The Third Time

 This is a story I wrote in 1974 or 1975. I recently found a copy in the attic, reread it, and deemed it not unworthy.
 

The Third Time

Who I am is not important; the curious may find my name scrawled at the end of this tale. My trade, such as it is, is in words, the transcription of the world of boundless colour around me into dead monochrome, infinity into a series of straight lines. I live nowhere, and eke out my small living in wandering, sleeping rough where I must, easy where I can.

It is also unimportant how I came to be walking along that sanded shore with only the Moon for company and the sure knowledge that the nearest friendly face was so far away that it might have shone from the serene disc ahead. The only thing that is important is that this tale is written, even though I fear that there is something, someone, who does not wish it so, for twice before I have begun it, and have had to break off before it was finished, as the inchoate rush of memories still too close overwhelmed me. I never saw those pages again, though this, perhaps, was a consequence of my peculiar nomadic lifestyle, carrying my study - along with my kitchen and bedroom – in a pack on my back, vulnerable to weather and chance.

It is now four years since my last attempt, and six since the time of which I am about to write. I start again, then, knowing only too well what imps and demons lurk there in the shadows thirsting for freedom, waiting for me to grant them admittance to my consciousness: yet I am encouraged by the thought that, this time, secure in the Brighton home of a trusted friend and brother of my soul, there will be no need for me to stop until it is done. My room is spacious and airy, there are many hours of daylight ahead, and just a call away are people with food and drugs and comfort. I am ready.

It was a balmy night in early summer, the moon so bright and high that there were few stars. It was late, but I was not thinking of sleep. If I had been, there would have been no problem: I could have unrolled my bed anywhere in that silvered sweep before me and slept immediately a deep sleep lulled by the sound of the murmuring sea - a murmur I can hear now as I write, although the beach is out of sight and the windows are closed against the sound. There was no aim in my walking beyond enjoying the sound of the sand drifting beneath me, loving the way the night tugged and teased at all my senses: there was even a hint of salt in the air to thrill my tongue as I breathed it deep.

Another of my friends, an amateur astrologer, once told me that Neptune in the eighth house and the Sun in Scorpio accounted for my love of the sea, my fascination with it. I preferred  to think of it, though, on nights such as this as an atavistic memory of its subtlety and grace springing from some fishy ancestor across uncountable links in the chain of genesis that had brought me to this place of quiet splashing and  - distant weeping. I thought I must have misheard at first, mistaken the far-off sob of a gull for a human plaint. I stopped, listened hard: the waves whispered to me in spirit voices. I walked on. Then it came again, then once more, and there was no mistaking it this third time: it was a girl’s voice, maybe a woman’s, certainly that of someone in great distress.

Despite the heroic name that I bear in enduring memory to my parent’s bad judgment and misplaced hopes, I have no taste for errantry. Here, though, in this place of radiance and equilibrium, there could surely be no danger to me, and my decision was made for me by another cry, much louder, that set me running towards the rocks whence the sound had unmistakably come.

The rocks were an outpost of the low cliffs that framed the bay, cropping out of the sand just below high water mark. When I got close, I stopped, suddenly unsure; I was panting, and the blood rushed a storm in my ears. The sound came again, quieter now, and to my left. I set down my rucksack and climbed one of the smooth slippery stones that was a little higher than the others to scout my way.

Below we, trapped in a basin of rock, was a large tidal pool, striped like the shifting sea by the light of the Moon, but perfectly still. Phosphorescent fishes flicked green at me from just below the surface. On the other side of the pool I could just make out a dark shape huddled on a ledge, unmoving and silent as the rearing rock that shaded it from the moon, but indisputably alive. How I could be so certain I do not know, save that, as I looked around for a way of skirting the pool, I glimpsed from the corner of my eye an aura, a hazy turquoise mist, so diffuse that it was almost not there at all, hovering over the place where the shape lay.

It was a hard and slippery way around the rim of the pool, much harder than it had looked. At times it even felt like some will was trying to prevent me reaching my goal.

- I had to stop writing then, my hands would not be still. As I approached the memory of what I found, along a path no less arduous than the one I slithered over that night, I could sense again those nameless things lurking at the fringes; I could hear the dinning crescendo of the waves tugging me. In a sudden fit of terror, I screamed aloud, and my friend came at once with sympathy and solidity and a pipe of sweet opium. I can face it now, though I am still aware of the tendrils of sea sound tapping away at my window pane.

I did not realise how close I was until I almost stumbled over her. Looking back across the still water to my erstwhile vantage point it did not seem more than twenty or thirty feet away, yet it had taken me many minutes, during which I more than once lost sight of the water, or the the cliff, or both together, to reach this place. She lay on her side, half in and half out of the pool, her arms bent in front of her, her back towards me. I dug out a packet of vestas from my trouser pocket and struck one.

In its flare, I saw that she was naked. Her skin was the iridescent while of mother of pearl, and strands of kelp were tangled in her dark hair, My first thought was that she was drowned, and my second, ludicrously enough, was to call for help where I knew there was none. I bent over to look more closely. A slight rise and fall showed that she still breathed. Then I noticed high up on her back a dark trickle. Gingerly, I pulled aside her hair and found, high up at the back of her neck, a wound that was still slowly seeping blood.

Before, I had felt only a vague helplessness and, at the back of my mind of my mind, a faint unease - I had only seen her back, but it was young and pleasantly rounded and complected, and the fact that I was compromisingly alone with a helpless lady miles from nowhere had occurred to me. Now, though, there was something I knew I could do. I shook out the match and set about cleaning her wound, bathing it with handfuls of the still-warm water in the pool. It was not as bad as I had first thought, not a gash or tear, but rather the sort of bruised scrape you might get by banging against the rounded rocks.

I soaked a handkerchief to clean off the blood on her back, but before I could apply it, she stirred. I sat back, plunged into fresh unease at this unexpected turn of events. With a grace and fluency of movement that astounded me - and showing no trace of discomfort or difficulty from whatever it was that had laid her low - she sat up and swivelled towards me. I had time - little enough in fact, but lengthened in my memory by what came after - to see a pale oval face, eyes shining dark and far away like treasure in the depths, lips glistening and parted, showing sparkling teeth and and a thick, wet tongue, hair cascading over her breasts in black waves. All this in the moment before her swivelling movement ran to its completion, and with a heart-stopping wet slapping sound, she brought herself fully out of the water and on to the ledge. Her lower body was a smooth cylinder tapering to a fork, the whole from the waist down covered in scales of sparkling silver-grey. I swooned.

I could have ended the story there, I suppose. God knows how much I wish it. It has some substance, the drama and imagery are competently handled. I’ve sold far worse. I’ve read it over and over these past two hours, changing a word or two, fiddling with the syntax, anything to put off carrying on. At my request, my friend has been in again and tacked a blanket over the window to muffle the intrusive sounds of outside. Despite my procrastinations, despite my fears, I must carry on, for no other reason that it did NOT end there, for this is not one of my imagination’s tales that can be neatly rounded at my whim, this is real and ragged, this is experience: like my absurd name, it is mine, mine alone, and I must cling to it as a drowning man to a floating spar.

Salt and sweet corruption, a warm liquidity. The sea was in my mouth. I opened my eyes and dark waves cascaded around my face. I could feel that thick pink tongue exploring my mouth like an inquisitive mollusc, slowly probing, could feel it bore into my soul, take root, feel the sex rising in my blood. I clung to her, and her to me - her skin like warm sand at the water’s edge - and we rolled over so that I was on top. My bare legs slid along that scaly cylinder and found, not the mucilaginous disgust of slabfish, but a velvety smoothness like snakeskin. Her arms clung tight around me and those dark and lustrous eyes locked on mine, draining what remained of my will; as my body slid along hers I felt the slight ridge beneath me give way to softness there, a pliancy, yielding yet fixed, silky and warm like the waters of a tidal pool. I hesitated - ah, not long! -  on the brink. She pulled my face down on to hers. I closed my eyes and plunged in.

Rushing, a swift descent, pressure building, then rising to plummet again, a dismasted ship tossed on a swell, cleaving the angry waters, the screams of its crew in my ears as it succumbed to the storm, sunk tangled in the maidenhair of the dark night, lights extinguished, down ever down; a great whale festooned with harpoon dragging its lines behind, seeking its doom in the depths.

