; a second album of the year for Christmas. And now this. The last leg of a footsore Rubber-Souled whack tour before a limo back up to a party in London.”

“Oh.” Despite herself, she was impressed at the workload. They always sounded like they were having endless fun but clearly it took a lot of work to do it. She also liked the sound of the limo and the party in London. “Well, you didn’t come to Wales much.”

“Three times in Cardiff; just the nine times to Wales in all. Unless you count Ringo’s previous career with the Hurricanes. The Beatles played Rhyl, Prestatyn, Mold, before we were famous; Cardiff, Abergavenny, Rhyl, Llandudno, Cardiff, after. And now Cardiff again, now we’re wax models from Mme. Tussaud’s. On the US tour we played 55,000 people at Shea stadium, a new record. Not worth hearing because we certainly couldn’t. Today it’s a mere two sell out houses of 2,500 each, with 20,000 more who won’t get in. Not counting the support acts: The Moody Blues; the Paramounts; The Koobas-”

“Anything tonight that’s worth not hearing?”

“I Feel Fine, She’s A Woman, If I Needed Someone, Act Naturally, Nowhere Man, Baby’s In Black, Help, We Can Work It Out, Yesterday (Beatle Paul solo with an electric organ), Day Tripper, I’m Down. Accompanied at peak volume throughout by whatever ‘Screaming’ is in Welsh.”

“Sgrechian.”

“You speak Welsh?”

“No. I was born in Monmouthshire, which was officially England until 1956. The official language of Monmouthshire is Wenglish, which is English set to a Welsh tune and a 700 year grudge.”

“Blimey, I only asked an innocent question.”

“I don’t speak Welsh. I just noticed the word ‘Sgrechian’ on a caption under Munch’s The Shriek in a Welsh Library. I was looking for a birthday card for my Stepmother.” 

“You don’t sound that keen on her. Or on Wales.”

“I like Wales. I can’t stand what my Stepmother’s made of it.”

“Which is?”

“Do you know why they call us Taffy?”

“Because it rhymes with Daffy?”

“No. Pub quiz time. I’ll give you three possibles. You have to pick the Answer.”

“OK.”

“The condescending nickname ‘Taffy’ is derived from: 1.the name of the river that flows through Cardiff? 2. a corruption of the popular Welsh forename ‘Dafydd’. 3. “Taphephobia. The morbid fear of being buried alive.”

“Have you ever considered working for the Welsh tourist board?”

“I don’t live in Wales. I live with a Welsh stepmother in Somerset who thinks she’ll only ever be happy if she goes ‘home’ and when she does she’ll hate it even more than she hates Somertown. The Welsh have a word for that too.”

“Misery?”

“Hiraeth. You can’t really translate it but it’s a feeling you get there. The endless rain. The green. The mountains. The rivers. The thousand foot high panoramas. The word-music. The mountain pit towns with courts named after the Old Testament. The chapels and cathedrals and cities named after King David. The sheep hills that look like Israel. The tiny city called St David’s. The Bethlehems and Bethesdas. The enormous little old port of Cardiff with its mediaeval Castle and Catholic cathedral that was suddenly if temporarily overgrown as the largest town in Wales thanks to its coal pit by a tiny village called Merthyr Tydfil.”

“A place you can go.”

“Except I can’t.”

“A way back homeward?”

“A longing for my real Welsh Mother.  Mary. It’s Stepmother Mary and her coffin-home narrow-minded little Welsh valley that makes me feel like I’m buried alive.”

“Your dad married two Maries?”

“One became the other when I was eight. Mother Mary died for me and now she doesn’t even come back for Christmas”

“You ought to be glad she’s there at all. Half of our mothers aren’t.”

“Well, I’m not. Your Mother Maries are probably still there for you in spirit. Mine is just dead. Are you going to guess or not?”  

“Taphephobia? Buried alive.”

She was triumphant. “No. Dafydd.”

“Ah! Taffuth.” 

“Right. The name of the patron saint and the cathedral and St David’s that little city in Pembrokeshire, in little England beyond Wales. So calling a Welshman Taffy is the equivalent of calling an Englishman a Tommy.”

“Except Tommy isn’t an insult.”

“Exactly. But it’s an insult to call a black person a Negro even though it just means ‘black’ and it sounds like an insult to call someone a Jew even though it’s just a description of what they are.”

“And Wales is a Saxon insult that means ‘foreigner’ – even though it was their country (Cymru) - or ‘slave’. The English have by and large been the ones doing the invading and enslaving so that’s why ‘Welsh’ and ‘Jew’ and ‘Negro’ is an insult and Tommy isn’t.”

Silence. 

“Any more than it’s an insult to call Germans ‘Fritz’ or Scots ‘Jock’ or Russians ‘Ivan’”

“Hmm. Have you ever read Dostoevsky?”

“Yes. Four times.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. We especially liked the comedies.”

“All right. How many brothers are there in The Brothers Karamazov?”

“Four.”

“Blimey you have read Dostoevsky. Most people think there are three. Ivan. Dmitri. And the holy one. All basically orphans. But there’s a fourth orphan as well, an outsider orphan even among the four outsider orphans, a murdering bastard.”

“Is the odd one out murdering orphan bastard called Ringo?”

“No, he’s called John.”

“Ah.”

“You haven’t read Dostoevsky at all have you?”

“No. We just like the number four.”

The rain battered the windows. Beatle sang in shrill scouse. “’Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief, Taffy came to Maggie Mae and nicked her handkerchief. He paid the price, it wasn’t nice, of rifling through her clothes; the dirty whore’s, it was her drawers, he caught a nasty dose. Oh dirty Maggie Mae…"

“I hope you’re not going to release that!”

“Never say never. But it’s just a warm-up. A good old gutter gurgling Liverpool-Welsh folk song.”

“A Liverpool-Welsh folk song that mocks the Welsh!” 

“And the Liverpudlians. But we can take it. You heard the story about asking Mancunians, Brummies and Liverpudlians who they think is the second city of England. The Mancs said ‘Manchester’; the Brummies said ‘Birmingham’ and the Scousers said ‘London.’”

She laughed. “Very good. But what did the puritanically well-educated inhabitants of the Welsh capital say was the second city of the British Empire? Edinburgh, Cardiff or Belfast?”

“Glasgow?”

“Yes. And there you have why Tommy isn’t an insult and why Taffy, Jock and Paddy when they stop being called Tommy want to kick his head in.”

“It’s also the being open to the great world beyond England, even as an enemy. The patron saint of Liverpool is also the patron saint of Christmas, sailors, Eastern Europe, Belgium. And…”

“And?”

And thieves.”

“Thieves?”

“Yeah. Hence ‘Nicked.’ But Liverpool Irish don’t let names like Paddy Wack hurt us. St Nick is a Liverpool low life; a dirty old cat burglar man in a suit shimmying up a wall. The dirty dog in Maggie May watches girls go by with his hand on his wotsit. It’s a dirty story of a dirty man.” 

Cindy knows about those. “And I thought were so clean!”

“Don’t judge the Beatle by his white collar. The dirt’s there if you want it.  A Hard Day’s Night. I should be seeping like a log with John inserting ‘I may not have a lot to give’ before Paul sings ‘but what I got I’ll give to you.’ And as for (Scouse voice) ‘I’ll get you in the end!’ (Later it would be Desmond, bringing Mollie a multi carat diamond ring, “And when he gives it to her, she begins to sing.”) We can hardly sing it for laughing. When we sing “When I think of think of things we did it makes me want to CRY!” we sing cry like an orgasm but it’s a cry from the heart first. The Stones might sing “You can make a dead man come” which is funny but also single-barrelled, puerile and heartless. I Want To Hold Your Hand can also mean just that. Your hand. (Later it would be ‘Everybody had a hard year, everybody had a good time, everybody had a wet dream’ but it’s a honestly confessed wet dream on which the sun shines.) If they caught us with our flies open in a garage forecourt like the Stones, we wouldn’t use it as a publicity shot. We’d launch it on a heart-lifting tune that makes you laugh and look the other way. And we’d call it ‘Flying.’ So Maggie’s handkerchief that’s really a knicker-nicker’s nicked pair of prossie’s knickers is also just a handkerchief, even in John’s sticky hands. It’s life, it’s a laugh, and we’ve seen a lot of it. But we don’t wallow in it or force the dirt on anybody.

Silence.

“Shouldn’t you be getting tuned up or something?”

“No point. I’ll just smoke this University cigarette.”

“A four in one! You’ll be growing the same moustache next.”

“We’re a group, love.  And we’ve been singing ‘I Get High’ instead of ‘I Can’t Hide’ on I Want To Hold Your Hand since Dylan hand-rolled us one of these in ’64.”

“Can I have some?”

“How old are you?”

“Er. Just Seventeen.”

“When were you born?” 

“16 going on 17. January 30 1950.”

“15 going on 16. You’re too young.”

“That rapist in the alley didn’t think so!”

Pause.

“Fair enough.” He hands her the joint. “Only keep your head. And don’t tell your mother....”

“Stepmother. I’m not her Little Child, nor your little Girl. Stop treating me like it.” Cindy puffs furiously  

“What are you doing? Kissing it?”

They chuckle helplessly.

“You’re supposed to pass it round. That’s why it’s called a joint.” 

“Sorry.” 

“What are you giggling at?”

“You’re wearing Hank Marvin glasses!”

“I need them for my visions!”

“Of what?”

“Of the seven levels. There are seven levels: that’s the Answer. Up there. Look.”

He hands her his glasses. She looks up. “Oh yeah.”

Silence. The rain beats like a sea on the roof and windows. There is a knock on the door. “Fifteen minutes boys.”

He sighs. 

“The Welsh rainy season getting to you? Cheer up, it only lasts from September through to August.”

“The weather’s fine. It’s this raining in my heart.”

“What about?”

Another bloody tribal rite.”

“Why not stop touring if your heart’s not in it?” 

“And do what?”  

“Stay in and grow up. Get out of that MBE suit.” 

“And what about the screamers?” He inhales, voice thin. 

“Tell them about Love.”

“What do you think we’ve been doing for the past three years?”

“I said Love. Not infatuation. Not screaming. Love.”

“Ah but would you still love us when we weren’t Number One?” 

“I’d love you more. Only…”

“Only what?”

“That MBE suit...That wax model grin.”

Beatle laughs. ”Don’t be taken in by the suit. Look – under the tie.” 

“You’ve got your button undone.”

Beatle winks at her.

She wrinkles her nose. “It’s not much of a rebellion is it? If I’m going to run for my life with you, I want to make sure it is my life, and not some heaven-pence mirage in a puff of magic dragon-.”

“It’s the life we gave our All to get, love. OK.  We’ll give up this misery tour of the scream factories. We’ll work it all out in the studio, find the Answer. Tune in, turn on…”

“And drop out?”

“We don’t do that. We drop in, everywhere, on a rainbow parachute. We work through your water supply, turn everybody on via the kitchen sink. We change your system from within: we didn’t turn Hamburg’s U Boats into yellow submarines by refusing to play to the audience or refusing the money you need to turn the world. It’s like Van Gogh. Sometimes you have to cut off your ear just to get in the frame.”

“Dylan doesn’t.”

“What? Behind that beady Prophet’s Eye, he’s got one of the hardest business heads in America.”

“Uh… but he doesn’t cut off his ear to get in the frame. He paints a masterpiece and then finds a frame for it.”

“Yeah. We call that a B side. Or an album track. Mind you, it’s still a world-Beatling Christmas Number One, as often as not.”

“But while he’s waking up a generation, aren’t you singing it to sleep?” 

“Perchance to dream, love. Sleep with me.”

 

She laughs nervously. “Why me?”

“Because you’ve got that Something.  I want to hold your-”

“Take the suit off first.”

*

So he peeled off his MBE suit, Edinburgh.  And his Madame Tussaud’s grin. And she stripped off his Hank Marvin glasses, let her hair down, surrendered her resistance, and they kissed. An innocent kiss. A dream kiss.  A magical realist kiss.  And I Love Her played. And then Girl. And they danced. And into the gloomy post-war parlour, there came strawberry-pink light and marmalade sound. And this time not just for the screamers and the Beatle-wiggers but for all the lonely Prudences pressure-cooking the rice leavings of that wild Sixties wedding. Everyone was invited to that mad spinster’s tea party in wonderland. John the knife to Paul’s honey and sometimes vice versa; George the apple jam to Ringo’s home-made bread, and sometimes vice versa. 

And the Something he saw when She walked into the room; the Something She didn’t even know she had; (the Something greater than the parts they all tried to take away at The End and none of them could, not even George) he shared it with her.

*

And he was as good as his Word, Edinburgh. That bittersweet Christmas December 12, 1965, at the Capitol Cinema, Cardiff (two houses of 2,492 more than the Edinburgh fringe average of 7) would be his last British concert tour date ever. 

It is the end of Beatlemania as we know it. The end of Yeah Yeah Yeah and jelly babies and screaming. But the Liverpool-hard rock Made in Hamburg Beatle U boat isn’t sunk. It is rock and rolling, going down, singing, under a tidal wave of screams. And it is about to resurface, up periscope, new sound waves foaming, all flowers blazing, as a spring tide-running cellophane flowered psychedelically Yellow Submarine. 

 

Chapter Six

 

Girl

Once upon a time in 1973, I went to the Top Rank in Cardiff to ‘check out’ the Velvet Underground. A Sunday. It always is in Wales. Thanks to a successful series of hitched lifts along the M4, a schoolfriend and I had arrived at the gig 90 minutes early and at that moment formed the entire queue. We were from the valleys. The cool city slickers would arrive fashionably later. My friend was looking for the gender-fluid Bowie-era Lou Reed we’d seen recently on The Old Grey Whistle Test singing “Walk on the Wild Side.” I was also looking for that gender-fluid Bowie-era legendary Lou but also exhilarated to seeing onstage in Cardiff the starry line up on the coolly obscure but now iconic first Velvet Underground album – Nico, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Mo Tucker. It was a record I played incessantly and some junior sixth form sense (after Cindy’s recommendation of it by letter) told me it was closer to the contemporary high art I was after in lieu of the Fab Force and an awful lot cooler than the meat and two veg heavy rock most of our peers were gorging on and saying had banished it into poppy oblivion. Because I was also looking for that legendary last Beatles gig Cindy saw at the Capitol Cinema in 1965. It wasn’t there. But something magical was. A stage door opened and those fairy kings of New York appeared. They actually recruited us to help bring their gear in, so I can honestly claim to have once worked as a roadie for the Velvet Underground, New York City. They actually invited us into the dressing room, where they huddled around a tiny portable TV watching Songs of Praise. “Turn this bogwash off, man,” said a Velvet.

“Where’s Lou?” I asked and, in the silence, could hear the Christmas Number One December 1965 ghost of John answer. ‘I think there’s one down the corridor.’” Guaranteed to raise a smile. 

Not this lot. The Velvet Who Wasn’t Lou growled, “He’s sold out, man. He’s working for Dave Boowie.”

It began to dawn on me that I had entered a staged version of the budget counterfeit monthly mundane ‘Top 6’ records Cindy and I had endured as children. Of course, I should have known Nico had left the band in 1967 after that one seismic album; that co-founder and super-cool classical Welsh keyboard virtuoso Cale been fired by grumpy super-cool co-founder Lou in 1968 after two albums and been replaced by Doug Yule; that founder Lou had actually left his own band at the peak of his unwanted commercial success in 1970 after the glorious and satirically poppy ‘Loaded’; that Sterling Morrison had left in 1971 and that the hairy drummer sat behind the legendary Velvet Underground drum kit on the present occasion was decidedly not a woman (not even the butch lesbian I’d been misinformed she was) so could not be the legendary Velvet Mo Tucker (who had left along with Sterling; and who much later would Confederate-drum all the way from the heart-soaring New Age of the Loaded album via five children and a family life in Georgia to the loaded gun Stone Age of the Republican Tea Party, an all too familiar libertarian turn from left field to hard right in individual freedom riders of the Sixties, from the Hollies group vibe of “Everybody I Love You” to solo Graham Nash’s “Let a man live his own life now/ Rules and regulations who needs them?” - of which more later, Edinburgh, if you’re here)…  So basically, my schoolfriend and I had hitch-hiked away across half of Monmouthshire and Glamorgan excitedly singing ‘Holly came from Miami FLA, Hitch hiked away across to Tiger Bay” under endless coal-grimed Cardiff railway bridges to see “The Velvet Underground and Nico” and were about to get An Evening With Doug Yule, the man who sang a lot like (and very cutely with) Lou and played a decent bass and who in the future would work with Lou on some of his classic solo albums and who shared a mystical birthday (February 25 1947) with George Harrison (February 25 1943) and shared an impossibly lovely ba-ba-ba-ba chorus with Lou that in ice-heartedly sending up the pop genre simultaneously achieved its heart-melting perfection in a hymn to pop beauty and joy … but also the man who had never quite been able to replace John Cale. So I had come to 1973 Cardiff in search of Peak Beatles giving their  final mainland British concert tour date in 1965 and hadn’t even got the Velvet Underground. 

The Fabs never hiked an agreed fee, even when Beatlemania made them priceless. These imitation  Velvet NYC B listers refused to play because the Top Rank wouldn’t pay them in used banknotes. And I’d even helped roadie for them! (On reflection, I probably ought to have read the warning signs at that point. And Groucho put it, I’d never join a  club that would invite me to be a member)  The Fabs would never have let me down like that. 

Our word for ‘unhip’ back then – the older generation word for honest, as in someone who didn’t fiddle bus fares – was ‘straight.’ The Boys were as straight in that sense as they were hip in the other six. They weren’t saints, even if one of them ended up a martyr, but they created a group innocence: beyond themselves, that tweaked the nose of her Majesty. Once upon a time there was a cavern, where they used to raise a hell or two, but there was a light at the end of that cavern. 

I made for that light now – (announcing to my schoolfriend above the baying crowd in a desperate attempt to be as too cool for school as Nico, Cale et al, that “I’m splitting, man” though this was at least partly because it was getting near 10 pm and I was worried about how I was going to get home)  exiting the spectral Capitol Cinema 1965 it never was, then took a swift walk down the wild side of Union Street just in time to catch the last bus homeward. And guess who was in the semi-skilled driver’s seat, now his skilled artisan capstan-setting days were over, whistling a tune from Abbey Road? 

Dad, yeah, Beatle-whistling Once There Was A Way To Get Back Homeward. “I wish I’d had an old man like yours,” said the conductor. “You can trust him. He sets an example. He’s (meaning honest and true, like Epstein in his business dealings and the Beatles never defaulting on a gig) straight. And a damned good union rep.  He stands up to the boss and puts our point of view without fear or favour. He’ll fight our corner like a tiger. But a courteous tiger. And unlike a lot of them, he’s never in it for himself. He’s a good sport as well. If he loses, he doesn’t get nasty. It’s like we’re his team and he’ll support us until he dies with all he’s got but he won’t put the boot in on anyone or chant nasty slogans at the gate or begrudge the boss a fair deal.”

Which, despite the classic teenage embarrassment of meeting Daddy when you were out in the big city trying to be Lou Reed (though secretly very relieved Daddy was there to keep you safe), made me feel suddenly lucky and proud. 

I had to go out into the big bad world like an orphan to find him though. And his workmate the conductor clearly knew him better than I ever would.

*

Did someone just say, “I thought this show was supposed to be All About The Girl?” And this chapter of it’s even called ‘Girl’! So why do I keep bang-banging on about the invisible boy narrator writing it, his absent dad role model, his dad’s workmates etc etc? … Because, as I’ve already told you, Edinburgh (God, now I sound like my dad)  (a) There was an extraordinary shift in valuation of the female in the Beatles decade, a much higher regard for ‘feminine’ qualities after two thousand years of patriarchy had peaked and climaxed in two previous generations of World Warrioring and (b) Because this flowering of female power didn’t at first take feminist form (until the Seventies) but manifested in men becoming girlier (long hair, pastel-silk peace uniforms on Pepper etc) in dialectical response to which, the Girl on the street, in the cavern, the schoolroom, the Maharishi ashram and the office started looking like a twiggy and disconcertingly sexy Female Boy (and Lou Reed and Nico to look like Frank and Nancy at once) albeit with legs and laps a boy could only dream of. My w Cindy was exactly that rebel Beatle Girl, breaking out of the doll’s house (and the binary cage) in pursuit of a new kind of Beatle Prince instead of kissing frogs that stayed frogs. And (c) growing up with her gave me an additional and alternative role model to the one I was getting in Commando comic. And (d) Cindy is my Beatle Girl heroine, the She of all the songs happening In My Life. And I Love Her.  So if you can’t see that her story is also my story, like the ways she actually Helped to ‘write’ me and if you can’t appreciate that I’m also trying to show you me, the invisible narrator, so you can make up your own mind about how completely detached and omniscient I am, then you’d better sneak off to the smelly Gents and/or fragrant Ladies down the spooky corridor and skip the rest of this chapter because there’s going to be an awful lot of me doing this in it before we get back to Cindy. But I guarantee you’ll understand how magical she is a lot better if you stay.

Right. After a ‘normal’ Sixties boyhood reading photo-stories of square jawed clean cut short back and one sided Tommies graphic-zapping, splatting and GNNNNNING Germans on the Nazi jaw with haymakers and blasting them to kingdom come with rifles, grenades and machine guns from bunkers, boats and planes in Commando Magazine and the Victor comic, I am sitting in the Gaumont Cinema Somertown awaiting a screening of Help when my life changes, utterly, and a terrible beauty is born. Sophia Loren (on a beach on the cover of the dizzily technicoloured Gaumont Cinema magazine) is giving me a look I can feel in a hip pocket I didn’t even know I had. 

It’s the eyes, blue as the Adriatic sea, hot as a Napoli sky in June. I am God-smacked. And when I eventually look up at the U Boat sinking U certificate B movie that precedes Help, I can’t see anything except Sophia. My male gaze is never the same again. I stop checking the credits of films I’m watching on home TV with Dum and Mad planning to escape the room if there are any of those blush-and bilious attack love story women in co-star roles… 

Even though six months later I would still be telling little blonde bombshell tomboy Josie Mills that I was giving up holding her hot little hand at the Gaumont ‘to concentrate on football’, like Pele, I would never really be able, unlike Pele, to pretend to be Pele in quite the same way again. And to give Baden Powell his due, this new vision did make me go blind to a Boy’s Own Universe but it opened up another, better half, a lost chord. A twin soul. A world suddenly full of Liver Bird Take Three Girls lolling about in girly TV bedsit capers in alarmingly curve-filled frilled white petticoats seductive as a spell – this is before I learned such fairy undergarments were called slips (in the Freudian/lapsarian sense). It was like a long hot peep show into an under-heaven, the white-hot hypocaust heat Hades underlying my earth.  And of course, as 1965 dizzily progressed to 1969, such shortie dolly undergarments became the dresses girls (and Jagger at Hyde Park) wore in public. 

It was that other half of the sky waking up. Though my life would still be an arrow-straight boy’s story about a hero (me) shooting into Nazi villains and German World Cup nets – with those graphic ‘whack’ and ‘smash’ lines starring my gun barrel or boot – there would now always also be the counter-plot I found in Cindy’s abandoned pile of Girls Annuals and Bumper Books of Girls Stories under her wardrobe with their rounded characterisation, shapelier phrases, proper emotional development, absence of numbers, dates, statistics and facts, inaction-packed with moon-tides of ‘feeling’ and with those dream boys I might be, boys who were heroes  without having to be a khaki killer or a tough of the track as modelled in my own simpler bully beefier gun-slung gang-ho bang bang comics. (While uneasily sensing I might be straying into territory where dog-faced Ugly Sisters cut off their toes to force big brutalising feet into the seam-split and shape-strained elfin loveliness of Cinderella’s balletic slipper and that such Sisters were played by pantomime dames sporting  balls crushed into tights not actual females.  I suspected that either the balls or the tights are going to be distorted out of shape. Probably both. 

Cindy Spectre is a female part, Edinburgh, and I’d obviously look a complete twat if I tried to play her myself. Like the time I did the magnificent last battle speech the (Roman and male) historian Tacitus wrote for Boudicca in my show here two years ago. It felt magnificent and it was a pretty good performance of Tacitus;  it just wasn’t Boudicca.      But Sophia Loren’s fiery blue wide-eyed heaven gaze had furiously blazed away a veil from my eyes. Before I had only seen football boots. Now I also saw Cinderella’s looking-glass slippers, like a fairy shadow glancing off them. And those fairy tale Beatle boots seemed to be both at once. 

*

A consultant from Bristol Water is telling me

That men are being turned into females

Via oestrogen wee’d into the water supply by Pilled women.

I believe him, even though he’s a Rovers supporter

And a scientific gym-workout, racquet-muscled he-man

Because, from fish up, the earth is turning female:

Low sperm counts, impotence, collapse in male fertility,

Smooth-lipped boybands crooning speyed Cat Stevens songs

Without the bass vocal counterpoint they depend on

(In a way that makes even the Bee Gees sound like Lee Marvin)

And because these days I’d rather be Sheryl Crow

In tomboy leather cat suit, than her faithless bitch-boyfriend

Whereas when I was a boy I wanted to be John Lennon

Singing Girl (and looking, so Dad said, like one

With his cute fringe) every note hairy with testosterone

And because the grail is a wounded female symbol

Whose cup lip kissed a Christ and gives love,

The heart and the hurt, the womb and its waters

And oh because when George Harrison was asked in 1964

By some dripping hack what he called his hairstyle 

He said ARTHUR, like a king. These days he’d simper and say Nancy.

*

Yeah, I know Edinburgh. You’re not sure whether you can applaud that anymore. It used to get a tidal wave of approbation at a point of the show I really needed it. One night in the lower depths of Hull around the end of the 20th century it brought a potentially hostile house down. And, although it rather divided football audiences in Bristol, the second verse was always cheered to the echo at Ashton Gate. Not for the actual gender fluidity point I was putting myself through all the stagefright and tour angst to make, true, but, onstage, with a testosterone-fuelled crowd easily lager-charged and men-brained to chant ‘what a load of rubbish’ and ‘you don’t know what you’re doing’ at your loudly beating easily broken sleeve-exposed art, you’ll take any clap you can get.

These days you silent watchers – if you’re here - don’t applaud in case it upsets the LGBTQ+ who may be sitting next to you; (if they have time to spare from making their own point at some length in the poisonous phantom fen-light of Facebook.) While a much more elderly queue pontificate on a much older social media tablet thus: 

A woman must not wear men's clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing, for the LORD your God detests anyone who does this. 

Or, on that very same social media tablet, the Old Testament, with the same religious vehemence, (though nowadays raised more rarely in this debate)

Do not wear clothes of wool and linen woven together

and all the endless atavistic camel hair splittings accreted to fun-loving octogenarians Deuteronomy and Leviticus by various 7th Century BCE business and social interests. 

Edward ‘Funky’ Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (set a millennium or so later than Deuteronomy’s Decline and Fall of Man) in its eloquent pages about The Emperor Constantine (the one who made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, arguably by converting it to Rome’s worship of military victories) notes that “The salvation of the common people was purchased at an easy rate, if it be true, that in one year, twelve thousand men were baptised at Rome, besides a proportionable number of women and children; and that a white garment, with twenty pieces of gold, had been promised by the emperor to every convert.” Set that against the impious selling of Judas’s eternal soul for thirty pieces of silver. Allowing for three centuries of inflation, the price of a Christian soul in Constantine’s time now seems to be twenty pieces of gold and – as my heathen wife puts it – a white dress.  If Gibbon is right, it only took three centuries for the den of thieves to get its own back. While the chanting Whitehouse ultras (if not Whitehouse herself who was rather sweet) avoided, like the plague, the real Leviticus: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

In other words, if your holy sign or a-gender isn’t All You Need Is Love, forget it. It was probably added by a 7th Century BCE linen salesman.

 

*

I once played the gospeller Luke, Edinburgh, in a show I wrote called “Authorised” where the young Luke was frustrated that his gifts as a storyteller went unrecognised and he was unable to give up his day job as a doctor to follow his ‘true’ vocation. None of his stories ever appealed to the zeitgeist (and all of these works have vanished without trace) remained unpublished and when he did readings, people just asked him about their symptoms.  Then one day he came across “the greatest story ever told” (Jesus, about 100 years after it all happened) in some early sources by Matthew and even earlier ones by Mark and with a strong sense that this was an amateur undertaking, done for love,  quite separate from his wannabe  professional work as a serious artist but also with the zeal of a new convert,  he wrote it all up as lucidly as he could, adding many original touches (he was particularly pleased with the Nativity chapter which no-one had ever done before) and even wrote a sequel about the Acts of the Apostles but always felt he had lost the mainstream and that his niche and often not very literary Christian audience was only really interested in his subject never really in his art. He died accepting humbly that his divine Muse had decreed he was never going to be an author of repute or a household name. I mention all this merely because I played Luke in a white linen sheet and had a light playing on me throughout which I thought was a pretty neat reference to the Latin meaning of his name (the male equivalent of Lucy not to mention Lucifer heading for a fall but I just meant ‘Light’) and an extended visual metaphor of his divine enlightenment and I got some unusually good houses ( mostly girls as it happens) who I thought had finally recognised my gifts as a visionary, zeitgeistmeister, storyteller and performer. I also got an offer to do a season in Brighton at the Gaiety Theatre. It was bliss. I was finally delivering the word to an on message multitude. It turned out that my wedding tackle was visible through the backlit sheet throughout and full frontal in the kneeling scenes. I was glad of the bums on seats until I realised the bums weren’t watching the show I’d written, not even the wildest critically theoretical interpretation of it. An actress friend said it was an occupational hazard (or trick of the trade in the case of Barbara and some of the other Windsors) that women tended to learn very early on.

So it’s all about the Girl but it’s never about all of the Girl. When men ‘write’ women, we are told, even the greatest authors in the canon make them either Whores or Madonnas. You can argue that they also make them Eves, Magdalenes, Witches, Virgins, Femme Fatales, Damsels in Distress, Cassandras, Ice Maidens, Ingenues, Death Hags, Angels, Calypsos, Galadriels, Insoluble Mysteries, Unfathomable Beauties, Beloved Soulmates, Muses, Moral  Guardians, Healers, Dominitrixes, Moon-goddesses, Sphinxes  or Boudicca/Cleopatras (hysterics in power who shouldn’t be) unless you think these are mostly little more than extensions of that original Mother-Wives/Whores binary. It’s instructive to try and list in opposition what types and archetypes obtain when even the greatest male authors write men: there is a lot more social and political scope but is the range actually much wider? And how many approved role models for men are there? Certainly, growing up in the valleys of the Welsh coalfield there was only one. My Uncle; Dai Hard. Make your own long list of men writing men, Edinburgh.  Action Heroes, Women’s Men, Drips, Creeps, Messiahs, Hamlets, Dictators, Satans, Rakes, Innocents, Daring Doers… However confining and alienating a mirror image of female confinement dialectical ‘opposite’ sexuality it is, it’s definitely a more exciting, spacious, subtle and varied binary than Whore/Madonna (as today’s exciting badass action heroines and Madonna Cicceone’s sex-plosive conflations and rejections of the binary testify.) When men act women, though, there seems to be only one role: Widow Twanky the Ugly Sister thrusting her big bulge into a high heel.

       

*

Mother Mary was a child of the Forties. Land girls, blonde bombshell-makers, lacy brief encounters. Never mind the Pill and the miniskirt, hers was the most liberating decade for women since the First World War. 

But before you get excited, do the math. She was born on January 30 1933 (the day Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and the 316th anniversary of King Absolute Charlie I’s execution; plus the date the Beatles would finally prove her right and sing their live swan song from the roof in 1969) and just 12 years old in May 1945 when Old Addy that Very Bad Catholic went to meet his Maker (“Can you ever forgive me Vater?” “Not until the End of Time, my Son, there is more bad karma to unravel here than Creation to do it in.”) So Mother Mary wasn’t a woman until the Living Doll Fifties, the decade they herded the unbridled clotheshorse back into the closet. The long long longed-for D Day for the Land Girls, the Home Fronters and Enigma Code Breakers meant Doll Day. ‘Thanks for the war work, now we want our jobs, workplaces and whore-madonna-wives back. So fuck off back to the Doll’s House and iron these trousers, Mare. And when I come home to our spotless box, if you play your charms right – the woman’s touch, the soothing hand; the soothing dinner; the soothing music; the flowers on the table; the lace upon the cleavage, the perfume, lipstick, powder and paint; the Reader’s Digest Kamu Sutra on the bedside table – we can play mummies and deaddies. For you, Doll, the war is over.’

Stepmother Mary was a child of the Forties and a woman of those Fifties. That meant one high heel placed firmly in the previous century. When Dad asked her to marry him in 1949, she crossed one seam-stockinged century-straddling leg over the other and said – No. She meant Yes, naturally. She ‘had to’ and did so. Yes is what she said before the priest at their wedding. Her body had said Yes and her Catholic mind and soul assented. But her heart said No. And it’s been saying No ever since.

So where did Dad’s Songs for Swinging Lovers become The Point of No Return, Edinburgh? How did Mum become Nun? Who put the (goose)Step in Stepmother Mary? When did the Hidden Meaning become the Isn’t There? Why did the pregnant meadowsweet Maggie in I Can’t Let Maggie Go become the Barrenness Thatcher? How did the freeloving Mother Mary whom Cindy and I could only dream of... with much less wish-fulfilment than the Paul told to Let It Be and the George to long long long for by Krishna and even than the John in his wicked counter-Oedipal throwaway Goonish Beatle radio introduction (You Really Got A Hold On Me… MOTHER) … end in a locked parental door, marked KEEP OUT, with a Wicked Witch jeering “You’ll be toeing the line from now on, James” crowing “Ha! You’ve lost your father forever now, Cindy!” and “Not Tonight, Joseph” for Throbbingly Present Dad. 

“Sweet Dreams, Joe.”

“…Night, Mare.”  

The Victorian Novel’s trope for this is the Angel Mother dying as she births the hero. Stepmother Mary’s story has the opposite trope. The mater doesn’t die; the maternal love does. 

Cindy’s Brave New Mum progressively died as the Fifties wore on, suffering a miscarriage in 1950, delivering a stillborn in 1951 (as the Conservatives finally wrested ‘their’ country back from those Home front heroes Nanny State NHS Working Class-at-Grammar-School Socialists) and more or less dead as I arrived in 1956. She had defied the new Fifties Woman and Home stereotype as best she could. Not very well. It was no doll’s house party bearing and not being able to bear Cindy; bearing and not being able to bear me; bringing up a magical realist bulldog bitch in our midst and expertly navigating the sibling rivalry it provoked by always as a matter of principle siding with the dog; and competing with men for ‘proper’ jobs against the old-world order. 

Stepmother Mary replaced her, like a caterpillar emerging from a butterfly, and she never stopped blaming and punishing men for the change. Her epic harpy avenging recorder-angel of the hearth (“My Struggle”) makes Gilbert and Gubar’s mad wife in the attic look like an episode of Mrs Dale’s Diaries.  But how reliable a narrator is she, Edinburgh? Ha!

Well, you can rely on me… 

Up to a point. I have odd premonitions of Mother Mary with a shining face and loving smile and curly hair all like (yet unlike) Stepmother’s still being around and nurturing me until Special, our dog-sister in the manger, arrived as my first actual memory. After that, Mother Mary only returned at Christmas and birthdays, amid angels, music and presents, Cindy says I was in hospital (and nearly died) for 7 weeks after Special appeared. If nearly dying was my unconscious effort to win back Mother Mary, it failed. 

*

“James, give us a feel of your ball! I’m Number Nine. You can go in goal.”

Mick the Prick seizes my glorious new leather football and starts a game in the tarmac and grit of St Jude’s Road.

“Don’t, Mick. It’s sposed to be for the fields. It’s got dubbin on it.”

“Shut up ya big girl’s blouse.” Mick smacks a wall pass against the blue coachwork and chrome of my Welsh fairy grandfather’s beautiful D type Jag, the best motor carriage in any street let alone this one full of battered four wheeled pumpkins,  and then thumps a superb low shot into our hedge. “Goal! Pelé scores!”

His younger brother Dick the Prick follows up with another, hurling aside my tackle. “Goal. Hurst scores!”

“Rubbish. Pass it to me, ya twat.” Mick the Prick robs Dick, runs rings round my despairing dap and nets a third. “Goal! Hurst scores again!”

I manage to stop the Hurst hat trick with a diving save that removes the skin from my right leg. But Mick the Prick kicks it savagely out of my hands and nets again. “Goal! That’s Hurst’s hat trick!”

“Foul!”

“She fell over! She fell over! Stop fannying about ya tit!”

The real adult world rattles through our fantasy football in the shape of a Ford Anglia and we jump onto the pavements just in time. Several other boys have now come out to play and the beautiful leather football, Mother Mary’s father gifted to me because ‘You’m the Son’ (as in The Sun shines out of my ass and I WILL go to the Ball and all those other Cinderella-whispers in my ear I’m not used to hearing in our house) well, this beautiful magical Cinderella ball begins to get scratched and ruined. On the other hand, I am popular.

Special wants to join in, soppy-growling and sissy-baring her teeth. I have been ordered by Corporal Punishment via Stepmother Mary (who resents her patriarch’s favouritism of me) to include Special in the game. “But it’s football, Dad. The lads will…”

But he’s already gone, of course. And Stepmother is there to see fair play for her favourite and to get her own back on her father who favoured her brothers against her. Against me, who was never there. Man hands on misery to Woman who hands it on to Boy. It deepens like a coral shelf… 

Cindy intervenes, “Mick, give my brother his ball back or let him take it up the field. It’s not meant for gravel.”

Mick, despite the IQ  inherited from his feather-brained dame, (Chick the Prick)  is quick enough to be temporarily subdued. The lovely Cindy. His dream surrogate mother, sexily cross with him, withdrawing valued favour. 

“What are you sticking your nose in for?” demands Stepmother. “Dada didn’t give it to you. He gave it to Special.”

“What!” I gasp. 

“He gave it to James! Special’s got her own balls. And usually ends up losing them. Why should she lose James’-?”

Cindy, freed of her usual inhibiting fashion wear, finds herself unexpectedly able to trap the ball under her dap on its way to Dick. And she rolls a perfectly weighted pass to me. 

“Cindy you’re good at this!” I exclaim. I pass it back. Then, seeing the dog bulling forward, cry  “Special, no!”

“Give Special her ball!” The SM boots the ball from under Cindy’s foot towards Special. It is contrary stepmother Mary’s speciality – and certainly never a sister to anyone fighting the same battles - to always be the other team’s best player. 

Sending division in the maternal attack, Mick (who has been stifling laughter at Stepmother’s reference to sticking a nose in and aiming gestures at her own cartoon-long one with his fingers) regains possession and strikes a wall pass to his brother off the Jag’s coachwork. 

I could see what’s coming – all of it – and it starts here. “No, girl, don’t-”

Special gets her slobbery passive-vicious teeth into the leather and starts worrying at it. Mick the Prick swings his mighty right foot through the ball and connects ‘accidentally on purpose ha ha ha’ with Special’s jaw. The abrupt change from menacing growl to whimper and from attack to, well not so much defence as a pantomime turn-tail into the house squealing, makes everybody in the street laugh except me. Unlike me, Special is not used to being punished. 

“James let those big boys bully me and now he’s ruining the ball Step-grandfather gave us,” barks Special through the blood and the slobber.

Cindy and the SM look   expectantly up for Absent Dad’s response…. But, like a Secondary Modern teacher looking for a member of a senior management team when Mick the Prick badly needs managing, not even your omniscient narrator can find him. 

Meanwhile back, on the front. 

“Mick, give me my fucking ball back,” I shout and grab it.

“Ah keep your Nancy ball, ya wet fanny,” snarls Mick, kicking it half a football pitch down the road. “Talk to I like that up at the Secondary Modern and I’ll kick your knickers off. Ha ha ha.”

I silently resolve to avoid this scenario by passing my 11 plus. 

“Ha ha ha,” echoes Dick. “You tell im Mick!”

“Shut your cake ’ole Dick and go and get I that plastic ball I nicked from school before I kicks your face in an all,” orders Mick.

Prick the Younger obeys. The future football careers of the three named human players in this otherwise unchronicled 4-0 are testament to their diverse nature, education and place in the sibling   hierarchy. Dick was later ejected by stewards at Brighton for chanting ‘Watch yer Arse City’; ‘The RefeRee’s a homeR” and (as he was ejected)  “watch their falsie number nine!”; I was arguably the first man at a woman’s professional football match ironically to jeer “He fell over. He fell over” when Beth Redwell the lethal opposing sharpshooting  centre forward went down in the penalty area. (No-one joined the chant but I think a smart Alice in Row Z cracked a wry smile.) And Mick the Prick had a trial for Bournemouth after two seasons banging them in at Number Nine for Somertown Athletic and might have achieved great things if he hadn’t also had a trial for attempted rape during the same season.  He wasn’t very experienced with girls and the signals they give, he pleaded. He asked the judge to consider the disadvantages of his upbringing. Unlike his  “clever Dick” younger brother shouting (like me here) from the stands of life, he didn’t enjoy the civilising benefits of a grammar school education and unlike the favoured few (like me) he never had a football of his own and, well, he had Special needs and his father ( ‘Big’ Prick) treated him like a dog (like me, like me!) but he still banged them in for Somertown Afletic (they like me) and yeah he’s been a bad bad boy but he done pretty good for a kid what went to the Elvis (Costello) “You never gave me the chance I took” Secondary Modern. 

*

 

Once upon a time it was 1956. I, the invisible omniscient narrator of All About The Girl, was born. (And high time I got on with narrating All About The Girl, we’ve been waiting in that 1965 Beatles dressing room in Cardiff for most of this chapter, I seem to hear you say, Edinburgh, if you’re here. Why are we meanwhile back in 1956 instead of 1965?)

Because Beatle, Cindy and I all came out of the Fifties. You have to know what’s really going on when Lennon says “before Elvis there was nothing” because like all Lennon’s quips it’s shockingly truer than the conventional wisdom and also a complete rubbish he will himself debunk when a funnier quip occurs to him later. ( eg the B side of Let It Be, You Know My Name (Look Up The Number.)  Let’s write a Grammar School discursive essay in response to this one. Viz,   Grammar School Bad Boy John tells us Secondary Modern Elvis was King of the Fifties and in the Sixties his crown passed to the Beatles, except their crown was much bigger and didn’t require a pulsating pelvis to turn a generation on. And also except before Elvis there was definitely a Something they also inherited, albeit from an older generation, even if the Someone ( Frank Sinatra) didn’t sing it until 1967 with Nancy (calling it Somethin’ Stupid) and then in George’s version (calling it Something) in 1980. The Beatles didn’t just replace Elvis as the King of Rock, they also replaced Frank Sinatra as the Sultan of Popular Art; his long playing concept albums with an inspired swing orchestra and maestro conductor creating the symphonies in which his sublime art-that-conceals-art New York Voice  crooned out of the gramophone and radio when so many of us Fifties kids were born, getting the Lady (briefly a Tramp) and the Gentleman (ahem) in the Mood. Sun Session Elvis is the rustic Rebel yell set free but the definitive Fifties soundtrack was at least as much that towering masterpiece of conjugal stimulation and Tender-Trapping glory: Songs For Swinging Lovers! With an exclamation mark. The Fab Four may have started and never stopped rock and rolling from the pelvis like Elvis but in the end they also made art music  from the heart like Sinatra. 

 

Jazz? Black slang for Sex. Rocknroll? Black slang for Sex. But Sinatra? The Beatles? All that indeed but Something beyond it as well.  Love and Marriage. Art and soul.

 

The Fifties was JAZZ. (Nice.) As well as rocknroll. (purring Roy Orbison  growl). There was Elvis strutting his pelvis but in the end, tragically,  that wasn’t going anywhere except the army. Frank took it All The Way home.  Oh, that coy Yes-No Marilyn skirt-blowing decade! 1950-1962. A dozen years and a lot of anxious months between the hungry glamorous gone-tomorrow Forties where you might as well whisper a free and loving Yes Yes YES. And the love-Pilled YEAH YEAH YEAH Cindy Sixties where warm buns were everywhere, including the oven, but you could get away with it. Do the aftermath. 

 

What the Fifties did behind a bedroom sign saying ‘Do Not Disturb’ and tried to undo in nasty back street clinics, or to neutralise with a GI uniform, the Sixties did in the road. But it’s the Violets – the free and loving loving Maries – by a mossy Stones that had the Fifties Dads Yessing whatever the Teddy boys were doing. Ask Marianne Faithful (before she got out of the convent.) Ask Frank Sinatra. 

 

The Yes-No Fifties was never going to be as Free and Loving Yes Yes Yes as the Sixties but it wasn’t an army-cut Elvis or a Sunday-frocked Doris Day No No No either. It’s still all about the Girl. 

It just happens under the Freudian slip. 

And what would a half blind visionary bespectacled English teacher Mr Lennon quip under THAT conclusion I wonder? With any luck “See me.”

