Sergeant Spectre's Lonely Rubber Soul (A Novel)

by Gareth Calway

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

Author’s Note

Sergeant Spectre’s Lonely Rubber Soul is a double bildungsroman; the coming-of-age story of a teenage girl who goes missing at the end of the decade and of her younger brother narrating the whole thing from a Wannabeatle stage at the Edinburgh fringe 60 years later - on their magical-realist mystery tour through the Sixties. Somehow, that “white-hot heat of technological revolution” – and all its attendant revolutions - is now 60 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. 

My chapter titles are the tracks of the Beatles’ Rubber Soul album* released 4 December 1965 in a moment where two trajectories crossed at their highest point: the studio-artistry of a still-live rocknroll act. Eight days later the greatest popular band of all time - with 1,466 gigs 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 (which was also Sinatra's 50th birthday) provides the fairy tale centre piece of the story.

Sedgeford, Norfolk. 10 April 2023

(* and a 1965 Number One single from the previous album 'Help')
 


This is fairy tale set in the real Sixties. The period details and Beatle history are real. Any resemblance to real Spectres living or dead is coincidental.

Chapter One Think For Yourself
Chapter Two In My Life
Chapter Three Nowhere Man 
Chapter Four   Wait
Chapter Five Run For Your Life 
Chapter Six Girl
Chapter Seven  Norwegian Wood
Chapter Eight I’m Looking Through You
Chapter Nine The Word
Chapter Ten Ticket To Ride
 
Chapter Eleven You Won’t See Me 
Chapter Twelve If I Needed Someone
Chapter Thirteen  Drive My Car
Chapter Fourteen Michelle
Chapter  Fifteen  This Bird Has Flown
Chapter Sixteen What Goes On

for Emma

Chapter One
 
Think For Yourself

Council House No 9, Fernway, Somertown, was Beatlemania and England winning the World Cup Final. 4, Snob View, Somertown was ‘Pepper’ and British teams bringing home the European Cup. Hiraeth, 13 Graveside Villas, St Jude’s Road, Milltown, in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, was ‘Abbey Road’ and losing all of it. 

They always pontificate about ‘Pepper’ as the peak, the incredible high before the comedown that 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…

*

June 18, 1967. 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 lonely 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.’

*

22 November 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. Last Friday she was doing exactly the things she is doing now, in exactly the same order, looking forward to a night out 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 Wednesday. Thursdays she loves because it is payday. Hope day.

But she lives for Fridays. Friday is Heaven’s Gate, the Way Out of 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 Telegraph - 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 day-dreams about going West to America where the President is a young man with filmstar looks planning All Our Tomorrows. 

Tea break soon. The big wireless is turned on for the 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 cigar. ‘Churchill’ they call him behind his ample back: always ready to make a speech and stand behind you in a crisis. He allows them five extra minutes, frowning slightly. Then he nods at the foreman and, gradually, chatter starts and the machinery rolls again. 

And Friday 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, 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,” said Margaret.

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

“Your mum? Why not?”

“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? She’s a 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 idealised into something higher and better organised, which is why she hates the Germans-"

Margaret laughs. "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 were the brightest kid in our school.”

“Yeah, that's why they expelled me.”

“Their loss. I bet your mum’s dead proud of you really."

"Stepmother Mary doesn’t believe the world can be put to rights. 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.”

“Or graced with eloquence and whimsy, which is why she hates the Irish, especially the big-talking American Irish 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, Mother 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 Austrian Irish and her uncles fought on opposite sides on the First World War then changed sides when Hitler signed a pact with the Pope to protect the nuns. She was brought up by nuns. She hates them. “Pillars of salt and vinegar. Nazis in black.” 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.”

“What!” Margaret laughed.

“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.”

“But she looks Jewish herself.”

“So does Wales. It’s all the St David Old Testament hillsides and sheep and Psalm singing and chapels called Bethesda.”

“But why does she hate the Welsh even more than she hates the Jews? I thought she was Welsh.”

“She is. And looks Jewish. That’s how she recognises them. And sounds Welsh. Third generation Land of the 700 Year Grudge hyper-Welsh; via Austria and Ireland. 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.” Cindy is 13 going on 14, like Shakespeare’s Juliet, or George when he joined the Beatles, 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 she looks 16 going on 17, like the girl in I Saw Her Standing There. 

“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 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.”

“And will we be asking it tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow Never Knows.”

“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.) Brit pop was rarely even Grammar-school bright, let alone the Wit in Witgenstein. 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 incisive four dimensional 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 they know we’re Number One.” 

“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!”

*

Back in her Somertown bedroom, Cindy Spectre is making herself up. As a Beatle. 

In the mirror, she sees a thirteen-going-on-sixteen-year-old girl gaze back at with house-coal eyes under a heavily fringed beehive. I Want To Hold Your Hand is playing very loudly on her hire-purchased record player. Our parents are shouting up the stairs at her. Our Father is a shop steward who had a good National Service rising towards sergeant, until his class roots pulled him back. Our Mother 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’s shop steward and the Jews are somehow responsible for this; as they are for the Beatles, managed by Brian Epstein and crash-bang-walloped from behind their awful din by Richard Starkey. Or if not them, the Irish. 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 it’s 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 No 9, striking lasciviousness slouches in their outlaw cuts. “Well, I’m a king bee, buzzing round your hive…” They are from a better area than this – 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 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 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 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 they 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 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 world storm. 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.

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 15 weeks 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 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 pile of crap 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, Beatlemania. In 1963, Britain had this madness to themselves. The four-star band line up, all lead vocalists, a top drummer and the top guitarists, the lead guitarist better even than the yin/yang double act 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 four way performance 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 finally 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; their 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 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 brother. 

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.

No, over here. Yes, it's me, your invisible narrator, waving at you in the dark. A dark horse running on a dark racecourse, a little short of breath and very long of odds. Welcome to my bunker. Apologies about the lighting plot. I’m afraid my Brighton-based lights 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 monkey with a monkey on its back ‘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)

*

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.)  "A Nobody's Desert Island Discs, all 186 of them by The Beatles." (Broadway Baby). 

*

 

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!”

Sidney...

 

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.

*

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. 

Most of the vintage vinyl concerned – this pile here - was my big sister’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. 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 fifteenth ear instead of right in your third eye. And that wax-warm crackle accompanying the glorious music is the groove. 

‘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 my Big Sister 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 to stay up to see them for real on Ready Steady Go with Beatle-fringed Cathy MacGowann.

Once upon a time, 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. George Harrison Space Station. Paul McCartney Inner Light Railway. Ringo Starr Magical Mystery Charabanc Tour…

*

I’m voicing this over the nearest The Beatles got to soundtracking that other Sixties fairy tale... When it came out, it sounded more like the four Beatles than some of Paul’s late long and winding pianistic solo work with the Beatles. Or it would have done if the Live and Let Die theme hadn’t been a jarringly un-Beatley celebration of old school violence (old school as in Winchester) - happiness is a warm gun without the triple entendre. So it’s the Beatles without the Fab Force. On which suitably ambivalent note, key and tempo change, please allow me to introduce myself.

The name is Spectre. James Spectre. Your reliable narrator. (bam bam bam)

Nowhere Man at your service, pounding the British beat, policing the gunpowder plot, looking for clues at the scene of the crime. (Heeeeellllll!)

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.

*

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 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. He's always watching me. 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 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…”

*

I didn't kill Kennedy, Mick, so I don’t have sympathy for the devil who did. When I was christened at the original-and-best (established  30 AD, 330 AD or 1030 AD, depending on your politics) Catholic font, I was seven years too young to have the devil in me thrown out.  It wasn’t there. (Unlike the “hidden meanings” in Sixties songs, whatever Absent Dad said later.) And when Kennedy was shot, I was in my parents’ bedroom, being told off. Guilty of being seven and a boy in the eyes of every nag since nursery began maybe but innocent of murdering Kennedy. 

Here’s what I was being told off for. Mick ‘the Prick’ Price and the older boys in the gang (surrogate fathers if you like, in the Absence of Dad) told us that there was no Santa, it was just your dad dressed up. Father Christmas (Absent Father Christmas in our case because Mother Mary did all the honours as well as gift-buying, wrapping, putting the tree up, cooking etc etc etc.) This terrible shock was followed by a do and die challenge from Mick ‘the Prick’ Price. 

This. “Search through your parents’ house and find the gold, frankincense, and myrrh they’ve bought you. Hunt down the Presents that will prove Santa’s Absence; that there is no Santa. Go on, Break your own heart. Exile yourself from Eden. Knock yourself out.

So the choice for this little boy lost in the wilderness, in absentia parentis, as always, Edinburgh, was either to remain in our Mother Mary’s magical Christmas Nazareth. Or secure my position as a junior member of the Big Bad World where it was always winter and never Christmas. By spoiling it for myself and the ‘little sister.’  

So I hunted every last crook and cranny of Council House No. 9 until I found the snake, disguised as a stepladder into Mother Mary’s enchanted roof, treacherously calling my ‘little sister’ to follow me prematurely to the end our childhoods; and found three piles of beautifully wrapped presents in the loft. A tiny pile for big sister, a bigger one for me (marked ‘if he behaves’) and the stepmother and father of a dogpile for Special. Including ten years’ piano lessons with a local piano teacher because she was ‘musical.’ I looked in vain for 10 years guitar lessons with a local guitar teacher because I was musical. Tone deaf Stepmother decreed that, being a boy, I wasn’t. And I showed that pile to Special. Who, of course, being a dog, ran, howling to Stepmother Mary.

*

Special’s howl had magical powers. When she wearily lifted her self-pitying head that fateful ‘Mick the Pricked’ Christmas and sighed and whimpered and fixed you with her black-hole gaze, Stepmother Mary and Absent Dad could hear and see nothing else. Special’s self-pity vacuumed Everything into Nothing. 

Special was not a working dog or a guard dog (she ran away from any challenge) or any kind of a family support: she had no function; no character; no charisma; she gave nothing. When they speyed her, it only confirmed her essential non-productiveness, the everything ending with her. If you were ill, she wouldn’t come and lay her head on your lap as a family dog might, unable to help or understand but giving her fellow-mammal warmth and sighing for you in a way that made you feel better. She would sicken and subside into her basket and self-lick the sympathy she felt into that black hole of herself, and then consume your reaction like a dog treat. Her whining for your suffering consumed it. You would have to get up from your own sick bed to tend to her. 

Special’s response to family bereavements was to grieve so profoundly that no attention could be given to the actual dead. 

If Special isn’t “too ill or too poor” to be here at the end of the show, she will start by claiming the show is all about her and end by chirping that in essence it is her show. And Stepmother Mary and Absent Dad will support her delusion by adopting it themselves.  

*

When she was about seven, she packed Dad’s suitcase with her dog-gillet, Special toilet paper, Sunday best collar and tie (their name for her lead) and howled at the bus stop, waiting for him to nip home briefly from work and ask what was going on.  “I’m leaving because of James,” she whimpered. I waited for Grown Up Sensible Dad to call her bluff and say “Oh yeah, and where are you going and what are you going to do for bus fare you silly bitch?” but instead he grounded me for “hounding your poor little sister out of the family home.” 

He was a shop steward and all for the underdog – unless the underdog was my Big Sister and me, the in-the-underdog-house-dwellers in his own home. Though to be fair, he didn’t just model deference as the behaviour he expected from us. He growled a lot at the Daily Malice and the News and barked Labour movement dogma in your ear, repeating the same tied-to-the-kennel liturgy and examples, year after year after year, until your brain was screaming but, unlike my Big Sister, always stopped short of ever challenging the overdogs who actually run the world. 

Naturally, next day I tried the same “I’m leaving home” tactic myself, except I actually got on the bus, travelled a few miles into and stayed a few nights out in the scary world and after they enticed me back with a prodigal son happy ending got beaten, leashed, grounded for six months and told “next time don’t come back” until one day I didn’t.

My first eighteen years may be represented thus as a series of unsuccessful bids to start my story. My story genuinely began when I left home, without any preparation for or means of keeping myself, with their boot up my backside. The moment I left, they moved to a new house with two bedrooms, one for them, one for the dog. Unlike my Big Sister, I was still welcome to visit (my dog bowl overflowing with dog food and a dog basket on the front room floor to sleep in: my animal needs were always well attended to) on the condition that I revert to the person who hadn’t left. But I was and always had been. Nothing was real. After Special’s little Leaving Home melodrama, they never felt like my real parents and where they lived never felt like my real home. 

*

Stepmother Mary caught me peeling the ruby and silver foil off a chocolate Father Christmas and screamed. “YOU STOLE CHRISTMAS! Wait until your Absent Father gets home!”

It took a while. It was like waiting for Christmas in June. 

“What would you like for Absent Father’s Day this year, Absent Dad?”

“Presents,” he’d reply, drifting off. Even when he was in the room, he was absent. “I like presents…” 

So we waited all year for his Presence. And AT LAST it’s 2 am on Christmas Morning …and you’re still watching the big hand go round on the bedroom clock so slowly you want to scream. 

Dad was in a good mood because the SM had bought him of those new transistor radios, so my sentence was suspended.  The Light Programme played as I waited outside their bedroom. I was summoned in and fined all my presents as a punishment.  So now it will be always winter and never Christmas. I pushed Special off the bed. 

“Special!” shrieked Stepmum. She went in to her routine. “And who’s Stepmummy’s soppy doggy woggy then? Who’s Stepmummy’s soppy doggy woggy woo? Who’s Stepmummy’s soggy doggy -” 

“Bitch,” I corrected.

Special bit my finger, mistaking it for her chocolate Father Christmas. 

“Ah look. She’s trying to kiss her brother. What a clever doggy woggy-!”

Which of course taught our ‘little sister’ that the way to win is not to fight on the beaches and landing stages and fields (and picket lines and factory floors) and never surrender (as my Victor comic taught me, in absentia Dad) but to look sorry for yourself and whine. Which is why, now she is an older version of the little old lady she always was, our 'little sister' still lives in the only place she can’t Lose. With our parents.

All through the Sixties, where working class heroes were fighting and starring and winning, in our house the Loser won. Which meant in 1967 my Big Sister disappeared for good. And in 1974 I followed: and am now only ever visible under HELLO MUM LOOK AT ME Lights. And back in the valley of the shadow of death, the little old spinster’s self-licked-to-little-death wound is still the babe in the manger, the dog-star of the show.

Pets are the children you can have without the generation challenge that peaked in the Sixties. Pets snap and bite but they don’t offer an unrelenting critique of parenting. They don’t make a parent think about who they are or what they’re giving; pets just gobble up the grub and look up at you with doting black hole eyes for more. 

That’s fine– they’re pets and they’re always there for you. Even if you rot their teeth with biscuits and don’t take them for walks and let them shit where children play. They love you, no matter what, and that’s a rare delight, especially around teenagers. But they’ll never make a parent of you. Because pets are the children who never grow up.

I’d been practising some moves from drawings in Commando magazine and expected Dad to praise me when I fetched the bitch a smart one across the chops. He didn’t. Special exploded in a panic. Unlike me, she didn’t know what a smack was. It was like the time I reported Mick the Prick’s description of Dad ( “tell your dad e’s a pig”) expecting Dad to go out and give Mick What For and just got What For myself. 

The radio went flying. ‘Here is the News’ intoned the BBC voice sailing across the bedroom. The same BBC voice my Big Sister and Margaret were listening to at work. And Wicked Stepmother Mary, protecting her favourite, clouted me at Absent Dad, who (evading responsibility) clouted me back – with the full force of his factory arm – my head pinging like a pinball between them. 

And then they shot Kennedy.

*

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.

Well he certainly wasn’t here. 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 childhood

home in Nazi Verboten. It wasn’t our fault she thinks she was smuggled out of the Black Forest in a copy 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 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 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 a year, like Father Christmas, he landed his magical reindeer on the roof and came home for the whole day...

*

Christmas morning 1963. The Spectre children have hardly slept. After hours tossing and turning, waiting to catch Present Father 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. 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, My Bonny, the Skye Boat Song, 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. Present Dad is home. 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, the 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.

*

Cindy sighs and waves the make-up box across her looking glass face. “Yeah you’ve got that Something…” 

She sings the world-conquering Beatles spells. “When I get home to you, I know the things that you do will make me feeeeel...”  She carefully re-assembles the clogs, overall and pumpkin-skinned-dog-eyed puppy-love rat-tails of her workaday life in the shimmering silver magic of the mirror. She’s not just one of the endless local beauty queens the Beatles have been photographed with since those first hazy crazy heady days of February 1963. She is the One.

Stupidly, when she’d had the chance to see the Beatles the first time at the local Merlin theatre in Somertown, in the Summer of ’63, Cindy had actually missed it. 

That was Margaret’s fault. Margaret had met some typists and factory girls from Liverpool on holiday at Minehead Butlin’s in the Summer of ’62. She told Cindy everyone in the city of Liverpool was raving about this phenomenal group of rockers and Margaret being Margaret, she stayed in touch, struck up a correspondence, won the Pools, decided to go up and stay with them and see a pre-Christmas lunchtime show on December 12 at the Cavern. She had the time of her life, met a handsome Scouser doorman who had been at school with Ringo (on the rare occasions either of them was there), went back with him in the evening, exchanged addresses and bodily fluids, luckily without subsequent issue, and had been a pre-Beatlemaniac ever since.

So the Beatles were Margaret’s ‘thing’ not Cindy’s.  And, as 1963 progressed, this ‘thing’ overflowed the banks of the Mersey and drowned the whole country. 

Margaret and her Liverpool doorman and her fairy tales of meeting The Fab Four became increasingly true. Cindy, slightly the more magnetic of the two girls in canteen and milk bar foursomes, rather resented and resisted the magic. And, when Johnny got two precious tickets for them to see the Mop Tops for herself (he himself was going to see the mean and moody Americans they’d scandalously replaced at the top of the bill since he originally booked the tickets), the envy of hundreds of Somertown girls whose would-be-courtly providers failed, his face full of his swaggering success, she, perversely and churlishly, affected indifference. And Johnny, being Johnny, took Margaret instead.

Cindy wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. But she’d made a different mistake when Johnny got tickets for them again at Bristol Colston Hall in October 1963. She’d assumed the concert would sound something like the records. She’d had to pretend to be ‘Fran the Fan’ while Johnny pretended to be Roy Orbison (with his “what’s a Beatle anyway?” slightly shaken and very stirred American superior smile of condescension at the pre-male Chaos of fury all around him) so as not to upset Johnny A Second Time while all the time she was actually completely missing “that Something” she’d spent 1963 inhaling from the airwaves. When Daltrey of the Wagnerian Who alleged in his autobiography a century later that the stadium rock of the Beatles was actually the screams of the girls while the music was a dinky toy size, he loudly missed the point as usual. What rocked the clubs, cinemas, theatres and stadiums of the 1963-1965 was what the Beatles honed in the caverns of Hamburg and Liverpool and broadcast intact through the early records, not the one they lost in the tour-wilderness of wax model showtime and screams. 

*

Margaret Deeds lost her job at Wally’s Biscuits for taking that pre-Christmas week in Liverpool, “Family Firm” Wally, handing her her cards. “If you’re so flush with Pools, Miss Deeds, you can go and live on them. Life isn’t a fairy tale. Happy Christmas.” 

In January, as the Pools money ran out, Margaret put on her luxury dress and shoes and luxury make up and travelled first class up to Temple Meads for a job interview as chambermaid at the Grand Hotel in Bristol. She made all the other candidates look stupid and got the job. And, being Margaret, not only thrived in the post but found herself in celebrity company as various artistes from the Hippodrome and the Colston Hall stayed there after her shows. Cindy tried not to be jealous when Margaret came back to Somertown in her Bristol look (voted the prettiest in Britain by the Daily Mirror) and with signed programmes and even record sleeves from celebrities she’d taken late night cocktails and early morning tea to. Many years later, her grandson would be a star himself, a dream born in reception and the early hours of a Bristol morning, son of her star-struck eyes offering tea and sympathy to the working class heroes of the day. Their room-at-the-top rubbed off on her. And never more so than the night Ringo and George stayed.

*

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

“Bristol,” says 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, only the sound of empty critics – it’s now more like the scream of jelly babies. I have enough trouble slowing down my Mersey Sound 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.”

“Luxury! 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 before you. 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.”

“We were child brides to rock n roll. You never Beatled until you were a grown up.”

“Well you’re the oldest baby at the top of the charts now. And everyone’s trying to be your baby.”

“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 separate hotel room 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. 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 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 triple barrel of a Revolver that’s been loading since 1962 and reached for the sky with Abbey Road in 1969. 

*

Meanwhile, back in 1964, Margaret is feeling blue. When she visited their dressing room at midnight like this last winter telling them she’d seen them at the Cavern, it felt much more special. They’d dipped their wicks and signed their autographs with a weary enthusiasm rekindled by that special ownership of a Liverpool that had prized and possessed them first and for two glorious years. Mal Evans, the bouncer at the Cavern, had dropped in too about a security scare at the hotel and she joked with him about his old job. He didn’t remember her of course but she remembered him and he appreciated it. 

(From ever-presents at the Cavern 1961-1962 to six performances in January 1963; three in February three and none in March. The reverse Liverpool gauge of success. They’d be 

buying houses in London next.) 

Cindy is poised next to her on the service stairs of the Grand Hotel, in a borrowed chambermaid’s uniform trying not to giggle.  She is holding a tray of tea ordered by Room No. 1. On it is a complimentary box of Beatle jelly babies. Only she and Margaret know who the occupants of room No. 1 are. A large police security operation has been in place since this morning to make sure the secret doesn’t get out. 

Part of this security operation has been to leak false leads to the press, one reporter apparently  being told that the Beatles are guests of the Marquis of Bath at Longleat House thirty miles away just over the Wiltshire border, along with the Duchess of Kircaldy and a boudoir of Society belles with whom they will playboy the November night away into a conservatory breakfast of champagne and shepherd’s pie made with real shepherds; while simultaneously Guy Fawksing the service cellar with the lower servants and the Marquis’ wayward son (later Lord Weymouth) in a radical toff/working class plot to bring down capitalism.  Another is to suggest The Four are already installed in a hotel in the town of their next venue, an implausible ruse give that the Colston hall Bristol is the last night of the tour. In fact, in an effort to control the mass hysteria, and to divide and confuse the crowds, four vague lookalikes (Mal Evans, Neil Aspinall and two other old Liverpool friends) have been driven in a limousine through the screams at the front of the Colston Hall while the real George and Ringo have been rushed out of the back. John and Paul, meanwhile, have sprinted down a stairs, through a beer cellar, up another stairs and out of a side door into an ice cream van and finally up into up the back stairs into Room No. 1 of a completely different hotel.  It is one of the many circumstances which fail to divide the Fab Force, who, as George will comment later, were so ‘tight’ together at the time – experiencing an individual adulation shared as a group – (unlike Elvis or Frank) so in tune, on the beat and in time as forged in the heat of the Cavern and Keller-years crowds that not even being unable to hear each other onstage for two years could stop them – and with no-one in the world except each other to know how it felt, including a work schedule (now also beyond all  predecessors) by which they had collectively made it possible.

Margaret knocks on the door and listens for a Liverpool voice to answer. Cindy tells herself she is going to meet the Beatles and almost drops the tray pinching herself to prove she’s not dreaming. The two young women’s ears are still ringing from the concert and even in the post-concert quiet of the hotel they have to put them to the door. Cindy rehearses a fairy-tale greeting.  “Hello George. I hear you like jelly babies? Nice to meet you Ringo… I hear you like…” Of course, she will probably just stand there, like a star-struck Beatlemaniac, speechless. But either way, this will be one in the eye for Johnny, who had roared off into the night on his motorbike when she’d said she was seeing Margaret afterwards and didn’t need a lift home. 

“But Johnny, you’ve been moaning all night anyway. Saying how overrated they are. I’d thought you’d be glad to see the back of the place.”

In fact, even rocknroll Johnny wasn’t quite untouched by world Beatlemania. Like many 1964 lads, he was wearing Cuban heels and had combed his Teddy boy hair forward into a Beatle fringe. He looked like a Beatle or as his dad would say, a girl (the only difference in Paris at the start of 1964, said Paul later, was that it was boys screaming – rather gay looking boys, George would add.) If every female in the world between 12 and 20 thought that look was sexy, Johnny wasn’t going to risk missing out. “I liked Roll Over Beethoven, Boys, Money and Twist and Shout – what I could hear - but I can’t stand that girly stuff they do. And I’ve had to listen to a thousand schoolgirls screaming their pants off and throwing jelly babies past my head for 40 minutes. And now I don’t even get a kiss goodnight. Thanks for nothing.”

“Shh,” whispers Margaret.

“I haven’t said anything…” responds Cindy.

“What’s that screaming?”

A manager’s voice thunders behind them. “Miss Deeds!”

Margaret spins round. 

“There are a thousand Beatlemaniacs stampeding outside my hotel. How did they find out we have two Beatles here?”

“I don’t know Sir.”

“I do! You were sworn to absolute secrecy.  Have you any idea of the cost to the hotel if either of them is hurt? How many police I now have to ask the council for? Just so you can boast and show off to your friends?”

“I didn’t tell anyone!” pleads Cindy. “Not even my boyfriend.”

“I only told a couple of girls at the bus stop,” whimpers Margaret. “They were showing off some Beatle autographs to some boys and I said ‘Big deal. I saw them in 1962 at the Cavern when you could hear them’. 

‘Yeah yeah’. 

‘Yeah! And I bet you don’t know where they’re staying tonight!”

*

James is in Cindy’s bedroom mirror trying to brush his SM-imposed Hitler parting into a Beatle fringe and listening to a pile up of six brand new authentic 1963-1964 Beatles singles when Cindy comes in. She didn’t buy ‘Love Me Do’ (which got to No. 17 selling – copies, most of them bought by Brian Epstein) and ‘Please Please Me’ (which got to Number 1 in several charts but only Number 2 in another.) So James’s little sequence piled up on the ingenious device which thumps a (semi-) controlled sequence of vinyl 45 rpms onto the turntable begins with ‘From Me To You’, the single which confirmed at the third time of asking that this ‘interesting and innovative’ new Northern guitar all-singing all-chancing fast combo was more than a two hit wonder. Only Margaret and the pimpled secretary with the dirty minded boss had bought ‘Please Please Me’. Every girl in the factory bought ‘From Me To You’, the third one. It unequivocally topped the chart and heralded the Beatlemania singles (‘She Loves You’ ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’) that followed, hogging the top three chart spots for several weeks, occupying Christmas 1963 and changing everything forever. 

Just before Cindy came in, James paused in his hair redesign to mime triple guitar triple vocal to ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ and the new one: ‘I Feel Fine’. She finds him mid-shave on the feedback opening of that, the comedy moment John had made into a moment of global mirth. But she doesn’t see him getting in touch with his male side re-enacting that feedback shave; she only sees her little brother posing in her girly mirror with her big girl’s brush. Not to mention risking her hard-earned brand-new records in the dodgy pile up system.

“You shouldn’t use my stuff without asking, James. Anyway why aren’t you out playing Beatles with your mates? What are those red marks on  your face?”

No reply. He’s a loser. A long silence while he summons up the courage to answer. Finally - “Mick the Prick keeps punching me because he says he’s John. But I’m John.”

“Mick keeps punching you? Have you told Dad?”

“Yeah. On Boxing Day.”

“What did he say?”

“He told me Jesus said we should turn-”

“We should turn…?”

“He had to go to work then but he finished the sentence on Easter Sunday. He said we should turn the other cheek. I said I couldn’t”

“And what happened when you said that?”

“He gave me a clout around the back of the head.”

“What for?”

“To help me remember to turn the other cheek.”

“And what happened when you did?”

“Mick gave me a harder punch on the other one.”

“And what did he say about that?”

‘Jesus?”

“Dad.”

“He was back at work.”

“What did Mum say?”

“She says she was glad Mick thumped me and that it serves me right for being cheeky.” 

“To Mick or to her?”

“To everybody I guess.” 

Another silence. 

Cindy looked at the disfiguring bruises on her little brother’s face. “OK. Jesus says turn the other cheek but after you’ve done that and got another smack, maybe give Mick a thick lip to keep him honest and tell him to stop being a bully? I’m not sure Mick is spiritually advanced enough to appreciate your efforts to preach Holy Joe’s gospel, James, and you certainly aren’t. If you’re offering your other cheek out of fear, that’s not Jesus, it’s the opposite.”

“Oh God!” James gulped.

James can feel his parents undermining his efforts to make a fist of it so Cindy shifts tack. “You wanted to be John yeah?”

“I am John.”

“Well, what would John say about it?” 

*

For all their in-touch-with-our-feminine-side girl’s hair hippy-next-door vegetarian pipes of love and peace, God’s cheeky choirboys certainly never offered a cheek that shrank from a battle with anyone. They did their apprenticeship in Liverpool and the Reeperbahn after all. 

“A Hard Day’s Night was the best ‘not at all difficult’ third album since Beethoven’s Erotica. (sic) It was mostly written by a wise-cracking rudely punning John as his marriage broke up and it blazes with joyous Beatle light – whoops of joy in four part harmony - over a dark subject, until the final track, where the shining grin slips from that much-loved, much-troubled face. Always giving you all his open hurt, straight from the heart, straight from the hip, bang on your nose: the most honest and vulnerable, the angriest, the least modulated, least calculated Beatle. Here, the wife-Beatling (judged “man I was mean…” by his Sergeant Pepper male-reconstruction) home key, sublimated throughout by four brilliant young guys having fun with tunes to die for, has the oddly downbeat last word. It may be the best-ever pop LP for all those reasons. 1963-1969: those were the days when every new Beatles record was a visit from the gods.”

That’s the review I would have written at the time if I’d been Cindy’s age (14) instead of mine (8). It’s the review I later used to show girls on the way to school, or later still people I hitch-hiked lifts from, telling them I worked for a record company.  Living a truer lie than the life I had as the Nowhere boy the unloved son of Stepmother Mary and Absent Dad and other-cheek punchbag of Mick the Prick. It's the review that got me the job of Reliable narrator of this long game of hide and seek with Absent Dad; this long Orpheus escape through the spooky, off-key, Night Mare's nest; this long Beatle music lesson tuning in, turning on and dropping out of their parrot-flat, dog-howling family row.

*

Christmas 1964 was done up in tinsel and crépe as always. (Crépe as in Christmas  and funerals not as in a wine-bar loo poo in Edinburgh, Edinburgh.) Free and loving Mother Mary’s lullabies heralded and lit up my Christmas Eve as ever, saying Yes to my heart’s highest hopes and absolving me from all my trespasses, sending those magical light shows across the ceiling as cars went by on their way out to Beatle-land. But even before she’d risen from my bedside, her satanic negation, the Stepmother Mary monster under the bed  (her alter ego) began hissing her War-reared, hysterical, Nazi-accent scary Mary recitations of Nebuchadnezzar the King of the Jews and Kaiser Bill (to be banished from heaven is all very well but it’s just too bad to be kicked out of hell! snaking off the tongue and into the ear with particular venom in a Welsh lilt as soft as a slip)  No more soft, beguiling Mother Mary melodies about me and her in a world made safe by unconditional love, these were fame-starved bunker-music-hall cameos from a shadowy old ego-witch who craved the limelight denied to her by a scandalous fate and wanted to tell her story at interminable length to the applauding world using my night-lit box bedroom as her substitute stage. 

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 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; 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 “A Taffy in Cheddar” by the Baron Knights.

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

Yeah, we could.

Chapter Four

Wait

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 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 friends 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. 

Dylan's troubadour canon searched for 50 years for the Answer to the riddle of the Universe and ranged Homerically across Judeo-Hellenic Culture and Faith while rooting deeply within the musical limits of Americana. (Including his undeclared cover of Nottingham Town reworded as Masters of War and of Norwegian Wood reworded as Fourth Time Around.) I can’t recall a single psychedelic or Eastern note in his music though the High Tambourine Man’s amphetamine-charged words certainly began tripping out of his cowboy mouth in a Fool-on-the-Hillbilly direction in his Blonde on Blonde period. It was the poetry: the Biblical-Hermetic howling-wolf lyric; the singing odysseys; the psalms, proverbs, parables and prophesies rather than the bringing-it-all-back-home mid-Western music he sang it to that made him so far out. 

All this might make the Beatles' essential philosophy of All You Need Is Love - rainbowing out across every kind of popular and classical Eastern and Western music - seem a bit trite. The Who and the Animals expressed the divine desperation of youth with a harder punch; Hendrix had a more complicated vision of the divine and the rare technical genius to realise that divine complexity in a harrowing and/or beautiful recorded performance. Even before the Fabs split into less than the whole of their parts, Dylan's philosophy is perhaps more searching, his words more intelligent - his divining more apocalyptic - than George's mystical clarity or John's malaprop a-gnosticisms. But it's like comparing the Bible to the Music of the Spheres. 

Because, even if and where these 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 beat thumping 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.

For No One was my original name for this show, Edinburgh. But the Fringe Booking Office advised that in a city where every audient is at a premium it might be taken literally. They agreed that "Detective Sergeant In-Spectre’s Lonely Hard Solo Magical Realist Misery Tour With A Little Help From The Beatles For Sale" was relatively more inviting but might be hard to fit in the brochure. How about “Revolver: A Warm Gun For Sale”? I compromised. Or "Detective Sergeant Spectre's Lonely Rubber Solo"?  In the end we agreed on The Beatles Forever Fringe Show. Let's face it, the B word does it. Like all the Mersey Soundings; Fab Fathomings; Eulogies; Dream-busting, Party-Pooping, Balloon-Bursting Un-Bury The Hatchet Jobs done by Wannabeatles kissing or biting the hand that’s held and fed them since the Sixties let us all down in 1970 (not to mention those two early albums actually with the band name in the title because even they traded on it then) that "Beatles" still sell tickets.

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. But for 15 year old Cindy in 1965 it 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. 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, doll? 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 Buckland Dinham 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 ruin that cheeky long-haired little monkey newspaper boy the sack. He does what 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 20 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 skirts 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 that ‘Safety’ matches made fire safe. Cindy knows it isn’t. 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. 

*

You’ll notice, Edinburgh, that Cindy has a Welsh lilt herself, clear as a mountain stream. Cindy is defined by a certain kind of Welsh accent just as Beatle is defined by a certain kind of Liverpool accent. When I heard Emlyn Hughes speaking calm down, calm down ‘Scouse’ after a Cup Final win a year or so after being charmed by that magical laid-back Beatle voice of my childhood, I refused to believe they were from the same place. And in a sense I was right. The Mersey Sound was never Emlyn Hughes. It was John, Paul, George, Ringo, McGough, Henri and Patten, a Scouse lifted by poetry and music and education and that land of saints and scholars across the wath’er, out of its raw materials. 

 

Liverpool (pwll, Welsh for water) and Welsh are both un-English, Irish-facing, musical, sing-song (it’s all that Rain in the throat). The dialogue of Cindy and Beatle is the musical dance of Wales and the Mersey, a Celtic connect and disconnect; magical scouse and realist valley; earthy city and airy mountain. 

 

One of the many contrary things about Stepmother Spectre’s family is how each family member, because of our regular uprootings and split origins, has a completely individuated accent; is each a sound-island cut off from the main. I can never watch, say, a Geordie folk band on stage without envying the way they, like each vivid Beatle in his identical suit, shares that family identity, that glory in the more than the sum of its parts. The Spectres (though much more parent-child visually akin than Cindy and I ever wanted) each spoke a distinct babel with a different accent. The only place all of these particular voices is blended is in the dog. There the family whine peaks, a perfect blend of West country (sarcastic self-pity) Welsh valley (moaning) and stifled Daily Malice aspiration. Special’s voice is a comical imitation of posh English inflected with Welsh notes, mainly whining, but with asthma barks of laughter when the joke is on anyone but herself, usually her siblings; and suicide howls when attention is given to anyone else. 

We all suffered from a sort of Nowhere-ness in our voices. It reflects the uprootedness of our lives. When I informed Absent Dad, on his way out to the Milltown Retired Gents Social Club many years later, that our first child wasn’t going to be christened because we objected to the assumption that our newborn had the devil in her, he protested “The devil is all around us, mun.” If he’d said “The devil is all around us, man” I might have believed he was saying it – and saying it to me – rather than the imagined Milltown community he’d absorbed into his sentence. 