A second time I broke surface, opened my eyes, struggled to be free. Her arms bound me like steel hoops, and her eyes filled my sight, the last light I would ever see, a phosphorescent greenness lurking there. I pushed my self up away from her, but she arched up beneath me, that cloacal fishy hole gripping my throbbing sex, pressure building. I heard a song, a lulling siren song that sapped me. A tension: the pull was too much for me, and I went under for the third time, and touched bottom, my bulging eyes full of the glints and glimmers of the swallowed treasures of the seabed, a ruptured galleon, the gash in its side showing brassbound chests burst open to reveal strange jewels.

I flailed my arms and my right hand closed over something round and damp and too solid to be her flesh. A heavy pebble. I picked it up, blood streaming from my nose, pain in my ears, drowning, drowning. My muscles tensed, beyond my control, yet I clasped it and managed to bring it down not once, but many times on the wracked head beneath my own. A scream bubbled from her sucking mouth into mine and the pressure in me exploded out through my loins. As it ebbed, my blows grew lest frenzied, petered out. My eyes opened as her lips released mine, and closed again to shut out the thing I had done; an ineffectual gesture, as that bloodied tangle of hair and splintered bone burned itself on my memory. Even now I can see it if I close my eyes, giving me no rest save that induced by sleeping draughts.

There is little more to tell, to confess. I lay exhausted until the incoming tide lapped over into the pool, then struggled to my feet, gathered up my clothes and stumbled and waded my way to the shelter of the cliffs, to lie at last in a cool cave out of the reach of the ocean, which was no longer the conversational friend of the night before: its aspect had changed, and I could no longer trust it, knew surely that although I had escaped it this time, it would surely and implacably seek my out, for I had violated and destroyed its daughter. As I watched, it found her smashed body, caressed it, bent and broke over it, then bore it away, the swirling spume of its salt tears carried by the wind to burn on my face.

My body got up and left that place, but what happened there has tracked me ever since. I had to come here, as close by the shore as I dared, to write about it, to leave it behind me, my only hope. And I can no longer hear the waves outside the window. I haves won, I am here, it is done! My head hurls back in sudden wild laughter. Yes! I have won, my frame shakes with the triumph of it, all the poisons that gnaw me purged, spewed on to the sheets before me. And my eyes, open wide with glory, look down and see my hands as they grasp the pages, pen gripped tight in surging of relief, see the blood trickling between the fingers of my clenched fist that opens like a flower of hell confronting the fire, and shows me its map of gore and hair, in which I trace the final meeting. And as I begin to walk that path I can hear, growing like a marching band coming over the hill, soft and rhythmic and full of music, approaching inexorably, banners unfurled, can hear growing the clamour of the sea.

I hear it calling and I must go to it.


Galahad Lethbridge

I'm off later this month to Wales to help my mate of nearly 60 years, Clive, celebrate his 75th birthday, and was rummaging about in some old files and papers looking for stuff with which to mortally embarass him, when I came upon the following. I have no idea of where or when or why I wrote it, and indeed no memory of having done so, although stylistically it can only have been me.

Anyways, here,  with spelling, punctuation and paragraphing copied from the original, it is

Dear Sir

Do not discard this letter! I suspect that, after your recent access to FORTUNE, as one of the Lucky Winners in the Lottery of Life, several parsons have attempted to sway you with tales (exaggerated ruderies, a cluster of hyperbollocks) of their insipid misFORTUNES (I see that you understand me perfectly) in a transparent (vitreous in its limpidity) and possibly criminal (limp in its virtuousness) attempt to mendaciously deprive you of some of that FORTUNE you now, so deservedly, enjoy.

I am not one of these wretches, fallen on hard times, mewing brats queuing at the breast, house repossessed, and always a sick infant, or dying grandparent (sole support), or crippled spouse (worked hard all his life and cruelly treated after the Accident) in need of Urgent Medical Attention. "Hah!" I say, and again, "Hah!", for surely a seed so sickly needs annihilation more than rehabilitation. Let the buggers die. Such letters anyway always written by cheroot-stained hombres w/eyeshades (green) and rolled shirtsleeves (grey) working in offices w/green-painted windows and dustmotes dancin in the rays where the paint has chipped, a blue grey swirl of fug ribboning in and out the bright corridors of dust (largest constituent of which by the by is sloughed-off cells of skin, human detritus - which, by the way, is the way I would charitably describe these epistolateers of which I speak, scum that floated in off a Pecos wind, men with more motion than morals, you know of whom I speak) and the only sound the sucking of cheroots, the rasping of ill-used pulmonary bags, and the scritch scritch scritch of fevered quills

Sir, you have received such missives, I know it, for these Vultures in (approximated) human shape are quick in the lowness of their cunning and conning ("Look for knowledge in the cunny and the coney" - Malaclypse the Malaclypse) of the daily rags (detestable yellow stew-rags - you know them of whom I speak,Sir, you with your ever-readiness to plunge your hand up to the armpit in the sewers of life in order to retrieve the priceless pearl of truth!) for the names and - too horrible to relate! - sometimes even addresses of those who, like yourself, have a change of luck, a fall of wind (from the back of Lorelei)(as it were), an increase, Sir, in their Standing in the World. I see you understand me perfectly.

I know, Sir, that in your commendable indifference to the suffering of others you will not have been swayed by this army of grasping idlers, for you, Sir (how I tremble even to write your name) are made of more tumid stuff. You are an oak, Sir, nay a veritable telegraph pole in the rectitude of your stance, the unforgiving nature of your rigid roundness.

No Sir, you are fortunus intacta, as the Latins would say (for I am not without learning), and you remain adamantine in your belief that It is most definitely not Your Round in the Saloon Bar of Life, and that the importunate rabble can look elsewhere for their Pork Scratchings.This is as it should be. For if you were (if I may permit myself the familiarity) to unburden, to disburse yourself at these seedy promptings, ask yourself , please, how you would feel when from the azure comes a plea, a plaint of such poignant piquancy that your heart (the fine that discriminating organ) haemorrhages, your eye's o'erflood and all your hair falls out, greying as it wafts to the rug; your face all over-harrowed you stagger sobbing to the place wherein lies your SUBSTANCE. In you plunge your hand, only to close around vacuity. For you have spent your SUBSTANCE on Poltroons and Lack-willies and now there is none left, no soupçon of CHEER, no morsel of moolah with which to assuage the MOST TERRIBLE ILL-FORTUNE EVER TO COME YOUR WAY.

Nay, Sir, you, You are not like that. In you, hand and mind and ears are closed in perfect accord, your door locked and blinded, while on your knob dangles the legend 'Out to Lunch'. Let them wheedle, let them whinge and whemmle and whiff: you, Sir (the very pronoun is eye-blasting in its effulgence) are hanging on to you ha'penny (one speaks metaphorcically) against that day when real ILL-FORTUNE tenderises your teakiness.

Sir, that day has arrived. 

Others, Sir, talk of their lives of woe. He, Sir, the wretch on whose behalf I speak, has had not a hint of happiness in a bunch of incarnations. His children are as numerous as seed-spilling starry skies of sand; all demand daily ambrosiacal indulgences, suck leechily of his material substance and rarely make their own beds. despite his prodigious paternity He has never known the joys of coupling, being parthenogenically inclined in the throes of absent-mindedness. This is just as well, as his private parts were lost in a left luggage office soon after the last uprising.

He has been cursed with countless commercially uncommutable genii for dazzling doodads. Forced to preposterous prostitution by an unbending muse he totters the scummy streets, wading lead-legged through Kentucky fried Detritus (boxes greased, discarded, showing the hated Red and White), looking for work beneath interestingly wrinkled bits of orange peel, shouting with the winos "AZUM BAZUM GAR. Focken FockenGerawanayoud'vere. Grssplt," all the while composing inheadfully plans for world Scrabble domination and black book disposals; his most ambitious wish to be a guest on TV Talk Shows, to have Jim Fix It for him. Fear is the only thing of which he is not afraid. Truly he is man of a thousand disgraces. If he ever found the Yellow Brick Road he would trip and graze his knee then limp out of town cringing under the assault of stone-throwing munchkins all breaking his windows and insisting he wears trousers.