*

Meanwhile back, in 1965, inside the Capitol Cinema Cardiff, on Sinatra’s 50th birthday and just before the Beatles last ever mainland concert tour date second set, Madge Jones pops out for some more woodbines, past the Koobas discussing how the first part of their Beatles support act went. She bumps into a dedicated follower of fashion (who apologises) and then watches him with amusement. The DFOF threads through the first house of home and pub-going Beatle concert crowd as it mingles with the last ticket-to-ride holders for the second house and the thousands more who didn’t get in at all. He is a vision, more in tune with the gay fairylights of Christmas than these December’s children Beatle fans in their blue, sodden grey and black winter overcoats. If Madge could foresee those outrageous Sergeant Pepper pastels rubbing shoulders with their funeral-suited Beatle predecessors (or their hippy-wizard-next-door roof-topping the workaday Sixties on the Get back roof) it wouldn’t look much different from this. Our dedicated follower of fashion is an island of Carnaby Street in a sea of grey. He asks his way of a group of drunken and temporarily euphoric winning Rugby spectators which includes my Uncle Dai( Stepmother’s model of the real man I should be though she hates him.)  They have been discussing the beginnings of a deplorable popstar tendency in soccer players to kiss  each other when they score and to pretend that a tackle hurts when it doesn’t, rather than (as in Rugby, a man’s game) the other way round. They wonder where it will all end under this government, football going to the girls and the country to the dogs but they stand beefy shoulder to shoulder across the pavement and they know where THEY’RE going. (To another five pubs, then the dogs, then to spend their winnings – if any – in another five pubs and then back to ‘the rolling pin’ and the nine to five and ultimately Nowhere, certainly not the summer of love,  Edinburgh.

“You mean Queer Street don’t you, butt?”

“Queen Street.”

“Polka dots! Stripes! Frilly nylon panties probably. Jesus wept, mun, are you a girl or a boy?”

“You can’t talk to me like that. I’m-”

“E’s just a fairy,” growls Uncle Dai, squaring his shoulders. “Not worth the swing. Leave im mun.”

But Uncle Dai’s scrum chum is massively offended. Thump. Kick. “Oi! Pansy! I asked you a question.”

“I’m a boy, I’m a boy, I’m a boy, I’m a boy.”

*

Something is happening here and Mrs Jones the Capitol cinema cleaner thinks she knows what. Mr Larkins has asked her twice if the dressing room is ready and now he is asking her again. It isn’t the presence of the Beatles that has put stars in his eyes. He’s hosted the Beatles before and anyway they’re nice unassuming boys, not pop-tsars, even if they’ve seemed a bit fed up this time. No, everyone knows it’s Cindy, sleeping like a baby in his office. He even persuaded the Beatles – good hearted boys – to make her day with a visit after some nasty little devil wrecked it by attacking her. They did it of course, heavenly voices but nice down to earth boys, and she certainly deserved their concern but WL didn’t half put her case to them. “I know what I’ll say to her father about his responsibilities if he ever turns up, and I know what I’d do to the perpetrator if I got hold of him. She’s a babe in the bloody wood Boys!”  No fool like an old fool, bless him. 

Willy can’t help it. There is such defiance in that pale face and smile. He wants to see her through her hour of darkness. He wants to take her home with him. He coughs. Strictly as a daughter, he means. He’s fat, fifty and nobody’s prince. He knows that. But he’s also very possibly the Father (Christmas?) she should have had. “I know what a father I’d be if she was one of mine.”

Her newspaper smells pleasantly of her perfume. The Guardian. That surprised him in a nice working-class girl. What ideas to put in that pretty little head! 

‘Teenagers may well have cried “I am different” down the ages but never before have there been vast commercial empires whose balance sheets depended on them responding ”Amen” to every ping of the cash register. Just how today’s teenagers are to be brought back into the mainstream of life I do not pretend to know. Taxing their income to help pay for the ever-increasing number of pensioners may be the Answer.’ (No. Not that one.)

They’ve autographed the article for her. John Lennon. Paul McCartney. George Harrison. Ringo Starr. Good Boys.  Wonder which of those four rascals signed all four names in their four different ways this time. 

Willy looks. John? No George. Or..

The phone goes and Mr Larkin snatches the receiver quickly, listening – brow furrowing along practised lines – and then whispers hurried instructions. He calls Mrs Jones. “I’ve got to sort a few things. If you’ll look after The Girl during the concert – you two take the reserve box – and I’ll sort you out some overtime? All right, love?” 

Madge Jones nods. It is easy money just before Christmas and besides it is pleasant here with the coal fire. And it will be very pleasant being up there with Cindy watching the Boys. When they were singing to Cindy in the dressing room before the show, oh it was pretty. Like the records. A shame none of these screamers ever listens to them.

Madge enthrones herself in the reserve box. A Beatle comes in now, looking very handsome in his suit. “Right, your Madge. No talking during the screams.’ Madge smiles at the irreverence. “Or rattling your jewellery!”  (Your Madge indeed! But the cheeky choirboy always makes her feel like royalty.) Then settles back for her very own Royal Command Performance.

*

And so the Last Act begins. The Act You’ve Known For All These Years for the Last Time. The indifference of the playing should have alerted the screamers, but since nobody can hear a note of it, does not. Willy Larkins stands at the back, supervises the removal of a girl being sick, then looks up at Cindy in the box. 

There is magic in the air. Something about those four young men and their audience has changed the face of shortchanged-pound-in-your-pocket post-Empire-Britain. It has put a big smile on it. 

On stage, and under cover of the screams, Beatle George mischievously starts playing sub-continental sitar chords from Norwegian Wood and, catching the fun, Beatle Paul and John sing it. Beatle Ringo, already drumming on the offbeat instead of the on, because he’s tired and it looks the same so what’s the difference, improvises a droll roll off the hi hat, a slow droll heavy fill and a little psychedelic run in training for his drumming masterpiece: Rain. John’s folky narrative manages to out-lonely Dylan while remaining plangently John. And then Paul adds an exquisite vocal harmony that takes the whole somewhere over the sun. 

No-one in the building hears it. Not yet. No-one except Cindy, who heard it earlier. But this is what they want to be playing now instead of Twist and Shout and Yeah Yeah Yeah. 

*

It has been a long and winding road from that  cellar in Liverpool and Hamburg to this floodlit arena, from nowhere to everywhere, taking in a world record 55,000 in Shea Stadium the previous August. They will do one more not very enjoyable world tour in 1966 but as far as British tours go and (apart from a 15 minute thrash through extinct 1964-5 hits in London on Mayday 1966 at the NME poll winners concert hosted by Jimmy Saville ( not yet a knight of the realm but already a paedophile) and Pete Murray and an exhilarating filmed London rooftop reminder of the live act above Saville Row on January 30 1969, of which more later) all live performing as the Fab Four on the home soil they blessed and that made them, it ends here in a cinema in little old Cardiff. 

But even as we look forward at that fifteen minutes of spirited live Beatle-comet global celebrity playing captured on the stills taken that Mayday 1966, we know it has already gone. We watch it  from the outer darkness of this obscure black box in a converted Apostolic chapel up a backstairs above the Royal Mile decades later and sense an interval coming on. We will never see the Boys on tour in Britain again and at the time the Beatles and Beatlemania – tour/album/ tour/ album / tour/ album/ tour/ album – seemed synonymous. The End of the Show, particularly as the world tour of 1966 will feature precisely none of the music from their 1966 studio album. As the curtain comes down on that Cardiff cinema live screaming  Beatlemania finale of 12 December 1965 and the Beatles celebrate in the Christmas green room en route to a double Number One with all the support acts busting their guts for a Number Twenty let alone a Number Two, before breaking up for an unusually early Beatle Christmas, we draw a veil over the limo back to London (was Cindy waving them off  or inside?) as Beatle leaves his native stage and the howling pack of tour-chasing British girls behind for The Last Time, more than ready to be done with touring altogether. It’s not the End of the Beatles, Edinburgh, (though George for one assumed it was) or even the Beginning of the End, as Churchill’s recently arrived Ghost of Christmas Past might have put it.  

But it’s definitely the Beginning of the End of Part One, our gratifyingly delayed climax, which you’ll find laid out for you like a Christmas dinner ( or a ghost) in the next chapter. Which we’ll introduce with a brief sneak peak (sic) ahead at Beatle Part Two John (25) and Beatle Part Two George (22) strung out along a fairylit road in London’s Clubland a few days after Cardiff, demob happy, already floating off the edge of Part One between the end of their last ever British tour and a third Christmas at Number One everywhere. Odd things are happening because their dentist dinner-host decided it was part of his duty of care to lace their after-dinner coffee with LSD. These are the same two Beatles tripping off their photo-faces in the Pepper inner gatefold covershoot 18 months later and definitely the two leading acid heads of the Beatles. (They all did it all but Paul favoured the pipes of peace and Ringo something a little more alcoholic).  How easily either or both of John and George could have ended up six feet underground or mad like Syd Barret rather than just the peerless ‘underground’ musicians acid helped to make them. Especially (as George reminisced) if they’d absorbed all the bad trip nightmares the authorities were peddling about the drug before setting off on their first trip (as opposed to the all the endorsements the establishment was giving to Mothers Little Helpers, frozen steaks, instant cakes, vesta curries, canned peaches, incinerated Sunday roasts, turbo-boiled vegetables, sweets, cigarettes, alcohol, pornography, institutional racism, institutional sexism, Red X etc etc.) LSD is a heaven and hell drug and you tend to go to the one your mind is already most tuned into as you take it and, by most earthly measures, and certainly by my own , Beatle was on a heavenly high that Christmas. 

 

Chapter Seven

Norwegian Wood

Christmas Time is here again (“ow many times do I have to tell yule?” thunders Absent Dad from upstairs) for the 1,965th time, give or take the three centuries it took for Jesus to turn into Father Christmas and for God the Father to turn into Absent Dad.  Unlike Christian Dior’s print suits, straw hats, black stilettos, black beads and gauntlet gloves, Christ Time never goes out of fashion. 

Time and again, nothing changes. Again. In shop windows Anno Domini 1965 is already Anno Domini 1966. The Mod on a Motor Scooter – urban modernist slayer of the farm machinery motorbike–replaced by the Girl in the Miniskirt. But at Council House No.9 St Jude’s Road, on the new Key Worker Estate of Homeway, Heaven descends from the loft as Ever, in gift-wrapped bundles of love. 

*

Except for one visionary Christmas moment during my green microdot period, when I gazed for three hours at my right foot and saw Christ’s in all its beautiful crucified two thousand year divine humanity (while listening to Bowie’s 20th century elegising  messiah-complexed Man Who Souled the World album) I have never had enough faith in “The Kingdom Of God Is Within You” to believe in it; and all too much experience of its satanic negation in a legion of demons – doubt, fear, uncertainty, mistrust, suspiciousness; no belief in anything; lack of faith; confusion, anger, resentment, self-pity etc etc etc etc… - to believe that Unholy Joe aka Absent Dad and Wicked Stepmother Mary aka the SM are my REAL PARENTS. I even look and sound like them – despite all my efforts to the contrary - and have all the faults, ailments and tics they have plus (as ‘Prince’ Philip Larkin puts it) some others, just for me. But deep down, like a dim memory of an absolute knowledge, I know they’re not. I began to suspect it the last day of the autumn term in 1965 that the SM invaded Mr Gateman’s watch tower over my lower school playground.

“Headmaster, there’s a parent to see you.”

“The one who’s always asking about her son’s reading or the other one?”

“The one who’s always asking about her son’s reading.”

“Damn. She always brings out my sss, my ssss...”

“Your Sssss Headmaster?”

“Yesssssss. You’d better send her in.”

“Good morning, Mr Gateman,” 

“Nice to see you again – so sssoon – Mrs Sssspectre.”

“I’ve come to Inquisition you about how James is getting on with his reading.”

“After your last visit, I gave him a personal interview and discovered how much he’s enjoying the Norman and Henry Bones detective stories.”

“Yes, I’m worried about that. I’m getting him Kidnapped, Treasure Island and David Copperfield for Christmas but he can’t seem to get past the first pages of Lorna Doone.”

“Those are Victorian classicssss, Mrs Ssss-. The language is quite dense for a young reader. The point is to get them to love reading first and then…”

“That’s why we got him something more modern.”

“The Norman and Henry Bones detective stories are not ‘modern’, Mrs Spectre. I loved them myself when I was a boy, in the Thirtiessss. They’re very good but considered a little old fashioned now.”

“I hope you’re not one of these Ban Enid Blyton fanatics like that flighty young hussy at the Library?”

“No, no. Our dear Miss Millington swears by the Faraway Tree as a shared magical reading experience. But Jamesssss is a very good reader. He was promoted to the top ssssset on the sssstrength of it.”

“And how is he getting on generally?” 

“Well, as a matter of fact, Mrs Sssssspectre, I’ve just given him the cane.”

“What for!?”

“For climbing a drainpipe.”

Former World War Two Sergeant Len Gateman’s cane had seen plenty of active service that term. On one occasion, all the boys under the tutelage of hip miniskirted Miss Millington (rebel younger cousin of semi-detached suburban Mr James) file in to Gateman’s orifice in turn to receive the welted hand and each of them, including me, had tried their best to emulate Cool Hand John Urchin’s superb exit gesture, blowing his hand like Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy and grinning. Ken, John’s  partner in crime and privileged deskmate, had suddenly lost all his swagger under the Headmaster’s ire during a dramatic intervention into the rollicking classroom. 

This had impressed me deeply. I realised I would rather be approved of by John Urchin even than the Head, Stepmother Mary, the whole world. How fine it would be to share a punishment and a swagger out of it afterwards like that. (This un- Beatleness made John Urchin not just the captain and top scorer of school cricket and football teams but also the ring-leader of shop lifting expeditions and brushes with the police and, before too much longer, perilous first adventures with girls.) Mrs Spectre, naturally, had chosen the day I climbed a drainpipe beanstalk into John Urchin’s rarefied world to pay one of her James-watch visits.

Mick the Prick was at the Secondary Modern but his younger brother Dick the Prick, or to give him the formal name used by his teachers, ‘Big Head,’ has other plans for his educational future:  to avoid being at the same school as Mick. Dick was in the class from which I had been promoted mid-term into the top boys class with John. The second stream class photo shows Dick’s big head centre stage, grinning like a pike, and my rival big head grinning like an anxious stickleback out on the far left; I will find the photo years later and be shocked to realise I have reversed their positions in my memory, putting myself and not him centre stage. 

Dick the Prick targeted me quite early as the cause of all his primary school frustrations– Dick hadn’t been promoted; he wasn’t favoured by the Welsh football teacher; he wasn’t trusted with the school tuck shop and his unmarried Dead End Street mother didn’t come up the school from all the time to Inquisition Len Gateway on his reading. 

The violence exploded like a pogrom, an Iago of malevolence, in the upper playground, the afternoon after Mrs Spectre’s school visit. I was unprepared in every way, notably the absence of any masculine role model at home beyond soppy Holy Joe’s whack round the head sermons about turning the other cheek.  So, towards the end of the school year, I, the ever-dependable right half, feeding the ball so cleverly up through midfield to star centre forward John Urchin, suffered a dramatic loss of form in the vital Somertown Junior school derby, pulling back the ball over my own goalline mistaking it for the six yard line and so scoring the decisive own goal in a historic 1-0 defeat. Len Gateman singled me out for disapprobation in assembly the next morning. And the following summer, on the day of the 11 Plus, disorientated by the nervous frenzy of his instructions, I entered 1967 instead of the year of my birth on the sacred 11 plus paper, was whacked round the back of the head so hard I fell into the aisle between desks. It was in this concussed state that I passed for Grammar School. (a foreshadowing of would happen with Corporal Punishment as he patrolled the escape tunnel of my A levels, of which more later).

“Well, it’s very average,”  Stepmother Mary would scoff about my first Grammar school one word machine gun reports about my performance in exam papers that appeared to have been written in an ancient foreign language. And Absent Dad, when available for comment, rolled his eyes to heaven with a ‘what can you expect?’ look. (“My father is a capstan setter. My own dream is to be an electrical engineer…” is how Stepmother dictated my first English homework,  “Me”.) Joe and Mary were still very keen on my education then. Later when it became a means of empowerment and self-discovery, they (the SM vehemently, Dad absently) stopped checking my progress, while doing everything they could to check my progress. 

Meanwhile forward, in the strange new world at the top of the junior school drainpipe, patrolling the corridors of my uniformed Grammar School powerlessness like the Hitler youth he was, a giant Dick the Prick would be doing the same: taking my place in the school football team (the mincing  manager likes his triumphant will), in the classroom, on the bus home and at John Urchin’s side. Or the Summer of Love as Cindy would call it. But let’s not go there. Yet.

Christmas Time is here again. A Norwegian wood fills the room of Key Worker Council Estate No. 9, St Jude’s Road, Homeway, Somertown. The Fairy Gabriel and the latest Beatles carol are, now and forever, topping that tree. Since the Cardiff concert Cindy has been going round with a Mona Lisa smile. In a flush of seasonal generosity, she ruffles my Hitler back-and-sides into a Beatle fringe and tells me I can borrow her Rubber Soul LP and play it on the family record player any time I like.

The magic is working. Curly-haired Mother Mary has descended to the record player and glory is shining around as Joe kisses Mary under the mistletoe. Cindy and I look at each other in started wonder. 

Then as the Christmas intoxicants begin to wear off, we all fall one by one into a deep slumber. Only Mother Mary stays awake smiling down on all of us and kissing us tenderly as we drift away… 

Special growls, jealous. But for once is treated like the dog she is, directed to her place on the floor, in front of the fire, where she is perfectly happy.

“Babies goes to sleep now; babies go to sleep now…” croons Mother Mary in a Cliff Richard voice. 

This is a Christmas Present that will never end. It stretches away beyond the limits of the past and the future. As Beatle would carol a couple of years later, All you need is love…. 

And then we wake up. The vacuum cleaner is blasting everything back into a black hole and Stepmother Mary is clattering her way through the dishes. Christmas is over. Again. Special jumps back onto the table and wolfs the remains of my rice pudding.

“Down, girl,” I protest.

“Leave Special alone. It’s Christmas!”

“Christmas isn’t just for a dog.”

I get a Stepmother smack across the lip. “Now clear those games away – properly.”

Dad comes round last. He is seeing two of everything – except his wife. He wishes he could see the other Mary, but he can’t. He shakes his head. He has a headache. He roars, “Stop rattling those bleddy wotsits!”

“I’m putting the games away!”

“I SAID STOP RATTLING THOSE WOTSITS.”

Cindy snorts, “That isn’t what you said.”

“Yes it is!”

“No it isn’t. You said ‘Bleddy wotsits.’

“Don’t you use language like that at me, you bleddy-!”

“And don’t snort at your father.”

“He’s my father and I’ll snort if I want to.’

“Don’t cheek your bleddy mother.”

“She’s not my mother.”

Silence.

“Can I listen to Cindy’s Rubber Soul in Cindy’s room?”

“No. We’re going to listen to this – As A Family”

The needle drops into the imitation groove. It’s the budget Sound of Music on Music for Pleasure with FW Woolworth and the Mike Sammes Singers. Not since The Four Seasons put out Vivaldi their best-selling album of violin-led chamber music has a popular classic caught the ear with such ersatz. Can You Tell the Difference Between This LP and the Real Sounds? 

Yes. We could.

“I love presents,” sighs Absent Dad, looking round the room (and sleep-walking-to-work out of the door) for his vanishing tipsy Christmas like a man with a hangover.  

Presents are something both Spectre parents love to excess; a love they can control and control with, favour with, commodify and (as a punishment) take back. Presents are a love Money Can Buy. 

Giving yourself – your time, your support, your unconditional appreciation, your parenting, your heart, your presence – is a lot more difficult.  Years later, reading King Lear for ‘A’ Level, I will recognise Lear’s parcelling up and gifting of Britain to any child “who will say they love him best” as so clearly a parable of my own bargain-hunted childhood, I think I must be making it up.  

Dad comes back in because it’s Christmas Day and everywhere else is closed. We freeze in our places for the death-sentence of his annual blessing. “We need Christmas because the rest of the year is so bleddy awful…” 

Cindy disappears.

*

Johnny Churchill opens his present from Cindy. They haven’t seen each other since Cardiff so he is amazed to get it. From under the pretty gift-wrap, the present comes roaring up at him like a lost Eden and it hurts. The Rolling Stones glare up through the crack of an alley door, grouped behind blond Beatle-hive hairdo’d Brian Jones. Out Of Our Heads, sneers the title, which in the US gets it the obligatory sales-boosting ban. (retitled as December’s Children) Johnny laughs. 

He puts on side one. She Said Yeah. Mercy, Mercy. Good Times. And then at the end of the first side, a song he doesn’t recognise, a new one they’ve written themselves (the Beatles started this trend and now everyone is doing it) Gotta Get Away. Not original, except in a Neanderthal original sin sort of way. (which is why John Lennon’s amused response to the Stones was that their compositions ‘sounded strangely familiar.’ Even down to his 1963 lyric Please Please Me lyric resurfacing as the Stones’ 1965 The Last Time. But you don’t need to be original when you can fill the groove with diabolica as good as this. Paint it black, you devils. He plays the second side and it is even better, even blacker. But that’s it. He gives it one shot and his mother, Martha, is worried he doesn’t like it. 

She suspects there is something up with Cindy. His father grunts “yeah, Johnny’s todger, probably,” and gets told off for being rude. 

“Cindy hasn’t been round lately then, love?” 

“No,” says Johnny.

“You usually play a new Rolling Stones record to death.”

“Stop naggin’, Ma. It’s great.” 

“Martha, the less often we hear those oversexed Yanks snarling at the grownup world the better,” says his father. 

“They’re from Kent, Dad. And the really oversexed one is from Cheltenham.” Johnny can almost hear Jagger saying. “You oughta be glad you got a mother who worries about ya.” 

At the moment, he isn’t.

Johnny has lost interest in the Stones. He hunts round the house for some Beatles. In the absence chez Churchill of the new LP, he spends Christmas playing his mother’s copy of Help. In particular, You’re Gonna Lose That Girl and Hey You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away, over and over again. Then he borrows his little sister’s Beatles for Sale and plays Ev’ry Little Thing until even she wants to scream.  His father catches him on Christmas morning with tears in his eyes. “You all right son?” And I Love Her comes on the radio and Johnny flees from the room.

“Now I’m worried about him, Martha,” says Mr Churchill. “He normally plays records by Animals about boys with hearts of stone being ruined by gambling. What’s wrong with the lad? He’ll be playing Mary Poppins next.” 

“He’s in love, Victor.”

“Out of it more like.”

“He needs Help.”

The Beatles and their love songs, never special favourites of Johnny’s, taunt him like a lost heaven. By Boxing Day, his father has had enough. “If you’re going to mope all the way up to Molineux, I’ll travel up with Bert instead.” The match ticket is his Christmas present to his father so this is serious. Johnny pulls himself together. They set off through the icy wind on Johnny’s motorbike and sidecar. The Black country is grim in the cold, earthy stone-faced Wolverhampton no brighter for Christmas décor. A black forest howling at Red Riding Hood’s door. 

They park in a side street and have a swift half gallon each in a chippy but cheerful pub, crammed full of black and gold rosettes and Wanderers memorabilia, scarfed bottle-necks and grey heads like his father’s. One labour-honed peasant called ‘Heavy Metal’ at the bar has a football rattle and looks ready to use it. Johnny is tense at first but his father’s generation are hopefully able to distinguish between ritual joshing and the Second World War they’d fought a common enemy together. The giant goes out to eat a nose bag of fish and chips in between pints. It is like a lorry has moved out of the light.

“One day the magic will wear off,” explains a miner in day-off gold and black, wolfing peanuts. “And then Heavy here will turn back into a pig.”

“He already is a pig,” says Johnny.

“Is your worzel calling our ‘Heavy’ a pig?” 

“The only magic is manual labour,” replies Victor. “If the factory closes-” 

“No offence,” says Johnny.

“None taken,” chirps the miner. “Keep the crowd trouble where it belongs I say. At the ground.”

“Aye.” Everyone drinks to that.

“If there’s a ground open.”

“Woss mean?” says Victor.

“You shut Ashton Gate because of crowd trouble, during the war. That’s cowardice in the fice of the enemy.” 

”I was in Burma so it wasn’t me. Your gold standard has dipped a bit since then.”

Heavy Metal comes back in belching loud enough to shake the glasses off the shelf. “Dunno how your carthorses beat us last year.” 

“We scored more goals than you,” explains Victor.

Guffaws and growls. 

“Not this time. We’re going up.”

City’s red robin underdogs play out of their shirts, getting a 1-1 away draw at a big promotion rival. This sets up a thrilling table-topping clash under the new floodlights in Bristol the next evening. Better still, a chap in a robin-festooned trilby puffing out Christmas cigar smoke behind them on the terrace sells him a couple of cut-price tickets to see the Sound of Music in Bristol. 

“Where are you going at this hour?” asks Victor as they get back to Bedminster. The old man is almost asleep.

“Don’t wait up. Happy Christmas.” He starts detaching the sidecar, then dashes to his room for the gossamer fetherlite his dad mischievously slipped in his Christmas stocking. His dad laughs. 

“At least have a tot of rum for the road-”

But Johnny roars off down the freezing A48 to Somertown. He skids a couple of times but doesn’t actually come off until he hits the Stepmother force-field and loose gravel outside Cindy’s house. It takes a layer of skin off his leather trousers and cracks his goggles, and shakes him up like an early Elvis lyric, but no worse. 

Cindy hears the accident and comes out. “God!... Johnny! She fears for a moment he is dead and her heart jumps a beat. “Are you hurt? Shall I get an ambulance?”

Johnny rolls over to face her frown. It looms like a troubled angel out of the starry Somerset sky. “Sorry.” His head is back in the alley, going BANG BANG. He shakes it, smiling, eyes wandering beneath wobbly lids.

 

Several neighbours join her from various late night house parties. They help lift the heavy bike off his leg. They carry him into the house, repeatedly bumping his wounded knee. The house is awash with silly-season trifle, cake, nuts, raisins, fruit and booze. They peer at him through the Boxing Night tobacco smoke and spirit fumes. 

“What a lovely boy,” the women are saying. 

“Bit of wild one. Er’s like the Steppenwolf.” A man mutters. 

“That’s what we meant,” say the women. 

All except Stepmother.

Joe offers the invalid a Christmas drink. “What’s want? Harvey’s Bristol Cream? Bristol Milk? Emva Cream. Warnink’s Advocaw? Egg Flip?”

“He needs a brandy, dad. He’s in shock,” says Cindy.

“No brandy here,” snaps Stepmother. “Just tea.”

“Hot strong sweet tea then.”

“What’s he doing here this time of the night?”

“I been to the Wolves game, Joe.”

“Oh ah? Woss fink of e?”

“Parr’s looking tip top.”

“Ah? Give im some tea, Ma.”

“I’ve come to invite your daughter to see the Sound of Music in Bristol with me tomorrow.”

“She’s heard it.” Dad holds up a counterfeit cover proudly. “We got it for Christmas. It’s got the Mike Sammes Singers.” 

Cindy tuts. “Typical.”

Joe beckons the mother away into the living room, leaving the two lovebirds in the kitchen. Johnny stares at the brown tile wallpaper, the dingy cupboards and cold stone. He’s come a long way just to explain and now has nothing to say.

“Why’s it typical? Because your dad can’t get the genuine version of even a Julie Andrews record?”

“No. Because I called for you earlier,” says Cindy. “I’ve got us tickets to go and see City play Wolverhampton Rovers.” 

Johnny laughs. “Wanderers.”

“I had to queue for hours. I’ve wasted three whole quid.”

“No you haven’t.”

“Well if you think I’m giving up the Sound of Music to go and see some lousy football, you better think again.”

“We don’t have to. It’s a matinée.”

“Exactly. It clashes.”

“But it’s an evening game.”

“Be serious. How will they see anything?”

“It’s City’s first game under the new floodlights. We can do both! It’s meant.”

Cindy looks away.

“I’m really really sorry, Cindy. About Cardiff. I’ve been a bad bad boy. I could shoot shoot myself. BANG BANG. But I’ve learned my lesson. Now I’m going to give you the best Christmas ever.”

“Are you indeed? Sorry for what exactly?”

“Leaving you... like that. Anything could have happened.”

It did, Johnny. You did.”

“I know but after. Look I was drunk, angry, desperate. Staring into a black hole…. I’m  not a saint, Cindy, just a man. And I wanted you so much. But I’ll never do you no harm. Cindy?”

“Why are they called Wanderers?”

Johnny is taken aback.  “They didn’t have their own ground.  They had to play away.”

“So… Sheffield Wednesday…”

“…could only play at home on Wednesdays. 

“And what about you?”

“What?”

“Do you have to play away?”

Johnny grinned a little painfully, getting it at last. “No. I play at home now.”

Cindy noticed Stepmother listening in the crack of the door. She lowered her voice. “I would too – if I had one.”

“Why are we speaking in code?” Johnny was used to the respected privacies of his own home. 

Cindy indicated the presence of a spy and whispered. “Norwegian Wood.”

“What?” He was bred on Stones lyrics.  A killing floor and the body lying in its own blood and sperm on a bed of straw. He couldn’t follow this deep layered stuff.

Cindy rolls her eyes and looks down at him. “You Secondary Mods!”

“I’m a Secondary Rocker, doll!” he protests, then groans as Cindy smacks his wounded knee. 

“Sorry.” She lowers her voice even further. “Norwegian would, if you asked her.”

“What?”

“Tch!” She finally gives up and whispers in his ear. He finally gets the message, the hidden meaning that is most certainly there. Now his eyes open wide. 

She laughs. “Is that your hip pocket or are you just pleased to see me?” 

“Both!” He kisses her, wildly. He hands her a beautifully packaged present.

“Who wrapped this? Your little sister?”

“Our ma.”

“Wow! Day Tripper/We Can Work It Out! How did you know how much I’d want this?”

“I saw you buy the album in Cardiff. And you said their Christmas single wasn’t on it. So-”

Johnny put his hand on Cindy’s blouse at the back, feels her backbone. He’s never felt it before, hands too busy elsewhere. He is fascinated.

“What are you doing?” spits Stepmother.

Johnny bursts to say “Life. I’m doing Life, Mrs Spectre, reaching for the stars through the bars of the cage. Life, which is, like the average male penis, as I’m sure Mr Spectre will agree, very short, too short for all this fussing and fighting…” but wisely restrains himself. Mrs Spectre is shocked already. She has not been so shocked since Jean Shrimpton appeared at the Melbourne races in 1964 wearing a short skirt and no gloves and the spectre of feminism (it won’t actually materialise until about 1970) began to stalk a world already debauched by The Beatles.  

“Joe!” Stepmother storms back into the living room. Special starts barking, a crescendo made wayward by the brandy she’s lapped up from Absent Joe’s upset glass. Joe comes out of his dogatonic trance. Cindy and Johnny hear Stepmother through the slammed kitchen door. “She’s all over that Bedminster Animal. And last Thursday Mrs Sargent saw her going into a Family Planning clinic in Bath.”

“What?” gasps Joe, terrified. “She’s going to have a baby!”

“How? You silly ass! She’s on the Pill!”

Johnny looks at Cindy with a wild surmise.

*

It’s true. Cindy has scored Love’s Sixties Drug, the real LSD. She has claimed her place in the first female generation in history to have access to Love Sans Disaster. Love Sans Doom. Love Sans Diaphragm. Love Sans Demoiselles-in-Distress. No, not acid, you Love-Summer Dreamer. Never mind the LSD, here’s the bollocks. The Loophole in the Damocles. Larkin called it Paradise after centuries of ‘wrangling for a ring’. YES!!!

The Answer?

Well... The Pill. 

It will have its problems, being a part of the first female generation without a good reason to say ‘No’. Even Johnny, contrite, and grateful, can wait now, for a time and a place (not under Stepmother’s nose) where it can mean Something, Everything. But even a contrite and grateful Johnny still won’t wait forever.

*

Meanwhile, Norwegian Wood – sooner or later – and the hills are alive with the Sound of Music. December 28 1965 is the happiest day of Johnny and Cindy’s lives. They join a group of lively and inebriated pensioners forming an elderly queue behind a lot of youngsters forming an orderly one round three blocks for the movie whose soundtrack album will dominate the decade’s charts from the fall of Beatles For Sale in April 1965 to the rise of The Beatles Double White album at the end of 1968; repeatedly returning to Number One like a faithful pigeon. It is the album that infamously knocked Sergeant Pepper off the top of a 1967 chart the ‘landmark of Western culture’  Beatles LP had owned since June despite the Beatles dominating the Christmas hit parade not just with their Christmas single but incredibly with an EP at Number two as well. The Sound of Music: an LP older than Help returning to stop the Pepper-hot psychedelic Summer of Love Sergeant being Santa as well as Mr June, Mr July, Mr August, Mr September, Mr October, Mr November and Mr January. If The Sound of Music soundtrack is not the real Sound of the Sixties, if only in strictly commercial terms,  then I’m the man from Engelbert Humperdink’s uncle. 

The movie queue includes a woman who will pay to attend 365 performances in a row – they generously stop charging her after that. It also includes a young lecturer from the new Bristol Polytechnic who declares it, satirically, the best production of Jane Eyre he’s ever seen. And, in the upper circle, unseen by and unseeing Cindy in the blissful dark, Mother Mary, Absent Dad and James, enjoying a rare and magical holiday on the proceeds of a small Pools win, getting away from themselves and finding it All while Special has an operation to remove a toy car (one of my Christmas presents)  from her gullet. 

To give Julie Andrews’ ravishing strawberry vocals the credit she rarely receives, The Lonely Goatherd also diegetically and non-diegetically soundtracks the slowest burning, most patiently coaxed extended crescendo of delight Johnny’s ever had in female hands – or indeed his own. Cindy has to be content with a nylon-pinioned grope that occasionally hits the spot like a getaway driver on the way to nowhere fast. (‘When he spins that dial, I go wild,’ as Transistor Sister was putting it at the time.) But, she consoles herself, Christmas is about giving. 

Their bodies are still singing as they sit down to watch the football later. Yes, sit down. Cindy has bought those (outrageously expensive) seats in the Grandstand and the view is spectacular. It is like watching colour TV after black and white. The floodlit green, old gold and Christmas robin red on the frosty air play across Johnny’s eyes like a technicolor movie. Only the brutal chopping down of Gordon Parr as he races through into the Wolves penalty area spoils everybody’s Christmas. FUCKING PENALTY! Yells Johnny, jumping up and forgetting he is in the respectable seats. 

It is too. (I’ve told you I’m a reliable narrator.) But the penalty is not awarded. Parr has to go off with a broken nose, “blood pouring down his scarlet shirt.” (The Green ‘Un). What might have happened if he was replaceable, who knows? But this is one of the last games before the new world order of Substitutes, as possibly referenced by the Who shortly afterwards. Gallant ten-man City go down at home in flames to predatory Wolves 1-0 in the winter dark. Wolves move top though not to stay and City go on to miss a promotion they’d been chasing since 1911, by three points... 

Three points of weakness. Attack. Midfield. Defence. As Johnny’s Dad put it later.

Still, thinks Johnny, 1966 is looking like his and Cindy’s year. And England’s. The football frog is about to turn into the prince, after a century ending its brief hour upon the brilliant football stage doing retirement jobs as publicans, postmen, car salesmen, or (in John Atyeo’s case, City’s faithful England international when he could have gone for glory) part time maths teachers or (as in the case of Terry Bush, scorer of the first ever City goal I celebrated, against Rovers in 1965) as invalids on fifty quid a week half pay. No longer. George Eastham is about to become George Best. George Best is about to become ‘O quinto Beatle.’ ‘O quinto Beatle’ is about to date Miss World; Alf Tupper and Adj Cutler are about to mushroom into Jeff Beck; Stanley Matthews on the long transition to blow out the Psycho-Delia wish-candles on the end of decade cake and dress like the Fab Four (if never quite like that androgenous son of a PE teacher Mick Jagger with the possible exception of Charlie George of Arsenal) is about to become Bobby (aptly named) Moore Moore Moore.

YES! THE BALL IS IN THE BOX. THE PENALTY IS YIELDED. THE HUNTER STANDS ERECT. HE QUIVERS. HE COILS. HE AIMS. HE SHOOTS! AND THE BALL FLIES.

GET IN THAT FUCKING NET AND STAY THERE! All is beatific smiles. Johnny Beatle-smiles at Cindy. Cindy Beatle-smiles back. He is in Beatle-heaven. 

But since Cardiff – and that vision beyond the alley – he senses, somewhere amid all the jubilant goal-celebrating Sixties crowd noise and the love choruses and the glory in excelsis deo chants and the beat beat beating of hearts and pulses and parts as one through the beatific long shuddering demise…. That there’s a problem.

He's a substitute for another guy. It’s all about the Girl. And he shouldn’t be getting the climax to Cindy’s story.

*

Or mine. See you (God willing/ lights permitting/ if you’re here) for the second half, Edinburgh. 

 

Chapter Eight

I’m Looking Through You

It Was Sixty Years Ago Today. World Cup 1966; London swings: Britain sings in Beatle harmony.  A mind-blowing Revolver charts the tops. Meanwhile, back in Somertown, Class 1 (the top stream) is introduced to the semi colon and colon by Fanny Insole and I find I am better at it than the brackets, plusses, minuses; multiplications and divisions which are the equivalent punctuation marks of numbers, but which I must also subdue my flyaway brain to master. All Our Yesterdays shines like Tomorrow Never Knows; Tommy wins the War – again   - every time you open a comic, look in the Daily Mirror or gape up at a screen. Long golden legs slope through the long grass leading down to the river under the Good Day Sunshine. And then – Goal! My Cup Runneth Over! – WE WIN THE THIRD WORLD WAR in colour; for the first and, as yet and as yet again again and again (It was 60 Years Ago!!) the ONLY time: 4-2, AET, at Wembley. 

When you get all that at ten, Edinburgh, it’s a hard act to follow.  

*

I pass for Grammar School. We move up to 4, Snob View, Hybris, Fernweh, with its yellow summerine front door and large garden and garage on the other side of the tracks and of the river and up the much higher hill to the other side of town. Absent Dad buys me that commemorative gold Parker pen (while Stepmother, scandalised by how much the new uniform is costing us, saves two thirds on the regulation tan leather satchel so that I stand out like a twat from every other kid in the school with what looks like a dark brown plastic handbag, while Special, judged too sensitive to share my fate, frolics in a winter coat made of the thick tan leather she begrudged me and Dad insists without explanation that I turn up at the factory after school in my new school uniform, the uniform he never got to wear. I do so, dreading but not understanding the enormity of the occasion. 

Suddenly Vivid Present Shop Steward Dad meets me at the factory door with his workmates and members ranged behind him and I can tell immediately I’ve let him down. I was supposed to be playing Absent Dad as The Grammar Schoolboy He Should Have Been to the workers, a bit like Lord Snooty playing to the gallery at the Glasgow Empire (or you, Edinburgh, if you’re here) only without being told how or who or what  or why. 

He berates me at home later, putting in an unusually intense shift as Suddenly Vividly Present Dad, for “looking like a bleddy yokel. I am ashamed of you,” he says, not for the last time. In a year or two, if he was on afternoons and late overtime, and as I began to realise my education was a way of escaping him to University, I would get my reoeat early morning school call (having teenage-sleepily ignored the SM’s) in the shape of his furious factory fist. “How dare you sleep to your mother like that!”  He’d passed for grammar school himself but never got to go because he saw his mother couldn’t afford the books and uniform which is a truly noble self-sacrifice as long as you aren’t still thumping your own son in the face for it thirty years later. “It’s mutual,” I might have answered, if I’d had the lightly punctuated words I have now, to express how much I had rather been proud. 

*

Johnny’s apprenticeship is over and he gets a good job at the garage. So good that he contemplates buying a new car.

“How are you going to afford that?” protests Victor his father.  “I’ve been earning for thirty years now and I’ve never had a new car in my life.”

“By working a lot of overtime, Dad, spending evenings in watching TV with you and Mum and Cindy, selling my (his voice catches a little) motorbike. And with a little help from my friends...”

“You mean your parents!”

“I do,” he grins. “With all that, I reckon I can save enough to buy a new car.” 

“It’ll have to be very small and very cheap,” grumbles Victor. He is impressed that his son seems to be settling down under Cindy’s influence. But he also wonders whether it’s happening too soon. “You’re a long time married, son.”

Tommy looks at a Ford Anglia with his father and Cindy for £380 but he can’t see himself in it. Cindy’s parents have just got an old one for a start, outside of their new Daily Malice show home at No. 4. No thanks. He really fancies a Triumph Herald, small but cool, a saloon that thinks it’s a motorbike, but, at almost £500, it’s way out of his league. Cindy wants him to buy a bubble car but his father argues that he didn’t win the war for his son to “put the British Motor Corporation out of business buying bleddy baubles of Euro-trash from Krauts and Eyeties.” Besides, he says, “it’s strictly for the bIrds, son."

“What about a mini?” sighs the bird he means, Cindy. She points at the one on display in a Union Jack festooned window.

“Not got the legs for it!” laughs Tommy, looking  at hers before adding, “though you certainly have.”

“Ahem,” coughs Victor, who thinks Cindy’s mini skirt belongs in a brothel. (Or as his mother put it, “If it’s not on sale, don’t put it in the window.”)

“I meant the car.”

Tommy knows, of course. And he knows these odd-shaped trimless wonders – originally designed in the Fifties as ‘the charwoman’s car’ – are an engineering nightmare. But they only cost £350 and ‘classless’ British celebrities are suddenly swinging the mini’s cheeky little rear all over London. Five million no-frills ‘people’s cars’ will eventually perk up the British landscape. Beatle John has one, painted in rainbow colours, parked next to his Rolls Royce. So does Beatle Paul and George, who is a bit of car buff. So do those fast-living dolls Marianne Faithful and Twiggy. Even Her Majesty has a trial drive.

Johnny resists. “A mini minor! Who do you think I am, Lord Snowdon?”

“No, a Beatle! Look – there’s a sunflower-yellow one!” 

He buys it. It takes him straight to her No. 1 on a car mechanic’s wages. 

He should have known better, of course. “One hand on the wheel and one hand in your pocket,” he moans for the next two years. And, when the rain came, “They should give you a pair of wellies with this bloody thing. I’ve got goldfish in my door pockets.” Half the time he thought he had a flat tyre or even a puncture, the carriage was so low. 

Cindy loved it though, slung back in the low uncomfortable seat beside him assuming her Thunderbirds chic – a mood usually worth the rough ride. Like that classic evening on a lonely road near Heaven’s Gate in June under the stars when the fan belt snapped and he had to ask Cindy if she would mind removing her tights...

That sunflower mini spent half its life in Tommy’s garage being mended. His grey-haired workmates shook their heads over it. The engine was back to front and placed over the wheels for no good engineering reason – just to save space inside – and the minx needed her own set of special tools to fix. They feared the mini was just the sort of cheap gimmicky car, designed by ‘that young Turk Issigonis’ – actually the British citizen son of a Greek engineer and a German brewer’s daughter – that would destroy Britain’s reputation for solid workmanship and Rolls-Royce reliability. “A toy engine under a flower-power bonnet,” they grumbled. And of course they were right.

I see less and less of Cindy, Edinburgh. Johnny gets the Witch of the North freeze from Stepmother all summer so they do their courting away from Snob View. “Must that Animal park his common little mini in our road every weekend? What will the neighbours think?”

“Anyone under ninety thinks – ‘A Beatle car! Fab!’” says Cindy, grabbing her mini mac from her drawer and blowing me a kiss. “But unlike you, I don’t let what ‘people’ think control me. Tell Dad I’ll see him later. Bye James!”

Johnny picks her up – he in his mini; she in her mini – and off they chug, exhaust billowing, up to Bristol or down to Weston. 

*

The Times They Are A Changing, even for Beatle. Paperback Writer is released as England is progressing to that final of its only World Cup and takes a while to get to No.1. The Fab Force’s tenth chart topper in a row, it is the first since She Loves You not to go straight there. 

But it still goes there. The distinction between popular and art (which is always really about class) started to disappear around then. If I knew how they did it to me, Edinburgh, I would do it to you. 

Except they never did it the same way twice, or even with the same voice. So no-one could ape them for long. Not even the Monkees. Not even the Stones. And then sometime mid-career, they took a whole generation off up a completely different Garden of Eden path.

Again.

Philip Larkin said they were gaining the avant garde at the expense of the typists at the Cavern. ‘Is that French for bullshit?’ quipped Beatle John. ‘Avant garde’ a clue’ zenned Beatle George. Because, however Schoenberg-deep they went from the G eleventh suspended fourth at the start of A Hard Day’s Night to the black hole E Major at the end of Pepper, they (like Larkin, but on a global scale) kept faith with the popular chord. Even Tomorrow Never Knows is copper-bottomed on a twelve bar blues. They took the washboard and the mop; the tea chest; the hobnail boot; the old brown shoe; the broken banjo; the man in the crowd; the rainy English garden; NHS glasses; NHS grannies, the football terrace; Edwardian whiskers; Northern brass; the ukulele; music hall; paper picnic cups; postcards, the cornflake waiting for the van to come; the-found-coat grabbed-hat-seconds-flat-had-a-smoke-and-somebody-spoke-and-I-went-into-a-dream-bus-upstairs; the factory-flying mystery charabanc tour through the South West of England, the ten bob note and the Maggie Mae pub chorus and turned them all into a high art you could buy at Woolworth’s – art you could sing in the pub and whistle home. And invited us all to the Ball.