“The Daily Malice hates him because he’s a sushalist!” was his defence of Brian Clough, a defence I shared but in that Nowhere accent, ‘socialist’ sounded more like bleating the same Welsh notes at me as his potential attackers on him. 

When I thanked a busman for the ride (“CheeRs, droive”) on a root-seeking return to Bristol in the 90s, that homely local responded, “All right bud” (instead of Dad’s attempt at a Welsh ‘butty’ which came out as a Northern sandwich) Friends, that driver was the busman this orphan never had. 

Dad was so caught between the default comfortable rolling Bristol hills of his childhood accent and his 50 year sojourn among the mountain-peak shrillness of working Wales that there are now words and even sentences he can’t say, or says in two ways so opposite that they cancel each other out. Gas mask for instance. He says Gass Marsk with a short ‘a’ then a long one; then corrects it to Gars Musk. For Folk music he’s caught between Falk Mewsick and Fulk miaousic and ends up saying Fuck Music. Bath is neither the short ‘a’ version you get from Northhampton to North Yokshire, nor the faux French southern softy version Barth, but the Bristol posh Barhth (as in Barhth Spal) sliding into the Bristol working class short ‘a’ Bahf as in I aven’t ad a bahf for free weeks. 

Posh Welsh-piping Stepmother Mary would often confuse us in my West country childhood by asking my Somertown mates if we were going to the ‘Swimming Bars.’ She was saying “baths” but seemed to be warning us about the underwater bars we might hit our heads on if we had too much fun water-bombing. When I was younger so much younger than today in 1965 I parodied the Number One Help in that ‘Swimming Bars’ avoiding the black bars demarcating the lanes at the bottom of the blue water ‘Help me if you can I’m feeling square/ Help me get my feet back in the air”). I got to University, passing all my O and A levels, still writing it as ‘Swimming Bars’ only discovering in a death leap off the high diving board of the Norwich Municipal ‘Bars’ on the wings of a Geronimo! “Hail Mary!” that it wasn’t even a Baths for the dirty workers anymore but a leisure classes Pool. As children we were also taught to fear a venomous winged killer that rhymed with ‘asp’ - a “Wasp’ It stalked our nightmares and was another of their Nowhere Bristol-Welsh up-rootednesses, neither Welsh (wosp) nor Bristol (waaaahsp) but their own hysteria, channelled at us from our co-anti-educational language school on warring sides of the Bristol Channel.

My own dialect of the Spectre Nowhere babble is, as you may have noticed, a bit fluid. Especially when in a spontaneous overflow of method I forget to get the voices and accents of my characters right. The truth is, I’m better at Beatle Scouse and Welsh (and Scots and Irish and Indian and even Norfolk, which unlike many actors I at least know isn’t Somerset…) than my own voice. If only because I don’t really know what it is. 

All through my childhood and early youth, Stepmother Mary took a personal hammer to my voice. I had to watch my Ps and Qs, sound my aitches (dropped all over Wales and the West Country and colossally sounded in its reverse region of Norfolk) and tees. If I wanted the bu’eR, the correctively teed ‘butter’ and the insistence on “Please may you pass the…” were part of the same Daily Malice RP aspiration programme, though complicated by the fact that it came with a Welsh lilt (and an absent whack round the back of the head from a Dad who dropped aitches and tees much worse than me, if I objected, and if he was there.) So I grew up feeling the invasive violence of a foreign English reluctantly adopted ‘inside’ and swiftly chucked over the hedge with a whoop when I got outside into the Common Speech of the field, playground, football pitch, cycle-freeway…

I was considered ‘well spoken’ by all the mothers on the estate except my own and with a reputation for scholarliness at school that got me promoted to the top stream (nine months of mock 11 plus papers) and unsuspected, as tuck monitor, of thefts from the school shop for which rougher peers were punished. It was an early lesson in sociolinguistics (and the law.) And in my struck-dumb first terms at Somertown Grammar I did what I still do to this day if interviewed by the BBC or the police or describing symptoms on the phone to a doctor: I watch my Ps and Qs and sound my aitches and tees.  It is the oral equivalent of my first essay for my Somertown English Master, ‘This is Me” (I transcribed it using the fifteen ton Parker Pen my father had got me for passing, with the family name on it, misspelled in gold by the engravers as ‘Sceptre’) which Stepmother dictated rather use my own words so that, she explained, “you don’t sound like a cabbage”.

Stepmum’s heavy involvement in how I sounded was partly her resistance to how Factory Dad Joe spoke. But, as with everything else in our family, it was more complicated and contrary. It wasn’t just the Daily Malice versus the Daily Mirror. It was also prim Wales against slack Somerset. Which meant that, when we moved back to Milltown in 1968, her voice-control changed. 

Suddenly we were surrounded by a Celtic choir. The first week, I went to bed with my ears ringing. And Stepmother Mary was less inclined to stamp out dropped Welsh aitches than Somerset ones. After all, unlike the rest of us, she was ’ome. (pronounced OM). So my first teenage years were spent learning to pronounce ‘Hoe-lea Boibaw’ as ‘Wholly Babel” just so I could understand that the RI Master was setting me the whole of Leviticus to copy out as a detention for not following what he said. It wasn’t until the Sixth Form reading out passages of Browning and Shakespeare for Mr Amis to a class of trainee intelligencia that my own wish not to sound like a country bumpkin in such company began. This persisted through University (it was bad enough laying my private cards on the seminar table  anyway without the Totopoly disadvantage card of “Tennyson well e’s a craaaftsman more’n a FilosoPher, in e?”) It became second nature as a teacher, and later as a performer, needing to be  audible in different parts of the country. It regressed on Monday mornings in my return-to-Bristol-City period where, after a weekend on the purgatorial terraces, broad Norfolk girls would interrupt me to note “Sir, ya sound lak a yowkel” to which Oi’d reploy “Get that clawth out of your eaRS giRl and don’t be so bleddy cheekay.” 

So unlike my mother (prim Welsh RP) and Bristol father (Nowhere Welsh) and the dog (prim Welsh RP whine, look-at-me-growl, barks of laughter at sibling misfortune) my Spectral tones are: deep Somerset roots occasionally showing through the resisted-Welsh RP controls of the educated teacher buried under whatever character voice I’ve been playing lately. 

George Harrison’s bus driver father once stormed into his son’s school and into the annals of world narrative to punch a teacher who’d attacked his son. I too had a bus driver father (after he swapped the lathe for the handbrake in the 1970s) - and the resemblance ends there - but there are other uncanny similarities between myself and the most famous (versatile/inventive/ melodic?) lead guitarist in history. I don’t just mean the way his ‘dark horse’ virtuosity as showcased live and on the 3 albums not dominated by Lennon-McCartney compositions (try Beatles For Sale as a rocking lead guitar masterclass for instance) became obscured by his competitors as I am by all this Edinburgh razzamatazz. George decided very early on to counteract his opaque Scouse accent by speaking…………… very…………… slowly. (If only ‘shrieking’ Cilla had taken his advice to do the same!) It’s why he sounds like a guru always saying something profound, even when he’s just shooting the breeze or laughing with the Pythons, making light of the Inner Light. He does also deliver gnomic homilies distilled from all the great faiths of the East as neatly as a note for the milkman but most of the time all he’s actually doing is making sure you can hear him. The complete opposite of our metalwork teacher ‘Acker’ Thomas (Hacker without the ‘H’) whose terrifying warnings about how the lathes (and milling machines and grinders and shaping machines and the forge, not to mention the file that ripped a fingernail off a classmate) can kill you iffew fhhg  bmndhht  ghhsgs  jdhcng  tjkksks7  hskgnng!!!! (if you don’t follow my instructions to the letter) remained a voice in the wilderness to those of us only fluent in Wenglish, French and Latin (and I who only knew Nowhere.) 

As a classroom teacher myself later, I did something similar with my Somerset voice, whenever a father came in to attack me. I watched for his famous right ’ook, watched my Ps, Qs, Ts and Hs – while watching - and MADE MYSELF CLEAR. 

*

“A pint of Tristram Shandy please, Landlord,” I enunciate very clearly.

“Another digression, Novelist?” asks the Sterne  Lawrentian Landlord of the Novelmongers mildly. Life’s too short to be Bitter.

“Yes,” I reply. “Did I ever tell you about the driving lessons my bus driver gave me?”

“Yes. I’d better be-”

“He was a bus driver so I was better placed to receive the empowerment and independence  conferred by a driving license than anyone else in the Sixth Form. Not to mention those who’d left at the end of the Fifth (and were now taking girls out to dances on their own wheels) because unlike them who’d sold their future for a brief ten minutes of pleasure I would get my series of driving lessons gratis, just as I would get a University grant and tuition. And I would also get the very best professional guidance because Dad drove enormous double deckers full of passengers up and down narrow mountain valley roads in all kinds of weathers. I’d seen him reverse a packed bus on an old industrial sixpence round a corner. He was bloody good at it too. Driving a car was like driving a toy to him. By the time he’d taken me out in our toy car for a series of insider driving, the DVC would be begging to give me an advanced driving licence.”

“Sounds good,” chimes Landlord, dropping a glass

“Doesn’t it? Even if I had to wait until a blue moon was in line with Venus and Mars causing his second overtime stint of the day to be cancelled just at the moment he’d temporarily run out of DIY projects and so was at such a loose end that even spending on hour in loco parentis preparing me for life seemed like a plan. And yet I was one of the few Sixth Formers who left school without a single completed lesson under my seat belt.” 

“Why?” yawns Landlord.

“Because Absent Dad never even completed the first Lesson. First of all, he took me as far up the lonely mountain road, next to the derelict coal mine, as he could and then he thought it was a good idea if I learned by sitting in the back and watching him do it. Then, after I convinced him I needed to be in the driver’s seat, his hands kept leaping up to the steering wheel and whacking me round the back of the head the moment I tried to grab it back. When I finally got to turn the key and drive, he held on to the handbrake and his passenger rail like I was going to drive us off the mountain and every time I let in the clutch he nearly put his own foot through the bottom of the car hitting the phantom brakes with both feet. He made me so nervous, I eventually reversed into a stream of Monmouthshire pig iron rusting into a sepia postcard of the Way We Were (in the Wales That Was) and he declared I was unfit to drive and we never had a Lesson again.” 

(And then they shot Kennedy)

*

Apologies for that digression. And the one before it. My brain jumps around, the result of being whacked round the back of the head from an early age, as I shall no doubt tell you again if I haven’t already. 

I was talking about George Harrison and a received pronunciation that doesn’t lock you in your root region. But in this I was, as in everything else, only following Cindy. She started with Wenglish and I started with Somerset but we were trying to find the same place. An Everywhere out of Nowhere, but with roots.

Cindy’s Welsh accent was like Wordsworth’s “selection of language really used by men but purified… from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike and disgust.” Wordsworth nails the difference between Angie at the chip shop and Cindy at the bus stop ready to assume the world. Angie’s accent had that same warmth and homeliness I heard in Cindy’s but a chip-and-fish-wife-squawking-into-a-karoke-mic-when-you-know-she-can-sing-default-defect-quality as well. Cindy’s voice was rooted in the ‘essential passions” “a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language.” Her accent was the sound of home, the home that became hiraeth when she left. The accent in the mouths of girls I’d first-kissed or chatted to on the hill up to school; girls who’d been ‘girlfriends’ with the emphasis on ‘friends’.

In Cindy’s voice was all this plus the subtle modulations of her education, which took her out of the valley without losing its music. For me, with my Nowhere voice, it was a voice forever calling me home. 

*

“What’s the statue supposed to be? A star,” muses Cindy, “stretching silver arms in all directions.” 

Mr Larkins looks at it again, through her eyes. “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 it biting like legs 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 grails 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, as in pay-rental  care, and well over the odds. 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 WIRELESS DOWN!!

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 musical eardrum in a demoralising nausea of dog breath and pandemonium. I fling up my arm to protect my hearing 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 at his age”

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 and pat her as she does so. Her breath reeks.

The presenter of the Light Programme announces – now very quietly 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 Ex-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 pleasant odour of tobacco disguising the cider-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. Many dads were absent, in those days: it was just that our Dad was absent even when he was ‘there’. 

“Send all my loving 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, you got that; 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 and Linda that we lost interest.

Uncle Ex-Pat was a good surrogate Dad for both of us, when he wasn't at the pub. 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, as this show testifies) 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 R’s!

She snuggles back under the starched white cotton sheets. They are not as instantly warming as Stepmother’s new toe-clinging pink 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 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 free of Aunt Norris’s nastiness because at heart, at some level, in tune with the Sixties' 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 enough. ‘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 (however 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 Ex-Pat is making tea downstairs. She goes down to join him. 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. 

Ex-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 Ex-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 planned 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 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 stole, worked “like a Black” (only he didn’t say ‘Black’) for a crust, and finally got caught poaching from the lord of the manor. 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. 

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, started work at Queen’s (Queenziz) a large department store in the centre of Bristol. He is making the most of his 4 'O' levels (History, Geography, English and English Literature), first attending a retail management course in Leeds 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) the Catholic gene (I told you not to mention our Mother Mary) 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 at the bottom of her secret wardrobe, then accordingly signed up to Ex-Pat’s holy and apostolic creed of the overflowing cup. Ex-Pat Junior was sent to Catholic 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, which he was not averse to joining and even leading, notably on 'holy days of obligation' when he was legitimately school-free and 'on the mooch.' 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 Cider-rotting father and hapless 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 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. He 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 questioning 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"; away from this blind faith Catholic God. 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.

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 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 neighbourhood– 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 her hand-operated mower, her rose 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. Just as her council house is never more than a step away from the ‘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 Somerset that starts a hundred yards away– but Aunt Rdognas’ is the grandest, the most densely planted; in all ways the most cultivated. 

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 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. 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, a 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 little boy 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 stream down in the spinney, not to mention the supermarket trolleys, dead prams and overflowing ashbins. One minute you’ve got Somerset lakes, 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. “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 up. 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. 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) seem to nod and smile out at her. The soul-soaring West Hampstead to West Coast Dusty surely the most naturally gifted (and least rags-to-riches but with other troubles to overcome with that boy-bell 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 (recently married to Joe and now living with his parents) 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 man on the bike with a little boy behind perilously secured 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 steam ship. Three steam ferries crossing and re-crossing the ancient deep every day in 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. 

“I wonder if 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 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, 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 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 she 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 Absent Dad, still my hero, in the forecourt of Mendip View petrol station. 

I have its shiny replica 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 bleddy 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 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 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 - the ubiquitous don't tie me down British cinema angry young man verse-line complaint of "I've been working like a dog to get you money to buy you things" of A Hard Day's Night only without the joyous key-turning jail-break harmonies of the  chorus - 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 real Somebody, living in a real Somewhere, making all his really Something plans, for a real 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, hisses 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, singing “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! 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 warm gun. Bang bang. Shoot shoot. He empties his hard seed of death into her, pumping her over and over, drowning her maddening light in his endless dark. Ah ah -.

*

- Cindy hits the weapon from his hand – a knife, is it, a gun? She doesn’t hear it fall. She stamps down with her boot-heel on his feet, feels him lose his venom. Freed from the paralysis of fear, indignation electrifies her. She jerks her knee up into his groin. Twice, fucking 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? Has the knife? – the gun? - done damage? How much? Where? She staggers into the Ladies to find out.

*

Bollocks, grunts her attacker, groaning in the pitch-black alley. 

*

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’ 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? Sunday Driver?"

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  world 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.” She holds up a white bandaged hand, cherried with blood. “He... shot himself all over my clothes…” 

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

“but... 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 - 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 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. The four most famous Boys in the world. Nice boys. Visiting her on old Mrs Jones' request to make everything better. 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. "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 so-called – utterly 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 there you don’t want to mess with as well. This Boy is clearly no Monkee, no manufactured 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 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 Dr O’ Leary would call it). And on the dreamy Celtic fringe of Wales and 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 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 Liverpool-Jewish; 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 Mother (laughing at the irony) as a pre-Beatles child and 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.

*

"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 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.”

“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. 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?”

“No, 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. 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 madonna 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 scintillating George lead, the scintillating Paul bass, the scintillating 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 his American solo career; all right, with the exception of 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 the Jaggerwocky.”

“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 mate 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 all 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. 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 whacked out 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. We played Rhyl, Prestatyn, Mold, before we were famous. Cardiff, Abergavenny, Rhyl, Llandudno, Cardiff, after we were famous. 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-”

“And are you doing anything tonight that’s worth 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. Not that you will hear anything except 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.”

“What was it again?”

“You speak Welsh?”

“No. 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. She is Welsh.” 

"You don’t sound that keen on Wales.”

"I like Wales. I can’t stand my stepmother. She gives Wales a bad name.”

Silence.

“What name?”

“Taffy. And do you know why they call us Taffy?”

“Because you’re from Everton?”

“That’s ‘Toffee’. There’s an awful lot of Toffee in Everton.”

“There’s an awful lot of Coffee in Brazil.”

“And an awful lot of Taffies in Patagonia. But where does the name come from? I’ll give you three possible reasons. You have to pick the true one.”I’ll give you three possible reasons. You have to pick the true one.”

“OK.”

1. The name of the river that flows through Cardiff? 2. A corruption of 'Dafydd'. 3. Taphephobia.”

“Taff a what?”

“Taphephobia. The morbid fear of being buried alive."

“You really don’t like Wales do you?"

"No.”

Pause.

“I love it. 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 Bethlehems and Bethesdas. The little old port with its mediaeval Castle and Catholic cathedral that was suddenly overgrown as the largest town in Wales by a pit village called Merthyr Tydfil.”

“Social comment that!”

“My Mother Mary was Welsh. It's Stepmother Mary and her coffin-home narrow-minded little Welsh valley I don't like."

“Hang on. They are both called ‘Mary’?”

“They’re the same person. One became the other when I was eight, the age she was when Grandmother Mary, died. 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. Two of ours died, in the flesh, when we were kids.”

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

“Taphephobia. Buried alive.”

She was triumphant. "No. It’s 2. Dafydd.”

“Pronounced “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.”

“But Tommy isn’t an insult.”

“Exactly.”

Silence. The rain battered the windows. Beatle sang softly, in heavy 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 song. A good old gutter gurgling Liverpool-Welsh folk song.”

“That mocks the Welsh!” 

“And the Liverpudlians. But we can take it. The patron saint of Liverpool is also the generous and promiscuous patron saint of Christmas, sailors, Eastern Europe, Belgium. And”

“And?”

And thieves.”

“Thieves?”

“Yeah. Hence ‘Nicked.’ But we 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. Maggie May mocks mortal man in general, watching 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!"

"You're having a laugh! Because we are. The dirt’s there if you want it.  A Hard Day's Night. I should be seeping like a log 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!’ We can hardly sing it for laughing. So Maggie’s handkerchief that’s really a nicked pair of prossie’s knickers is part of the music. Don’t judge the Beatle by his white collar. We’re all good clean dirty fun, us.”

"Blimey." 

"But we don’t force it on anybody. 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 put it in a chirpy song that made you laugh and look the other way. And call it ‘Flying’”

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?”

“Just 17. 16 going on ‘17’?”

“Hmm. What year were you born?”

“1950. No! 1949.”

“Ha!”

“Well I’ll be 16 next month. 30 January.”

“30 January? Isn’t that the day Hit-”

“Charles I was beheaded in 1649, yeah. I was born three centuries after the end of Despotism. Come on!”

“Three centuries and a year after. You are 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. “Don’t tell your mother....”

“Stepmother. I’m not her Little Child.” Cindy puffs furiously  

“What are you doing? Giving it a blow job?”

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!”

“What of?”

“Us. On seven levels. Up there. ”

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

“What’s that noise?”

“The Welsh rainy season.”

“How long does it last?

“All year.”

“It doesn’t dampen your spirits?”

“The weather’s fine.”

There is a knock on the door. “Fifteen minutes boys.”

He sighs. “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 sm-.”

“It’s the life we gave our All to get, love. 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 Boat into a yellow submarine 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. A magic 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 2,498 more than the Edinburgh fringe average of 2) 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, new sound waves foaming, all flowers blazing, as a spring tide-running Yellow Submarine. 

Chapter Six

 

Girl

"What's my name? Ike and Tina Turner."

"Ike AND Tina Turner?"

"Yep. I can do it all."

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 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 major frock roles… 

My male gaze would never quite refocus. Even though six months later I would still be telling little blonde bombshell tomboy Josie Miller that I was giving up holding her hot little hand at the pictures ‘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. Plato’s twin soul. A world suddenly full of Liver Bird Take Three Girls lolling about in girly TV bedsit capers in alarmingly curve-filled white petticoats – this is before I learned such fairy undergarments were called slips (in the Freudian and Eden-Fall 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 dolly undergarments became the only things 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 bullets into Nazi villains and balls into 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 characters, shapelier phrases, proper emotional development naked of dates, statistics and facts, inaction-packed with moon-tides of ‘feeling’ and with those dream boys I perhaps could be without having to be that khaki killer or a tough of the track modelled in my own more clinical comics. 

Let’s not overstate this. Cinderella was never going to replace Beatle as my fairy tale of choice; but the veil over my eyes through which Sophia’s fiery blue wide-eyed heaven gaze had furiously blazed meant I would never again be in any doubt about the difference between Cinderella’s glass slipper quest and the pantomime dame’s.

Of course, quite a lot has changed in this regard since 1965. Girls’ Stories have, finally, begun, after two millenniums washing, shopping, nursing, serving, cleaning, drying, boy-dreaming, child rearing and standing in the shadows with your Mother, to come charging on their Boudicca chariot back towards the centre of the stage. Female parts are all the rage, (relatively). A female Dr Who (“it’s about Time” as she said) a female 007. What next? A Goddess? Just a little too late for Joni Mitchell perhaps, very arguably a better poet, folk-singer, composer and guitarist (not to mention a kinder heart and more perceptive about real women) than the Dylan whose fame eclipses hers like the black hole in the cosmos George told the other Beatles he sings from; but at least her light – and some of her late 60s sisters like Sandy, Janis, Joan et al - peeped out like a rosy fingered dawn from under the 2000 year bushel. And, as a hopelessly biased clinical Beatlemaniac, I honestly think that Beatle did more to prepare for and help inspire this re-appraisal of the ‘feminine’ with his long hair and love songs in 1964 than when Joko was sc/preeching about it in 1973. 

James Spectre isn’t a female part, Edinburgh and I’d obviously look a complete twat if I played him that way. But I seriously considered doing what McCartney did with Mary Hopkin at the end of the 60s, writing myself out to the relative safety of the wings and hiring a Liver Bird (albeit a songbird flown up the length of Wales from Pontardawe) to sing his heart-ache out. 

*

The chord at the start of A Hard Day’s Night. Lights up on Girl George’s Beatle Fringe Show in some godforsaken Edinburgh cellar. 

Voice off: Stand Up, Stand Up for Girl George lady and gentlemen!

Enter Girl George a young woman in a Beatle suit 

Girl George I'd very much like to introduce you to my guitarist Dick Joy- not his real name, for tax purposes. Dick Joy ladies and gentlemen! 

Pause.

Girl George I would very much like to but I’m afraid I can't. We split up. Yesterday. Just before we hit the Edinburgh small time. Why did we split? Dick was one of those tedious look-how-long-my-solo-is guitarist's guitarists who believe Clapton was God. The Clapton-God whose evocation of the Something in George Harrison’s wife was Layla, about his schoolboy hard on.  I didn’t need a Dick. I needed a George named for England and the Saint by First World War working class Liverpool-Irish Catholics in the middle of a Second World War under yet another king of that name, crafting guitar solos a factory girl could whistle while she worked.  A George who played for the group.

Changing from the classic Beatle suit into the Sergeant Pepper suit. Incidentally revealing the ‘Miss World’ swimsuit she wears under both. As she does so.

Girl George Let me take you back where females were literally judged and routinely presented in newspapers by their age and vital statistics. I’d be sexy Georgie Girl, (19, 34-23-35). Funnily enough, this didn’t happen with the guys. Unsexy Dick, 53, 4 inches erect and a half and two inches flacid….

It’s been a hard day’s night, girls. You only ever see the achieved artwork and the fame and the glory and the God-gift and the spotlight and the posters and the rave reviews and the applause. (pauses for applause- there is none) You don’t see the exhausting rehearsals in empty rooms; the brown-nosing for gigs and tours and promotions and media; the cultivation of a global network of movers and shakers to carefully stage this rose-tinted view of my life.

Neither do I, in fact. My long and winding world tour of smalltown England and the capitals of Wales and Scotland alienated every collaborator, media opportunity, fan, bandmate, co-composer, venue and festival, promoter and friend I’ve ever worked with. My most heartbreaking combined arts divorce, Wasted On You Lot, declined from honeymoon through half-working marriage to messy divorce in 12 months. The least heartbreaking  - Self Pitying Ron - started with the divorce, onstage and on air. Ron found it easier to blame me for his entire life than do something about it himself. Arts In Harmony , six prickly months in the making, imploded half a hour before we got onstage. The only thing worse than playing a show without the band you’ve life supported it against for six months is to do it with Joe Brown and the Bruvvers without the Joe Brown and where the Bruvvers were Cain - nursing his one idea, two slogans, three crowd-pleasing choruses on a chandelier anyone could join as long as he was the only one you could see on on his mobile phone footage loop later in the unreality-TV unreality-radio poisonous phantom fens of Facebook - and me as Abel. Not even my folk-duo, sorry folk-duel, with Def Leonard whose 70 year solo career continued in a sound balance over buzzing amps with a secret huge adjustment in his own favour just before we went on. His considered choice for our single was his original solo demo, an interesting view on how a group sound is made, just as “There Is No Society,” was his interesting take on the folk tradition. Musical harmony is a treat for the ears and a tonic for the soul and a symbol of the beauty of human concord. But if, like me, harmony of the players is your real aim, try squash.

So, after lots of honeymoons, and lots of soul-destroying divorces I am now a completely unviable proposition: no usp, no big new idea, no favours to call in, no contacts to contact, no fanbase to build, no local club to workshop the show, nowhere to stage the latest comeback and nowhere to publicise it even if I had. Welcome to Beatle-Fringed Girl George’s Lonely Hearts Club Stand Up. Don’t mention it. Oh you didn’t.

*

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 deepest Hull around the end of the 20th century it brought the house down. And, although it 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 misery to make, true, but, onstage, especially with those lager yobs, you’ll take anything you can get.

These days you silent watchers don’t applaud in case it upsets the LGBTQ+ who may be sitting next to you; (if either of you are even here rather than making your own point at some length in the phantom spotlight of Facebook.) In the Sixties, you might have reached these seats through a picket outside chanting BLASPHEMY and signs proclaiming THE END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH and DEUTERONOMY 22. 5. (or some heavily-handed modern retuning of its ancient Hebrew) 

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. 

taken as gospel, along with Deuteronomy 11:

Do not wear clothes of wool and linen woven together

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

That fun-loving octogenarian Deuteronomy of Gath wouldn’t have been keen on Sophia Loren but even less keen on our gender-bending tomboy twiggy sixties flirting with Venus in Blue Jeans/ Mona Lisa with a pony tail nor with Joni Mitchell’s Hijara  crazy shift towards that exciting middle of the gender road nor with me pointing out that ‘Girl’ is actually Anglo-Saxon for child of either gender, and all that suggests about us using it to sex-objectify and belittle any workplace female or performing artist under thirty five, including all the brilliant bushel-hidden Girl Fridays running all their Old Boy Mondays false-fronting companies and  institutions. 

Edward ‘Funky’ Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire set a millennium or so later in its 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 now seems to be twenty pieces of gold and – as my wife put it – a white dress.  It only took three centuries for the den of thieves to get its own back. 

While the chanting Whitehouse ultras (if not Whitehouse herself) 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 (not the Narcissus version: Love thyself; thy linen as thyself and thyself in lingerie.) 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.

 

*

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 just 12 years old in May 1945 when 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.”) She wasn’t a woman until the Living Doll Fifties, the decade they herded the unbridled clotheshorse back into the closet. The long longed-for D Day for the Land Girls, the Home Fronters and Enigma Code Breakers meant Doll Day. ‘Thanks for the war work, Mare, now we want our jobs, workplaces and whore-madonna-wives back. So fuck off back to the Doll’s House and iron these trousers. 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 Catholic priest at their wedding. Her body had said Yes. But her soul said No. And it’s been saying No ever since.

Our heroine (Cindy) was a natural issue of the cup runneth over glory that was VE night in Bristol; that wonderful night strangers kissed in the streets and why-don’t-we-did-it-in-the-roads as they danced away the Blitz on Hitler's grave. (not the actual night in 1945 in her parents’ case – they were only 12 and they were Strangers In The Night who only got as far as their first hullo - but its sufficiently recovered and re-trenched anniversary when their paths fatefully crossed in the same place four years later: even wild abandon was rationed in those days.) That VE night, and its anniversary recurring to the end of the Forties, is the night and the place the Sixties was born; as the global love child of that global war. They call Cindy’s generation the baby-boomers but the booms were not made by bombs, even if 1949 issue Mum and Dad, sweet and sixteen and with the world at their feet (albeit in ruins and ruin) literally conceived her amid the 4 years uncleared victory rubble. 

Yes, this Sire and Dame of the Sixties met in peace and love that magical May 8 1945, met again in the same place on the fourth anniversary of it in May 1949, and got a little carried away. Who could blame them, blitzed evacuees and war-survivors with a worker's paradise now before them, vouchsafed by Attlee's landslide Labour Government, a brand new nationalised Society, a new education, health and welfare system fit for working class heroes and their bombsite kids, if a little pinched for cash at the end of Empire and in the busted bluff-called flush of War; including a debt to the USA we've never repaid, nor paying out impossible sums to help rebuild Germany out of our own financial ruin; to defend the peace. The Sire and Dame of the Sixties enjoyed a ‘long’ summer engagement (3 months) married on the fourth anniversary of VJ night, August 15 1949, sweet and sixteen, with hope in their hearts, not much in their bellies (Orwell’s 1948-written 1984 minus the hope) and a bun in Mum’s oven. 

Cindy appeared, on the NHS, in a long long labour of love (and peace) on January 30 1950, “four months premature” (insists Painfully Present Dad to smirking relatives.) “A honeymoon baby, conceived on our wedding night,” "She had the V sign over her and the spirit of victory in her." 

Wicked Stepmother is as silent as the grave about the details and indeed about everything else since she turned into a Blue Meanie. 

So how did that Brave New Mum become Blue Meanie, Edinburgh? Who put the (goose)Step in Stepmother Mary? How did the Hidden Meaning become the Isn’t There. How did the meadowsweet Maggie in I Can’t Let Maggie Go become the Barrenness Thatcher? How did the sort of freeloving public spacious Mother Mary whom Cindy and I could only dream of... with much less wish-fulfilment than the Paul told to Let It Be and George to long long long for by Krishna and even than 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, a jeering “You’ll be toeing the line from now on, James” a crowing “Ha! You’ve lost your father forever now, Cindy!” and a “Not Tonight, Joseph” for Painfully Present Dad.  How did her

“Sweet Dreams, darling.”

become his

“…Night, Mare.”  

Well, because they got married ‘for the child’ devoutly believing that to be born out of wedlock was a fate worse than … to be born in a wedlock in which the parents felt unsatisfied. Who would resent the child who had bound them for life to a partner whom they realised after the wedding had died down they didn’t love as themselves. Resent that child (Cindy) in particular and the one that (eventually) followed (me) in general and expect them both to repay that sacrifice with endless gratitude and similar sacrifices of their own. As a sort of, mean and pointless, compensation. This is where the free and loving Mother Mary we needed passed away into Wicked Stepmother.

The Victorian Novel’s trope for this is the Angel Mother dying as she births the hero. It was a lot more than a trope for Charlotte Bronte or the multitude of Victorian mothers who died in childbed of course; but, however common this child-bed death bed scene was in Victorian reality, it was also a powerful symbol for something else. The unconditional self-denying maternal love we need to survive, to breathe, to make our way through Life’s Valley of the Shadow of Death. The mater dies but the holy spirit of mother-love calls us hauntingly on across the alien valley. Symbolically, the mother (occasionally even supported by the father to whom it sets a supreme example but usually in complete contrast to his ruthlessly competitive egoism) sacrifices her own self-centred life for a higher and wider fulfilment in love, nurturing the lives of her children.

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 every well. It was no doll’s house rearing Cindy, bearing children 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. Mad Aunt Madge, a woman Dad knew from Mum's church who later appeared in a Roger McGough poem in The Mersey Sound and never got paid for it, met the SM at a funeral the year I was born. In a fury of Agatha Christie noir, she started screaming that Dad had actually murdered Mother Mary, whom she could still see haunting the suburban house, and replaced her with Stepmother. But how reliable a narrator is she, Edinburgh? Ha!

Well, you can rely on me… 

Up to a point. The whole period (like the whole family) is shrouded in mystery but 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, amid angels, music and presents, and birthdays. Cindy says she thinks I must have remained in contact with Mum's real spirit for my first couple of years. She also told me I was in hospital and nearly died for 7 weeks after Special appeared. If it was my unconscious effort to win back Mother Mary, it failed. 

*

“James, give us a feel of your ball!” 

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 and everything.”

“What! ya big girl’s blouse.” Mick smacks a wall pass against the blue coachwork and chrome of my Welsh step-grandfather’s beautiful D type Jag, the best car in any street let alone this one, and then thumps a superb low shot into our hedge. “Goal! Pelé scores!”

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 great tit!”

The adult world rattles through the 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, Stepmother Mary’s father gifted to me ‘because I’m the Son’ (not something I’m used to hearing in our house) begins to get scratched and ruined. On the other hand, I am popular.

Special wants to join in, growling and baring her teeth. I have been ordered by Corporal Punishment to include her in the game. “But it’s football, Dad. The lads will…” I could see what’s coming – all of it - and it starts here. “No, girl, don’t.”

She gets her teeth into the leather and starts worrying at it. Mick the Prick swings his mighty left 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. 

“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.

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

“Ah keep your pissy ball, ya Nancy,” snarls Mick, kicking it half a football pitch down the road. “Talk to I like that up at the Secondary Modern and I’ll rip your trousers off.”

“Ha ha ha,” laughs Dick. 

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

Dick follows the order. I’ll leave you to guess which of the three named players in this otherwise unchronicled 4-0 was later arrested at Brighton for chanting ‘Watch yer Arse City’ and ‘The RefeRee’s a homer” and “watch their falsie number nine” and which – by contrast - was the first man at a woman’s football match ironically to jeer “He fell over. He fell over” when the lethal opposing sharpshooting centre forward went down in the penalty area. I’ll give you a clue. Neither of the smart Alecs concerned went to the Elvis (Costello) “You never game me the chance I took”) Secondary Modern. 

*

Every now and again, the ‘Secondary Modern’ tendency in rock and pop (Suzi Quatro, Gary Glitter, Elvis Presley II, 1968) tries to pretend the Sixties never happened. The best thing I can say about those back to the Doll’s House Fifties is that around 1956 the Beatles came out of them; out of that fecund cradle rock-around-the-clock year of Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly and Uncle Bill Haley and all. 

 

1956 was the end of Empire (Suez) and the beginning of rock and roll, the year East came West in the person of an Indian Messiah named Meher Baba who shared George Harrison’s birthday, kept a 44 year vow of Silence as a sort of protest at humanity’s inability to live God’s loving words rather than parrot and kill for them, from July 10 1925 until his passing on January 31 1969 (and who would later inspire those Sixties seekers Pete Townshend, Ronnie Laine and Melanie) and the year I was born (4 hours into Easter Monday on April 1, Aries). Its real King was never Elvis. It was Frank. Frank’s New Deal soundscape singing 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. The real Fifties soundtrack was that towering masterpiece of conjugal stimulation and Tender-Trapping glory: Songs For Swinging Lovers! With an exclamation mark.

 

Jazz? Black slang for Sex. Rocknroll? Black slang for Sex. 

 

The Fifties was JAZZ. (Nice.) 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 (1950-1967 for most of the country) did behind a bedroom sign saying ‘Do Not Disturb’ and tried to undo in nasty back street clinics, the Sixties did in the road. But it’s the Violets – or the Maries - by a mossy Stones that had the Fifties Dads Yessing. 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 a Sunday-frocked Doris Day No No No either. It just all happens under the Freudian slip. Elvis had left the building in his GI Doll uniform a whole Sixties revolution before Suzi started playing Fifties house in his discarded sex-stained rocknroll leathers.