Sometimes he stomps the jagged streets, resurgent bile knifing his gullet, the redness and the anger all upon him. 'D Klein is a Fool' is painted on the outer wall of a pub; he goes in; all around him a hissing and a bubbling. Either they don't like him in here or he's walked into a laundry by mistake. He walks up to the bar (or maybe a trouser press, the steam has opaqued his windows) and inquires, "Kashmir Czech?"    "Heave a prawn," replied the moustachioed muchacho, "dyed inner punker. Wasser pissword?"   "Wider jerrycan. Neigh till dawn" (golden naturally)  "Piss, friend" - well you see how it is with this chap, what he has to contend with - and the many-faced density of his aethyreal comminutions. Words fail (Boy, do they).      ()

Sometime stumble the sodium streets, that old starry dinosaur of night we all heard so much about, but mostly he just sits, waiting for epiphany or maybe for the phone to ring. sometimes the phone does ring, in the middle of a sentence, a clarion-call, sweet trill beckoning him to the hall - perchance a long-lost pal? Mayhap a happy happenstance? Actually though an intrusion of confusion from the past; wouldn't lay down then, won't lay down now. Bugger Porlock.

It may appear that I am straying from the point. Either that or you're going cross-eyed with boredom.
He always saw the dark side of things.He was born in an eclipse.
A man walked into a bar. He said "ouch". It was an iron bar.

But, Sir - I may call you that, may I? "Your Effulgence," though truer title in a descriptive vane, troubles my turbid typing skills - I digress. My recounting of this recondite wretch's trials and tribulations has broken my spirit, sent me pell-mell fleeing into ludicrous flummery.   Ichabod! "Redemption resides in rock & Roll" quoteth a passing hipster, but his beret sags and his sax is lax. "Come blow your horn, the walls of Jericho precipitate. Come plague and pox and tumbling tomfoolery, break break dance on this rumbling rock!" Sir, his turbulence confounds my very mind!

John Dory is a Fish!

Soft now, Sir, do not take alarm. The passion is past, the night - the enveloping night that hisses past my window as I type here, alone, my heart afire with mission - has stolen on. I have taken a draught, my mind is clear now, mine again. The man rambles in his mind as well as my own. that is the simple truth. He slips the foetors that bind him in the garden of rememberants, and goes abroad in that intricate place, a place where lurk pigwidgeons and poltergeists, banshees and bugaboos, goblins and hobs. Incubi and succubi dance widdershins in the basement and flibbertigibbets flit feather-duster through the corridors. All is mist and momishness, yet heedlessly he goes, his kitbag packed with troubles and this idiotic grin, this rustic rictus defacing his gob, and he rattles the handles of dust-caked doors. Buried treasure is his measure but the locks, yielding to his incompetence vouchsafe only graily glimpses, evanescent. Some yield teeming terrors, others inconsequence, but most give on to other doors. And yet there is treasure, there, as surely as precious jewels scintillate in the skulls of toads. Yet, harassed by FORTUNE, larruped by luck, this fellow, this pitiful plaything of the Immortals, will never find the heart of the lotus without a map. He needs to quit this hither and yoning, stop paddling in the miasmatic gooze. He needs stour boots and a stout heart, a conscience for a compass. The footpaths must be lighted and he needs a faithful companion. That, Sir, is where you and your FORTUNE come in. You see, sir, I have the honour to be the representative here on Earth for the Guide Dogs for the Mind Association.

"'You can't B Sirius,' I hear you say, 'Is God to be found in Godalming?' Well, I, madam - I may call you madam, I hope, it's all the same to us - need jaw support too. Yes, my mouse dropped open when I heard the news. I, Frankly - that's my name by the way - I found the whole concept of external aeternal alternate othernesses interacting with temporal bozos of the citizen kind to help them relocate their locos, be consumed in fire and come up smelling of ash and roses (a tasty trick in my book [Bradshaws Railway Almanac 1938]) a bit difficult to swallow. This was no way to treat Toledo. Nah, I thought, this spiritual redemption jive was a crock, and I was Cap'n Hook. But then I discovered Guide Dogs for the Mind, and now I hope I can Lick it Good."

Well, Sir, now that you've heard from Frankly himself, and I hope his plea has plucked at your purse-strings. There he stands, on the edge of tomorrow: hope, a battered bird, only now fluttering and trembling in his heart, expecting to fly – Can you, Sir, I say can you forbear for one moment from stomping this avian avatar of aspirance with your hand-tooled kangaroo-skin boots back into the oblivion which such yearning in the face of the real richly deserves, and allow me touch your tenderest place, just outside your heart in your inside jacket pocket the last time I lunched, to partake of your most cherished substance within, to fondle your spondulicks, molest your moolah, caress your cash, covet your coppers and nuzzle your notes, lick your lucre and ’andle your ackers, get brazen with your brass and waspish with your wampum, coy with your coins and sexy with shekels; yess oh yess yess.

Yours without wax

Urizen Heep

Guide Dogs for the Mind
c/o A:A:
Sirian Bdg
Great Godalmighty
Surrey 










 

It Was 100 Years Ago Today

This was originally conceived as the story of my mother and what she called her ordinary life, to celebrate what would have been her 100th birthday, but in the writing and delving, it turned out to be a lot about me too. I’m not sure if this an apology or not.

Phyllis Lily Edwards was born 19 January 1922, the tenth child of Isaac Richard Edwards and his wife Minnie Emma, née Fryer-Kelsey. Two elder sisters, Emma and Frances, had died as babies, and a third, Doris, would die of septicaemia, aged 12, later in the 1920s.

My grandfather Isaac was born in Bermondsey, in the heart of London’s docklands, in 1876. At the time of his birth, his parents lived in Jolly Sailor Row. Both of them died when they were 27, leaving an eight-year-old Isaac and his younger sister to be brought up by relatives.  Around 1890, he lied about his age and enlisted in the army. He fought several colonial campaigns, including in South Africa, but he left active service for the reserve some time early in the 20th century, and spent the rest of his life working mainly as a demolition ganger. He was called back to the colours in The Great War, where, as a Sergeant Major, he spent two or three years training recruits to send to the front - something, according to my mother’s eldest sister, Cissie, that deeply affected  him. He was a committed nationalist and Victorian - a portrait of the late queen hung alongside family photos in the hall until he died.

He married Minnie Emma (born 1884, the fifth of nine children – two girls and seven boys) on Christmas Day 1905, and their first child, Dick, was born in October 1906. Their last, my mother’s little brother, Bill, turned up in 1928. In between came George, Cissie, Albert, Frances, Doris, Emma, Ernie, Gladys, Phyllis and Hilda. I’m going into this because her family was the biggest thing in my mother’s life. It trumped everything and everyone else. Her father was her hero, and her mother her role model -  all she ever wanted was to be a mother herself. 

She was the only one of her siblings who never fell out with any of the others: she would not hear a word against any of them, and in later life, in tandem with Cissie, became a keeper of family records and ‘papers’, rememberer of anniversaries and birthdays, and circulator of news. I sort of did the same thing with my circles of friends over the last four or five decades.

At the time Phyllis was born, the family lived in a small - tiny is not too strong a word - two-up, two-down, end-of-terrace house, 1 Milton Road, Tottenham, just opposite Ducketts Green. The boys had one bedroom and the girls the other, in both cases sleeping top-to-toe in a double bed that took up most of the room. Downstairs was a parlour with sofa bed of some kind for Minnie and Isaac (who was known by his second name, Richard, or Dick) at the front, and a sort of kitchen/dining room/sitting room about 12 feet square, with a coal-fired stove for cooking and heat. Meals were served in shifts, as there weren’t enough chairs to go round. There was also a small scullery with a cold-water sink and a copper boiler, where my grandma would do the family washing, along with other people’s that she took in to supplement her income. Out back was a WC and a cobbled yard, just big enough to zigzag in a washing line, and that was it.

 Hilda and Phyllis in the Long Gardens, late 1920s

The other side of Milton Road was not built up. There were much grander houses just around the corner in West Green Road, and their gardens ran the whole length of Milton Road. Sometimes the local kids would play in them. One of these houses was owned by the music hall star, Harry Campion. More than once he forked out to hire a charabanc so the kids from the street - and their mothers and grannies - could go on day trips to Southend or Clacton, pretty much the only holidays the family ever had.

Of course, this is all second-hand knowledge, gleaned in part from her, partly from a smattering of family pictures, but mainly from my Auntie Ciss, who was very much a second mother to me, as she had been to my mother and her two younger siblings in the ’20s and ’30s. She liked to talk about the past. In the 1950s, Cissie had a confectioner’s shop in Lawrence Road, Tottenham, literally around the corner from the house where I grew up: I would hang out with her during school holidays, and sometimes go round there for lunch in term-time. Cissie, who had worked between the wars running the canteen kitchens in Tottenham Bus Garage, was a wonderful cook, and I ate a lot better there than at home.