Nevertheless, Christmas 1966 is the first since 1962 without a Beatles single or a British tour. The final world tour has gone down in flames and fists in Alabama and the Philippines. In August, as they fly out of Candlestick Park, San Francisco, Beatle George declares – “that’s it, I’m not a Beatle anymore.” 

The Spectres’ yellow submarine was in choppy waters too. I come in from football to find Cindy squirming in the dock. 

“And what the hell is this?” Stepmother demands. 

“That’s my poetry and it’s private. I’m sixteen, not six.”

Special looks up in her basket. She is so fat these days, she can hardly move. Stepmother reads out something called Needle. Dad goes pale as a Mr Wodehouse (as in Jane Austen’s Emma, not PG). Not because he thinks she’s on heroin – which the Malice hasn’t heard of yet – but because he’s scared of needles. Cindy and I are repressing hysterics at the SM’s soppy-twee performance voice.

“I draw out the new mascara–black vinyl from its Fran the Fan wrapper. I hold seven inches of summer Rain. The needle bites the groove. The Beatles float off a bed of music and enter me...” 

We are crying with laughter by this point. 

“I like that,” says Dad, rapt, dreaming of Mother Mary.

  

Stepmother Mary glares. “What the hell does it MEAN?”

“It means whatever you want it to mean, man.”

“Don’t cheek your mother,” sighs Dad. 

“She’s not my mother.” 

“Yes I am. And little thanks I get-“

Cindy sighs. “It’s about me, Dad. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me,” says Dad. 

“Whenever I do, you either drift off the planet or fly off the handle before I finish my first sentence.”

The SM interrupts. “It’s about drugs!” 

“It’s ‘about’ the weather!”

“What do you mean it’s ‘about’ the weather?”

“What do you mean, ‘what do you mean, it’s ‘about’ the weather?’”

“Don’t cheek your mother.”

“Stepmother. Why don’t you ever tell her not to cheek your daughter? It’s ‘about’ Rain, the ‘B’ side of Paperback Writer, the new 45 rpm by that enduringly fast popular music combo the Beatles, the Act you’ve known for all these years. And now it’s ‘about’ us having a row about it.”

“Where did you learn to talk like that, madam?”

“Not from your Daily Malice, madam.”

Cindy tries to retrieve her poetry. Stepmother holds it above her head, like a perverse child playing Piggy with grown up emotions, then, throws Cindy’s heart like one more game of one-up womanship to Dad, who drops it. Special, who (like the average England football fan) assumes taking part in a game is the same as being awarded the winner’s trophy, immediately begins shredding it. Dad eventually retrieves the ruined tome ¬soggy and fouled with slaver. It looks like a dog in the manger’s dinner.

He hands it back to Cindy. She meets his eye with inexpressible reproach. He looks away.

Stepmother demands to hear this Beatles’ Rain nonsense she’s writing about. She frowns at the nasal Indian whine and binary weather report that both somehow express Lennon’s withering contempt for convention.

“It’s like the wailing rubbish you get in an Indian restaurant,” says Dad.

“Since when have you been in an Indian restaurant?”

“When I was fighting for the Empire, my girl. On National Service. I was sick as a dog afterwards, I’ll tell yule. I-”

Always hypersensitive to atmosphere, Special demonstrates. Copiously.

“Now look what you’ve done! Poor Special!”

My cue! I look up. But they’re blaming Cindy this time.

“What! Your dog is sick because a Beatles record makes me want to be something?!”

“The Beatles can afford it. All that money they’ve got. For singing! You’d be better off learning how to keep house, my girl,” barks Dad.

Special joins in. She loves telling offs. She barks at Cindy too then howls the house down. Cindy leaves the room and soon after I see her leaving the house. My heart sinks. It’s only a matter of time with Cindy now. I know it. She’s leaving home. 

*

Going up in the world was ironically a comedown for the Spectres. On the Key Worker’s council estate, all of the boys except Mick the Prick – who’d got brain damage repeatedly heading a sodden leather football – made it to Grammar School. Here on Snob View, behind their privet hedges, the private estate sons mostly went to the Secondary Modern. Their businesslike dads had more money than brains. Their mothers praised my table manners at parties and told Stepmother I was the politest boy in the street. I’d rather have been the toughest. Their dads smirked at their hell-for-leather sons with pride. 

I began borrowing Cindy’s sheepskin coat. Three sizes too big but it had that certain Mod-without-a-scooter vogue. It helped me fit in with The Snob View Secondary Mods. They were mostly older and savvier and they  didn’t take any prisoners. Their rite of passage was to keep hold of a jam jar full of the gunpowder taken from six bangers while they tossed in a match and retired. I made the mistake of looking down to see how things were going. I got home an hour after curfew, blinking through a fog, panic-stricken hand finding a forbidden packet of cigarettes in the pocket. I stared at them, unseeing.

“James! You stink like a bonfire” laughed Cindy. “Have you been plucking your eyelashes – where’s your hair?” She saw the cigarettes. “Quick. Hide!”

“What’s going on?” demanded Stepmother.

Cindy covered for me, as always. “I’m just seeing if this old coat of mine will fit James.”

Stepmother glared at the pack in Cindy’s hand. “Joe! JOE! Cindy’s teaching James to SMOKE!” My bare legs got a stinging slap. “You’ll hurt your lungs.” She smacked me again. “Where’s your hair!”

“He looks like Dada!” hooted Cindy.

“Joe! JOE! James is going off the rails.”

Absent Dad finally presents fists as Corporal Punishment. “This is what comes of all your bleddy Beatles music!” he says. “I can’t even hear the words on the one you’re playing up there at the moment.”

“Good because they’re not addressed to you. And anyway those are Donovan.” 

“And what the hell is bleddy Donovan?”

“Folk music.”

“It doesn’t like falk music to me.”

“That’s because it’s folk music.”

“That’s what I said – falk music. Drugging and falking and eating their own dire eel like beasts of the fields-”

Stepmother, allowing the unspeakable earthiness of the Biblical vision to pass without censure for once, persisted. “And SMOK-” 

“Folk, Dad. People. ‘This land is our land. This land is your land.’ It’s just your old shop steward stuff brought up to date. The old folk traditions Beatled up by the Dylan generation.”

Stepmother chokes. “To think, your father and I went through the Blitz and rationing and the Nazis for this tribe of long-haired communists to-”

“The war’s over, Stepmother. It’s just your Daily Malice blue rinse brigade hasn’t noticed.”

“Our ‘blue rinse brigade’ stopped Hitler, my girl. Now your precious ‘folk’ is in bed with the Germans, buying their cars, using their tools-”

“I’m not your girl. Your Daily Malice backed Hitler all through the Thirties. And now it’s fighting the Second World War against Britain for all of Hitler’s policies!” 

“- Well, we didn’t stop Hitler just to hand our country over to a tribe of Israelites if that’s what you mean.” 

“Exactly. You blame the Jews for everything like he did. Or any immigrants who refuse to lie down under your jackboots. And it was the armed forces of the British Empire, America and the Soviet Union who stopped Hitler not you. And after a brief wartime truce your Nazi newspaper started waging Hitler’s war again on the Government the British people who won the war elected.”

“And you’re waging war on your own family.”

“We’re making love not war. Folk-” 

“There’s no need to keep using the F word!” interjects Dad.

“And why have you taught James to smoke?” demanded Stepmother.

“I didn’t. He picked it up from your ashtrays and your example, like everything else you blame me for.”

“GET OUT!” yelled Stepmother. 

“And now we hear the hidden meaning in the same old song.”

“What hidden meaning!?” thundered Dad.

“That one.”

Stepmother demonstrated, “GET OUT! AND DON’T COME BACK!”

“Me?” Dad quailed.

“HER!” clarified Stepmother.

A mini horn tooted outside. Johnny to the rescue in a mini of shining (if slightly rusting) amour.

And before Dad had chance to modify the second part of Stepmother’s order, Cindy was gone. Across the new garden, up and away like Val Balloonican’s bright elusive butterfly, or Cliff Richard’s Marie, playing in a version by FW Woolworth and the Counterfeits as soon as Dad was calm enough to put it on.  Cindy turned once by the new rockery and new fishpond and waved me goodbye. The builders’ sand in the garden of our new house was illuminated bright yellow suddenly. Like the beach holidays of childhood. Then, into the last rays of the sun, she was gone. 

Only for a week. She came back, that time, at least physically. This bird had not quite flown.  

But after that Rain storm she was never quite there. Never quite there but more achingly present than anything before or since, the fey Muse of all those ‘Someday I’ll make her mine’ birds in the Sixties bush. Jessamine. Maggie. Julie. Jennifer. Eloise. Emily. Julia. Penny. Ruby. Mary Poppins. The Pretty Flamingo. Firebird in the sky. The Fox On the Run... 

Yeah yeah, I know it took until proggy heavy maxi 1970 for the Sixties to kick in as far as the female majority is concerned. But as I’ve told you before the dream-music that honey bus chick-child made raised the female standard. All those birds in the Sixties bush songs tuning up the dawn chorus; opening the case for the female side…

*

We all live in a yella summerine! 

That was Dad singing in the bath atop the hit parade at No. 4, Snob View, Hybris, Fernweh, the highest the Spectres ever got. Playing with a yellow submarine with a depth charge in its tail. The U boat came within an American ace of sinking Britain. It’s a terrifying symbol. The Beatles painted it yellow (the Stones would have painted it black) and launched it at the Blue Meanies. Beatle symbols are always double-barrelled, loaded, unlike the single-entendre standing in the shadow Stones. The Fab Four’s angel-harmonies are from a Celtic other-world going pop in this one. The Yellow Submarine had a dark (flip)side. (Eleanor Rigby. Set in a grave.) But the dark side had a yellow sunbeam a mile wide. The Stepmother Spectres of course opted for the shadow.

*

November’s Gunpowder plot comes. (To our barnstorming big beastly boy-gang-built community bonfire beside the allotments, not to the Spectres’ back garden this year: that is hosting a Special-only miniature safety bonfire at which Present Dad and Mother Mary are finding Bonfire Night i/c Bell, Book, Bonfire, Rockets, Catherine Wheels and Roman Candles a bit of a damp squib for the first time now I am 10 and in a gang firmly in Cindy’s fairy footsteps to becoming Cindy-bereft Absent Dad’s son and heir Absent Son.) An earlier Celtic age would have called it Samhain. A great fire as we go into the cold and dark; a ritual incineration of the pumpkin-orange dead foliage and leaves of our dead outgrown or unwanted selves. A later generation than Cindy’s will reclaim it as Halloween. Cindy watches a wax dummy of – surely not Beatle! – being incinerated. 

The flames light up the proto-Pepper-red, proto-Pepper-yellow leaves of nearby trees, play ghoulishly across pumpkin faces. Eighty tractor tyres assembled by the Secondary Mods have sent our gang-bonfire dangerously high into the sky and some of the mothers are muttering nervously about the fire brigade. The Secondary Mods are eighty miles high, Beatle fringes gunpowder-blasted to Kingdom Come. The odd combinations of light – some soft and magical, others furnace-violent, turn faces into ghoulish masks of delight, excitement, alarm, lechery. Roman candles and rockets fizz, whizz, BANG, shoot. The gun-in-hand Mark Chapman who lurked in the shadows of the Beatle record burnings in Alabama seems suddenly to be lurking here too. 

It's an optical illusion. This is Britain not Bible Beatle-Burning America. Here is merely the life and limb-threatening bang bang shoot shoot of fireworks enacting a Guy Faux Pas Revolution that never quite happened and a newspaper-stuffed tramp-clothed Guying of a Catholic England being unspeakably burned to death in case it ever comes back to haunt us as the ghost of Bloody Mary.  All part of the formation of the English national character. 

Mary Mary quite contrary

How does your garden grow?

With silver bells and cockle shells 

And pretty maids all in a row.

A children’s nursery rhyme encoding horrific tortures inflicted on three Protestant martyrs (Three Blind Mice continues this jolly tale) for the love of the Blessed Virgin Mary. So the maleficium cuts both ways. The establishment-conditioning packed newspaper inside the Guy is a great pile of Daily Malices James rescued from the SM’s Snob View bin and the effigy is blazing gleefully as she watches. The boys are exulting in the inferno, their eyes glinting like Hitler youths at a torch-lit Nuremberg book-burning. They are chanting something diabolical, but their voices fade away and Cindy hears something else.

Remember remember the Mail backed Hitler

Through Gunpowder treason and plot.

We see no reason why Daily Mail treason

Should ever be forgot!

Cindy moves away from the inferno into the safer shadows. The heat is overwhelming. Her retreat continues beyond the field-edge into the allotments opposite someone’s family garden. Here, a kiddie weaves a sparkler in magical rings, her face a flower of innocent joy. Other kids join in and remind Cindy of the transforming magic of ritual and fantasy. 

Not me. Bonfire! Bonfire! Never mind the Government and the ‘penny in the pound’ or even the Beatle-taxing ‘nineteen shilling and sixpence in the pound. Never mind the disinfectant cutting through country stink with something worse: next year’s 1967 Foot and Mouth epidemic. Never mind Brady and Hindley and the US bombers over Hanoi and Haiphing. Never mind Aberfan and its hundred children’s smiles slipping beneath the shadow of our industrial past, or the tragic gravitas of their blank-eyed parents. Never mind the war in Vietnam and its dead children running in their hundreds into clouds of napalm. Guy Fawkes is burning again like the Armada and Drogheda and Wexford and Dresden and Berlin and all the outer devils who ever threatened us! Like all the phantoms and demons and own worst enemies within us. Hallelujah! Bang bang shoot shoot! All’s right with the world! 

*

We won the war in 1966. 

Those who can’t see at the back because of the obstructions and the dark, if anyone is here, I was kneeling as I chanted that, a kid at play.  And now I’m standing up, a middle-aged man stranded in a kid’s short trousers. The child is father to the man.

That’s what we were chanting round the bonfire, Cindy. We won the war - in 1966. 

*

Tommy drove Cindy past his old school in the mini on his way into Bristol. “There’s Percy, my old gardening teacher.” He hit the horn, “Wha-hae, Sir!”

Percy gave him an affable Sec Mod salute. Both fingers. Johnny laughed companionably. The Ello Mate solidarity of the workers. They drove on, mini exhaust fuming. 

They parked and got out. They were going to a restaurant and felt very middle class, French and sophisticated. Cindy opined, “That’s not a school that’s a greenhouse.”  

“Purpose built for growing cabbages, Cind. Now if I’d had a red brick Grammar start like yours-” 

They sat down and tried to work out the bewildering artillery of cutlery. “Yeah!, three years filing my nails at the top of the class waiting for the boys to catch up and then expelled in the fourth year for bunking off? Give me five good reasons why that’s a good start?”

“Your beloved Beatles. They went to a Grammar-”

“Not the drummer.”

 

“The Who. Acton Grammer-”

“Grammar not Grammer. And the drummer went to a Sec Mod.”

“The Kinks-”

“Except the lead guitarist.”

“All the writers, chart toppers, leaders, thinkers, movers. Lennon and McCartney even write popsongs in French now!”

“Steve Marriot went to a Sec Mod in the East End but he still played Oliver.”

“He played the Artful Dodger, Cindy.”  

“Our drama was Shakespeare from behind a desk. Our music was a ten second audition being told I couldn’t sing. Ditto art. Ditto most subjects actually, except Mr Rafferty’s English.-.”

“Our musical ambition was seeing if we could sling every single desk and chair out of the second floor window before the demon Headmaster arrived.”

“Where was the music teacher?”

“Locked in the cupboard. By us. If the teachers weren’t off sick, they were hiding or drunk. Class sizes could be sixty, Cind. Half the morning was equipment checks-.”

“Our boys got thrashed for having the wrong bag.”

“We got thrashed by the teachers for not having a bag. And by the other boys for having one. The Maths teacher threw Text book 5 at us – we’d already done Text book 12 in primary school. When your lot was being taught Shakespeare, I was teaching myself to take a motorbike engine apart, hang a door and dig a trench.” 

“Which made you independent, handy and at home in the world, Johnny – don’t knock it: it’s sexy, especially the motorbike. And our local Modern girls were learning shorthand and typing while I was conjugating the verb ‘to come’ waiting for the boys to catch up and conjugate the verb ‘to be’. Lesson after lesson kicking our high ideals while they shuffled their big feet.m Until I was expelled. At 14, I was in a biscuit factory being no-one. You were doing.”

“That was in fourth year. I’d lost interest by then….” Johnny glances round in a Secondary modern way.  They don’t call ’em waiters for nuffin do they. Is this one ever coming?” 

“You’ve got to snap your fingers and-”

Johnny called “Oi! Service please!” while Cindy cringed. 

“Monsieur?” dit le garcon.

“A plate of bread and butter please while we’re waiting. And I’ll have a pint of Double Diamond and a babycham for the lady. Thanks.” He turned back to Cindy. The waiter’s face carried a certain je ne sais quoi.  Johnny continued. “And let’s face it, if we have this Paris honeymoon you’re dreaming about, who’ll be ordering the romantic dinner. Not me!  Vous.”

“Tu.” 

“Because your school taught me how to fetch and carry. Yours gave you the word.”

“Yeah so I can ask the ‘waiter’ ou ce trouve un fountain pen and du foolscap and write it out fifty times in a correct grammatical sentence. While you translate a French kiss into English and wing us some dinner because you haven’t had your confidence frozen by the battleaxe who flung the French verb ‘to fail’ at us for four years.”

“Mable! C’est les mots!” He tried to kiss her.

“Mable?”

He tried again, looking outrageously French. “Marry me sherry Mabel. Zen make love on ze table,” 

She laughed. Surely he wasn’t trying to translate The Word into French? C’est le mot, l’amour? Ah! Then she twigged. “Ma belle not Mable!”  That’s why you should listen to the Beatles. Try rhyming ‘Ma Belle’ with ‘Chapelle’, instead of table. Try-”

He kissed her. 

 

Chapter Nine, Chapter Nine…

I’m Looking Through You

It Was Sixty Years Ago Today. Pepper-hot 1967. The Summer of Love (and legalised abortions). The Fab Force at its Icarus peak. A giant sunshine-yellow iced lolly all the sweeter for that hint of acid in every lick. And all the peasants in fairytale finery at their ball. Now that was a summer to remember.

Can you remember the (pre-Murdoch, first Rees-oMogg) Times calling Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band “a landmark of Western culture” (and Jagger a butterfly you don’t need to break upon a wheel)? The screams at No. 1, Edinburgh? The mad wife at number 10? The bingo at number 11? 

If you can remember it, man, you weren’t there. 

I wasn’t. It would take me until 1973 to grow a moustache. The only acid I experimented with in 1967 was in incomprehensible chemistry practicals. And my only bad trips were the bus rides to Somertown Grammar School, getting thumped by teachers and pupils alike for having the wrong bag. 

Meanwhile back in that fairytale Summer of Love, on June 18, 1967, it was Absent Father’s Day: because real men didn’t have their own day then. President Johnson may have proclaimed a Day honouring fathers in America that President Nixon would make law and a permanent national holiday in 1972 but in Swinging London the Pepper-hot BBC Beatles, currently rehearsing All You Need Is Love for the world’s first live satellite broadcast, were voicing the daughters and sons beyond their command. She’s Leaving Home and, essentially, I’m Leaving with her. She sheds our Parents a musical Note about living alone for so many years which leaves Wicked Stepmother Mary nose-cold and dry-eyed on the top of the world and Absent Dad, when he finally gets home, feeling even more sorry for himself than usual. 

In a minimalist, open-heart grief-lyric (taut heart-strings tuned on those understated short stories Paperback Writer and Eleanor Rigby) Mother Mary picks up the letter that’s lying there; is standing alone at the top of the stair, before she, and the held musical Note, and the audience hanging on it, break... down… and cry to her husband, 'DADDY, OUR BABY'S GONE!' 

When we remove to Wales from Somertown, without that long-gone Baby, 18 months later, I will learn Wales’ national word for all this: ‘Hiraeth’: home-longing. (It was hard to avoid learning it. It was the name of our new house.) She was the She of She-Loves-You-five-years-sadder-and-wiser by then. But, even before She was the She of She Loves You, She knew all about ‘Hiraeth’.

Meanwhile back, All You Need Is Love is broadcast live by satellite to five continents three weeks after the red Pepper yellow Pepper lorry releases its confetti parade along the ticker tape carnival barricades of a generation making its landmark. Cindy’s heart-and-flowers dresses get shorter and shorter and her hair gets longer and longer. Maybe one day, at the end of the rainbow, in nirvana, they will meet. 

The rents haven’t seen or heard from Cindy since Absent Father’s Day. “She’s left our home and she’s left our hearts!” is how he announced it to me and will repeat to the County Council when they ask for a parental contribution to her grant next year. “And we never want to see her again,” clarifies Stepmother.

But, as in the 1914 trenches, after an exchange of Dad-and-daughter cards, both sides of the generation barricade have called a truce for Christmas. 

“I believe in The Family,” announces Suddenly Vividly Present Dad ((5432154321543215432154321 British Bulldog 123 Corporal Punishment reporting for duty Sah!) in our Snob View doorway.

“I believe the Earth is flat and that love makes it go round,” quips Johnny. “But if you’ve seen a family, Corporal, I’ll take your word for it. We don’t have them in Bedminster.” 

 

“Very funny. A few House Rules, son.” Suddenly Vividly Present Absent Dad gives Instruction in the holy hallway of No, 4. I don’t fancy Johnny’s chances at winning the parents over but, if he brings Cindy home, that’s like Christmas coming back to Narnia for me. And, against expectations, as I show him where to put his stuff in the wardrobe, and see there’s a Beatle record-shaped gift for me – I like having him around. 

“Seems to me Special is the dog’s bollocks!” he observes in our shared bedroom at curfew, before adding “and no-one else is allowed any.” We are still shrieking with laughter half an hour later. “Joseph where’s your troosers? Stepmother Mary’s wearing them….”

Stepmother, abandoning her interrogation of Cindy, calls up the stairs three times to be quiet. Dad finally thunders through the flimsy ceiling. “JAMES THAT’S A BLOODY NOUGH!”

We are still whispering conspiratorially when the rents come up to bed come up to bed. Dum and Mad spend a long time in Special’s bedroom, tending to her emotional needs and kissy-kissing her goodnight, reassuring her that in spite of the attention being given to the Intruder, she is still their extra-Special. Cindy has gone out to look at the stars.

“Some boys need to be trained by their fathers in how to be men,” snipes Stepmother.

“When have I got time for that?” protests Absent Dad.

“I didn’t mean James. I’ve done that. I mean this Young Master Churchill.”

Dad has drifted off so Johnny shouts through the long and whining door, a little open, “My friends call me Johnny.”

There is a gasp followed by some furious whispering and finally the door of the parental bedroom slamming and a cat squawking. Then opening and slamming again as the mangled cat escapes. 

“Good night Master Churchill!” they chorus.

“Good night Irene!” laughs Johnny. This attempted solidarity, an insider reference to Bristol Rovers, the pantomime villains and common football enemy of Bristol City FC, gets no response.

Their conversation continues in a muffled counterpoint of Mum-yipping and Dad-growling through the wall which for some reason is hilarious. Then finally we hear their endearments:

“Night Jaw.”

“Night, MaRe.”

A silence as we gasp for breath. 

“Joe’s got that right at any rate!” snorts Johnny.

I smother another gale of laughter in my pillow, nearly crying with the strain. Somewhere, under the window, we can hear Cindy laughing too.

“That boy needs to sleep!” shrieks Nightmare.

“PLEASE WILL YOU BE QUIET!!” samsons Suddenly Vividly Present Dad.

We apply a silencer to the jags of laughter that continue to machine-gun through us. Finally, we subside, Cindy comes in from outside to her room and the besieged castle relapses into silence.

“What did you think of Johnny?” Stepmother asks me next morning.

I note the past tense and sense my vote isn’t going to help him. “All right. Spose.”

“He’s not very friendly to your sister is he?”

“Cindy? He loves her!”

“I mean Special. She doesn’t like his hair. It frightens her.”

“Can I have long hair?”

“Long hair is for girls.”

“Johnny’s not a girl.”

“No. He’s a man and ought to look like one.” 

But both Stepmother Mary and Corporal Punishment look like they’d prefer it if he wasn’t. 

*

Christmas Day dawns on us like a forgotten Eden. We unwrap our exultant loving mutual presence amid whoops of incredulous wonder (Mother Mary has bought Cindy Sergeant Pepper and  Johnny the Magical Mystery Tour double EP and they have bought Joe and Mary the authentic “Sound of Music” soundtrack album to replace their Mike Sammes Singers counterfeit and they’ve both bought me Beatles annuals and even when the black hole of ordinary life vaguely threatens to return around noon we can fill it with a lot of mulled bonhomie and three exquisitely punishing rounds of Mother Mary’s sumptuous Christmas banquet: it’s a Christmas dinner we will all say a grace of thanks for and attempt to recapture on every Christmas Day for the rest of our lives. After the subsequent coma,  we surface into a Christmas afternoon grey with TV light and blue with cigarette smoke.  Special is barking at the telly and her flabby sides are being patted and wobbled around by the parents. The perennially absent snow comes down like a gentle persuasion. Suddenly-Vividly-Present 5432154321543215432 154321 British Bulldog 123 Corporal Punishment reporting for duty Sah! (wearing his quarter master’s National Service battledress) holds up a Melody Maker Johnny has left in the toilet. “What the hell is this supposed to mean?” he barks.

“I am the Wireless,” howls Step-Aunt Rdognas, ordered over from Merthyr for the week, from under the red Welsh tartan dog blanket of her usual chair. 

Stepmother Mary’s Welsh Aunt Rdognas, not ours. No relation to our Aunt Rdognas except by having the same forename, which confuses everybody every year.  

“I am the Wireless,” Step-Aunt Rdognas Welsh-lilts again. No-one asks her what the hell that is supposed to mean. 

I’ll tell you. You can rely on me. Step Aunt R’s husband died ‘underground’ thirty years ago and she still blames the old pit bosses. The tragedy at Aberfan earlier this year (also their fault though blamed by the Daily Malice on the lefty pinko quisling National Coal Board left holding the slag sandwich of a hundred years of fair country rape) has brought it all back to the surface again and mixed her present horror at 100 children dead, 100 no futures frozen under the dead past, with all the earlier burials of mining communities; and in between saying “I am the Wireless” Aunt R makes a lucid case against the greed-is-not-good of capitalism, holding daily court in the parlour of her Aberpenar brother’s Daily Mirror cottage. Except at Christmas when she comes to say it here. “I am the Wireless.”

“What?” asks Johnny.

“I am the Wireless. They say you cun change the capitalist system from within but I say you cunt.”

“What?” gasps Johnny.

“We think you can change it from within you without you, Aunt R,” says Cindy.

Stepmother Mary puts down the Daily Malice. “More fun and games from the transport unions I see,” she says, testily, “just as everyone’s travelling awm for Chris’mas!”

Home?

Absent Dad whimpers. Special joins in, gradually drowning him out with a howl.

Stepmother snaps them down. “I’d have given him what for if he’d said it in front of me.” She looks round the room threateningly.

A bewildered silence.

“Said what in front of who?” asks Johnny, still expecting a logical sequence.

“Whom” growls Special.

Corporal Punishment smacks the broadsheet and declaims from it at arm’s length in a Mary Whitehouse yip, “The Rolling Stones start better than anybody – and then get stuck in a groove. The Beatles are never predictable like that. They rewrote that groove in 1963, and now, in 1967, they’re rewriting it again.” He holds up the guilty paper in triumph.

Johnny looks round the room to join in the applause for Absent Dad’s ‘performance’ then realises he’s not at a performance of Joe playing a furious Stalin at a Soviet treason trial but in an alleged conversation. A conversation taking place a hundred light years from OM.

“What the bleddy hell is THAT supposed to mean?”  Joe throws down the paper like a gauntlet and glares at Johnny’s devilishly handsome shoulder-length hair. (Stepmother privately and guiltily approves the Kitchener sideboards but is spooked by the Jesus beard) “Would you care to explain that?” 

“The word “THAT” can be used as a Definite Article, a Conjunction, an Adverb, Pronoun, and Adjective,” yelps Special, with a superior snort, catching the tossed reward-toffee neatly in her dog gob, tail thumping into my groin.

“Just listen to it, Dad.” Cindy puts Sergeant Pepper on the family turntable and Corporal Punishment listens to it like a Soviet censor. It’s the least comfortable ten minutes of Johnny’s sweet short life. 

“Isn’t it just… beautiful?” sighs Cindy. (Johnny notices the nod to Hendrix’s “Not necessarily stoned but… beautiful”.)

Dad pounces on a dissidence. “Tangerine trees and flowers that grow incredibly high!” What the hell is THAT supposed to mean?”

Special exhales an ‘I’ve already explained that’ sigh.

Johnny answers, quite slowly, as if handing Joe the power of an imaginary flower. “May I wish you a hippy Christmas and a very new year?” Cindy thumps him from out of storm of laughter. Special gives him an old-fashioned look.

“Mince pie anyone?” growls Stepmother through clenched teeth. 

Special is already licking the half-emptied plate. Cindy and Johnny shake their heads, looking through a glass pickled onion to see how the other half half-live. I join in the head-shake. Upset Dad pats his upset stomach and shakes his upset head at the same time and says he’d better not – or only one anyway. Stepmother nibbles a corner. Special vacuums the other half of the overflowing plateful. 

Dad reverts to the Melody Maker, now using his Sunday best voice, like he’s reading a lesson in church. “Ahem. Nobody can follow PeppeR. Not even the Beach Bouys whose mind-bending ’armoniz ’elped to inspoire it.  And certainly nought the aaaarse-wrigglin’ Stownes.” 

“Is there any need for THAT?” demands Stepmother.

Special breaks wind copiously, as if to prove there is. I also explode, with laughter and am warned that I will be sent to my room. The stench is horrendous. I can’t stop. Johnny and Cindy are in hysterics too. They collapse into a kiss of sheer delight. Special makes a growling bolt for the tight groin of Johnny’s loon pants.

“That’s enough of that,” snaps Corporal Punishment. 

“Thanks, Joe.”

But Cindy knows better. “He means me, Johnny. I’m not supposed to kiss you until after we’re married, if then. Special can pleasure you whenever she wants.”

Stepmother snaps. “How dare you! Go to your room, James.” 

“What have I done?”

“GO TO YOUR BLEDDY KENNEL! IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE CHRISTMAS,” snarls Dad, exhausting his presence with the effort.  I had a kennel in those days. I go. Special jumps up into my place. I listen at the door.

Cindy is giving them both barrels. “I saw two ancient women zebra-crossing in Milltown centre yesterday. Pale as Death and with a sort of Hell-darkness in their eyes. Everyone was staring at them. Who are they?”

Special did her Hound of the Baskervilles howl. This was her favourite story.

“The Nowhere Twins,” snapped Stepmother. “James! Get back downstairs. It’s high time you heard this!”

“Not tonight Mare,” pleads Dad.

I creep back in, terrified and fascinated. Cindy and Stepmother, pale and pinched, are seated facing each other across the cakes and sandwiches of the late Christmas afternoon coffee table. I always knew there was some shadowy secret in the Spectre closet. Here it is!

“The Nowhere Twins were kept in an attic for 37 years by their mother. For being born out of wedlock. She named them Shame and Judgement. She believed the sins of their father were on them; that she had to keep them hidden from the light.” Stepmother was fascinated by the cruelty and folly. “They didn’t see the sun until last summer. Perhaps now you’ll be a little more tolerant of your own upbringing. That’s what the real world is like. I protected you from it. I sacrificed most of my life to see you were fed, clothed, roomed, kept safe. Given everything.”

“Except love,” whispered Cindy. I am about to nod my support but I see Corporal Punishment tossing up his best forehand behind my head and duck instead. He remembers we have company and pretends to be replacing the set of Holy Family Christmas cards he’s just dislodged.

Stepmother “Yet according to your generation, I’m the monster. Well, the real monsters are in the Nowhere attic.”

“They’re not the monsters. The father and mother were.’

Dad looks Absent. Stepmother is vividly present. “That’s what I said.”

Cindy tried to look on the  bright side. “Those twins must have been dancing in the streets when they finally let the sunshine in.” 

“They’re still in the darkness,” said Stepmother triumphantly. “And always will be. You can see it in their eyes. They might be crossing the zebra and smiling at the faces they meet. Even on the sunny side of the street, they’ll always be locked in that attic. There’s no coming back from that. I did my best and you think it’s the worst. But all your brotherhood of man is as useless as a French army against that Nazi darkness. That attic is the only higher hidden meaning. Keep weaving your pretty lies and your Beatle fairy stories, Lucinda. You’ll never let the sunshine in under that Nowhere roof.”

“Oh God, everything you say is so miserably Fascist!” choked Cindy standing up.

“How dare you call me a Fascist!” snarled Stepmother, like Dr Strangelove caught torturing Palestinians, her eyes glinting like the sky above Hitler’s bunker. “I remember the war!”

“You’re still fighting the war. On the wrong side. Like your dirty Daily Malice was in 1938 and still is.”

Not this again.

“She’s getting awfully weird, Joe!” states Stepmother waspish with turkey, pudding and sherry, as if Cindy isn’t there, which essentially – since their interrogation of Rain in the summer of 1966, even now she’s auditioning as the prodigal daughter, she isn’t.  But neither, in another way, is Dad. “Joe. Joe! Where are you?”

“Perhaps e’s down the back of the sawfa!” lilts Step-Aunt Rdognas.

“Why would he be down the back of the sofa?” demands Stepmother testily.

“Looking for ’is trousers!” whoops Rdognas.

“Looking for ‘Hidden Meanings That Aren’t Bleddy There’?” teases Cindy.

“Looking for the Answer?” I add, sort of getting the drift.

“No Answers in This House!” clips Stepmother Mary across my lips. 

Johnny sings along, “I nearly made it, sitting on the sofa with a sister or two.” 

I shift on the sofa, jammed in between Cindy (her long legs making a love-not-war ménage a quatre in plain sight with Johnny’s and an overheated Special, my leg half-Nelsoned into the arm of the sofa and my only free hand neurotically working along the crack at the back. I locate various lost items, mostly unholy relics of Special’s Christmas Past (Special learned quite early that the way to defeat the Christmas expansion of love beyond her own top dog-ness was to hoard and Miss Havisham her presents until everyone else had finished theirs while Cindy and I were grabbing and tearing open what we could while the magic was still flowing).  The gold, frankincense and myrrh parodied on this occasion were: a cannibalised casket of shining gold-wrapped chocolate money dog-toothed and slavered into thirty pieces; a lipstick and vial of perfume given to Cindy by ‘Father Christmas’ (aka Absent Dad on his day off) but revoked by Stepmother Mary on Boxing Day after she read Cindy’s diary and found evidence that Cindy intended to wear it to attract boys; the tube of ointment Stepmother bought to anoint Special’s perpetually over-licked arse; the toy gun Special was given to celebrate the assassination of Kennedy at Christmas 1963; the petrified dog-vomit of a mummified trifle Mother Mary always made “her special boy” (yes she meant me!) for Christmas tea which Stepmother always confiscated after I was sent to bed early on Christmas night because I’d ‘spoiled everyone’s Christmas”; ditto the delicious but equally vomited, petrified and mummified rice pudding Mother Mary always made “her special boy” (yes, me!) to go with that Christmas trifle; the blood-anointed knitting needle I’d jerked my foot onto while watching a particularly scary episode of Dr Who  at Christmas 1964; a Selection Box of fluff-preserved Dog Treats; the summer holiday jelly I had to pretend Special made me when I was in hospital for the summer, confiscated by Stepmother for my not being grateful enough to “my little sister” while overjoyed to have my leg in traction receiving visits from a dog-headed family during the longest and loneliest 7 weeks of my life; a licked to death 1965 Easter egg; a half chewed Christmas toffee from Special’s 1966 Miss Havisham collection, both of which I had been accused of stealing; Special’s 1964 birthday ball, wrecked with teethmarks; the Sellotape nobody could find yesterday during the last minute panic-wrap; a pilled and scrunched up pair of Mother Mary’s nylons Step-mother laddered to the limits and clinging like a discarded snakeskin; a 4” screw out of Dad’s toolbox (which I absently hand to Johnny) and quite a lot of unidentified grime and stickiness. Absent Dad’s balls are probably down there as well. 

It’s Getting Better All The Time sings Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

“Can’ get much worwse,” explodes Step-Aunt Rdognas.

Johnny beams. Cindy has eyes only for Johnny now. But it is not Johnny.  His Walrus moustache and lengthening centre-parted locks have turned him into Christmas Beatle. 

“Hippy Christmas, babby.”

“Hippy Christmas, babber. Mmmmm.” She kisses him.

Stepmother goes into a spasm. “You can’t do that! You can’t do that here!”

“We love each other. Why shouldn’t we show it?” 

“Not before you’re married! Not before you’re married! Not before you’re married! Not before you’re married! Not before you’re married! Not before you’re married!”

“Nor after by the look of it,” says Cindy.

Vaguely Present Dad emerges from that hole he thought he’d fixed and the crack he wallpapered over last summer, the day after Cindy split, back into the conversation. “Don’t cheek your mother!” 

“She’s not my mother!” Answers Cindy. Cindy sees Mother Mary smiling at her like a ghost of Christmas Past hovering over the table in the dining room. Is it a trick of the Light or the Nativity scene laid out next to the Christmas tree?

“That’s it. She’s leaving home!” snaps Stepmother, slamming the other room door. 

“She already has,” Cindy, reminds her, turning to Absent Dad. “You know I really thought after I left you’d finally welcome your prodigal home. More fool me. If Stepmother forces me out again, don’t ever expect me back. Not even for a visit.”

“No,” I plead, running back in. “No. No!”  

My shouts half-awaken Dad. Sergeant Pepper is a psychedelic circus. “Turn that bleddy noise off. It’s supposed to be Christmas not bleddy Bonfire Night. “ 

“We’ll have Sound of Music,” orders the SM brightly, in that wicked voice she’d instructed the barber to cut my hair ‘Very short’ as my ‘little extra’ Christmas Eve gift the day before I wanted it to be long for Cindy. The wicked spell voice in which she annually exorcises Mother Mary at Christmas, though usually not as early in the Day as this. She prepares to sing along, heart-sinkingly flat, “what are we going to do about James Spectre…?” 

Spooked by her wicked domineering scariness, hypnotised by the long witch-nose that spites itself and others alike, Johnny tries to oblige, carefully taking off the wounded Pepper and getting ready to apply the soothing balm of The Sound of Music. 

But he is finding it hard to manage two records, two inner sleeves and two sleeves and ends up putting the Sound of Music record back inside the Pepper cover and the Other Side of Pepper back onto the spindle. Beatle George’s Indian love and peace-in starts again. 

Stepmother spits, “I’m telling you Joe, I can’t stand any more of this, any more of Her” into George Harri-Krishna’s Indian-whining …the Space Between Us All…

“Any more?” laughs Cindy.

“Neither can I.” Dad gets up, bump-scratches the record player jumping With our love we could save the world into the psychedelic guitar-storm of It’s Time for Tea and Meet the Wife.

Special yawns – a contended squawk in her throat. The smell of rancid Christmas empties from her jaws and fills the room. By the time everyone comes round from the gas, the record player is climaxing with: We’re Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts’s Club Band. We Hope You Have Enjoyed the Show.

“Too much bleddy love on this record and not enough bleddy marriage!” snaps Dad.

“What good is marriage without love?” snorts Cindy, grieving for her scratched Pepper. “Look at you and Stepmother!”

Uh oh.

They drive off into the rain, without waving or looking back, in Johnny’s itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow-blue-orange-green Pepper-pumpkin bikini mini. The record ends with the famous exit groove that doesn’t exit uttering hidden meanings that are there over and over and over and over again including some spectacularly high-pitched sounds only Special can hear. She is mortally injured by the sounds, barks the house down until Suddenly Vividly Present Dad knocks the tonearm, the spinning platter, the cartridge, the stylus along with the “landmark of Western culture” it has just played (or now just scratched all the way from A Day In The Life to Within You Without You ) flying across the mind-numbingly conventional living room into the middle of a next week without Santa, anything landmarkable or Cindy.

That night, Sergeant Pepper himself, that love-landmark of Western civilisation, enters my now grave-silent bedroom, “For you, Sergeant Spectre, zer Christmas is over.”

*

I’m showing the jury Cindy’s original 1967 gatefold mono vinyl copy of Sergeant Pepper, Edinburgh. Not the imitation CD. This is the real McCoytney. 

See the cover now, through my NHS Lennonist lens. It captures the landmark moment they gave us the word and we finally heard. The gay colours; the sumptuous costumes; the irreverent majesty. The moment Cinders got to the ball and became Lucy. In the Sky. With Diamonds. The moment khaki became satin; Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali; Van became the Man; frogs became princes; pumpkins turned to bubble cars; guitars became wands; school became art school; Satan became Santa; guns became flowers; Colonel Blimp’s lightning flash of manoeuvres above Salisbury Plain reflected in my bedroom window became the marmalade skies of Sergeant Pepper’s love Goons; the artiste/artisan became the artist; George Eastham became George Best; the Black GI wielding his Master’s axe became Jimi Hendrix; the Stone Age came in colours; Brian Epstein came as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi; the Hollies became King Midas (on their way to becoming Crosby, Stills, Nash and Jung); the Wurzels became Jeff Beck; the Mirror became Mirrorscope, a light beyond the pricky heat of The Sun; the council estate got through the generation gap in the barbed wire and away into the Milky Way, heading like that “they think it’s all over, it is now” Geoff Hurst counter-attack over Heaven’s Gate. 

*

Except, on Boxing Day, 1967, the country’s long love-in with the Beatles finally ended. Their Magical Mystery Tour came to Earth, an explosion of colour, screened in hippy-defeating black and white. Macca said later that its long slow debacle was worth it for the I Am The Walrus sequence alone and, in hindsight, in colour, in memoriam Beatle John, he was right. But we live in the moment, a moment the Beatles usually made their own, just as Sinatra made every room he walked into (until the Sixties) his own. And in the moment, for a hungover-Peppered nation needing that day-after-Christmas black hole fix of Rhythm and Beatles, it was no match for the music and got an unprecedented drubbing from the critics. 

The Summer of Love was over.

 

Chapter Ten

You Won’t See me

It Was Sixty Years Ago Today. 1968. A transistor is playing the new (self-proclaimed ‘Onederful’) BBC Radio One. The Home Service (now Radio 4); the ‘Light’ Programme (now Radio 2) and the Third Programme (now Radio 3) have finally acknowledged that Young Persons Need A Programme Of Their Own and that if the BBC don’t give it to them, offshore ‘pirates’ in flowery shirts and flower pot hairdos will do so. The Light Programme’s rationed 45 minutes of ‘popular’ music from ‘fast combos’ per week is now relentlessly piped out and rocking- around the clock. 

The ‘Light’ Programme’s weekly 45 minutes of one second half of one ‘League Division One’ Football ‘Metch’ will eventually rival ‘fast combos’ for world domination leading to something called Radio 5 in the Seventies (and subsequently global broadcasting; comment and commentary; expert summariser analysis and serial repeats of every goal; goal attempt; assist, corner, disputed throw in, strop, spit and dive 24/7 even if you switch on just to get the digital time in the middle of another sleepless night...) Football will then be called, in a neologist comparative incomprehensible in 1968, “the new rocknroll.”

But at the moment, in 1968, when ‘tranny’ still meant a transistor radio rather than a soul on a gender dial, ‘Radio Five’ is not yet even a Monty Python joke and it is fast and flowery combos rather than fast and furious association football that is the Sound of the Sixties, pouring out of the battery ‘tranny’ warbling from the tinny speaker on the window sill. So much great sound from such awful speakers: the exact reverse of now. 

Willy Larkins’ dingy office at the Capitol Cinema, Cardiff, has been transformed as if by a magic wand. It is striped; polka dotted; flowered and has a see-though minimac hanging on a hook. Masculine BO and eau de ashtray has been replaced by a girl’s perfume. Madge Jones the Cleaner has always diligently hoovered and dusted but this is altogether another kind of Woman’s Touch. Willy Larkins has never been so happy. His things don’t get lost, except half his paunch and most of his headaches. He has got himself a Girl Friday. 

Something is happening here and you do know what it is, don’t you, Mrs Jones?

Willy waves a typed sheet headed Christopher Lambert Sq, Management, 84 Eaton Place, London seeking tour dates for his band. “Are this lot going to smash up the stage and bring in troublemakers like the last lot?”

“They are the last lot.”

“The Who?”

“Yes. But they’re more peaceful now.”

“You always see the best in people, Cindy.”

“I’m usually right, Mr Bill. The Who could be the new Beatles.”