*

Madge Jones pops out between sets 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 says sorry, 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 fairy lights of Christmas than these Beatle-fanning December’s children 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 Rugby spectators which includes my Uncle Dai. They have been discussing the beginnings of a deplorable popstar tendency in soccer players to hug each other when they score and to pretend that a tackle hurts when it doesn’t rather than the other way round, like a man. 

“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- 

Thump. Kick. “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 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 – nice boys at heart - to make her day with a visit after some dirty little devil wrecked it. They did it of course and she certainly deserved it but he 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. 

He 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 just now, 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 smart 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 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 a cellar in Liverpool and Hamburg to that floodlight stadium, from nowhere to everywhere, taking in a world record 55,000 in Shea Stadium the previous August. And it ends here in a cinema in little old Cardiff. 

*

All right, Beatle anorak, the two ‘other’ UK gigs. (not tours)

London. May 1st 1966. A 15 minute thrash of those 1964-1965 world-Beatling hits as winners of the New Musical Express Poll Winner’s concert. I Feel Fine; Nowhere Man; Day Tripper; If I Needed Someone (step up to the lead vocal, George) and I’m Down. 

Old-hat hits interrupting your Tomorrow Never Knows Revolver introduced by Jimmy Saville (yes, the later Knight of the realm, pleasuring those minors with his announcement microphone) and Pete Murray, for 10,000 screamers, supported by The Stones, Roy Orbison, the Spencer Davies Group, the Who, the Small Faces, Dusty, The Shadows, The Seekers, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mitch and Titch (Remember them Edinburgh? If you do, assuming you’re here – which I can’t - I think I’ve just identified my genre. Neostalgia. In which case, I Can’t Go On…) (Or rather, I’m off. Neostalgia ain’t what it sued to be) 

But looking at that distant Beatle-comet of global celebrity as we do from the outer darkness of this obscure black box in a converted Apostolic chapel down a backstairs below the Royal Mile, that 15 minutes of unbelievable unrepeatable global fame no-one can pay their managers enough to film shows they can certainly still hack it live, even if they’re dressed like the funeral-suited Mme Tussaud’s models standing above the grave on the cover of Pepper rather than those 1967 Pepper-hot kaleidoscopic psychedelic pipers of peace they are halfway to being already.

And the other UK gig? 

A London rooftop, January 30 1969, of which more later.

But, essentially, on December 12, 1965, in a Cardiff cinema and afterwards in the limo back to London, with Cindy inside, Beatle left the howling pack of tour-chasing girls behind for The Last Time.

*

Beatle John (25) and Beatle George (22) are strung out along a road in London’s Clubland a few days later, demob happy, somewhere between the end of their last ever British tour and Christmas, another Christmas at Number One everywhere. Odd things are happening because their dentist-host decided it was cool 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 best acid heads of the Beatles. How easily either or both of them could have ended up six feet underground and/or mad like Syd Barret rather than just the peerless ‘underground’ musicians acid helped to make them. 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, as noted above, objectively the Beatles weren’t in a bad place that Christmas. Apart from anything else, they had Cindy, 15, fabulous and free, to love and look after, to guide with their songs, a thunderbird super-fan fast becoming a fellow traveller. That’s her watching them drive their Beatle car very very slowly down the middle of the left field road and laughing their cares off their heads about it.

Chapter Seven

Norwegian Wood

Christmas Time is here again (“ow many times do I have to tell yule?” yells Absent Dad) for the 1,965th time, give or take the three centuries it took for Jesus to turn into Saint Nicholas and for God the Father to turn into Nobody’s Daddy. Christ Time. Unlike Christian Dior’s print suits, straw hats, black stilettos, black beads and gauntlet gloves, it 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 verily 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. 

*

You’ve probably worked out by now that Absent Dad and Wicked Stepmother Mary aren’t my real parents. I’m not saying Absent Dad didn’t lob in the bridaled knobbly knob sperm and all the unholy family resemblances into the panting Mare 

“Night dream boy.”

“Night, Mare.” 

but, like Gabriel, the Spirit it was in definitely came from elsewhere, and created me also in God’s own image. A very long way from here.

I looked like Joe and sounded like him, sweated, sneezed, excreted, smelled, laughed, went short sighted and hard of hearing, cancerous and heart-diseased like him, despite the earring and the shaven head and the conspicuously different glasses; but the Celtic dark hair and Somerset tongue I inherited had roots in an Otherworld beyond Glastonbury. 

What’s that, Edinburgh?! (If you’re there.) Spectre thinks he’s Jesus! Holy Moses, Mary and Joseph, he thinks he’s King Arthur bulrush-cradled by Merlin with humble peasant carers until he can inherit his Kingdom. This isn’t just an unreliable narration. It’s Mein Kampf! Get us out of this bunker now! 

Relax. Sit down. (If you were) I mean we’re all Jesus, man (Potentially; all in all; in Reality; Ultimately; Word-within and all those other adverbs) “The Son of God is in every man but has to manifested.”

The man is easy. Manifesting the God takes a little longer.

Except for one visionary 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 messiah-complexed Man Who Souled the World album like it was some Elegy for the Twentieth Century, I have never had enough faith in that Kingdom Within, to believe 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… 

But for all that, my real/fairy tale Father was Love, not Holy Joe. My family tree was never the unholy Spectres; it was the one we can all trace via Adam back to the Holy Ghost.

The only way Joe Spectre ever resembled the conventional God was by being Absent (in three aspects: negatively in his occasional Vivid Presence as Corporal Punishment 5432154321543215432154321 British Bulldog 123 reporting for duty, Sah! Ubiquitously, in spectral hauntings of the family home in superstitions, holidays that never come, holiday-longings that never come true, broken covenants and jam tomorrows as the Unholy Ghost but most reliably in his regular as clockwork daily bread and butter un-manifestation - two hours late - in time, as the Invisible Man) the Absent God worshipped in so many temples; crusaded for instead of love-thy-neighboured in; abused behind the cloak and dagger of. But on Christmas mornings he resembled the real one by his loving Presence. At such God-manifesting times, Council Estate House Number Nine, St Jude’s Road, was my real and stable home.

*

Homeway is a glitter of Fifties pebbledash unscathed by the World War Two bombsites that still trouble the old centre of the Monmouth-rebellion market town like a Bathstone-yellow smile with missing teeth.  The serpent in that Eden is legion but last summer he became Mick the Prick, from No. 2 St Jude’s Road. The Allies versus Nazis craze had been ranging across our Eden farms, hedges and streams in the absence of the football season and found a peak of expression in stealing hefty timber and nails from the building sites that would eventually grow to conquer our fields and from which we constructed wooden ‘Tommy’ guns. 

My own Tommy gun was the best made and during the conquest of El Alamein (a hillock of removed topsoil we would in a later craze re-imagine as Camelot), Mick the Prick decided he preferred it to his own. I thought we were all on the same side! I beat a tearful Dunkirk retreat to Council House No. 9 and shared, with diminishing confidence, my narrative of the crime with Stepmother Mary.

What happened next has stayed with me all my life. Stepmother Mary blitzrieged into the field with Special prancing cissily behind her and harangued the whole field of Mick and the Allies in all her histrionic Welsh mountain fury, seizing the prize from Mick’s cowed hands. I know that fury well. I took it in with my Stepmother’s milk and subsequently reproduced it in extremis – and, alas, in minimus - many times. The fury of the weak aching for the non-violence of the strong.  Or, failing that, and I always have, the cool violence of the Mafia don or the stiff upper-lipped Mr Bond.

Mick had been in the middle of a Jewish joke, his Allies hanging on every word. When I say ‘Jewish joke’ I don’t mean one of those exquisitely funny jokes bled from millenniums of pain and self-loathing and actually told by the Chosen People themselves (“Hitler’s marched into Warsaw and he’s rounding up all the faggots and Jews” “Oi, how we gonna run a theatre?”  - jokes with a heart in them, however broken - I mean those heartless racist caricatures of survival-thrift inexplicably still being pedalled like used toilet paper in every postwar playground by the sons of Tommy twenty years after Auschwitz. I remember the Tommy ‘joke’ that finally cured me of thoughtlessly peddling so many of these myself, the one about how surviving some Nazi genocide was simply a case of mind over matter - “we don’t mind and you don’t matter” – that “hang on, that isn’t funny, people are getting murdered in this joke” moment. How did the Nazis we resisted as our finest hour become the hero of our army’s jokes?

Anyway Mick’s Allies never got the rabbit punchline to the kosher kidney that day. They got Stepmother Mary. It was a great moment as she handed me my Tommy gun in a whirl of righteous fury, overflowing battle adrenalin. But then, instead of empowering me with it, she, the unholier half of ‘turn the other cheek’ Joe, announced to the now helplessly giggling gang (rather than privately afterwards, with her bellicose presence like a protective spirit around me) that in future I had to fight my own battles, I’m not going to tid you up ya Nancy. 

She’d won the battle for herself and lost the war for me. No-one even wanted the gun after that.

*

“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 soon – Mrs Sssspectre.”

“I’ve come to investigate 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 got him Kidnapped, Treasure Island and David Copperfield for Christmas but he can’t seem to get past the first pages.”

“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 actually considered a little old fashioned now.”

“I hope you’re not one of these Ban Blyton fanatics like that silly young lady 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.”

Len Gateman’s cane had seen plenty of action that term. On one occasion, all the boys in Miss Millington’s class filed in 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 and grinning. Pete S, 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 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-beatableness made Beatle-cool John 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’ brushes.) Mrs Spectre, naturally, had chosen the day I climbed a drainpipe beanstalk into John’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 school with his bastard big brother. Dick was in the class from which I had been promoted mid-term into the top boys class with John Urchin. The second stream class photo shows Dick’s big head centre stage, grinning like a pike, and my rival big head grinning nervously 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. 

Dick the Prick targeted me quite early as the cause of all his frustrations– Dick hadn’t been promoted; he wasn’t favoured by the Welsh football teacher; he wasn’t trusted with the tuck shop and his unmarried Dead End Street mother didn’t come up the school from all the time to spy 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 model at home. 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 scoring the decisive own goal in a 1-0 defeat. Len Gateman singled me out for disapprobation in assembly the next morning. And on the day of the 11 Plus, disorientated by the nervous frenzy of the Head’s 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. 

“Well, it’s very average,” scoffed Stepmother Mary about my first Grammar school reports, those one-line machine-gun report teacher denunciations about exam papers that appeared to have been written in an ancient foreign language. And Absent Dad, when finally available for comment, rolled his eyes to a heaven that James wasn’t making much of a fist of. (“My dad is a capstan setter. I want to be an electrical engineer” is what Stepmother dictated in my My Dreams homework”, a situation hilariously satirised later in We’re Only Making Plans For Nigel about Nigel’s future in British Steel.) 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. 

Eden Vale Primary, Somertown. An innocence with a Dick sliding around in the Eden-green. A fairy tale with a Wolf in the Wood.

*

Christmas Time is here again. A Norwegian wood fills the room of Key Worker Council Estate House No. 9, St Jude’s Road, Homeway. 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 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 Joe kisses Mary under the mistletoe. Cindy and I look at each other in started wonder. Special growls, jealous.

“Get down you daft dog,” laughs Dad. And after a frown of consternation, black-hole self-pitying-eyed Special gets down from her place at the table, tail wagging and the endless whine catching in her throat and coming out as a bark of relief. All the tension and even some of the fat seems to have fallen from her body. She is soon contentedly lapping up water and dog food by the door.  

Mum, Dad, Cindy and I sing Beatle carols round the fire. Special goes out for a run round the garden. And when the neighbours complain as usual, instead of Stepmother threatening the terrors of earth - and Dad huffing and puffing and threatening to blow their house down, but then both caving in - Dad goes out and tells them to pipe down and cheer up for God’s sake, it’s Christmas. Mum dances the twist with me, then with Cindy and then with Dad and then all four of us together with Rubber Soul – Cindy’s gift from Mother Mary - on full blast. We are the Fab Four. 

“I’ve got to go,” Mother Mary says at last.

“No! Stay”

“Well someone’s got to make the tea!” she laughs.

She goes to the kitchen to prepare the 1, 965th Christmas tea. Dad puts the kettle on. Cindy and I lay the table with the special Christmas crockery. Tea arrives in an elfin-horn of plenty, (replayed by Alan Civil on the next Beatles album.) Chocolate log, rice pudding, sherry trifle, bread pudding, Christmas cake with a robin, thick bread and butter, salmon, ham, cheese and salad sandwiches, strong tea from the Christmas pot, Harvey’s Bristol Cream sherry, egg flip, fruit, nuts and wine. And a chocolate Father Christmas for afters.

“I love presents!” exclaims Present Dad, flourishing his brandy and soda and opening a board game. Camelot. He feels like a king.

We play our new board games Totopoly, Camelot and The Battle of Little Big Horn - and for an enchanted time when Cindy and I look like we might win we don’t for once have to hand it all over to Special in case she gets upset. 

*

Totopoly is deeply life-like; part English caste system, part Hindu karma. It means you enter the race (the reverse side of the board) like a new lifetime with advantages and disadvantages stacked for and against you and, in the course of the race, play the balance you have been dealt. Cindy and I know we’re from the lightweights stable in class terms, from a council estate and obviously not running the country, the county, the town or in my case even the street. But we know there are other lightweights on the Key Worker estate - and on the older council estate it shades into - who are even lighter than us. Bin men’s kids; labourer’s kids; kids in the lower streams heading for the local Secondary Modern. 

Dad is an artisan, a capstan setter, a shop steward and on good wages and overtime rates compared with most of our neighbours. Wicked Stepmother’s Mary’s family run small businesses in Wales – bookmakers’; newsagents; joiners – the kind of private enterprise she would like us to be. Cindy was at Grammar School (before she was expelled) and I am ‘Grammar School material” so we’re potentially in the heavier lightweights category. Not exactly the captains of industry John Cleese (from nearby Weston) and his Clifton School peers are being trained for but perhaps a Sergeant acting as some expensively educated public schooled twit’s faithful lieutenant. There’s no magic Daily Mirror in our house to tell us with warm approval via Keith Waterhouse, Mirrorscope, the anarchic Scots Beano-Dandy-like cartoons and clear, reflective editorials that we might escape through the looking glass as the Beatles did. The Daily Malice tells us that the Beatles (as they do with David Beckham and Posh Spice later) are lucky pools winners and working-class monkeys whose more classical songs were actually written by a Daily Malice reader in Maidenhead and that the ones with hidden meanings aren’t there… 

My Eagle and Commando comics (the Boy’s Daily Malice) tell me that real men don’t crouch at microphones with long hair. They hoist Union Jacks on foreign mountains and square foreign Fritzes with a straight right to the jaw. And while a chirpy cheeky ‘Tommy’ from a background like mine is often an heroic batman in in their hands, the protagonists are Lord Snooty and his Pals without the (Scottish) send up.

‘Tommy’ is never the one running the show. But we hear it in the music anyway. The rags to riches fairy story where George and Paul got to the royal Ball from a background not unlike ours with a wave of music’s magical wand; and Ringo got there from one slightly worse (Toxteth) and John only slightly better. That musical fairytale is our Mirror and in it we are better than nearly-Sergeants; we are Kings. It's Christmas! 

*

Today, Totopoly is not skewed to Special’s whining pleads. Cindy and I give free rein to our skill and daring and finish first (on a heavy lightweight called Play On) and second (on an absolute lightweight called Jerome Fandor) and with Absent Dad coming up out of nowhere on the outside with his massive underdog Knight Error to take a roll-of-the-lucky-dice third and Mother Mary (a narrow fourth on the heavyweight second favourite Dark Warrior) content to let all of Special’s cheat-steeds fall, burst a blood vessel and break a rein, including the weighed down with multi advantage-card odds on favourite Dorigen,  without punishing the rest of us for it and still enjoy the fun of chasing the rest of her family home. Cindy and I play better than usual because of the unusual admiration from both parents for our achievement. 

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

“Babies goes to sleep now; babies go to sleep now…” croons a Cliff voice.

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.”

“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 Holy Joe, looking round the room (and sleep-walking out of the door to work) for his tipsy Christmas like a man with a hangover.  

Presents are something both parents love to excess; a love they can control and control with, favour with, commodify, take back. 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 can’t believe it.  

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…” 

*

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 perhaps 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 down like an angel in the starry Somerset sky. “Sorry.” He shakes his head, 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. But I’ve learned my lesson. Now I’m going to give you the best Christmas ever.”

“Sorry for what exactly?”

“Leaving you... like that. Anything could have happened.”

It did, Johnny. 

“Cindy?”

“Why are they called Wanderers?”

“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. “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 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 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 young 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 an elderly queue 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 knocked  Sergeant Pepper off the top of a chart the landmark 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. The Sound of Music soundtrack is in purely commercial terms the real Sound of the Sixties. 

The movie queue includes a woman who will pay to attend 365 performances in a row – they 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. 

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 even 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 and the Bristol Green ‘Un took the same view at the time.) 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. 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.) 

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.

Chapter Eight

The Word

World Cup 1966; London swings: Britain sings in Beatle harmony.  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 though the long grass leading down to the river under the Good Day Sunshine. And then – Goal! - Our Cup Runneth Over! - WE WIN THE THIRD WORLD WAR in colour; for the first and, as yet (nearly six decades later) only time: 4-2, AET, at Wembley. 

When you get all that at ten, Edinburgh, it’s a hard act to follow.  

Artisan Dad is doing well at King’s Lathes: a skilled capstan setter on rather more than the King’s Shilling, a basic of Thirty Quid A Week (plus the constant overtime he kids himself he is doing for us, more money to spend less time with the kids) when the average working-class wage is Twenty. He is also the shop steward; the Labour movement is in office and the heavily unionised Labour-voting working class is on the up. Another slab of golden Bath stone goes up onto the foundations of our house-to-be on Snob View a new private estate on the other side of the old town; the other side of the tracks. We will be moving there soon. We watch the house go up, like a high harmony on our previous life, as we will surely also go up. A big yellow front door, a garden sweeping round on three sides and a private garage. We’re nearly there….

The Spectres are now living in Tomorrow’s World, the futuristic Dr Who Am I future. Where we will leave Homeway, descend old North Parade into town for one last time and ascend Roman Bath St along the Butts to Snob View, Hybris. The Spectres at No. 4 and still rising, to our all-time chart high. We all live in a yellow summerine…. 

*

Meanwhile, back in the present, I still have to pass my 11 Plus.  And I can still walk to school with Bernard.

School Road, at the top of Zion Hill, skirted the extensive slums, some now condemned and several with derelict walls or windowless (one housing a wall-scribbling old crone we believed was a witch) but many still inhabited, a piece of Victoriana surviving in our New Elizabethan 1966. Facing Eden Vale Primary, its interior a mini pine palace of Norwegian Wood, stood Gospel Hall, where I was sent to Sunday School. The child-sized chairs gleamed in all their modern zeal and an earnest group of young Jesus People put us through our modern prayers and homilies there.

The Church atop Zion Hill was lined with Victorian wrought iron railings a confusion of lessons made us believe released Boadicea-spears in wartime to repel invading Romans and Germans. In peacetime, they were locked like King Arthur’s sword in the stone. Our ‘Somertown’ lay in an Arthurian Summer Country ruled by Guinevere’s Father, both the Aquae Sulis resort of Roman times and that magical mythical Celtic otherworld of Peace and Plenty, with its Eden tendency to get lost. 

Looking ahead to my final weeks at Eden Vale Primary, I would have to get the Snob View bus from the other side of the tracks and no longer mount Zion Hill with Bernard. Risen in the world, yet gone down in some vital otherworld. I would witness the World Cup and Sandy’s 1967 Eurovision Wins in Homeway when I was still at Eden Vale and Man United’s Georgie Boy win and Congratulation Cliff’s slip to Eurovision Number Two as a four term Somertown Grammar Schoolboy in Snob View 1967-1968. We would go up in the world – including Grammar school – and down in the (spiritual) Flood at the same time.

Bernard Bexley and I were best friends, my first experience of that settled state. In Homeway childhood and memory, we always were and lasted forever but, looking back through the diminishing lenses of time, you could probably date us, on and off, as lasting from 1964-1968, with a Primary School heyday of 1965-1967. A long time.

He was a plump confident boy with long white hands and ghost-pale freckled skin who lived in Embankment Row, a close off St Jude’s Road, one of the older interwar houses on the estate, overlooking the railway line on which his father worked as a signalman. Like many on the estate and in the town, his family had come down to Somertown’s postwar West country pastoral from London. He supported Chelsea. 

We met at Eden Vale Primary and for sustained periods walked there (and home) together, down St Jude’s Road, across a road into some fields, along the sleepy meadowed banks of the River Somer into Willow Vale, sucking stalks of grass, using tubers as blow pipes and then darting and skipping through the market town itself before mounting Zion Hill to the school. When I visited his house or called on him for school– he was an only child – I always got the impression his mother thought I wasn’t good enough. Looking back, I suspect this was partly snobbery against the people in the ‘new’ houses, partly London pride but was mainly because she didn’t (and never would) think anyone or anything was good enough for Michael. His father was a remote and shadowy absence, like mine, and never a welcoming presence when there, which wasn’t often. 

They ‘spoiled’ him with lavish toys, Stepmother said. (They certainly overfed him: his large, tall, plump freckled frame always carried about half a stone of excess weight; the Bexley biscuit barrel, fruit bowl and chocolate supply was always full of stuff I hardly recognised. These days he would have the full Chelsea replica kit with his name and a Number 9 on the back, while I, who played right half for the school football team, would have a misfitting not quite right second hand pair of Bristol City shorts Absent Dad had spotted in the bin at work). During Beatlemania, Bernard had all the Beatles singles and LPs like a prince endowed with impossible treasure and I know that part of my endless adult pursuit of the Beatles is compensation for not being ‘spoiled’ then.

Bernard and I weren’t classmates at Eden Vale until I was promoted in the summer of its Second Year but we shared a double desk through those crucial Third and Fourth Years. And, in the different dimensions of childhood, the fact that he lived near the other end of St Jude’s Road, a long road made longer by our Key Worker development, meant that we rarely met outside school. It was “too far and too dangerous to go the length of St Jude’s to play with someone” decreed Stepmother (even though I did so every day before walking a mile and a half to school with him along a scary fenced off alley behind gardens, a remote river bank, through a cowfield with a bull and crossing two busy lorry, bus and agricultural -trafficked main roads) and Stepmother didn’t want me getting ideas above my station. So I spent my out of schooldays with much less congenial peers and older kids like Dick the Prick, with whom (when we both got bikes for Christmas) I later cycled two miles to school along one of those main roads, crashing under a skidding quarry lorry on the steep hill down into town  before repairing to a nice lady in one of the old town houses for first aid and cake before continuing to school. We were nine and this was two decades before Health and Safety and Child Protection. But it was always serene and steady with Bernard. 

The Eden we had before Adam and Eve sighed and settled for raising their firstborn Cain and his sibling rival Abel is lost forever yet it is never quite gone. Any April sunshine kissing the Easter green of a wood of flaming horse chestnut, ash and apple tree leaves brings it back, tantalisingly beyond our grasp but just as tantalisingly always still in reach. I think I was in that Eden on those summer childhood walks home from school with Bernard up Willow Vale and along the meadows of the River Somer and because I saw those things then: the dazzle of sun on blades of grass; the diamond-light on ripples of water; the bees buzzing and the birds singing like Beatles in harmony; that’s the magical home I still see and hear now as Summer returns. The serenity of that period after the 11 Plus, very secure of our position at the top of the school and in high favour with Miss Insole near the top of the class, doing a project called Holidays where we brought in proper travel magazines and booked fantasy holidays in Italy. (The fun was that it was so fantastic. That it was so fantastic was the fun. I never believed I’d ever really go and when I finally did, as a married man two decades later, it was that school project come true. Everything had to be costed and we made real phone calls to a travel agent as an arranged part of the project: the school was very advanced like that. (Or perhaps Fanny Insole was having a fling with our local Thomas Cook?) Above all, we two best friends had each other’s backs and felt like we could conquer the world. 

The two of us are on our way home from a school heading for its last long summer holiday, a school we have successfully accomplished, the wheels of our minds sent up a penny farthing lane on a penny farthing tandem bicycle into a future that never will (with furlongs, chains, hard yards, flat feet, inches, pinches, pinches, ounces, pounces, pounds, penny blacks, halfpenny lanes, threepenny bits, six as ninepences, bent King George shillings, renaissance florins, half dead crowns, ten bob notes, mental arithmetic and endless exercises distinguishing “the ship is lying on its side” from “it’s Christmas” and which witches they are and which witch is which where they are jabbing you with wicked poison disguised as school nurses hiding their black cats in their capes over there.) We cross the town bridge with its scary statue of some terrifying benefactress from pre-Beatles pre-history and swerve right into Willow Vale. We are running because we can’t wait to get down to our green island.

It's not really an island. It’s a strand of fertile silt permanently beached at the river’s edge, reached by climbing over the railings and dropping several feet down the stone wall into a duck-friendly world of green rushes, grasses, reeds, nettles, pebbles and water. It is the Earth to us and half hidden from the road above which is half its magic. It is ours. We occupy it like two ‘island’ kings for a timeless half hour late home every day, launching duck and drake stones and long grass stalks into the rapid stream and watching them race like friendly battleships into the middle stream and away under the distant town bridge, where an unsuspecting fuming adult world hurtles back and forth on its metalled ways of time past and time future. It will be one of my pilgrimage sites when I go back years and decades later and unlike most of the town (especially the three schools I attended and the two houses I lived in) it does not seem to diminish at all in size. It’s still our port of Eden on the River of Life, which we shout for joy at racing away under the town bridge and on down the valley of the two different hills on which I lived and schooled. An awful lot of water has passed under that bridge since then.

Some of it took Bernard violently away and off into games of Somertown Grammar school football from which which I was excluded to the sidelines by predatory new striker Dick the Prick next to John Urchin, with Bernard playing (not that well) in my old position of right half. 

Judas! calls that 12 year old Spectre from the sidelines.

I don’t believe you; you’re a liar wails twelve year Bernard in reply. (I was just obeying orders … they would have done it to me otherwise etc etc). Yeah yeah. Don’t forget to hide the broken heart gold I gave you in your Dick-pleasing smile.

In my last year at Eden Vale, I kept an hybristic weekly hit parade of friends, ranking them (there were about ten quite complicated criteria) on the balance of their good or bad turns, their karmic interactions with me. John Urchin, the real top-stream centre-of-the-photo (as Dick the Prick was just the second stream centre of the photo bighead and I was now the one on the edge of John’s top stream photo instead of Dick’s middle stream pale imitation…) John Urchin, that clever undisputed Number One hero of school football, cricket, playground, classroom, street, headmaster’s office, detention room and juvenile court, was only the most distinguished of many peers surprisingly beguiled by wanting to top my weekly chart. “How do I get to be Number One?” John asked, appalled with his Number Six rating, handing me a stolen ciggy, and spending the next weeks doing all I described and more to be top, combining a diligent stint as a fearsome personal bodyguard with passing me (shop lifted) crisps, chocolate and the ball in goal-scoring positions while also achieving a mysterious category: having a good presence around me. It was like the period Stepmother’s rich father brought me a leather football from Wales, only it lasted longer. This time, I was in control. My weekly chart wasn’t in someone else’s gift. It was innate. It was also not quite as arbitrary as it might sound. There were times when  it would have been quite expedient for me to make John Number One but some art-like integrity, some truth to a certain vision of what friendship should be, prevented me from cooking the books. True, there came a time when John and most of the others furiously competing to be my Number One got fed up with my shifting whims but that proto-literary power, the power of the Author-ised version of events, the would be prophetic vision of Truth was always there, even then. If you wanted to be churlish and uncharitable, Edinburgh, (and most audiences and critics are nowadays) you could call it the art of doctoring the class photo to fit your false memory of yourself at the centre of the pic, surrounded by heroes who want to be your friend. 

John was always the biggest coup for that chart but until 1968 and even after that Judas betrayal in the Grammar School Second Year in his non-charting, uncharted, weeks before the Spectres fled to Wales, Bernard spent the most overall weeks at Number One. Just in case either of you are here. And if Mick or Dick are here, I’ll see you outside you bastards.

*

I pass for Grammar School. 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 ever other kid in the entire 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. 

On my walk down the old grey road our parvenu new yellow estate has built itself onto; across the ancient Somertown-Bath road and the tarmac lane serving the light industrial units still half-hidden among the reeds, farm-gates and cowfields, I cast about desperately for a method, eventually seizing on ‘the carefree schoolboy’, plucking a West country grass stalk and putting it in my mouth. 

Suddenly Vivid Present 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 why or who. 

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. “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 bomb 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 was released as England was progressing to that final of its only World Cup and took a while to get to No.1. The Fab Force’s tenth chart topper in a row, it was the first since She Loves You not to go straight there. 

But it still went 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?’ asked Beatle John. ‘Avant garde’ a clue’ replied 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; 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 was the first since 1962 without a Beatles single or a British tour. The world tour had gone down in flames and fists in Alabama and the Philippines. In August, as they flew out of Candlestick Park, San Francisco, Beatle George declared – “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 seven.”

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, maam.”

“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 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’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 frowns at the nasal Indian whine and binary weather report that 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. 

*

Not that time, though. She was actually on her way up to my Grammar School (the first time since they expelled her for smoking in her fourth year.) “They thought I was your mother at first.” She laughed. “They’re ‘more than a little concerned about your conduct’.”

“Yeah. I forgot my cap.” 

“Well, learn from my mistakes: keep your cap on and get some A levels, if you want to go to University. I’ve got to do mine out at Somertown College now-”

“Why?”

“Because, James, we’ve got to get out of this place.”

*

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 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. Stepmother opened a handbag containing my Absent Dad balls and handed them around on a plate with a rare Mother’s pride and with her ‘naughty’ smile telling me to wash my hands before eating fruit because they’d been picked by Black people. It was when she said stuff like that (or that God and Heaven were just a fairy story after Holy Joe told me  - sending me off to Sunday school on his one day off - that he wasn’t my spiritual father just my earthly father and told Cindy she’d have to learn how to keep house)that I started wondering if I’d been brought up wrong.

I began borrowing Cindy’s sheepskin coat. Three sizes too big but it had that certain Mod-without-a-scooter vogue. The Snob View Secondary Mods 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, 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.

She 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. “Look at your hair! JOE! James is going off the rails.””

“What hair?” hooted Cindy.

Absent Dad finally presented fists as Corporal Punishment. “This is what comes of all your bleddy Beatles music!” he said. “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 J- to-”

“The war’s over, Stepmother. It's just your Daily Malice blue rinse brigade haven't noticed.”

“Our ‘blue rinse brigade’ stopped Hitler. And we didn’t stop Hitler just to hand the country over to a tribe of Israelites.  Your precious 'folk' is in bed with the Germans, buying their cars-

“The Malice backed Hitler all through the Thirties and it's still fighting for all his policies now. Folk makes love not war."

“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.

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 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... 

*

Yes, I know it took until proggy 1970 for the Sixties to kick in as far as the female majority is concerned. But 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, 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. Their 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. 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. 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 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 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 a rising industrial past, or the tragic gravitas of blank-faced parents. (A happy valley world, oh joy, we would be going to before 1968 was out, thanks to Wicked Stepmother Mary.) Never mind the war in Vietnam and its dead children running in their hundreds into clouds of napalm. Guy Fawkes is burning again! Hallelujah. All’s right with the world! 

*

We won the war in 1966. 

Those who can’t see at the back because of the obstruction and the dodgy lighting, 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.

I made a stand for the Golden Age of the Grammar School earlier. The tarnish on that gold was not just the tendency to expel ‘characters’ like Cindy and massively discriminate against girls but also to condemn 80% of teenagers to a second place in the human race, at 10. 

Don’t kid yourself that’s changed. It’s just shifted to a different 80%. When my own two bright young things underachieved, it was because the Comp spent its time and money ‘driving’ D grade kids up to C to make the school look more ‘competitive’ in the ‘league tables’. The different minority The State is educating now is much less likely to compete with the Public School for leadership of the country, that’s all. We were at least contenders. That imitation leather KICK ME HARD satchel on my back saved my parents two pounds and cost me a year of my life. But in the end that Grammar schooling gave me another. 

*

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-hay, Sir!”

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?”

“The 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. We were sons of garage mechanics, manual and factory workers, miners, builders and publicans prepared for life by what their dads taught them at home (if they were there). Apart from sport - we did have some good teams and Chris  got a start with Bristol City  - but we learned nothing at Sec Mod that we didn’t already know. 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 for not having a bag. 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 with a motorbike under it. And our local Modern girls were learning shorthand and typing while I was waiting for the boys to conjugate the verb to be. 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, n’est ce pas? 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 le 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. “Ma belle not Mable!” she twigged. That’s why you should listen to the Beatles. Try rhyming ‘Ma Belle’ with ‘Chapelle’, instead of table. Try-”

He kissed her. 

*

Meanwhile, God Only Knows by the Beach Boys is on the transistor radio: a strange new vibration I feel in my veins, my heart going boom, every time I speak to kaleidoscope-eyed Veronica Singer, unvalued little sister of my Secondary Mod mate Keef up the road… 

An abandoned plot in the garden of Eden, behind Neverland railings. I knock at Keef’s door as if I’m really interested in the game of knock a door run and calling up the operator from a pungent public callbox high up on a blue remembered Somertown hill. (“Button A. Button B. Is that the operator on the line? Well get off quick there’s a train coming.”) There’s a word on the tip of my lip every time I try to answer the louder knock at my heart her big brother Keef would laugh to uncomprehending scorn if he knew. It’s a word I’ll never say to her and a story I will never even start but I’m still thinking about it 60 years later. 

The Word is love.

Chapter Nine, Chapter Nine…

I’m Looking Through You

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-Mogg) 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 was in incomprehensible chemistry practicals. And my only bad trips were the bus rides to Somertown Grammar School, getting thumped for having the wrong bag. 

Meanwhile, 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 that Absent Father's Day I told you about at the top of the show (or the top of the novel of the show depending on how far back and uncomfortably you’re sitting.) "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.” 

 

“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 to Narnia for me. And, against expectations, as I show him where to put his stuff 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. 

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:

"Nightie nightie, 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 rounds of laughter that continue to machine-gun through us. Finally, Cindy comes in 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. 

*

The Christmas Day room is 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 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.

“Basically, ‘this’ can be classified as an adjective, a definite article, a pronoun, or an adverb depending on how it is used, “counter-barks Special, wagging her tail. “‘This’ can be categorized under adjectives if it is used to describe a noun. It is commonly placed before a noun to emphasize the person, place, or thing that is being referred to in the sentence.” She loves showing off the new grammar skills she’s been learning at dog school and is rewarded instantly with an extra Special Christmas dog-log. 

“This?” asks Johnny, struggling to make himself heard above the incessant barking  and tail-thumping.

“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 Aunt Rdognas, not ours. No relation to our Aunt Rdognas except rather distantly by step-marriage and by having the same forename, which confuses everybody every year.  It shouldn’t really as there is all the difference between Somerset and South Wales in the way the ‘rDOGnass’ sounds in a Mountain Ash accent, the R silent and the ‘DOG’ shrieked into your face, compared to the Bristol-pronounced rolled Cider ‘ARRR’ ejaculated like the ‘ruff’ of a baRk then the long AR of DARG and a final AR of ‘as’ as in ARSE.   

“I am the Wireless,” Step-Aunt rDOGnass lilts again. No-one asks her what the hell that is supposed to mean. 

Wicked Stepmother conjures her over the mountains and the sea to stay every Christmas and she sits there in her 40 year coal-black widow’s weeds lost in her Morning Star. Stepmother Mary tries to convince her The Sun is the new Morning Star in order to avoid the embarrassment of having a Communist newspaper delivered to 4, Snob View but the old lady is not as foolish as she looks, and nowhere near as foolish as the daily workers who buy The Sun and think it promotes their class interest.  (It may have done when it was The TUC-owned Daily Herald until 1964 and more certainly won’t when it jumps ship – or Benny Hill milk cart – under Rupert Murdoch’s free spirit of 1969 to the Milk Snatcher Thatcher in 1978 but even if it does promote their Benny Hill class interest at Christmas 1967 it’s an interest that like too much Savoy Truffle, selection box stuffing and fishnet Christmas stockings is not very good for them.