Virtually as soon as she could walk and talk, Phyllis took over from Cissie - who by then had a job of her own - as her mother’s main helpmeet: as well as dusting and sweeping and scrubbing down, she helped with the laundry, shone her brothers’ and father’s shoes, and made the beds. She was always tall for her age, long-legged, gawky even. Shy, and wholly lacking in the more assertive, outgoing qualities of her sisters - Gladys was very much the rumbustious tomboy and young Hilda was full of mischief - she embraced the role of Dutiful Good Girl at school as well as at home. Her younger sister, Hilda, once told me that when she started at the same school three years later, her teacher asked if she was related to Phyllis Edwards: hearing that she was, the teacher immediately appointed Hilda class monitor, a position in which she lasted hours, rather than the whole year, like my mother. 

 

 Classmates, about 1932. Middle of the back row

As a teenager, she was never particularly interested in the radio (then cutting edge media) or socialising - as far as I can tell she had few, if any, friends, or indeed playmates she was not related to - but she absolutely loved the cinema. That’s where the few pennies she could lay her hands on went. Her particular crush was Robert Taylor, but she pretty much loved ever single star in Hollywood who wasn’t involved in musicals, which she couldn’t stand - my mother was never particularly into music, or dancing.

When she got a little money of her own, she would go to the cinema several times a week. The movie-going habit was so strong that when I was born in 1948, and she was looking at Not Going Out for a few years, my dad bought her a TV set, rather than waiting five more years to the Coronation, like everybody else.

Cissie with L-R Glad, Hilda,
and Phyllis about 1930

She left school at 14 and got herself a job in the Oakwood laundry in Harringay, where she worked alongside the woman who would marry her brother Ernie and become my Aunt Eva. I never did find out whether Eva introduced her to the laundry, or my mother introduced a co-worker to her brother. Another consequence of her getting a job was that she started to have her hair, which was lank and mousey if left to its own devices, done. Most of her wages continued to go to her mother, though.

Not long after she started work, her Mum and Dad and the unmarried children - Ernie, Gladys, Phyllis, Hilda and Billy by my best guess - moved to a larger rented house at 186 Clyde Road. It wasn’t exactly palatial, but there were three bedrooms, two reception rooms, a kitchen and a scullery, as well as a ‘conservatory’ - a roofed-over side return. My grandmother’s sister, Annie, lived just a few doors down. Phyllis got on really well with Annie’s daughter, who rejoiced in the name of Nellie Pratt. 

 

 On holiday 1938, Phyllis, Minnie, Bill and Hilda and someone else's car

And then, in 1939, things started to go wrong for her.  In the summer, her Dad fell ill, and in September, he died, aged 63, of degenerative heart disease. My mother, who was 17, was devastated, and Billy, just 11, inconsolable.

And then Hitler started trying to kill her, and her family started to dissolve. Her three oldest brothers, Dick, Albert and George, all worked on the railways, which was a reserved occupation – as was working in a laundry, as it happens, not that Mum would have joined up, anyway. Billy was evacuated to Hertfordshire, and, as the war went on, Ernie, Gladys and Hilda all enlisted: none of them actually fought, although Gladys, who joined the WAAF, was badly affected by a bombing raid on the aerodrome where she was stationed. Her barracks took a direct hit while Gladys was on guard duty, and she was the first one on the scene after the raid, having to dig out her mates from the rubble. She never got over that. 

 1942 - Dad carried this picture in his wallet until the day he died

And then, of course, there were the air raids, miserable nights in Anderson shelters in the backyard at 186, then a fairly long walk (she never learned to ride a bike or drive, but my mother was a ferocious walker, with a long, swift, stride and endless stamina, even into her seventies) to work through streets filled with rubble and overnight change. I only know this from conversations with Cissie. My mother refused to talk about the War, except in most general terms.

Some time in 1941 or early 1942, though, she somehow got into conversation with an equally shy and awkward - and shorter - young man in a queue at a Post Office. Neither of them had ever been on a date before, but somehow one happened, and on 3 July 1943 they had a wartime wedding, with a rationing-style cake (two of the tiers were made of cardboard), and she too moved out of the family home, to an upstairs flat at 73 Chesterfield Gardens, off Green Lanes in Harringay. It was there she had her closest brush with World War II, when a nearby blast took out all of the front bedroom windows when she was in the shelter with my dad. She had kept her job at the Oakwood laundry all through the war, but gave it up in the summer of  1948, when she was pregnant with me.

In later years - not that much later - she described my first five years as the best of her life. She doted on me. I already knew in childhood that my birth had been difficult (three weeks overdue, weighed 5 kilos, induced, forceps, double pneumonia and straight into an incubator), but Aunt Hilda informed me in much later life, apropos of nothing in particular, that my mother had also had ‘a few’ miscarriages, and could not have any more children after me. 

So Mum made the most of me: when I wasn’t sleeping the days away in my pram in the front yard in Chesterfield Gardens, I was being given tours of the parks and streets of North-East London, or taken to see my aunts, uncles and a small but growing band of cousins. Hilda had married the year I was born and went to live in Avonmouth, in a house she and her husband rented for almost half a century, and Uncle Dick and Aunt Alice had been settled in Nottingham since the 1930s, but my mother’s six other siblings, and her mum - not to mention dad’s parents and sister - all lived within a brisk twenty minute walk or short bus ride.

I saw very little of my dad in the first few years - he worked a lot of overtime to make up for the lost income. It occurs to me now for the first time that the financial pinch of one more mouth and one fewer wage may have been the reason that, sometime in 1951, I think, my parents gave up their flat and moved back into 186 Clyde Road with Grandma and Bill. Uncle Bill married in 1953 - I was a page boy, in a ghastly blue itchy thing, at his wedding, and I remember standing on the table being fitted for it while the Coronation was on TV - and moved out, letting me have a room of my own, rather than a cot in my parents’ bedroom. Later that year, I went to school, and my mother decided to go back to work. 

Just across from where her in-laws lived, in Glenwood Road, Tottenham, was the Paris Laundry. Dad’s sister, Aunt Min (the third in my family - my grandma and Cissie were also christened Minnie) worked there, and not long after I started nursery school, Mum did too. After a couple of years of being typically conscientious, uncomplaining and competent in the steamy atmosphere of the laundry and pressing rooms, she was asked to manage the laundry’s shop in West Green Road, and she worked there until 1964.

One late afternoon in January 1955, my gran collapsed in the front room at 186 Clyde Road while she was talking to Albert, who had popped in to visit. Albert got back on his bike and raced off to get help. I was in the back room watching TV, and at just that moment it went on the fritz. I wandered into the front room to get help. Grandma was sitting upright in her high-backed chair, hands gripping the arms, as if she were about to spring up, her eyes and mouth wide open. I spoke to her, but she did not reply. I don’t know how long I was there before some adults turned up, probably not long, but I was ushered off to Cissie’s. Everyone did their best to shelter me from what had happened, and their own distress, but I remember feeling perfectly serene, spooning down some of Cissie’s mince stew.

Sheltering me from bad news and unpleasantness was something my mother did as a default setting, to the extent that I never really knew what was going on throughout my childhood. Some time in the 1950s, for example, my grandfather was sent to prison for six months. It was kept from me then, despite regular visits to see gran, and I still don’t know any of the details. There were strains in some of mum's siblings’ marriages, as well as the usual complement of illness, financial hardship, conflict, and minor criminality, but I never got to hear about them, except later from Cissie when I was a grown man.

There was just one exception to this rule that I remember: a tearful Albert turned up one day with my father’s watch and one or two other trinkets he had found in the possession of his eldest son, Richard, who said he had ‘found’ them. What he had actually done was to purloin a front door key on a family visit, then come in and help himself when the house was empty. A little while later, Richard came round, maybe to apologise, I don’t know, but my mother tore into him to the extent that I was frightened listening from the next room. It was the angriest I had ever seen, or heard, her. She never really forgave her nephew. Tellingly, it wasn’t the thieving, or the lying, that she found unforgiveable, so much as that he had humiliated his father and made him cry. She was fiercely loyal to all her siblings, as I’ve said, but she had a particular soft spot for Albert, who was a lovely, gentle, sweet-natured man.