“The one who writes the songs perhaps. He’s a gentle soul under all his towering fury. You could hear it on that LP they brought out last year with all the adverts. The Who Come Out or something.”

“The Who Sell Out. I got it in Woolworths for a fraction of the price because someone swapped the price sticker with one of those counterfeit cover albums. It kind of trembles with California yearning. I Can’t Reach You. Relax. City in the Sky. Our Love Was Shining Like A Summer Morning. Magic in my Eyes. And all those flower power radio jingle jangle mornings. Pete Townshend is turning the other three into long summer dreamers.”  

“Replacing the stale smell of excess with the sweet smell of success? They certainly needed it. They could single-handedly turn a Love and Peace Festival into a Third World War and feel proud of it. Where’s the Revolution in that? I’d rather book the old Beatles! Speaking of whom, where are they?”

“India.”

“Oh dear. Losing their touch on their last one. Faces as long as their hair. No wonder Engelbert kept them at No. 2. And now India! They’ve gone too far this time!”  

“He’s been saying that since She Loves You,” says Madge, polishing the desk. “And they always grow on him in the end.” 

“Well, they’ve lost touch with the typists at the Cavern.”

“Not this typist,” smiles Cindy. She puts a flower into his buttonhole.

”Right business concluded.” He rubs his growling reduced paunch. “Lunch?”

“I’ll follow you, Bill. I’ve just got a letter to Answer.”

*

A sun-drenched postcard, actually. From the Boys. Postmarked Rishikesh, India, March 1968. 

“Dear ‘Prudence’, wish you were here. Our personalities have gone under. It’s like Butlin’s without the chips. It’s not us.

PS. We thought of you when we did Lady Madonna. Did you think that money was heaven sent?”

 

She touch-types her reply.

“Dear Boys, 

“One minute you’re offering me the Boy-next-doorstep; the next you’re sneaking out the back way to India, leaving a ‘Message’! What’s going on? Have you found the Answer? Does it rhyme with dancer? We could certainly use it at the Capitol Cinema, especially when there’s no new single from you on the tranny. You are coming back aren’t you?”

She pauses, presses ‘return’ and the lightning rat-a-tat continues. “I’ve moved to Cardiff.”

She presses ‘return’ again and slows down slightly. “I guess I’m still looking for that Night Before we had in December 1965, after the Capitol Cinema gig.”

She presses return but then reverses the manoeuvre and adds. “Johnny wants me to move in with him in Bristol. He used to be cruel to his women – he’s a lot cooler now – but he’s still not you. I’ll stick with Cardiff for the moment. But will you come back?”

She presses return and types on faster than before. “I get £5 8s 6d a week and I’ve learned Pitman’s shorthand. And I get to take the typewriter home at weekends. Bill’s not a bad boss, not like Wally at the Biscuit factory who wanted me to ‘take’ ‘dictation’ on his knee. I get half of my college course done at work – I tell him I’m practising my speeds. He loves me but he wouldn’t approve of a chick typing her own story. In his book, chicks aren’t supposed to have one.” She paused, added a clarification. “Bill’s book, I mean, not Johnny’s.” Pause. “I think.”

Return. Pause. Clackety clackety clack. “We’re doing this book on our course. Jane Eyre. It’s the Sound of Music except the governess doesn’t hand over the plot to the hero when the Nazis come. She drives the story right through to the happy ending.”

Return. Pause. The machine accelerates like a machine gun shooting bullets. “Do I still have one with you? Or am I supposed to follow you – with all the trustfulness of a Hindu wife – to some bed-sitting pie in the sky?”

Return. “I keep seeing you in the foyer, like that first time, the shake of your head, the bounce of your hair… Are you still there?” Pause.

Return. “Getting a job is easy – there’s only half a million unemployed in Britain now – but every Cardiff landlady I tried wanted a reference from an employer and every employer wanted a reference from a landlady. They probably took one look at the minimac and decided I was on the game. Then Bill offered me a room at the back of the cinema, behind the screen, like you in Hamburg. Like a fairy tale.”

Return. Long pause. “The rents won’t see me of course. You’re ‘a Bad Influence on James’ apparently. But their idea of a man is a killer in World War 2 khaki. I prefer your Knights in Bright Satin on the cover of Pepper. They say Pepper Road is an ‘undesirable area’ and that the Summer of Love is ‘a fancy phrase for living in sin.’ But sin is supposed to be miserable and I was so happy last June, holding your arm on the Magical Mystery Tour bus...”

The carriage return sends the perfectly typed sheet rolling off the top of the typewriter. She puts it in the tray. She inserts a virgin sheet from the snow-white pile; adjusts the position; fires off another round of black words. “I’m applying to Bristol University. Bill and Madge are like a mother a father to me and I really don’t want to let them down, but I’ll have to in the end. Just to find out who I am.” 

Long pause. Return. “There’s an anti-Vietnam war demonstration in Trafalgar Square next week. Maybe see you there?” 

No pause. Return. Rat-atat-tat. “Love, peace, truth and happiness. Cindy xxxx.”

*

St Patrick’s Day 1968, fitfully sunny but cold, a Middlemarch between snowdrops and daffodils. The Berkshire leaves hesitate, a fortnight further back than the Somerset ones. 

“What we gonna do if the pigs turn nasty?” asks a weedy student in pinstriped loons, granny sunglasses, gold waistcoat, shivery tee shirt, love-beads and bumpers. Today, he is a Back-to-Child-of-Mother-Nature’s Son (his ethnic sky-blue, green and soil-brown cottons are in the wash) rebelling against all the appliances, gadgets and Sensible Shoes of his Fifties parents but currently wishing he’d worn the Rupert Bear duffel coat his mum had bought him for Christmas. When he grows up, he wants to be a rock star or maybe a roadie. 

Cindy smiles at him. “All you need is Love.”  He beams in response and bears up but he still looks like he wouldn’t have lasted five seconds walking into Jerusalem behind the donkey and the original Jesus people if anyone had hard-cheeked his love daisy.

Johnny’s Jesus-people aura comes over more like when Christ threw the money lenders out of the Temple. Or threw Satan’s promise of “all the nations of the world in a single moment” off the Lucifer mountaintop. He is wearing a Sgt Pepper peace jacket (re-woven out of Wehrmacht surplus; re-stitched in a Liverpool cavern; the stripes and medals well and truly earned charming the dogs of Hades and in the front line storming the citadels of power with love songs and music), fringed cowhide flares, Kashmiri sandals, a flower in his hair and beads. Johnny’s bum-fluffed grin is peaceful. He looks like God in college, which is where he’s thinking of going soon, if only to keep up with Cindy. He leads the magical mystery peace bus in a chorus of: 

They seek him here, they seek him there,

In Bedford Place, in Grosvenor Square….

Cindy is in an ethnic bead dress – chequered red and white over slices of orange silk and a whole Eden of golden skin. There is a slit up the front of the skirt lest the hemline, which barely brushes her haunches, be considered too coy. She is stepping outside all the gloomy bonds that held her. She is going to a Peace ball. She is free. 

In her kaftan bag, though, (ever practical and realistic as her sex, so often left holding the baby/rat sandwich/bomb, have had to be) she has a rolled-up silver space-suit mac in case it rains. At a time when women are still being measured by ‘vital statistics’ (34-24-36) and presenting their hind quarters to male judges in beauty contests, but also topping the NASA training tests in endurance of pain, boredom and everything else (except the military experience to blast the Martians to kindom come) this particular astronette wants the moon. And to fly to Venus not Mars. And today she wants the Earth as well. When Yves Sant Laurent claimed clothes were a form of social protest, he probably didn’t have Cindy’s current outfit in mind. Perhaps he should have.

She is reading Black Dwarf as she started doing when the Beatles went to India in February. It’s her preparation for her future as a University student. She’s starting to put together a vision – for herself and the world. Her college lecturers say she should make the top grades for Bristol, even part-time, and that her expulsion from Grammar School said more about Grammar School horizons than hers. She dazzles them, as she dazzled her University interviewers. She is a light come from under a bushel. She dazzles the hippies on the bus too.

“We tried love last year – and it didn’t work,” retorts a roadie in a Moroccan kaftan. He purses a joint between droopy-moustached lips, sucks hard and inhales. “Jagger feels the same.”

“Know him do you?” smirks Johnny – 

“Roadied for him the month he got busted.”

“Yeah?” The weedy student pretends not to be impressed by the counter cultural name-dropping.

Cindy isn’t. “Did we try though? Did we stay with it?” 

Cindy has become much more confident, even with hippy men, since starting her ‘A’ levels. She can argue about books and poems and has that Something to say, unlike a lot of the guys on the course who are just locking horns. The roadie – ‘Rodeo Ron’ – shrugs. “I’d stay with you doll, that’s for sure.” He laughs. 

Johnny glares at him. 

”Well, I’m not going to listen to Vanessa again, pretty as she is.”

Cindy raises her eyebrows. Rodeo only notices how pretty they are. Cindy mutters dismissively. “You should listen to what Redgrave’s saying”.

Ron watches Cindy’s lips shaping the sounds and imagines himself kissing them. “I’ve heard all that red rhetoric before. I’ll drift off to the pub during her speech – come back and see what’s ‘Happening’ later.” 

A guy in a Cherokee headband and dope-smoky lenses, who has just caught up with what Cindy was saying five minutes ago, says, “Right on sister.” 

“Jagger beat the rap. So some higher Power was with him.”

Ron retrieves the joint.  “Yeah, the Times. And all his upper-class mates. It’s High Noon out there in those streets. If plebs like us get busted, we stay busted. We gotta fight for ourselves, man.”

“United we stand, man,” says Johnny, holding his hand for the joint.

 

The weedy student nods. Roadie Ron looks sceptical. There is a long silence.

“Don’t Bogart that joint, my friend,” says Johnny.

“Right on, sister,” says Geronimo. 

A couple in the back with identical long hair (and clothes) catch Johnny’s eye. The girl is whispering in the boy’s ear and Johnny remembers Cindy telling him that “Listen Do You Want To Know A Secret?” (Do you promise not to tell… I do…”) was actually an all-for-four Beatle in-joke about John being secretly married to Cynthia and how it was only likely to be a week before it all got out. It would be a year or so yet before Johnny and the world would feel how different that witty pretty ditty – and yet still genuine boy-girl love song – was from the current John-and-Yoko-against-the-Beatles empowerment of the wife; and its attendant three albums of squawking. 

Tristan Rhys, an elfin youth in a hood and cloak at the back of the bus still somewhat the worse for yesterday’s whole green microdot of acid, drops a paperback the size of his new bumpers dap-box. The tome’s heavy thud jolts him from his dream world. He stoops to pick it up, the bells around his neck jingling faintly, his flower-braceleted wrist reaching out fey and vulnerable from under his Celtic-fringed sleeve. 

Rodeo Ron grabs the dropped tome first. “Lord of the Rings! Ha! There’s a fight on the mean streets of the real world up ahead, brother. Real dragons of oppression and greed. The dragons in this fagot of fantasy died a thousand years ago. High kings with swords that were broken and elf ladies in starlit woods with magic mirrors and rings! You’re still in the feudal dark if you think that flowery fascism is going to bring down this capitalist establishment. It IS the establishment in fairy clothes to keep you under its spell. Wake up and smell the tear gas pal!”

Johnny who has a stolen Library copy of Tolkien’s epic at home and had read most of it, finding it sat very easily with his Tyrannosaurus Rex album soundscapes and covers (“My people were fair and had stars in their hair…” bongos and backing vocals by Steve ‘Peregrine’ Took etc etc) is more conscious at this point of Ron’s onion breath blowing out the joint smoke than any prospect of tear gas and is also genuinely surprised.  “Fascist? All these trippy elves and trees fighting back against deforestation seems pretty cool to me.”

Tristan also objects, retrieving the tome. “It is the real world: a higher and truer world than this one.” His Welsh accent seemed to add a subtle Celtic music to his thought. “And an escape from death-heads like yours.”

Ron laughs. “Yeah? Nordic sword and sorcery, ring-powered wizards zapping clueless orcs; Théoden King and his tall blond Reich-riders of Rohan Valkyring off into an Aryan-pure sunset Into a blood-red dawn. ‘And they sang as they slew’. Not to mention all that High Elfin Master race Men of Numenor Gondor bollocks. It’s just Hitler with bells on.” 

Johnny thinks about it furiously, his gut wrenching with frustration. “But Sauron’s the Hitler isn’t he?” He squares up to Ron, frowning at how Ron’s calculated sneering is messing with his mind.

Cindy, more as a wondering statement of her own strong feeling than with any conviction in herself as an authority, says, “But the Man of Numenor with the big sword failed the quest and it only succeeds an age later because of a tiny irrational act of pity shown towards a miserable ‘undeserving’ creature by an unassuming halfling in a waistcoat. If Bilbo or Frodo had killed Gollum, the Ring would have won. All the might in the West wouldn’t have helped them.” She looks out the dirty window at the approaching destination.  “Isn’t Lord of the Rings the triumph of the Little Guy, stumbling helplessly and hopelessly to the world’s end and its redemption under the feet of the great, rather than the act of some mighty swordsman killing thousands in battle. If that’s Fascism, I’m an elf!”

The three hippies regard her. Johnny wishes he’d been able to best Ron in that wise and collected way. Ron thinks it isn’t fair that a chick can make him look so stupid while herself looking so beautiful: why should chicks have beauty and truth? And Tristan is confounded because she has just cogently proved (as he felt but couldn’t explain) that the Book isn’t Fascism… but all the same she is definitely an elf.

Now not even Tolkien’s worst enemy would dispute his facility in the epic ‘masculine’ genres of quest, legend and action hero and surely not even his wife (his best surviving friend after all save one of the others died in the First World War and that one fellow survivor stopped being friendly) would defend his interest or ability in such gossiping ‘female’ genres as romance (the ‘Woman’s Realm’ kind), kitchen sink realism, soapy domesticity or the existence for much of the time of any women at all (Rosy Cotton’s comic subplot romantic conquest in the novel’s final pages of a Sam who just carried his beloved master to the crack of Doom is surely more fond bathos to highlight Frodo’s inability to come home than full authorial entry into her postwar love and marriage story, even if Sam as a postwar husband and father does have the epic’s final word.) Although, if that worst enemy did, she might mention that what very few females there are, have a mighty agency for good (Galadriel) and evil (Shelob) and/or against the prevailing patriarchy (Not just Eowyn the Shield Maiden, who strikes the decisive mystical battle-blow against the unkillable-by-a-man Lord of the Nazgul while defying orders from the very king who has just been slain by him; but also Aragon’s starry-passive alter ego and love object The Lady Arwen who tragic-heroically subverts the entire elfin order, and even perhaps begins to deconstruct the entire genre, by choosing mortality.) In short, pipe-smoking male-bar inkling Tolkien might even understand Cindy (as she him) at this moment more than these three men.

The bus draws up a long way from Trafalgar Square. They troop out, drawing army surplus greatcoats around their peace pastels like a scarecrow army. They chant their way through the London streets. 

Large better-organised love-generation troops with banners and acronyms like SDS and NLF and VSC, talking in excited German or French, stiffen the peace ranks. Marching with 10,000 young radicals, Cindy and Johnny are framed for a while as if marching at the front line of history, under a German banner proclaiming the end of War. The ‘acronyms’ are chanting Ho Ho Ho Chi Min and practising little charges and bunching manoeuvres they perfected in anarchist demonstrations in Europe against heavier-armed, nastier police. “Keep together, love,” Johnny calls. He nervously glances at Cindy, wondering if he’s going to have to defend that love from some of this mounted police escort, or maybe even from some of the scarier ‘peaceniks.’ But Cindy is beaming around at everyone with flowers in her hair. She smiles at him. “Every step takes us nearer to peace in Vietnam.” 

And then outside the LSE Cindy actually sees His Satanic Majesty himself! He is peering, at a discreet distance, at massing Youth, all dandelions blown. “Johnny, there’s Jagger!”

“Where? I can’t see.”

“There.”

“Oh wow – yeah”

“Let’s go over.”

“Cindy we can’t-”

“Wait here then.”

And Cindy goes. And because she is a chick and at home in her earth-goddess dress as she is in her own skin – and they are to some extent interchangeable at present– and because she smiles like Lucy in the Sky and is like a rainbow, coming colours in the air towards him- she is allowed through.

*

The Boys sent her that postcard from Rishikesh that very morning. Are they still where it’s at a year before everyone else or have they finally lost the plot? The Indian sentences sound in her head like their separating individual voices. It’s like Pepper stuck in its run-out groove.  

“Wish we weren’t here. George isn’t happy and if George isn’t happy, we aren’t happy. Ringo went after ten days, Paul after a month. John’s here but he’s long gone… (“lonely, wanna die” lead-heavy blues on a Himlayan hillside) And I’m not so sure about George either…

*

Cindy and Mick don’t do it in the road – not because that isn’t the way to stop war, it is, but because (contrary to the interminably marketing pantomime PR) he’s actually more than just a Mouth. They talk. He is articulate about the demo, funny, educated, political, arty and in the left place at the left time. But then he asks her if she knows anything about sleeve design and she points out a brilliant young artist she’s met off the bus. Jagger calls him over and the two men do a deal. The artist suggests a daemonic prick-tongue poking out from a red vagina (the Mouth of Jagger). Jagger thinks it could sell the counter-culture all the way to the Left Bank.

Cindy (who already has a vagina) wonders if it’s a sell out, “Are we going to change the institutions of sleepy old London town then Mick?”

He yawns, then beats out a stern march on the LSE railings, punches out a cha cha accompaniment between his tongue and teeth. 

“What’s that?” gasps Cindy. 

“It’s a wake-up call; a call up.” He says. “After all the dandelion dreams and Jonesy-rainbows, me and Keef are like, let’s rock the hippy dreamboat, y’know what I mean?” Cindy feels the hard, new catchy tune and the old familiar raucous voice in her fingers; feels it in her toes; the groove is all around her; Mick really gets into her knickers (which fit him uncannily well); tries to catch the beat of her heart.  There is a woken mettle in his eye that maybe his and Keef’s short taste of prison has put there. She likes this new businesslike heavy chord-punching Street Fighting Man a lot and, in the continued absence of the Beatles on the other side of the looking glass, she flirts with the idea that Mick is the new leader of the Revolution. And naturally he flirts back…

*

Beatle, who tends to say what he means and to mean what he says, as they do in Liverpool, continues. “We’ve been here for eight weeks. We’ve started talking in four parts – without harmony. Words are flowing off like endless rain and Life flows on without Brian Epstein, but everything takes a lot longer. The Magical Mystery Tour went on forever. So we came here expecting Beatle through the looking glass and came up hard against ourselves instead. Forget Pepper. We’re going back to basics with a plain white album. It’s full of songs we heard in the Indian silence, the Reality we’ve been chasing since Help. And yet now we’ve actually tuned in to Reality in the silence of India, we’ll never sound Indian again! (not even George) 

Love, 

Beatle xxxx

PS George says nothing is real except India. Not even us. Especially not us. 

*

Cindy kisses Mick goodbye – a sisterly kiss (love is just a kiss away) for her anyway – then retraces the LSE railings to the demo. In absentia Beatles, can the Stones change the institution, with LSE as the new LSD, or will they just join it? She wonders. 

Johnny is waiting for her, like a guy for his factory girl, at the corner. She waves at him. He waves back. She looks so beautiful he has to turn away. She beams fondly. The Beatles have definitely changed Johnny’s hair if only possibly his head. 

Now she cups his face in her hands and looks at him, eyes like daisies. “Guess who?”

“The Girl With No Eyes?” He means the poster currently on every bedsit wall.

“No.”

“The Girl with kaleidoscope eyes?” 

“Can she see for miles?”

“Yes.”

“Then, yes.”

“And how was His Satanic Majesty?”

“I think he’s with us, brother.”

*

In Trafalgar Square, thousands of young dreamers listen to a Beatle-haired student Jesus called Tariq Ali. He has a vision of heaven and a programme for bringing it to Earth. “The overwhelming majority of us here today don’t just want victory (for peace) in Vietnam. We want a new world without wars, oppression, and class exploitation. We want comradeship and internationalism!”

“Oh Johnny, we can change the world,” sighs Cindy.

“Right on sister.” He flexes his feathers. “Stand By Me. Shoulder to shoulder. Saving the world is a job for JC.”

Johnny is as spellbound as Cindy is.  Vanessa Redgrave, in her headband and cloak, turns and looks right at him with grave eyes and he feels like he’s just given Miss the right answer in primary school.

A massive group breaks off from the Trafalgar Square mass towards the American Embassy at Grosvenor Square. Sister Redgrave is going to deliver their collective protest, a letter of appeal. The letter attacks US troops laying waste to Vietnam, and also attacks Harold Wilson’s tacit (though in fact – unlike an entranced, watching, public schoolboy called Blair – never actual, military) British Government support. The mood is utopian. Everyone is singing. We Shall Overcome. Hundreds of shoulder-to-shoulder police block out the square as they get there.

 

“Don’t worry,” says Johnny to an Italian comrade at his elbow. “These are British bobbies, serving a Labour government. They don’t shoot. And if you knock their helmets off, they fall over.” A few student Brits laugh. 

“But thzat one is armed,” mutters a German comrade.

“Relax Rudi, it’s just a truncheon.” 

The acronym squad – and then the whole rally – start chanting, “L L LBJ how many kids have you killed today” swiftly countered by “Ho Ho Ho Chi Min, how many kids have you done in?” Then a (sort-of-united) generation press at the police cordon.

“All we’re saying is give peace a chance!” cries Cindy.

A police megaphone cuts through the air. Telling them in imperious tones to back off from the Square.

“Peace!” calls Cindy. And the rally surges forward.

The March sun goes behind a cloud. Mounted police canter forward. And people in front of Johnny are getting their heads cracked with truncheons. Blood starts to fly.

“Peace!!” shrieks Cindy. 

Johnny is less surprised about the police than Cindy; - a few run-ins in his Bedminster rocker days, including an intoxicated fist through the window of Bedminster police station. But he tries really hard to be peaceful. “Officer, your horse is crushing this guy. Officer, man! Hey, we’re already moving away from the street. What the fuck–”

A truncheon catches Johnny with frightening spite across his mouth, in its official mission to “defend American territory against Marx-driven terrorists”. This overrates the average British hippy’s capacity for applied theory, though not that of the international escort around a now grim-faced Vanessa and Tariq delivering the protest at the front door.  The average – Rolling Stoned – British hippy is playing massed cops and robbers in nearby streets. 

“Man, these pigs are seriously un-peaceful.” 

“Cool it, Pig! Hey!”

“Jesus, man! They’re killing that guy!” 

Cindy is sobbing. “We’re just trying to stop all the heartbreak in Vietnam!” 

Johnny grabs her and breaks through the suffocating police ranks towards the lawn of the embassy. As other protesters follow his lead, they break through the plastic fence and hedge. Johnny sees a stoned 23 year old yogi singing All You Need Is Love knocked down by a truncheon and kicked across the road by copper-boots, just like John Lennon’s mother was by that cop car he quotes in the Na-na-na-na siren mellotron at the start of Walrus, a record more prophetic of 1968 than it was given credit for in 1967. Johnny winces. Tear gas catches in his throat. And the tears in his eyes aren’t just the gas. This flower boy won’t be voting for Harold again. 

Smoke bombs – student toys – bloom on the air. The kiddies are getting upset. Their peace party has been ruined. The IMG start throwing red paint bombs. Is this revolution or street art or both at once? A stick from a peace banner smacks a policeman so hard from behind he falls along his horse’s neck, clinging on for dear life. Stones rain behind it. This will make the News today (oh boy) as will the injuries to ‘the poor horses’. But the hundreds and hundreds of fresh-faced hippies gassed, wounded and beaten out of their Whig interpretation of British society, naturally, won’t. 

*

Four years ago, the Beatles had eliminated all crime in America, with 73 million viewers held spellbound for 17 complete minutes. Where are they now? 

*

Meanwhile, a new political experience called theory is being beaten into British youth the old fashioned British empirical way and they won’t forget it. A police face contorted with rage butts into Cindy’s. She screeches, “Johnny – look out!” as a wannabe American cavalry of British ‘bobbies’ advance to ‘snatch’ him. He swings round, appalled at the blood on Cindy’s face. He clenches his Peace sign into a fist, furious. He aims, swings mightily, left-hooks PC Porky off his trotters and into space. "So Pigs do fly!" his adrenalin shouts. He watches fascinated. A truncheon swings through the air and catches him on the ear. He snatches it and hurls it at the thick blue line. The thick blue line keeps on coming. He drags Cindy in the safety of an alley.

 

“No!” she screams. She is back in the alley in Cardiff. His violence maddens her.

“Cindy? This is me, Johnny. They’re the ones with the truncheons and horsewhips.  Come on.”

A ham police fist gets a grip in her long hair. She smacks it away. The pig’s helmet falls back, closing the strap round his throat. The man starts to choke. “Oh! Sorry!” wails Cindy. “Sorry!” 

Johnny seizes her hand and pulls it away hard. An Eden of embassy lawn opens before them. They bolt across it, to the sanctuary of a coffee bar whose door sign announces ‘NO HIPPIES.’ They go in anyway. The blood and shock on their faces wins them a kind of universal diplomatic immunity from the shopkeeper’s fear and loathing. The latter puts down his Daily Malice and offers them a choice of (instant) coffee or (instant) milky coffee. Or a proper brew, hot sweet tea, which they accept.

The jukebox is playing the new Beatles single left in the can in February when they went in pilgrimage of the earthly paradise in India, a rocking blues hovering uncertainly between heaven and fallen earth. Lady Madonna. It sounds weird, unfamiliar, though not as ‘last year’ as the unreleased single Lennon originally proposed before the eight-legged Beatles flew off into the Indian heights: a transcendentally meditative, tuned in, turned on and whacked out Across The Universe.

Instead of which never released single, they have a new one already hatching. A 15 second extract online from its live performance on TV with beatnik skinny guitar George jigging about in a jumper and joshing with a Little-Richard-yelping Paul at the support mic  (no-one knows what he says but it looks like “John’s mic is shit”) as John does his hard Maharishi routine stage left on lead and Ringo kicks it to kingdom come from behind like a steelworks on speed (instead of the acid of recent years) and in which un-suited and wild they look like the greatest storming late Sixties rock band they have kept hidden in the studio since the screams stopped them touring has been described as “the greatest 15 seconds in Beatles history.” In the end, it only made the B side but what a B side. Revolution. 

*

October 1968. 25,000 instead of 10,000. Most of them harder edged.  Tariq Ali’s petition of 75,000 names calls on the British Government to oppose the bombing. Ali proclaims the end of guns-and-profit civilisation. Meanwhile, back on Earth, the Britain-Vietnam Solidarity Front (BVFS) – a core of 6,000 (‘splitters!’) now including Cindy and Johnny – break off from the main march led by the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. Cindy knows all the acronyms now, more in touch now she is up in her first year at Bristol University. Her BVSF lot are Maoists, and Mao is cool. Last March’s Slaughter of The Innocents won’t happen again. 

They form a human chain of six thousand links and charge the same ruthless Pig wall that beat the shit out of them in March. They charge it for three hours. But the ‘Pigs’ have learned their lessons from March too. They plan for 50,000 protesters this time, and don’t lose control so much. New Home Secretary ‘Sunny’ Jim Callaghan is very smug about it afterwards. “A peace march could not have taken place so peacefully anywhere else in the world,” he smirks. Certainly not in the Northern Ireland where he would be sending troops a few years later.  

It isn’t peaceful from where Johnny is just about standing. The boys in blue, after holding back all day, charge the remnant of peace marchers and politicos still interminably singing We Shall Overcome. Cindy gets pushed over. Johnny changes back from Muhammad Tariq Ali to Cassius Clay. Or Sonny ‘cheating’ Liston. He gets out a big brown bag.

“What’s that?” 

“Marbles.”

They glint in the October afternoon light like lost innocence. The marbles Brian Jones has lost since his Stones became a vehicle for Jagger-Richard. International Marxists grab the marbles from him and start rolling them under the galloping police horses. Cindy’s eyes go horse-wide with fear. “You’ll break their legs!”

“They’re the cavalry behind American soldiers napalming and gang-raping Vietnamese kids and women. And they’re not fucking hurting you again, Cindy.” 

“But Johnny – that horse last Christmas.”

He remembers. A white horse up in the Mendips on their Christmas Eve escape-trip from Dum and Mad. Coming out of the dusk like Pegasus, with all-seeing Jesus eyes. So… far … out. They didn’t just believe they could save the world with love then. They knew. The Horse told them. 

Cindy really is much braver than him, he thinks. She really does stand on these barricades armed only with flowers, like the Beatles. She’s a true Lennonist, and more consistently than the Lennon who said that’s the only thing you should ever expect the Beatles to mount the barricades with. A post-Gregorian chant goes up and Johnny joins it. Something about Peace. 

Cindy points the irony. “Johnny. You won’t get peace with marbles! You can’t just chant the words. You’ve got to live them.”

A police-horse the size of small house hits the marbles and comes flying onto them, taking a couple of protesters helter skelter with it, the horse’s legs spread-eagle in a sickening crack. A truncheon thunders down towards Cindy’s cry and Johnny hooks it away with his peace banner. But – here comes the Cavalry! – there are always more. Once again, the peaceniks have to retreat. 

The US flag flies above it all, as if proud of itself. “You couldn’t save Martin Luther King you cowboys,” wails Cindy “but you can bring Viet Nam to London!”. They take refuge in a pub this time, The Invisible Man, licking their wounds. Johnny doesn’t know which is worse. The ugly red mark on her forehead. Or the Cardiff alley black hole his peacenik retaliation has left behind her eyes.

He won’t see the Love with which her open arms would embrace the world, could save the world, if it only knew.  She won’t see that, the way things are, it will crucify them all if he doesn’t help to shield her, if she doesn’t do something to protect her bleeding heart from the real world’s cut-throat coffin-nail cynicism, the cold attrition of its infinitely thick skin. The thick world won’t see what the march was about, what all their love-generation is trying to do. The historic march of comradeship and internationalism; of love and peace; of a new order without wars, oppression and class-exploitation, suddenly falters. The strawberry sherbet love-heart song they were sharing misses a beat. No birds sing on the way home. They look at the world through the bus-window glass, darkly, wondering if and how it can be changed, not really seeing it anymore as a part, a reflection, a redeemable aspect, of themselves. The magic bus back to Bristol is like a funeral. 

*

A month later, Johnny leaves the Cornucopia at quarter to three, slightly late for the Wolves game. He takes his superstitious roots-ritual railway route to the ground, keeping Clifton’s suspension bridge of disbelief behind and to his right. These days of high tension he tends to follow this ritual alone, without Cindy. 

He nearly pulls a muscle in his steely calf as he drops down onto the railway line via a steeply propped sleeper. He hops around cursing but he’s okay. A couple of stray Wolves hover, whether to help, attack, or just to ask their grinning blind-drunk way to the ground he’s not sure. They move on anyway as he shapes up. 

He hears the Ashton Gate crowd across half a mile of park turf and excitement tightens his chest. Whatever City’s form, this is always the moment of irrational hope and unbearable love. He chokes out the distant chant, nervous as a boy on his first date. The lights from the ground are brilliant in the grey midwinter afternoon. 

Cindy isn’t with him and Johnny is worried about it. The Spectres have moved back to her Stepother’s hometown in South Wales without telling her, so she’s lost contact with James. She’s also having rows in her student ‘commune’ with two girls even messier than her. He’s hoping she’ll move in with him. Hoping but not expecting.

The dope has made her very amenable but increasingly passive. She’s started ‘lying back and thinking of Hanoi’ as she calls it. Lying back is not Cindy’s natural position, on anything, especially now she’s a student. You should hear her on equal pay for women or civil rights for Afro-Americans. She told him that it was women who won the first ever strike and frankly he can see why: not so much ‘Man proposes, God disposes’ as ‘Man proposes, Woman gets it done.’ 

No, Cindy hasn’t come down out of her University cloud up in Clifton and joined him on the purgatorial concrete terraces of his beloved Bedminster Robins since September and she only saw two games then. Johnny jokes that it’s a good job – City players can’t concentrate when they see her on the terraces in a mini hanging only slightly lower than her hair. She’s certainly caught the eye more than this season’s City. 

She spends a lot of time thinking, a lot of time studying and an awful lot of time in student politics. And all three involved sex – just not, it seems, active sex with Johnny. “Is the Revolution going to be won on the streets or in bed?” she asked him, during their long-running comparison of the Beatles and the Stones. While he was trying to work out if this was a rhetorical question and, if not, what was the Answer, she asked him another. “Why don’t we do it in the road and find out?” He was really turned on about that and so was she. But he lost his nerve before they got to the edge of the kerb. Does he really care more about what people think than about what she thinks. My God, what if she’s getting bored with me? 

‘Ska’ Curtis, a fat apprentice in tight jeans and stayprest shirt with buttoned tiny collar jumps on Johnny’s back from a pub doorway, yanking at his long hair. It is as long and as well-kept as Cindy’s these days. He launches Curtis onto the grass, pinions him and makes him say Hippy Rock is harder than Skinhead Ska before he lets him get up. “O gRow up, CuRtiss,” he says as Curtis then pulls his hair again. He treats Curtis to a Gordon Parr stepover, sweeps his Dr Martens from under him head over heels onto the grass with his weaker left bumper and answers his growl of protest with a Peace sign. Both fingers. Very close to the eyes.

Well, when you spend your days dressed as if you are going to a psychedelic ball in Eden, you need that other kind of balls to make sure no-one stops you getting there. Johnny needs this motorbike leather skin under the flowers and rags and feathers. After all, what kind of world would it be with boy-man Curtis on top? But it scares him.  He doesn’t trust his fists at all really, especially since the Peace Demo. Fists are a cop out. The iron fists on the cops in your head. Fists lead to My Lai. Youth needs to stop Vietnam, not stage another one in London. Or Bristol. If an actor was playing Johnny in a film and his director asked to make a definitive gesture of who he was, it would be fists up in front of his face against the world, ready to fight for peace if he had to. It’s his fists he is really fighting against. And, with young Curtis’s help, not getting very far.

“ALL ROIGHT JESUS! LIGHTEN UP,” laughs the skull-like tomorrow belongs to me Hitler-youth grin. “No need to get yer beardy sandals in a twist.”

“If you’ve got to follow someone’s example, Curt, ain’t the beard and sandals better than the jackboot?”

“Bloody cheek! Jesus boots! On me! Over your dead body.”

He won’t see me, Johnny sighs. “I didn’t mean literally, you twat.”

And the Lesson today is written in the Book of St John (Lennon) beginning at the ninth verse. We are all Christ and we are all Hitler and the miracle in this age is communication. Johnny isn’t communicating very miraculously with Curtis. He tries again. “And why the fuck are you cheeked by the thought of Jesus sandals but not by Nazi Jackboots?”

“Cuz I’m not even trying to be Jesus, ‘Jesus.’ That’s your trip.”

Anyone with long hair and a beard – and there were one or two knocking about – qualifies as ‘Jesus’ or ‘John the Baptist’ nowadays. It’s a harmless enough joke over the rainbow bridge of student Clifton, unless you’re tripping (which he often is). Not quite so harmless in bedrock-hard Bedminster. Not to mention St Peter rock-hard to live up to, as better men than Johnny have found.  Like the proto-crusader holy warrior sword-hero of Gethsemane, who cut off the adder ear of those who never listen, and earned a rebuke from the Love Man (who restored the adder ear) instead of a reward. And who ended up crucified upside down because he felt so unworthy of his Master.

Speaking of which, some of Johnny’s mates are outside the Wedlock Arms now, hanging off the red brick walls of the gents, finishing their half gallons of Double Diamond. Two of them look like they could have been any of the bearded Apostles, except for the City scarves and the C words. The majority are skinheads and would never be mistaken for Christians of any period. One of them pipes up. “I fought Roy was joining us?”

“E’s gone off with his new student mates,” scoffs one of the hippies. “There’s a sit in this munf at the Universitay.”

“Woss stewdents got to protest about?” asks Jesus-lookalike Bill.

“Everything from Berlin to Bristol.”

“I’ll join you, Johnny. I likes the girls up the Students Union. And they likes I.”

“Well, you’re all welcome.” 

“Not if Roy’s there I ain’t.”

“We’re all brothers, man,” sighs Johnny.

“Ark at Jesus!” sniggers Curtis. 

Johnny shuts that British Hitler youth’s mouth with a look. He will teach Curtis a lesson.  Show him how the hipper half love. “Aren’t we, Bill?”

“No. You can’t trust ’im,” idiot-credoes Bill, Jesus-eyes widening in emphasis, the bullshit dribbling down his guru beard. Even Curtis and his fellow bovver boys, who share Roy’s love of reggae, look shocked.

“I trusts Roy wiv me life,” says Johnny.

“Well I dohn’t.”

“What ’as ’e achtually ever dun to you, Biwl?”

“Nuffin. It’s what e is innit?”

“Which is?”

“E’s black inne?” 

Johnny growls. “My motorbike’s black, your record collection is black, Hendrix is black.”

“Hendrix? Black?” 

Winston – who is also black – mutters, “Ah, leave it brother. It’s just ignorance.” 

But Johnny keeps glaring. “Roy is cool. And I’m Big John. So fucking watch it, man. And I don’t mean the town in Somerset.”

The bovver boys exchange gleeful looks. Johnny winces at his and Bill’s oh so unhip, so unfraternal resolution of their hippy glitch and imagines what these looks are saying. ’Ark at the ’ippies!’Ark at their new generation’s new explanation; ’ark at their ’elicopter arms and beards and ippy hairdos in motion on the dance floor, whirling like slow-motion dervishes round a black ’ole while we bounce for joy on their fallen dreams; Ob la di ob la da, what trouble there is in Paradise! 

‘Great,’ thinks Johnny. My old man objects to me looking like a Sergeant Pepper album cover because it ‘isn’t manly’, but even my old man is hipper than Bill about race. I spend my nights off my head listening to Parables and Prophesies, Dylan attacking his father Abraham for killing his son; Leonard Cohen crooning about Jesus and Salvation Army Counters and Our Lady of the Harbour and Joseph looking for a manger and The Chosen People waiting for a Messiah. And now, instead of John the Baptist, I’m Big Bad John.  

But then the football chants begin like spells conjuring the oblivion, the transformation, the union. City are at home. His fellow travellers in their robin-red, swan-white livery are at home.  He is at home. Ashton Gate. Heaven’s Gate. After a liturgy of chants, comic, scurrilous, furious, and a rolling Greek chorus of comment on the opening moves, suddenly, a GOAL and the free and loving YEEEEEEEEEESSSS of affirmation. And then, as the screams and thunder-clapping finally subsides, a Macca-Lennonist Beatles song with parody words, “One two three four, can we have another score…?” lifts the rafters of the asbestos and naked breezeblock stadium, the cattle stalls of oblivion, like a yellow submarine coming up for air. It’s that defiant whistling to and while you work, dawn-chorus, chirpy milkman, stadium singalong, song-in-your-heart connection all four Beatles have to the everyday, and never lose, for all their increasingly high art and complexity. Bill is in heaven. Now Bill puts his arm around his multiracial football brothers Winston, Wayne and Johnny and bellows the war cry like a hymn of love. And Johnny joins in with all his heart. 

*

Croeso y Cymru. Welcome to Wales. Christmas 1968. Stepmother on the Yellow submarine bridge. Singing. (Ear-numbingly Special-barkingly flat) And guess what Stepmother is singing? Why Don’t We Do It In The Road? Revolution 9? that Martin Luther King swansong from the Double White-winged Album, Blackbird,? 

Er no. Ob La Di Ob La Da by the Marmalade. A not-so-real McCoytney the other Beatles wouldn’t release as a single. And Lily the Pink, a pantomime single, co-written by McCartney’s kid brother, eulogising a genius of British industry and her medicinal compound that wasn’t quite the LSD panacea it appeared. A carol to the pint-sized, garret-starved mend-and-make-do-British-genie in the bottle that gave us the industrial revolution; the Churchill tank; the Jaguar car; James Bond and all these tiny Beatle studios big wide Americans were now trying to ape back home. But which in our family’s case has dwindled into a child-biting tone-deaf British Bulldog.

I’d rather be with Cindy, wherever that is…

She is Sitting. Cat Stevens Buddha-still, sleepless and uneasy, in her Redland bedsit. It’s 4 in the morning, the end of December. She has just spent two hours reading her entire 1968 diary prior to writing its concluding entry, which begins: What happened to the Summer of Love? And trying to answer a vacation essay question titled Is all this Revolutionary action saving the world or making it even worse? 

She hates to admit it, but some of the European comrades’ smashing in things for peace in Europe do make Callahan’s claim that his British-policed peace rally was peaceful if not exactly credible then at least comparatively thinkable. 

Cindy flicks back through her 1968 pages and tots up the progress towards love and peace.

May 5-7. The ‘May Days’ –A thousand injured. 

May 9, the ‘Red’ Army prepares to freeze out the Prague spring.  

In England, Enoch Powell makes his racist ‘river of blood’ speech. 

In Germany, the West German student leader Red Rudi is nearly murdered. 

In Paris, French workers call a general strike in support of students. 

In Hornsea, British art students declare a ‘state of anarchy.’ (Ma foi! Not supported by a general strike of British workers!)

Right in the middle of the Student Spring After the Summer of Love Before, and (in a chilling foreshadowing of Eric play-the-blues “I Shot The Sheriff” Clapton’s I’m Voting For the National Front remark of a decade later after ‘a foreigner pinched my missus’s bum’), Comrade Street Fighting Sir Mick warns in his Daily Telegraph super-syntaxed drawl that immigration will ‘break up’ British society. “Because they are different and they do act differently and they don’t live the same, not even if they were born here they don’t.” Cindy has to read that one twice. Surely Mick has been impersonating an Afro-American bluesman/woman on 100 times an Afro-American bluesman/woman’s salary since before the Beatles were refusing to play segregated USA concerts in 1964? The old stoned neanderthal ‘us’ implied in that imperial ‘they’ divide and rule will be taking his pantomime onto the Black and White Minstrel show next. Cindy had simply assumed on the basis of his blues gospel and the liberty dances and the acid jailhouse “We Love You” rebel yell that the new ‘leader of the Revolution’ was as well ahead of the old school ties and on her side of the generation gap as the ‘free your mind’ naturally anti-Enoch, blackbird-carolling Live and Let Liverpool Beatles, but maybe (she hoped not) she – like the ‘free your mind’ naturally anti-Enoch blackbird-carolling Beatles – was much further over the mind-forged barricades of swinging Britain and ahead of her own ‘love’ generation than she had assumed.  

In June, in LA, Kennedy (another one) is assassinated (again). De Gaulle bans demonstrations in France. 

In America, Dr Spock is jailed for draft dodging. 

In Russia, Dubcek, the Czechs’ rebel leader, has a Last (radioactive) Brezhnev Warning yelled into his face. 

In August, there are race riots in LA. Mayor Daley’s police go berserk (in the Viking sense) at the governing Democratic convention in Chicago. A long, hot, bothered summer. 

Warsaw Pact forces invade Czechoslovakia: totalitarianism is restored; winter for the Prague Spring. 

Dubcek is reduced first by radiation poisoning, then by a life of grey-suited graft.  

Ma foi! De Gaulle – Mr Establishment – is re-elected by a landslide! 

The Stones’ Beggars’ Banquet is cited by Black Dwarf as the new soundtrack of the Revolution, replacing Maharishi Mahesh Beatles. (‘You knock it down and I’ll build round it’ retorts Lennon, whose acid vision of an England policed by bobbies in the head on ‘I Am The Walrus’ had (Cindy will argue in her essay) “perhaps sound-tracked the Revolution a year too early”).

November (after the second Grosvenor Square march) Johnson orders the end of bombing in North Vietnam. 

Students occupy Prague University against the Soviet occupation and plant the hope that educated youth is the future, not soldiers or politicians? 

Five days after Johnson stops the bombing of Vietnam, Nixon (the anti-Kennedy, Republican, yesterday’s man in 1960) is elected. Comme de Gaulle, plus ca change, plus la meme chose. (And that absurd anachronism would happen here two years later, as everything since the Beatles does). JFK’s brave new liberal Democratic consensus – as taken up by Southern square-faced Johnston in 1963 – is now a busted flush. A losing hand of broken hearts. Trumped (and I use the metaphor both advisedly and timelessly) by Old Adam. Just when Love seemed ready to inherit France, Czechoslovakia, the Earth.

*

Meanwhile forward, on May 4, 1970, four student peaceniks will be shot dead on Nixon’s orders in Ohio, a nation’s own children and future being shot dead by its National Guardsmen. May the Fourth Be With You.