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 bright 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 pit village parlour of her ash bin 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. Are you saying we cun change the capitalist system from within mun?” 

“We think it has to be within you and without you,” Cindy suggests, glad of Rdognas’s unexpectedly lucid mirror held up to real life amid the dreary blue-smoked horizons of her parents’ Daily Malice show home.

“Aye, I know you young guns say you cun.” Step Aunt Rdognas goes on. “But I say you cunt.”

“What?” gasps Johnny.

“That’s Step-Aunt Rdognas. Stepmother Mary’s cu -Aunt.” I explain hurriedly (trying to say it coolly like the Beatles said “That’s Paul’s Grandfather” in A Hard Day’s Night) but confuddled by Stepmother occasionally referring to her top secret counter-espionage conspiratorially behind curtains, doors, smoke and mirrors as “Second Cousin Rdognas” and desperately trying to avoid anything that repeats ‘cunt’. “Cunt Rdognas. She’s from MurtheR.”

“Merthwyr,” corrects Stepmother, poshly. She was as bitter as a bad orange. Every year until this one, she had at least been the Virgin Mother Christmas for the forever of a day but in this year of Our Lord 1967 somehow, because of that devil Johnny, she was the White Witch of the North all year instead and it was all Cindy's fault.

“Merthyr,” corrects Cindy, Welshly.

“I am the Wireless. Goo Goo Ga Joob,” howls Step Aunt Rdognas. 

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 hom for Chris’mas!”

Home?

“The workers united will never be defeated, Mare.” Then some howl in the hurt of Stepmother’s soul escapes the dogma. “That Clever Dick at a party who said 100 dead children under a slag’eap would have been a tragedy in England but in Wales it was a farce.”

“What?” says Johnny.

“Because Wales is a joke!”

“Jesus!” whispers Cindy.

“No need for blasphemy,” yelps Dad. 

“Absolutely,” says Johnny. “To joke about those poor children.”

“Unbearable,” cries Cindy.

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.

“And Manchester United fans chanted ‘Aberfan’ at Ca’diff when we played them,” adds Step-Aunt Rdognas.

“Unforgivable,” said Johnny, as no-one else answered, “but Cardiff fans were chanting ‘Munich’ so-.”

“It brought out the beast in them,” said Cindy. “United we stand, divided we fall, Rdognas. All these heartless moronic spiteful divisions just keep us all under. They make a hell of earth. But together, we can change it. To a heaven. All we need is love.” 

“Ha!” yips Stepmother.

Silence. 

“What did you mean ‘This’?” growls Corporal Punishment, slavering. “Are you going to answer me or not you bleddy ignorant sod!”

“What!?” answers Johnny.

“THIS!” barks Dad furiously. “This bleddy filth you left in our lava-tory.” 

I wonder why Shop Steward Dad is saying ‘lava-tory’ like an Snob View wannabe-posho with the Latin, as the knitted toilet-roll mothers of my new Secondary Mod peers do in the old money parlours of Snob View, instead of ‘toilet’ like we always do but then I realise he’s  biting back himself (and his own mother tongue) as a distancing technique from Bedminster Johnny who – whom – he heard call it a ‘toilet’. 

“Lavatory?” frowns Johnny. “Oh, you mean shitter.”

Cindy nudges him, trying not to giggle.

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 in an audience but a conversation. He’s 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,” snaps 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” I don’t - yet - because I’m only eleven.)

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 very 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, 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 ROOM! IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE CHRISTMAS.” snarls Dad, exhausting his presence with the effort.  I had a room in those days. I go. Special jumps up into my place. I listen at the door.

“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?”

This takes me back (where I came from) to long long lost lost Christmas Day games of Hide & Seek with Absent Dad. Magical times. He was the best hider and simply impossible to find but, under the spell of Christmas, wherever he hid, we found him. Until the clock struck 13 and Christmas was over for another year. At which point, we’d go off and hide in a black hole under the stairs and he’d waste away back to work while the clock counted 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 coming ready or not hours overtime. I accepted that I’d spend the rest of every year but never thought I’d spend the rest of my life looking for him. Like the absent grandfather clock in the hall that was too big for the shelf and spent 50 years on the floor and kept better time than the old man himself and weighed not a pennyweight more but that stopped. Short. Never to go again. The day I was 64 and finally stopped looking.

“Perhaps e’s down the back of the sawfa!” sing-songs 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. 

Johnny sings along, “I nearly made it, sitting on the sofa with a sister or two.” Cindy gives him a look he can feel in his hippy pocket which I will (a) not understand for a year or so and (b) spend the next ten years after that wishing every girl in town would give me.

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 overweight 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: a licked to death 1965 Easter egg; a disgusting half chewed Christmas toffee from Special’s 1966 hoard, 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 Stepmother Mary’s nylons, 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. My balls are probably down there as well. Absent Dad’s aren’t and neither is he. 

It's Getting Better All The Time sings Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

“Can’ get much worwse,” whimpers Step-Aunt Rdognas.

“Anyone need a screw?” asks Johnny.

He 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 is seeing her 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 a projection of 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. Dad slurs a volley of barks and snarls at the record player, half Mr Wrath’s Child, half asleep.  “Turn that bleddy noise off. It’s supposed to be bleddy 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 sings, heart-sinkingly flat, “what are we going to do about James Spectre…?” 

Johnny watches her fascinated as she becomes the Scary Mary negative she is, a Julie Andrews working undercover for the Nazis, 'innocent' shining face zapped into pixels by the Daleks. Spooked by her wicked domineering scariness, hypnotised by the long witch-nose that spites itself by spiting others, 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 six units at once - 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 and enjoyment 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. 

That night, Sergeant Pepper himself, that love-landmark of Western civilisation, enters my now grave-silent bedroom, absent of Johnny and haunted by the End of Cindy as We Know It, and (instead of doing a chirpy Dixon of Dock Green ‘Evenin’ all) Hitler-salutes like an SS Major McCartney and announces: "For you, Sergeant Spectre, zer Christmas Truce 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.

It didn’t matter that the mellotron melodies a ‘very, very stunned’ John weaves through the meanders of the group’s only officially released instrumental (only Lennon-McCartney-Harrison-Starkey composition) are so exquisite that they leave you staring at the left channel of your speakers. On Boxing Day 1967, we are in a black hole watching a psychedelic kaleidoscope on black and white TV. And when I say ‘We’ I mean the Spectres without Lucinda in a Sky without Diamonds. 

“I am the Wireless,” howls Step-Aunt Rdgonas, lost in her wet Welsh tartan dog blanket; her Morning Star fallen and blown around the round toes of her high shoes in the December-end wind and rain; hell-deep and friendless at the post-Cindy Spectres, sitting in an English garden, waiting for The Sun.

*

Summer 1968. Snob View is very tense and none of my clothes seem to fit, not just my chafing Grammar School uniform and Hitler youth Boy Scouts leather and khaki. Even my Stepmother-issue bri-nylon casual shirt and trousers. It’s Hey Jude sunny but I have a rotten pain in four of my pre-wisdom milk molars which is going to send me to the gas chambers of Dr Mengler (Stepmother’s orders) instead of my usual kind dentist Dr Mackenzie, who refuses to do the budget option of all four teeth at once because of the pain it will cause me. Last night, Dad gave me whisky for the toothache and I went off to sleep singing the Hey Jude playout choruses even longer than they do on the record. But when I wake up, all the rottenness and the pain is still there. And the shadow of leaving Somertown is still hanging over us. 

Our budget album of the zeitgeist is playing, aping the Monkees just as the real Monkees are aping the Beatles:  Let’s Pretend, Alternate Title, The Day I Met Marie, California Dreaming, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band… Special starts howling along and I tell her to shut up her noise. Stepmother turns off the record player until I agree to apologise.

“No,” I say. “She’s making all the tunes sound off.”

Absent Dad is unusually present the other side of the Ceiling That Joe Built. Officially, it’s summer flu. 

I am making for my yellow submarine bedroom with its brilliant pin ups of George Best pinned onto a hardboard erected by dad so that I wouldn’t damage the lovely new daffodil-yellow plaster of home when he burst out in fury, whacks me round the back of my head so I’m now walking back downstairs and roars that he now knows what Stepmother has been getting at all these years and he’s seen through me at last to who I really am and that he's ashamed of me. 

“He was always your favourite but you’ve lost him forever now,” crows the step-shadow of Mother Mary. 

I wail and feel a black hole yearning for that lost Eden when I was his favourite. 

The trouble is, sobbing myself to sleep with Hey Jude, I can’t remember it. I’m looking through a shadow family Stepmother casts like a spell and the real one I need – the one she and Absent Dad are shadow-puppeting onto a semen stained Fifties film projector sheet – has gone. I’m looking through an aching black hole for a Sun I know is there by my very 12-year-old desperation for it, the desert-shadow betraying its reality oasis, but beyond my unaided vision.

*

(That signature whining you can hear is the cassette tape of my life at its recurring thin-streak breaking point. …)

*

“James has found something better to do this Holy Friday than praise You, Lord,” observes the young minister. 

I carry on playing Patience. Not so much “Non serviam” as “I will not serve here”.

‘What’s the problem, James?” the young minister enquired complacently afterwards. 

“I have set my king upon my holy hill of Zion” I quote with extraordinary and ferocious fluency, in an emotional mix of Psalms and Commando magazine. “Be thou, O Lord, a shield for me, my glory and the lifter up of mine head… I cried unto the Lord with my voice, and he heard me out of his holy hill. I will not be afraid of ten thousands of people, that have set themselves against me round about. Arise, O Lord; save me O my God: for thou hast smitten all mine enemies…” (meaning Dick the Prick, that rival choirboy out of Lord of the Flies currently fooling the congregation three streets away) “thou hast smitten all mine enemies upon the cheek bone; thou hast broken the teeth of the ungodly.” 

*

What’s that, Edinburgh? Now on top of everything else – including a persistent crypto-denial of that Lonely Ash Grove where streamlets meander down the green Welsh valley of his earthing - he thinks he’s the Jews as well? 

Chapter Ten

Ticket to Ride

The Lord is my Shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He restoreth my soul. He prepareth a table for me in the presence of mine enemies. He annointeth my head with oil. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil. For thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. And I shall dwell in the house of the lord for ever.

At this point of the story, Edinburgh, I have to explain how the Spectres were driven out of the Promised Land by the Jews. It’s like being asked to stand at the Elim Pentecostal lectern and recite the whole of Leviticus and Deuteronomy by heart.

For those who don’t know the Bible, and there are more and more of you these days, if you’re here, the Promised Land is a Jewish homeland. Not the one proposed for them by Their Imperious Adolfs Eichmann and Hitler, nor necessarily the one established in/ imposed on Palestine (depending on how sensitive you expect a race who survived Hate Island to be) after the Nazi one had narrowly failed to eradicate them altogether, by the Jews themselves, in league with a war-exhausted British Empire on which the sun was bloodily setting. The real Promised Land of the Jews is the Moses-led one chronicled in Exodus and canticled throughout the Old Testament notably in the 23rd Psalm. This was the Psalm we’d been coached to learn by heart at Eden Vale Primary by Mr Hymn – I did it for you by heart just then, word perfect, like my times tables after 55 years. Mr Hymn was a big, gently smiling, kind, silver haired but occasionally tetchy old man who was really only in education – teaching the bottom stream - for the lay preaching; and our top class chanted it under his direction with insane percussion accompaniment from the ‘remove’ class on the assumption that Ringo-rhythm, beat and drummers are music for the educationally sub-normal.  This weekly religious bedlam was Mr Hymn’s finest hour but deep down I suspect it was also most important aspect of Eden Vale Primary’s final year curriculum for all the other teachers as well, even Mr Gateman. 

The Jewish Promised Land. But somehow those same Jews, drove us from it. It’s all The Chosen People’s fault. Like Eden. It wasn’t our own fallings and perversities; Stepmother’s stiff-necked hissing negativity. It was that snake in the Eden grass.  Judas betraying all the other Jews (Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Mary Magdalene, Peter, Paul, Andrew, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) and somehow (Stepmother reasoned) thereby becoming “The Jew”.

As I’ve told you before, blonde, blue-eyed, hook-nosed, Shylock-shouldered Stepmother Mary was herself a Jew, ancestrally, at Christmas (though with an Italian passport since the Renaissance.) Was it Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks or Woody Allen who said of a notorious anti-semite that he had to be Jewish; only a Jew could loathe the Jews so much. That’s Stepmother Mary in a bagel.

Stepmother Mary specifically blamed ‘That Jew’ for driving us out of our Promised Land - the Summer Country – and wandering back (like the Wandering Jew) into the late-industrial Wasteland of Wales in the midwinter of 1968. But that didn’t narrow it down much. She regularly denounced every member of the counter-culture to anyone who would listen, like a collaborator vengefully listing Jews for the Nazis in Poland in 1940. That’s Brian Epstein, he’s a Jew. Ringo, he’s a Jew. Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen – who let that cancer loose on the Sabbath? – Jews. She had a nose for it. A long, Jewish nose.  Dad played her post-Auschwitz holocaust down. “It’s ‘only’ fear.” He explained.  Not a bad one word explanation, for the longest World War in history. 

Dad explained why we'd had to leave Somertown the same way he explained the Facts of Life. Absently. And as if he expected someone to rescue him at any moment. But I gather though all the foggy competing narratives that it's something to do with our British bulldog Special roaming over the road into the neighbour’s little Eden and biting his daughter, who had a disability that made her movements and speech jerky and sudden, savagely in the face. 

Stepmother refused to apologise saying it was the girl's fault for ‘startling’ our lovely British bulldog and then accusing the parents of creating the whole situation in the first place by training the child to be nervous of bulldogs. And pointing out that on one of her regular visits to our little Eden of a garden to play with Special, the spastic child had paralysed one of our guinea pigs by dropping it on its hindquarters (which was true; and that crippled guinea pig was still crawling pitifully around its hutch, trailing a coagulated rosary of half-excreted poo pellets, cried and exclaimed over every morning by Our Infinitely Pitying Virgin Stepmother.) 

At this point, Dad came home from overtime appalled: with the luck of the Spectres, the neighbour just had to be Mr Jacobs his foreman at work. In the absence of an apology from Stepmother, Mr Jacobs then began a campaign of workplace bullying which Dad endured for six months before resigning. (Not for ‘health reasons’ as he explained a year later; an improvement on the original complete absence of any explanation at all; nor because Harold Wilson’s 1968 Factory Act put Shop Steward Dad into conflict with Management and Owners (who’d previously held Dad in high esteem as a valued hard worker and keen but principled opponent) over improved working conditions, as he subsequently added but stopped adding when he temporarily took up an identical capstan setter’s job in a factory in a town 10 miles away for less pay and in much worse working conditions and without the good reputation he’d built up over a decade.) 

Meanwhile the foreman's son, Master Jacobs, in the Year above me at Somertown, and thus invested as food monitor on my table and general monitor in the Feudal-Fascist authority pyramid of that school regime was doing the same to me, like ensuring I got no dinner and lined up at the back of every queue for everything, from bus home to kit and books supplies, which was all the more harrowing because I didn't know why. Workplace bullying: a Somertown Grammar school crash course. (Enthusiastically supported by Dick the Prick’s parallel pogrom of retaliation-in-first in every corridor, bus aisle and penalty area.)  

Stepmother Mary begins to express loud Dalek-like opinions in the garden of our sunshine-yellow Daily Malice Show Home (the newspaper that hates Britain) of 4, Snob View. She announces that it would be better for us all if disabled children were exterminated at birth or at least rounded up and sent to special camps out of sight and mind. In the woman you have been taught to call ‘Mother,’ and after all her sentimental effusions over the wounded guinea pig, this feels like the Virgin Mary striking a deal with Hitler. 

Mr Jacobs leaves her with the thought that he hadn't fought Hitler so that British bulldogs could savage his beloved child at home. At this, Stepmother announces she hates it in England and wants to go back to her hooooooooooooomeland with a howl Wales as soon as Busted Corporal Dad has found a (semi-skilled) job there he can do. 

So, in December 1968, clutching a white bird in a golden cage and all the other detritus of those two high as a kite Yellow Submarine summers (1967-1968) the Spectres ran for their lives – like many a woad-waging British ancestor - into the wintry Welsh mountains. And found a crack there to 'resettle' in. 

Yellow Submarine going down. 

*

In case anyone’s wondering what the puffing and blowing is, I’m carting my old Grammar School Desk onstage.  It’s solid oak with heavy metal hinges and its features include some industrial machinery for changing from an old flat top to a writing slope. My parents got it originally when I passed for Somertown Grammar School in the Summer of 1967 -

*

What was that? Did someone just call my 1967 Lucy in the Sky-high Grammar School ticket to ride into the Top 20 “the Summer of Gove?” “Three Games for (Theresa) May?”

*

Look mate (in case we have any Aussies in), not all Grammar Schools were, as often alleged,  Middle Class Finishing Schools for those who may have started in a lower stream, but Somertown Grammar definitely was. And a lot of us who passed the 11 plus and went there came from working class estates and more than a few of those (perhaps reflecting the attitudes of the home to the school, an offended parent; a jealous-competitive-possessive elder sibling at the Secondary Modern) were expelled, too. Notably our playground and sportsfield hero John Urchin and, spectacularly, Cindy, after a series of last warnings and suspensions about hair and make-up and length of her uniform skirt and general Smart Alice attitude and then finally for smoking, at the age of 15. I still remember the day she came up to the Park (stopping our football game with a flash of her dark eye) in her Eva-brown uniform with her king size fags out, so dashing and wild, and laughed about it with her big girl-friends but ever so slightly scared as well and said, “James, tell our Ma I’ve been expelled OK.” I was the boy hero all evening, the kid whose too cool for school big sister had been chucked out of ‘The Grammar”. (And all its English thought structures.)

Grammar Schools were often accused of offering a State-funded imitation of Public School - instead of an affordable cultural challenge to them - for aspirational parents who lacked the money or the connections to get their children into one and that Grammar School imitation of Public School was particularly uncomfortable for all the working-class children who went there. But, for a start, Public Schools range from temples of educational excellence to fifth rate dumping grounds for delinquents staffed by dodgy characters unemployable where proper checks are made. And sometimes both of these at once, varying classroom by classroom. And not all Public Schools were traditional and hidebound. Some, like Summerhill, were a lot more progressive and independent than a State school could ever be. And not all Grammar Schools were alike. The PE Master at Somertown was the best football coach a First Year boy could have – in World Cup winning 1966, he established something called Football Skills in a small field called ‘the Paddock’ where we learned how to ‘trap’ a ball and ‘lay it off’ as a ‘wall’ pass, skills I’m still modelling for my grandchildren nearly sixty years later. This pedagogical excellence was not just independent of, it was a dialectical self-abnegation of his tendency to stare at our private parts in the shower afterwards.   

Milltown High in all its coal-grimed Miltonic grandeur didn’t teach ‘soccer’ at all. It also prepared us all for the ultimate Judgement handed down by The Welsh Joint Education Committee whose examinations embodied a distinctly Welsh attitude to education, as different to England’s as Scotland’s. More reverent about learning; more aware of it as a radical force for social change and self-improvement – in a word, escape – more sympathetic to the stories of gallant little nations defying great empires; including the Biblical ‘Israel in Egypt’ model of all these. My brilliant English Literature A Level Principal Examiner at WJEC (the Board I was examined in and later examined for) was a prime mover in this, partly in protest at his Cardiff Grammar School education which he called a Public School deracination of his Welsh working class roots but which had nevertheless got him to a Cambridge University that, as with so many other innovators and iconoclasts from its breakaway origins through The Reformation to FR Leavis (and later his deconstruction Colin McCabe) and AstraZeneca, had honed his rebel yell. And, like most schools, my two Grammar Schools were not uniformly good or bad, nor even uniformly progressive or traditional.

While the Headbastard Major P.Q. Arnold - Cantab and bar; University of Life (Failed) - of Somertown G seemed to want a kind of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the Fun With Numbers teacher (one of several hip young Masters no less hip for the mortar board and cloak) spent one ‘Maths’ lesson inviting us to deconstruct the tyranny of alphabetical order. (“Why should Zak Minor and Miss Young - the girls were called by surnames like us but with a chivalrous /patronising ‘Miss’ in front - be at the back of queues all their lives?”)  It was most frightening thing I ever experienced until I came across Derrida and Deconstruction - Monty Python without the laugh - on a refresher course when I started marking A level papers. I was near the end of queues all my life but I was still ahead of Zak minor and Miss Young.

Somertown Grammar, as befits its comfortable North Somerset chic, was both ‘Middle Class’ and ‘progressive.’ A Kooky Grammar School for the Sixties. For instance, it did not teach Latin at all; Maths was called “Topology’ and meridians were ‘Merely Conventional Signs.’ I think they were trying to Make Maths Fun though the black-uniformed Gestapo prefects ranged along the barbed wire watchtowers rather cancelled this point. 

English at Somertown (in 1967) was called Creative Reading. The English teacher dropped his h’s in a matey fashion un’eard of in my Eden Vale Prim Mary School; marked the register with the transistor playing the Pink Floyd’s chart hit “See Emily Play”; read us rebel stories like Tom Sawyer in a cowboy accent and once even set fire to a piece of paper on a plate and ordered us to describe it. “The black skeleton writhing on the clinical white plate” earned someone (not me, I was speechless) an ‘Alpha plus.’ Several others got detentions for not being subversive enough. A lesson with him could never make up its mind if it was Hamlet’s Four Hours or Hancock’s Half Hour.

There were limits to the Progression. The repressed Latin returned like a Freudian neurosis in the subject names. ‘Divinity’ we finally worked out was Religious Instruction for posh kids. ‘Creative French’ lessons in the ‘Language Laboratory’ were spent waiting like French Resistance internees for ‘Recess’ (Break) or for our punishment luncheons in the ‘Refectory’. It was Veto Maximus for we novices to walk anti-clockwise around the ‘Quads’ and detentions were handed out by a Gestapo Prefect competing for the title of Most Detentions Handed Out Most Nastily In A School Year for doing so, even if not doing so made you late for a lesson (more detentions) or killed you in a fire drill (more detentions). 

During the Paris May Days in 1968, while we were waiting for Creative Physics (Fun With Electrical Circuit Boards) following a Creative Chemistry lesson in which a man and lady hippy with a guitar, both incredibly beautiful, sang us “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?” over the Bunsen burners without any introduction or explanation from the evidently approving Chemist (perhaps they’d slipped him a tab of LSD); we thought we saw a Fifth Former not only walk around the Quad the wrong way but actually walk on it, swiftly joined by a whole group of Beatle-haired June leavers. Then we looked again and we really had seen it! For once the Gestapo (who were allowed to walk there) failed to defend the Capitol from this much bigger and much less afraid outrage than usual) and the young ‘Topology’ teacher came out of the Stiff Room to do so. The laughter with which he was disobeyed was terrifying. 

In the December of that same year, though, that potential future was removed, at least for me. The Spectres took a time machine removal lorry back to the Welsh nineteenth century and I pitched up, by way of mountain gradients, slagheaps and sheep-clogged lanes, to Milltown Grammar-Tech. Topology regressed to “Arithmetic, Algebra and Geometry” (Trigonometry and Logarithms later.) English became B Ifor Evans’ Authorised Version of English Literature; Prescriptive Grammar, Parsing, Scansion; A Pattern of Islands; The Golden Treasury (Wordsworth, Wordsworth and Wordsworth) a foreign language play acted out in class every term written by a tongue twister called William Shakespeare; The Rivals by a being called Sheridan who lived a long time ago somewhere else and wrote clever things about it. Ancient as Hades Latin, mostly Virgil, was taught (crypto-bucking the trend) through a dazzlingly progressive learning new Space-age scheme called Quid Novi (What’s New!)- Stepmother’s energetic but failed intervention on my behalf for me to start it four terms late was her last show of interest in my schooling, especially when Special started her dog-Latin course a year later, and one of those fatal turning points as I’ve been trying to write, converse and teach in Latin without any basic training (ditto music, cookery, bricklaying etc etc) ever since - History was Religious Instruction about the greed of English capitalists; Geography was a living route map through the mountains and sheep by which you got there or played truant not going there; RI was the Bible taught by a Methodist directly briefed by God; Technical drawing; Woodwork (two years designing and making our own choice of project, in my case a record rack, then another one, and then finally reaching the end of Old Ernie’s benevolence by proposing a third, none of which ever worked: Ernie never really understood the joint-smoking records and I never really understood the record-bearing joints, but we tried) and Engineering. With ‘Acker’ (without the ‘H’) Thomas.

These three ‘technical’ subjects gave us actual industrial lathes and chainsaws to operate and dangerous real factory spaces to work our in-school apprenticeships in. And the Rugby Football which (obeying Absent Dad’s advice) I explained to the teacher I didn’t know anything about and was told “Well now’s your chance to leawrn” (I never did) was a completely different ball game from the Rugger Buggery my previous Headmaster had failed to import into Somertown Grammar from the Public School tradition. Marx would have had a field day analysing our version’s translation of the Playing Fields of Eton into the Welsh mountain’s Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Two career-ending injuries for two of my new classmates in the first week – in an ordinary Games lesson – and the lack of sporting applause for either of them as they left the field to howls of abuse for letting their teams down, taught their own lessons.  

Heavy Welsh Industrial Manhood has a lot of heroes and virtues but I didn’t want to be Gareth Edwards. I wanted to be the Beatles. And as soon as I could, I took the Grammar-stream non-Tech escape route in the Fourth Year and covered this old school desk with Books that promised a route map out. 

If you ever have 4 hours to spare, read Stepmother Mary’s short story “My Son Dai”. You can find it online,  her part of one of those Creative Writing diplomas. It’s about her imaginary Heavy Welsh Industrial Son, the spit of her Grammar-School refusing Bullshit brother Dai Hard (whom she fell out with when he told the same story in the pub claiming it was his) cheerfully doing all these Death Valley things as if the Beatles never happened. If (and its big If, as big as the 1968 dystopian horror movie of the same name) Stepmother had been lead singer of the Shangri Las, she’d have sung Leader of the Pack like the tragic death of the misunderstood motor bike hero from the wrong side of the tracks was in fact a life-affirming re-election of another Conservative Government and a cautionary tale for any male who dared to swing his dick while having a pee. During one of my University vacations enduring her brother Dai Hard’s continuing saga of attacks on state funded student communists (ie me), he asserted in his signature Stepmother all-knowing but masculine and therefore much more swaggering way, that communism would never work because we’re all animals fighting for survival and I, the pale, hungry, mentally exhausted student in charity shop clothes competing up at the University with entitled public school posers who hardly read the set books but didn’t let that stop them trying to monopolise all the platforms of discourse and entitledly rubbishing any point of view that challenged theirs, instead of going for the jugular by pointing out that Dai himself was out of work, on benefits given him by a Society to which he had  never willingly contributed anything while sucking in and spitting out a Grammar School education his sister never got offered and now wasted all his erudition pissing it up the urinal in his Rugby Club berating the rest of us trying to build a better world, I just said “Yes, Dai, but we’re not animals are we?”  And I know (a) that version of Dai Hard is the Unreconstructed Welsh Thug Son Stepmother would like to beat me with and (b) that she’d have hated that ‘Dai’ even more than she hates me. 

But it doesn’t matter how many long short Hard Dai luck stories she tells. Or how many blue meanie cash counters she plots.  Or how flat as a ten bob note her bird sings. She won’t see me.

*

Ah, so much for my shadow 1968. It was hell the first time and it still is. This is supposed to be a Beatles story. Let’s sneak a peep through the bent back tulips and see how the other half lives…. 

Chapter Eleven

You Won’t See Me 

Johnny Wal-ker…. (Giovanni Dante if we have any Mountain High Latin scholars in)

A transistor is playing the new (self-proclaimed Wonderful) 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’ like this young Walker cove 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 Premier League (then called ‘League Division One’) Football Metch will eventually rival ‘popular music’ for media coverage and 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, 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. 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. 

Johnny Wal-ker… 

the jolly psychedelic jingle repeats, an all-day overflow of light-hearted silly sally.  Johnny himself is still innocent of the Darkening Decade to Come and its long hitch-hike from Prog and Glam to Punk and the Wham Bam Thank You Ma’am Thatcher beyond; over which he will later preside with such distinction as the presenter of Sounds of the Seventies; nor of his own imminent Highway 61 through Route 66 American adventure and sojourn away from this Spectred Isle after Aunty BBC scuppered his musical flow once too often. 

In 1968, here and now, he is enjoying The Sounds of the Sixties as they happen and as they finally begin to move from Cute Kinksy Edwardian Englishness (with Eastern influenced psychedelia around the frayed edges and split Ends) back to their American roots.  But there is still plenty of Flower Power Summer of Love pop pouring out of the battery ‘tranny’ warbling from the tiny speaker on the window sill. So much great sound and such tiny speakers: the 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. Willy Larkins has never been so happy. His things don’t get lost, except half his paunch and all 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, Bill. The Who could be the new Beatles.”

“The one with the big nose 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 Stay In or something.”

“The Who Sell Out. I got it in Woolworths for a fraction of the price because someone swapped the price sticker with a packet of sherbet fizz Love Hearts. 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. He’s 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? Looked at me like I was a bucket of cold water in a summer of love swimming pool last time they were here. I’d rather book the old Beatles! Speaking of whom, where are they?”

“India.”

“Losing their touch on their last one, mind. Faces as long as their hair. No wonder Engelbert kept them at No. 2. Did you say India?”

“Yes.”

“They’ve gone too far this time!”  

“He’s been saying that since She Loves You,” says Madge Jones. “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 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 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. 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. Chicks aren’t supposed to have one in his book.”

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 Madge Jones (the cleaner, remember?) offered me a room. 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, shivering 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 Clothing of his Fifties parents but currently wishing he’d worn the Rupert Bear duffel coat they’d 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 wouldn’t have lasted five seconds walking into Jerusalem behind that donkey with the original Jesus people.

Johnny’s Jesus-people chic is more like when He threw the money lenders out of the Temple or “all the nations of the world in a single moment” off that 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, she has a rolled-up silver space-suit mac in case it rains. The Likely Lad who played that towering keyboard figure on the Animals’ House of the Rising Sun raised in absentia paternis by a community of women, would note (against the Victorian/1950s femininity myth of frilly-brained kitten-knickers) how inherently practical and realistic women are, if only because they are so frequently left holding the baby (or the rat sandwich or the penis nuclear warhead.) Everywhere on the planet, there is some mess they have to clear up; some damage to heal; before too much longer even the planet itself.  Somewhere in England, Cindy (18; 33-23-34; 5 feet 7 inches, well red student) reads in Woman and Home that Miss World contestants in bathing suits will soon be standing on a seaside theatre stage presenting their hindquarters to a line of judges pondering the dream ‘vital statistics’ (21; 36-24-36; 5 feet 4 inches; white; air hostess…) of the so frequently sex-kittened, knicker-frilled male brain. In NASA, in 1968, women are topping all the astronaut tests – notably the long endurance of boredom and pain for which they've had millenniums of practice – but will not fly the moon mission (until the Eighties) because they “lack military experience.” What for? These astronettes want the moon. And to fly to Venus not Mars. Cindy 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. 

“I’ve heard all that red rhetoric before. I’ll drift off to the pub – 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.”

Rodeo Ron retrieves the joint.  “Yeah, the Times. And all his upper-class mates. 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. 

“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? And Saruman the Master Race wizard scheming for power? ” He squares up to Ron, frowning at how Ron’s calculated sneering is messing with his mind.

Cindy, more as a wondering statement 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. 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 puzzled 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 but one of the others died in the First World War and the one fellow survivor stopped being friendly) would defend his interest or ability in such gossiping ‘female’ genres as romance (the magazine 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 that postwar love and marriage story, even if Sam as a postwar husband and father does have the epic’s final word.) Although, if she 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 battle-blow against the unkillable-by-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, Tolkien would probably 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 under a German banner proclaiming the end of War as if marching at the front line of history. 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 the ‘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 a Stone! 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 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 a postcard from Rishikesh that very morning. It sounded like Pepper 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… (“Yes I’m lonely, wanna die” – lead-heavy blues on a Pepper-hot 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 PR) he’s actually more than just a Mouth. They talk. He is articulate about the demo, funny, educated, political, arty. 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 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 mean what he says, 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. 

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 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 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 definitely changed Johnny’s hair if not 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. 

Johnny is spellbound too. 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. It attacks US troops laying waste to Vietnam, and 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 Brits laugh. 

“But zat one is armed,” mutters a German comrade sounding like a Commando-magazine Fritz. 

Johnny looks. “Drop your flowers you bad hippies!” he laughs, “You are surrounded by one-armed police! 

“Zere is only one who is armed?... Oh you mean he only has one arm?”

Johnny felt mean then, his tension-edged Goonish humour unintentionally mocking his German comrade’s earnestness. Lennon would have made him laugh.  “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 naive about the police than Cindy; - a few run-ins in his Bedminster rocker days. 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, officially “defending 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, 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 certain amount of political 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. He 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 owner fear and loathing. He puts down his Daily Malice and offers them a choice of (instant) coffee or (instant) milky coffee. Or tea.

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 blues hovering uncertainly between heaven and earth. Lady Madonna. It sounds weird, though not as ‘last year’ as the unreleased single Lennon originally proposed before the eight-legged Beatles flew off into the Indian heights: the transcendentally meditative, tuned in, turned on and whacked out Across the Universe.

PPS There’s a new single - Revolution- in the post...”

*

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 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 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 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 her Stepmother and dad. 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, even more than the Beatle 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. 

“Johnny. Not marbles! You can’t just chant the words of peace. 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 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 world without wars, oppression and class-exploitation, suddenly falters. The strawberry sherbet love-heart 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. My God, what if she’s getting bored with me? 

‘Ska’ Curtis, a fat apprentice with a ruthless short back and sides 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. 

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. 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, even if you’re tripping. Especially if you’re tripping. Not quite so harmless in bedrock-hard Bedminster. Not to mention 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.

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,” spits 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, 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 Beatle 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 he 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 flat) And guess what Stepmother is singing? Why Don’t We Do It In The Road? Revolution 9? Blackbird, that Martin Luther King swansong from the Double White-winged Album? 

Of course not. Ob La Di Ob La Da by the Marmalade. A not-so-real McCoytney the other Beatles wouldn’t release. 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 British Bulldog.

I'd rather be with Cindy, wherever that 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? 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 made 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!)

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 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. 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. 

*

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.

*

Cindy shuts the 1968 diary 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 Lennonism (for all the throwaway apostate self-hateful “Baby You’re A Rich Fag Jew” aimed tiffily at manager Brian Epstein on the B side.) 

Cindy 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 Twelve

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 windows 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 communal Donovan, Love Forever Changes, storm-purple Hendrix and Cream – 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, brother, 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 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 dads. 

“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!”

“All parts of the body are equal. Body parts of the world, unite!”

“Arise, comrade Penis!”!” Cindy commanded. 

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 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. 

Cindy woke up at 4.40 am, the time most people commit suicide and also the time in 1956 of her little brother’s birth, suddenly consumed with guilt about leaving him. How was he faring these days, in his unwonted Welsh exile?

*

He was writing out in Welsh-windbag-full in his damaged gold-nibbed Parker - 

 

"Hiraeth, 13, Graveside Villas, St Jude’s Road, Fernway, Claddu yn Fyw, The Valley of the Shadow of Death, Milltown, Monmouthshire, South Wales, Wales, Nowhere. Dear Cindy, Hope you can visit us in Fernway soon. Or at least write. But I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t. ‘Hiareth’ is the long long longing for home,  the grief of homesickness. 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. And Fernway is from the German, Fernweh - the longing to be elsewhere. 