The rest of the 1950s were pretty serene from my point of vew. My father bought the house from the landlord for a pittance as the whole street was scheduled for development in the near future (the houses dated to the 1840s). In 1960 (I think) it was compulsorily purchased by the council and Dad used the money (my parents split household responsibly on traditional gender lines - my mother was responsible for housework, shopping for food and clothes, Dad for paying the bills, home improvements and so on) as a deposit on a larger terrace house a few hundred yards away in Arnold Road, one with three bedrooms AND an actual bathroom, as well as an inside toilet. It was also literally a minute's walk from the County School, where I had started secondary education a year before.

Talking of education…I was a very precocious child, could already read fairly well when I started at nursery school when I was four, and reading became my first grand passion - I read the entire kiddies' section of my local lending library in double-quick time, and started in on the teenage section. Fiction or non-fiction, made no difference. Mum was a little nonplussed about what for her was abnormal behaviour for a child of 7 or 8 - ‘He’s always got his head stuck in a book’ - but my Dad was always quietly proud, I felt, of how well I was doing at school, and he actively encouraged my curiosity about the world and everything in it. He thought Public Libraries were one of humanity’s finest inventions, and he started buying me reference books like encyclopaedias and atlases, as well as books and magazines about things I took a deep interest in for a while - palaeontology, astronomy, zoology - getting me to stretch, never trying to rein in any of my enthusiasms.

 3 July 1943

When I asked Dad what he would like me to be when I grew up, he first off said it was up to me,  and that I would find out what I wanted to be, then that he thought a physicist might be the way to go. When I asked Mum the same thing, she said that all she wanted was for me to get married and settle down and have a family - with the unspoken subtext of a life of duty, of carrying on, not pushing too hard.

My mother’s focus on her families continued in the new house. Aunt Gladys, who had lived with her husband Charlie Nash just three doors down from us in Clyde Road, split with Charlie and came to live with us in the back bedroom. Cissie was still nearby, while Albert, his wife and his six children had a council flat in North Tottenham: she would usually pop in there when she went on her fortnightly visit to tend her parents’ grave in Tottenham cemetery. Three more pairs were a bus ride away: George and May in Southgate, Ernie and Eva at the other end of the local 41 route in Crouch End, and Bill and Mary in Wood Green. She visited all of them, usually with me in tow, on a regular basis. Dick and Alice we rarely saw, but my mother wrote to Hilda once a week, and we would go as a family to stay with her and her husband Edwin. Dad and edwin got on well, and we got into the habit of spending Christmas with them at one or another’s houses and going on an annual weekly holiday with them, at first to a caravan site on the Isle of Wight, then to various (non-Butlins) holiday camps around the south and east coasts.

 On Holiday, mid-1960s

Some time in 1964, Dad was contacted by some guys he had worked with years before who had set up a new business in Ware, a semi-rural Hertfordshire market town about twenty miles due north of Tottenham. They asked him if he would work for them. Looking back, I wasn’t aware what discussions went on with my mother, or indeed Gladys, but just before Christmas 1964 all four of us moved out of Tottenham and went to live in a year-old house in a cul-de-sac called Nursery Gardens. Within weeks, Gladys moved back to a council flat in Tottenham, which was a relief. It was a smaller house than the one we’d left behind, and there was tension between Glad and Dad.

As I was coming up to A-levels, I continued to go to school in Tottenham. It was a forty minute commute, but the council paid for my season ticket - which I could, and did, use to go up at weekends and hang out with my mates or go to the Spurs. Mum also went up regularly at weekends, to see some sibs and tend to the grave. 

Dad’s original plan was that, with a lower mortgage and a better wage, she no longer needed to work. She tried, but about four weeks into the New Year, the house pristine, and a dozen cups of tea a day no real consolation, she walked into town and got the first job she applied for, at the local firm Allen & Hanburys, which was later taken over by Glaxo. In the autumn of 1966 I went off to University, and my parents were alone together in their own home for the first time since Chesterfield Gardens.

Last family photo 1966

As I’ve written about before (in this blog), at the end of my first year at University, Dad met me from the train at Ware, and died in the street about ten minutes later of a heart attack. When I told Mum, she crumpled inside. It destroyed her. It was a horrible thing to see.

One of the first things she said to me afterwards was that I would have to give up university, come home and get a job, but I said no. I explained later that Dad’s life insurance would pay off the mortgage, and that I would be abe to get a better job with a degree, but admitted to myself that my primary thought was that I did not want to settle down, and least of all as the only child of a doting mother: if I was going to become the person I was just getting an inkling that I wanted to be, I had to keep looking outwards, I must not retreat. At the time, the family rallied round: Cissie came up on the train as soon as I phoned her with the news and started organising things, and most of the others came to suppor her - but they couldn’t stay, and in October I went back to Uni. She was on her own.

I never did go ‘back home to live’, spending four more years posing as a student at the university, a couple of years fretting and largely unemployed in Kent, then finally a move to London in 1974 and five years of full-time salaried work. We didn’t see much of each other in the 1970s. I was lost and adrift and felt terribly guilty. I knew it was hurting her, but there wasn’t any way I could make the pain of her widowhood go away.

Around 1969, she saw a notice at work looking for people who could put up graduate trainees who had come to work there, several from abroad. And she started taking them in, half a dozen or so, in total, full board, share the sitting room, their own bedroom, laundry done. She mothered them, basically, and they all seemed to love it - several of them remained friends years after they moved on, sending her letters full of news and Christmas cards.

 Ware, 1970s

The Seventies weren’t good to her family. Dick died in Nottingham not long after he retired, and his wife, Alice, had a heart attack the day after and also died. When Dick’s brothers and sisters, including Mum, went to Nottingham for the double funeral, there was an unseemly brouhaha in which Alice’s family insisted that everything in the house was theirs: the Edwards were lucky to escape the East Midlands with the clock Dick had been given to mark his service on the railways. Albert, worn out and not yet 60, followed soon after, then George. Ernie died in 1981, and Gladys in 1983 or 1984.

When she turned 60 and was forced to retire as second in command of her department (small world diversion/anecdote: her immediate boss, a Welshman, grew up in a small village outside Aberystwyth, a couple of doors down from the house in which my school friend Clive was living at the time), she carried on being a landady, and also acquired a clutch of cleaning jobs, in offices and old people’s homes in the town. This still left her with plenty of time to herself, and she started going to an over-60s club; she made some friends - the first friends I’d ever known her to have - and went on long couch tours and outings with the club. She went walking every day, and, although she had been frightened of the water all her life, decided to learn to swim: she proudly framed and hung the stiffy-cats, as she always pronounced ‘certificates’, for swimming various distances in the upstairs hall.

I had quit my full-time jobs in 1979 in pursuit of becoming what I had decided I wanted to be, a writer, and did a lot of part-time occasoinal work of the sort that look good on in the author bio on the end-papers of a novel. Again, this was something my mother obviously found difficut to comprehend, but she wrote me a sweet letter saying that she would support me, whatever I did, and more than once she gave me money when I needed it, financing the printing of my only completed novel, donating the deposit so I could buy the flat from my landlord, or digging me out of the odd hole.

She also took to visiting me in my flat in Cricklewood (she had never been to any of my residences in Kent or Putney) on her various trips to London to see Cissie and Billy. Cissie’s husband, Charlie Mart, had had a severe stroke in the late 1960s or early 1970s, and spent the last decade or so of his life in a nursing home, while Bill’s wife, Mary, had left him for another man, and now the two of them shared a flat in Bounds Green, a development where several people displaced from Clyde Road and Lawrence Road ended up.

After she retired, Mum took to coming to see me every week or so: as I had a temporary job and couldn’t guarantee being there to let her in, I gave her a key. Which gave her licence to clean. I tried to persuade her not to, partly because I was independent-minded enough to want control over my own environment, but mainly because I wanted her to relax. One time, the day before she was due to visit, I made the place immaculate - not just dusted, tidied and hoovered, but beds made, all furniture polished to within an inch of its life, all pots and pans and crockery and cutlery washed, buffed and put away. When I got home on the following day, I found her up a step-ladder cleaning down the sitting room walls above the picture rail (it was an Edwardian mansion block with nine or ten foot high ceilings) because she had been ‘bored’ and ‘thought she saw a cobweb’.