*

Cindy shuts her 1968 diary, sighs over the essay conclusion she doesn’t want to write and puts on last year’s bell-ringing Answer to cheer herself up. “There’s nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time... All You Need Is Love. Love. Love is all you need.” The Bible and heart-bursting international anthem of Harri-Krishna-Macca-Lennonism (for all the throwaway apostate self-hateful “Baby You’re A Rich Fag Jew” aimed tiffily by Bad Boy John at manager Brian Epstein on the B side.) She puts on Record One Side One of the White album and her heart lifts to the mischievous subversion of the cold war of Back in the USSR, the exquisite love and peace of Dear Prudence and While My Guitar Gently Weeps which all keep faith that summer of love, but there are also two big menacing songs about guns (Bungalow Bill who goes out tiger hunting with his elephant and gun and who in case of accidents always took him mom,  a sharp and funny satire of older generation America in keeping with if (like Piggies) a less loving indictment of the mums and dads than the ones on the Pepper album - but Happiness is a Warm Gun puts that same Mark Chapman gun in the hippy’s hand. And while you can’t blame Helter Skelter for Charles Manson it - like Revolution 9 - did soundtrack his darkness and horror better than All You Need Is Love ever could have.) She pins up the calendar for 1969 and wonders. Bristol’s December Days; her fellow UOB Students Sit-in, the charged march of youth: is it a Love-bed of Revolution, or a Stone-hearted Street Fight? Which way is it going? How did all this hate and murder get in? 

Where have all the flowers gone? 

Chapter Eleven

Drive My Car

It was Johnny’s idea to book a summer holiday in Weymouth during the long hot summer of ’69. His mother rented out a four berth and a six berth caravan down there: ‘Churchill Caravans.’ They could love on the beaches; they could love on the seas; they could love on the fairgrounds: they could surrender. Only they wouldn’t be going there in the magical mystery mini cooper. Johnny’s two years of fiddling under the bonnet trying to make it work ended in fury, an RAC breakdown and a bill for a hundred and twenty pounds. 

They’d made some fabulous love in it – Cindy’s First Time would always be there – and when it went, you felt like you were really going places. They crossed Clifton Suspension Bridge in it once and God’s Own City (Bristol) was spread out in sparkling gold to their left below like they were The Star Ship Enterprise, and she was Lieutenant Dr O Who Ru.  They tried out the new M4 motorway and the engine sounded like the crescendo at the end of Pepper. The draughty open windows (even when they were shut) winged their hair back like they were going through a black hole. Until the radiator blew. 

It wasn’t that he couldn’t fix a radiator – he was in the motor trade after all, and just gripping the oversized steering wheel in that little sunflower-powered capsule was to reach for the stars.  But reaching isn’t the same as grasping, as that Browning dude said. That last RAC hard shoulder comedown finally broke the spell. He hated the mini now. He sold it to a student in Clifton whose daddy would just add the maintenance bills to his Fine-Arts-dabbling-daughter’s other expensive addictions. He bought back his old motorbike and rode it to Cindy’s. He felt like a rocker again – that old two stroke British beat between his thighs – albeit a rocker with a kaftan under his leathers and Jesus hair, and (worst of all) a sidecar. They loaded up and roared off – hearing a noise like the Heathrow engines at the start of Back In The USSR with their voices singing “Yes, we’re going to a party, party…” Apart from an awful first day, when the sidecar came off round the Piddlehinton corner and sent all their luggage over the road, they had the perfect grown-up holiday for kids. Buckets and spades; fish and chips and as much slap and tickle as they wanted. All Day and All of the Night. And no parents telling them off for it either. 

Then came the bombshell. After a great night round a beach fire singing folk songs with some Seekers, Cindy grabbed his arm. “Johnny.” She looked into his eyes. “Let’s have a baby.”

“What?” These Lazy Stoned Days of communally listening to Donovan, Love Forever Changes, storm-purple Hendrix and Cream in smoked-filled rooms – and the unsolicited hints of a love-in with some swingers from Trowbridge – screamed to a halt in his head like a record player with its reject button activated. He stared at her. “A baby?”

“Yeah yeah yeah!”

“Yesterday it was a ring! Now it’s a baby!”

The end of the male road. His balls started talking, “But Cindy, we’ve got all we need.” 

“You’ve got all you need. All my loving for years. Now I’m asking for a bit of yours.”

“Now wait a minute-”

“I waited since 1963. Love isn’t a one-way street, dude, just because the Pill abolished the No Entry signs. All I’m asking for is love.”

“You’ve got it.”

“No I haven’t. I’ve given you everything (and tenderly) for years. I want something to show for it.”

“But-”

But there was a look on her face that silenced him then. He knew he couldn’t gamble with that look. Cindy meant it. And God only knows what he’d be without her. And besides, as she stood there with her long hair blowing in the wind, the light of the sunset a halo behind her, something changed. He wanted to be alone with her. In fact, he was amazed to find that deep down he was overjoyed, flattered. And she was offering, what? Everything. Fatherhood and lifelong responsibility began to appeal very much. “Well – I don’t want to lose you.”

She kissed him, a deep warm kiss, and they turned and walked back from the beach.”

“Hey! Where ya going dudes?” 

“Home,” called Johnny to the somehow now living-in-the-past crowd around the bonfire.  

They walked until they couldn’t hear the protests anymore. Then, in the delicious twilight, they kissed again, in a way that he’d never kissed a girl before. It seemed to go on even longer than Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands on Side Four of Blonde on Blonde – and as far as Johnny was concerned it could. He could hear waves crashing in the distance and above it, surely, that ‘music of the spheres’ he’d read about on a psychedelic album cover recently. She withdrew her mouth from his a moment, took a hard look at him as if to check something, then kissed him again. The way she looked, the way she spoke, the sunlight in her hair: it sent him higher than any drug. It was like their early days, the stakes high and wild again. Only wilder, higher. He felt in over his head – but in something good. He almost dropped his joint. 

But as soon as the bunk bed became a means to conceive a future, it all became ridiculous. Taking off each other’s clothes stopped being Fab-Foreplay and turned into kids playing Stepmums and deadies. 

“Missionary position? How kinky is that?”

Johnny frowned. “Is it in the Kama Sutra?”

“I thought the missionary position was Father Damien’s belief system until I discovered Reproduction.”

“I have to put it there.”

“Johnny – concentrate,” she wailed, “this is serious.”

“Is it like the Lotus Position?”

“Kind of. For me anyway.”

“Do we need a Bible? Some striped pyjamas? A winceyette nightie?” 

Cindy had forgotten how funny he was. “Mr Churchill, what is your missionary position?”

“Man on top, doll, like the Empire!”

“Shame on you comrade. Down with this capitalist monster! Private parts are public property!”

Johnny collapsed in giggles. “I’ve lost it!”

“Well I haven’t got it!-”

The hysteria gradually subsided. Johnny kept trying to rise to the occasion: this had certainly never happened before. He looked at Cindy’s breast being all mumsy and went off on another round of giggles. “You look like Doris Day!”

“I feel like Stepmother Mary!”

Johnny groaned with laughter. “I’m my dad. I’m your dad!”

This was too much. “Oh God, Johnny,” hoots Cindy, tears streaming from her eyes, “for Love’s sake just kiss me!”

Kissing Cindy was a trip through Paris at midnight, as usual. But the Cinderella coach and horses stalled. It wasn’t just the dodgily hinged double bunk bed, always liable to wind itself back up into the wall when you were least expecting it. It was the four berth itself. They’d already drawn comments from several families on the site for the way they set the caravan kangarooing around the clock. 

“It’s been like a robin reliant changing gears all week!” said a monkish guy with a premature bald patch, short fat hairy legs and thick glasses, passing under the window. His wife looked a bit jealous. Johnny giggled until he choked (near-fatally) but he was a bit worried about all this getting back to his mum. You could have sold tickets now the number of people queued up outside to watch. It was hopeless. They gave up and went to sleep instead, like an old married couple. 

*

James is writing out a letter to Cindy in his bully-damaged gold-nibbed grammar school State documents Parker, the one he will use to write this show, Edinburgh, sign his published books at readings, his marriage certificate, his arts funding applications, his Christmas and birthday cards to his ever decreasing number of loved ones and his Will. 

 

“Hiraeth, 13, Graveside Villas, St Jude’s Road, Fernway, Claddu yn Fyw, The Valley of the Shadow of Death, Milltown, Monmouthshire, South Wales,  Nowhere. Dear Cindy, Hope you can visit us soon. Or at least write. But I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t. ‘Hiareth’ is the long long longing for home. You have to be here among all this song-song to know just how long and deep the grief; there’s no word long and deep enough for it in English. Love to Johnny. James XX

*

“We’ve got to get out of this caravan!” wailed Cindy. “The future does not start here.”

Johnny suggested a hotel room. 

“Like John and Yoko,” grinned Cindy. 

“I was thinking more Hotel Prince Regent than Amsterdam Hilton.”

“Three stars though. Attaboy, Rocker-fella!” 

They stayed in the Hotel bar until closing time, along with a June Moon Convention, whatever that was, then swayed out onto the beach. It was a full moon. Johnny rolled a joint. They exchanged it boldly as they walked the yellow sands beside the esplanade their parents had marshalled (and/or lost) them on numerous childhood summer holidays. Bold as love. A police car appeared but Cindy just waved her hippy hat and, charmed by this pretty doll of nineteen going on twenty with hair down to her waist smiling and waving, they looked no further, shook their helmets tolerantly and waved back. Johnny they would have busted for impersonating Jesus even before they noticed the joint turned inwards into his hand, with the long practice of a bad boy avoiding teacher’s checks for cigarette smoking at school.  

They disappeared along the esplanade, like truants from everything. Johnny drew the dope smoke deep into his lungs. “Come and kiss me sweet and twenty, youth’s a stuff will not endure.” 

“Your poems are getting better all the time.”

“I’ll tell Shakespeare! Or Browning was it? We did them both on my fresh cut sandwich A level course.” 

He was finding everything hilarious. He exhaled pure joy. He kissed her – he would always kiss her. They suddenly burst at the same moment into a run along the sands ever further away from the town, completely in tune with each other. They felt like Romantic poets from the Byron and Shelley era. They started calling out rhymes, each trying to out-rhyme each other. “June.”

“Moon.” Her hat came off.

“Dune.”

“Loon!”

Cindy flung off her thin dress – without breaking stride – and ran out into the waves, costumed only in skin and starlight. She looked at Johnny. It was a look he remembered for the rest of his life. He followed un-suit and joined her, plunging about in the night surf. They struck out further, floating free between stars, moon and deep, black sea. The tide in Weymouth Bay takes a long time to get a bather out of his depth but Johnny got there. 

Suddenly he was choking in the dark on liquid salt. He started to panic, plunging around but without a clue which way was up. He heard Cindy shouting dimly and alarmed through a ton of cold water, through a silence deep as death. Struggle and I will take you whispered some Ocean at the bottom of his brain; an Ocean of which this was but a shadow. He plunged again, hard, for what he thought was the surface and instead of his hands breaking the surface, he touched at last a dark solid ‘roof’ of sand; the seabed! Oh God. He let go.

Trust me, said the Sea. He didn’t. It took him all the way down, no up. Dim lights rushed at him through a dark glass. Stars. He reached down – No, up – and, as time seemed to roar away from him, and all expectations of a future evaporated in surf and hissing, he, expecting nothing but death, instead, shockingly, and completely irrationally, broke the surface. Air! He gulped it, spitting and coughing, choked back to life. He stared wildly around, treading water to find his bearings. There was nothing but night, and the lights of a deep ocean liner. He turned around in the strong cold currents and saw the lights of the shore. What were they doing over there? Twice as far away as he remembered. He drove himself in despair towards them.

It was too far. He battled to the end of his strength, then a bit more, then at last let go. As he did so, again, miraculously – he felt solid shore under his feet. He stood up, staggered, whooped, fell over. Whooped again. He had never been so grateful to feel that Weymouth holiday gold between his toes. He flung back his head. Stars twinkled like kindly angels in a distant Madonna-blue. He fell over again for sheer weariness. 

It was only then that he froze. Where was Cindy? “Cindy! CINDY!”

“Johnny?” Her voice whispered behind him.

“Cindy!” He spun round, shivering. “Where did you go?”

She was sitting lotus on the sand, naked, silent and mysterious under her very long hair. How long had she been there? She stood up. Her face was Venus emerging from the shell on that poster outside the local teacher training college. Why had that stuck in his mind? Cindy said she was coming here to train at that college– after Uni. She wanted somewhere near the sea. Even though she was still only a second-year student at Bristol, Johnny had got the feeling her future was already plotted, well on the way, head in a cloud, feet on the ground, just like a woman. And he was getting too far behind her. That Venus poster was her, that college window this moonlit sea. Long and beautiful and grave.  And now, while he’d been looking around for the scattered items of his hippy uniform, Venus was already back in her maxi-dress and hat, all ready for the world. Smiling out of the shadows in a way that made him shiver.

“Where did you go, John?” Her voice was like waves snaking along the sand. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

“I got a bit out of my- ” He stopped. He couldn’t lose face like a Girl. Nor to a Girl. What if the whole thing had happened in six feet of water? 

He was wringing the water out of his long hair. “- a bit out of it. It was so cool, man – the moon and stars.”

“You’re blue.”

“Yeah – where’s me clothes?” He hopped about, juggling socks. “How about you warm me up eh?”

“Mmmmmmm. Come on then, baby.” Her face was a pale moon in the dark.

Johnny had nightmares about that swim for the rest of his life. But not that night. He and Cindy snuggled up in the hotel bar, gradually warming away his dread, and kept the night porter in gainful employment until three am. Then they went up to their room, carrying a bottle. Room 69.“Everyone’s favourite number,” yelled Johnny as they fell in through the door. 

Cindy was busting for a pee and nearly doing it for laughter. “No need to wake the whole floor!”

Self-appointed Majors, Blue-rinsed Thatchers and Whitehoused sepulchres advanced out of rooms 91, 79 and 1829 like a battalion of right wing think tanks. “Evening!” called Johnny. “We’re on our funny moon.”

“Get in!” giggled Cindy… 

*

In deference to Mother Mary Whitehouse and the bang bang shoot shoot occupants of rooms 91, 79 and 1829 (and to those critical theorists uninterested in plot, chronology or anything else that most novel readers are interested in) here, instead of What Happened Next, as it was in the beginning ever now and shall be, is some music:

Cant.1

[1] The song of songs, which is Solomon's.

[2] Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.

12] While the king sitteth at his table, my spikenard sendeth forth the smell thereof.

[13] A bundle of myrrh is my wellbeloved unto me; he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.

[14] My beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of En-gedi.

[15] Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves' eyes.

 

Cant.2

[16] My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies.

[17] Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.

 

Cant.3

[5] I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please.

Cant.4

[1] Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves' eyes within thy locks: thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead.

[3] Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely: thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate within thy locks.

[4] Thy neck is like the tower of David builded for an armoury, whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men.

[5] Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.

[6] Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, I will get me to thee [10] How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse! how much better is thy love than wine! and the smell of thine ointments than all spices!

[11] Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy tongue; and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon.

 

Cant.5

[10] My beloved is white and ruddy, the chiefest among ten thousand.

[15] His legs are as pillars of marble, set upon sockets of fine gold: his countenance is as Lebanon, excellent as the cedars.

[16] His mouth is most sweet: yea, he is altogether lovely. This is my beloved, and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem.

 

Cant.6

[3] I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the lilies.

[4] Thou art beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners.

 

Cant.7

[1] How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince's daughter! the joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman.

[2] Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor: thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies.

[3] Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins.

[4] Thy neck is as a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the fishpools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bath-rabbim: thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus.

Cant.8

[1] O that thou wert as my brother, that sucked the breasts of my mother! when I should find thee without, I would kiss thee; yea, I should not be despised.

[2] I would lead thee, and bring thee into my mother's house, who would instruct me: I would cause thee to drink of spiced wine of the juice of my pomegranate.

[3] His left hand should be under my head, and his right hand should embrace me.

[4] I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, until he please…

*

Welcome back to Room 69, Edinburgh. Instead of the traditional Cigarette Afterwards, Cindy and Johnny had The Spliff Before and After and then another one just like the other one and then another. Johnny rolled this last with loving care, lit it, puffed and handed it to Cindy. She was staring down towards Weymouth docks at the dawn, the solar candle’s morning star in the East. It was beginning to kindle already in the grey light over Nothe gardens. The morning tide was on its way in, making quiet swash and backwash in the distance. A dawn chorus was starting somewhere.  The glowing embers of daybreak fascinated her.

“Cindy?”

“Hmm?” 

“You were miles away, babber. Everything okay?” 

“Mmmmmm.” She looked up smiling but, in the odd light, saw a face she didn’t quite expect. Johnny’s. “A night to remember eh?”

“If you can remember it, man, you aren’t here.”

She snaked her arms round his neck, drowning him in warmth, in the sun-kindled life that, but for the grace of Something, was already spiralling down down down where the mermaids and sukies play ghost-cold amid the currents of Weymouth Bay. The thrill of that miracle life shocked him. They made love, or something very close, yet again. Afterwards, she snuggled against him. He was drifting towards sleep when he heard her.

“Johnny?”

“Mmn?”

“Let’s go to India.”

He shot upright. “India, Jesus!  Why?”

“For an answer to that question maybe. “

“Cindy! That’s crazy!” 

But Johnny was intrigued. It didn’t add up but not much did these days, especially after the dope wore off. India was the new rock n roll. Everyone was going East – except Dylan and Cohen who already had their own wailing wall, Book and candelabra in a nearer East. Johnny had actually been wondering about that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Meditation thing advertised at college himself. ‘Something of eternal benefit’. Even Elvis was turning to the East these days, embracing Karate and using it to disarm gunmen (albeit gunmen paid to let him do so).

His dad Victor Churchill had thought this new re-orientalism was hilarious. “India’s a trip all right, son – back in time on Dr Who’s Tardis. I nearly died there, of germs we eradicated here 100 years ago. They’ve got typhus, cholera, malaria, leprosy, worms, rabies,  not to mention starvation and Asian flu. Their so called holy men sit around in gutters with shit all over them. We threw a loaf of bread out of the train once for a starving native and about a hundred beggars mobbed him. They half killed each other. If there’s wisdom and inner peace to be found in that fly-infested cesspit of elephant-headed prophets and chattering monkey gods I’m the Archbishop of Canterbury.”

But dads weren’t always right anymore. Even the good ones like his. About anything. And, with Cindy, India would surely be the trip of a lifetime. 

“But I’ve used up my two weeks holiday.”

“Leave the motor trade. For good. They can’t work out whether you’re Jesus or Rasputin in that hair and beard and they all wonder what you’re doing there. They look at me and think that sooner or later you’ll pack up and fly me to the moon. They’re right. You’re meant for higher things than working in a garage. And if we’re still happy in October, I’ll leave University too.”

“What! No!”

“Yeah. Sod it. I thought it was going to be a Ball with books casting magical spells over the pumpkins and rats of the material world but half of the students are more than happy to be pumpkins and rats and the other half don’t need to learn magic spells because they’ve got carriages with footmen already. Every essay I write is another spell that doesn’t work. And most of the lecturers think talking about utopias in ivory towers for three years is going to build us a better future. Let’s live now. All we need is love and your motorbike.”

“Like a fox on the run? But I’m all set for promotion, Cindy. If I give it up now, I’ll lose the chance of getting my own garage, maybe forever.” He paused, still flushed with pride about that promotion. He added, in a voice that sounded contemptibly bourgeois and lame, even to himself. “And me A level results come out soon.” Jesus, he’d be saying he couldn’t leave his recently reorganised shed behind next! 

Because his heart had let him know what he wanted already. His heart leapt at the chance of getting out of the garage NOW rather than sooner or later (The shed not so much...) and any now and here with Cindy was better than any nowhere without her.  His heart said YES. YES.

But something in his brain, NO. “Be practical, Cindy.”

“I’m being practical. Listen to yourself, man. Locked into your suffering autopia and your A level pleasures are the seal. Is that practical? What would ‘Harri’ say?” 

“Krishna?”

“Harrison.”

“I’m Happy Just To Dance With You?”

“Tch. This is 1969 not 1964. On Pepper he mourned for the people “who gain the world and lose their soul.”

“He’s quoting Jesus. And Jesus was God, Cindy. And George is a Beatle, which is the next best thing; a Jesus of Liverpool gone through the looking glass and up the eye of a needle to live above the material world in a palace richer than the Sheik of Araby’s. I’m just a bloke.”

“God is just a bloke. Ask George. We can all be God. Do you really want us to mortgage off our life, at “sweet and twenty”!” 

Cindy’s eyes were shining. “Jobs are ten a penny. I want our baby to be born free – and stay free.”

Johnny realised if he made the wrong decision here, he would lose Cindy because she was going anyway. Her face had that old fixed look. And anyway…

“Oh God, Our Ma’s gonna kill I when I tell her,” he said. And Cindy knew she had won. 

They toasted the decision to go to India with a loving cup of English breakfast tea (which, like pheasants, rhododendrons, pyjamas and most of the ‘parent British culture’ they could think of, came all the way from China, India and Palestine.) They both fell asleep before they could finish it.

*

Cindy woke mid-morning. She struggled to remember the momentous thing that had happened the night before... Ah yes! She beamed like the sunshine streaming in through the curtains.  Johnny was taking her to India, where all the flowered Fabs have gone, where the Answer was. She pulled Perfect Love, her guru book, out of her Navaho fringed bag, turned eagerly to page 12, which she had underlined, student-like. “We are all looking for the perfect lover, mother, sister, brother, father, wife, husband. Not because we are immature as the psychologists say, but because any perfected love is God. The dream of perfection is not just real, it is the only reality. We need God like a drop needs the ocean.” 

She knew that was true. In India, she and Johnny, imperfect lovers as yet, would find God. They would become one and, out of that one, their baby and a future would be born. They’d have to be practical as well as mystical of course. They could slip out without paying for the hotel, use what they saved there to pay the ferry, crash on Guernsey beach, do some tomato-picking, then move on. Keep moving East, like the Magi, following their hippy star. She glanced at Johnny, her tall bearded Jesus babe in arms. She put her guru guidebook away and lit a cigarette. Then she looked at him again, for the face she really wanted. 

*  

Meanwhile back, in Hiraeth, Absent Dad, in his overtime between-shifts National Welsh Russian military man omnibus livery, removes one of the exposed woodworm-treated floorboards under the half-installed new radiator, locates and furtively opens last season Freeman’s Catalogue; turning, like so many men before and after him, to the chastity suspender belts on page 69. Next door, I am reading a cheap airport postcard from Cindy representing a divinely gorgeous peacock-blue Krishna dancing with some disturbingly under-dressed gopi. 

*

Bombay. A fecund, marshy, giant green flora and forested, sacred vaginal delta disguised as a city. Built, a companionable Sikh in the Sea bar had told them, “by those refugees from unspeakable Muslim persecution in Persia, the Parsis, the ‘Jews of the East’. No-one else could have built such a wonder in such an inhospitable swamp,” he’d chuckled with indulgent admiration. It was definitely a buzzing honking chattering blaring soaring clattering seething roaring thundering lightning humming hairy happening wonder of a city and definitely Kama Sutra steamy.  Not that Johnny was complaining. Some sex-and-fertility goddess in Cindy-form in the shower – Parvati was it? Lakshimi? – had just delayed their twice-daily (‘twice-daily’ as in Maharishi rather than Adge Cutler) Transcendental Meditation for a bit.

They had been initiated into TM in the Himalayas, for a week’s wages. One pound. Very democratic. It cost the Beatles a thousand pounds each. Now they’d come pulsating down to Bombay through a potholed pilgrim’s progress to look for a Master. So far they’d only found prostitutes, beggars and hawkers. And a hotel that was both luxury-clean and dirt-cheap. 

“Guests here are treated like God,” beamed the manager of the hotel.

“We’re more interested in finding Him,” said Cindy. 

So Johnny threw open the shutters of the air conditioned but stuffy room and learned immediately why they’d been kept shut. It was like opening an oven door that was also a mosquito jar.

Their Bible at this point was Cindy’s Bristol University library copy of Reich’s The Function of Orgasm, and its tenet that the ability to have an orgasm was not just essential to the health of both individual and society, but ‘generative of a revolution in both.’ In this Indian hotel room, a thousand sleevenote bedsit-revolutions came together. 

“Shall we uh...”

“Aspire to a Sorbonne-inspired Reichian reconciliation of Marx and Freud?”

“Oh all right then.”

Love, God and Sex seemed less rigidly separate in India. Something about driving along those mediaeval roads lined with rotting matter brought you into touch with the fundamentals.  

“We’ve got to give up drugs,” said Cindy.

He shied like a horse at a sudden unexpected movement. “Why?” he spluttered. 

“They’re stopping us conceiving.”

“You mustn’t believe all that anti-Revolution Conditioning the State’s Family Planning agencies…”-

“Then believe me,” interrupted Cindy, with the certainty and clarity that had made some of her lecturers wish Universities in general and Bristol in particular were a little less selective about how many students, especially women, from working class backgrounds they let in. He did believe her and the Inner Light that shone out of her.  She was looking more like an earth mother every day. The exotic Eastern colours and clothes, the long long long hair, the earthy browns and monsoon greens of the country, the deep tan – all made her look more like the person she  was rather than the doll she  was raised to be. The doll he used to manipulate while she manipulated the biscuit tins at work and the pots and pans at home. The unscary doll he privately admitted he sometimes missed when he felt her manipulating him. 

“The Maharishi says,” she added, “You don’t need Transcendental Medication to get high.”

And because She said so (rather than all the other deluded parents and people genuinely interested in Johnny’s welfare who were saying it) they – like all transcendental meditators were supposed to – and usually didn’t – gave up drugs!  And lo Johnny had seldom felt as high (even on drugs) as he did drug-free, Cindy-struck and riding the Indian roads. India felt like the Earth God made.

He’d even started writing poetry. Awful ejaculations on the back of fag packets that his amused and embarrassed children and step children would unearth in the loft boxes of the future. But none the worse for being drugless, if the printed lyrics on many contemporary prog-rock albums are anything to go by.

After the day’s third Sorbonne-inspired Reichian reconciliation of Marx and Freud, generative of an orgasm in both, or one and a half of them anyway, they went out again looking for the Answer. Eventually, a gutter sadhu with shit all over him told them if they asked the real question, it would Answer itself. Then they went back to the hotel.

“So what are we going to do now, doll?”

“Find the right question.”

“And while we’re trying to find it?” 

“Have you finished your poem?”

“Yeah.”

“Read it out to me.”

Johnny was embarrassed. 

She laughed. “All our loving Johnny and you’re still so uptight. Come on. Lay it on me.”

He lit a cigarette that crumbled and fussed with the pages of flimsy Indian notepaper. She lay back, waiting. 

“It’s called ‘Mumbai’…”

“Mum what?”

“The old name for Bombay. You promise you won’t laugh?” 

“Johnny, I love you. Why should I laugh?”

He cleared a nervous throat. “The delta jungle of hair below her mound of Venus, her… breasts hanging like exotic fruit, my tinder soul fired, her hair of floating sky –

Cindy exploded in laughter. They both did. 

“No, it’s lovely. Really.” She collapsed in hysterics. Then she put her hands on her golden neck and flung them out through her long long long hair and said seriously. “It’s cool.”

“I nicked the floating sky from the White Album. But it’s true.”

“Go on.” 

“Uh… ‘She’s got that Something. I want to hold her-”

It must have been the heat that had been working on their blood ever since they’d got to India –which mobilises all passions in that subcontinent. “Johnny...”

He couldn’t look at her.

“Johnny – you can’t write that for me and then make like little Willy in Sunday school. If you’re going to write something for me, read it to me…”

He read it to her. And the words drove him into her again, all the way, as if he were coupling with fecundity itself, or Mother India. He held back at the brink of oblivion – for a second – then surrendered. And as they came, absolutely, together - the only time this ever happened - he heard himself repeatedly calling her name.  “Cindy. Ah! Ah! Ah!”

If there was such a thing as unfallen, immaculate sex; the sex that might have stopped even D H Lawrence from pen-wanking in its absence for three pages about dark electricity thundering around the loins and climaxing up his literary backside, that had been it. An Earthly Paradise. Johnny had been a little worried by some of the stories coming out of Rishikesh about Maharishis and Mia Farrow. Various rock magazine divinings into the puzzling lyrics of Sexie Sadie on the White album suggesting this was why mystical John Lennon and even further Far East Man George Harrison followed more down to Earth Paul and Ringo out of that transcendental Love Garden. The original typically temple-trashing Rishikesh-written lyric was Maharishi, what have you done, you’ll get yours yet, however big you think you are…. (Tragically judged more fit to be on a White album brimming with Rishikesh fireside songs than the infinitely more tender and moving On The Road To Rishikesh which only reappeared, re-worded, Yoko-thin and whistling, on his post under-Beatled Macca-renouncing Imagine album.) If Maharishi had made dick music with Mia (contrast Lennon’s  infinitely more tender and moving heart song for her dear sister Prudence) apart from showing how very persistent the lure of the highest pleasure in the physical world can be even in those Masters focused on meditatively transcending it, that seemed more like the Serpent in Eden than Eden itself. More like ‘The Serpent’ that racism-damaged poison Catholic French-Vietnamese predator taking Manson-like revenge on all these white hippies going East to appropriate Buddha and Krishna just like their pukka and box wallah forefathers had the Empires. But Johnny had never known love this pure. Their very souls had touched; they had known each other in a higher Biblical sense than people usually meant by that very telling word for it. That crude binary separation of ‘soul’ and ‘body’, which is not reality and which will always end up a condemnation of the body, had disappeared, in this hot Bombay hotel room, where nothing was real in the Western material sense. He lay on the post-coital, starched, pressed and beaten white sheets listening to Bombay’s young wannabe Western playboys splashing around in the swimming pool below. Dancing in their Carnaby street fashion clothes to the latest Western sounds. 

“Why are they chasing those dead ends and roundabouts?”

“Mmm?”

“They have God’s own Earth here. Why do they hanker after the West?”

“They’re just kids, Johnny.”

She wasn’t listening but it didn’t matter. He felt so close to her he wasn’t sure which body was his. She’d embraced him completely, like a force of nature. And two into one make a third. He was sure of it. He turned, deliciously tired and content, to Cindy dozing on the pillow, long hair spreading a raven night over everything.

‘Cindyia,’ he sighed again. And slept like death. 

*

Cindy dozed, reliving the long trek East. The ocean ferry from Weymouth to Guernsey where they’d picked tomatoes and washed plates, saving what they could. Booze and cigarettes, being untaxed there, were cheaper than milk, so they did without milk. The Scot who ‘cannae feel ma body’ and punched Johnny as they ‘freaked out’ on the dance floor declaring ‘I love ye ya bastarrrd’ genuinely bewildered by Johnny’s belligerent objection. The mad Belgian who pissed in the soup on that crazy French campsite. The Welshman who hadn’t washed since 1967. The two handsome Austrian beardos, one with shoulder cascading dark hair, the other with bicep-brushing blond hair (where it mingled with the darker blond hair of his armpits) who performed a group reading of The VirGGin Soldiers around the camp fire, pronouncing, with an accidental comic effect funnier than either the amusing text or their own lively performance, every soft g as a hard one to general hilarity. The garlic-faced farmer who said he hated hippies but gave them a lift anyway, telling them at enormous length, and in broken English, about what he was going to do to his wife’s one-balled lover when he caught them. The pioneer 1964 Hanover cassette player and Euro-cassettes they bought in a marché that proved a useful travelling companion until a stardust child of the love generation stole it. Grape-picking and long warm days of sun, saving money all the time and still eating and drinking like kings compared to home. The giant bottles of wine you could buy like water in supermarkets. The Turkish style cigarettes that burned like the tar they rolled on Somertown roads. The coffee that tasted the same. Then the long days on the road to Greece when they’d started having rows. The split up in Turkey. The reconciliation, where a café of Turks cheered their make-up kiss to the drunken rafters, all with tears in their eyes. The French shirts they bought from a Russian bear wearing an Italian leather jacket in Armenia... The motorbike breakdowns on endless Asian tracks fixed by dodgy-looking Arabs who ripped them off but still charged almost nothing. The ubiquitous poverty that beggared belief. 

Then, finally, India with its staggering tackiness and equally staggering sublimity. Where you could see the surface for what it was. Trash. Nothing.  The southern Himalayas. Rishikesh (‘Master of the senses’ ‘place of the Sages’ or ‘Yoga capital of the world’ depending on which guide book you read) where they embraced TM and did a tour of the Beatles sites. And, seated apart from all the showy wise-spouting shited sepulchres of ash-costumed sadhus,  met that single ancient madman with uber-Maharishi hair and beard under a neem tree who called them over and told them about a Perfect Stranger who blessed Rishikesh with His Presence in the 1920s long before Maharishi (‘Great Sage’) Mahesh (‘Creation-Dissolver’) Yogi or the Beatles (‘World-Conquering Musical Fab Force’) ever followed His heaven scent there, a perfect Stranger come to Earth again and again in different forms at different times, as Zoroaster, Rama, Krishna, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed bringing the same eternal message and Who attracts like a magnet a few truly advanced seekers, interests a whole lot more and is ignored or persecuted by the vast majority, until they all flock to worship Him centuries later, using Him as a stick with which to beat the faiths and followers of all His previous incarnations. Cindy thought ‘this is mad but it’s God-mad’. Johnny stared at the Indian with dismay, trying not to foresee his own future when his youth and beauty and splendid athletic fitness had left him as broken and death-bound as this, then edged nervously away. Cindy lingered, fixed by the ancient wild visionary gaze, searching and then staring into her soul and seeming to read her thoughts, even to know her history and pitying her future. There was a disturbing compassion in that look, like he could see the many deep tangles inside of her and a long hard road ahead of her. She smiled nervously, self-consciously folded her hands in a show of respect and then, like Johnny, completely forgot the incident the moment they re-mounted the motorbike and left Rishikesh. Then Calcutta. The starvation, the dysentery, the turd-trench irrigation system. A passage through India. And India’s passage through them. The Delhi belly. The Kolkota cough. The two of them raving in a room at sun-surface temperatures, Johnny reciting an entire libretto of the Sound of Music not-so-lucidly ‘remembered’ from the film. “I own that my classes failed attention/ I often make mistakes at tea.” Or explaining to a grinning Soviet policeman so secret he wasn’t even there that transcendental meditation would do wonders for his rotten teeth.

And now Bombay, which Johnny loved and feared in equal proportions. The plugless sink a porter ‘fixed’ five times– meaning plunged it, more unnecessarily each time. Swimming in the Indian ocean, nearly choking to death on raw sewage because Johnny wouldn’t go out far enough.

But it was all worth it. Because tomorrow, today now, they were going to find a Master. Cindy knew it. Ludi, an ashram hippy-about-town on guru business, whom they had met at a rickshaw rank, had confirmed it. They were ready. Spiritually clean and drugless and they meditated twice a day for twenty minutes before meals. Their diet was meatless (their health certainly benefited from this avoidance of the Indian meat-unrefrigeration system) though so, in essence, being so undernourished, so was the meat. And they had just conceived. Cindy was sure.

“Think of it,” she said, “all our loving, passing into the Seventies. What shall we call our baby? Love? Or shall we wait until we know if it’s a boy or a girl?”

He was asleep. She propped herself up on her arm and looked at him. She sighed. She got up and went to the mirror, brushing out her waist-length hair. She’d gone a bit less doll and a bit more ethnic with the make-up: natural cheeks, sleepier eyes, lighter lipstick. But even in long dresses and under long hair, a chick couldn’t rest on her inner beauty. Look at Sandy Denny and Janis Joplin. Even with those voices, they were always fighting skin-deep beauty rivals for a man, or a man’s world.  Did even Johnny see past the face and figure of the woman on a Sandy Denny cover?  A face and figure that never fitted the de rigueur dolly bird of recent years. Sandy looked so much better in that recent music magazine photo Cindy had seen of the folk cover girl looking relaxed and earth-mother pregnant. Will I? she wondered. 

She gazed down at her lover’s longhaired tanned furry face and smiled. They’d come a long long long way since that last night in Weymouth. She weaved a flower into his beard. Her Jesus-Johnny. 

Almost a Beatle.

 

Chapter Twelve

If I Needed Someone

Cindy is about to confirm to a sweating, dusty Johnny that she is pregnant. 

“I’ve finally got that sidecar off,” says Johnny. “Now we can be free as a bird on the wire. In this Bombay traffic, that sidecar was like trying to drive a camel through the eye of a needle.”

“Uh... You’ll have to put it back on!”

“Cindy?”

She beams.

“Oh wow!”

She is in the flower of womanhood and under the sweat and dust he doesn’t look bad either. He has finally abandoned the ‘whites’ his father gave him and adopted a dhoti. (An incident involving an explosive curry badge of dishonour on the rear of his white Empire.) He is laughing. His long long hair, guru beard, bracelets and garland of flowers – not to mention the love in his eyes – make him look almost as much like Jesus as George Harrison does. And by ‘Jesus’, unlike John Lennon, Cindy doesn’t mean Lennon in the Sky with Diamonds...

The children are playing the games Johnny used to do. Yesterday, he didn’t even notice them. Now, a confirmed father to be, with a personal stake in something beyond himself, he is already checking out suitable schools. He watches an Indian kid in an immaculate English school uniform treading gingerly across a dirt track. The track is awash with puddles. She looks up at him, big round eyes shining, pretty as a princess, a changeling. 

“Her parents queued until 10 pm the previous night to book her this one day’s schooling,” beams a teacher. “They will repeat the ordeal today and every day also to give her this life chance.” A hillock of rubbish dwarfs her as she reaches the other side, the nest of hundreds of rats. Johnny winces. She has no shoes.

He grinds the red butt of his ciggy into the mud with the sole of his new chappal. He adds his old sandals to the hillock of refuse and walks away. The cigarette kiosk bears the silver-blue livery of a giant Bristol cigarette packet: surreally weird here. His head is itching under the headband. He has repeatedly failed to source toilet paper yet you can buy a packet of old ‘Bristol’ filter you can’t even get in Bristol!

The stallholder has a cheap transistor radio playing Western music. Smoky, heavy music and an ‘underground’ voice buried deep in the mix. Vibrant, tunefully upbeat, catchily and unmistakably buried, but unmistakably, yes, it’s them. What was John – no George– singing in that old brown voice out of that guru beard? ‘Love is something you can’t preach at?’ Johnny moves along the swift-drying monsoon roads, dodging goats and rickshaws, inhaling more pollution from the hot fug than from his Bristol tipped. The sound of that Beatles’ track – the words buried in it – seems to guide him. 

I’m stepping out of this old brown shoe

Baby, I’m in love with you.

I’m so glad you came here,

It won’t be the same here

When I’m with you.

A heavily trafficked, rickshaw-dodging humid, crowded groove. Smoky, deliberate clear-enunciating George is going somewhere as always, slowly, and very surely. Am I? wonders Johnny, pushing his motorbike off its pinion. 

A cyclist in an old bone-shaker waves to him, maybe enchanted by the big BSA, maybe just warning him out of his way. Johnny weaves between gaily-painted lorries, children, women in saris, men in loose flowery shirts with festival ribbons around wrists, bony cattle with bells ringing, mud. The noise density sedates him, makes him feel more in tune with the opaque utterances of his new Master. He just wishes he could breathe – in this thick Bombay air.

*

His Master’s Voice has been difficult to follow. 

“And how is your Progress on the Path, Johnny Ji?”

“Slow, Master.”

A smiling nod, a wag of the head: “this is all right.”

“It isn’t. I’m up the same blind alley that brought me here. It’s like I’ve just replaced the black hole of my life in England – going nowhere fast – with an Indian one…”

“Going nowhere slowly?” chuckles Master. “Of course it will seem like that, Johnny. Because of Maya. But Maya is illusion. You are making progress.” 

“Yes, Master,” mutters Johnny.

But his mind rebels. No Master, Three bags full Master. Master’s followers all say the same thing. They can God-talk the legs off a pi dog, especially his self-appointed chargeman, Ludi. But can they walk the God-walk? 

Master catches Johnny’s desperate eye. “Have you heard words of Persian Master, Zoroaster, oldest of the Messiahs? He has message for you now. Write it on your heart. Good words, good thoughts, good deeds.”  

“Right.”

The Master eyed him closely. “What it is?”

Johnny shook his head.

“God is Infinite Honesty, Johnny. Do not hide anything from Him. If you do, you hide Him also.”

“All right. It’s Ludi.” Johnny wondered how honest he could be. 

“Ludi, yes?”

Johnny mimics the American accent. “‘Invest your capital in God. Speculate to accumulate. Buy as many shares as you can in God’s flotation and sell the rest before they crash.’ It’s like talking to an American oil boss, Master. How can anything God come out of that?”

“Ludi was big American oil boss. He doesn’t know any other language. But it is just words words.”

“Exactly. And Zoroaster says ‘good words’! And I don’t even just want good words. I want the best words in the best order, like Coleridge. Or doesn’t any of that matter?” 

The Master laughed and tousled Johnny’s hair and said God too had a keen sense of humour – needed one with waywards like Johnny – and that Johnny was good honest boy and would find his best words. Then, as Johnny was leaving, he added. “The great poet Seemab wrote: 

Either peel off the layers of wounds of the heart and throw them out of sight

Or accept the wounds (of separation from the Beloved) as positive indications of love. 

A couplet so sublime that when a Perfect Master read it, He was moved to give the poet God-Realisation even though the poet was between lives.  For God-realisation, body must be incarnate and the poet was not here in the flesh at that time. But for words that good, God will break His own rules, and He gave Seemab God-realisation anyway. So when your heart is tuned, Johnny, then your good words, good thoughts and good actions will come.”

Johnny’s return smile hid a dread. He liked Master a lot. Master was a good man, maybe even a God man. But Johnny would never be able even to think good thoughts among all the bad ones that queue-jumped the dirt tracks of his mind, especially not here. Or wherever he was that Cindy wasn’t.

*

Cindy is meditating when he gets back to the ashram, her back supported by a big bright orange cushion fringed with tassels and beads. TM doesn’t need a lotus position and Master, though he adopts the Lotus for his own different meditation, doesn’t insist on it either. Like George Harrison’s Hinduism, it is all very free, different spiritual traditions co-existing peacefully together. Master respects and permits TM, saying that all spiritual rivers, sincerely followed, will flow to God. When though? 

Johnny waits impatiently for Cindy to finish.

*

OMMMMMMMMM. OMMMM. MMMMMmmmm hmmm er

Cindy’s mind wanders, as minds will... Master says don’t worry about this but calmly bring mind back to mantra without getting involved in the thoughts.

OMMMMM. OMMMMM.

The original sound at the genesis of Creation, containing all other sounds, all feelings, pain Mmmm, joy MMMM...

OMMMM OM- Um. I… a butterfly. Child. So free and so wild

Jesamine, the Casuals Summer ’68 hit plays in her head. A long long longing year ago. OMMM-

Cindy is wearing that butterfly-yellow dress she had. She looks like a dream. A big yellow sun-balloon at twelve o’clock. Her father looks up from his Snob View gardening and sees her. 

“You’ve come home then?” He looks pleased. No-one has seen that smile since Cindy left; since Stepmother came.

“Yes, but I can’t get down,” Cindy laughs. “We don’t live here anymore do we? Is this a dream?” 

“It’s always a dream when you’re here, Cindy,” Dad says. He reaches his hand up and pulls. He brings her gently to earth like a hot air balloon. A yellow summerine.

She breathes in the green green grass of home, watches her and James’ guinea pigs grazing. She picks her Daddy some buttercups and dandelions, like a toddler. When they talk, it is the rising melody and counter melody of the song. 

“This is my world at last!” croons Dad, wobbling somewhere between the Casuals and Sinatra.

OMMMMM  OMMMMM… hmmm… er oh… No!

A black hole stirs itself on the doorstep and waddles upright. Special! Barks – louder and louder and louder, like that Pepper-ending crescendo – the yellow sky sinks and and the whole world dies. Cindy rolls away into the black hole. Dad rolls over and Special tickles his tummy.

“Um… Ahemmmm. Dad! Help me!”

 

“Cindy! Cindy!” calls Dad.

But she’s not there... 

*

“Cindy!”

“Johnny?” 

Johnny frowns. Pregnancy has made her look like the fat Buddha, or a giant pumpkin. “If you’re taking five minutes to come out of a meditation, doll, maybe you should cut it back to the recommended twenty minutes.”

“How long was I meditating?”

“Fifteen minutes while I was here. What time did you start?

She checked. “An hour. Damn.”

“Maybe we’re just going round in circles with all this, Cind” 

He explains why. She finds it hard to follow his drift.

“So,” he finds himself concluding, as the gong goes for the meal, “do we want our kid walking barefoot across holy cowshit and all the other germy crap just to get to school?”

 “You’re not going all straight on me are you Johnny?”

He stares at her, a wish to strike that unctuous hippy complacency twitching in his fists. That is anger. Like lust and greed, he knows, it is ‘a refuge of the pathetic little ego that hides us from our true selves, feeds the illusory self and starves the real Self’. Master has told them so. A self fuelled by anger is like a fuming, fart-driven rickshaw going West, nowhere fast, ever faster, when you hailed it to go East. There were whole works, films, books, score-settling scores, lives, creeds, countries, cultures driven by that anger-fuelled self. That furious camera-I. God help us.