I hope I don’t have to spell out, Edinburgh, in formal and rather shaky fountain pen ink old-school handwriting, how that bullied Grammar School golden-nibbed show pen, the arthritic and shaky hand I was dealt, is the one writing this show…

*

When I was a boy, I belonged completely in Homeway as I never have anywhere else, at least until Stepmother informed me prior to a Eden Vale Primary school trip to Barry Island via Weston that, by her and by birth, I was Welsh, (despite the Headmaster’s puzzling quip on the boat that I was returning to The Land of My Fathers; ‘My father’s from Bristol, Sir” ) which of course I generally announced as a potential mark of distinction and endured endless ragging about thereafter (“Look at those ropey bleddy docks/boats/roads/hedges/fish/beaches/buildings/

fields/ cows/sheep/churches, that’s James’s ’omeland! Wottadump!) I waited in vain for the terrifying Headmaster to intervene and stop the ribbing which increased as the boys realised it would go unpunished by Colonel Punishment but he remained curiously detached. Perhaps it was his revenge for all those Welsh ear bashings he’d had had in his office from Stepmother about my progress. Because of all this, when I rose with most of the boy-heavy Eden Vale top set into the lower echelons of the Somertown Grammar Top 20, I was fascinated to be issued with a text book of historical maps which identified Wales in Arthurian red as ‘North Wales’ and the whole of the Devonian peninsula, including Somertown, as ‘West Wales.’ I don’t suppose anyone else in that class would trace his own chequered history – and chequered future - in that dislocation of what the present called Wales and England quite as much as me.

*

I couldn’t have done much worse than Milltown Mountain High, Cindy. Except the other option, Saville’s Lord Monmouth Boys Grammar School, a State school with hefty private funding, where Uncle Dai went. Dad is keen on this choice despite his politics (and despite Uncle Dai) because he is worried my preference for a school with girls might mean that that I am a homosexual, the logic of which escapes me 

The ’eadmaster also advised Dad that Milltown Mountain Grammar-Tech is a powerhouse of Welsh rugby chapel socialism rather than a public school manqué for the aspiring idle classes like Saville’s Lord Monmouth Boys’ Rugger Bugger Grammar. ‘Not that there are any aspiring idle rich in this valley, Mr Spectre, he said.’ Or I think he said that. He can’t speak English properly. He’s Welsh. 

It’s spooky in the back bedroom at night. This house is haunted of course. It’s a Victorian Villa. But not by the phantoms Special barks at, that’s just for the attention. By your absence, Cindy. A house without Cindy isn’t home.

Write soon and tell me what you’re up to.

 

Love J. L. G. Spectre 

 

PS Love to Johnny”

 

PPS “I’ve started using my middle names, Llewellyn, ‘Leader of Men’ (ha!. You have to spit the Ls along the side of a curled up tongue) and Gareth ‘mighty war spear’ (ha!) (or ‘good man/gentleman, depending on your view of the diversity in Celtic manhood) in the hope that I’ll get my head kicked in a bit less for being an English capitalist who has personally stolen ‘their’ timber, their coal, their iron, their steel, their prospects, their poor lost dead Prince, their King Arthur, their women. But ‘Oroight Oim Llewellyn’ don’t really weRk in a Bristol accent…”

 

PPPS Up the City.”

 

*

“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 just shook their helmets tolerantly and waved back. 

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 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 away from the town, completely in tune with each other. 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 other Sea at the bottom of his brain; a Sea 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. The sea took him all the way down. Dim lights rushed at him through a dark glass. Stars. He reached down – No, up - and 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, 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, silent and mysterious under her very long hair. How long had she been there? She stood up. Her face was that of 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 could have been her reflection in that very college glass. Long and beautiful and grave.  And now she was already back in her maxi-dress and hat, 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. 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. But 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 Sergeant Majors, Blue-rinsed Thatchers and Whitehouse sepulchres advanced out of rooms 91, 79 and 1854 like a battalion of right wing think tanks, glaring over the still incredibly high flower barricades of what that Chingford skinhead Norman ‘Sheriff of Nottingham’ Tebbit, misquoting Auden, would later call “a low dishonest decade.”  “Evening!” called Johnny. “We’re on our funny moon.”

“Get in!” giggled Cindy. 

*

As all the above would again and again, alas, in 1974, 1979-1997, 2010-Now and for most other ‘high honest’ dreary bourgeois decades of every century, furiously hurling back the Sixties, the Nineties and any other decade that might have a Society in it. 

*

After the show look up this script online, Edinburgh and put in a search. ‘Get in’ is one of the key phrases inter-connecting and radiating out through a network of contexts and hidden meanings, like the skins of a glass onion. The first one about the Beatles ‘getting in’ everywhere sets the tone. Then the sexual ones and the ones about the Tory Governments ‘always’ getting in except in the Sixties. You’ll see what I mean. And after you’ve pursued all those socio-political-sexual contextualisatings and recurrences, try putting all the other key words in this script into a search. A new and greater pattern will definitely emerge every time. And once you’ve done all that, I’ll meet you for a bottle of Vat 69 down at Waverley Station and we can do some trainspotting together. 

*

Instead of the traditional cigarette afterwards,  Cindy and Johnny had the Spliff Before. Johnny rolled it 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?” 

“Mmm?” 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 God or Love or something very like Him/Her, was already spiralling down down down where the mermaids and sukies play and going ghost-cold amid the currents of Weymouth Bay. The thrill of that miracle life shocked him. They made love, or something very close. 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 these days. Never had really, especially after the dope wore off. India was the new rock n roll. Everyone - except Dylan and Cohen who already had their own wrist-tattooed Numbers, cool Kings and Solomon-Songed Psalm-petalled Inner Paths around labyrinthine cabbalahs - was going. 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 disarming gunmen (albeit gunmen paid to let him do so).

His dad had thought this was hilarious. “India’s a trip all right, son - back in time on Dr Who’s Tardis. I nearly died there, of germs. 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 that’s wisdom and inner peace, I’m a shit hole.”

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 garage. Leave the motor trade. For good. And if we’re still happy in October, I’ll leave University too.”

“No!”

“Yeah. Sod it. 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. It leapt at the chance of getting out of the garage sooner rather than later. (The shed not so much, but he’d manage.)  It 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 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 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 half the ‘parent British culture’ came all the way from Asia.) 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. Our hearts need God like a fish 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, 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. She looked at him again, for the face she really wanted. 

*  

Meanwhile, back in Hiraeth, Absent Dad, in between shifts, in his newly issued National Welsh Omnibus livery, removes one of the exposed woodworm-treated floorboards under the half-installed new radiator, locates and furtively opens a cover-less copy of Playboy; looking, like so many men before and after him, for his Mother Mary. (“I was just looking after it for Jim Stallion, a mate at work, Mare.”) A slimmer but equally glossy volume falls out into his lap unseen as he male-gazes at the Playboy centrefold, objectifying what he sees and himself in the process. 

The centrefold is Adam and Eve (naked in the Garden, knowing each other in the Biblical sense in that last retrospectively tragic conjugal verse before the Fall, the final unfallen Act of humankind, from which, who knows, their firstborn, Cain, will be delivered outside of Paradise and in a much more painful labour than the way God planned it.) Only without the Adam.

The other glossy volume is The Reader’s Digest Guide to Religions, Volume 6, Hinduism, with a sumptuously illustrated Krishna and the Gopi under a Beatle-Peppered heading Within You, Within You. 

‘I wondered where that one had gone.’

James, looking for Absent Dad one empty afternoon some three months before (just after he’d been Cast From The Absence – ‘Forever!’ - for a repeat shoplifting offence in Woolworth’s, miserably failing to be the John Urchin of a rather feeble imitation of John’s Somertown gang) had found this glossy centrefold of an irresistible black hole covered with a shock of animal hair, lipped with existential terror, under its cunningly All-revealing fig leaf of fabric, and had felt the world shake. And temporarily forgot the other glossy volume he had brought in and dropped there. He would spend a long time looking for that lost volume. 

It had read “For Hindus, all Religions are Good Since They All Seek God” – which rang as true for James as the bells of heaven as soon as he saw it and always did and would forever ring so. “But that Hinduism is the quickest way…”

8.4 million lifetimes and counting…

*

Bombay. A fecund, marshy, forested, sacred vaginal delta disguised as a city. 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 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 soon immediately why they’d been kept shut. It was like opening an oven door.  Or a mosquito jar.

Their Bible at this point was Cindy’s stolen student 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.

“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,” said Cindy, 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 really suited her. 

“The Maharishi says,” she added, “You don’t need Transcendental Medication to get high.

So - like all transcendental meditators were supposed to - and often didn’t - they gave up drugs. And lo Johnny had seldom felt as high (even on drugs) as he did drug-free and riding the Indian roads. It was the Earth God made.

He’d even started writing poetry. Awful ejaculations on the back of fag packets that his amused and embarrassed children would unearth in the loft boxes of the future. But none the worse for being drugless, if the printed lyrics on some 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 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 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 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!”

That was unfallen, immaculate, divine, sex if there was such a thing. An Earthly Paradise. Johnny had been a little worried by some of the stories coming out of Rishikesh about Maharishi 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 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 lyric was Maharishi, what have you done, you’ll get yours yet, however big you think you are…. If he had, 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 bourgeois forefathers had the Empire. 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, here in India, 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 American 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, John.”

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 were cheaper than milk, so they did without milk. The Scot who ‘canna 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 objection. The mad Belgian who pissed in the soup on that crazy French campsite. The Welshman who hadn’t washed since 1967. The two Austrian beardos who suGGested a group reading of The VirGGin Soldiers around the camp fire, pronouncing 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 rafters, 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 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. Nothing. The Himalayas. Then Calcutta. The starvation, the dysentery, the turd-trench irrigation system. 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 policeman so secret he wasn’t there that transcendental meditation would do wonders for his bad teeth.

And now Bombay, which Johnny loved and feared in equal proportions. The plugless sink a porter ‘fixed’ five times– meaning plunged it. 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, 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 refrigeration system) though so, in essence, being so undernourished, so was the meat. And they had just conceived. Cindy also was sure.

“Think of it,” she said, “all our loving, passing into the Seventies. What shall we call it? 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 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 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 now she was relaxed and earth-mother pregnant. Will I? she wondered. 

She gazed down at her lover’s tanned furry face and smiled. She weaved a flower into his beard. Her Jesus-Johnny. 

Almost a Beatle.

Chapter Thirteen

If I Needed Someone

I’m holding up a Beatles calendar marking the sixtieth anniversary of January 1963. At which point they were touring the Highlands (their first proper tour) in gig-cancelling weather with only a debatable Number 17 to their name. Nevertheless the picture is of them in all their Sergeant Pepper majesty, guaranteed to raise a smile (note amid all the fanfare, the Lennon sardonicism in that morbid ‘raise a smile’ and the fact that stoned though they all are John and Paul are only half smiling and that George and Ringo aren’t smiling at all). So it's blooming June 1967 in a cold January, 60 years after that first one. It's The Boys. And they still look like boys, despite rewriting the history of music twice and towering incredibly high over the grown-up material world.

Yet, under their Pepper finery, John still looks like the orphan-soul only child who not only never had a proper sibling but never had his father either and – cruellest of all - lost his Cinderella single parent fairy-mother young.  The most aggressive attention-seeker in a band of main global stage showmen, crackling with fury and wit; the biggest mouthed, funniest, most charismatic of the charismatics and least secure of the Beatles. Ringo still looks like the somewhat sickly only child of a single mother from Toxteth who in the absence of any other riches (like my own Aunt Rdognas) lavished him with the securing ever-Christmas presence of her love; sang him “You’re Nobody’s Child” (with shared Jewish mother irony) as ‘their’ sentimental lullaby and whose ambition as his surrogate Beatle-siblings – “the brothers I never had” - finally lose their total grip on him in 1968 is to make her an album of standards. George (Paul’s “baby brother”) still looks like the dark horse of the one stable Beatles family, the most secure of them all in his own course, paradoxically close to his Liverpool Catholic kin, the only one with a sister (elder) and with his mother as president of the Beatles fan club, (and his bus driver father storming into his and Paul’s ‘college pudding’ school to punch a teacher on his sneering snooter) yet also the wildest longest-haired youngest rock n roll rebel of them all, even his pre-Beatle 1950s haircut “like a fuckin’ turban” presaging that Indian soul-seeking far afield in the Himalayas. Paul, the most English and conventional,  still looks like the eldest son and heir of a nuclear family which lost its nucleus when its mother Mary died in the two boys’ clinging childhoods, leaving the doting dad to raise them alone, and raise them high; a mixture of profoundly secure and deeply loved confidence in his gifts and his calling combined with an endlessly competitive and nagging need to please just that one someone (his mother, John later) who isn’t there. A blend of over-confidence in his every idea – if not in his peerless ability to realise that every idea, sublime or silly, in music - and of a ludicrous need to keep proving himself when he’s already done it from his heart and soul and standing on his head in the clouds a thousand times. There they are: the three sisterless, two motherless, band of brothers of Britain’s first, four-most, most famous super-functional family, streaming clouds of glory and 4 years of hysterical chasing girls.  Happy New Year.

*

Meanwhile, back in 1969, 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 badge of dishonour on the rear of his white Empire.) He is laughing. His long long hair, long 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 checking out 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’ 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, tuneful 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 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 guru. 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 inner void 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,” says 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 to the Word, Johnny, then your good words, good thoughts and good action, 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 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. 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. She hasn’t 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 their 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.

“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 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, 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 guitaR,’ Johnny affects a twanging American R.

“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-

“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 fucking smile off your face and ram it so far up your 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 group of gopis hidden among the lotus blossoms in a painting of Lord Krishna, and jabbing a finger 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 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’re having 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. “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. They 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. 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.”

“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 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. Partly because they have begun to realise this return to Wicked Stepmother’s Tribe was a Huge Mistake. (She will spend the next 50 years saying it was The Worst Mistake of her Life, which given all that Absent Dad, like a Ruth amid the alien corn, gave up to make it for her, is a little rich.) If I say I am happy they can at least pretend that they did it for me if not the dog and then blame me for it.

After driving Cindy out; after three months in solitary in the back bedroom and getting through my first Welsh winter in a valley ribbon development, perversely outside my new school peer group’s catchment, where I don’t know anyone, learning to survive a mountain of New School terrors; without any consultation, they now want to get me alone somewhere for an interrogation and get me to tell them that I’m happy. As always, I know that the right answer is to say ‘Yes. Thank you. I am so grateful’ because it’s not really about me; it’s about Absent "I'm Sorry I Couldn't Be There" Dad assuaging his Suddenly Vividly Present parental conscience so he can carry on Absenting himself from the consequences of doing whatever Contrary Mary makes him do. 

So I say “… Aye, Dai” (I was learning Wenglish as a survival technique and this was my translation of ‘Yes, Dad’) with a look that says, “If you cared, Dai, you would have asked me before you pulled me up by the roots or at least pretty soon after. All you do care about is appearances, mun.” 

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. 

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.

He 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 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 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 that perfect 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 Fourteen

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 your 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 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 Summer of Love down and themselves down – before proceeding to let 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.' Some tumulus dweller from the Daily Malice 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. ‘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– looking justifiably terrified at losing control of his class - tried appealing to their better nature. “C’mon people, we can be cool…” Then, fatally, hurled his Stones into Street Fighting Man. And all hell’s angels (employed by the Stones as Security) broke loose, armed with snooker cues. “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. 

In fact, you actually DID feel sympathy for the old devil when he finally threw in the Beatle- foiling black Stetson and sang the penitential laments of the immediate post-Jones post-Beatles years on those REAL hippy (mellow, emotionally matured, heart-piercing) long players Sticky Fingers (Wild Horses; Moonlight Mile; Sway; I Got The Blues, Sister Morphine; Can You Hear Me Knocking? that 3 am hippy-tempoed You Gotta Move…) and the holy rock and ganga-rolling Goat’s Head Soup, recorded in Jamaica (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 that trip through the fallen heavens only temporarily disappearing in a knee-jerk fart of pantomime sulphur at the end (Star Fucker.) At last, along with Through The Past Darkly, either side of and dialectically counterpointing their Mick-Taylored Keef-at-home Americana masterpiece Exile on Main Street, the quintessential hippy album Stones, twice. 

Alas, both 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.

*

But the Sixties didn’t 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 QUITS THE BEATLES headline in between the release of the Beatles’ last single and the release of their break up album. Let It Be sing the proto 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 it was - joyously and presently - as Get Back half a century later.) The Stones’ brilliant but patchy chart-topping Let It Bleed album, led out by their genuinely apocalyptic paint it blacking Gimme Shelter, spookily pre-answers it. Their Through The Past Darkly, a happy combination of hippy and heavy rock Greatest Hits Volume 2 some genius salesman permed from their 1967-1969 second heyday, replaced it as the immediate past present on my Seventies turntable.  

*

The Sixties started with a Kennedy bang. They climaxed with the Summer of Love. And they ended with a whimper on April 10 1970, when the Beatles finally Let It Be. The Day (with all due respect to MacLean’s 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 QUITS THE BEATLES.

I’d been playing Abbey Road non-stop since Christmas like a continuation of my magical Beatle childhood, ready to take it like 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- 

*

Holden Caulfield starts his story by saying he’s not going to tell you where he was born and how his parents were occupied and all that David Copperfield kind of crap. My parents were self-occupied and their good characters did not survive the unravelling Aristotelian Plot of family life. Their flaws were revealed in action as soon as their children grew a plot of their own. Unlike their own rationed childhoods, our animal and infant needs were intensively supplied. Our dog bowls runnethed over. But when we asked in our Blue Jay Peppery Way “what doth it profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul?” the loving pat on the head at the overflowing dog bowl was swiftly withdrawn. A parent worthy of the name facilitates the child’s story: I learned quite early on that as soon as ours started to diverge from theirs, they wanted to stop it.  

Theirs was not a story either of us could live in. The very last thing I wanted to be in After the Goldrush 1973 was a pimply post-Beatlemaniac 16 year old Billy No Mates with Reader’s Digest parents, no girlfriend and eighty pence a week pocket money among Sixth Form contemporaries who got five quid. The last thing I wanted to be was all dressed up with no wheels of fire and nowhere to go in the evenings, talking to a humdrum hospital psychiatrist in the vacuum of the Eastern Valley about my nervous breakdown. A nervous breakdown which the Absent Dad and Wicked Stepmother responsible for it belatedly acknowledged only by (1) sticking his hand in his bus driver’s greatcoat like Napoleon and when that flight into smirking facetiousness didn’t work, holed out into a screaming, kicking, punching, snarling-for-sympathy nervous breakdown of his own instead and (2) loudly begrudging the cost of the repeat prescription, just as she would resist paying the parental contribution to my grant if I ever got through the A level barrier. And, and here’s the rub, the very last thing I wanted to be was exactly the thing I was.

 

So I span a fantasy instead.  I wasn’t nervously broken-down stuttering to Psycho-Pat the State psychiatrist. I was performing a brilliant one man show to an enthralled audience.

 

I suppose nowadays, or even then if there had been anyone at home to contact, Pat would suggest A Family Meeting. But the idea of ‘A Family Meeting’ would have been stared at on our table like it was a spoonful of olive oil. The Spectres were militantly anti-middle class. We didn’t need Family Meetings. We had the Daily Malice delivered with its Hitler-underwriting poison pen delusions of culture and wallpapered every room with its mail order lifestyle. We defined ourselves as hard, decent, blue collar upper working class. We looked down our long nose on the ITV Co-op working class but sneered up at real coffee like it was garlic. We broke our respectable backs for other families and voted Tory in Stepmother’s case, and broke our back for the ‘public’ and voted pre-permissive-Roy-Jenkins-Labour in Dad’s. 

 

A Family Meeting presupposes some kind of democracy or group awareness or responsible hierarchy. Or family. Our family was none of these things. When it came to it, the Matriarch had the first, last and all the other words in any argument about how the family was going to arrange its day to day affairs; where we would live; what we children would do with our lives; that we children would dress in sensible (ie cheap unfashionable) clothes; how and where our birthdays would be celebrated; whom we would marry etc etc, but once this had been established (eg that I wasn’t going in to the Sixth Form, I was going to pay off my dues and the back rent by going to work in a hardware shop), she generally went back to her Blue Meanie enterprises and left us to our own devices and desires. And, thus unsupervised, two of us would generally find out own way back to something more congenial (eg I would pass so many O levels that even the hardware store for which I was spectacularly unsuited insisted I go back to the Sixth Form.) 

Which was all very well until one day I was spiralling home alone through every empty room of our Daily Malice Graveside Villa show home trying to fit G Wilson Knight’s insanely romantic schema for The Tempest into the square hole in which we lived when suddenly, just like in the song, nothing was real. 

 

At the start of the Sixth Form, I’d been elected but immediately deposed as prefect by the Headmaster on the basis of my ‘anti-authoritarian’ character. The Welsh valley teaching staff had ‘struck a blow for democracy’ by achieving my reinstatement. Not very gratefully, I subsequently stood as Anarchist candidate in the school elections on a platform of ‘don’t vote for me, I’m an anarchist’, successfully coming last with 24 of 400 pupil votes. You can see as I now do the devout belief in democracy and Society in my teachers’ attempted training of yours truly to be a responsible citizen. I wasn’t used to it. At home, when any parent was actually home from work to give us parenting, we were just taught to do as we were told. (It saved time for walking the dog.) 

The Spectres were way ahead of their time in this. The modern world’s (allegedly democratic) tyranny of individualism, in which everyone has an opinion, no matter how badly informed, its tedious self-interest loudly advertised across a ‘social’ media where the biggest deafest mouth (rather than the biggest idea) wins. Although in terms of actual power in the big world only if they’ve got the money (in Britain, old money and the privately educated insider training; in the USA just the money) to put where that big mouth is. 

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.’ – between The Conservative Party at Prayer and The Conservative Party just at it - that holy trinity of Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite mislaid that vital third revolutionary aspect, the holy spirit of the other two. 

Without fraternite, ‘democracy’ has nuclear-boomed into a neo-liberated self-consuming self-interest; somehow presided over by an inexplicable and craven anti-meritocratic return to the Eton cabinets of the Fifties.  

Love. (All You Need. Your Neighbour as Yourself. God.) Without it, or against it, all of the rest including hippie free enterprise (Starbucks, Virgin, rock tsars etc etc) and all the tinkling cymbal small print in Leviticus and Deuteronomy means absolutely nothing. And on it hang all the other commandments.

*

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

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 to the Comedy auditorium amid uproarious laughter.  In Modern Brighton.  From Ancient Greek Tragic Cambridge. With my reputation… 

When you’re young, you often feel completely at bay in the world. Then for a while, your generation (Blair’s in my case) is in charge. Then, as you get older and they add a thousand private channels, handsets and choices to BBC, ITV and Coffee, you start to feel less at home in the world. That age alienation started for me then. Mobile phones instead of call boxes with buttons A and B were bad enough; now it was mobile phones doing broadcasts; at scary comedy clubs; not to mention two of our daughter’s five Sussex University housemates with her that night, working the strip clubs all week to pay off the tuition fees and in lieu of the grants they never had. Teenage girls studying Deconstruction and Derrida by day – learning to distrust and disintegrate the authors’ visions (and to trust the blinding self-vindication of the critical theorists ) rather than see them as the friendly co-rebels, demo-leaders and fellow travellers authors were for us; then sex-objectifying themselves on stage, one getting more hot cash for her bra and pants in one night than she could have earned in a bar in a term: that’s what happens when you allow the ‘social market economy’ a free (wanker’s) hand folks.  Well done Blair for unleashing that particular pandora’s box. 

If you’ve got to go to the loo in the middle of my show, Edinburgh, please take your phone and Father with you. And be grateful you have one who’s Present, even if sometimes at the wrong moments.

*

So post-Beatle was already letting it be in January 1969, a year before the Beatles fairytale ended. Already heading for that Paul for one and one for Paul Let It Beatle of which the others accused the album and film of that name. In fact, Beatle was already swinging out of the Sixties on the swansong wings of his four for four solo photographic studies in a Double White album in 1968, 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.) From Yesterday into Tomorrow Never Knows. 

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 broken 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 100 year old 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?”

“What? A V sign?”

“Yeah. Peace off!”

*

"Yeah Peace off!"

John is always laughing at his own convictions like this. (Like his later and initially much funnier “The best drummer in the world? Ringo isn’t even the best drummer in the Beatles,”) his semi piss-take of the Beautiful People and nasty flip semi-swipe at his manager’s race and sexual orientation on the flipside of All You Need Is Love, it’s a lesson in the dangerous game that comedy plays. The first joke is a mean self-hurting racist homophobic caricature alien to Lennon’s whole woke outlook and the second is a betrayal by one of only three persons in the world whose witty-criticism of the Beatles’ peerless ever-supportive drummer could stick; was ‘Nasty’ really claiming he or Paul or George – with one drumming style between them - was a better drummer? The throwaway laughter rings very hollow very soon. After which of course the real John writes I’m The Greatest for Ringo to sing on his All Starr album (‘Ringo’), supporting it with harmony vocal and piano alongside George’s guitars…. And after which it emerges that John never said it anyway. What he did say (to Playboy magazine, hmmm) is: “Ringo was a star in his own right before we even met... a professional drummer who sang and performed and had Ringo Starr-time, and he was in one of the top groups in Britain but especially in Liverpool before we even had a drummer. So Ringo’s talent would have come out one or another… acting, singing, drumming… there is Something (a spark) in him that is projectible and would have surfaced with or without the Beatles… He is a damn good drummer… underrated in the same way Paul’s bass playing is underrated.. Paul and Ringo stand up with any of the rock musicians.”

 

Doubtless the pages of Playboy were jerking so much they needed a better story than that to focus. Like that fake news story, that endures despite the fact that he’s still alive, that Bobby McFerrin committed suicide after recording Don’t Worry Be Happy. We read the fake news today (oh boy) that 'Nasty' (John’s caricature in the Rutles) said Ringo wasn’t even the best drummer in the Beatles! Ha! That does it.  An Urban Spaceman Bonzo Dog myth.  Lennon never said it but it will always be attributed to him because it's a ‘better’ less stranger story (like most fiction) than the truth.  John says “Paul was one of the most underrated innovative bass players ever. And half the stuff that is going on now is directly ripped off from his Beatles period”. Yeah but… Yawn. Tell us how they hated each other.

 

Speaking of which, no-one ever mentions that Ringo was the fifth best piano player in the Beatles Paul was probably the third best (after Billy Preston and George Martin). We forget that, after their Beatlemania electric guitar heyday, Lennon-McCartney weren’t bad on the piano either. John did more live piano in the stage act and tends to play more intricate progressions and changes than mellow mainstream Paul and does that stunning (very stunning) stuff on the mellotron keys on Flying. While The Fifth Best Pianist In The Beatles plonks some decent three chord country on Please Don’t Pass Me By. But late Beatle Paul is playing dreamy piano all the time (Hey Jude; Let It Be, Long Long Long and Winding Road…) 

Beatle knew how good his band was; the best in the world: he also knew it was too good to become a 40-year self-tribute act like the Stones, but while Beatle John turned the pain of his marriage break up into A Hard Day’s Night, ex-Beatle Paul turned his pain at the Beatle break-up into Wings, and ex-Beatle John his hippy dream unravelling into Joko. The Artful Lennon was the most limit-pushing genius of the Fab Force but he also most needed the other Beatles (including Fifth Beatle George Martin and very much needing the genius multi-instrumentalist McCartney) to help him realise his ideas. He was never very gracious about it either once saying he wished he could re-record everything and when Martin queried “Even Strawberry Fields” retorted “Especially Strawberry Fields.” Well he certainly never did it with Screeching Yoko.

*

The benchmark is Bob Dylan. As a Fab Force in the Sixties, Beatles albums repeatedly hold their own with any Dylan masterpiece, when very few – Hendrix excepted – could ever do that more than once. Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, John Wesley Harding, even that incredible double masterpiece in one CD Blonde On Blonde, are racing cars on a B road miles ahead of the rest, hectic, kite-high and heaven-strung, until you notice the Beatles catching up in terms of words, generally keeping up in terms of hippy creativity and actually overtaking in terms of musical beauty and variety, melody and harmony.  You’re listening to the Help album and you suddenly realise the title track is John doing Dylan but Paul adding the buoyancy of laughter and just as you start thinking the folk tracks are essentially just very good pop, then you get Ticket To Ride which is heading through that psychedelic Rain on the horizon to Tomorrow Never Knows. But this stops in the Seventies. What solo Beatle album matches the resolved magnificence of Blood on the Tracks and Desire, that sense of an artist self-actualising his genius in a signature work that embodies all his various strands, making the early hectic brilliance of the mid Sixties look like wayward youthful promise, the spring of that sublime harvest  and the country calm Nashville Skyline look like the calm before the storm it was holding its breath for, painting his masterpiece, twice. Pre-painting the masterpiece in that modern Psalms of David up on his Old Testament shepherd mountain of New Morning, spinning jazz poems and blues chronicles into the four seasons that come and go and leave him there like God in his soaring Song of Songs heaven – he even sounds happy, he even croons, like that funky Frank Sinatra song for swinging lovers on the title track and God bless us even ascending into la la la las on Man in Me like an angel visiting the pop  charts… and then re-painting his masterpiece again in a brilliant half hour miniature in the Eighties with Oh Mercy, in that short sigh of relief  that followed his long Book of Revelations ‘Saved’ period when we had begun to wonder if we’d lost him to the God Squad forever. That was the period where the Jeremiah always threatening to overflow the loving cup of Dylan’s Song of Songs finally did so. It’s the Jeremiah that gives him his edge; that makes him soar like a recording angel up but also high above the pop charts, particularly when driven by the spectacularly cool bands he magnetises to him. But when that yin yang Song of Songs goes missing from the mix – the Song of Songs that paradoxically gives the edge its loving human kindness; the hawk transfigured (but still present) in the dove; the velvet hand inside the iron glove – you yearn for the friendlier and less judgmental heart-soaring Beatle later separated out into  Paul’s ‘Simply having A Wonderful Christmas Time’ always ready to take the accusing nasal edge out of John’s ‘And So This is Christmas and what have you done?’ in that Beatle blend where both saved the other from the excesses evident in their later separation. In fact the Jeremiah/ Song of Songs dialectic is as fittingly applied to the Beatles individual and collective as to Dylan. Harrison has a great deal of the Jeremiah in him and it (along with Lennon’s acid angst) is what gave Pepper a cultural gravitas and generational counter-revolution manifesto which Paul’s buoyancy and Ringo’s merry singalongs - raised into visions by the collective - might have made into a much less alternative party, the kind of party Tom Jones’s mother told him not to come to and which for all his prodigious vocal range, beat and blues soul he never actually got to, even when he was right in the middle of it for all those years. “They don’t know; they can’t see. Are you one of them?” is very much the pointing Jeremiah finger of the Summer of Love, lifting the whole flowery grave like a Beatle Lazarus into heaven and so incredibly high above the Flower Pot Men and Green Tambourines of as those happy weekend hippies who thought it was just some kind of summer fireworks. But the Jeremiah in George stayed balanced by his inner Song of Songs even after the Beatles. All Things Must Pass perhaps, in which Harrison is much the total Harrison as Dylan is total Dylan on Blood on the Tracks and Desire. But total Dylan (and he doesn’t always achieve it) is less other-worldly even than total Harrison, who was always Earthed by the warmth, humanity and humour he co-sparked in the Beatles (and Monty Python) and where Beatle Lennon’s acid evocation of England (Rain and especially I Am The Walrus) is achieved in a Wonderland snap of words,  music and audio collage (those snatches of King Lear and Greensleeves to go with the perfect Edward Lear sense) is as majestic a vision of Little England as Blood on the Tracks is of the inflated solo preachy ‘Imagine There’s No Heaven’ Lennon so perfectly satirised by Steely Dan’s Only A Fool Would Say That ( with the exception of Lennon’s one perfect self-actualising Ringo-supported album in 1970) uprooted to America with Yoko and never power-flowering from those rich deep-mined, fractured-seamed English roots again. Solo and irritatingly patchy self-indulged McCartney, after he’s 64, with all his effortless musical and lyrical flair does eventually make some seriously sustained high art - Egypt Station and Memory Almost Full – unflawed by musical doodling, art that you could at least put on a shelf with Blood on the Tracks and Desire and they are definitely the full and real McCoytney – but they don’t threaten the peak position of those Dylan masterpieces like his work on Revolver, Pepper and Side 2 of Abbey Road. And the Prophet Jeremiah Dylan is the one nasty enough (while Lennon was applauding Cilla) to nail the difference between the genuinely woke Sixties he and the Beatles led  and the Cilla / Engelbert imitation in that hawking successor to Positively Fourth Street which if it wasn’t a dalek-extermination of Pontypridd-popping green green grass but not that kind of grass of home Tom damn well ought to be: “Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr Jones?”

*

In Get Back/Let It Be the high priest of Lennonism is still mining his goonish, life-long tearaway, psychedelic-left liberation of the mind of its own and Straight Society’s controls by free-associating words, making a Dylan-busting lyric out of the breakdown of conventional meanings and connections. Like a rolling stone and the FBI and the CIA and the BBC menacingly groups agencies of the authoritarian State in the same anti-litany with BB King and Doris Day, Matt Busby… dig it, dig it. You start off in a sneering Dylan protest song but the meaning of ‘like’ instantly changes from simile to affection with which you overthrow (the fear of) all the Blue Meanies as well as the Dylan-protest earnestness that’s also controlling you. 

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 that 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, show-stealer Beatle John of that mischievous rooftop farewell concert, rocking their cavern in the sky with his three boyhood beat-mates again, to almost anything. 

Anyone know Lennon’s Last Words as he stared down the barrel, the black hole, of Mark Chapman’s infinite mediocrity?  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 hard edge to the Beatles – 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 signing himself ‘John Lennon’: his last words as the bullets exploded into his open heart were- I’ve been shot! 

The late plain style.

*

‘YOU SAY YOU’LL CHANGE THE INSTITUTION… WELL, YOU KNOW… WE ALL WANT TO CHANGE YOUR HEAD.’  Beatle John is moanin’ low now from his very high place, via the booming family radiogram in our Graveside Villa front room bay window (with its grandstand view of the splendid Victorian prison across the valley) rather than as usual on my cheery trebly mono hire purchase Dansette record player upstairs.  The McCartney bass (the slow graceful album version bass with its elegant complementary melodies, not the street fighting drive of the fast single version) is booming and blossoming so loudly I don’t hear In Between Shifts Dad unexpectedly come in behind me. 

I start upwards. But he’s in a good mood today reaching out across the generation gap, as advised by something he read in the Daily Mirror at work (Marjorie Proops), like an Apollo astronaut in busman’s overalls into a black hole for the moon he lost in 1963 and last saw going down somewhere over Snob View in 1968. His long right arm of Stepmother family law turns the volume down, as he listens tolerantly to this family-friendly doo wop version of the terrifying song that deafened his ears the last time he heard it on the radio in Snob View. He even Sinatra-croons along, ‘you say you’ll change the institution… well, you know… we all want to change your head…’ 

He comments, leniently, “You can’t put an old head on young shoulders, boy” then pats my teenage head like he is trying to stop me growing. Or standing up on my own hindlegs. “Why can't you be more like your sister?”

"Cindy?" My heart leaps.

"Special!"

The Ugly Sister! “No thanks."

Special 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 dog-heads like yours on our backs. Not to mention old dog collars and ties.”

Whack. “Get to your room.” Clink.

Meanwhile, back in Swinging London, on which he is hanging like a man who believes Beatle Britain Labour 1964-1970 MBE has surely replaced the Hampstead Heath Self-Preservation Society as the natural party of Government, Prime Minster Wilson, on an axis bold as love, changes the constitution. He gives long-haired 18 year olds the vote, a progressive (if two years delayed) response to the agitation of 1968.  He will confidently go to the country on his pipe-puffing resume of his government’s 1964-1970 rewriting of the nation, his (and Attlee’s) probably the most radical rewrite since Thomas Cromwell’s: repealing the Death Penalty; (puff puff) refusing, unlike his weaker successors, to join the USA's clownish invasions; passing, to an uplifting Beatles soundtrack, a rainbow of Racial, Gender and Sexual Equality Acts; an Open University; free student grants and votes for teenagers; 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.  Heath’s response, supported by Stepmothers everywhere is: give them a National Service short back and insides like in the Fifties. 

And guess who wins the election?

*

Johnny can’t adjust. In his mind he is eternally riding north from Cindy’s maternity bed up into the 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 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? Simon? Garfunkel? Jack? Eric? Ginger? Jimi? Noel? Mitch? Van? All the other torn a-parts of perfect Sixties wholes?  Yoko? Street Fighting Sir Mick? 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 Pillbox Pete had ever been Fooled on a Hill nailed suffering to a Cross of Love and Peace in the first place) (except on that The Who Sell Out which I windfalled one bored teenaged wasteland Sunday afternoon in Cwmbran Woolworth’s in 1971 for 3 shillings and sixpence in a price sticker switch with some Music for Pleasure fake like The Jimi Hendrix Experience: The Purple Fox Sings and Plays.) 