One thing I should make clear is she wasn’t a neat freak, or in any way obsessive about cleaniness or tidiness: it was just that she had grown up in a happy household with a mother who had coped with the swirling chaos by being conscientious and diligent, just keeping on top of things, or at least abreast with them. And young Phyllis had found her niche at a young age. She liked to be useful, to be appreciated, to be a part, and this role suited her character. The year she retired was also the year I got together with Chip. She was appalled at first that my mother was coming to clean for me at my age - and, for heaven’s sake, taking my washing home with her and bringing it back laundered and pressed the following week (in my defence, there was nowhere to do laundry in the flat, and the local laundromats were full of pissing drunks), but eventually relented, accepting Mum as ‘a force of nature’, simply unstoppable.

 

 The Two Mrs Granger, 1990

 

Chip and Mum got on OK, pretty well in fact, and Mum was absolutely thrilled when we got married in Bristol in 1988. Bill couldn’t make it because he was working (it was a Thursday) but Cissie and my Mum went to stay with Hilda and both came to the wedding, and she was smiling throughout. She was a bit less happy when, two years later, I moved to Bristol to live with Chip, but I would still come back to London to work a couple of days most weeks, and sometimes stay overnight in Ware. The last lodger had left by this point, and a very good friend she had made at the Club died in the early 1990s, so she was effectively alone again, although she kept up her cleaning jobs, and served, as she had done since the 1970s, as unpaid baby-sitter to two lads across the street, as well as a friend and companion to a youngish woman who moved in next door. Mum encouraged Joan, whose parents had largely rejected her, to read, and they spent a lot of time together.

Then, early in 1994, Cissie died, aged 84, leaving my mother as de facto head of that family. She organized the funeral, on a frozen Valentine’s Day. Hilda and Edwin came from Bristol, and various of Albert’s children turned out, but it was not a large gathering. At Cissie’s request, the priest was side-lined - Ciss was a comitted atheist - and I wrote and gave the eulogy, as well as taking her ashes and burying them in a pot in our garden to feed the flowers; Ciss and I had talked about this and I knew that was what she wanted. Cissie’s death left Billy adrift, and he died that summer. There was no-one left in London, although Mum still made occasional trips to that gravesite by the Moselle.

She finally gave up the last of her cleaning jobs - working in some sheltered housing for what she called her ‘old ladies’, some of them the same age as she was - when she turned 80. Although she was still physically fit and full of energy, she was starting to get forgetful. Doing nothing did not suit her. Ever since I moved out, I had phoned, or tried to phone every Sunday morning at ten o’clock, and she would then phone Hilda, but apart from that, and a monthly visit from me when I was in London for work, she was alone, and often unhappy. Things she had enjoyed doing, she could no longer do because of the memory problems. In a letter my dad once admiredly described how she was multi-tasking, watching Corrie on the TV while knitting, chatting and ‘puting an armlock on an orange’, but short-term memory loss stopped her knitting, watching soaps and reading, three of her favourite leisure activities, because she kept losing her place. She always had a jigsaw on the go, and took to buying puzzle magazines, but lots of simple things became difficult for her.

In her mid-80s she was officially diagnosed with what she insisted on referring to as ‘dimension’, with a short ‘i’, and she started to get helpers calling in on a regular basis to check on her. In 2011, Chip was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and I saw little or nothing of my mother for a while, although we did have several painful weekly phone calls, where I would have to explain about Chip’s illness every time we spoke.

Chip died on 8 September 2012. A few months later, I got a call from one of my mother’s visitors. She had made her regular call, and found Mum at the top of the stairs, on the landing, barely conscious and with a broken arm. I visited her in the hospital and found that taking her out of her normal environment and routines had a devastating effect on her. As a test, the nurses asked her to make herself a cup of tea, something she had been doing successfully several times a day since she was a child, and she couldn’t manage it. A decision was taken (by someone - I had nothing to do with it) that she could no longer live by herself, and she was found a place in a nursing home in Hatfield.

 

Ninety-second birthday at the nursing home

Thankfully, Joan and her husband, Dave, made the drive out to see her on a regular basis, as did several others from Ware who had reasons to be grateful to her. And I went, too, albeit not that often: it involved booking Scrap into a kennels, a bus into Exeter, train to Paddington, tube to King’s Cross, train to Hatfield, bus to the home. The first bus I could catch out of Sandford dictated that I wouldn’t get there until about 4pm, and I usually had to leave around six or seven at the latest to get into London to see whoever I was staying with for the night, before I did the journey in reverse the following morning.

The staff at the nursing home told me that she was always talking about her family - she was convinced one of the other residents was Gladys, although they looked nothing like one another - so I made her one last gift, a photo album with all the pictures that I could find of the family, all the way back to the beginning of the 20th century. A lot of our conversations at the home took on a bizarre turn. Although she usually knew who I was, once she mistook me for my dad, and another she kept insisting that I should go and see her father. And there were several repetitions of a particular catechism, in which she asked after her brothers and sisters, one by one and I explained that they were dead, apart from Hilda, who died in a nursing home in Bristol, aged 90, in 2015. After I told Mum this, as well as confirming that the others were all still dead, she said, ’That’s it, then? I’ve got no family left?’ I replied something on the lines of what am I, chopped liver? ‘Oh, you know what I mean.’ And I did.

The last time I saw her was her 94th birthday. She didn’t know me. When I tried to talk to her, she said I was frightening her, and that I should go away. Partly out of cowardice and partly out of a sense of futility, I stayed away. Then, on Valentine’s Day 2016, I had a  call from the care home saying that my mother was obviously dying and in distress, but hanging on and fighting. They asked if I would talk to her, tell her to let go, that it was all right. They put the phone to her ear and I spoke for a couple of minutes. She died the following day.

There was no funeral, by my request. She was cremated in Hatfield. In the spring, my new partner, Emma, drove me to Hatfield to pick up the ashes, then to Ware to say goodbye to the house and the town - I don’t suppose I will ever go back there - and down to Tottenham, where I picked my way through the neglect and memories to locate my grandparent's grey stone slab, and clandestinely buried the ashes there, just as those of several of her siblings had been.

Goodbye to all that

After she moved into the nursing home permanently, I had to clear out the house in Ware - which she had signed over to me not long after I got married - to make it ready for sale. Apart from my mother’s belongings, there were books, magazines, comics, toys and other trappings of youth that I had stashed in the attic at Nursery Gardens every time my own home overflowed. At this time (2014-15) my house in Devon was already pretty crammed with the stuff I had inherited from Chip, including the pieces she inherited from her mother (who had died in 1988), but I brought back as much as I could of my stuff, plus photo albums, pictures and several of the things, trinkets and keepsakes mostly, Mum had inherited from her siblings and parents - the clock Dick had got for 50 years on the railways, her father’s tankard, a couple of trophies Bill had won for darts or cribbage - with the intention that I could sort through it and dispose of it appropriately at my leisure. Somehow, even though I had a craving for simplicity, I had become the curator of the memories of at least three people, and through them, of many more.

Two things in among the geegaws and quotidian sorrows particularly affected me. There was a battered zip-up case that contained family papers - old insurance policies and paying-in books, family birth, death and marriage stiffy-cats, mysterious old invoices, the estate agent’s details of the house from 1964, and bundles of letters. Some of them were to and from me, including ones written by my dad when I was away at uni, but the others I had never seen before. They were love letters between Mum and Dad when they were just Phyllis and George, from before their marriage. I read just one, and found a different side to both my parents - nothing scandalous or revelatory, just the emotion, the youth, the hope, the exaltation, the love. I broke down when I read it - ffs, I’m crying again now just thinking about it - and I haven’t been able to face reading any of the others, now buried deep in the attic here.

The other item was an old St Michael biscuit box secreted at the bottom of her wardrobe. In it were two ladies’ watches (one maybe hers, one Cissie’s), some military-style buttons, her mother’s Labour Party pocket diary for 1954 (the year before she died), some costume jewellery I did not recognise, Mum's engagement ring, an ancient purse/wallet (presumably her father’s as it was stuffed with his army papers), a receipt for an upright piano that I remember from the front room at Clyde Road - £43! Difficult to know how they came by that much money in 1924 - and, at the bottom, twelve grubby, chipped, coloured plastic disks threaded on a chain that I recognized as the rattle that was strung across my pram in Chesterfield Gardens.

I'm sorry, Mum.

It was 50 years ago Today

First off, I apologize for the length of this. Although I know the tl:dr crowd will be itching, it would be nice if they just moved along a bit. And second, I am genuinely sorry for the proliferation of first-person pronouns. It isn't only Bobby Vee's Night that has a Thousand Is.