Even so, Johnny fumes, and the fume feels truer to his real self than all this bloody smiling. He gets up and follows Cindy’s slow waddle to the refectory. 

“What is it tonight?” he asks the fat cook, his stomach howling with hunger.

“Curry and dal.”

“Again?”

“And brown rice also. But food is nothing nothing, Johnny. A tickle of the palate only. No need to feed ego. Ego is fat enough. It is feeding heart that counts.”

“All the same, I’d kill for some meat,” confides Johnny as they sit down. “Just to add a bit of interest.”

Before she can answer, other seekers join them and the conversation turns to white light, Nirvana, Maya and the illusory nature of the ‘real world’ – especially the body and its desires. At length, Johnny risks a development. “I heard The Beatles’ new one today. Love is something you can’t preach at. A George song.” 

“I’ve always said George was the spiritual one,” chirps one of the American chicks.

“They’re all the spiritual one,” says Cindy. 

“We’re all one,” says Buzz.

“What did George Say?” demands ‘Sita,’ her huge American twang clashing horribly with her delicate Indian face.

“‘Love is something you can’t preach at’.”

“Love is something you can’t reject,” corrects Ludi. They all look at him. He is the pilgrim who has brought most of them to Master. The so-called ‘chargeman.’ The pimp more like, thinks Johnny. Or the dealer. Johnny glares at him.  Ludi meets Cindy’s eye and smiles. A lot of the other pilgrims look up to Ludi, the Master’s errand boy. But to Johnny he is a Lord of the Rings ped-ent in a skullcap knitted by some rich Connecticut aunt. 

“What?” asks Johnny, pausing between bites of illusory (but nevertheless granite-hard) Nan bread.

“George is singing ‘Love is something you can’t reject, not ‘preach at, my friend.’” Again, Ludi’s eyes stray towards Cindy’s.

“Well it should be ‘preach at’. ‘Preach at’ is better.” Johnny is chomping furiously at his Nan bread.

“Whatever it should or should not be in your limited mind, Johnny, it is ‘reject.’ As the Gita tells us-”

“I thought George played a Git-aRR’ Johnny affects Ludi’s twanging American R.

Ludi smiles. “As Bhagavad Gita tells us – pass the dal, Lucy,” –Ludi turns complacently, touching Cindy’s hand as she obeys his request, calling her by the Master’s pet name, like he’s some kind of Master himself. They smile at the contact- Ludi and Lucy. A thousand Westerns and war movies trigger behind Johnny’s eyes as he ‘sees’ Cindy’s lips intolerably Yokoing Ludi’s loaded barrel instead of his own. BANG BANG shoot shoot!

“We’re all one,” beams Buzz again.

“Ludi – Ludi –if you touch my girlfriend one more time, cosmic illusion or no, I’ll pull your ludicrous smile off your ludicrous face and stuff it so far up your Connecticut yankee arse you’ll never see it again!” He starts this sentence in his head but sometime during it – somewhere around ‘my girlfriend’ he is standing up, chair clattering behind him, dal backhanded across the room into a painted group of gopis hidden among the lotus blossoms around Lord Krishna; and shooting finger jabs into Ludi’s ‘third’ Eye. He is not just saying it aloud either. He is SCREAMING it. Everyone is staring.

Ludi goes white under his tan, looking suddenly much less Indian than the dhoti would have you believe. Looking in fact like Lou Schlesinger-Dunk Junior, the prodigal son of Peyton Place he is. Forks are suspended in space all over the room.

“I’m not a possession, Johnny,” announces Cindy quietly. “Don’t put me in your ego bag and fight the world for me.”

“Fuck’s sake!” says Johnny. Cindy was right of course, but he is fed up trying to be a saint or a sage, especially when half the other seekers were using that very dictum to bonk each other’s partners senseless. He glares at her. He wants to say – “If you’d given yourself, to me, completely, like I have to you, maybe I wouldn’t get so touchy about claiming you!” 

What he actually says is, “Yeah, well. Fuck this.”

The whole room is still gaping. But he is aware only of the two of them, in the same gulf they’d always been. In that Weymouth hotel, on the beach, in the Bristol cinema, at Ashton Gate, up that blind Cardiff alley.

“We’re all one in God,” she whispers. 

“We’re all one,” agrees Buzz.

“That may work for gurus, Cindy. But I’m human. I need you. And I can’t share you with tossers. How would you feel if I took up some of the offers I’ve been getting with some these ‘pilgrims’ here?”

Several ‘chicks’ look abashed, under long concealing hair. One free loving hippie double-thinker even asked the bemused Master yesterday if ‘not sleeping together’ as a spiritual discipline meant just not actually sleeping in the same bed with the partners you’ve just had promiscuous sex in them with. 

Cindy stares at Johnny as if awakening from a trance. She sees this man claiming her, offering himself heart and soul in exchange. It doesn’t feel like possessiveness. It feels like love. Commitment. Humility. Humiliation. Self-abnegation. A gift. And all sort of other holy words. She is profoundly touched. And more grateful than words can express. 

But it’s no good. She meets his eye and the fear and hope there, through a blossoming tear. “The truth is Johnny, I wouldn’t mind.” She sighs, wishing she were dead or unloved rather than hurting him like this. She grabs his arm. “No. Not because I believe in all that gang-bang-thank-you-ma’am-isn’t-it-God bullshit… It’s just –”

“We’re all one,” beams Buzz.

Johnny feels unsure of his feet suddenly.  

“You’ve got to understand. Before the Pill, a girl could say No. Now it’s like she’s got to say Yes even if she means No or Maybe or Later or I Don’t Know. And even that’s fine if she loves the boy and the boy is saying Yes too. But he often isn’t.”

“I’m saying Yes! I said Yes when we came East. Yes yes yes! To you, the baby, everything.”

“No. You said, ‘Ye-es’– to me, ‘Well okay,’ to the baby. And ‘No’ to Everything.”

“What?”

“Say Yes, Johnny. To Everything. Come all the way with me.”

The earth is spinning away from under him. He grabs the outed truth as the only thing that he can stand on.  “But I don’t want Everything. I just want Us.” He reminds himself that she is pregnant; that her body and feelings are not just hers. “The Two of Us. And our baby.” His voice fades away. Him and Cindy go back such a long way. How far? 1962?  Tears splash onto his face. He realises in detached surprise that they are hers as well as his. He chokes. “Aren’t I enough for you?”

“You can’t put a limit on Yes.”

“But – all those years? All my loving? Is that nothing?”

“Not nothing. A great deal. But not Everything.” 

“I was Everything to you for years.  Has that gone?”

She speaks very quietly. “You know it has.”

He flings himself away from her. “Do I? Do I really? And what about the baby?”

A door opens and Master is standing there, watching them. Johnny feels the atmosphere in the room change.

Master beams. “Vat is happening, please?”

“We’re all one,” beams Buzz.

Johnny’s eyes remain on Cindy’s, imploring, urging. Cindy returns his look, eyes dying under his.

“Children, vat is happening? Speak.”

Ludi takes off his cap and speaks. “Johnny’s lust and anger are trying to possess Lucinda and her baby.” He looks up, to see if he has given the right Answer.

“Our baby,” whispers Johnny.

“And is that making you happy, Johnny Ji?” beams Master.

“No,” sighs Johnny at last, eyes still on Cindy. “But this might.” And he wrenches the skullcap from Ludi’s hands. Ludi opens his mouth to protest and Johnny stops his mouth with it. 

Everyone except Cindy and the Master – and beaming Buzz – shrink back into their little selves, directed there by self-preserving fear.

Johnny hears himself saying, “I think the Sixties just disappeared where I stuffed Ludi’s cap.”

A long silence in which everyone present looks like they are at the vertiginous crisis of their lives to date.  With the singular exception of Master, who appears as blissfully poised as usual and waits a long time before breaking the deadlock. 

“And does this action with Ludi’s cap make you happy?” asks Master.

Ludi makes furious noises behind his gag.

“He’s speaking to me, not you,” says Johnny. Then, to the Master, “Yes!”

“Yes?”

“No. Not really.”

“And vat would make you really happy?” beams the Master.

*

“Happy?” asks Suddenly Vividly Present Dad.

We have moved recently retreated to the Wicked Stepmotherland and gone out As A Family for A Walk Up The Mountain.  

They have decided to check how I’m coping. If only because they have begun to realise this return to Wicked Stepmother’s Tribe was a Huge Mistake. If I say I am happy they can at least pretend that they did it for me (and the dog currently stranded amid the alien fern) and then blame me for it.

I am relieved as we climb above the densely-populated terraces of the valley into Gypsy Lane atop the hill onto the lower slopes of the Mountain but I am still keeping my distance from all the soppy doggy stuff, especially when AD and SM start to hold hands in the wild lanes of Wicked Stepmother’s girlhood. I go missing in the woods, alive with Welsh wood ants, homesick for the little stingers I’d known in boyhood Somerset. Somertown was no picnic as you know but at least it my no-picnic. Plus Cindy had lived there and left a thousand memories and a room that used to be hers. She would have laughed with me when I nervously laughed at the ludicrous names on the signs on the way up the mountain – Pantyfarteg!  – not silenced like desperate Dad in case it offended the new neighbours. 

Happy Ha! 

*

“And vat would make you really happy?” beams the Master to a rubber faced Johnny.

“Cindy.” He sighs. “Always Cindy.”

Cindy is looking at him, a princess in some marble tower. Sublime. Unattainable. Cold.

Johnny states the fact. “But it’s all over now. She’s gone. And now I have nowhere to go.”

Master beams. “There is always another path. Like in that very spiritual film The Sound of Music: ‘when a door closes, the Lord opens a window.’

Several pilgrims choke on this unexpected view of that soft-Sixties chick-flick but the word ‘path’ makes Johnny picture the track he’d walked on earlier, searching for schools and toilet rolls. Now the shoe-less schoolgirl walks into Johnny’s head along it. Or is it their own child, which Cindy wants to name ‘Love’, in ten years, picking her way through the rubbish? Johnny turns to the Master. The Master beams, nodding, as if he knows. Johnny wonders, amazed, if he does. “I wanted to help this little girl today. Find her some shoes...”

Master’s head is wagging. He smiles, nods. 

Johnny’s fists began to relax. “I wanted – to give that child the world.”

The Master throws up his hands as if something has been decided. He claps them together once, as if in closure and praise of some noble achievement on Johnny’s part. “Lucy, you must leave the ashram with Johnny Ji today.”

“But Master-”

The Master held up his hand. “Johnny Ji must take you to maternity hospital in Bombay. When the child comes, you must be together. You have two hearts now – yours and your baby’s. Afterwards, when your hearts are clearer, if you wish, Cindy make my ashram your home.” He wagged the fingers of his long bony hand – a hand spiritual and mortal at once. “But Johnny must go back to his English education.”

“Go back?” gasps Johnny.

The Master looks stern; and loving. “Ah Johnny Ji, the Path is not an escape from the world. It lies through the world. Vat can you do for that so needful schoolgirl at this moment? Nothing. Vat will your child with Cindy gain from you drifting here, unhappy with-without Cindy? Finish your own school first. When you have learned, then you can teach.”

“Here?”

The guru wagged his head. “Anywhere. That is happiness. The search for God and the search for Love are identical and God Man has said so since the dawn of time. The search for our real family and real self is the search for God. Or in perfect words of perfect Sufi 

poet, Hafiz,

“One searching heart was sorely grieving, though in his heart – was God

And so he cried to God while still concealing.”

“I see,” whispered Johnny. For once, he really did.

“Love Cindy and you become Cindy. Love God and you become God. And Johnny Ji?”

“Master?”

“Please to remove constriction from Ludi Ji’s mouth. His silence has properly concentrated all minds here. But it is now I think time for him to breathe again...”

 

Chapter Thirteen

Michelle

 

Johnny is flying Pakistan International Air first class in amazing luxury watching a 16mm in-flight movie. He is making up for six months of Indian austerity. He watches his lost English summer, the last summer of the Sixties, on a flickering monitor. He tries to hear its racket on a hollow tube headset. The film is a retrospect of the decade and is called You Say You Want A Revolution? There is lots of newsreel footage of ‘his’ generation marching about, singing folk songs and chanting. (“If you carry pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow… or maybe you are.”) Now they are rallying in Hyde Park.

His mother’s tinny voice in a Karachi airport phone booth – hallucinogenically far away and mother-close at the same time – replays in his head. “You’ve passed you’re a levels! Well done, son. Now do something with them after throwing the garage away! Have you any idea how much this call is costing us?” 

He has. Johnny is marching home from six months in India, without his bike, which he had to sell for the ticket. And on the first class screen, in a white summer dress, Michelle Jagger is reading a poem at the rally.

“Are you gonna be quiet or what? I want to read something for Brian.” 

Brian Jones is dead! And what the hell’s happened to the Revolution? Will ‘Mr Jagger’ sweep back his elbow length hair any minute and tell his Hyde Park Assembly they’re letting the Stones down, the Old School down and his frilly nylon panties down? 

The movie cuts to Rees Mogg from the Times calling Jagger ‘A right wing libertarian – a butterfly we don’t need to break upon a wheel.’ Ten to some tumulus dweller from the Daily Malice who seems to be confusing the Summer of Love with the 1967 Foot and Mouth Epidemic. To Johnny, for all the pantomime menace and Regency buck frills, Jagger now sounds more like a Headmaster than a ‘head’. ‘Is it me that’s changed or him?’

What Johnny doesn’t know is that Jagger has, since that footage, endured an electric end of Sixties shock at Altamont in December. And as the many-headed sans culottes monster he once celebrated deconstructing the pavements of the Sorbonne – Sous la pave, la plage – threatened to storm his personal champs des Elyssés, Professor Michel Jaguerre– looking justifiably terrified at losing control of his class – tried appealing to their better nature. “C’mon people, we can be cool…” Then, fatally, addressed the violence by hurling his Stones into Street Fighting Man. Yes (as many commentators will forever purr with approval) the Stones could always paint it black, always curry the darkness, spend the night, let it bleed. But could they handle it when it turned on them and really was this the time to do it? All hell’s angels (employed by the Stones as Security) broke loose, armed with snooker cues, beating the naked hippy to death. “Cool it Keith, someone’s hurt in the crowd.” And Jagger retreated, forever, with the Sixties shrunk to a tiny tail between his legs. You almost felt sympathy for the old devil. 

Especially when you heard the penitential laments of the Stones’ immediate post-Beatles years on heart-piercing hippy long players: Wild Horses; Moonlight Mile; Sway; I Got The Blues, Sister Morphine; Can You Hear Me Knocking? You Gotta Move; Can You Hear The Music? Winter, Hide Your Love, 100 Years Ago, Coming Down Again, Angie…  all those dreams gone up in smoke; the starry magic on their blanched Stetson angel trip through the fallen heavens (despite the bathetic knee-jerk fart of pantomime sulphur at the end Star Fucker.) All heralded by their hippest album, the Brian Jones heyday collection Through The Past Darkly, a much fitter elegy for their fallen angel than Jagger’s Jekyll and Hyde Park shilly-shelleying.  At last, as leaders by Beatles-default, they took some responsibility. 

All too late to stop the death-blow at Altamont. Would the Beatles have played All You Need Is Love? Would it have worked? It did once. 

The Stones’ Mick-Taylored Keef-at-home Americana masterpiece Exile on Main Street seemed to mark the moment the Stones abdicated, with a blues sigh and a back to bad boy groove, their own attempt to lead the Sixties somewhere.

But the Sixties didn’t really end at Altamont. They ended, out of time and out of money, on April 10 April, 1970, the eighth anniversary of pre-Beatle Stu Sutcliffe’s death, the date of that PAUL IS QUITTING THE BEATLES headline in between the release of the Beatles’ last single and the break up album. Let It Be sing the imminent ex-Beatles on both, the posthumous album recorded ‘live’ a year before and over-produced just in time for the Beatles funeral by the year-late Phil Spector. The last, and only, Seventies Beatles LP released, though actually recorded in January 1969, before Abbey Road, and certainly every Beatle’s least favourite Beatle album (at least until Macca produced it properly as Let It Be Naked and Peter Jackson retold it as Get Back half a century later.) 

The Sixties started with a Kennedy bang. They climaxed with the Summer of Love. And they ended with a whimper on April 10 1970, The real Day (with all due respect to Don MacLean and Buddy Holly) the Music Died. I was doing my paper round as usual. I shoved the biggest pile (The Mirror) in my bag first, teenage half-asleep as usual, suddenly SEEING the headline.  PAUL IS QUITTING THE BEATLES. (Not seeing the secondary headline An Early Swing To Labour… but Tories still hold the lead.)  I’d been playing Abbey Road non-stop since Christmas like a continuation of my Beatle childhood, ready to take it like some kind of pop Dante’s guide from here into the hell of puberty, and suddenly, right in the middle of the beginning, my Wanna-Beatle story was over- 

Somewhere since the Sixties, between the end of free school milk and Thatcher’s announcement that ‘There Is No Society. There are Individuals and There Are Families.’ (Families yawning with a huge generation gap in our case) – between The Conservative Party at Prayer and The Conservative Party just at it – that hippy trinity of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité mislaid that vital third revolutionary aspect, the holy spirit of the other two. Which black hole propelled our I-land nation inexplicably and interminably (at least until 2024) to an anti-meritocratic return to the entitled Eton cabinets of the Fifties.  Only without the ideal of public service. Love. (All You Need. Your Neighbour as Yourself. God.) On which hang all the other commandments….Without which, all the tinkling cymbal small print in Leviticus and Deuteronomy means absolutely nothing- 

*

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

Is that someone’s mobile? If it is, I’ll do to you what a Brighton Comedy Club Stand Up and my daughter once did to me; left her mobile on a front row seat so that when I rang her from outside the Cambridge Arts Theatre, having just watched an Ancient Greek Tragedy in Ancient Greek, instead of my beloved daughter I got the comedian being extremely witty at my expense and my frantic responses – WHO IT THAT? IS SHE ALL RIGHT? On speaker. My pity and terror broadcast large to the Comedy auditorium amid uproarious laughter.  If you’ve got to go to the loo in the middle of my show, Edinburgh, please take your phone and idiot Father with you. And be grateful you have one who’s calamitously Present, even if sometimes at the wrong moments.

*

… Where was I? Oh, yeah the generation gap that Thatcher replaced with the gap between all individuals (and whatever she meant by the ‘families’ Cindy and I needed to get away from but without the generation gap as a collective way out) the public service that became the self-service check out; the self-centredness of receiving a phone call during someone else’s performance-

*

 

Is that cymbal still tinkling? Is that someone’s mobile flickering in the dark, filming me as I lose the plot? Please turn it off, if I’m not. And if you are. And if you’re here… 

*

Where were we? Beatle was heading for that Paul for one and one for Paul Let It Beatle of which the others accused the album and film., having already swung out of the Sixties on the swansong wings of his four for four solo photographic studies in a Double White album in 1968, always ahead of his time, already looking back at his own legacy in that heavenly sunset over Abbey Road. He was moving on, over the zebra crossing, as always. All of them had left the band by that zebra crossing except Paul, who was only thinking /writing/singing constantly, morbidly, about it (the Long and Winding Road, Let It Be etc etc.) They’d always moved on from Yesterday into Tomorrow Never Knows and now they were moving on from that too.  

Moving on into a new decade. The Spectres, stuck at No. 13, with a roof going down like a Led Zeppelin, weren’t.

Here’s why. A Wilsonian housing development called Poulson’s was slum-clearing the valley floor under our doorstep, right under Stepmother’s nose. You could get a nice little box of ticky tacky, if you were poor enough. Stepmother never liked the Sixties. Now, in 1970, she wanted us to move there and applied for the grant. We didn’t get it, naturally, and besides, half way through completion, the development was arrested – as was Mr Poulson – by a sudden running out of all that mad Sixties money. Even Super Roy at No. 11 couldn’t stop it running through his fingers. The Sixties were done at last. Not because the love ran out. Because the money ran out. 

All you needed was money, then, after all. After all the love anthems, it was money that made the Sixties go round. 

To be fair, the Beatles never made that hippy distinction. They made money like they made love and music: like a cornucopia running over.  (They just didn’t care too much for money.)  Until the Pepper-horns of plenty hit a ceiling we’d spent a decade thunder-birding, moon-chasing and sky-kissing. And there was a complete change of housing policy. Instead of Slum Clearance, the Government got the Ronan Point. The Sixties skyscraper was too high and founded in sand, like that windblown melody treading the trampoline drum and bass of Don’t Let Me Down. 

The government suddenly noticed how solidly built our wonderful Victorian slums were. Half way through demolition, they got back to basics and started to rescue them instead.  Except Hiraeth was too posh to be rescued. Dad had damaged his back doing overtime to lift us off the valley floor – again – and Step-mum had worked 8 days a week at Step-grandfather’s betting shops and from home at all her own little businesses – so we didn’t qualify. We were stuck with Victorian foundations, a house Absent Dad had modernised from top to bottom and a leaking 19C slate roof. 

*

I’d been pretending to be a Beatle since I was seven, quarrelling with other seven year olds about who wasn’t going to be Ringo, like the argument about who wasn’t going in goal. The Beatles were now returning the compliment in the recording studio by behaving like 7 year olds themselves. 

“I want to be John.”

“I’m John. You can be George on The Ballad of John and Yoko.”

“George doesn’t play on The Ballad of John and Yoko. I want to be Paul.”

“I’m Paul. You can be Ringo.”

“I’m always Ringo. He doesn’t play on the The Ballad of John and Yoko either. I’ll be George on Old Brown Shoe.”

“I’m George. Where are you going, John?”

“I don’t play on George’s records anymore. I’m off to start a proper revolution with Yoko.”

“You spend more time with her than you do with us! And when you do turn up, you bring her with you.”

“See this?”

“A V sign?”

“Yeah. Peace off!”

Lennon’s late gold-standard 1969-1970 comedown then takes this All You Need Is Love hippy dream liberation into a sort of plainsong beyond itself. Instant Karma Mother Love Cold Turkey Working Class Hero Isolation. The dream is over. Face the truth in the real world. It’s glorious clear-sky down to Earth music. But so was all his giddy hippy head-in-the-clouds swaying at the top of his Sixties sky-scraper. I loved the hoarse vocal depths of Don’t Let Me Down on the rooftop of the Apple building on January 30 1969, chord-shuffling uncertainty rooted on heart-leaping Paul and safety-blanket Ringo. Much more than his announcement from an even giddier place at a Beatles board meeting on May 18 1968 (three days after launching Apple) that he was Jesus.  And for all his (and Ringo and George’s) late-Beatle reluctance, I preferred the happy-again, energised and excited again, goonish show-stealer lead Beatle John of that mischievous rooftop farewell concert, rocking their cavern in the sky with his three boyhood beat-mates again, to almost anything. 

Hey Edinburgh. Who remembers Lennon’s Last Word(s) as he stared down the barrel, the black hole, of Mark Chapman’s infinite mediocrity?  Was it God! Help! Imagine! O Yoko! Mother! We Are All Christ and We Are All Hitler and the Miracle in this Age is Communication!?

 

No, the Beatles’ hard edge– the one that wanted to put Hitler on the cover of Pepper, the one that sent its MBE back, the hard Rain-soaked Yes is the Answer, anything-but-phoney, shot out of the limelight (for ‘being a phoney’) by a phoney MC signing himself ‘John Lennon’ (excuse the tears, here) the dear beautiful Boy’s last words as the bullets exploded into his open heart were- I’ve been shot! 

The late plain style.

*

“You can’t put an old head on young shoulders, boy” Suddenly Vivid Present Dad announces as he pats my teenage head like he is trying to stop me growing. Or standing up on my own hindlegs. He tries to pick me up like I’m the puppy he remembers and I resist. “Why can’t you be more like your sister?”

“Cindy?” My heart leaps.

“Special!”

“No thanks.”

The Ugly Sister starts whimpering.

“You’ve upset her now!”

“I couldn’t care more, Dad.”

“What does that mean?” Dad gets down the collar and lead from the hatstand. “Why do never say anything straight?”

“Because, if I do, you whack me round the head and send me to my room.” (I had a room then.)

“Try me.”

“Young shoulders like mine have had enough of old dogs like you on their backs” Not to mention old dog collars and ties.

Whack. “Get to your room.” Clink.

*

I remember what I meant to say when that possible mobile distracted me, Edinburgh. It’s that our generation seemed not to turn into our parents as regards the generation gap. Our children are more like friends than adversaries from another planet (the Beatle-friendly Britpop of their teenage years for instance)  much to Stepmother Mary’s fury and despite her telling us and them all our lives to date that we were spoiling them, failing to beat them,  mis-feeding them, mis-educating them, not training them properly for a hateful world, supporting them with love as well as with boundaries, not treating them like she treated her dog. I’m not saying our children didn’t put Larkin’s poem about your parents fucking you up on the outside of their teenage bedroom door like a print of Delacroix’s Liberty leading the people; I’m saying we laughed with them about its hilarious accuracy and tried not to fulfil its wryly miserable inevitability too much. We wanted them to grow up and find themselves and a Someone who loved them in the way that even love-struck parents can’t. Which means ‘She’ can leave home but still want to come back for some more with partners, career support requests, what’s app photo diaries, grandchildren. 

*

Meanwhile back, in Swinging Labour London, Prime Minster Harold Wilson, on an axis bold as love, changes the constitution. Well, you know, we all want to change the world. Harold swings like a man who believes Beatle Britain has surely replaced the Hampstead Heath Wealth-Preservation Society as the Natural Party Of Government. He gives long-haired 18-year-olds the vote, a progressive (if two years delayed) response to the agitation of 1968.  His 1964-1970 government has Liberally rewritten the nation, its most radical rewrite since Attlee if not Thomas Cromwell. The list is iconic and oddly unsung since: repealing the Death Penalty; repealing Habeas Corpus; refusing (unlike the rest) to join the USA's series of Macarthyite invasions; and passing instead, to an uplifting Beatles soundtrack, a rainbow of Racial, Gender and Sexual Equality Acts; not to mention founding an Open University; expanding free student grants and free University education; securing for the first time in history, an inspiring leadership of by a post War Grammar-school educated Common Man of culture, fashion, popular music, business and government.  

‘Hampstead’ Heath’s reactionary ‘Answer’, supported by Stepmothers everywhere, is: Give Them All A National Service Short Back And Insides Like In The Fifties. 

Harold banks on the international service generation he’s just enfranchised to help see that one off. And guess who wins the election?

Johnny forgot to vote (and wasn’t going to vote for Harold anyway because of the police violence at Grosvenor Square) and can’t adjust. In his mind he is eternally riding north from Cindy’s maternity bed up into the southern Himalayas’ heart-rending star-splashed loneliness. When he came down out of that silence into Karachi airport, it was like the opening of the Double White album in head-cans at ear-splitting volume. But Heathrow was much worse: everything clean and hard and jagged. In Bedminster, he carries India, Cindy and the Cindyless silence round like a black hole. And this nonstop 1970s-Beatle row going on over the airwaves about money doesn’t sound much like Love’s cheeky choirboys either. Johnny sighs. He went to India to find a new Eden and lost Eve there. Now even her music has gone. 

*

A serpent had wriggled into the Apple garden, Edinburgh, and it was tearing the Fab Force and all it had achieved apart. It would rather rule the Seventies, without them, than serve at No. 2 in their Strawberry fields. What was its name, this serpent?  John? Paul? George? Ringo? Yoko? Simon? Garfunkel? Jack? Eric? Ginger? Jimi? Noel? Mitch? Van? All the other torn a-parts of perfect Sixties wholes?  Street Fighting Sir Mick, the sin-creased gargoyle on the Beatles’ knave?  Money? (as if they needed more money) Alan Klein? (More of him in a minute) Bye bye Love; ’ullo the ’orrible oo gleefully thundering Won’t Get Fooled Again (as if Dark Keith Moon or The Artful Roger or The Ox or even the pillboxed Pete that came out of a gin-genie jar had ever been Fooled on a Hill up a Cross of Love and Peace in the first place.)

Yes, all those. But it was Ego, man – and his name is legion.

Ego and Allen Klein. Nothing rhetorical about that serpent’s role among the Apple trees. On Not Guilty (100 unsuccessful takes by the Beatles and still no cigar until George recorded it himself ten years later) the boy Beatle’s gently weeping rebuke of his fellow litigants Lennon and McCartney during that terminal Beatles-in-Court period, George declares himself “not guilty” of upsetting“the Apple cart” and, in comparison to Klein, you could extend that not just to the other Three but to all those listed above. Klein was the snake in the grass; the maggot in the Apple; the devil in the managerial detail: and his 1969-1970 bank-robber custody of the band is a black hole that casts into sharp relief both the oft-missed sweetness and light that emanated from those genuinely more diffident Beatle-daddies Brian Epstein and (post-Epstein) Paul not to mention the occasional total colossal blindness of the band’s original daddy Blind John Lennon. Visionary in one Eye; myopic in the other two.

When Paul took the other three to court in 1970, objecting to John’s maudlin short-sighted-self-abusing-hero-worshipping-absent-father-substitute-seeking recommendation (to George and Ringo who trusted John’s enthusiasm in this as much as they had his more lukewarm lead about appointing Epstein in 1962 and who had always looked up to him generally) that they appoint Klein as manager, all their multi-million Beatle assets went into receivership. Paul, the deputy king ‘second boss’ turned enemy plaintiff, saved them a Beatle fairytale fortune by doing so. As a result, Klein, in this the indisputable Fifth Beatle of so many (Stu Sutcliffe, Brian Epstein, George Martin, Klaus Voorman, Billy Preston, Uncle Tom Cobbley etc) stopped earning 20% of all the Beatles owned and in due course went to prison for his shady manoeuvres to snake-suck even more into his black hole. And while quietly applauding Sir “you live with straights who tell you, you was king” Paul, Edinburgh, perhaps start applauding with your other hand as well – I know Paul then smugly blotted dozens of potentially classic albums (made with his other half and solo) with silly love songs doodling glibly all over the studio and being so effortlessly multi-talented instead of showing his genuine heart – but, by the original agreement, all four shared equally in their solo sales as well as their Beatles sales. Ex-Beatle Ringo sold the least (though he got to sing many more top ten hits than Beatle Ringo did) but he got an equal share of the other three’s greater income. Paul’s singles and albums basically helped bankroll the other three (relatively!) lesser earning Beatles. Paul was the one who left last and wanted the End least; he’d spent many fraught months and years trying to keep the Beatles flying. But with a crook for a manager and his short-sighted-Klein-blinded-daddy-craving-mirror-opposite-self-abusing-twin John not returning to the band, he had no other options. 

In fact, they all left before Paul (and probably because Paul kept telling them, albeit brilliantly, how to play their own instruments)  Ringo left during the White album in 1968. George (with two wacky solo albums already under his belt) during the Get Back/Let It be sessions in January 1969. John (with a solo band and three Joko albums already under his belt) after Abbey Road in August 1969. You can see all this on their body language on the Zebra crossing cover of that farewell album. Paul finally joined them in the Ex-Beatles in April 1970, despairing of John’s return. The only difference in Paul’s Leaving was that he announced it to the world and to fanfare that quiet-genius-next-door at home commercial solo album, McCartney, seriously compromising the simultaneous release of Let It Be. 

Let It Be excitingly announced itself as “a new phase Beatles album, live for many of the tracks.” The minimal sleevenotes alleged “in comes the warmth and the freshness of a live performance; as reproduced for disc by Phil Spector.”  In fact, as we all began to learn, it was not a new phase but a project that had been on the shelf and/or festering in Phil Spector’s brain amid the Beatles endgame poison since January 1969. And not just over a year old but not very live either, albeit vintage Four-Fabulous where it is. And it did have a glorious Second Coming half a century later as the sequel to Lord of the Rings, when Peter Jackson Got Back its original five hours of magic in 2022. 

Jackson’s Get Back film confirmed how much John’s abdication as group leader derailed them; how they all, even Paul (especially Paul) hated Paul being in charge, for all his multi-musical genius and energy,; how third Beatle boss George chafed under Paul’s second Beatle boss half of the Lennon-McCartney double act much more than he ever did under his guitar buddy/fellow ‘underground’ rocker/Love-elder/ Rishikesh-fellow-seeker John; how John knew this with a nurturing male role years ahead of its time and at sweet odds with his abrasive persona when he privately told Paul they had “left George’s wounds festering and not offered him any bandages”, which Paul accepted; (George sulks at/ bickers with Paul all day, tells him ‘I’ll play my guitar any way you want me to or I won’t play at all, whatever will please you’ but it is John he goes to with ‘I’m leaving the band now’ ‘When?’ says John, shocked and stunned(…very stunned) ‘Now’ says George leaving. See you round the clubs.”) How once John stopped absenting himself – physically, mentally, narcotically – from the Let It Beatle project and from George’s concerns (about the awful sound of the Twickenham sessions; about being heard personally) it began to flourish and everyone to smile again, with Paul happily running the sessions as John’s comedy-partner second boss.  But apart from that default fabulous Four for One and One for Four finale, the warmth had luked. The Dream was Over. At the end of Abbey Road was a crossroads: John turned left; Paul turned right; Ringo turned back and George...kept going.

Lennon-McCartney wrote some of the most revolutionary music ever written. And the happiest. And, with Harrison, the loveliest. Love as a political liberation (“say the word and you’ll be free”), love as personal revelation (“the movement you need is on your shoulder”) love as a mystical force (“with our love we could save the world”.) It was the blissful fusion of opposites, counter-parts and unexpected wholes to fill the Albert Hall. Upbeat sad short-story Paul the most supreme melodist but downbeat poet rasping rocker John the composer of the great three part harmonies (This Boy; Yes It Is; Because.) George doing them both (and Frank Sinatra in the process) with Something. And, being Love’s music, it plays on from heart to heart, and each new generation catches it and sings along. It was rock n roll, the heartbeat of the Sixties, the catchiest art music ever. It did not set out to be Shakespeare but then neither did Shakespeare. It was beat music with a Grammar School education. When Sinatra takes his trilby off to it – the “greatest love song” of his fifty years – and he sang a few – you know they had that Something She didn’t even know she had. Yet there was a hole in the heart of the happiest Beatles record. And in the end, it was the hole that found Lennon’s heart on December 8 1980. It was there at windblown peak of their great signature album, which ends… after all the fuss …in an Albert Hall-sized black hole. It was there at the end; it was there at the beginning.

Ego. My shell.

*

It’s where we are now, Edinburgh. A black box in the dark. 

*

“A face as long as a coffin, James. What’s up?”

“Cindy, you’re home!” 

She is, only not here in Hiraeth, somewhere far away in India. The sky is tangerine and a warmth shimmers around her. She is radiantly pregnant, about to pop. I show her the Mirror. Her face blanches.

“Oh. So the dream is over.”

And she’s right. It’s the Seventies. A bucket of cold water over our Sixties bed. Paul’s lyrics stop meaning anything. John cuts off a decade of Beatle growth, gets a short, back and B sides, and stops being funny. England lose the World Cup. Wales never have it. Pan’s People become Legs and Co. The Stones emigrate. Legs disappear. The Mersey Sound and the Internationale become Standard English and National Service. Jesus Christ Superstar becomes Andrew Lloyd Weber. 

All You Need Is Love becomes The Me Decade.

“If that’s what happens when we wake up, what’s the point? There’s no magic, no cuddle, no love, nothing. Cindy, the dream’s not over if we still want it.”

“Oh spare me the Lennonisms, please! I’m not your Mother!”  

She turns away with a Munch scream on her face and I have a horrible premonition that she is going to lose the baby. And then I wake up.

I wake up to the sound of Paul’s ringing gospel piano with its message about Mother Mary: And in my Aunt Rdognas, she is standing right in front of me. Fairy Godmother Mary is standing right in front of me. IN my Aunt Rdognas! Yeah yeah yeah. She’s still here! Don’t you know it’s gonna be… all right! (That is I think it’s Not Too Bad.) After all… Even though. It’s The End. 

The news was full of it. “We can’t stay Boys forever. We gave you a three cool cat choir, great clunking guitar solos and a Cavernous drum. We gave you the perfect two minute pop-song. We gave you the perfect four minute rock movement. We gave you heart-winged mind games, melodic bass lines, backward drum fills, a hand full of perfect notes. We gave you The Inner Light Programme and the Get Back Home Service. We gave you intergalactic hippy tribute bands from Oldham. We gave you that Something you never realised you had. We gave you all those home-yearning bittersweet harmonies, that Apple-taste of a lost Eden. We gave you heart, mind, body and soul for ten years. You’ve got your telly and your own house and car and garage. Harold’s in his office. Ann Jones won Wimbledon. England won the World Cup. What more do you want?”

And Cindy breaks down and cries. Because instead of all she ever wanted, and all he told us – with such aching conviction – was all we needed – Love… He. Is leaving. Her. To the Fabless 70s. Clutching a pair of Beatle nylons and the crumpled flowers of a dream.  She cries for her lost innocence, her lost girlhood. She’s grown up with Him you see.

And I haven’t. Beatle left as I turned 13. So I was stuck in 1963-1969 because I’d never really been there, trying to sneak a look up the miniskirt of a generation I’d never really belonged to. I was still a 9 year old Beatlemaniac. I needed Help.

 

And I wasn’t going to get it.

Selecting some post-Pepper albums for my nineteenth nervous trip, dithering between Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Bowie’s Man Who The World, I stumbled across the lyric sheet on the stiff inner sleeve of that counterfeit quadruple Blue 1967-1970 and Red 1962-1966 album the ex-Fabs gave us instead of a Beatles Seventies. I checked out “In my Aunt Rdognas, she is standing right in front of me.” And I got a terrible shock. IN CAPITALS. 

It wasn’t ‘In my Aunt Rdognas’…  It was IN MY HOUR OF DARKNESS.

IN MY HOUR OF DARKNESS. 

IN MY HOUR OF DARKNESS. 

IN MY HOUR OF DARKNESS. 

IN MY HOUR OF DARKNESS. 

IN MY HOUR OF DARKNESS. 

IN MY HOUR OF DARKNESS. 

IN MY HOUR OF DARKNESS. 

IN MY HOUR OF DARKNESS. 

IN MY HOUR OF DARKNESS. 

IN MY HOUR OF DARKNESS. 

IN MY HOUR OF DARKNESS. 

IN MY HOUR OF DARKNESS. 

IN MY HOUR OF DARKNESS. 

IN MY HOUR OF DARKNESS. 

IN MY HOUR OF DARKNESS.

IN MY HOUR OF DARKNESS.

IN MY HOUR OF DARKNESS.

IN MY HOUR OF DARKNESS.

IN MY HOUR OF DARKNESS.

IN MY HOUR OF DARKNESS.

IN MY HOUR OF DARKNESS.

IN MY HOUR OF DARKNESS.

IN MY HOUR OF DARKNESS.

IN MY HOUR OF DARKNESS.

IN MY HOUR OF DARKNESS.

Where we are, Edinburgh. World without The End. Oh man.

Beatle was gone. And never was.

Mother Mary was gone. And never was.

Cindy was gone. And never was.

Aunt Rdognas was a hidden meaning that was never there. 

Michelle was my shell. ‘I love you I love you I love you’ was the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ without the love. The ‘within you’ without ‘the love between us all.’ The gained world with the lost soul. The nothing I was without the everything one is. The egg without the chicken. 

They were all the black loophole: the crack in my alibi; the puncture in the space helmet of my Astro-knight grail quest; the bullet hole in my story. I had shot myself in the Jesus foot with my own magic bullet. Now God was dead and magic no longer afoot. I was the devil, like Michel Le Stoned Economist du Sorbonne had always sneered. I had shot Kennedy after all. The Sixties Ball wasn’t just over; it had never been. Absent Dad and Stepmother Mary had been right all along. 

*

 

Cindy’s last written Word to me (I preserved her letters like holy scripture) was from a maternity clinic in India, dated April 10 1970. She told me to not to worry about Yesterday or Tomorrow Never Knows but just Be like the Beatles did in the present and stay true to the spirit of their 186 Songs of Praise. “Love, James. The only thing that really exists. The only thing that makes us true to ourselves; that makes us true to others; that increases when we share it. Love.” And in my mind, she blows me a kiss and smiles so Cindily as the Julia-wind whispers though her long long long (sometimes twice as long) hair. 

But then, at the end of Abbey Road, ding ding, the magic bus stops. And off steps my beloved She, the Beatle bird, the Girl in all the songs (the one walking past the Abbey Road sign on the back cover of the album); my Cindy; my belle: 

Into the black hole that opens up between the Prague Spring that incinerated itself in front of a Russian tank in January 1969 and the American moon mission that fails. 

Into the black hole Between Wilson’s Equal Pay Act of May 1970 and Thatcher’s ending of free school milk in October 1970. 

The black hole between Hendrix at the Isle of Wight in 1969 and Heath’s festival-busting legislation of 1970. 

The black hole between the Race Relations Acts of 1965/1968 and the Immigration Act of 1971. 

The black hole at the end of Pepper and in the middle of She’s Leaving Home in which vacuum I had spent years trying to be, with her. And which, now I am finally there, hurtled there by thundercloud Wicked Stepmother Mary, that dark day in February 1974, is all nothing. And Sergeant Pepper (busted down to Corporal and frog-marching the rest of the band in a chorus none of them dug), The Sun King, Lucy, Michelle, Mr Kite, The Hendersons, Prudence, Maggie Mae, The Walrus, Lovely Rita, Sexie Sadie, Aunt Rdognas, Penny Lane, Mother Mary, Polythene Pam, The Nowhere Man, Mean Mr Mustard, Eleanor Rigby, Father McKenzie, Julia, Martha, The Piggies, Mother Superior, Rocky Racoon, Bungalow Bill, The Fool on the Hill, The Blackbird, Her Majesty and the rest all go with her. Into the silent funeral. The Carnival – the Sixties Ball – was over.

And I never see her again.

 

 

Chapter Fourteen

What Goes On

What goes on is Cindy’s parting word to me before going to India, via Weymouth, in 1969. She was chopping up red and yellow peppers in her psychedelic kitchen, subcontinental substances I’d never seen in any of the Stepmother kitchens of my childhood. They looked like forbidden fruit, dangling down from incredibly high above. I thought we were going to smoke them. Then, after that (last) Supper, floating amid the angel songs and incense of dope smoke, she smiled down at me, like Mother Mary used to on Christmas Eve; her face a Nativity scene, Santa a gift-bearing Magus.  As I ‘crashed’ on her cool alternative-adulthood Sexy Sadie sofa, she Ringo-whispered “Good Night, Sleep Tight, Sweet Dreams. All You Need Is Love.” Then angeled upstairs with her Beatle Johnny. Love. She made that Word flesh, man. And I Love Her. So I believed her.  A first love that was going to last and could never die. But, as the Fabless Seventies led-zeppelined the blue skies over Abbey Road, it got heavier to say and even harder to do. 

In my black hole gap year of 1974, cut scarily loose from ‘Hiraeth’, dragging the long-overstretched leash, I follow her hippy trail to India, and get as far as that now Cindy-less top floor Weymouth flat (sous le pave le plage; sans le famille Spectre, le vacances parfaits.) Cindy and he had named it ‘Love-heights’ and the name was still there on the bell list but there was a Cindy substitute in there with him now. Johnny pokes his Jesus head and beard out of the window and tells me to fuck off. I shout up “Hey Judas!” until the Cindy substitute closes the window. And, after a winter of discontent on supplementary benefit in a seaside town that finally came up with some seasonal employment for me in March, I am still here the following July, like a misfunctioning Bounty advert.  He came in search of Paradise… and didn’t find it. I still haven’t found Beatleland. When I finally get here in Cindy’s hallowed sandal-steps, at University the following October, part of me honestly thinks she will be waiting for me in the Union bar. “Hello James,” she’ll grin with an overflowing Cup in one hand and The Answer in the other. “There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known… nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be… All You Need Is...” And I will leap forward with the Answer, “Love!” 

The University of the Esoteric Answer. Et in Arcadia Est. Fields of glorious discourse; no sacred cows; abstract concrete space-age pyramids spreading its white concrete abstraction wings over a hundred acres of discourse. All I need to change the world is the Transcendental Meditation Cindy recommended like the new LSD before she stopped writing me letters from India. That Revolution in my Head certainly seems to be making my own world a better place. I am somehow President of the Transcendental Meditation Society and I have girls queueing outside my room for our meetings like a Beatle assailed in his dressing room. And I have a Fab Three of first best friends along the corridor. 

There’s only one thing missing. She’s Not There. 

And the Lecturers don’t have the Answer She yearned and got a ticket to ride and left home for. So I learn instead to ask the “University questions” she did. Questions without an Answer I could ever nail in an essay. And then by the Second Year I learn to stop even asking the questions she did and SHOUT SLOGANS. Answers without question. I spend my days and weekends demonstrating shoulder to shoulder with ‘class-conscious’ workers (all those factory workers and bus drivers and jobbing carpenters who read Das Kapital rather than the Sun or the Daily Mail) and students and academics trying to dictate to the factory workers and bus drivers and jobbing carpenters who read the Sun or the Daily Mail how to act like Marx said proletarians naturally will. Demonstrating against Wilson’s Labour Government and for a Society. In hindsight, Edinburgh, with all the free tuition, grants, free prescriptions, worker’s rights, free childcare, affordable housing, nationalised industry, public spaces, park-keepers, bus conductors, public transport, amenities and a welfare state we had to play politics in and which anyone here under 50, Edinburgh, if you’re here, can only dream of (and with entitled toffs and utility-haemorrhaging shareholders now telling us “There Is None”) it looks like we had a Society already. 