Yes, all those. But it was Ego, man - and his name is legion.

*

In Klein’s case you can take that literally. 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 day-seizing fellow litigants (or Lennon and McCartney anyway) 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 really 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-leaders Brian Epstein and (post-Epstein) Paul not to mention the occasional total colossal blindness of the band’s original guiding light 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 hero-worshipping, absent-father-substitute seeking recommendation to George and Ringo who trusted his enthusiasm in this as much as they had of old his more lukewarm lead about appointing Epstein in 1962 and had always looked up to him generally, that they appoint Klein as manager, all their multi-million Beatle assets went into receivership. As a result, Klein, in this the indisputable Fifth Beatle of so many nominations (Stu Sutcliffe, Brian Epstein, George Martin, Klaus Voorman, Billy Prestonetc) 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 gob. And while quietly applauding 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. 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 lesser earning Beatles (not that they needed it). 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 John not returning to the band, he had no other options. 

Ringo left the Beatles 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) left 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 used the fact loudly to fanfare that quiet man next door at home commercial solo album, McCartney, compromising the 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 to have a glorious Second Coming 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 George chafed under Paul’s deputy Head Beatle 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 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 deputy head.  But in 1970, the warmth had gone cold. The Dream was Over. It was the End. 

At the end of Abbey Road was a crossroads. John turned left; Paul turned right; Ringo turned back and George...kept going.

*

Still, the Walrus wasn’t quite dead. 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 well fifty years – and he sang a few - you know they had that Something She didn’t even know she had until he held Her Hand and told her.

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.

*

It’s where we are now, Edinburgh. A black box in the dark. 

*

That spring, I had this recurring dream about Cindy for the first nine days of April. It scared me because Stepmother told me if you dreamed about someone repeatedly like that it meant they were dead. And the next day, April 10, 1970, I am coming back from my hospital paper round at The End of Abbey Road, exhausted as usual. I look in that Mirror I deliver to most of the neighbours and the headline is something about the Beatles which always cheers me up but then I look again and it’s Paul’s ex-Beatle pout and the headline is PAUL QUITS THE BEATLES. 

*

There was a house on my mountain estate top paper-round up near the cricket ground that I always used to fantasise belonged to my real parents. The Melburys, Bill and Penny, from somewhere in the north of England. They took the Guardian and the Daily Mirror. They’d been best friends since they were teenagers – close enough to have some epic fall outs as well as lots of fun - in a foursome including his friend Tim and his sister Sue as teenagers and later on, after his national service, they were students together at Oxford. It took him years to realise they were more than friends but they’d married at the end of the Fifties. He now taught history at a Grammar School in the next valley and she worked for BBC Radio in Cardiff. On Saturday mornings, I’d see them in the garden and it became a bit of a habit for me to chat with them after I’d handed over the papers. He was very curious and professionally interested in the A level history papers and Exam Board I was taking, lent me a text book he said would help, told me my teacher was ‘very sound.’ She was more dramatic; she said I was SO fortunate to be studying the essays of George Orwell which were MUCH better for my writing and thinking than his novels (and D.H. Lawrence’s for that matter) and of course her flashing dark eyes and waves of black hair as she talked did wonderfully scarily ear-drummingly ( and on close reading after that not very D.H. Lawrentian) things to my blood flow. They were actually about the same age as my parents, very much children of the Fifties, and they certainly weren’t hip in any Sixties hippy sense but they were decent, progressive and in touch with the developments of the day. They had two young children and they talked to them like they were trainee citizens and junior fellow human beings rather than subjects to be drilled into line, the line of their own lives. Before I was finally kicked out of Hiareth for treading that life line one too many times after being warned not to for four years, I used to dream of climbing to that mountain top housing estate under the stars and presenting myself at the Melburys. I would see them kissing in the window, the kids in bed, laughing as they heard the doorbell. They’d turn off the radio - a play on the Third Programme – come to the door; I would tell them my plight and they’d adopt me. I could never have grown up at Hiraeth so I really was running for my life when I shot off down St Jude’s Road. But, if you’ve read this far and I’ve given you the impression that I was fleeing in search of some far out hippy commune or that drug-addled 2000 Light Years From Home at Dr O’Leary I lost my virginity and marbles in, I can only apologise, (while privately suspecting you get your Beatles history from The Daily Mail.) I can’t speak for Cindy in Beatleland of course (though I have my suspicions) but I don’t think that was ever the way back homeward the Beatles sang us lullabies towards either, however genuinely hip they all undoubtedly were. 

*

“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 paper. Her face blanches.

“Oh. So the dream is over.”

“NO!”

But she’s right. It’s the Seventies. A bucket of cold water over her 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 might lose the baby. 

*

Night mare. Cindy’s baby is born but it’s not a baby, it’s a miscarriage or something. It’s cradled in her arms in the Indian maternity hospital, like a prophesy. There is a long long long mirror on the wall and I slowly realise what I’m experiencing is the reflection, the reverse image, of the maternity hospital room in that mirror.

“Her name shall be Michel, after Jagger of the Sorbonne” she says, beaming. “The future is female.” 

It dawns on me slowly that something is wrong. “But that’s a boy’s name, Cindy,” I protest, the French masculine of Michelle.’ 

“And that’s what she is,” cackles Cindy, sounding disturbingly like Stepmother Mary. “Jagger the pantomime villain of your Beatle-Cinderella Sixties getting his revenge comeback trouser role as the real villain Free-Me neoliberal of the next 50 years, stealing Tina Turner’s moves, Bianca’s clothes and your show. Female in the way Arnold Layne and Margaret Thatcher are female. Unpegging see-through baby blues and May gowns that touch the ground to self-model them in that self-absorbed mirror in Arnold’s case. And drag-queening Hitler as our first ‘woman’ prime minister, making war not love on the enemy within /without as a self-interest self-promotion campaign while privatising public parts with closing-down sell-out High Street labels, in Thatcher’s.”

“No no no. You were going to call your baby Love. She’s a real woman like you and she’ll grow up to Fairy-Godmother the future.”

Michel bawls out of her swaddling bands like a bandit Messiah with a pair of tights round his face. “I am the future. The Barrenness of All-Femininity, dressed to kill. I will ’ow you say strap, corset, geld, gag and garter and suspend you across all time with my killer apron strings.” 

“NO! That’s the wrong way round. We need women who dare; men who dare, people who dare - to love each other, to be themselves. Not dolly birds and drag queens.”

Lovely Rita Tushingham rushes in behind the butch fireman and says the anti-choice sailor hero who made her pregnant didn’t stay to help her raise her baby and nor did the drunken straight mother. They left that to the gay un-dashing un-hero, whom the mean streets behind Penny Lane queer-bashed for being, and that a bit of early Sixties gritty kitchen sink British realism like that wouldn’t go amiss amid all these silly surreal late Sixties capers. Then Lovely Rita orders George Harrison the butcher’s boy to deliver the entire stock of her butcher father’s three shops to Maharishi’s ashram in the Himalayas before it closes. Meanwhile back in heaven, Paul swings down from the blue suburban skies singing A Taste of Honey and the scales fall like flat notes from my eyes and I see it’s not Rita Tushingham ordering bloody meat and an I for an I after all but Stepmother Mary. I turn back to the baby. 

It cries, “I’m Joko. Pixie Paul and his little wife Linda, Ziggy Stard-”

“I’d rather have The Boys.”

“I’m Michel/le!”

“You are Love! Not a shell or a dolly. And I’m no dolly’s toy.”

“Ma belle!” 

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

And I punch right through the looking glass, sweat flying, hard as the drum and fierce as the vocals on Beatle Ringo’s Boys. And spin round behind the punch into the Indian hospital room it reflects to find a triumphant midwife Aunt Rdognas and Cindy lovingly suckling a newborn Love instead.

*

I wake up to the sound of Paul’s ringing gospel piano and a 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’d 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 Somewhere in India 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.

Walking through the scary teenage park in the shadows of their continued absence, secretly missing the Beatle smile from George’s rocking guitar-cool; screeching Joko’s humourless Christmas sermon single all the empty-drunk louder for my not quite believing it and pretending that Joko’s Imagine that pompous easier-sung-than-done American dream is a genuinely high-flying British Beat heart-in-cheek All You Need Is Love, or even the Let It Be which rock-hard Lennon had so mercilessly mocked (“are we supposed to giggle like choirboys during the chorus?”) and then succeeded in exactly soul-piano reproducing as Imagine two Beatle-less years later, only without the heart-lift; me crying out for Lennon’s plastic ono Mother and the rest of his brilliant 1969-1970 neo-Beatle dawn; irritated by the Beatle bass, bounce and buoyancy I missed even there, isolated and wasted on pixie Paul’s pre-1973 drivel; and much too teenage-serious to be satisfied with Back off Boogaloo or Ringo’s sentimental voyages around his mother (not hearing that Fab Force gem Photograph and the Beatle-reunion Ringo album until two of the Beatles were dead) it was never clear confident morning again. And one day, amid the sterile mind games of 1973, like Orpheus looking back in a moment of doubt to make sure Eurydice is following (I just couldn’t let it be could I? Not without them) I Found Out… that I’d made it all up.

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. (If I couldn’t have the living experience of Love’s cheeky choirboys, I would play mind games with Scripture, a Victorian Clergyman having Doubts.) 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. 

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 wasn’t there. 

They were the black loop-hole: the crack in my life-story; the puncture in the helmet of my Astro-knight grail quest; the bullet hole in my perfect alibi. 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 Mick had always sneered. I had shot Kennedy after all. The Sixties Ball wasn’t just over; it had never been. Absent Dad had been right all along. Stepmother Mary had been right all along. 

*

 

Cindy’s last letter is from a maternity clinic in India, dated April 10, telling me to not to worry about Yesterday or Tomorrow Never Knows but just Be(atle) Happy in the present and 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; the only thing that makes us true to others; the only thing that increases when we share it. Love.” And she blows me a kiss and smiles so Cindily and the wind whispers though her long long long sunshine-yellow hair.

And then off she goes 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. 

The Carnival – the Sixties Ball - was over.

And I never see her again.

Chapter Fifteen

This Bird Has Flown

BRITISH PARENTS, THE WORST IN THE WORLD!

(That whining you can hear is the cassette tape of my life at its thin-streak, split-thread breaking point, first sensed in 1968, heard mind-bendingly loud (the crescendo-loud of that Pepper playout) in 1974. The whole of this show has been the whirring fast forward and back fast forward and back fast forward and back to try and get past this moment without mangling…)

BRITISH PARENTS, THE WORST IN THE WORLD!

For the benefit of the Edinburgh jury, if I have one, I’m holding up a February 1974 Daily Malice. The Malice’s beloved Conservatives have just been thrown out in the ‘Miners Strike Election.’ Prime Minister Heath, four fifths into his term, rhetorically demanded “Who Governs? Her Majesty’s Government or The Miners!?” He meant, “The Legitimate Conservative Establishment or the Uppity Working Class.” And the Answer to his electorate-begging question is, after four years without the Beatles and seven weeks with miners’ strikes and power cuts… Harold Wilson’s working class. Just. 

The CIA wasn’t pleased. Harold Wilson was a Limey JFK, a British mini out-performing itself like a Dallas limo on the Highways of Power, and the CIA wasn’t keen on either. Huddersfield Harold was the Yellowbelly who wouldn’t back us in Nam. The Thoroughly Modern Millie who found a USA-threatening role for a British Empire that had lost its Empire and gave an MBE to its Fab Force. This was the British Invasion that Secondary Modern Elvis had tipped off Tricky Dicky Nixon, in a food-smudged and badly spelled Republican-scarlet letter, was Backing the USSR. This the CIA did not like. (“I like Ike. A Rolling Stone, the FBI and the CIA and the BBC (not). BBK (not). And Doris Day.”) But they were Harold groupies compared to the Malice, which, for all its imperial-font British ‘patriotism’ (aka daily hatred of any Britain that isn’t Isle of White English) was never going to love a Government so recklessly rose-tinted and progressive that it in its Sixties heyday it had repealed not just Hanging and Racism but the 1534 Buggery Act and 1714 Riot Act as well!  It preferred even the CIA to the ‘Labour-lovee’ British Broadcasting Corporation. So in their 4 year commando campaign to keep Hampstead Heath in power the Malice headliners had done their daily best (as daily Malice reader Dad never stops moaning but never stops reading either) to shoot Wilson too. And missed. Just. 

So now the Malice is mightily pissed off. It hates losers. It thought it had seen off the Labour Sixties forever with Heath’s shock short back and insides (to National Service) Election victory in the summer of 70. But ’uddersfield ’arold and the ’orrible Sixties are - hevidently - still ’ere. 

Which was the end of civilisation as The Malice knows it. The young working class in office; in offices; in the limelight, making money, winning the World Cup, Beatling the World. For a while, under Beatle-King ’arold, the mini-coopering working class (and the country it led for the first time in fashion, cinema, music, art, sport, broadcasting, business and even some sections of the Labour Party) seemed to fly like a bird. And the country, despite a lot of grumbling about high and mighty unions, and industrial strife, and taxes, and long-haired student grants, wasn’t quite ready yet to let that particular Maggie go. (Though it would be electing a very different one five years later).

A bad loser is a loser. And the Malice, like the loser it is, took it out on the parents. WORST IN THE WORLD? Yes! With the workers back in office, the aspiring-to-be-middle class home must be suffering. Or if it isn’t, it damn well ought to be. Middle Class/Family values cannot be safe in the permissive hands of Roy Jenkins (Not just Race Relations, Buggery and Ye End of Ye Scaffold but Equal Pay; A Woman’s Right To Choose; Trades Descriptions; Factory Workers’ Health & Safety; Free Collective Bargaining and Ye End of Merry Olde Workhouse England As We Knew It…) Family Values need to be in the hands of – um, Profumo? No no. But not in Wilson’s horny workingman’s that’s for sure. 

The Spectres have come down in the world since Cindy left. Cindy leaving was the end of our Sixties heyday. We no longer live in leafy, kooky West Country Somertown and Absent Dad is no longer building aeroplanes as a skilled engineer at the forefront of Wilson’s white hot technological revolution. We have regressed to the Industrial Ex-Revolution among Stepmother Mary’s family on the dying South Wales coalfield. Once-almost-Sergeant dad is now busted to private in the nationalised transport industry, driving nationalised Welsh miners to the nation’s coalface; nationalised Welsh steelworkers and nationalised car workers to the nationalised factory gates and back (Enjoy it while you can, brothers and sisters!) and New Town shoppers (cooking for, cleaning for and serving all these) for the rest of the day. And while he is still very much part of the rude horning and agitating redtop tabloid at work, he comes home to the private Welsh parlour of Stepmother getting ready for her day jobs (cooking for someone else’s kids; washing other families’ clothes; counting someone else’s profits) in her upper working-class counting house, while receiving middle class Instruction from her elegantly bitching Malice. 

The Malice needed someone to blame for all this. And that avenging newspaper fury’s first victim is - me. 

*

I was tired after my paper round. And I was a teenager so I was tired anyway. And I was on the last desperate lap of ‘A’ levels so on top of that I was exhausted. Old people like I am NOW indulgently discussing their rigor and mortice forget what murder a teenage body can be. Puberty is like teething with nagging and life-deciding tests on top. And both parents resented that I was getting out of a world they were stuck in and regularly expressed this resentment. 

Some would identify this as the culture conflict of the ‘middle-class’ Grammar School and the working-class home, smoothly deracinating the child of its organic root culture, with the variation that my Grammar-Technical school was more like a WEA college in a coal mine, its library and laboratories, factory lathes and chain saws well integrated with the locality and that my contrary-Mary Daily Malice upper working class and proud of it home culture was ruled by Special the bull-underdog and never took much root with me anyway, so there was no conflict within me.  But there was certainly plenty of it between me and ‘Hiraeth’ as I got past 14. I was studying Sons and Lovers as my main A level novel as if my actual story needed underwriting any further. 

*

Sons and Lovers and Wordsworth. The coalfield and the daffodil mountainsides. You could see why the WJEC chose these texts for us. You can also see, if you look close enough, the struggle to escape a clinging mother in the first and the acceptance of a clinging sister (muse and/or part-author of the Daffodils and several other famous pieces) in the life of the second. The complete opposite of my own story in both cases. And by unclinging sister I mean Cindy, not the dog. If Special had been Wordsworth’s dog, she’d have claimed to have started the French Revolution, got Annette Vallon pregnant, built Westminster Bridge, shot the Albatross, taught the Ancient Mariner and written The Prelude.

*

*

What was that? Is Popeye HERE? (silence) If so, shut your class-disrupting noise and make yourself useful for once by fixing that bloody auditorium toilet. (silence) No, I thought not.

 

*

Absent Dad passed his 11 plus in 1945 but his mother couldn’t afford the books for Grammar School so he settled for a technical school, left at 14 and built war planes for the masters instead. That kind of self-effacement is movingly noble as long as you aren’t still busdriver-punching your Grammar School son awake in the face for it yelling ‘get out of bed and get to bleddy school when your Stepmother tells yaw’ decades later.

*

I was stressed, all the time, that I wouldn't pass my A levels out of this nightmare. I hung my newspaper bag up on the banister and looked at the Malice’s headline. BRITISH PARENTS – WORST IN THE WORLD? And I winked at Special. 

And Wicked Stepmother saw me. It was “You’re the Devil Who Killed Christmas!” all over again. 

*

In the interests of ‘BBC’ balance, you might want to look up an alternative version of this incident in Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”) Stepmother Mary’s Collected Diaries and Memoirs (illustrated by Absent Dad in his ‘Blank’ period) on her hallway of bookshelves. It’s in a 3 volume section called ‘I Don’t Know What I’ve Done to Upset James.’ (Note to self, hmm, are those last six words a better title for this show?) Or if you haven’t got fifteen thousand hours to spare, you could try Corporal Punishment’s Despatches to see if the defining family event of his son’s life get a mention. Sadly no-one reads the SM’s Mahabharata-epic revenge narratives except me; not just because they take so long to unburden their Dracula-points (“like watching the paint dry on both Severn Bridges” The Spectre “a Jim Davidson joke without the humour” Uncle Dai) but because any reader who visits that hall will, eventually, find himself the Bond villain of the piece. The SM is still the only member of her Reading Group who thinks the problem in ‘We Need To Talk About Kevin’ is that the mother loved Kevin too much. 

*

Shortly after my eviction (the crisis of the Gunpowder subplot, btw, in case yours truly your reliable narrator is ever set for A level) I linger on the threshold of ‘Hiraeth, 13, St Jude’s Road’ in my sky-blue loon pants. I have ludicrous tennis balls in my cowboy boots to keep the ludicrous loon-hems just the right distance off the dirty ground; I didn’t go to a Grammar-Technical school for nothing.  

My particular version of the home-Grammar school conflict is that I still do go to a Grammar-Technical school; it’s just I now have no home to go to it from. I try to find my balance on that over-scrubbed doorstep, with my bags of vinyl and schoolbooks and wonder where to go next. Stepmother Mary has finally done to me in 1974 the She’s Leaving Home thing she did to Big Sis in 1967. 

*

John, Paul, George, Mick, Keef, Pete, Roger, John, Ray, Eric, David (Hockney) and all the other Clever Dicks and Smart Alecs fairy-lighting up the Sixties and Seventies didn’t whine about not going to Grammar School. They kicked against it from inside its system and changed it for me from within. They passed their 11 plus and down the Grammar School corridors of lower power en route to that working class University of the late Fifties and Sixties: the art school. 

These weren’t pre-War Grammar School Boys like School Milk dispensing ‘udderfield’ Wilson (who went on to Oxford) and ‘Hampstead’ Heath (who didn’t) who ran the establishment for them. They were hard cases taught to calculate how many workers does it take to dig a First World War trench to die for King and Country in; who played truant to do their guitar homework; answered the teachers back in dirty Latin and, like me, learned to investigate crime rather than direct traffic. It’s what started me up the national ranks from artisan’s son to middle management as the Head of a large comprehensive school English department; that and my University degree in Hidden Meanings That Aren’t There. I spent most of my teaching career feeling like a young captain in the trenches of the Great War, leading the cannon fodder into a crusade (made increasingly worthless by the field marshals of the Eighties and Nineties directing state education from 170 miles behind the lines.)  But in national terms, a Head of English is at most a Sergeant. Albeit, in my case, a detective sergeant pursuing his own investigations. Shadowing a case he’s been ordered to leave. Asking awkward questions of the Chief Constable. 

It was gratifying to see (in the Observer) recently a photograph of Beatle Paul in 1962, before he was Beatle-famous, reading the Observer because his father wanted him and his brother to have horizons beyond the tabloids.  The article said he’d briefly thought about a teaching career (unlike the other three who were basically school refusers, even when they were there. Whereas in the Get Back film Mr McCartney even looks like his old hip English master.) It’s only fair that McCartney briefly thought about a teaching career before the Beatles as I endlessly thought about a Beatle career before, during and after my 27 year teaching career. 

Asking awkward Beatle questions of the Chief Constable. And not taking No for an Answer.

So what has Detective Sergeant Spectre found out in his 67 years to date? This. The Swinging Sixties was the working class at Grammar School. A shotgun marriage of middle-class culture aimed with working class irreverence. They didn’t keep up with the Cheltenham Joneses; they Stoned them. They didn’t think outside the box; they smashed it into the top left-hand corner and won England’s only World Cup. 

That working class Grammar School Cocky Bastard of ’56-’69 may not have built the Worker’s Paradise but he and she made a much better job of sharing out the rainbow at the end of Empire than Eden’s toffs were doing. Thanks to Grammar School, workers turned the world as upside down and inside out as a Mary Quant fabric. Liverpool rocked; London swung (up to a point: Beatle in the Sky mostly surrounded by trilby/bowler-hatted squares) and even Edinburgh and Cardiff let its hair down a little: and Britain boomed on the back of all their funny business. In the almost words of that the cockiest Grammar School-educated outsider of them all (Shakespeare) “Now, gods, stand up for cocky bastards.”

*

My A levels were just 4 months away. I looked at the Hiraeth house name and the unlucky Number 13 on the family door of Graveside Villas for the last time and wondered where in hell I was going to go. 

I don't mean in my life. I was going to whatever Wicked Stepmother and Absent Dad were deprived of at 14 and were trying to deprive me of, like an inherited disability now.  I had every sympathy for their missing out and I spent a long career as a comprehensive schoolteacher trying to right that class wrong.  But their missing out wasn’t my fault and, in terms of my own destiny, I wasn’t going to miss out myself now and punish my children for it later, as they were doing. 

But where was I going to live while I did it?

Truth is stranger than magical realism. There were two No. 13s in our long St Jude’s Road of Welsh valley houses (in the aspiring parish of Fernway, from the German Fernweh, the wish to be elsewhere.) Two lines of Victorian gothics classified under one long road, the slightly set back behind gardens Villas bigger than the ones on the main road itself. And just my luck, I would live in both of them.  I was going from the somewhat grander (if badly roofed bargain basement Villa 13) to the smaller main street 13. 

No. 13, St Jude’s Road proper housed the burgeoning NHS Surgery practice of Dr O’Leary a parallel universe through the looking glass. Dr L. dispensed pills and sick notes with equal abandon and this brought the huddled, hypochondriac and work-shy masses flocking, despite a local conspiracy theory that he was running guns for the IRA. I’d registered with him recently after Special had started disappearing down there for treats and (in the absence of Absent Dad on overtime and Wicked Stepmother at work) I was the one who had to fetch her and tell him in no uncertain terms from them to stop. He was mortified and apologetic, and unexpectedly charming, his Dublin-educated Connacht eloquence a beguiling music to my valley-tuned ears. “Will you have a smoke?” he asked which I of course accepted, and in that moment, the barricades along the generation gap, the fortress walls of the adult world - the limestone walls of his house (identical to ours); even the official Doctors’ name plate next to the door – seemed to blur into something friendlier. I was desperately in need of a friend and desperately in need of a doctor: two birds with one er… stone.  After that, every time I walked Special up the Mountain after my paper-round, I dropped in to see the Doc. He was like an ally in the adult world, a fellow traveller behind enemy lines striding along happily ahead of me on the main road we shared. He had a jaunty step, long wizard-grey hair and seemed more switched on/tuned in to teenage problems than even my increasingly estranged peers, let alone my hostile parents, my bewildered teachers or Dr Death, Strangelove, Faustus and Jones in the established Surgery, at No 1. 

Dr L. was also sympathetic to girls who turned up from isolated pit villages with horror tales of abuse by their fathers. A lot more sympathetic than Dr Death, Strangelove, Faustus and Jones in the established Surgery, at No 1. who seemed to equate the shocking un-thinkableness of such abuse with the 14 year old victim it violated rather than the Macbeth who should have protected them from such horrors. So when I met Dr L, my doctor, at the cigarette machine, buying Capstan Full Strength, and told him I was homeless and when, like a Good Samaritan, he kindly offered me an A level supporting room and a job while I studied, it seemed the perfect place to host my nervous breakdown. He was not popular with the neighbourhood puritans or the regular doctors or my parents but he was loved by the needy and the unfortunate. And any hippy-haired guy who’d been nice to Cindy and who helped girls escape dodgy fathers was all right by me.

Of course, if I’d known what I know now, in 1974, I would have said it to Psycho-Pat (the NHS Psychiatrist Dr L referred me to). “There are Individuals and There Are Families? Tell that Oedipus, Orestes, Electra, Medea and all the other Greek tragedies, Doc.  There are Individuals Who Say There’s No Society Because It Gets In The Way of Their Tyranny and There Are Families Like Mine You Have To Get Away From.” I’m sure Thatcher’s daughter would say the same. But all I knew then was that the Beatles (in the absence of any guidance from my parents if not my Grammar School teachers) had blazed a counter trail I had to find. So I put my inherited hand into my second-hand-me-down Western Welsh Omnibus greatcoat, Napoleon-style, and pretended I was what I had always wanted to be instead.

“What prescriptions are you on?” asked Psycho-Pat, poison pen poised over his pad.

“Cannabis and LSD.”

“Pardon?”

“Do you know our Double White Album, Pat?”  

 

“Should I?” Pat exclaimed into his sociology beard.

 

“There’s a moment on it, just before I go into Revolution 9, where Paul sings. Can you take me back where I came from, can you take me back? Can you take me back where I came from, mama, can you take me back? Can you take me back? Can you take me where I came from, mmm, can you take me… back?” …

 

“Er…”

 

“Well. Can you?”

Cleavage by James Spectre aged 14

"Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife."

You were in the doorway but 

I knew you couldn't help me

Even then. In fact your silhouette

Unnerved me strangely, the ghost

Of the Daddy you'd been once,

So strong and secure - and wrong

(It now seemed) about everything.

At 13, I'd found out (for myself)

The hardest of the facts of life:

It ends.  Why Death's fingers

Clutched my vitals then is a Mystery

Which discreetly remains

Eternal. I was in a sweat about Hell

When you broke in.

I told you out of dredged up childish

Habit, knowing it would do no good.

You said the right things - said I'd

Get to heaven, was a good boy, “usually”,    

But I disbelieved your word,

Not your judgment, not your virtues,

Not even your love, could save me

Because I was me, alone

In the dark with a skeletal hand

Clamping my privates. You closed 

The door, following Mum….

You'd gone. The radio scraped

Ephemeral music on the pillow

And I held my doom in my hands alone.

The R.I. Master droned, "See me

After school," set me Bible Questions

(Avoiding Genesis 2:24) but couldn't atone.

Only that girl at the bus stop, whose

New contours muddled the child's coat

I'd torn a toggle from the last time

We’d skirmished, made me forget.

Oh not forget, but make it matter less.

Sooner or later, I’d die. But something

That answered in my heart then

Felt like it wouldn’t. The darkness lifted

To a decent distance. And life went on

Soon after, though she, shadow-eyed,

Grew aloof and I more awkward.

What good was Grammar and Lit.?

My heart was a cry in the wilderness:

I’d have given all the poems we scanned

For one kiss, her real kiss, that stopped

The longing. You felt the change cleave

Your heart like a blade, but I was me,

Lost. And you couldn’t find me, Dad.

*

 

I never missed Hiraeth much for obvious reasons but not all the memories were bad.

I remembered how, on St Nicholas’ Day, 1973, Absent Dad appeared out of double overtime Nowhere with an unexpected present. He did this from time to overtime, trying to make up for his absence, for the Dad he wasn’t, for whatever thump to my self-confidence he’d given me last. The last present he’d given me (the SM handled all the official Christmas and Birthday presents) was Alexander Cordell’s Rape of The Fair Country, (as recommended by our brilliant History Preacher) in a white WH Smith’s bag, his fingerprints engine-oiled onto it. 

The last presence he’d given me was a shared labour of love, just the previous summer, when we rebuilt the precarious garden and garage of our Hiraeth back garden at the foot of the Mountain together, establishing a rockery and fetching tons of earth-fragrant leaf mould from woods near the top of that Mountain, all while listening to Radio 2 (Wings’ My Love sounding almost like The Beatles.) I still love leaf mould more than any other aroma. Alas, the truce collapsed, the generation gap gaped and war recommenced. Absent Dad went back to his overtime and his lowering resentment of my student-hippy social life (cadging pints and smokes from miners at the Forgehammer in lieu of pocket money) and I went back to my rebel books. 

This latest peace-offering/ present – a vintage Beatles 45 - was psychedelic because, on the School Rugby pitch that very afternoon, I had wonderingly scored my first tab of acid. I swear LSD makes trippy things happen in the ‘real world’ like this. So Dad’s present this very day, acquired from one of his workmates, with a magical realism that makes even this self-suspecting novel a little self-conscious, and with the Malice running exposés against LSD all that week, was, what else? Strawberry Fields Forever… 

Eight hours later I was still watching Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (mainly Paul in his sky high blue) from behind a terrified clump of frosted grass as they “meanwhile backed…” into Penny Lane from our winter-dark bleak mountain-school Rugby pitch, in their kaleidoscopic uniforms.  

The other single which Absent Dad had procured for me that day was by the Rolling Stones and it proves that not all truth is stranger than magical realism. I took it off at the start of my trip because unlike the Summer of Love Beatles it just sounded jarringly petulant, mean and cross instead of mature, floaty and loving. Recorded in 1965, it was already from the Stone Age. But it was also better mood music to The Pits, the rowdy miner’s bar from which I had fled forever onto the Strawberry School Rugby Field.

Mood music from a lazily loose-tight blues-rooted gang of fiercely federated competing private enterprises each of whom would end up wanting the band to be, respectively, Mick’s Motown Chartbusters; Charlie’s 50 Watt Jazz Band; The Brian Jones Experience (or Brian’s Beatles); Keef’s Rock and Rolling Stones (or maybe just The Rolling Stones); Bill Wyman’s Still Life Rock ‘n’ Roll Diaries. And in this particular matchbox-sized chart-topping slice of that glorious Thor-hammering chaos, hatching a big hit, high tide and blue grass that nailed everything that Honky Tonk Woman would ‘progress’ to 4 years before but with Brian and its blues soul still driving and without the yawn, The Last Time. The Last Time I’d go to that Stone Age cavern of a pub on acid, certainly.

*

Speaking of trippy coincidences and spookily apt titles, you may remember a previous chapter of this Stand Up Chamelian- which ended with Beatle aged 22-25 strung out along a road in London’s Clubland inadvertently tripping for the first time courtesy of an after-dentist coffee and, spookily, with the otherwise acid-uninformed Day Tripper at Number One in the charts, so spooky that Lennon Sans Discrimination would later, implausibly, ‘remember’ it as being about acid while robustly denying the same of the suspiciously capitaled Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

8 light years behind Beatle on that same road, in Milltown 1973, aged 17, between crucial end of term A level Mocks and my own last bittersweet Spectre family home Christmas, I am also on my first trip and also, with the perversity that repeats itself through my lifelong shadowing of them, en root (sic) from a dentist. In my case, an NHS dental check up. I must be one of the few people in history who would – Freud would day at some level deliberately - choose to pilot test-flight their first tab of green microdot in a dentist’s chair. I dropped the full tab– not the half my ‘dealer’ recommended for a first trip (even that, about 10 times the amount mixed into ecstasy in differently dangerous, later decades.)  I can report back from this mind-numbingly pointless and life-threateningly dangerous dental experiment that, as I realised that Adrian Airhead from Mountain High has not slipped me the expected dud after all but for the only time in his life is as good as his word, I suddenly feel surrounded by a duo of white coats (the dentist and his lovely assistant) peering down my infinite mouth into my inner being having first placed me upside down. I notice that they are gaping at my perfectly natural gibberish as if it's nonsense! “I’m on bottom of the world” and “why are looking at me through flying saucers” and “get those poles out of my mouth” etc etc. It is fortunate for the survival of your ever-reliable narrator and this show that on this rare occasion no drilling or extraction followed. As with that infamous Nazi dentist torturer, ‘Christian’ Szell, the White Angel of Auschwitz, resistance would have been useless, holy-cowed as I was by the notoriously passive-case generating drug and by these uniformed agents of the state as they probed my lip service to thought crimes to report to Big Father (Corporal Punishment is Watching You) about my first magical mystery tour bus away from his world without the right ticket. As I may have mentioned already, a mind on acid does not just see trippy things, it also makes trippy things happen and on my way back home to Hiraeth from the white angels, I ran into my stunningly sexy Auntie Sophia, looking even more like a Welsh chapel-valley Sophia Loren than usual, and she chose that moment, over the garden gate prison bars of her petit-bourgeois show home, to tell me “I often wonder what all this hippy fuss is about, Jems, but when they gave me that pre-med in the hospital I didn’t have a care in the world, world, world…”

I did have a care because by then I was beginning to realise I had an 8 hour after-school trip ahead of me and nowhere in the world to park it.

I didn’t even want the trip really, however hip it made me look to my peers. I was only doing it in the absence of a real heaven, a real earth. I wanted a soul mate, my other half. I wanted a girl, a room, a bed, tavern, music. I wanted to be meanwhile-back in 1965, with Beatle and Cindy…

Stepmother Mary reacted to my mild-acid-morning-after observation that the breakfast egg she’d boiled me was hard by humorously fetching in a lump hammer from the shed and pretending to crack the egg with it. It was the hammer Mother Mary bought for me to give to DIY Dad for our first new home Christmas in Hiraeth in 1968, when he hugged me in pure joy because it was ‘exactly what I wanted’ one of those joyous Christmas moments I pined for, like him appointing me his (almost) come-of-age barman for my last family Christmas party there in 1973, a deft and preciously rare devolving of manhood I cherished and viewed later through my lost Eden gate of acid-aggravated seventeen going on eighteen going on nineteen nervous broken family breakdowns. 

I leaped about three feet across the room towards the door. It was prophetic. Two months later, she’d be casting me out of itnonto that over-scrubbed Stepmother step, en route to that other unlucky 13.

I am staring at the scar made by the knife on the desk. It was done cutting a tab of green microdot in half, to share my second trip/ nineteenth nervous breakdown with Adrian Airhead, my fellow sixth former/ dealer. Beginning To See The Light by The Velvet Underground is playing, palpably against the mood. We take off from the front doorstep of Hiraeth and balloon ineffectually around the valley floor until we board a Western Welsh magical mystery tour bus.

HEAD YOUR MIND it says above the stairs. Ha ha ha. Then we notice the driver. Absent Dad! Suddenly Vividly Present! We think we’re busted (we are outside time but also on the 13.09 to Millport and conspicuously absent from Period 7 in Milltown Grammar Tech). When you’re on this kind of magical mystery bus trip, All You Need Is Love, but, unlike the May Days alliance on the Left Bank of a very different river in 1968, I see in Dad’s Cyclops Eye on the banks of the River Angry Lewd in 1973, only the historic resentment of the worker for the student. 

The ever-loving Daily Malice, the newspaper that hates Britain and anyone (even/especially, Archbishops) who actually practises or preaches the Anglicanism it carpet-bomb crusades for, has just published a pictorial guide - How To Eye-dentify If Your Child Is On LSD - but Absent Dad somehow fails to read our Eyes as we smuggle our two sets of flying saucers past him. As always, it’s like passing a Big Brother Is Watching You (With NO Eyes) poster; a scrutiny by an absent-minded off duty Thought Policeman. He’s not seeing his son on a trip to a heaven twinned with hell; he’s seething the Grammar school boy he never was.