I’ve probably mentioned before how I spent a week in a Thomas Hardy novel back at the end of my first year at university, a week that ripped me out of an extended, secure and rather humdrum childhood and thrust me into adulthood far before I was ready, and without a guide: a week that began on a Saturday with me having sex for the first, hapless time (and fathering my only child), continued with me having my first-ever, cataclysmic taste of a mind-altering chemical (beer!), and ended the following Friday with my returning home to be met at the station by my father, who collapsed and died in the street just five minutes later, and then telling my mother the terrible news, and seeing the light go out in her eyes, never to return, save for the odd flicker. Well, all of that was 50 years ago this week, to the day, as well as the date.

And although there have been 49 other anniversaries up to now, some of them marked by significant events (the break-up of my relationship with Margaret B, my first wedding, the birth of my second grandson), none (that I can remember) has affected me in quite the way this one has. I know that 50 years only has significance because humans happen to have five digits on each of two hands, but that golden jubilee notion is hardwired. So, this year more than any previous, I’ve been thinking about that week, or at least given in to its insistence to be heard, giving it room and time to surface, trying to remember details of what happened then, what came before, and finding some inconsequentialities returning to me: this all occurred before I had a camera, or kept a diary, so there is nothing to aid me in remembering things from my teens.

Besides, the shock of Dad's death blasted my memory of some things, to the extent that I had no access to them even a year later. This troubled me then, but I accept it now, now that I've learned that my memory is not truly to be trusted. Not because I'm losing it, or indeed 'losing it', but because I now understand its as a narrative, the imposition of a pattern and coherence on essentially  chaotic events. As such, it is as susceptible to revision, editing, elision, poetic license and confabulation as any other story.

The feeling that memory and a sense of identity are virtually indistinguishable has been with me for decades, although my reaction to it was different than. Indeed, I had a feeling in the years immediately after dad died that, by fiercely remembering as much as I could of him, I was somehow keeping him alive, while letting go and forgetting was the equivalent of killing him all over again: that by reconstructing moments of communion – of outings together, of playing cribbage and other games, of our Saturday lunches when Mum was working at the shop, of the things he made for me in his workshop – I could preserve the joy I found in his company, re-experience it without mitigating sorrow at my loss of it (half a century later, I still can't do this, although the pain no longer pierces).

Nowadays, though, as a born-again autotheist, I recognize these memories – of him, of everything – as a creation, my creation. I am their author, neither their servant nor their victim: the horrors (guilt, shame, despair, regret, embarrassment, echoing loss) still swirl around my head from time to time, but I can swat them away. But one thing I've never done with this story, even though I've told and retold it so many times that any sense of spontaneity and originality has been drained from it (even though this lack can easily be covered by artifice).

So, anyway, from October1966 to June 1967 I had been staying in lodgings near Sturry, outside Canterbury. I’d been billeted with a guy from Abercanaid (one village up from Aberfan: the school disaster happened a week or two into the first term) called Roger, and another large double room was taken up by two second-years, Maurice, a farmer’s son from East Anglia, and John, a farmer’s son from Devon, who went into the Prison Service and eventually ended up as the governor of Dartmoor – when I was dealing, it whimsically crossed my mind that we might meet again professionally one day. For most of that academic year, I hardly spent any time there. Three others had gone up to Kent from my class at Tottenham – Al, a Jewish guy whom I didn't know very well, but better mention because he might turn up later in the story; Malcolm, a gay Monday Club Tory who would take over the Conservative association at the Uni within months of his arrival and run it for more than two years; and Keith, who was already a good mate and would become a better one – and they all had college rooms, so I spent most of my time hanging out with them in Canterbury, coming back on the late bus. I don't know why this changed at the end of the summer term, but apparently it did.

The house I remember as large and rambling, with a big kitchen where the family lived, extensive gardens I never went into, a small downstairs room where the lodgers had breakfast and a large entrance hall with a wide central staircase. It was owned by a middle-aged couple who lived there with their only child, H, a schoolgirl. I split up with my first and only high school girlfriend, Marion, between Xmas and New Year in 1966. H had a boyfriend, a dark and hairy guy with specs (I think) whose name has gone, but they split up that Spring. I don't know exactly when H and I got together, but the first time we kissed we were watching Top of the Pops at the house of her friend Linda (?) - so many details gone and Traffic's Hole in My Shoe was playing, in the week commencing 18 June, so someone could probably work it out to the minute.

Anyway, the evening of Saturday 24th, I remember us canoodling in the back of a van (going out to the coast, Whitstable or Herne Bay, I guess, but that's more missing detail), being driven, I presume, by a boyfriend of possibly Linda, when one of those in the front seats chucked a condom in the back as a 'get a room' gesture, and H chucked it back again. Not that I had any idea what it was or what I could have done with it. I cannot over-emphasize my sexual ignorance: I was a virgin, and H was not, but since she was two and a half years younger than, I had lied about it, pretended to know what I was doing, and carry feelings of shame about that to this day. And that's basically how and when my son was conceived, back in H's bedroom at around midnight. There was easy communication between her room and mine via the servant's staircase at the back of the house.

Now here’s a thing; in my well-honed narrative, it was the very next day that my three doughty housemates, finding out somehow that, although I had been of legal age for the last eight months, I had never been to a pub nor had an alcoholic drink, sought immediately to rectify that omission, taking me off down the road to the local, where I got truly, horribly drunk. The myth is that I drank eight pints of beer, but I have no memory of that, although I do recall, or have invented, slanted evening light pouring in to the bar, bringing forth the golden nature of the first drink in front of me, and later a quite spectacular fall into, and indeed through, someone’s front-garden hedge while I was staggering home in the deep twilight: not to mention a spectacular fountain of mid-brown vomit with which I blocked and filled the bathroom sink and significantly spattered the bath and toilet once I had been helped back to the house. The following day I remember the misery of the bus journey into Canterbury, and of walking up Whitstable Road pursued by a cloud of sulphurous farts, an experience so miserable that I did not touch another drink until I was 20. And I never even saw an illicit drug until, as a post-graduate, I took a room in a houseful of reprobates at the beginning of Spring, 1970.

This memory, though, is false in at least one particular, because I also remember watching the broadcast in which the Beatles debuted All You Need is Love, while sitting with a group of pals and making ribald remarks, but have recently discovered that this happened around 10 pm that Sunday night, meaning that the only possible ‘pals’ were the guys in the house, and possibly H (although as this was a school night, she might not have been there). So this whole appalling episode (which might well be the source of my chemical sensitivity to alcohol) must have happened on the Monday, or even the Tuesday. Whichever it was, the rest of the week remains a blank, a total blank, until Friday, when I was on my way back to my family home in Hertfordshire on a crowded commuter train, surrounded by masses of luggage, trying to stay awake in the hot and crowded carriage, desultorily reading an economics text, a Pelican with a picture of bees on the cover. What I did in those few days is just wiped: I don't even have a cover story, can't remember if I ever spoke to H again, whether I said my goodbyes (I know that H and her parents went away that week on holiday to Italy), what I did, whether I traveled back to London with Keith or anyone else - really, nothing, just elided and deleted.

And then, that Friday evening, around 6 or 7  (another missing detail) I arrive at Ware, and greet my Dad as I stand outside the station surrounded by luggage, including a huge blue backpack stacked with albums, several bags, a suitcase, and my record player – not the tinny ‘Dansette’ of legend but a lovely modern valve-amp job with a full, rich sound. Dad, who had worked for a loudspeaker manufacturer, dabbled with electronics (he liked to make radios, among other things) and knew whereof he spoke, had bought it for me a year or so before. It was so good that I didn't get a stereo until the early ’80s, and it has semi-legendary status among many of the large cohort that shared houses and flats with me in my young adulthood. I've still got it, as it happens, tucked away on the upstairs landing. I recovered it from the attic of the house in Ware (where it had been left, along with much of my young manhood, when I moved out of my mansion flat in 1988) after my mother was lost to dementia. I keep it more as an object of veneration, a totem, than in any hope it will sound again. So it goes.

Anyway, he's looking very tanned – the week before, he and Mum had gone on holiday with her sisters Cissie and Hilda, and Hilda's husband, Edwin, to a holiday camp near St Austell where Marion (remember her?) and I had gone the year before. He hadn't had a particularly good time, though, he tells me (or maybe someone else told me later) because a pain in his leg had made walking difficult at times, although it isn't troubling him now. Much later (decades) it would occur to me that the pain was probably a deep vein thrombosis that was no longer painful because it was now bumbling through his venous system towards the right atrium, but back then, and soon after, what was important was that it was the only memory, reliable or otherwise, I have of anything he said to me, although we chat away as always as we load up and walk off west down Station Road, the sun in our eyes, and turn right into Amwell End. As usual, I automatically drop my pace to accommodate Dad, who was lame from birth, but I'm slightly in the lead as we reach the main London to Cambridge road, which winds through the town and crosses the River Lea here just in front of us.