I also had a 52 week lease in a campus bedsit but made the schoolboy error of going ‘home’ for the vacations, partly because I was hoping to persuade Absent and Step to step up their vacated parental means-tested ‘contribution’ to my grant but mostly because I just wanted to have parents supporting/proud of me in my scary quest as the first of our family to get to Uni. Naturally, when I got ‘home’ they’d moved to a new kennel-sized convenience box called God’s End on the other side of the valley with two bedrooms and stunning views of nine mountains. One bedroom for them; one for Special; none for Cindy and me; a quiet residential close crammed with spacious gardens, really awkward high gradient drives, roadside-parked second cars and no chimneys (the mighty Welsh coalfield had entered the vacuum of the post-coal era). I was admitted to a centrally heated carpeted hall which had been fitted out as a public library of Stepmother’s Diaries 1950-1975 (“My Struggle”) self-published and with three grumbling appendixes “What Are We Going To Do About Cindy?” “We Need To Talk About James” and “I Want To Feel Special” and which would provide a furious deconstruction of this show, Edinburgh, for any critical theorist sufficiently interested in either and willing to endure the most long-winded howl of self-pity in history, the entire 28 volume collection of “My Struggle” with illustrations by Absent Dad. Like her, Absent Dad started Welsh home-based University outreach revenge courses as soon as Cindy and I were gone, in all the things neither had been able to do because they’d had to leave school at 14; had to work all the hours God sends; had to raise a family: very much like a lot of other parents we knew who were actually bribing their children to work as hard at school as I did without asking; not punishing them for seeing education as a way of improving on their parents’ hard lot; parents much more proud of them for achievements lesser than mine. All of which self-improvement I was genuinely (and guiltily) supportive of and received in response an unremitting critique for three years of everything I shared with them of my own University radicalisation and then of its later reversal in the real world as a progressive farming correspondent for the Eastern Daily Mail, which Dad saw as a betrayal of the former radicalism he’d spent three years sniping at and Mum saw as both that and simultaneously too ‘woke’. Dad had absently converted Cindy’s Hiraeth  bedroom (which I had preserved as a Beatle shrine) into his new art studio: an exhibition of empty canvases called Hidden Meanings. This exhibition of his ‘blank’ period had now been shifted to the garage at God’s End and the blank canvases become skilfully executed Welsh industrial landscapes without human figures. The latest was a prophetic one called ‘Redundant.’ No matter how long I stared at it before going to sleep on the garage floor (because there was no room for me within) I couldn’t see him (or anything) in them. After two or three such ‘welcome home’ visits and the all too brief glow of family reunion that escalated into full-scale mutual vituperation, I got the message. And even if I hadn’t, Stepmother spelled it out for me in capitals on the door that faced the garage: NO STUDENTS; NO SPONGERS; NO STALINISTS. (Yes, comrade, she never appreciated the Siberia-wide distinction between the various revolutionary parties. Nor between spongers and a bright very studious twenty-year-old trying to read the preparatory reading lists for the whole of Western Literature from Gawain and the Green Knight to Finnegan’s Wake without waiting tables or pumping gas to help pay the rent.) 

I knew Something was up when my penance phone calls home started going like this.

“Cwmcysgodionamarw 666?”

“Hi Dad!… That was a good win for the City!”

Silence.

“Dad? … are you there?”

Silence. TV football in the background and Dad’s off phone drooling over Special. 

“Dad?”

“Who is this?”

“It’s James!”

Silence. 

“Dad?”

Silence. 

“James who?”

“Who is it Jaw?” Stepmother calls acidly from upstairs.

“No-one.”

“Aw. Aw kay. Night Jaw.”

“Night, Mare. I’ll just walk the dog and then I’ll come up. Where’s yer lead girl?”

Special pants. Click. Dial tone. Rrrrrrr. 

“Dad??”…

And then all too quickly it’s the autumn term of the Third Year in the Student Union debate. I have my hand in the air like the senior schoolboy I will always be and I’m sure everyone in the packed Lower Common Room can see the fingers trembling. And then, black holes appearing behind my eyes, the Speaker gives me the nod like Charles Brandon did the axeman at the execution of Charles II. 

My sheets fall from my hand. Like my essays, they have repeatedly failed to clinch the argument partly because I have tried to say everything at once; partly because of my thought-policing by Trotskyist Unpopular Front (TUF); partly because most of it is never quite what I want to say anyway and partly because the person I am not quite saying it all for (Cindy) is Not There. My safety-pinned punk T shirt (‘Never Trust A Hippy”) unrecognisably shaven face, slashed school blazer and spiked hair speaks louder than any of the action TUF has urged on me throughout the Second Year and any of the action TUF is yelling for now. If the Beatles were Cindy and I’s rebellion against the Dums and Mads; punk was my rebellion against Cindy, or rather her absence.  I look at the sheets in dismay; there is a slow handclap as a steward hands them to back to me.

I think sod this for a game of class soldiers, drop the sheets, grab the mic and bellow at the top of my voice, “Look at you all! See the luv there that’s sleeping…”  It is a bit like the agitprop that AgitSoc, my Street Theatre duo with Arnie, staged at Carrow Road last week, chanting “Cellophane flowers of yellow and green towering over your heeeeeeaaad” in the Barclay End. That had gone over the crowd’s head too.

The steward tries to take the mic back and I whack him with it, murderously, depositing him on the floor. I didn’t mean to hit him so hard. I didn’t mean to hit him at all. I thought he was Absent Dad, trying to Corporal Punish me back to my place. It happens a lot. I sing on, gaping at his face, “I look at the floor, and I see it needs sweeping”. TUF is announcing collectively that I have just been excommunicated, citing St Marx Chapter 7 verse 5, the chapter about religion being the opiate of the masses. They rush out a sequence of splintering statements saying that they do not wish to be associated with ANY non-Leninist violence, unless it is directed at Reactionary Elements In Their Own Party,” ie me. RUGSOC are carrying the bloodied steward, a fellow member of the University Rugby team, and organising a ruck and rolling maul for me outside.

I am told by the Student Major Generals that my punkish behaviour will be reported to my Dean of Studies and the Vice Chancellor. The Dean of Studies actually has me double-listed already as a possible First and, along with several Eastern European governments and the IRA, as a possible recruit/double agent but is ‘worried by my extra mural activities’. (‘We are worried by your extra mural activities’ is exactly what Cindy got told at Grammar School, so this both worries and pleases me.) Then everything changes.

“Bravo Abdiel!” Victoria La Dida calls through the hissing din, referencing our recent shared ‘Paradise Lost’ seminar, in her musical voice. So I am in heaven. And everyone else can go to hell. 

*

My class paper on John Donne is at 9am. Not so much a class-paper, more a cry for help. Arnold, my partner in AgitSoc, is grinning at me over his plastic coffee at the drinks machine. I put in a coin for a thin hot chocolate in a very thin plastic cup.  I grasp it by the tiny rim to avoid burning my fingers. 

Arny looks penitent. “So the Rugger Buggers didn’t drop-kick you into kingdom come last night? Sorry I couldn’t make your performance, by the way. I had an essay to finish.”

“I saved their wing three quarter from a council estate pogoing at one of our Punk discos last summer- I’m his hero so he called ‘mark’ on the loose mauling.”

“I don’t remember that.” 

I showed him the mouth-sized scar he’d left under my original mouth, pogoing it into my face during Safe European Home that summer. “You don’t remember anything, Arny.”

We enter Room 101 like it’s a dentist’s. Having been up all night, it’s still too early and I have to sit there staring at my class-paper like it’s just a “starting off point for a discussion” when God (and everyone else) KNOWS it’s a manifesto of my entire world view and an Apology (in the sense of Shelley’s Apology for Poetry but also, yes, just an APOLOGY, Edinburgh) for my entire existence. The pretty vacant students I will have to address keep flitting through the door and perch, not even aware I’m the one giving today’s class-paper from hell or in several cases even what it’s on (or what day it is) but still assembled like an Inquisition. 

“Did you have a good vac?” asks Dr Death, ‘putting me at ease.’ ie making me even more tense because unlike Burke and the privately educated members of the ‘clarss’, I don’t know that this means ‘vacation’. So I leave a vacation of my own. 

Dr Death tries again. “Jerry. You were going to give us a clarsspaper?”

I still am.” A few of the half-awake ones laugh.

“What?” frowns Burke. (son of Lord Burke of Gloucestershire)

“Forget it.” 

“He will,” wheezes Arnold. “And Jimes’ name is Jimes, not Jerry.”

“Or even ‘James’” reproves Burke.

Names (except mine evidently) are supposedly a big deal at The University of Esoteric Abbreviations. The Campus Street is called The Street. The Supermarket is called The Supermarket. The Library is called the Library. The Square is called The Square. The Lecture Theatre is called the Lecture Theatre. The Refectory is called the Refectory. The Student Bar is called The Student Bar. The University Village is called The Village. The University Administration is called The Council of Elrond. The English Civil War is called The English Revolution. My Music and Drama Act with Arnold is called AgitSoc. And my mind running off like this is called a nervous breakdown. 

I stare at my manically prepared paper and begin reading it out, unable to look up at the points I’ve indicated because my neck is a gripped vice. So I am effectively giving my class paper to itself. Somewhere out of the top corner of my cast down eye I am aware of Dr Death nodding and Cambridge-sneering “Mmm mmm Mmmm’ which disconcertingly speaks aloud to the whole world the Transcendental Meditation mantrum I abandoned as a decadent bourgeois indulgence when I joined TUF, but which is still lodged in my brain and which according to the TM ‘initiator’ who originally gave me the Word in Weymouth must be keep secret. So in this present psychotic episode I am even being held hostage by the me I was before the me I no longer am.

I (the TUF me I was before) reference the Doctor’s recent lecture on an England heading for Civil War: “a Christian island on the edge of a greater continent dividing against itself in a devastating Thirty Years War” - and how Donne reflects the social tensions in the faultlines of his deviant grammar, the illogical “I am none.” The class don’t understand but write it down anyway. They think they may need it for the exam. Burke, whose father, Lord Burke, owns a fair bit of Gloucestershire, doesn’t need the exam so doesn’t even do that.

“The new grammar affirms the self beyond the negation. ‘I am.’ It demands a society in which self is not negated by wealth or status, or lack of it. Like France’s description of Cordelia in Lear “thou are most rich being poor, most choice forsaken”

“Which itself references St Matthew’s “he who saves himself, loses himself but he who loses himself for love, finds himself,” sneers (and selectively quotes) the reverend Doctor.

I take a dizzy breath and push on. “Donne isn’t indulging in paradoxes and witty conceits for the showy sake of it – it’s not a display of wilful cleverness – but to express the essential paradox of life on earth-” 

The room starts to spin. No one except His Reverence (because it’s his lecture) or Arnold (because I’m his pal) appears to have the slightest interest in what I am talking about, or what Donne is writing about or in anything except the trivia they will exchange like a kit kat in the coffee bar afterwards or the bodily fluids this Adam and Evening.  “I…” (But who is that ‘I’; what sentence is he the subject of; what object has he here?…) “I…”

“Purcell’s musical grammar does that too,” chimes Victoria.

The room shifts back.

“At the Restoration,” Cambridge-sneers the Doctor. “I know one is slumming here from FAM, Veronica, adding some linguistic and literary ‘accomplishments’ to one’s Seventeenth Century Music finishing school but in EAS one is discussing Jacobean pre-Revolutionary language and culture….” 

“One still are discussing Jacobean pre-Revolutionary language and culture…” I thrust. I find the notion of a musical grammar beautiful and enchanting.

“It’s Victoria, Doctor, not Veronica. And one are actually doing joint FAM/EAS degrees-” 

We share a deviant grammar smile.

Rosa snorts. “Oh one are doing a joint degree are one? One had better watch ‘our’ Ps and Qs then. Or one will be the first one up against the wall AFTER THE REVOLUTION.”  Her eyes glint like steel, catching both the hothouse strip lighting within and the plate-glassed abstract-concreted sunrise without. She is doing a joint EAS/SOC (Sociology) degree, mentored to do so over the last three years by Dr Death, though entered only for Final papers in the first half of that degree, a misdirection by him that will cost her a First. She is a Catholic as well as a TUF party girl so has introduced me to Free Abortion marches on Saturdays; the Free and Loving Virgin Mary (with all the trimmings of bells, smells and smoke) on Sundays and The Bright Illusive Butterfly of Free Love On Demand 24/7.

Rosa is also currently ‘doing’, in this order: me, technically her long-standing  boyfriend, (though maybe not even technically now I’ve splintered out of TUF); a beautiful young Anarchist Polish Christ-boy in the First Year (doing a joint degree in SOC and Free Love Studies) who looks like Cat Stevens on the inside gatefold cover of Teazer and the Firecat and follows her round like a lapdog; an extremely butch rough diamond Lesbian Cable Street Commie/ Feminist Third Year from Liverpool who unpredictably tells Rosa she must stay with me as well as her (and everyone else) because I clearly love her and am good for her and that Love ain’t for keeping, sister; a pre-University boyfriend/ future husband who is lately back on the scene - I saw the two of them mundane-grocery shopping in Norwich together as we used to do and felt suddenly two thousand light years from virgin single pre-University Nowhere; a skeletal obsessive pre-University girlfriend who is also lately back on the scene - and urging Rosa to leave me, along with all men (ie rapists) – who keeps playing Rosa 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover (and it’s Garfunkel-horrible being on the wrong end of Paul Simon). And finally not one but two members of Faculty: her longstanding older man/ Leninist confessor Stan Rose from SOC and, more recently, Comrade Dr Death, MA Cantab, her ‘adviser’, who lent her his course reader “The Female Orgasm” to keep on our bedside table and who is probably feeling her up under the seminar table as we speak. And I don’t protest at any of this, comrade sister Edinburgh, because that would be patriarchal, possessive and bourgeois. I might have benefited from Cindy’s Macca-Lennonist hippy feminist peaceful revolutionary older sister insight (if I’d listened) and definitely from her loving sisterly care and attention; but her letters from India have mysteriously dried up. 

Victoria goes on. “Purcell and Donne were both ‘Royalists’ in your terms, Doctor, yet both write in a revolutionary new language. Purcell doesn’t restore a pre-Revolutionary language after the Civil Wars, any more than Donne resists one before it.”

Silence. There is a sigh of relief from several bewildered Burkes when a nettled Dr Death punctures it smugly. “Revolution, Veronica – may I call you Ronnie? Not Civil Wars.”

“No, because my name is Victoria. May I call you Dick? I said Revolution. I said pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary.”

“And after the Civil Wars.”

“Which ‘pre-Revolution’ self-evidently connotes!”

“This is boring,” pipes Burke hoarsely, musing one probably should have gorn to Oxford with one’s Eton messmates after all. One had enjoyed shocking one’s peers (some of them actual Peers) by applying to a space age University near a coast one could sail one’s yacht. But this was too much. 

Arnold laughs, “You can’t help being our University Village idiot, Edmund. May I call you Berk? As in Berkshire Hunt, rhyming slang for Cunt? (No offence). But the least you can do is let those of us who didn’t get all this on –

“A FUCKING SILVER PLATE AT BIRTH SEIZE OUR DAY. YOU HAVEN’T EVEN READ THE SET BOOK HAVE YOU!” I have taken over, in capitals. “BUT DON’T LET THAT STOP YOU PUTTING YOUR FEATHERBRAINLESS ETON BLADE IN AND PUNTING THE WHOLE DEBATE UP YOUR BLACK HOLE, ALONG WITH OUR LIFE CHANCES!” I am half way over the table with my Stranglers at his neck. My neck is punk-pink, with fury, and with the shock of self-revelation. 

Arnold manhandles me back in my seat. “Not one’s fault one was too dim to get in at Durhams, old boy” he grins at Burke. He has a lighter touch than me.

I lighten up, a bit. “This Burke regularly parks his yacht on the green outside of Arnold’s ground floor study bedroom in Norfolk Terrace, blocking his view of the river, everybody.  It’s not allowed or approved of – one’s heavily fined for it on a weekly basis - but one’s landed father directs among other empires a multinational electronics company so to one it’s just rent.”

This is no longer a seminar. It’s a lecture. 

“I see before me: a shopkeeper’s son; a miner’s son; a steelworker’s son; two keen girls whose mums and dads teach in State schools or work in the State sector. A staff nurse’s daughter and a doctor’s son. A car worker’s pride and joy; a probation officer’s foster son and a social worker’s estranged step-daughter. A high-flying female architect’s daughter whose mother went to a Secondary Modern and whose daughter came into this room via a comprehensive school in Leeds. There’s even one of those lucky 3% working-class females (as opposed to quite a lot of working-class males) who now get into Higher Ed. What is the world coming to? Well Donne you. And there’s me whose dad is a bus-driver in Wales and Arnold whose dad is currently in prison for the way he ran his business on the Goldhawk Road. Well Donne us.”

Silence. I look my classmates in the whites of their eyes for the first time. “I apologise –”

Burke waves his condescension; realises that peasants don’t know how to behave etc etc.

“Not to you,” - Arnold laughs because it’s our Brideshead Unvisited routine. “To Chars,” I nod at Arnold, who plays Charles in the routine. Arnold bows. “I thank you”. 

We bring the show to an end. “And we do apologise, genuinely, to everyone we’ve lumped in with this Burke. This has been a been a Boal-inspired Invisible Theatre by AgitSoc. We don’t want to suggest that you’re all Burkes, too illiterate and idle rich to do the preparatory reading. Nevertheless, and thanks for pretending, if you have, but we worked our whole lives to get here because we love Literature and no-one here except my old mate Arnold is remotely interested in my class paper on Donne’s metaphysics.”

Silence.

“You can’t say that!” exclaims Victoria.

“I just did!” 

“But you can’t!” She says ‘can’t’ with a disturbingly sexy, ladies’ college long a, instead of the short one I inherited from my Somertown council estate - or the ‘u’ I’m used to hearing in the valleys.

“Why can’t I?”

“Because I am interested.” 

*

Honky Tonk Woman is playing in the FCS disco (Federation of Conservative students, the richest, largest, most influential and idlest Student Society, no change there then.) It followed the last two Beatle chart-toppers, Get Back and The Ballad of John and Yoko, both still doing radical Sixties things with words and sound, to the top and beat Give Peace A Chance, a genuinely revolutionary pop hit still carrying the Sixties flame onto the barricades, Petula Clark no less, part of the supporting choir. Honky Tonk Women is in terms of the musical and social revolutions of the Sixties led by the Beatles little more than an easy lay (albeit with a genuinely radical twist and shout) and that is certainly what it seems to mean to many of the still lifes around us. Neither Vic nor I are in any way atttached to the FCS but there are a lot of Tim nice but dims keen to invite her to the party and even some moaning Maggies who think I might be worth taking up some plushly carpeted stairs for a ride. I have inadvertently given many attendees of the GaySoc discos the same wrong idea. Few appreciate what bliss it is to be able to bop around among people asking, “And what is your position on imperialism, comrade?” (Rev Soc) and “Do you accept it’s liberating to leave off your bra; your underarm deodorant; your lipstick, sister? (Fem Soc) or “This disco is really disorganised” (Anarchy Soc) “rather than “What the fuck are you looking at, boyo?”. (Milltown). I exultingly attended every fresher year campus disco on offer after my disco-starved valley adolescence (The Milltown British Legion Murder and Dance tended to close down after a week because of all the young rams who thought the backbone slip is a martial arts manoeuvre and the mashed potato is what your dance partner’s face looks like after you’ve worked him over with a knuckle duster.) I am back on the milling floor after my year’s international service in the class war and I am making up for lost time. Honky Tonk Woman, the Stones’ gender flipside to Street Fighting Man and their final Number One (farewell not just Brian Jones, edited off the record and then out of the picture by a swimming pool, but the Sixties) and, heralded by that menacing, lowstrung-strut foreplay into the explosive honky tonk guitar and drum break, is my all-time favourite floor-kicker. And Vic looks up at me from under her Keef hairdo and says, “Shall we dance?” 

Hell, yeah. 

You can take the boy out of the valley… But it somehow always seems to follow me. It is not necessarily my drop kicks and crooked elbows to the back and spleen which outrage the petrified ‘dancers’ around me. Nevertheless, I’m nervous. The last time I performed my Honky Tonk Women routine here in the LCR with gaffer tape on my Elvis Costello specs pigeon-rutting around an ‘intrigued’ disco belle from Warrington, to gathering applause, it only took a thrust from an FCS Blue Meanie for me to swing a James-spectacular glass-splintering four-eye-penny one up through his chinless chin.  I knew even as I watched the BM sail like a Wild West movie stuntman across the LCR and onto the steps that he was really only the shadow of Absent Dad Becoming Suddenly Vividly Present As Corporal Punishment but after all no-one asked the poor Laius-substitute to rob my spotlight or upstage my show- 

*

Did someone just scoff, Edinburgh?  Is that you, chinless wonder, doing it again? Come on then, if you think you’re hard enough!... Ha! Thought so.

*

I haven’t been back to the LCR for a disco since. I’m back now in a valedictory capacity, on what is probably my last night before being sent down, swinging from the Jagger hip in all directions. And Vic is doing a honky tonk of her own that looks a lot better on her hips than it does on Jagger’s. Or mine.

About four hours later, somewhere between midnight and dawn, in her bed in Waveney Terrace, after a bottle of Tia Maria and a conversation that has mutually not so much dangled Paul Simon campus fashion as dazzled like Shakespeare, Victoria laughs that it was the dance of her life. It was certainly mine. We have already agreed that she will join AgitSoc (now to be called Extreme Umbrage, a punk quibble on Extreme Unction ) and that the three of us – ‘Honest Joe Asthma’ on guitar; ‘Dick Abuse’ – that’s me – on bodhran and punk vocals and she, ‘Salve Vagina’, on cello - will change the world with our Last Rites of the Iceni Boudicca show. (Opening track “No Roman Stones in AD 60”) I’ve also told her about my unholy family and my uncertain deflowering by Randy Mandy and Gangster Moll Trish at my (not quite) Coming of Age party at Dr O’Leary’s, an ersatz deflowering to a soundtrack of Their Satanic Majesty’s Request. Eighteen seems a lot longer than three years ago. Now I glance at the bed uneasily. “I haven’t really had a sexual relationship since Rosa. I’m not saying it wasn’t a blast living with the Whore of Babylon in EAS 2 after all those years solo-dogging in my kennel at the Daily Malice show home. But I’m red-bedded out. I don’t want that again.”

“I’m not her.”

“I’m bored of just shacking up and shagging.”

This is true but she also knows I’m petrifed. “What do you want. A Madonna?”

“The Beatles’ kind, maybe. I want, I don’t know, a kind of soul sister.”

“Like your beloved Cindy? I’m not her either.”

“I incest that you leave my sister out of this.”

We laugh. It’s a relief I can make her laugh because I was wondering what a jabbering twat like me is doing in a magical place like hers. 

“You know what Freud says about jokes, James. Confessions disguised as clowns.”

“The trouble with Fraud is that he forgets to see the funny side of clowns.” 

She looks interested. 

“Like Joko the Clown at the End of the Sixties when he lost the Fab Force, stopped being the Joker and became the Joke. Cindy said he’d left the Goons and joined the Agalestas, they who have no laughter.”

Vic really has the most amazing eyes. 

“And Cindy should know. She was the Girl in all the songs.”

Beautifully made up and pretty as bluebells yes but that’s not it: grey and calm and warm, kind, generous, unveiled, seeing eyes. Altogether lovely. She reaches over for the bottle and her hand brushes mine. “Cindy sounds a bit of a fairytale, James. Are you sure she’s real?”

Vic’s hand feels so real I want to hold it forever.

“Nothing is real. But she’s as real as anyone else. Real enough to be working in a biscuit factory the day Kennedy was shot; to have a baby in India with Johnny Churchill...”

No escape from those eyes.

I jabber on. “As real as this bed-womb or your Freudian slip on the radiator rail.” 

“Very punny. James, it’s time for bed. I’ve got to work in the morning.”

I’m thinking of all the times I had to play doggy on the sofa at Cindy’s when she and Johnny went upstairs to Loveland to commit adulthood. “OK, sorry, shall I crawl off to sleep in the bath?”

“Oh dear. This is like being in that song 

“‘Norwegian Wood.”

*

Cindy rubs her back in an American clinic in Bombay in January 1970. It’s been over six months since that magical July 10 she noted the positive test in her diary. She is heavily pregnant and the heat, though more endurable than the monsoon a few months back, is overwhelming. Hi Buzz.” 

“Dr Robert will see you now.” 

Dr Brad Robert, the American volunteer doctor ‘Serving Humanity and Guru Right Swami Bug’ is beaming from the door. “I actually said that fuve minutes ago, Buzz. Hi Cindy. Come in.”

Dr Robert prescribes a Lily the Pink compound for every symptom Cindy offers and several she doesn’t. Cindy is dubious but complies. “After all, you are a doctor.” 

“I’m a psychiatrist doing general practice actually,” Dr Robert beams, showing God-perfect white teeth. They get up and he shows her to the door, where Buzz is pontificating about LSD to a death-pale couple with typhus. Dr Robert gives the couple emergency treatment in the corridor – a stiff Sixties cocktail of conventional, homoeopathic and herbal treatments – and then casts a professional glance over Buzz. “This should help.” Dr Robert gives Buzz a capsule and a launching pad of cholera-free water.

“Thanks Brad. It’s been hard day’s night.”

Cindy laughs. “Buzz you’re the only soul I know with worse Beatlemania than my baby brother.” 

“I love them with all my heart, mind, body and soul,” says Buzz. “I remember some American guy – Brad, I think his name was, from San Francisco, in an ashram somewhere telling me they were a perfect whole. John the was mind; Paul the heart; George the soul and Ringo the body.”

“Wow. Which ashram was that Buzz?”

“I’ve been in so many I can’t remember. But there was this amazing Master there who made me feel really happy just looking at Him. There was a line all down the track of about a thousand pilgrims paying their respects at his feet and when I got there I couldn’t move on. I was just gazing up at Him. His disciples came over to keep the line flowing but He waved His hand for them to leave me. Wow. It was like all the Beatles songs were singing in my heart at once; like all of the Fab Four was smiling at me at once; like I was meeting that genie in the bottle that George said possessed the Beatles until it jumped into Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”

Cindy wonders what on earth Monty Python’s Flying Circus is but gives the kind of smile Dorothy might have given when Wordsworth said he found the madness of William Blake more sane than the sanity of Lord Byron.

“And afterwards, you know, I just sat for days in a daze. Everything buzzed with purpose, for the first time in my life. The disciples gave me some books about the Master’s life and all these Beatle dates kept coming up. It was ridiculous. Their Master’s birthday was February 25. That’s George Harrison’s birthday and the day the Fabs started making A Hard Day’s Night in 1964. Their Master started a 44 year unbroken Silence on July 10. That’s the day the Hard Day’s Night film was premiered in Liverpool in 1964 and the day Revolution was recorded in 1968. And you know the Beatles did an incredible farewell concert on the Apple roof on January 30, 1969?”

“I do now.”

“Well that was that Master’s last full day on Earth. He died the next day.”

“Jesus.”

“He was at Rishikesh in the 1920s as well, blessing it with His presence. It all fits.”

“Why did you leave that ashram, Buzz? It sounds like the end of your long and winding road?” 

“I can’t remember. I can’t even remember which Indian state it was in. Except it was warm and dry even in the rainy season and a long way up.”

“Once there was a way to get back homeward, eh?”

“Yes but it’s like I’m always searching Yesterday for Tomorrow Never Knows. Brad told me I could get a job for life in America just talking about the Beatles. But I need to find this ashram again first.”

Cindy gets a sudden vicious pang. “I need air.” She and Buzz go out into the compound. 

“Oh goody, it’s Cindy!” cries Hockey Styx, a rare English voice among all the Americans. 

“Oh God,” groans Cindy under her breath.

“Yes, God! It’s the hospital’s benefit concert for Guru Right Swami Bug and it’s just beginning. Lots of Swami Bug’s followers are here.  Do come!”

Cindy groans again. 

Hockey Styx leads them into a dark hot reception room adapted into a dark hot theatre. There is a performer onstage called Big Ed, his overweight underdressed in criminally underpaid Indian bespoke-tailored oversized pink dhoti and pants. If a middleclass American had come to work in an elephant’s pink pyjamas he could not have looked more like a very pregnant woman, only without a baby, and not a woman. There is knee-jerk laughter at the spotlit Big Ed’s self-deprecation. “You may have noticed the deliberate mistake in that last number,” he says. “As the old Persian carpet-makers used to say, when they wove a deliberate flaw into their work, only God can be perfect.”

“Yeah but they only made one mistake, not fourteen!” stage-whispers Cindy, louder than she realised.

“I was being serious.”

“Sorry.”

“I’ll tell you when I’m being funny,” chides Big Ed.

“She’s pregnant, man. Cool it,” says Buzz.

“This one’s called Consummation. Jai Swami Bug!”

Everyone clasps their hands at their foreheads like a flock of mechanical birds and choruses ‘Jai Swami Bug!’

“Oh Goddy!” whoops Hockey Styx.

The strumming develops, after fourteen false starts, into a dirge about the yearning for an annihilation of the performer’s existence– something Cindy would cheerfully arrange. 

“I want to die.

I want to die.

I want to die...’

Cindy joins in, with Yer Blues sincerity.

I want to die.

I want to die.

I want to die… 

Big Ed adds an exhorting ‘Everybody!’ exactly unlike Paul’s on All You Need Is Love. Everybody (though none as smugly as the performer) joins in for a mind-numbing dirge (or a divine mantra, depending on your view of what God meant by music).  It eventually ends in a modest bow of the head and a splatter of applause. Upon which, for all his sentiments about giving his heart to God, Big Ed seems reluctant to give his song to the audience. “I’m sending your applause straight to the Master where it belongs!” and the joined hands are whacked into his forehead again.

“In other words, ‘Noli me tangere. Keep Out. Keep off,’” mutters Cindy. “Why would God need your applause?”

“Here’s the song I did as my failed audition for the Beatles in Hamburg in 1962, after underage George Harrison was sent home. Perhaps it was too spiritual for them! Ho ho ho!”

The audience think it’s a mantrum and join in. “Ho ho ho. Ho ho ho.”

“Does Ho ho ho mean it’s funny? Am I allowed to laugh now?” asks Cindy.

“George Harrison?” repeats Buzz in awe. The audience is pretending to be too spiritual to be impressed. Except for Buzz who is too impressed to pretend to be spiritual. 

“Yes. George Harrison!” Big Ed deflects another volley of applause for this name-dropping with a prayer-hands judo punch, almost knocking himself out. He then serially messes up the intro, nodding as if this confirms his humility rather than a lack of industry, right to the spotlight or talent.  

“Why not just work at perfecting the song instead of over-indulging your mistakes; accept the applause if you’ve honestly earned it and then let it go. All this God-awe-full self-effacement is just avoiding the Judgment artists face every time they dare to give a song to the world. You haven’t renounced show business. You’re not good enough for show business; so you take your song to God. I’m not sure He listens to special pleading like that. God gave us religion to fatten our egos and show business to shatter them as far as I can see. Look at the Beatles.”

As Buzz looks round in wonder for the actual Beatles, the partisan Hockey Styx-led applause for Big Ed’s humble ‘artlessness’ drowns out most of Cindy’s review. But not all, as his loving look of furious hatred shows.

Cindy hears again Johnny’s parting words. “Why did God create the world if He wanted us to run away from it to an ashram in the mountains?” 

She turns to him, “You were wrong about Master’s ashram but (indicating Big Ed) you’re right about this windbag of sub-incontinence. We’ve got to get out of this place.”

Ah. But Johnny is gone. This Beatle bird has flown but she’s not flying any more. There is only Buzz, who is lovely but whose critical reason (and awareness of how low a sub-Beatles submarine can sink in the shape of a Big Ed) disappeared long ago. Cindy sent Johnny away last Christmas Eve, after he kept hassling Dr Robert about proper health care. “We don’t need you, Johnny. You’re suffocating me, man. Piss off,” she’d snapped. And the next time she looked, he had. 

The holy show goes on (and on.)

“I want to be God

Ego Ergo I Go Ug

So I must stop being 

Me Me Me Me Me Me Me.”

“I need to puke.” Cindy stumbles out past the acrid collective deodorants into the earthy open air and that heaven-Scent of the East: dust, dung and spices. Dhobis are washing clothes by hand on the rocks of a river better than they will ever be by Western washing machines though tending to smash the buttons. Traffic drones and whines along a dirt road. A train is thundering and claxoning in the distance. Cindy sighs. 

Buzz emerges from the black hole of the concert door behind her. “You sick?”

Good old Buzz. There was a heart still beating to a Ringo drum in there somewhere. She retches. “World-sick, Buzz. A whole world in my womb. Or it feels like it.” She rushes aside to vomit that world’s side-effects into a disgusting latrine then moves away, Buzz now supporting her. 

Watching the monsoon wash dead mosquitoes off the veranda, they sit back with a herbal remedy, a bug spray and Buzz’s hamper of American vite-amins and take stock. Buzz pulls his beard. “What did you think of Big Ed?”

“The pantomime dame pretending to be Cinderella?  Being holy shit doesn’t make it any less shit. I know he’s sincere but so is Sunday School.”

“You’re right. Anyway, he’s not that sincere. He’s not even American.”

“What? Where’s he from?”

“Liverpool.”

“Oh no!”

“It makes me miss the Beatles.” Buzz looks crestfallen. “I still worship them, Cindy. They’re Everything to me. That Something they had. More than this Sunday school stuff. Is that because I’m unspiritual?” 

“No it’s because the Beatles give their audience their All. Big Ed gives you his Nothing and calls it God.”

“That’s what I think… I think… I think,” says Buzz. A long Buzz pause. “Fabulous that he played with George Harrison in Hamburg though.”

*

My Tuesday (forever) afternoon with Vic has become, via the Honky Tonk disco and the dangling conversation over the Tia Maria, Wednesday morning, 3 am. The sound of silence is deafening, a vacuum, a ‘vacation’. I’ve told her I don’t want it to be Randy Mandy and Gangster Moll again. I’ve told her I don’t want it to be Rosa’s one womban collectivisation of Marriage, Private Property and State (in dialectical symbiosis with the Holy Family on Sundays) either. For it to be a genuine rite of passage this time, I need a soundtrack that ISN’T Their Satanic Majesty’s or Street Fighting Man. “Vic?”

For a moment she’s gone, like a rainbow. Then she’s sliding out a masterpiece from her classical records collection. She puts it on and the warm crackle of vinyl builds the anticipation. And then I smile and – don’t you know? - it’s going to be all right. It’s the last, best, most symphonically complete side of rock music ever recorded: the greatest love song to rock ever recorded, by a band at the Everest of its powers; singing “The End” of both its own story and of the Sixties. It’s Side Two of Abbey Road! Twenty five minutes of heaven.

After which Vic kisses me lingeringly on the lips for the first time and it’s like being kissed by a rose. Heaven-scented, sumptuous, dangerous. This punk angel who will answer my every beat onstage (and off) with her crashing cello strings for the next six crazy months. I lie there dazed. I get up automatically to turn the vinyl over for Come Together on Side One. She stops my arm. “Let’s make our own music, James.” And, as the dawn comes up, we do.  

Afterwards, I descend the Eden-green slope from Waveney Terrace through an orange October sunrise to class, feeling like Lucy in the Sky. I give the lucid class-paper that saves me from being sent down. That and (ahem) an agreement to have counselling, which I do furtively, finding a back-walkway to a concrete abstraction pillbox out of the sight of TUF and anyone else who might think I have caved in to petty bourgeois self-indulgence because I haven’t been able to stand shoulder to shoulder like a man against the solidified might of the rich and powerful alongside victims much more oppressed than me. I expect the counsellor to be a Nazi employed by the State to denounce Lennonists and change my head using torture but at our first meeting instead of “Ach! Herr Spectre, ve haf been expecting you! For you zer war is over! Resistance is useless!” he comes out of his office, smiles “James? I’m Uri” at me and turns out to be a hippy angel (also Jewish, which reassures me on the Nazi angle) with a picture of some Indian guru on his wall. 

In the Victorious days and nights that follow, I read lots of printed word looking for the Answer, and ways of living it that embraces, but improves on that previous one year black hole of international service in the class war. I realise that the parts of Marxism I always believed in were the Sermon on the Mount and the Kingdom of God being within us; never really believed in materialism (even the historical kind) being the basis for a better society, nor in that evangelical idea Marx got from his Jewish heritage that history is getting better all the time until it’s perfect. History is one fucking thing after another and a nightmare from which one is trying to escape, the men all so good for nothing and hardly any women at all, just as it always was, though admittedly with better plumbing (and infinitely worse church music/art) since the Middle Ages. I start making sense, read more and more brilliant writers and less and less mediocre Critical Theorists eating the hand that feeds them and then excreting it as a hand of their own. And, after sharing a joint with Arnold and Vic in the Congregation bogs, get my working class honours degree, my equivalent of the Beatles’ MBE. And I take off with Arnold and Vic up here to Edinburgh for the summer of 1978 and Extreme Umbrage have a Beatle ball with a show called Is There Life After EAS? (our version of George’s All Things Must Pass) which eventually proves prophetic – Arnold meets his Lovely Linda there and leaves us, pick-nicking up on Arthur’s Seat as the perfect after-Uni summer goes down, bereft and bittersweet-sad and hit-show disbanded. But Vic and I are still going. 

 

 

 

Chapter Fifteen

Day Tripper

What goes on, goes on. It was twenty years ago today, my Beatle bird flew away. 

In search of Everest, in August 1989, I am in Deolale, twenty years too late and on a pilgrimage from the No Society of Thatcher’s Britain. It’s here I finally catch up with the Girl who fled the Ball at Sixties Midnight. I lurch out of my luxury (meaning not a hovel) hotel into the monsoon mud. I am wearing sandals with thick white sports socks; a sensible precaution against mosquitoes, not much use in a flood. I make for a stall. Mother India. As I do so, the stallkeeper pulls her marmalade-sky sari over her head to hide her eyes. She can’t Fool me. The years may have taken their toll but she is still the Girl of all those songs. The same old immaculate Cindy, not a speck of all this monsoon-muddied dust on her marigold sari, like a true local. Her feet are clad in red open-toed half-slippers, like flip flops, a single anklet, her toes pricked out in betel-red nail-varnish. The sun comes out from behind the monstrous monsoon cloud. The hem of her sari shines like an angel’s wing.

“Cindy!”

She makes that Indian head-bobble. “Sindhi, Sindhi,” and rattles off a stream of Marathi. She tries to sell me some jewellery for my ‘Special One’ back home, demonstrating earrings against her own ears, ribbons against my chest. I fix her liquid I-can-see-a-rainbow dark eyes with mine. But she seems not to know whom I mean when I keep whispering ‘Cindy.’ I wonder, terrified, if I am looking at an acid casualty, a spectre of the Cindy I knew. Or even if I’m just seeing things. But no, we’re still the same old James and Cindy: only the illusion of time’s impression-crusted lens casts a shadow between us. 

“Cin, it’s me ...” I’m all but leaping for joy. “Sweet Baby James!” I see the old glint in those  kaleidoscope eyes. I grab her elbow and she jumps back. 

Has she “gone native”? I’ve been warned (by Americans) that Indians may find Western levels of eye contact deeply intrusive while tolerating (and inflicting) a great deal more physical proximity from strangers than us. I have certainly experienced plenty of queue elbows in my belly, shoulders in my neck. Not this time. This Indian Cindy does nothing to avoid my ecstatic gaze, meets it with a ferocious glare. But she makes it very female clear that grabbing her elbow is invasive, the way it would be from an unfamiliar man. She protests volubly, grows cold, pushes my water bottle off her stall onto the dirty ground. A crowd begins to stop and stare.

“Cin! Please!” I bring out her old copy of Sergeant Pepper in triumph. The cover flashes like red and yellow peppers in the monsoon sun. 

She stares at it. Those eyes… Why would she want to hide from me?

“It’s yours, the very Pepper you left me, look!” I force it into her hands. It looks so right there, flashing in the Indian sunshine; the hot chilli-pepper reds and yellows, the brilliant cellophane flowers of yellow and monsoon-green she wore at the Beatles Ball that was 1967. She stares at it like an exiled princess recalled to her lost realm. She puts it on her brilliantly coloured stall, amid the fairy spices and foods and saris and jewellery. Then she… still frowns at me like a stranger. She calls something in Marathi and in a voice I really don’t recognise. A thug with angry red eyelids and yellow dye in his hair appears and pushes me away, none too gently. The crowd does the same.

A horn sounds and I turn round. My waiting rickshaw-wallah. “Better get in, Sahib.” He says ‘Sahib’ but he means “bhai.’

When I turn back to ‘Sindhi’, She’s Not There – only the empty trashy Mother India stall.  A mirage of her. Her junk shrine at the end of my long long long pilgrimage. Our fiery hippy chariot of fraternity, communality and counter-cultural collectivism shrunk to this cash counter peddling tinkling symbols (sic), sparkly trinkets and Far East smells. All over the world, there are corporate versions of this gutter shack, lining High Streets and Shopping Mauls, soaring into the global skies of New York, London, Moscow…. The Free Me Me Me up up and away Branson-Starbucks balloon wind-blown by the sacred cow of market, selling its soul for yours, flogging Mother Earth to death to keep its plague of hyper-advertised viral hippy capitalism alive twenty years past its sell-by date. An Eight Miles High crash-landed like Icarus into a Virgin Air commercial. The shrivelled pumpkin of the starship Enterprise. The Yellow Submarine going ever further down.

Another stallholder takes her place, his face sullen and hostile. The thug loses patience and says something voluble to my driver– I only recognise ‘jaldi, jaldi’ and the imperative tone, who passes it on to me. “Sahib, Leave now.” 

I nod. My driver indicates, chewing betel excitedly, his open mouth blood-red, his engine farting out fumes, that I will have to pay for the time he’d waited. I nod again, even though I never asked him to.

“Go to town for girl?”

“No.”

“Go to ashram for God?”

“Just take me back to the hotel.”  

Next day, and for four days after, I stake out Mother India – at a safe distance from the thug - for Cindy to appear again. In letters of gold on a snow-white kite I write WHY HAVE YOU SOLD OUT? WHY HAVE YOU LET THE MAGIC WEAR OFF, FADE INTO THIS COMMON DAY? WHY HAVE YOU LET ME SPEND MY LIFE CHASING A FAIRYTALE TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE? And I loose it like a Firebird soaring high above her for All to see. To shame her in the face of All back to the Dream. She’s Not There and no-one else takes a blind bit of notice.

On the sixth day, the sun is especially hot and brooding behind the clouds. The thug patrols around, spitting out betel juice like blood... At last he sees me and crosses the road, looking like this time he really means business. Small business.

I check out of my five-star luxury air-conditioned hotel the next morning, a beautiful morning, orange-tinted and sunny behind the thin white cloud. I feel like I’m in a play. From Deolale, I take the short Bombay train ride back into Victoria Terminus, shivering in the conditioned air. In VT the full fury of the monsoon hits me like the Joe Frazier/George Foreman Ali-breaking punch I got from the thug. The betel-red shirted porters, seeing a Westerner wilting amid the fever, rip me off even more than usual. I don’t care. 

I am boarding a windowless bus for the airport when I collapse, raving in the heat. The driver refuses to take me and my unstable stomach into the oven of his bus which, judging from the appearance of some of the other passengers, is testament to how bad I am looking. Someone steers me (now minus all my luggage except my concealed money belt) through some beggars, emaciated cattle, dying dogs, dead cats, swarms of flies, bleating goats, six lanes of fuming vehicles, galloping pedestrians, beeping scooters, bell-happy cyclists, rats, barefooted schoolchildren, white bullock carts, horse tongas and pink elephants to some monsoon-turboed vegetation cum hillock of refuse roadside taxi rank. A cab driver takes me to ‘Western clinic.’

An old hippy with maharishi hair, who looks like he’s taken the Syd Barrett route home – far too much acid in the Sixties and Seventies (and Eighties) books me in. He appears to be smoking joss sticks, for want of anything else. “What have you taken and how much?” he asks.

“I haven’t taken anything,” I say. “That’s what’s terrifies me!” The fever claims me like a black hole. It is easier than thinking about Cindy and that crock of shit stall at the end of her rainbow…

When I finally come out of my fever, the clinic peacenik tells me his name is Buzz and asks what my connection with the deceased was.

“The deceased?”

“Cindy Spectre.”  

The world stops a moment. “Cindy! How do you know Cindy?”

“Only that you’ve been raving about her for 48 hours, man.”

“She was my big sister! I’d been trying to find her since The Sixties. But why are you calling her ‘the deceased’? She’s not dead, though she might as well be. I found her in Deolale, peddling hippy relics.”