We bail out of the bus up a back valley and float harmfully off up the Mountain. Into eight hours of what I want to be the Summer of Love (in December) and Adrian Airhead wants to be A Laugh At The Pretty Lights. We don’t trust each other for a second. Or ourselves. And we are absolutely right. We are increasingly spooked by old forests of Lord of the Rings conifers; Velvet Underground railway tracks up to the coal mines of Moria and a horse that bites Airhead after he hails it as Jesus. 

For those who can’t see, if there’s anybody here, I am performing this now while cowering under my old school desk. The Victorian one they got me to do homework on with my gold Parker pen instead of buying me the right satchel so that mine didn’t stand out from the outside class pile like a dog turd in a row of medium rare steaks. The saw-damage you can’t see was sustained when Dad cut a vice into its Grammar School oak for his heavy industrial revenge, after Stepmother Mary threw me out. I am looking at its sturdy Industrial Revolution hinges, complicated sliding mechanisms and superior joinery. I am tracing that LSD scar it sustained at my own hand in December 1973.

And now, by association, I am back at school, staring at Paradise Lost. 

I don’t like Milton. I didn’t choose English ‘A’ Level so that the Prescriptive Grammar Teacher whose class I’ve topped for the last three years, could stop me reaching for the stars. The system in those days was to teach every text on the paper as well as to encourage pupils to ‘read around’ and leave your effortlessly informed students to choose between all the texts on the actual paper itself, preparing your pupils for the exam ‘incidentally’, ie using the exam as a pretext to educate the young in the entire canon of English Literature - or as much of it as inhumanly possible in two years - because state schools were not then private enterprises in reductive competition with each other, brandishing their exam results at every opportunity, but custodians of culture, more likely to underestimate than overestimate their assets in the general cause of human progress. Society, not the Good Of The (Private) School and its Honours Board (“but we were at school together, Bertie”) was the heroic State School Aim. 

This is in many ways more admirable than the intensive exam coaching that choked the last years of my own teaching career, including the art of studying as little as possible for the largest possible exam dividend, which is neither gnosis, culture nor education but at best Training and at worst Cheating. But it did have the disadvantage of causing nervous breakdowns in those who, like me, followed it to the letter. And it did depend on half the course not being ‘taught’ by an ancient Prescriptive Grammar Teacher still lecturing from her 1936 School Certificate or passing on her own Victorian teacher’s Matriculation and Grammar tips along with junior school simplifications, liturgical catechisms on the tablets of stone on the graves of Dead White Authors to be recited and learned by rote and extended and irrelevant extracts from her spinster autobiography. So I decide I’m no longer going to Restrictive Grammar Teacher’s lessons.  

She is always late; she’s late now. She is having a last two cigarettes in the Staff Room, and when she does get here she’ll either croak the same unedifying anecdotes she told us all through ‘O’ level or, as the lesson runs out of time, dictate some old saw she dictated the lesson before last and will still be dictating the lesson after tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Like “Shakespeare Is Our Greatest Playwright But Milton is Our Greatest Poet.” 

I hand in an essay declaring with the arrogance of a wonderstruck boy who has just (on Cindy’s recommendation) read King Lear as background to RGT’s set text The Tempest, that Milton “is not Our Greatest Poet. Reagan and Goneril make his Satan look like an Angel; he offers structural grandeur and majestic images but has no vision and his intellect is therefore not worth studying.”  I didn’t add then that the Great Man might have lightened the infernal gloom with the odd joke. Or rather that, hilariously funny as his Eden Nudist Colony with its centre-fold Eve bending over the weeds while Adam handles his tool with divine vigour in the bushes is, I suspected that Milton himself wasn’t in on the joke.  Nor did I have the necessary context to note that, compared to Dante’s zenned-out Catholic Eden, a reified sacramental state made manifest by the purgation and forgiveness of a mountain of sins, Milton’s Garden of Eden seemed to need a comical amount of maintenance by two partners in an endless labour of love who then ended the day getting to know each other in Biblical sense, with the pre-lapsarian bonk, the last ‘innocent’ act before the Fall, described at the very end of Genesis Chapter 2. But I am as good as my word. I will take A Level without a further study of Milton or attending any more of RGT’s lessons. I do this for an entire year before she notices after which she tells the class she will stop my exam entry. It’s one of the reasons I disappear from school altogether rather than telling them I’ve been thrown out of the parental home. Fortunately, my three other teachers back me to do well despite my evident troubles as I’ve been top of their subjects for the last four years.  But now I teach myself everything at Dr O’Leary’s. And get an A grade in two of them. And every bruise of the hubristic Fall RGT wished for me. 

And when I do get to University, the other side of my black hole gap year, I will learn that Milton was Oliver Cromwell’s Secretary in the English Revolution. I will learn that the ‘Chapel’ is (or was) The Labour Party at Prayer. That the War in Heaven and the expulsion of rebel Lucifer becomes the defeat of the Absolute Monarch Charles I (by New England dreamers and romantics like me.) The frontispiece of William Blake’s “Milton” (the words of ‘Jerusalem’) until then a Hymn to The Establishment will become a Liberation theology. Abdiel the Puritan angel will stop being a boss’s nark and becomes the rebel who stays with God. The same chapel-repressive set text opening words that RGT used to keep me in my place “O Spirit, that dost prefer/ Before all temples th’upright heart and pure” will set me free. 

As George Harrison put it, “it’s all in the mind”

*

My Coming of Age, March 1974 at Dr O’Leary’s. The good doctor has prescribed me a rest from my A level labours. “All you need is a lift,” he says, noting my exhausted features. He prescribes a sockful of Mandrax, Tunol and Seconal. They go well with the 18th birthday joint Cindy (I believe) has anonymously sent me through the post. 

(I found out later it was Johnny Churchill who Wanted To Be ‘Straight’ with Absent Dad in their post-Sixties ‘any sign of Cindy?’ meetings by telling him he’d supplied me with joints on several occasions since my sixteenth birthday. This was Johnny “Love, Peace, Truth, Joy and Glibness” Churchill the Honest Hippy Modelling To Be The Future Bourgeois Citizen, ie putting his ‘integrity’ and own personal love-and-peace of mind before any consideration or awareness of how this might affect my precarious tenure in the Spectre home. Thanks, man.)

I am in the company of Randy Angie from the chip shop, all blonde Rod Stewart feather-cut and baby-blue eyes. A Living Doll. She is 17 going on 18 and always will be. Dolly Parton says she never minded being called a dumb blonde because she knows she ain’t dumb and she knows ain’t blonde.  Angie could make neither claim. Overwhelmed by the prescription buzzes on offer, she has gone of course for Mandrax and is all over me accordingly, long before they can possibly have started working. I am also in the company of her beast-friend Nicky, 18 going on 28, in a short leather jacket, boob tube and a what, if it was six inches longer, might be called a miniskirt, who belongs to a particularly possessive Dai Hard from Up the Valley who doesn’t like me anyway and who will certainly remove my testicles if I take liberties with his ‘bird.’ This is more or less stopping me, 18 going on 8, from doing so but it is not stopping her, in between long erotic pulls on the joint, from trying to blow-change my mind. 

I have put Their Satanic Majesties Request on, conscious that I have staged My Coming of Age deliberately for this novel. I want my procrastinated First Time to happen with the Stones ‘Satanic’ album playing and am impressed that the grass, the cornucopia of NHS drugs and the fact that there are two girls at my deflowering makes it a scene worthy of Cohen’s Beautiful Losers.  

For all this sexually erudite reading and inspired staging, I’m know I’m not playing the scene well. Angie is more or less coming by herself at the idea that she is in bed with (she thinks) the Grammar School’s answer to Mick Jagger – and that the Mandrax in her system justifies the cartoon erotica she’s moaning in my ear – and Nicky is letting her lips and thighs sag open with equal abandon, like a centre spread stolen from Dai Hard’s Rwgbi Clwb. 

I’ve rehearsed this scene alone four times a day for five years. Get a grip on yourself, James, I say. No, get a grip on Angie. Let yourself go. Enough of the revising and the theory. This is the exam. Those who can, do. …. And (like Macca’s My Love and its 1969 Joko prototype single entendre Don’t Let Me Down) …do it good.

And of course, (despite a dubious introduction, twenty nine circuitous paragraphs and no real conclusion) I don’t. Like Prufrock after NHS narcotic ices, I don’t have the balls to force the moment to its crisis. So what should have been the eighteenth birthday age-coming double counter-climax of this bildungsroman subplot has (unreliably) Let You Down, Edinburgh, for which I can only apologise (while privately suspecting that if you do feel let down by my 18th birthday story you probably get your bildungromans from Adrian Airhead.)

Look it’s hard enough to be a reliable narrator anyway when you’re from a family like the Spectres where everything you’ve been told about your family history is a either Several Huge Hushed Up Gothic Secret Skeletons in a Cupboard Under The Cellar Stairs Behind A Graveyard of Victorian Ghosts or a long mind-numbing dog-howl of self-pity and imagined conspiracies that change every time they’re told. Of course we all retell history to suit our needs in the present but I was never sure what present needs these myths of terrible past wrongs were told to serve. A version of events so remote from any kind of reality that even ancestry.com would give up trying to make any money out of it. I waited years for Absent Dad to confide his Secret Shame – that Aunt Rdognas was actually his (unmarried) mother our gran, not his elder sister, our Aunt: so that I could tell him it never mattered to me and it doesn’t matter to anyone else anymore either. All I cared about was that he loved me, as she did. Sure, when I first had to learn it, traumatically and without any sympathy for the black hole it blew in my life, from Ex-Pat Junior, “wanting to be Honest” (yeah, thanks Ex-Pat Junior, you sneering bastard) it blew my life off course for a week. But it would have been fine to have been blown off course for a week on that particular voyage with my Absent Dad at the wheel, doing the telling. 

It's also hard to be a reliable narrator when (as like Homer, who repeats about a third of his epics, I’ve possibly said already) your brain keeps jumping around and digressing because of all the early whacks around the back of the head it got from Corporal Punishment. But I just remembered how I sold out Dr O’Leary, the man who gave me a home to do my A levels in when my parents cut theirs away from under me. True, once I’d finished my A levels he’d got increasingly paranoid on the massive overdoes of amphetamines he was devouring in place of food and after some dodgy episodes where I woke up to find him cadaver-thin naked and cutting all the cables in the attic to “stop the Police surveillance of his alleged IRA activities”, his Chatterton-teethed paranoia eventually began to turn on me, this undercover agent the Police had placed in his house. But after all he’d done his bit already and he owed me nothing; HE wasn’t my parents. They summoned me back from my gap year in Guernsey to Hiraeth, my lost family home, saying The Police needed to see me and then Vividly-Present supervised my answers when I was questioned by detectives about Dr O’Leary’s self-prescriptions. (He wasn’t allowed to prescribe morphine, his emotional Pain-killer of choice, anymore because of past addiction, so had made up phantom teenage girls for whom he prescribed amphetamines as a slimming pill. And as part of my board and lodg. I counter-signed his scripts.) My absent parents made me witness to this Evil, on the vague suggestion of some kind of reconciliation with me, perhaps some support for my University future, then once I’d sold my hippy soul to the system, Stepmother kicked me out again. They saw themselves as Good Citizens doing their Daily Malice duty and keeping me Out Of Court, but I could see what was really eating them. Dr O’Leary had been there for me when they cut me loose but more crucially they had tempted Special away from them with dog treats. Plus Dr O had written Absent Dad a letter apologising for ‘gate-crashing’ (the same squeaking haunted gothic Victorian wrought iron gate in both No 13s, one closed to me, the other open) the Spectre family and Vividly Insulted Dad furiously objected to one phrase in it that wasn’t quite grovelling enough. 

*

So I make my lover’s leap out of the Mare’s Nest a Second (and final) Time, flapping desperately, but determined, just about where the Beatles were in 1958. Nowhere. I was 18 as the older two Beatles had been then (Paul was 16, George 15) with the following to my name:

Education: 9 O Levels.3 A Levels.

Football career. Eden Vale Under 11s

Position: Right Half

Honours: none.

and pledged my four Gap Year and Uni Years to reach somewhere where the Beatles had by Brian Epstein’s end-of-1962 Beat-all report.

 Won Mersey Beat popularity poll (2nd year)

 Voted fifth in NME poll for the Best British Vocal Group

 Four BBC broadcasts

 Four BBC appearances

 Two Luxembourg broadcasts

 Two Hamburg engagements

 Entered the Top Fifty within two days of “Love Me Do’ release

 Hit No 21 in the charts with ‘Love Me Do’ their first disc

 Appeared with Little Richard, Frank Ifield (Joe Brown, Jet Harris, Gene Vincent, Johnny and the Hurricanes, Craig Douglas and many others

 Appeared at Liverpool (Empire), Birmingham, Manchester, Hull, Doncaster, Crewe, Stroud, Coventry, Shrewsbury, Bedford, Peterborough, Preston, Blackpool etc etc 

 And in 1963

 ‘Please Please Me’ (released January 11th)

 Appearances in ‘Thank Your Lucky Stars’, ‘Saturday Club’ and BBC TV (January)

 Scottish tour (January)

 Helen Shapiro Tour (February)

 ‘Love Me Do’ Release America, Canada and Germany

 Tommy Roe Chris Montee Tour (March)

 And who knows!

50 years later, I’m still nowhere and if any of you are a fellow Fringe performer, Edinburgh, you probably haven’t achieved anything like that modest pre-Beatlemania list either. But it was their next two years that no-one on the planet will ever equal and with it they were blazing a trail for us She’s Leaving Homers, Cindy’s generation and mine. They were ours alone then. Later, their additional embrace – in 1964 mostly between takes - of a timeless popular and classical culture beyond the “Tell Tchaikovsky the news!” of its initial twist and shouting, even if by then the timeless charm of When I’m 64, Lovely Rita and For The Benefit of Mr Kite embraced everyone, the acid visions of Pepper,   George avant-garde-a-clue-“Tell Stravinsky the  News”-ing” advocation that the band continue to make records “like Stravinsky” rather than restage what John would call their Performing Flea period,  still spoke only for us and none of it was encouraging we She’s Leaving Homers to stay put. The Stones - with one main taproot - American blues - and one rebel yell - might (wearing their second best PR hat while putting out a counterfeit Pepper of their own) accuse the Beatles of a vaudeville rootlessness on Pepper but we never forgot that Hard Day’s Night shift they put in on our behalf, soaring above the older generation’s nesteggs and securities. It made Midwich Cuckoos of all of us.

I took flight south as Cindy had done to Weymouth on a Beatle wing and prayer. 

Chapter Sixteen

What Goes On

So we come to it at last, Edinburgh, the All Things Must Pass last chapter (dramatic pause as you turn the final side of an old classic vinyl album set). The long long lost chord. (George’s G eleventh suspended fourth radiating into its constituent fifthless Am7 and F major at the start of A Hard Day’s Night… segueing into the mighty E major at the end of Pepper). The hidden meaning that isn’t there.  (Ringo reverse drum roll…)- The Answer!

The Answer we all looked under chairs and tables for, asked the Beatles for, thrust our hands deep into the sleeves of our album covers for, next to that concealed acid tab, chasing the bright elusive butterfly of drugs. 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 haunting all these places, people and things in my life. 

Her last Word to me before going to India via Weymouth in 1969 was All You Need Is Love! She was chopping up red and yellow peppers in her psychedelic kitchen, ‘Indian’ foodstuffs I’d never seen. I thought we were going to smoke them. She made those words flesh, man. And I love her. So I believed her.   And then suddenly, as the Sixties lead-clouded over into the Seventies, she was gone.

In my black hole gap year, I followed her hippy trial to India, via her last known embarkation place (and first choice teacher training college) Weymouth. I was still there the following summer. He came in search of Paradise and got as far as Weymouth. India would take a while longer. 

Gap Year by James Spectre aged 18

The white hot swans of summer

are melting out of the bitter glare

which I, a boy with iced dreams,

held them in.

I spray my eye with Right Guard

and promenade

upon the esplanade.

Bikini'd housewives

are golden beach-babes for a day:

The sand is seen

as pastry with too much margarine.

This girl on my arm

where she's been since October

buttons her pink heart forever away.

I am in a black hole

of this past still-winter

(supplementary benefit spent

on a Romantic education,

Chatterton-teethed heating

soul food, ghost rent)

so very far away from the thing I burn for,

I can almost touch it.

When I finally got to University in her hallowed red sandal-steps, part of me honestly thought she would have come back and be waiting for me in the bar, “Hello James,” she’d 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 were you’re meant to be… All You Need Is...” 

And I would leap forward like her teacher’s pet/ Chosen One with the Answer, Love!

 I enter the bar. …But she’s not there. 

I learned instead to ask the University Questions she did; and am taught to accept that these in themselves yielded more realistic answers than the Absolute I craved.  I was never convinced. Even as a Trotskyist Unpopular Front (TUF) Marxist, I still studied the poets like they were Scriptures; forever trying (page after page after page, student block after student block and anything but writer’s block) to Work It Out. When they told me The Answer is an authoritarian, out-dated and sentimental view of chapter and verse, learned in an old-fashioned Welsh Methodist Grammar school, I re-schooled myself; but somewhere deeper than thought I never did. It was easier said than Donne.

*

The student residences are a honeycomb for worker bees (and, God, I know I’m one) and most of what one does (music, wild parties; noisy nymphomaniac sex) is experienced as everyone even if one is doing it in a room of one’s own. But after having no room at all now at Hiraeth and a mad cell at O’ Leary’s and an unheated unfed black hole in Solitary Weymouth, it is bliss to be able to invite fellow students back to after seminars, campus discos and concerts; and very heaven to live where, in the nearby LCR, teenage legends walk off hallowed LP covers onto the stage. 

Never the extinct Beatles, of course, nor even the resuscitated Rolling Stones (though in a moment of exultation I do introduce them over the PA and the amused band oblige by playing Honky Tonk Women to rapturous applause.) But before the first term is out, I watch Fairport Convention fronted by Sandy Denny; Argent (“where’s the other Zombie?” “He’s Not There’”) one of the Bonzoes; all three of the Mersey Poets and folk-cool Rab Noakes, with whose staged Presence I actually speak. (‘Can you play One Bed One Purse?’ Pause. ‘Not wi’out a piano, son.’)  And all the tuition is not only paid for but supported by a grant that, even without most of my parents’ ‘contribution,’ keeps me in organic porage, a daily lunchtime omelette and an ongoing brown vegetable curry. (Maharishi – more of him in a minute - is a lot cheaper tp follow than drink and drugs.) In the Second Year, I will spend quite a lot of my days demonstrating shoulder to shoulder with class-conscious workers against Wilson’s Labour Government for a Society. In hindsight, Edinburgh, with toffs now telling us “There Is None”, it looks like we had one already. 

“The Revolution” we long-long-longed for like some desperate hope-smitten 17C Puritan for the Millennium, never quite believing as real yet still used a ubiquitous stick and carrot to beat our all too real Present with in all its aspects, did in fact come, and much sooner than expected, only of course from the completely opposite direction to where we were looking: hard to the Right; conceived not by a brilliantly  cerebral Marxist philosophical and economical vision but by a brilliantly cerebral philosophical and economical neo-capitalist one – monetarism - and bludgeoned through not by a Marxist-Leninist or Trotskyist Party and a Red Army and but by the Establishment-backed Conservative Party and the overtime-fuelled Boys in Blue, who brutally charged Britain’s World-War-Two-forged collective Society and State ethos with a breach of the peace on the Steel and Coal picket lines of the Eighties, frog-marched that Society into their privatised blue vans (with ‘get my own back on Society’ personalised private company names and customised number plates on) and drove it off at frantic speed into a new lonely TV channel, phone and headset for all individual self-absorbed hyper-competitive bombing atomised world of shopping and unregulated ‘free’ market ruthlessness. We might have been better employed defending the Society we already had.

*

In the First Year, I am In Arcadia Est, a New University version of Brideshead Revisited, with that tiny monkish des res bedsit to myself on campus. In the Second Year, in a series of unsuccessful student communes in downtown Norwich, one of them hilariously called Seaview Farm, I will be called up (by my guilt, background and - Welsh history - education and by the fact that Rosa my Sessex Girlfriend was a fully paid up member of that rock-hard left Baader–Meinhof group, TUF) into a year of International Service in the Class War. 

In the Third Year, liberated by punk, I will throw all this over, when I’m not grinding for Finals, and try to get back that timeless romaunt of the Rose… á la recherche du temps perdu First Year.

TUF would supply militant shock troops for many lastingly good causes (Rock Against Racism; Grunwick’s; pub picket lines against Wife Beater’s Bitter; a trans man who shifted left week by week  from the Federation of Conservative Students through the Liberals and the Broad Left every shade of pink and rose to the hard brick-smashed arterial red of TUF) but only on the understanding that all these causes could only permanently thrive UNDER Socialism in a chest-thumping fist-clenching group out on the extreme left of the Broad Church( and not even any of those unless it was the real TUF rather than its pinko imitations)

*

Year 1. November 1975. The President of the Transcendental Meditation Society has just invited fellow meditators to his campus cell by way of a notice in University House. One entire wall is covered with enormous glossy Maharishi posters and statements provided by the organisation. From the facing wall, dazzlingly, the Transcendentally Meditating Fab Four beam trippily out of the inner Eden gatefold of their  Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts’ Club. 

I (for that President is indeed I) am nervous but the first arrivals are two radiant young women looking very happy to see me. Unreconstructed 3rd Year womanisers, 2nd Year cynics and lonely First Year teenage boys (I am a gap-year their senior) living on this corridor gape at this Lothario coming up with a ruse like this and several become initiated into TM shortly afterwards. I host the group mediations all year. I didn’t plan it – God did - but a Lothario couldn’t have planned it better. 

One of the women – Sadie Lamour, who is 24 and from magic America - will be taking me out to dinner and giving me a long overdue sentimental education within the week. Whatever stern critique you might have about Maharshi’s idea of positive vibrations mentally radiated by meditation bringing about the salvation of the Earth (or about his marketing Self-Realisation as a brand with a TM trademark) ‘Sexie Sadie’ certainly made that Earth move for me. 

UEA’s Sixties abstract concrete was shining new then and it was teaching me to question standard versions of history and civilisation; the golf course it had been built on mourned by the golf-playing classes of Norwich. Post-Thatcher, it taught Writing as a business, how to sell your soul. Its Sixties/Seventies prospectus boasted that it did not train people for any job or profession: that could come after they had been educated. “There are no sacred cows or training courses at UEA.” It was about finding your soul, if you had one.

*

The Beatles were my Cindy-rebellion against our parents. Punk came in off the council estates to the student discos where I worked that summer as a bouncer, supposedly to eke out my grant but actually just to pay for the Dutch Courage I needed to do it. Punk was my anti-flare; anti flower power; anti-hippy demonstration AGAINST Cindy – or rather Cindy’s Absence – and it took me into Rod’s the Gentlemen’s Feather-cutters with that knockout first Clash album and my instruction to ‘make me look like that; it’s terrible.’ None of my TUF comrades, nor any of our various pinker shades of red dawn fellow debaters who regularly watered there, recognised me in the Prince of Denmark afterwards 

Punk burned bright, thick and fast as a gunpowder plot firework - and of course it was too good to be true. It threw itself away, which was partly the point. 

At its best, Punk did the job. It called a swindle a swindle and it scared the pants off the Burton suits who owned and marketed the rebel yell. It empowered the Cindys of the Sixties to become the punk-pink slits and violent fems fed up with rooms of stoned guys passing the joint and the buck on how we make the Pretty Flamingo and the Bright Elusive Butterfly of the Feminine an equal rights reality, rather than the Stones’ posho-lordly Andrew Loog Oldham’s reductionist version of Marianne Faithful (uncredited co-author of Sister Morphine and much of the Sixties groove, a reminder of how much of an achievement it was by those Labour government and other women who started to stand up for women’s rights back) as “an angel with big tits.” 

But it was a rebellion held together with safety pins and it spat out its neo-libertarian disillusion with a younger brother despair for the very hippy ideals it ripped through. At its best, it busted us all out of our no future Hotel California Dreaming; it its worst, it was a lean, mean, dreamless proto-Thatcherism with spiky hair (as Johnny Rotten’s pantomime shock support for Trump revealed in 2020) rather than the genuine proletarian liberation, the Cindy fairytale that got me to Grant-supported Tuition-paid University, not just to its summer discos. 

*

It’s the autumn term of the Third Year. I have my hand in the air like a schoolboy and I'm sure everyone in the packed Lower Common Room can see the fingers trembling. If this highly charged yet highly tedious meeting ends before they see me, I'll have got away with it.  Again. Then I notice the new President. (His dad owns a multinational cereal company and he is thanking us, arch-ironically, for paying for the jug of beer he is waving at us, out of our union dues. Not the Revolution 9 spirit of Berkeley and Sorbonne which drew me here.) 

Ah! He is pointing at me..

Charles I ascended the scaffold with lighter heart. I look up, undermined by my squabble of fellow romantics, TUF; outnumbered by a landslide majority on three sides, and with the 'grown up' student union officials at my exposed rear like four 17C Major Generals mounted along a ridge. One of them wears a red beret like the one on the cover of Jerry Rubin's book 'Do It' and I only wish that look inspired me as much now as when I devoured it in my black hole year in Weymouth. I can still see that gap year across my eyes now, a swirl of dark spots behind my Lennon lenses.  I am scared to death, and more alive than I have ever felt in my life.

Half-joining TUF has given me a voice that my good dais-to-desk Grammar School A level English teacher never did. A voice that speaks in CAPITALS; in transitive verbs like 'SMASH' and 'FIGHT' (‘Smash the bourgeois State’; 'Fight for the right to work'.) We lecture workers in the town; on the trades council; on the CBI; on picket lines, exactly what we lecture our tutors, classmates, class enemies, porters, cleaners and maintenance workers on campus: that any other party/practice of and argument for Marxism than TUF’s is Stalinist (State Capitalist agents of Soviet foreign policy); class collaboration; workerism; false consciousness or – irony alert - merely ‘academic’.  TUF gives me a suit of red armour with which to fight the battle of my life. My battle but not my armour. My passion but not my voice.

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-policed half- membership of the utopian-terrorist 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) isn’t here. She’s Not Anywhere. I look at the sheets in dismay. There is laughter as I pick them up. There is laughter as I drop them again. There is a slow handclap as someone hands them to back to me.

The punk music of my soul thumps a sea of blood into my ears. I go very still. I hold up my pages for silence, get it, tear them shreds, throw them at the officials, punch off the stewards, grab the microphone off its boom, scream “Look at you all!” and, in the absence of a weeping guitar, roar…

“SITTING HERE IN YOUR SAFE EUROPEAN HOME!”

I see the TUF guys and gals shaking their heads and everyone else - girls I fancy, guys I fear, girls who look down their noses at me, posh girls who like or chat or dance with and/or argue with me in seminars or don’t understand or who come on to/rebuff me; sympathetic gay guys and lesbians who have now lost sympathy; feminists and female fellow travellers whose deepest fears and prejudices about all men have now been realised by me; the feather cut student DJ with his identical girlfriend twin ('Pixie Paul and his little wife Linda’ please DON’T play Ma Baker one more time, Paul) the Student Union guy who employed me as a bouncer - all of them glaring. 

I'm wasting my breath. TUF is announcing collectively from the floor that I have just been excommunicated. They rush out in a sequence of splintering statements that they do not wish to be associated with ANY violence NOT immediately aimed at agents of the bourgeois state, unless it is directed at Reactionary Elements In Their Own Movement,” ie me. 

I am told that my behaviour will be reported to my Dean of Studies and the Vice Chancellor. The Dean of Studies has me listed as a possible First and the VC (doubtless along with several Eastern European governments and the IRA) as a possible double agent and both DOS and VC are worried by my 'extra mural' activities. (This is what Cindy got told at Grammar School, so it both worries and pleases me.) Plus one of the stewards I punched earlier is a member of RUGSOC, (with close affiliations to FCS, the largest and idlest University society, the Federation of Conservative Students) now discussing as they drag me through the carpet-stained, brutalist, student scruffy concourse of University House, what punishment may Conservatively be meted out in the dark behind the Sports Hall. My parting shout into the Pandemonium of the LCR is "I am the rebel angel Abdiel, quitting the hissing Satanic host!" 

And, whether I am the rebel angel Abdiel or not, I am in serious trouble.

But. "Bravo Abdiel!" Victoria La Dida calls back through the din, in her posh heaven-musical voice. 

So everyone else can go to hell. 

*

 

Hers was a face I’d seen and couldn’t forget. The time and place where we just met. A Second Year in my Third Year, so still at the heart of that endless, abstract concrete Paradise, not circumscribed by Finals, I was beginning to pine for as it implacably slipped away; framed with a bleached haystack of hair out of some Chaucerian romance one term, back to its natural midnight black the next; in a white blouse like some untucked private schoolgirl’s, playing truant from everything. Speaking mediaeval verse and discussing it with a musical diction I could feel in my hip pocket. 

Obviously, she was on the wrong side of the class war but she was also the only friendly face in that class, the face on which my heart brooded between times and lifted to see there as the class reconvened and wished I could see outside; and the one face I feel I can face now as I steeplejack the five flights of concrete stairs from my room at a half marathon pace, late, along the abstract concrete walkway and the three floors up to the fifth storey of EAS. I attract en route a few looks from students who saw me spectacularly kick off at the Union Meeting last night but nowhere near as much as I expected. It’s like walking through Brighton in a Beatle wig - or a Bowie dress. Student apathy. Ha!

I have to give my dreaded class paper on John Donne at 9am.

Less a class-paper, more a cry for help.

Arnold is grinning at me over his plastic coffee at the drinks machine. I put in a coin for some hot chocolate.  "So the Rugger Buggers didn’t drop-kick you into kingdom come last night?"

"I saved their wing three quarter from a council estate pogoing at one of those Punk discos last summer- I’m his hero."

"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. "You don't remember anything, Arny."…

We enter Room 101 like it’s a dentist’s. 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 everyone knows it’s an explanation of my entire world view and an Apology (as in formal justification but also, yes, just a whining apology, Edinburgh) for my entire existence. The bats keep flitting through the door into hell and perch, not even aware I’m the one giving today’s class-paper or in several cases even what it’s on but still feeling like an Inquisition about to pass sentence. My nightmare is having to explain something to a room full of unsympathetic people. Or any people. And this is that nightmare come true... 

"Jerry?" 

"It’s James. As I’ve already told you a hundred times.”

Dr Damien Death (DDD)notices I’m a bit tense. "Jamie. Sorry. You were saying?" 

“I was saying nothing, at length, before lapsing into a terrified silence, Doctor.”

"'Damien, please," 

"’is name's not Dimian, " snipes my soul mate Arnold, getting my back as ever. "It’s Jimes."

“Or even James,” sneers 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 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. My mind manically running off like this is called a nervous breakdown.

"Did you have a good vac?" Cambridge-sneers Dr Damien Death (DDD) trying to put me at ease.  The class nods. They all seem to know what a 'vac' is. That’s why, unlike restricted coders like me and Arnold, they feel they can turn up here without doing any of the set reading. 

"Vacation," translates ‘Edmund’ (Gent. Son of Lord Burke of Gloucestershire) putting down his Torygraph.  

"Jeremy?"

"James."

"Jerry, sorry. You were going to give us a classpaper?"

"I still am." A few of the half-awake ones laugh.

"What?" frowns Burke.

"Forget it." 

"He will," wheezes Arnold. 

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 like 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 nose-humming “Mmm mmm Mmmm’ which disconcertingly speaks aloud to the whole world my abandoned Transcendental Meditation mantrum, which must be keep secret. 

I 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 30 Years War- and how Donne reflects the social tensions in the fault lines 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 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"

“Or St Matthew's "he who saves himself, loses himself but he who loses himself for love, finds himself,” assents the reverend Doctor.

I take a breath, a little dizzy, and push on. “Donne isn't indulging in paradoxes and witty conceits for the 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) has the slightest interest in what I am talking about, or what Donne is writing about or anything except the trivia they will exchange like a kit kat in the coffee bar afterwards or the bodily fluids after that.  "I…" (But who is that ‘I’; what sentence is he the subject of; what object has he here?…) “I…”

"Purcell's musical grammar does something similar," chimes Victoria.

The room shifts back.

"At the Restoration," Cambridge-sneers the Doctor. "I know one is slumming it on loan from FAM, Veronica, adding some linguistic and literary 'accomplishments' to one’s Seventeenth Century Music holiday, but here 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 with contempt. “Oh one are doing a joint degree is one? One had better watch ‘our’ Ps and Qs then.” 

Rosa is doing a joint EAS/SOC (Sociology) degree, mentored to do so over the last three years by Dr Death, her libertarian socialist adviser, though entered only for Final papers in the first half of that degree, a misdirection by him that will cost her ‘her’ First. A First Dr Death himself secured at dear old (very dear, very old) Cambridge under (very dear, very) Old Tory guidance. 

Rosa is also currently ‘doing’, in this order: me, technically her long-standing  boyfriend, (though less and less often lately and maybe not at all now I’ve splintered out of TUF); a rather beautiful young Anarchist Polish boy in the First Year (doing a joint degree in SOC and Free Love Studies) who looks like Cat Stevens and follows her round like a Three Dog Knight; an extremely butch rough diamond Lesbian Cable Street Commie/ Hard Left Feminist Third Year from Bradford 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; an unreconstructed/ possessive old boyfriend who is lately back on the scene and wants Rosa all to himself again; an obsessive old girlfriend from home who is lately back on the scene and urging Rosa to leave me, the demon of all her troubles – who keeps playing her 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover (and it’s Garfunkel-horrible being on the wrong end of Paul Simon) and two members of Faculty: her longstanding older man/father Leninist confessor Steve Rose from SOC and, more recently, Dr Death, her ‘adviser’, who lent her his course reader “The Female Orgasm” to keep on our bedside table back at the commune; and who is probably feeling her up under the seminar table as we speak. (And if you think I’m exaggerating for effect, Edinburgh, I don’t need to because Rosa is randier than fiction.) 

And I don’t protest at any of this, comrade sister yippie, because that would be patriarchal, possessive and bourgeois.

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.”

The class is stunned into silence by this  breathless brilliance. There is a sigh of relief from several 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,” counters Victoria. “I said pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary.”

“And after the Civil Wars.”

“Which ‘pre-Revolution’ self-evidently connotes!”

"This is boring," pipes Burke hoarsely, thinking one probably should have gorn to Oxford with one’s Eton Messmates after all. He’d enjoyed shocking his peers (some of them actual Peers) by applying to a turned on and tuned in space age University near a coast he could sail. But this was too much. ‘Man’.  

Arnold snarls, “You can't help being the University Village idiot, Edmund, 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 BOOK HAVE YOU!” I have taken over, in capitals. “OK!?" I am half way over the table with my Stranglers at his neck. My neck is red, with fury, with the embarrassment of self-revelation. 

Arnold tries to get me back in my seat. "Not one’s fault one was too dim to get in at Durhams, old boy" he laughs at Burke. He has a lighter touch than me.

I try to lighten up. “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 – he’s heavily fined for it on a weekly basis - but his landed father, Lord Burke of Gloucestershire, directs among other things a multinational electronics company so to him it’s just rent.”

The seminar is silenced, locked down, awaiting Security. I am sick of arguing, debating, questions: ‘seminars’!  I am lecturing now. In the absence of Dr Death delivering an Answer, I might as well.

“I see before me a shopkeeper's son; a miner's son; a steelworker's daughter and a few keen girls whose mums and dads teach in State schools or colleges or work in the State sector. There's a staff nurse's daughter and a doctor's son. There's a car worker's pride and joy, a probation officer's foster son and a social worker's estranged step-daughter. There's 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. Through a window some Toff forgot to lock. 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. Security is looking through the glass door darkly now but slightly stymied because there’s a guy in a porter’s jacket with Sergeant Pepper piping already standing on the table inside. They speak into their walkie talkies for further information. “Yeah Ron the one in the porter’s jacket isn’t a porter. That’s just his stolen night porter’s livery from the Hotel Prince Regent in Weymouth. He’s been wearing it since he came here. He’s the one causing the disturbance.” 