He shows me some old documents. My heart leaps as I see her name. 

“St Francis Clinic, Bombay. April 10 1970.

Lucinda Spectre, temporary patient. 

Country of origin. UK, born, Jan 30, 1950; last registered address Redland, Bristol, September 1969. 

Status: student traveller.

 

Residence (temporary): Bliss Ashram.

Admitted with labour pains

Died in childbirth.” 

The world stops. The old Pentangle vocal soars into my head in Cindy’s ageless voice, “Let’s get away, find a better place!” and the jingling cash-register commercial music scales drop from my ears. Of course my beloved Cindy would die before she ever sold out! More Fool me for ever doubting her, no matter how long I’ve been seeking and no matter how strong that Deolale mirage of her as a sell out in the wilderness. She would never gain the pumpkin world and lose – sell - her soul like that. That was never her on that cheap stall. She died a martyr for the cause.

But then was this fin-de-Sixties uncompromised hippy martyrdom any better?  Was Beatle (like Hendrix, Morrison, Joplin, Brian Jones et al) better as the live-fast die-young Sun King he still is or… Then I remember Something. “But she came home that April 1970. She had a miscarriage...” I stop. “No, no, that was a dream.”

“The baby lived. Look. A copy of this information was sent to your family. But Cindy died, man.”

“We never got the letter.”

“Indian bureaucracy records everything in total detail, man. In triplicate. How hard did your parents try to find her?”

I am silent. I am about to leave when he mutters something else.

“Say again?” I ask.

“If they’d really wanted to, they would have.”

He seems almost too eager to convince me. I’ve Got A Feeling he’s hiding Something. I wipe my glasses on a sodden T shirt and put them back on. They are now even more smeared than before. 

“But there could be some mistake? These records could be wrong?”  

“No no no no no no. Absolutely not. Indian bureaucracy records everything in total detail, man. In triplicate. I was here. She died. I’m sorry. Love – the baby’s name was Love – went to St Agalesta’s Mission. Catholic. Cindy chose the place herself. Very clean. We use them a lot. The records can’t be false. No no no no no no. Absolutely not.”

He's trying too hard. Something rings increasingly false. I glare at him in the cloudy sunlight through new rainbows of smears. I think, this is the guy they wrote ‘If you can remember the Sixties, man, you weren’t there’ about. “But she’d turn in her grave before she let the Step-Maries bring up her kid. That’s like Oedipus running from the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother.” I take in the signature at the bottom of the sheet of closely-typed Indian toilet paper. My Lennon vision isn’t as clear as it was, even when my NHS doors of perception are properly cleansed. My eyes play tricks sometimes, between the reading glasses, sunglasses, computer glasses and the bifocals. So I take them off altogether again and hold the sheet right in front of my nose. Then in front of Buzz’s.. “Read that,” I say.

“C. Spectre. So what?”

“So that’s her own handwriting. How many people sign their own death certificate?”

Buzz looks vague. Or more vague than usual. “What? You mean she faked her own funeral?”

“Of course. This has got Cindy all over it. It’s a Sign – to me. She knew I’d get here in The End.”

Buzz thinks about it. “Maybe she signed the sheet as she was dying.”

“Why would she do that? “I am officially dying’ signed Cindy Spectre.’ Did you actually see her buried?”

“...N-no, she left instructions that her ashes be spread over Mother Ganges and I could never handle all that Ganges shit. Not the mysticism. I mean the actual shit floating in the river. But I saw the body. I was the duty clerk. Believe me, she was dead. I oversaw all the paperwork – I was the duty clerk. I saw- I was the duty clerk- she was-”

“Buzz, I remember her like Yesterday. You can’t even remember five minutes ago. I know this handwriting, better than I know my own hand. Christ, her letters to me were all I had back then.”

“I realise she meant a lot to you. But I oversaw the-”

“She’s alive! And somewhere a lot more fabulous than a hippy trinkets stall in Deolale.”

Buzz meets my excitement with eyes whose fire has died long ago. “Love would be twenty nine now. But she’s an orphan. Her mother’s dead.”

“No! I know Cindy’s alive, somewhere, and she would have kept Love alive and with her and that’s God enough for me.” I say, as if that decides the matter. 

But why is Buzz so gravestone-certain about it?  Has he killed Cindy? Stuffed her? Is he keeping her alive like some ghastly Paul-ISN’T Dead Beatles shrine somewhere? Is she hiding Christmas in a locked attic now? Like grave-witch Wicked Stepmother Mary. Hiding herself. Even from me?

Buzz looks up suddenly, eyes properly focused on Something for the first time since I’d met him. He hides his consternation quickly, as though he’s given Something away. Cindy? It has to be. I turn round, slowly and very surely, excited and calm at the same time. To see the one person in the whole Universe I have been looking for.

*

Cindy rolls East along rusty tracks towards the mountains beyond Bombay. She is following her Master’s orders, infinitely relieved finally to have a father figure whose guidance she trusts. It is April 10 1970, the day Stuart Sutcliffe died in 1962, and the day McCartney released his own solo album in defiance of the Fab Force’s swan-song Let It Be, released (kind of posthumously, over-produced by Phil Spector and delayed from before Abbey Road) in 1970. She is a young Westerner in a sari – odd but more acceptable than a girl in a miniskirt would have been - travelling conspicuously third class, uncomfortably perched on wooden slats, comforting a crying newborn and keeping a sandaled foot firmly on her baggage in the aisle. One small bag containing all her possessions but still more than any in this carriage seem to have. A large round hill rises abruptly from the swamp plain just ahead of them.

“Is that the ghats?” she asks the toothless old women crammed sari to sari against her shoulder. 

Cindy gathers from the hilarity of the response that this mound barely rising out of the vast swamp on which Bombay is built is not the towering ghats which are many miles up the line. Cindy smiles, unperturbed. She knows exactly where she is going, for the first time in her life. 

She explains this, mentions that she is going to Ahmednagar, which causes some alarm regarding a need to get off the train. 

She has reached that Indian place and time where only God can help her: where all Western measures and maps, timetables and terminals are void, spinning in a maelstrom of unknowing. And precisely because her entire being has entered that black hole beyond her entire known mental universe, the oblivion that has always hovered above her (semi-detached, suburban, Western, time-bound, self-centred, anxiety-tied, fear-delimited, dollhouse and career-measured) future; the existential terror that bears the name ‘Death’, she knows that God will.  Help her. She beams at the women’s instinctive alliance with her plight, a place that Indian women like them seem to her now to live most of their lives. And then accepts the maternal attentions and curiosity they lavish on Love, her Sixties-conceived baby, her real future, here at the end of the Sixties.

She is coming home.

*

Yet it is not Cindy standing in the black hole of Buzz’s stare. It is a still Eastern figure in a hectic Bombay crowd who, though I feel I’ve met Him and know Him, an old friend become a Stranger, an eternal present become a dim memory, I have never made his acquaintance. And if I’m not very very quick, I might lose Him again. He is already turning away, purposefully striding faster than anything else in the street. Like where God says to Moses ‘I must hide Myself from you because if you saw Me as I really am, face to face, you would cease to exist,’ so God presents His back and Moses sees God’s back as a whirling wind, like a dervish. I know (yes beyond all reason but I know) this is the whirling wind that will take me to Cindy. I follow the perfect Stranger.

*

Cindy wakes from a railway slumber to find the train is stopping. She looks out of the glassless windows. The signs on the platform say POONA. The old women prod her and point at the door. She hears them cry “Ahmednagar” and point again, wildly, away from the station and make car driving motions. Cindy hitches Love on her shoulder, picks up her baggage to go. 

She alights into the seething, buzzing, fizzing novel-in-a-paragraph, epic movie in a frame that is an Indian railway station. It is wild, warm and windswept but deliciously cooler than Bombay. The maraschino-shirted porters shout frantic solicitations. She is aware of whirling bodies, whirling deeds, whirling thoughts. She feels as if she’s in a play but she is anyway; and none of it applies to her anymore. Nothing is real. She has run out of long and winding road; there is no more journeying homeward, no more stations and no more baggage or weight (apart from Love and a few necessaries) to carry. She is here. After all this crazy time, she is at the Eye of the storm.  

*

This is my last show, Edinburgh. The End of the Long and Winding Road. Shy, shadows-retiring James who only ever took to the stage so that his Mother might see him, is hanging up his on-the-beatle boots. The Beatles stopped playing live because there was too much screaming. Me, because there’s not enough. Well, none. The hands are too arthritic to play the drum like I used to and even that was never a shadow of Ringo. I was never the pulse and heartbeat of a song. I’ve got ideas that given long enough I can almost partially realise but I could never move the zeitgeist with them like the Fabs. I can hold an Author’s Note after a few wobbles but never like John, Paul and George. 

Spectres are ten a penny up here. On stages, in cafes, on buses, in the rainy granite-stone streets. Nowhere people. Losers selling their stories, narrating the world, telling it the way they see it, seeing it the way they tell it, ghost-writing their vacuum into the void. Billions of competing narratives all over the world. Mutual accusation of each vice. Forgive us not our trespasses as we do not forgive those who trespass against us. Hero-tales with themselves as hero, leaked-to-the media stories, shaggy dog ex-pat-me-on-the-head flyer-chasing, twittered, facebooked, instagrammed, HELLO MUM tell-tales to Stepmum and Absent Dad, the Thought-Police, the Government, the promoter, the commissioner, God.

Sod that. I'm an incurable Beatlemanic. I need Help.  And all I have is this ghost story self-consciously calling attention to itself with a thousand stunts, posters, plugs and spotlights – that comes down in the end to a black box of - Nothing.

All things must pass. It’s time to blast this endless black hole of misery, moaning and malice into the Light. The Wannabeatle Show mustn’t go on (and on) and I’m sure you’re in desperate need of closure and a wee/post-performance pint. And if you leave me now, you can still get back onto the purgatorial terraces to see the Hibs/Hearts Edinburgh Old Firm derby or whatever other promise of heaven gets you through the night. 

But if you don’t, I would get down behind the seats because this wand, this Wannabeatle Revolver, I’m waving as I pull down the funereal curtain from the chapel window (and here comes the sun) is as loaded as a post-1965 Beatle lyric. Here comes the gun. Nothing is real except the gun. The mind-blowing gun. This gun pointing at your black hole heart. I can see you now. Nobody’s audience. All the Nobodies I’ve made all these Nowhere plans for. NOBODY to point my warm gun of Happiness at. NOBODY to aim my mind-blowing Revolver at. NOBODY to shoot For No One at…  Except my own head. The end of all this hatred and whining and misery. Nobody’s Disappearance. The Death of the Author. The Show Mustn’t Go On. The End of a Complete and Utter Waste of Time. 

BANG! (Hello Mum!)

WTF!!!THERE’S NOBODY HERE!!!

Chapter Sixteen

We Can Work It Out

“Am I dead?” wonders Cindy, like that world-detached Andrei in ‘War and Peace’ except that instead of lying on a battleground she is standing amid a whirlpool of noise and movement that is unable to touch her. “Of course! It’s not ‘Death’ we’re afraid of, all our lives. It’s this.  Life!” 

A white apparition – richly and stylishly dressed in a Lauren Bacall trouser suit, Western, elderly, imperious – advances along the platform from the first-class coaches, followed by a porter bearing her suitcases, and interrupts Cindy’s meditations. Is this an angel?  Cindy realises the white lady is speaking. Very clearly like an actress. But not like Bacall. English. “My dear, what on earth are you doing?”

“I…” Cindy isn’t even sure what ‘I’ means anymore.” I…” How can she individuate an ‘I’ from the oneness she feels with … life, existence, being …with what she has always so ignorantly called ‘death’. What on earth indeed? 

“One cannot simply stand here and wait to be robbed or worse, my dear. A Western girl and baby alone amid the alien corn.”

“It’s not alien,” protests Cindy. “It’s home.”

“Oh.” The old lady seems to grasp something. “I see.” 

Cindy locks eyes with her. “I know you don’t I?” 

“Many people think they know me. I was a movie star, Leila Lamour, quite famous in the 30s.”

“No, it’s not that.”

“I see. Good. So why is Poona home?” 

“Not Poona. This…” Cindy racks her brains to explain her feeling of detached certainty. “A Master in Bombay told me I would meet a perfect Stranger at the end of my journey, an old Friend I’d recognise the moment I was absolutely lost.”

The lady becomes very practical, brisk and English.  “Well even God can’t get a passenger train direct to The End from Poona. I’m going there too. My second visit. We’ll get a car across the mountains.”

“I spent my last money on this train ticket to Ahmednagar,” confesses Cindy, suddenly childlike, showing it to her. “It’s actually already been used. And it wasn’t even to Ahmednagar.”

“Well God has got you this far. Let’s encourage Him to show us the rest of the way.” 

Leila hands Cindy’s bundle to the sweating porter, who adds it to his load, confident a big tip is waiting. He gets an even bigger tip from the ancient English lady than he bargained for a few minutes later when Cindy loses consciousness near the tracks. He runs forward with several names of God on his lips and catches her just as she topples off the platform. 

*

So we come to it at last, Edinburgh, the last chapter. The lost chord. (George’s G eleventh suspended fourth radiating into its constituent fifthless Am7 and F major plus whatever Paul is doing underneath it at the start of A Hard Day’s Night, segueing into the mighty orchestral E major Lennonism at the end of Pepper.) The hidden meaning that IS there. (heavy Ringo reverse drum roll…)- The Answer!

The Answer we all looked under chairs and tables for; thrust our hands deep into the sleeves of our album covers for; next to that forbidden Apple-green microdot tab of shadow gnosis, chasing the bright illusive butterfly of luv. Cindy never stopped believing we could work it out. That’s what took her to India all those years ago. And it’s what still has me endlessly haunting all these places, people and things In My Life.

*

The gleaming white Ambassador cab finally breaks down near a tiny wasteland village, on a roadside lined with desert vegetation. The car is immediately surrounded by a hundred Indian villagers, peering curiously in at the hippy girl with a babe in arms and the white trouser-suited actress. 

“Where are we?” asks Cindy.

“Nowhere. About thirty miles from Ahmednagar. The abode of our perfect Stranger is about seven miles beyond that.” Leila Lamour seems at home with the crisis. She leads Cindy out through the hundred staring pairs of eyes into the shade of  prickly trees. 

“What do we do now?” asks Cindy nervously.

Leila smiles like an ageing John Milton might have done when told the surgeon could do nothing for his eyes. “We stand and wait.”

The driver is busy poking around under the hood of his ‘luxury’ cab. The newborn is wailing to be fed but there is nowhere to do it modestly. Cindy feels the crowd is sizing up the fabulous Western wealth on offer: these sullen-eyed women in workaday saris checking out the white trouser suit of Leila and what a later (less Indiaphile) generation might call the cultural in-appropriation of Cindy’s Bombay sari; the children pointing at the handbags and luggage; the red-eyed red-mouthed betel-chewing men in worn out white tunics lasciviously eyeing up Cindy’s person in particular. Black spots appear before her eyes.

After the longest twenty minutes in her life, too petrified even to think, she starts praying fervently, “God please please Help us.” And lo a police car arrives almost immediately. Their cab driver closes the hood and gets back in the car. The engine roars into life and Cindy, still panicking he might leave without them, leaps in, glancing back frantically for Leila. Leila is still talking to the children and giving them sweets and their mother some ‘baksheesh’ before returning to the car.

“Buckshee! My old uncles used to say that,” Cindy says. “Something for nothing.” This homeliness so far from home! “So ‘buckshee’ came from here!”

“From the war probably. But the British were here a long time before that. It just means ‘alms’.”

They resume their journey. The police car follows. “What’s happening?” asks Cindy.

“The police are providing us with an escort into Ahmednagar.”

Cindy finally relaxes. She breast-feeds the newborn. “Thank God. Why?”

“The driver alerted the police on his walkie talkie as soon as he broke down. Those poor villagers aren’t robbers but it’s as well not to put temptation in their way.”

Ha! A much more realistic explanation. “I knew it was too pat to be God answering my prayer. So that’s why you were so calm? You knew all the time?”

“Darling, how could I know? I’m understanding it now. Back there, I was praying as fervently as you. Who do you think sent the Help we were praying for? Is a perfectly practical twentieth century police car not God enough for you? Would you prefer a thunderbolt from a cloud?”

*

Cindy’s first impression of the Pilgrim Centre is of immense disappointment. Not in the desert climate and stony terrain, arid even in the rainy season, which the old disciples cheerfully and ironically describe as looking “God forsaken” when they first came here with the Master they followed as God, though the hard-won and progressively expanded settlement has civilised some of its sharper edges since. Not in the simple buildings, the wooden veranda, the flourishing gardens, the calm interiors, the life-saving amenities and above all the warm professional welcome of the disciples and staff. The disappointment is that Leila hadn’t seen fit to mention that The Stranger had died the previous January.

“But you said I would get to meet Him!”

“You have. Avatars don’t ‘die’. He may have dropped His body but He is as present here as He was before.”

“More so,” agree several of the ‘mandali’, the old, closest disciples who lived with Him and shared His work.

Cindy believes them at least, feeling she is in the presence of something absolutely genuine. But…

“Of course, we miss His bodily presence. And there was the problem of thousands of pilgrims coming for His darshan at this year’s Sahavas. What were we to do? But we agreed that we should go ahead as if He were still here. And He is. He feels closer, more pervasively present, for being freed from His exhausted body.” 

Cindy senses, though, the ‘hiraeth’ heartache that their lifelong Beloved Master was no longer a daily companion in their work (and play). She shares the acute sense of loss and remains cross with Leila for some days. 

“But there was nothing to prepare you for,” the actress smiles. “He is here, as He always was and always will be. He was Zoroaster, Rama, Krishna, Buddha, Mohammed, all those Messiahs in One, the same One periodically returning to guide us home. You can speak to Him anytime you like. And He has to Answer you. You know this.  You met Him when He was Jesus.”

Did I? Cindy treasures this affirmation in her heart, while very much doubting it in her flattered mind. Imagine!  She goes up to arti (songs and prayers) through the flourishing desert garden, over a road, some railway tracks and up to the top of a rocky hill, unconvinced. She joins a queue of pilgrims leaving their footwear behind like Cinderella at the entrance to a domed Tomb.  A homely  Eastern reorientation in blue and yellow, reconstructed from a demolished imperial British army post office building. (A relic of  Empire that reminds her of the fairy godmother’s transformation of a pumpkin into a chariot. Cindy feels a shy  homecoming affinity with and a bubbly yellow submarine of patriotic pride in this sword-into-ploughshare of  deconstructed Raj).      During a sequence of eloquent set prayers (composed by the Stranger Himself) recited in a mix of mostly Indian and American accents and three lovely hymn-like songs, Indian and Western, the queue moves into the enclosed Tomb one by one to bow down and receive the Master’s ‘darshan’ ( His divine presence) in the shape of an orange sweet from the attendant. 

Then comes the individual songs and poems of praise and self-offering. Cindy drifts off, thinking about James, whom she could just picture reading his lonely heart poems here. That one called Soulscape he sent her that was just a list of titles of yearning Sixties songs beginning with She’s Not There and ending with Led Zeppelin’s Thank You. Suddenly Leila declaims to the assembled supplicants, “Am I homesick for England or for that Stranger in my heart? This ocean I’m sailing between me and my home, has it always been there? He is the heat of the East and the spice of Life. I’m not beautiful enough for Him. I’m not wise enough for Him. I am nothing. He is everything…

I love Him. I am a light that turns on in His presence, dispersing all darkness into nothing. When He walks, his followers hurry after and angels weep to see such beauty fallen to earth. He is the father I longed for, the mother I needed, the friend I always had. He is the film star who doesn’t fade, the nightfall and the new day. His hands are wings of speech; His Silence a glow of absolute meaning. He is the dance and the play and the song. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to realise Him on stage. He is the performance for which I’ve strained every fibre of body, heart and soul. He shimmers off the air and falls from the sea. I have Him in my heart yet I can never reach Him. I know Him better than I know myself and I haven’t a clue who He is. He is the light of my eyes I’ll never see. It is impossible to express what I feel for Him.” She addresses the Tomb directly. “I’ve been waiting for this moment all my life. I have a question to ask you; a question that if answered can make sense of all the suffering in the Universe. I know you have the Answer.”

The Tomb itself seems to answer! (in the person, it will emerge, of a Parsi actor inside its entrance, costumed as Rama.) “You are the flower of England. A snowdrop. A primrose beside a rocky stone. Your eyes are Arctic light, the hard grey-blue light of ice and sea, but you are not cold, only pure. You burn from within with a love that would consume all the frozen wastes of the world without a thought. Your gaze is always trying to pierce through to your Beloved, indifferent to all else though bearing ill-will to none. You have the poise of one who has been hurled head over heels into the whirlwind of God’s love. Your patience is a rose-thorn in the side of God; your fretting a joke that relieves even His cares. Your heart is a jewel, your soul the fairest in England.”

Chipmunks chatter, cicadas chorus, distant villagers call and close-up chronics cough. 

Leila exclaims, “…But it’s You! I was expecting a Stranger. And you can speak! You are always using signs or an alphabet board instead of this angel voice. Why have you never spoken before?”

“You have been given enough words. It is now time to live them. In this present Avataric form I observe Silence. Yet I am always speaking. Through those who love me; through creation, in the apparent Wilderness. There is no wilderness. There is only my Voice.”

“Your voice is the loveliest music I have ever heard. Why cloak it in silence?”

“Silence speaks most like God. When people are angry they are a great distance from each other, so they shout across that great void. People at peace with each other, speak at a comfortable volume. Lovers take hands and whisper. Divine Love communes in silence. I am silent because there is no distance between us. You and I are not we but one. I am closer to you than your own breath. I love you more than you can ever love yourself. If you knew how much, you would surrender everything – wants, needs, worries, even your spiritual quest itself – to please me. Do you love me?”

“Yes.”

“Then one day you will see me as I really am.”

“I know I love you but who are You?” (Cindy agrees with all of that)

“I am God.”

“No! You turn up out of some Indian legend and smuggle your way into the twentieth century. What has God got to do with the motor car? The movies? The Great Depression?”

Off comes the Rama headgear. “My message is always the same. Man has to be stripped of his material possessions so that he may realise through actual experience that his true base is spiritual and not material. Man is, in reality, eternal in his nature and infinite in his resources.” 

On goes the white fedora The Stranger wore on His visit to Hollywood in the 1930s, where the Pickfords and others took Him to their hearts  and the exquisite  Tallulah Bankhead said He was the most beautiful woman she’s ever met. “In the Twentieth Century I am the same One who was Zoroaster and in all previous cycles of time.   “I come in different guises in different parts of the world in different cycles of time to sow again and again the same eternal message of Divine Love… from the beginning -less Beginning to the endless End.  I know you, an English lady, do not give your heart lightly but when you do give it, caution flies to the solar winds and even the angels are astonished. Come to me when you are ready. Do not worry. Just love me.”  

Leila and her Parsi co-performer fall silent. Arti comes to an end. There is nothing else to say. Cindy is weeping, silently, uncontrollably. All her woes seem to be pouring out: her broken family; her absent father; her lost Mother Mary; her lost Johnny; her lost Aunt Rdognas and Uncle Ex-Pat; her dog-house upbringing; her broken up Beatles and broken Sixties dreams; her orphan-soul brother; all that lost twentieth century spring tide of advanced-soul aspiration and liberation in art, politics, science, civil rights that we call the Sixties,  seeming to recede. All the upbeating heartaches in all those Sixties yearnsongs; overflowing cups of too much far out. Surely this love was what had brought all those advanced souls together to Earth at this same time?  This love Leila and the costumed Indian had just enacted was the abiding love she had always longed for. It filled the black hole of her heart like a satisfying agony, an aching bliss; a Something she couldn’t describe except to say that it was Something she would never be able to live without. 

Next morning, the women mandali gather at the Tomb and sing a ‘Gujurati arti’ based on a morning raga with words and music by the Stranger Himself which completely and achingly express the ineffable longing and bliss she had felt at the Tomb. She makes a recording and plays it every morning for the rest of her life, except on the special days when she is able to hear it sung by the women mandali in person. If her sense of  hooooooooome has always felt like a lone wolf hiraething for the moon until now, this home she’s found is the howl and the moon in one. Bathed in lovely moonlight but knowing that moonlight is borrowed; is really the Sun’s. 

*

By the time I got to Strangerabad, I felt like an Indian Sea prawn left unrefrigerated on the shelf of a Chinese restaurant for six weeks during the fishing-stagnated monsoon. The meet and greet guy on the Pilgrim bus from the Centre promised me some water up ahead I could trust and an American homoeopath, while another guy was talking weirdly about spiders and how they were like God, pulling you in. There was an Indian army camp bordering the Stranger’s Love Camp with a high barbed wire fence. It started some unpleasant trains of thought. “If your Stranger is God, Cindy, why did He allow Auschwitz and child abuse?” was one of the questions I felt she would not be able to  Answer. There wasn’t a sign above the Pilgrim Centre entrance declaring “ARBEIT MACHT FREI” or ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE" but my fear ghosted one there.

I was sick to the gills  by bedtime and slept like the dead. I dreamt I was trying to escape an electric-fenced death camp  and awoke at dawn jaded and weak but infinitely relieved to be alive and somewhere civilised and (at least materially) safe. A medic brought more clean water and meds. I was already dreaming again by the time he closed the door.

And Cindy came to me. She was standing right in front of me. And she just smiled. 

And I said, “But you’re Mother Mary who always turned up on Christmas Day and birthdays!”  

“Yes,” she smiled again, free and loving, “I was your mother in a previous life.” 

My mother Maria! Like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. Or  Sophia Loren in a hot white slip in The Women of Rome.  

“Your Father died in the Great War so we only had each other.  We had a Wilkommen mat outside our perfect loving home. But the world jackbooted in and signed you up to the Axis army.”

“You wouldn’t let me go so they kicked us out onto the street, shot the Jew we were hiding in the loft and sent me to Auschwitz in his place.  A daily nightmare in pink-badged striped pyjamas, mocked and sniped by ‘real men’ in grey uniforms. But your love was with me even there; the mirror reverse of the SM’s home this time.”

“Yes. But this lifetime – as Cindy and James - I’ve absolutely got to let you go. And you’ve got to let me go.”

Why? Had I come all this way just to stumble back into a Night Mare? “But Cin I can’t let you go!” 

“We are Spectres, James. Shadows cast by the light. When you look into the Light of God, the shadows disappear.”

“But I don’t want God. I want YOU!”  

I woke up shouting that (the guys in the next room told me.) And, all through my fever- dreaming, while being kind and attentive in every other way, still no-one would tell me where Cindy was. 

5,000 miles of pilgrimage to find myself in the same place, only deeper, the vacuum at the core of my being. Whenever I tried to see God, I saw Absent Dad, Stepmother Mary and Special’s dogged gaze like a black spot in front of my eyes, the aching absence of Cindy. Nothing was real except her. And without her, Eastern mysticism was just weird and getting weirder. The Stranger’s uptight and rather desperate fellow English followers were either trying too hard to emulate natural Indian devotion along with Indian native dress and reminded me squirmingly of Sunday school only in the wrong clothes or 20-years-after hippies attempting to abdicate all their family responsibilities along with all their Western traditions (including one grubby poet allegedly “surrendering his All to the Master” and expecting thereby to become Beatle-famous and wealthy without having to work eight days a week like the Beatles did for a living, or to support his abandoned wife and children. (An old devotee told him this straight). The Americans, always warmer and more genuine, were also more naïve (apart from those Lou Reed locker-roommates who found my locally tailored Santa-red thick brushed cotton pyjamas hysterically funny) and sometimes too genuinely happy-clappy to take seriously. The kind of people who think Imagine was Lennon’s masterpiece.  Then of course, some utterly overwhelming rejection-risking offer of love from a fellow pilgrim – like the American woman (who had got on my wick since I’d arrived) suddenly saying with that boundless energy they have, “hey James, you’re one of the funniest five men I’ve met in the world; and that includes Lenny Bruce” – would blow all of this darkness away like a Light switching on and I’d weep in gratitude and shame for my ignorance. Then I knew why Cindy had stayed here. 

And I could happily have stayed there with her. But where was she? Not There.

And in the end, at the Stranger’s Trust Office in Ahmendnagar, the very office where Cindy had worked as a typist for the Stranger’s sister and niece for 20 years (“so much for your fancy degree,” sniped Stepmother’s  poison envy in her ear, until Cindy remembered not to hear it: in fact, she’d been encouraged by the mandali to finish her higher education and found it helped her think for herself more clearly,  including how unimaginably fortunate she was to be sharing an office and a typewriter with God’s sister) typing out His Word, minuting His work and doing her best to keep both from the thousand schisms and obscurations that religion is heir to, I demanded an Answer. Is Cindy here or not? There was a long silence and then the Stranger’s sister handed me a letter out of a battered old filing cabinet.

Dear Prudence (it read, I knew it was Cindy then, that was one of our jokes) Won’t you come out to play? You’re in the best place on Earth. The Stranger’s Pilgrim Centre. I knew you’d get here in the end: what took you so long? The thing is, they tell me my work for Him is done here and I’ve got to go West. Please don’t follow me any more. Please don’t try and find out where I’ve gone. Stay here and get to know the Stranger. Obey Him as I have learned to. He’s all you need. I love you more and more each day but He loves you even more than I do and if He has arranged our fates like this, there will be a reason beyond reason that we can’t fathom. Accept his rhythm. Come into tune with it without reservation. I’m sorry but it’s time to go. All my loving, Cindy. XXXXXXX

Now I felt like the Lennon who wrote ‘Julia’ for his departed mother in India. So close to a  divine Beloved’s absence, I could almost touch it. And if it weren’t for the genuine love overflowing from her in my direction, sounding to be honest a bit of a religious nut. This persuasion only increased when, over tea and Eastern weirdness with one of Stranger’s oldest disciples, an ancient woman who as a girl had yearned to travel the world but who had obeyed the Stranger’s order never to leave Strangerabad (one doesn’t disobey a Perfect Master however difficult the order) and who smilingly announced that now the whole world was coming to her, I learned that (apparently) Queen Victoria was a reincarnation of Ravana’s sister whose selfless protection of her love rival Sita for Rama’s sake earned His promise that (as a future Queen of a very distant future British Empire) Ravana’s sister would one day marry her beloved Rama… (so much for The Wealth of Nations and book eight of Das Kapital) I also learned that not only had had Cindy arrived at Strangerabad with the Hollywood actress Leila Lamour only just too late to meet The Stranger in bodily form, but I also had only missed Cindy by a day. By the width of a street in fact: the very day I was seeing that phantom Cindy on the Mother India stall in Deolale, the real Cindy had been riding through the town in a monsoon-diverted cab en route to Mumbai airport and an Air India flight to the USA, where she was taking up a clerical post in the Stranger’s ‘Home in the West.’

I started to pack. I knew I had to go home to my own West. I knew my life and work – perhaps even a masterwork - was there. And I was certainly not going to let this weird mumbo jumbo about obedience and self-denial stop me from going even further West after her the next time I had enough money. But I also understood now that the reason I felt so very far away from myself here in the East was because I am very far away from myself and always have been. 

As I was leaving, Something divine happened. I met Love,  (visiting her Strangerabad family from University in Mumbai, with her lovely Indian boyfriend) who confirmed that Cindy said that under no circumstances was I to follow her. And in the black hole that seemed to engulf me as Love shared this shattering news, she said “So you’re my uncle?” and hugged me. Then I knew  the long long long trip had been worthwhile. “But I wanted to be The Man From Uncle,” I quipped, performing as always, though my heart was aching with gratitude and my eyes damp at having a family connection with this lovely new stranger, who by her look recognised some spectral resemblance to her mother in me. And she got the joke and laughed.  That was Something.

And now as my wrist-shaking Rubber Solo big BANG revolver shot ricochets off my bullet proof Beatle wig and up through the chapel roof like a last desperate prayer, I see in the big blazing spotlight it makes that I DO have an audience. Is it The Edinburgh Fringe Average of Seven?  Well let’s not fool each other or fiddle figures this late in the show. It’s Three. And it is applauding! Yesterday it was a single hand, clapping. And Today by the Grace of Dog it is a single hand clapping me round the back of the head. Because I have that God-old empty feeling that Absent Dad is here. And if Absent Dad be here, can Stepmothering Mary and Dog-Realisation be far behind?

Yes! Absent Dad. Wicked Step (Hello) Mum and The Howly Gust. The only audience in the world remotely interested in my Wannabeatle show. If only because they’re in it. Hello Mum! Happy Christmas Father!  Hey Bulldog, you made it! Now that's Special. You’re looking well, girl, or at least not too ghastly, considering that you have a roll of gaffer tape holding one of your legs in place after your argument in the Spectre drive with the bully neighbour’s invasive extra-large SUV and a wagging metronome instead of the tail you all but pulled out trying to escape the SM Volkswagen Dad absently parked on your tail before taking your empty collar and lead for a walk when he was left in charge of the house for the day. In fact, you have a half-dog’s half-life but keeping you half alive gives AD & SM that special feeling of self-martyrdom that would be forgivable as well-meaning ill-doing soppiness if I didn’t know that Stepmother would have had both Cindy and I immediately put down if we’d ever been remotely in your place… But it’s getting very near the End and time to forget all that now.

“Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Now I know how the Beatles felt before the record breaking 55,000 World Cup Football-sized Beatle crowd at Shea Stadium New York City (including a suitably intimidated Mick Jagger). It makes such a difference when an audience lives a show with a performer and you certainly have - so, thank you again for making all the backstagefright, loathing and two grand of overdraft worthwhile; thank you for Wannabeing here for me in my Lunch Hour of Darkness. Sorry Aunt Rdognas was too dead to make it. Sorry Cindy was too Far East. Sorry for the black hole you made of my Beatle star. Thanks for being the darkness that comprehended my show. 

But wait a minute. I’m still wearing the Lennon-lensed reading spectres I use to build my character’s naïve slightly lost look. Let’s take them off. Now. Let’s cleanse my long-distance doors of perception, jam them onto my gnosis and read the room again. What!? There’s another audient! Wait! Surely not Johnny, minus the beard, looking like both he and Cindy did in 1969, that Johnny I used to trust and worship like he was Jesus? Ah! Let’s give the long distance Lennons another polish. Oh my God” It’s even better than that. Can this be a happy ever after sting-in-the-fairytale?  I’ve just seen a face I can’t forget in the sudden ssunburst of the apostolic chapel window. “Cindy!?” I cry.

*

Wicked Stepmother Mary opens and reads another letter from Myrtle Beach, North Carolina, addressed to James at Hiraeth. (Please forward)

Dear James,

This is the only address I have for you so I hope you get this. I find it hard to obey the Stranger’s order not to contact you and anyway He says if in doubt follow your heart and your conscience, so…    He knows it’s probably less painful if we don’t write to each other any more but whenever one of the ex-Fabs release a new album, I can’t help myself. I enclose a tape of Double Fantasy without the Yoko tracks. I think it’s the best since that first Plastic Ono Band solo album (Working Class Hero, Mother etc) and almost like having him back. Did you get all the other letters I sent when All Things Must Pass; the ‘Ringo’ album; Ram, Red Rose Speedway; Band on the Run; ‘George Harrison’ (masterly) and McCartney 2 (masterly in patches) came out? I’m not saying they’d all be better for having the other Beatles on. I’m saying that all of John’s would be; that they’re all on Ringo’s anyway; and that Paul’s ability to play all the other Beatle’s instruments almost as well as they do would still be better for having the real John telling him his getting better all the time can’t get much worse; and that George’s solo career is the only possible argument for the break up being a good thing and also an argument for how much his inner light irradiated its Beatle bushel. Anyway James, the longer I live and work here in the Stranger’s home in the West, the more I realise Love comes to everyone and I really hope it has come to you. Please please let me know if you get this. I know I should have faith in the Master that you’re OK but I still need to hear it from you. All My Loving, Cin XXXXXXX

Stepmother Mary flays the letter into pieces of confetti like all the others, puts on the face that she keeps in a jar by the door for keeping down with the Joneses next door and flounces out to bury the pieces in the bin.  She doesn’t know how much she is going to miss these love letters when Lennon is shot and Cindy finally accepts that James is never going to get them.

*

Johnny looks out of his office window at the children playing, thinking of a Love he lost four decades ago. 

The County suit coughs again. “Apologies for this, Mr uh. I know it’s rather sudden. But your replacement wasn’t up to it.”

“At least you realised it in time.”

“Just. Anyway, we have your agreement to stay on for another year?”

Johnny watches a child climbing a frame. “Just one, then. The old grey mare ain’t what she used to be.” He laughs to himself. “He never was.”

“We really appreciate this, uh Mr-. You’re a very hard act to follow… -.”

Johnny smiles. He’d got Outstanding in the recent inspection and this fast-insider-tracked public-school County suit was still trying to find his name on a list. You don’t get Beatle-famous in a schoolroom that’s for sure. 

He hadn’t done it for fame though. Ministers and Sinisters came and went and ‘delivered’ their judgements (like a would-be googly at the would be-Oval) depending on which way the Government wind was blowing. And it damn near killed everyone, mostly for nothing. But it was what Cindy would think that mattered. She would like his school motto – “Working together, playing together, all for one and one for all.” It was the nearest he could get to “All You Need Is Love” without alerting County that a 1968-1972 hipnik was on their payroll. 

Johnny sighs. He’d never seen Cindy again after they broke up in India that fatal Christmas Eve 1969. Never saw the bike again either, that faithful BSA he’d had since 1964 and drove through the Himalayas to the very end of the Sixties. (Some Indian was probably still riding its rusty relic.) Never held again that hand he’d held on the generation barricades. Never extended his to Help her brother out of the generation gap hole he’d waved and drowned in that year in Weymouth. (But, with Cindy gone, James was heavy and wasn’t his brother.) Never held their daughter Love’s hand at all. But he had served the child he had lost, in all children. In Dorset, if not in Deolale. And, in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

*

No, the happy ending gazing at me from the back of this converted chapel, is not Cindy, Edinburgh! It’s a completely new kind of audient. One I’ve never targeted, solicited, marketed, leafleted, usp’d, social mediated or bargained for.  A strange and exotic gaze; a foreign body; an oriental complexion; a long white Eastern slip of a garment (a ‘sadra’), an altogether unfamiliar presence. I can’t place it or associate it with any time in my life. It’s the face of a perfect Stranger. And yet there’s Something deeply, dimly, familiar about it. You know I’ve seen this face before. Or at least felt this presence; or known this Something - what is it? 

I think furiously; ransack my brain for what exhilarating experiences In My Life it recalls. The mystery water colour I did of an Old Man I called “A Russian Spy” as a child?; the face of astonishing beauty and sadness giving hope through twenty years of galley slavery at the well to Ben Hur?; the guru poster on the wall in my student counsellor’s consulting room?; the Stranger Introductory Meeting at that same counselling centre I attended in my first winter as a confirmed Bachelor of Arts in which I giggled hysterically throughout as a doddery old actress with Parkinson’s called Leila Lamour dared to speak her Love to a world I was scared even to tell the name of my football team? and who, even as I shook off her dust from my daps and scorned, I found somehow standing before me in the doorway, accepting the apology I’d unconsciously returned to make, out of awed respect for her moral courage, and asking me if I wanted a hug (which oh God I really did) and after which I went out into the January night to come off the dole, find a job, stop smoking dope and move Vic and me out of our post-student schism-racked ‘commune’ and start to build the new life that oddly felt worth living, yet still (inexplicably, it seems now but it seemed too pat at the time) not connecting this feeling with the morally fearless old actress?; and finally even to that whole forgotten adventure in Cindy’s sandal steps, when I went to her Stranger’s Pilgrim Centre in India in 1989? “The Kingdom of God is within you” the old actress in the doorway  had said which, unlike everything else in her loony lecture, made perfect sense. Of course I had met this Stranger before!  How could I forget Something so deep? I made all those efforts to get to America and surprise Cindy with a forbidden visit that always seemed to come unstuck, the most recent as Covid struck when, after years of saving, all our flights to and in America and all our hotels in New York and en route to Myrtle Beach, were all cancelled without refunds, along with a decade’s savings:  a bitter disappointment that finally made me give up the attempt to ever find Cindy. I remembered her Pilgrim Centre in India where there were pictures of a Stranger with eyes who looked at me. And I remembered that Stranger across an Indian street who smiled at me. 

And this Presence in the audience is smiling at me now just like that. Like Sophia Loren gazing at me from that film magazine. Like Cindy smiling her lovely smile at me and my heart lifting. Like the Beatles beaming at us in the boundless joy of Beatlemania and our hearts singing Yeah yeah yeah in four part harmony. Like Mother Mary’s loving kindness,  tender compassion and boundless generosity at Christmas. But not even any and all of those can account for this overwhelming sense of recognition. Its root is stranger, older, wilder. All those recalled incidents in time, in my life, can’t comprehend this Presence Here, There and Everywhere, Yesterday and Tomorrow.

Who is this shining Presence (in the not quite Average crowd with  triple mirrors on its three way reading sunglasses?) The Sun King? Present Dad? That Hullo Mum we climb our mountains and light all our stages for? 

Yes. All those heart-soaring things. And also beyond all those things. A boundless spirit untethered in its slender and beautiful Persian form; a Something. God? Love? But, in this Presence, those are mere words, meaningless tokens trying to purchase the ineffable experience of Him. 

I finally realise what that experience is. “Oh My God! You can see me!” 

He Answers, quite slowly, ”If you were to experience even for a moment an infinitesimal part of my Knowledge, you would derive infinite bliss. You would then experience only bliss from every external thing. Every particle would tell you its story in Knowledge. The whole world, which now seems full of misery, would shine forth as heaven.”

And we all loved happily ever after. 

 

Exit groove

A Happy Ending is not an escape from the real world huddling outside in the rain, Edinburgh.  It is a joyous protest against it. Every killjoy news bulletin keeps us in our places; like the bullet that shot Kennedy. Every killing floor anthem telling it ‘like it is’ paints it blacker than it is and keeps us in our places. Every black hole symphony exulting in darkness and despair is the devil’s music, keeping us down. Every Happy Ending is a revolution in the head; a Good day Sunshine bursting through our Noman attic; a Good Night Sleep Tight that refuses to normalise the unspeakable horror, the blood on the babies, the everyday sub-humanity of man (and woman) to man, woman and child; a Here Comes The Sun that refuses to make the latest nightmare news bulletin the story; refuses to make the unthinkable thinkable. 

So, here’s my News. Pratt’s Biscuits under Wally’s grandson Silly Pratt employs only non-unionised migrant labour on zero-hour contracts picketed by stroppy flag-waving nativists (Mick and Dick the Prick’s various families among them) who would rather not work at all than endure such minimum wave slavery themselves some of whom object to sharing their benefits with foreigners who, as well as taking their benefits, are somehow also simultaneously taking their jobs; and ask to be treated by white doctors while complaining that the waiting lists have increased now the immigrants they’ve forced out aren’t there to service them and now the Great White Hope of Brexit has brought the factory to the edge of ruin and reduced Silly to recruiting the Andrew formerly known as Prince to launch the new chocolate-and-biscuit-free ‘Patriot’ chocolate biscuit (baked on premises  by AI) while hoping for a cartoon Fascist Prime Minister in England to appease a tariff-touting cartoon Fascist American President but …  Johnny runs a great little school. All the kids got home safely again today and with Something in their bags to make them want to come back. After Ex-Pat died of the drink, Aunt Rdognas lived on into her nineties in Corbenic, with her crosswords and a grail chalice in her lighted window. Cindy and Johnny followed the hippy trail to the end of the Sixties in India and only Johnny came back. Willie Larkins lost his wife and is dying to join her as he walks his dog along the beach at Penarth whistling Beatle tunes into the sunset remembering that wonderful Girl Friday (though not her name, nor even sometimes his own) he shared a magical three workaday years of the Sixties with;  before going back to his as-often-as-not happy retirement home. Old Madge visits him on Fridays and they laugh about the good old days, cooing over the picture of Love Cindy sent them later from India, only half-aware in doing so that they’re having the time of their lives.  Johnny married a doll who looked like Cindy and it didn’t work out.  But they had a family who did. And then he married again, making, despite troubles between the step children of both divorces, a much better go of it. Some of the parents in Johnny’s school have stayed married. I am an incurable Beatlemanic; I need Help but I get it. 

God is alive; Magic is afoot (as Field Commander Cohen once said.) The Sixties were Sixty Years Ago Today; these days Vic and I sing When I’m 64 to each other like it’s a bildungsroman. I never stopped hoping Cindy would Come Home just as I never stopped hoping she'll come to one of these shows. (Not today.) But in the end (along with the love you take being equal to the love you make) I have learned to Let It Be. 

There was a crossroads at the End of Abbey Road. John turned left; Paul turned right; Ringo turned back and George ...kept going. Johnny went West and Cindy went East.  The world is full of heartache but the radio is full of love songs. A blackbird sings in these madhouse grounds, heart overflowing in the evening quiet. Imagine it’s Eden because, oh boy, when that bird sings, it really is.

The End