During the kerfuffle at the door, 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.

“Not to you,” I Eton-snap, and Arnold laughs because it’s our Brideshead Revisited routine. “To Cha’les,” " I nod at Arnold, who plays Charles in the routine. Arnold bows chivalrously. 

I bring the show to an end. “And we do apologise, genuinely, to everyone we’ve lumped in with this Idle Rich tosser.” We glare at Edmund. “This has been a been a Boal-inspired Invisible Theatre by AgitSoc. We don't want to suggest that you’re all Burkes, too idle and rich to do the preparatory reading. Nevertheless, and thanks for pretending, if you have, but I worked our whole life to get here because I love Literature and no-one here except my old mate Arnold is remotely interested in this class paper on Donne's metaphysics."

"I'm interested," says Victoria. 

*

A week later - the week after my expulsion from TUF and suspension from classes and my general fall from grace, anxiously waiting to see if I’m going to be kicked out of Paradise – I see Victoria again. I assumed she was keeping clear. My outburst at the Union Meeting was a two day storm on the Goldfish Bowl (the campus café) but the Boal stunt has caused an existential debate about what a New University is for. Some of the faculty who got up The Threepenny Opera last term have even been putting my case… but Commissar Comrade Dr ‘Dick’ Death (who reportedly has the  Dean’s ear, not to mention the Dean’s wife lady-penis) is definitely not among them. 

But now this Keef-haired young woman with the perfect diction of my class-traitor dreams, is giving her full name 

“Victoria La Dida. But my friends call me Vic”

and waiting for AgitSoc to introduce ourselves in return. I fancy I am meeting a daughter of the ruling class out of class and am conflicted between political enmity and lovestruck admiration of her ladies-colleged intelligence. My tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth. 

"I'm Q.P. Arnold," Arnold takes over. “Honest Joe Asthma to my friends.”

“Hey Honest Joe Asthma,” she counters. “Where you going with that gun in your hand?”

“I’m James,” I add. “My friends call me Clever Dick.”

“That’s Abuse,” laughs Victoria, engagingly unintimidated.

“Dick Abuse!” shouts Arny delighted, making a note. That’s your name for the show, James.”

I note it down. “What do your enemies call you?”

“Vagina Wank-Lewis.”

We all collapse into giggles.

I try to focus on the questions. “Any previous troupes?” I manage eventually.

“Lead singer with Hot Pussy and the Members.”

“Pull yourself together,” giggles Arnold, hanging off the side of his chair.

“Pull yourself off!” I groan, finding it hard to breathe.

The glacier suitably melted, ‘Vagina’ takes the script and moves into the audition space. Arnold and I, puritanically resisting the gales of laughter which have made us collaborate with the class enemy, glare up from our scripts, pencils hard as nails, willing her to screw up. 

We have been auditioning all day and have narrowed it down to a pseudo-hippy of left wing parents from Basildon; a posh punk from Hammersmith; a public school Marxist from Hebden Bridge and a disco queen from Leeds. The funniest bit of the day was when a Newcastle woman in an Aranrchist T shirt and jeans asked in a suggestive voice if it was OK to slip into something more appropriate - and after lots of rustlings off eventually reappeared. In an identical T shirt and jeans. 

We're tired now. ‘Vagina’ is too posh; we both have lots of approving ticks against Priti Vacunt's name and we want to go the bar. But we want music in the battle scenes and Vagina does unexpectedly play a cello that rocks like a machine gun (which would not only add grace and body to Arnold’s furious lead guitar but would also give my Celtic percussion and bass something to chime with…) And, anyway, after Vagina’s first two lines, we no longer want to go the bar. The way she's saying – gloriously shaping - our words is exactly what we want. 

We look at each other. We tell her she has the part, already planning a bigger venue for the show. Maybe even the LCR…. Maybe even up the 2468 Motorway to the Edinburgh Fringe? 

(We couldn’t, could we?) 

She explains that she has no philosophical objections to the nude scene and is more than happy with our suggestion of the three of us rehearsing it together naked in a lovely golden July cornfield, as long as it’s sunny, but argues that in the actual performance no-one is going to follow the amazing dialogue if we stage private parts as public property like that. It’s the best compliment anyone’s ever paid to our words and I intend telling her so. But first. 

"Any questions for us?"

“Why is the show called The Answer?” she asks.

Arnold stares dumbly at her mouth and then at me to respond. This entire show shifts in response across my brain, Edinburgh, as if suddenly clouted across the back of the head by Absent Dad.

*

Grant Street, by James Spectre aged 20

I'm using my own words now

Though I'm sharing a languidge,

A small self-furnished room in a sprawling mansion

And little sign of a father now

Save for the ash in the chipped chalice saucer

Which might have been his

(It wasn't any of us)

And the bright steamy kitchen

Against the dark garden of apple trees and mystery

Smudging an uncertainty his brow might have worn

And the door-torn carpet, the worn-out walls,

The shabby curtains in the living room

Housing a decay legend tells me went with him.

And the unwashed plates, the serving knife,

Littering last night's supper table,

Hold a nostalgia, cold but not keen, in the dining room

Where we talk and exhale with smoking breath

'Til warmed with the heat of the airing cupboard there

And filled with the incense of cloth aromas,

The room becomes too stuffy and we turn back again

To the hall: the cold, lofty hall with the stained glass windows

Where the telephone on the table and the knob upon the door

Hold no communion with his memory

For if he ever was here seems oddly irrelevant

Knowing now he has gone

And left no address.

*

Honky Tonk Woman is playing in the RevSoc disco, the Stones’ 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.) The final Beatle Number Ones (Get Back, Ballad of John and Yoke) are not playing. Though both semi-rockers for the thinking woman’s revolutionary (who doubtless preferred the underground ‘B’ sides, Old Brown Shoe and Don’t Let Me Down) Honky Tonk Woman (Hi hats off to Charlie Watts) is, as always, better to dance to. Jagger’s agit prop theatre accompaniment as a Honky Tonk dancing girl one man gender-culture-buster concludes the case for a uni-Sixties begun with the Fabs’ Astrid Kircherr hair do in 1962.

And Vic looks up at me from under her Keef hairdo and says, “Shall we dance?” 

Hell, yeah. 

It is not necessarily my drop kicks and crooked elbows to the back and spleen which outrage the Still Lifes dancing around me. (I never felt like I was playing a midwinter grudge match under lights on an away Rugby ground against Pont-y-Mill RFC here; here, the killjoys are the away team.) Nevertheless, the last time I performed Honky Tonk Women in the LCR with gaffer tape on my Elvis Costello specs around an ‘intrigued’ disco belle from Leeds, to gathering applause, it only took a thrust from an FCS Blue Meanie for me to adapt the routine and swing a Charlie Watts bicep from floor up three feet and all the way through his chinless chin for him to sail like a Wild West movie stunt man across the LCR and onto the steps. Even I was watching it, jaw dropping, like the shoot-out in High Noon. It did wonders for my reputation as a hard lefty. But it scared the girl – it scared many girls; it scared my friends; it even scared TUF; it even – especially - scared me. And I hadn’t been back to the LCR for a disco since. 

I’m back now, on what is probably my last night before being sent down, swinging from the Jagger hip in all directions. And Vic isn’t scared.

About five hours later, approaching dawn, in her bed in her room in Waveney Terrace, after a bottle of Tia Maria and a conversation that has not so much dangled Paul Simon campus fashion as dazzled like Shakespeare, Victoria said, that it was the dance of her life. It was certainly mine. 

“Now, how to thrust this moment to its crisis, as J Alfred Prufrock once said,” I smile uneasily.

“But Dr Dick says Eliot is a Fascist. Lawrence, Pound, Yeats too.”

“As soon as you get into the capitalist era, all art except their seven versions of the Leninist Pastoral is bourgeois mediocrity or, if it’s genius, Fascist, according to these Marxist clerics.”  

I have gone over to Vicky’s record player for a suitably divine soundtrack for what I hope is going to happen soon. I open the gatefold of Beggar’s Banquet. It is the White Album, done as a RSVP, just as Satanic Majesty’s was Pepper. But inside is masterpiece of rock photography/ a rood screen of the Revolution. 24 inches across and over a foot high; sepia: the Stones at an antique wooden table, ranged across a Satanic banquet with a sheep, a dog, Keef lying back across the table, tankard lolling, an animal on his lap, holding up a Beatle apple suggestively to the ferocious biting mouth of Beggar Jagger. This is not pantomime. This is Revolution, the turbulence of the May Days, the Sorbonne, the Left Bank, le plage sous le pave; the whole singing swan-broad Street Fighting Man Left Wing of the Sixties. And the music rocks.

I slide out the black vinyl, read the blue Decca label, and it’s a toss up between Street Fighting Man and the first track on Side 2, Sympathy for the Devil.  Then I notice another LP filed neatly next to it. 

My old friend Their Satanic Majesties Request, with its lenticular hallucinogenic ‘art school’ sleeve, kaleidoscopically Sabbat-attired Stones changing position depending on your angle of vision; around an unmoving Jagger still and imperious at its heart, in a skyscraper-tall Wizard’s hat with a spooky moon on it. 

I hold it up and start one of my Beatles lectures, the ones I began giving under the Christmas tree in 1963; paused to check when asking Absent Dad what “Come Together” was about in 1970 realising from the furious paranoid response must be about sex (and/or drugs) and will doubtless still be giving here, Edinburgh, when I’m 164..

“I love Satanic Majesties, Vic. It’s A Day In The Life in the acid eyes of one not quite so involved the car crash. But it’s still the music of my soul…” I turn back towards Lady Madonna, lying on the bed… 

And of course, she’s gone. Like a rainbow.

*

Fleetwood Mac are singing of crystal vision;

I’m mourning the death of teenage romance:

A girl, the short-term long vacation dance

Of abstract concrete and revolution;

Oil’s in crisis: my mind’s in sick rotation;

My heart feels nothing of the sudden lance

That smashed its Jericho walls, selling punks

My student sub-let of love’s ancient mansion.

Next door, a Shell garage sleeps: I don’t, haunted

By absence – hers, mine – the hell-thunder                            

Of vacuum; chase a ghost through every room,

Armed with a Marxist crit. of Roundhead texts

And a Cavalier prayer on lips struck dumb

By Apocalyptic explosions of doom.

*

Victoria’s study bedsit without Victoria is a hairy black hole. Christmas at Council House Number 9 without Mother Mary. Council House Number Nine without Cindy. Snob View the summer Cindy left and the Christmas she didn’t really come back. Hiraeth. I pick up Vic’s elegantly constructed cello from its homely Indian rug and finger it nervously, feeling utterly out of tune - with its owner, with music, with the Universe - and so crassly ignorant of how to make it sing, terrified I might break it. I am a bull in a china shop, an Ugly duckling Sister hamming a Cinderella slipper, big toe hacked off and bleeding, butch(ered) heels mincing I look in the mirror at my stupid goggled reflection and feel a nightmare vision of her cello-hands plucking my actual heart strings, TOUCHING my skin. The nerves at the base of my belly are shorting like a D.H. Lawrence paragraph supposedly describing extreme pleasure but sounding more like the electric episode in Frankenstein. Blood painfully hammers behind my ears like that roaring crescendo at the end of Pepper. The pretty rose bra drying innocently on the radiator turns into a scold’s bridle. I’d run for my life like a shot but there’s nowhere else left to go. I hear a hand on the door handle. I have been locked in! All the air sucked out! Cast out into an outer darkness! Welcome home James!

*

During my black hole gap year in Weymouth, I read an English mains student teacher's notes about Blake’s Visons. "Did the French Revolution inspire these dreams?"  I was enchanted. It was the first time I'd make a link between History and English, between an author's vision and the outside world, between the metrical feet of poetry and the March of Events. Perhaps Poetry could change the world; not merely transcend it?

Ah but it was a question, not a statement. "Did the Revolution inspire Blake’s dreams?...”  

(Yes says Lenin. Yes I mean Er No, says Lennon.)

“…Or was it the other way around?”

The classic Lennonist view is that the dreams – the revolution in the head - inspire the Revolution. And even when the dreaming heads start being chopped off by Madame Guillotine, the Romantics keep dreaming them.  And, in that sense, those dreams still came true - subtly or actually, as a timeless standard to live by or strive for, even when they lay in blood and ruin under the Terror. 

In all my Seminar Duels and Campus Street Fights, Cable Street Demos, Student Union Harangues and 20-page-too-long Work it Out essays (McCartney’s Inner Light Red Rose Speedway Winging me through the night) that’s the nearest I ever got. 

To an Answer. To Cindy.

 

*

So where did she go, when the magic bus stopped at the end of Abbey Road? 

Into a black hole. Between Wilson’s Equal Pay Act of May 1970 and Thatcher’s ending of free school milk in October 1970. Between Hendrix at the Isle of Wight in 1969 and Heath’s festival-busting legislation of 1970. Between the Race Relations Acts of 1965/1968 and the Immigration Act of 1971. (That old clouded silver lining between the Attlee-established NHS and the first Tory prescription charges of 1952…)

The black hole I was in on the step of Hiraeth on that dark February 1974 day Stepmother sent me hurtling after her. I had spent years trying to be the morning star of She’s Leaving Home with Cindy and now I’d finally got there it was the loneliest place in the world.

*

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 an hour ago, Buzz. Hi Cindy. Come in, babe.”

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 them 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, remembering her little brother. “Buzz you’re the only soul I know with worse Beatlemania than James.” Cindy gets a sudden vicious pang. “Ah! I need some air, man.” She and Buzz go out into the compound. 

“Oh goody, it’s Cindy!” cries Hockey Sticks, a rare English voice among all the Americans. 

“Oh God,” groans Cindy under her breath.

“Yes, God! The concert’s just beginning. Do come!”

Cindy groans again. 

Hockey Styx leads them into a dark hot theatre. There is an enormous melting tub of human lard onstage, his overweight underdressed in criminally underpaid bespoke-tailored Indian clothes. If a middleclass Englishman had come to work in his pyjamas by mistake he could not have looked more like a very pregnant woman, only without a baby, and not a woman. 

There is mechanical laughter at the spotlit performer’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!” says Cindy.

“I was being serious.”

“Sorry.”

“I’ll tell you when I’m being funny,” says the performer.

“Thanks that’ll help.” Cindy laughs hysterically and wonders aloud if the performer has read ‘Death Of The Author’. Or anything except his own lyrics. 

“That ISN’T funny!” 

“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 goody!” whoops Hockey Styx.

The strumming develops, after a couple of false starts, into a dirge about the yearning for an annihilation of the Fat Controller’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… Everybody!”

Everybody (though none quite as grossly as the Fat Controller’s) joins in for what seems like a hundred times, a mind-numbing ear-bashing brain-washing dreary repetition OR a divine mantra, depending on your view of what God meant by music.  It eventually ends in a smug beam and a splatter of applause. Upon which, for all his sentiments about giving his heart to God, the Fat Controller seems reluctant to give his song to the audience. 

“I’m sending your applause straight to the Master where it belongs!” He whacks his joined hands into his forehead again.

In other words, ‘Keep Out. Keep off,’ mutters Cindy.

“Here’s the song I did as my failed audition for the Beatles in Hamburg in 1962, after George Harrison was sent home. Perhaps it was too spiritual for them! Ho ho ho!”

The audience take up the mantrum. “Ho ho ho.”

“He’s laughing. Does that mean it’s funny? Am I allowed to laugh?” asks Cindy.

“George Harrison?” repeats Buzz in awe. Half the audience is pretending to be too spiritual to be impressed. The other half is too impressed to pretend to be spiritual. They applaud like Tomorrow Never Knows it isn’t Yesterday.

“Yes. George Harrison!” The Fat Controller deflects another volley of applause for this name-dropping with a terrified prayer-hands judo punch, almost knocking himself out. He then messes up the intro, nodding as if this confirms his humility rather than a lack of talent, or industry.  

"Why not just work at perfecting the song instead of indulging your mistakes; accept the honestly earned applause and then let it go. All this God-awfulness is just avoiding the Judgment artists face every time they dare to give a song to the world. 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. You need bit more show business to slim down your ego, man, and a bit less religion, like the Beatles. "

The Hockey Styx-led applause for the Fat Controller’s artless huge-egoless humility – unlike the artful ego Beat music Cindy evidently prefers to God - drowns out most of Cindy’s review. But not all, as the look of furious hatred, which the artless egoless humility darts at her, reveals.

Cindy hears again Johnny’s parting words. “Why did God create the world is He wanted us to run away from it to an ashram in the mountains?” 

She turns to him, “You’re right. We’ve got to get out of this place.”

Ah. But Johnny is gone. There is only Buzz, who is lovely but whose critical reason (and disbelief at how low the Fat Controller’s sub-Beatles submarine can sink) has long been suspended by a dope pope on an Indian rope. She 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.” And the next time she looked, he had. 

The holy show goes on (and on.)

“I want to be God

Ego Ergo Ego 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 open air. Into that 'smell of the East': dust, dung and spices. Dhobis are washing clothes in a stream and smashing all the buttons. Traffic drones and whines along a dirt road. A train thunders and claxons in the distance. Cindy sighs. 

Buzz emerges from the black hole of the concert door behind her. “You sick, babe?”

*

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 vomits that world’s side-effects profusely into the 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 ‘vitamins’ and take stock.

Buzz pulls his beard. “What did you think of the Fat Controller?”

“Being holy shit doesn’t make it any less shit.”

“It was Sunday school. It made me miss the Beatles.” Buzz looks crestfallen. “I still worship them, Cindy. That Something. More than this stuff. Is that because I’m unspiritual?” 

“No because the Beatles give you their All and make it yours. That pumpkin gives nothing like it’s 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.”

*

It is 1989, in Deolale, twenty years too late and in appalled retreat from the No Society of Thatcher’s Britain, that I finally catch up with the Girl who fled the Ball at Sixties Midnight.

I lurch out of my ‘luxury’ 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-coloured sari over her head to hide her eyes. 

She can’t fool me. The years may have taken their enormous toll but she still looks … unwearied, immaculate. Not a speck of all this mud on her marigold sari, like a true local. Her feet are clad in red open-toed half-slippers, like flip flops, a single anklet and 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 native Indian gesture with the head tilted to one side. “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 glistening black 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. Or if I’m just seeing things. But only time’s impression-crusted lens stands between us. 

“Cindy, it’s me ...” I’m all but leaping for joy. “Sweet Baby James!” I gaze into those  kaleidoscope eyes. I grab her elbows and she jumps back. 

I know Indians can find European levels of eye contact intrusive but also that they will tolerate more physical proximity from strangers. I have certainly experienced plenty of the latter – elbows in my belly, pinches on my cheek.  I’m not sure what she thought of my ecstatic gaze. But she makes it very clear that grabbing her elbow is intolerably invasive from a strange man. She protests volubly, grows cold, pushes my water bottle off her stall. People begin watching.

“Cindy! Please!” I bring out her Sergeant Pepper in triumph. The cover flashes like red and yellow peppers in the monsoon sun. 

She stares at it. Those eyes…

“It's yours, look!” I force it into her hands. It looks so right there; the chilli Pepper reds and yellows, the brilliant incredibly high flowers of cellophane Indian yellow and green she wore at the Beatles Ball in 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… 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 circles round.

A horn sounds. My waiting rickshaw-wallah. “Better get in, Sahib.” He says ‘Sahib’ like he’s saying “bhai’.

I turn back to the stall, a pilgrim at his long long long-sought shrine. The Hippy Dream! The Lucy in the Sky chariot of fraternity, communality and collectivism shrunk to this shrivelled pumpkin, not so much a counter-culture as a cash counter peddling tinkling symbols, sparkly trinkets and Far East smells. Cosmic, Man.

All over the world, there were corporate versions of this gutter shack of the soul, lining High Streets and Shopping Mauls (sic), soaring into the global skies of New York, London, Moscow…. The Free Me Me Me Market. Up up and away and down down and down into the gutter like a used-condom inflation-indexed market-led Branson-Starbucks hippy tycoon balloon, selling its soul for yours, flogging Mother Earth to death to keep its long-past-its-sell-by plague of hippy capitalism alive, hyper-advertised and viral. The titanic spirit of the Starship Enterprise going down on the neo-liberated petty bourgeois Spirit of Free Enterprise.

Cindy was gone. Another stallholder was in her place today. A man with a dark mien and a hostile manner. 

Why would she want to hide from me? 

Or was it never Cindy anyway, however sure I’d been? And even if it was, it wasn’t; because that relic of Love’s Summer Dream was no longer Cindy. I’d spent my life chasing a fairytale too good to be true. The magic has worn off; faded into the murk of common day. 

The thug says something voluble to my driver- I only recognise ‘jaldi, jaldi’ and the imperative tone, who passes it on to me. “Sahib, get in. Leave now.” 

I nod. My driver indicates, engine farting out fumes, chewing betel excitedly, his open mouth blood-red, that I will have to pay for the time he’d waited. I hadn’t asked him to, but I nod again.

“Go town for girl?”

“No.”

“Go ashram for God?”

“Just take me back to the hotel.”  

Next day and for days after, I stake out Mother India, under cover of goats, cattle, cycles and traffic, to watch. ‘Cindy’ doesn’t appear again. Was she ever really there? The sun is hot and brooding behind the clouds. The thug patrols around, spitting out betel juice like blood... Eventually he sees me and crosses the road, looking like he means business. But I can’t move away.

He takes my arm and puts his pungent mouth to my ear. “Go home, Sahib.” He pushes me gently West along the track, presumably in the direction he thought my home was.  

I stare back at Mother India. That is home if it is Cindy's, more than anywhere on Earth. The soft cool voice; the clear bright eyes; the colour of her hair. But She’s Not There.

I check out of my hotel the next morning, a beautiful morning, orange-tinted and sunny behind the thin white cloud. I feel like I’m in a play, in a present that is already a warm memory even as I experience it. I get very sick on the train ride back down to Bombay, shivering in the conditioned air.  In VT the full fury of the monsoon hits me like a Joe Frazier/George Foreman Ali-breaking punch. The betel-red shirted porters, seeing a Westerner wilting amid the fever, rip me off even more than usual, not that I care. 

I see everything in grey. Americans walking round in Punjabi suits. Bombayites in Levis and T shirts with ‘New York’ across the chest. I see the former taking photographs of holy sites with expensive cameras and the latter drooling over the cameras. A Sadhu grimed with ashes and fundament in the gutter and that the Westerners waltzing around exotically amid the Indian crowd over-tipping the cab drivers and rickshaw-wallahs are somehow keeping millions of other Indians in that same gutter. The sadhu looks at me with a sort of sublime appalled sympathy, like he knows the hurtling self-destruction of my thoughts, my past, my future, in my life. He is in the gutter through choice so he is not in the gutter at all. I am even though I’ve spent all my life trying to ascend out of it. A mist seems to have fallen over my eyes; or perhaps a veil has lifted.

I shake my head, and feel thoughts physically floating out, clearing:  the familiar angst of the Westerner trying to atone for and escape from the nightmare of colonial history. Guilt-tripping Western theories of cultural appropriation of the East buzz around in my brain like a swarm of malarial mosquitos. Was Hitler’s ‘politically correct’ insistence on using actual Jewish actors for his hateful caricatures of a race and a culture he wanted to liquidate in Nazi propaganda films (and gas ovens) really better than us all trying on each other’s clothes and voices? Victoria Terminus in all its colonial splendour makes its own infinitely louder and clearer statement about Empire: the wholesale appropriation of an entire subcontinent; the selective cancelling of a culture!

I hear voices shouting what sounds like the N word at me. For once, if only in my head, I am the oppressed and hated minority and I want to run back to my safe European home. Of course, whatever N word they’re shouting, it’s not that, nor are they shouting at me, not here and now anyway. I stand out – bigger, whiter, taller – but I hardly matter at all. I am the centre of this revenge Eastern in my own head only. 

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!” 

I am raving now, but it is easier than thinking about Cindy…

*

“Your holy germ is taking me places

Which have no painless position to lie.

I escape to my mind but it won't stop

Pitching me backwards through haggling faces,

Six degrees of separation unwound-up,

Fried, shivered skins: all the layers of ‘I’… ”

*

When ‘I’ finally come out of my fever, he tells me his name is Buzz and asks what my connection with Cindy Spectre was.  

The world stops a moment. “How do you know Cindy?”

“Only that you’ve been raving about her for 48 hours, man.”

“She was my big sister! I’ve been trying to find her since The Sixties.”

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. 

“But she came home that April. 1970. She had a miscarriage...” I stop. “No, no, that was a dream”

“The baby lived, man. Look. A copy of this information was sent to your family. Cindy died.”

“We never got it. These records must be wrong.”

“Indian bureaucracy records everything in total detail, man. In triplicate. It depends how hard your parents wanted to find her.”

I wipe my glasses on a sodden T shirt. “There’s got to be some mistake.”

“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.”

“She called the baby ‘Love’? She said she would…” 

I glared at him through new patterns of lens-smears. I thought, this is the guy they wrote ‘If you can remember the Sixties, man, you weren’t there’ for. “But she’d turn in her grave before she let the Step-Maries bring up her kid. That’s like Oedipus running five thousand miles to the very fate he was trying to flee….” 

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. 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 nose. “Read that,” I said.

“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? 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-”

“I remember her like Yesterday, Buzz. 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. So is Love.”

Buzz met my excitement with eyes whose fire had died long ago. “Love would be thirty something now... But her mother’s dead.”

“No! I know Cindy’s alive, somewhere, and that’s God enough for me.” I storm out. 

But why would Buzz be so gravestone-certain about it?  Had he killed her? Stuffed her? Was he keeping her alive like some ghastly Paul-ISN’T Dead Beatles shrine somewhere? Was she hiding Christmas in a locked attic now? Like grave-witch Wicked Stepmother Mary. Even from me?

 

*

 

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 stallion ain’t what he 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 Vietcong hippy was actually 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. (Was it rust by now? Not that THAT ever stopped anyone in India.) Never held again that hand he’d held on the generation barricades. Never extended his to pick her little brother out of the generation gap hole when he begged for Help in Weymouth. He ain't heavy, he's my brother. But he wasn’t, with Cindy gone. 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.

*

Victoria hadn’t gone, like a rainbow. She came back 5 minutes later, into the coeducational convent cell we post-Cohen novices had made of the University Study Bedroom, holding a copy of Abbey Road. 

“I thought we should listen to this. It’s the FAM studio’s copy. I thought it would relax you.”

“You broke into FAM at …3 am.”

“Through the bathroom window. Naturally.” 

She puts on Side Two and we lie back on her single bed for a Transcendental 20 minutes,  listening to the last, best, most symphonically complete side of rock music ever recorded, by a band at the Everest of its powers;  singing the conscious “And In The End” of both its own story and of the Sixties. 

“Shall I turn over for Come Together?” 

She kisses me for the first time. “No,” she says. This woman who will answer my every beat onstage and off with her singing crashing strings for the next few crazy months. “Let’s make our own music.”

And, as the dawn comes up, we do.

*

This is my last show, Edinburgh. The End; of the Long and Winding Road. Shy, shadows-retiring Detective Sergeant Spectre, who only ever took to the stage so that his Mother Mary would see him, is hanging up his on-the-beat boots. The Beatles stopped playing live because there was too much screaming. Me, because there’s not enough. Well, none. 

Spectres are ten a penny up here. On stages, in cafes, on buses, in the 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 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 See Me ghost story that calls attention to itself with a thousand stunts, posters, plugs and spotlights - and comes down in the end to a black box of - Nothing.

All things must pass. The Show mustn’t go on (and on) and I’m sure you’re in desperate need of closure and a wee and a wee post-performance pint. Not even the Beatles can last forever. And if you leave me now, you can still get back onto the terraces to see the Hibs/Hearts Edinburgh Old Firm derby or whatever other purgatory gets you through the night.

*

But one last wee drama afore ye go. A reason for waiting. A secret never to be told. A hidden mean I only got to hear about in a Please Mr Postman Cindy letter later.

Tuesday morning, January 30, 1969. Absent Dad working overtime; me enduring that all-time low double Algebra with Sid, French with Napoleon and Tech Drawing with Troll (two hours non-stop incomprehension every Tuesday). So we both missed a revelation like that opening bar of Jethro Tull’s “Reason for Waiting”.

Cindy Came Home. Stepmother received her in the death parlour. It was their shared Aquarius birthday. Cindy’s 19th. Stepmother’s 36th. Special was occupying Cindy’s old seat, growling, whimpering, yelping so Cindy had to balance her cowgirl-jeans on the politically incorrect pouffé. 

“I just saw two ancient women on the zebra crossing in town. 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. “They 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 1968. 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.

“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.’

“That’s what I said.”

“Those twins must have been dancing in the streets when they finally let the sunshine in.” 

“They’re still in the darkness,” said Stepmother. “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 of the street, they’ll always be locked in that attic. There’s no coming back from that. Like the Nazi camps. If Mr Nowhere’s sins and the mother’s guilt can turn Christ into Hitler, what chance have the rest of us got? I did my best and you think it’s the worst. But all this generation’s flower power millionaire popstar brotherhood of man is as useless as a French or Polish army against that 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 the 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 in a Mossad interrogation cell, her eyes glinting like the sky above Hitler’s bunker.

Cue the Last Battle. A blitzkrieg about Absent dad, me, Special, the Jews, the Nazis, free love, Johnny, India, revolution, money… The End. Cindy fled the house screaming. The last visit that never was, over before it began. The forever ruby Tuesday afternoon I might have had with her, vanishing like a rainbow.  

I too want to let the sunshine in to this attic. Not normalise its unthinkable-ness by making it the story. Abuse unthinkably happens but if you fix your gaze on it, you’ll miss not just the Light but the everyday darkness of family life, which is what most of us – sucked into those horror stories down our black hole TVs from our murky family living rooms – need to put right. 

Because when you let the sun shine in to this black box of darkness, this cobwebbed crepuscular attic, this theatre of cruelty, it disappears. So, here’s my Beatle Revolver – my warm gun of Happiness - where it matters. At my own head. 

High time to get shot, once and for all, of all this whining, miserable hatred, rape and murder just a shot away up a blind alley – all this legion of devils who killed Kennedy. Roll up roll up for THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR. Goodbye, cruel world. BANG BANG shoot shoot.

Hello Mum…

*

At which the house lights rise and I DO have an audience. Yesterday it was a single hand, clapping. And tomorrow never knows. And today it is a single hand clapping me round the back of the head. Because I have an that old empty feeling Absent Dad is here. 

Yeah yeah yeah!  One above the Fringe audience average of two: a very old man, a very old woman, both clapping, and one very fat very old Breck’s Isle bulldog sleeping in the back row. Hey Bulldog, you made it! Now that's Special.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Now I know how the Beatles felt at Shea Stadium. It makes such a difference when an audience lives a show with a performer and you certainly have - so, thank you all again for making all the backstage fear, offstage loathing and two grand of overdraft worthwhile; for just Beatling here for me in my lunch hour of darkness. Thank you for listening to the story of my life, you three. Even if it’s only because you’re in it. 

*

But it isn’t Wicked Stepmother and Absent "I'm Sorry I Couldn't Be There For You" Dad at the back after all. Edinburgh It’s “too far to come” at their age. They’re in Mafia gangster capital-liberated Russia on their thrice-yearly hols. Or Belgium, where, as good old Labour shop steward Absent Dad says, “you can get English food and they don’t Jew you. No offence.” (None taken, brother. I’ll pass that on to the victims of the Holocaust.) 

It’s – well, not exactly the record-setting 55,000 World Cup Football-sized Beatle crowd at Shea Stadium New York City, in 1965 (including one envious and thunderstruck Michael P. Jagger, terrified by their level of fame) playing out through the tinny PA, sure, but then all of the Beatles asked the gross record-setting 304, million dollar question afterwards: what exactly was the musical value of that shitshow? I see a few old friends, leaning together like bookends; a few un-friends on that fairground-mirroring hell-smoking shark-infested fen of unreality TV and radio, Facebook; a pretty nurse who feels as if she’s in a play (she is anyway); a few five-and-Sixties who were there; a few thumbs up and down on YouTube from people who weren’t and – wow! finally, the Scotsman with a three star review! And no stars in The Daily Malice, Hell’s leading newspaper, but there are no stars in Hell anyway.

“Is Dick the Prick here?” I ask. (Laughter) Nothing so dramatic. But Milltown Mick is, remembering his rags to riches fairytale (not through music nor University but a good local marriage, 1980s World Banking, Singapore and then the Home Counties but he was there in our Golden Years, when it mattered. And some pedant who always asks about the pronunciation of Welsh words which he then mis-corrects and then someone else who doesn’t seem to realise that after a show you’re exhausted (and still have to strike the set for the next group) and frankly don’t want to talk another half an hour even about yourself let alone about their Sixties. And then someone else who thinks I am their audience for a show of their own that takes me further and further away not just from my bookstall (where people are getting so tired of waiting) and the ‘loved it thanks’ which is all I have time for and the copies of the book for me to sign (with that damaged gold nibbed Parker which is also my State pen for signing Wills, Royalty statements, Christmas, Birthday and Wedding Anniversary Cards, Pension Applications, Surgery Permissions etc) but from this hard-earned after-performance glow I want to take away somewhere now with a pint ON MY OWN. I have given you all my 67 year long life-loaded, joy-aimed shot of that Beatle Something. I have given you All My Loving. Now, as Ted Hughes once said (only without the please) to the guy behind me in the queue after a poetry reading in Cheltenham, will you please fuck off.

*

What about out in the ‘real world’ outside, though, Edinburgh? Outside that pint-savouring glow? The world skirling its demented bagpipe a few yards the other side of this Fringe-commandeered Catholic chapel window?  The Beatles’ fairy tale is no escape from that ‘real world’. 

No. It is a joyous protest against it. Every killjoy news bulletin keeps us in our places, like the bullet that shot Kennedy. Every Happy Ending is a revolution in your head. 

So, here’s my News. Johnny runs a great school. All the kids got home safely again today and with Something in their bags to make them want to come back. I need Help. And I get it. 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 and married a doll who looked like her and it didn’t work out.  But they had a family who did.

I came out of Victoria’s ‘convent’ room after we made love at dawn and walked across the campus under an orange October sunrise to class, feeling like Lucy in the Sky, to give the lucid class-paper that saved me from being sent down. I read lots of printed word looking for the Answer, and ways of living it that embraced but improved on that previous year of international service in the class war and, after sharing a joint with Arnold and Vic in the Congregation bogs, I got my working class honours degree, my equivalent of the Beatles’ MBE. And I took off with Arnold and Vic up here to Edinburgh for the summer and had a ball with an Is There Life After EAS? show called All Things Must Pass which eventually proved prophetic – Arnold met his Yoko/Linda there and left us, but we still love the each other we knew when it mattered;  and, one fatal end-of-August night up on Arthur’s Seat, even Vic and I took our tearful separate ways down from one last emotional all-time crescendo high. 

And when I got back to where I once belonged in post-student Norwich, Grace (the girl subletting my room) was – without either of us knowing it - waiting for me, with kaleidoscopic eyes. And 50 years on I (still) feel fine. And I (still) love her. And our kids. And grandkids.

We were unemployed in more than just an economic sense and the student house we now shared with not-so-fellow travellers overlooked the huge city cemetery. I walked there constantly, watching my shadow approach and then flit across the brown plate glass of the funeral directors as I returned to the single room where I’d been a student. The whole period was like a vision of the teenage wasteland, finally revealed for what it is. 

Gaining heart, I crossed my city of the dead 

To Easter Thursday chancing on a grave

Dated the day I was born and lay down.

‘What’s lost in the wasteland is found there,’ it said 

‘Who loses himself for love will be saved,’

‘Who dies lives’ and my heart, lost to you, was found.

God is alive. Magic is afoot, as Field Commander Cohen once said. A lot of the parents in Johnny’s school have stayed married, one or two of them happily ever after. I am an incurable Beatlemanic. I need Help but I get it. 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. Johnny went West and Cindy went East and maybe She is still there.  There was a crossroads at the End of Abbey Road. John went left; Paul went right; Ringo turned back and George ...kept going. The world is full of heartache but the radio is full of love songs. A blackbird sings in the madhouse grounds, heart overflowing in the evening quiet. Imagine it’s Eden because oh boy when that bird sings, it really is.