Dad says something (gone) then makes a noise or does something to alert me because as we approach the curb I turn my head and see him stumble. He pitches forward on to the pavement. I don't know what's happening, but something flows through my hormone system and I'm in this heightened, dissociated state I've glimpsed before and will become very familiar with in the future, and something tells me he is having a fit, even though there is no history of epilepsy. He's on his back now, he's rigid, eyes closed, back arching, fists clenched by his sides, face reddening. I'm scared he's going to swallow his tongue, and try to force his mouth open, but his jaws are clenched really tight.

And then he relaxes with a shuddering sigh, his mouth gapes and his head lolls to one side. I take the false teeth from his mouth and (?absent-mindedly) put them in my pocket. In a few days time I will smuggle them to the funeral director as he leaves the house, a moment of high weirdness that I cannot really emotionally encompass to this day. Of course, I realize later that that was when he died, right there on the pavement, but at the time I'm thinking, hoping, the crisis has passed.

I look up: a crowd of curious onlookers ranged along the bridge railings on the other side of the street, silhouetted against the golden sky. And then out of that goldness, from the West and the lands of the dead, three swans come flying up the river and over the bridge, and in my heightened state I feel them in my gut as a portent, although of what, I do not know. Soon though I see them as representing the three of us in our small family, leaving our lives behind one way and another, They are an abiding vision: I can see them clearly now, but can no longer be sure if I that is what I actually saw or whether I have enhanced the image, conflated it with some other memory for convenience and effect: I certainly have a penchant for taking pictures against the evening light, golden frozen moments.

A police car stops. I give them my mother's address: they call an ambulance on the radio and go to pick her up.

The ambulance arrives. Time has fractured by now. I know there's a crisis but I'm drifting above it. I don't see it yet, but they know immediately he is gone. Despite that, they load him, me and my fucking luggage into the back and race to the hospital in Hertford, while one of them tries to revive him. And I'm still above it all, taking note of how different, how insistent the siren sounds when you are inside an ambulance, with no Doppler effect to alter it, and even though there is a voice in my head praying to whatever's listening 'don't let him die, don't let him die, don't let him die' in syncopation to the siren it's still a horrible rude shock when, a minute or so after they wheel him in to A&E, leaving me standing outside in the ambulance park, a doctor – or at least, some offhand young shit with a white coat and clipboard – comes out and says, 'He's dead, of course,' in the sort of tone you'd expect from someone called away from doing something Very Important to deal with an importunate peasant. That locks in some fury. The ambulance guys are apologetic, and I thank them.

I'm still standing there shocked to the core when the police car arrives with my mother on board, and she comes towards me, her eyes searching mine, 'How's your dad? Is he all right?'

'He's dead, Mum.' The worst thing I've ever said, or done, to anyone. It destroyed her. I saw it in her eyes, her face, the crumpling, the extinguishing of hope.

And then I have to formally ID him. Or maybe I don't have to, or I volunteer, but I do it anyway. When I go into the room, he's lying there naked on a gurney – I'd never seen my father naked before – and they cover him up quickly with a sheet, but not so quickly that I'm not horribly struck by the contrast between his tanned areas, now a dirty brown, and his death pallor. My dad's piebald. I'm appalled.

I suppose the police took us back to Ware, me and my stuff. There are no tears, no meaningful words. Not that I remember. Just that sense of empty serenity and the nagging notion that my bubble was surrounded by horror. Actually, some words of great importance and resonance were exchanged that could only have been at this time. Soon after we got in, in the kitchen, my mother said I would have to leave the university and get a job. I refused, point blank. In that instance, I knew that most important thing for me was not to fall into the trap of being an only son looking after his widowed mother. The family dynamic was that my father always wanted me to educate myself to the maximum, to go as far as I could with my gifts: these same gifts scared my mother. All she wanted was for me to be settled down, and secure, but as far as I was concerned, security was all about peaked caps, and settling down was all right for silt.

The doctor was called for my mother, while I got on the phone to let our many relatives know, or at least to start a chain of communication. My mother came from a family of nine, most of whom lived within reasonable drop-everything range, and I started with my Aunt Cissie, who immediately began organize things: she was the oldest of the Edwards girls, well into her teens when Mum and Hilda were born, and acted as an assistant mother to the tinies, a role she continued to hold, and extended to me. Dad had been due to visit his mother and sister in Tottenham the following morning. I had to phone there, so that my aunt Min could break the news gently to her mother (whose husband, my grandfather, had died in March that year); but it was Nan who answered the phone (which she never did, usually), and so I had to pretend and dissemble, while she chatted on about seeing her George tomorrow, and I tried to get her to put Min on before I broke down.

Which I did, later that evening, dog knows when – it was still light – I just lay on my bed and howled until it hurt, and howled some more. I was totally wretched, a fountain of snot, my eyes were sore and my head ached and still it came pouring out. I've lost the rest of that day, any clear idea of what happened that weekend, who came, what was decided. I'd entered what my pal Clive, who'd lost his own father when he was 11, called the Tunnel, a hollow place where you are oblivious to what's going on around you.

The one thing I do remember is that I turned up in Tottenham as planned on the Saturday to meet up with Clive and Keith and one other, possibly the Al who appeared 3,000 words ago, to play tennis. I phoned Clive this morning, as it happened, and he remembers it well, although he couldn't remember the fourth player, either. It was an odd feeling, doing that. It was as the previous day had all been a bad dream that I hadn't quite woken from. A cliche I know, but a cliche rooted in truth. You can fool yourself into thinking something has not happened if you retreat into routine (me spending weekends in Tottenham was pretty routine at that time).

Anyway, all that writing, and all that high-faluting stuff about narrative early on, and this one has fizzled out rather, hasn't it?
I really ought to go over it a few more times, polish it, stitch it, give it more points and weave in more symbolic legerdemain than it already boasts. But that would take time, quite a bit, and then it would be 50 years and a couple of days ago, and where's the point of that?

Confessions of a record lover

This started out as an interview on a music forum, Black Cat Bone. I've edited it a bit for more coherence, and changed some names to protect the guilty. The questions, in italics, were served up by mail and I rambled lengthily in reply.

-What were the first sounds that you remember turning you on?

I've said so often that the first records I bought were He's a Rebel, Telstar and Love Me Do, in October 1962 – possibly for my 14th birthday – that it's become an article of faith. To the best of my recollection they were the first I bought new for myself, but I'd certainly got interested in music before that, largely at the instigation of the guy who was randomly allocated the seat next to me when I went to Tottenham County in 1959, Bob B, and the pair of us maintained the friendship right into the sixth form. We lived near one another in South Tottenham and would meet up on a Saturday to hit the local junk shops – traipsing all over Tottenham and scarfing up anything that was obviously American in origin, stealing as well as buying, then getting back and unloading our loot, divvying it up and playing it, finding out which names and (American) labels of origin were worth targetting and which weren't, basically educating ourselves. At that time there were no books on the history of pop, and the inkies were more or less rewritten press releases, with little or no depth, and we craved information – I even subscribed to Billboard for 18 months or so, wading through all the marketing shit for an odd nugget of info.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We had a record-player at home for as long as I can remember, but no-one sat and listened to records – at least, not often – and there was nothing in the way of recorded music on the radio except Two-Way Family Favourites, the forces' request show on Sunday lunchtime, where they sometimes played some decent stuff, but I was far more concerned with how to choke down over-cooked cabbage. What records we had would get played at family gatherings or parties (although when my gran was alive, up to 1955, it was more likely to be someone hammering the stand-up piano in the front room), especially at Xmas (when, from an age of singular years, I was granted the annual privilege/duty of going out and choosing some festive 78s; I was fairly long on Tommy Steele and novelty songs, and The Goons; I knew The Ying Tong Song, Bloodnok's Rock & Roll Call Rhumba and I'm Walking backwards to Christmas by heart).

My mother just didn't like music, and my dad (who, judging from a photo of him I have playing a piano accordion, was actually a musician as a young man; he was a man of serial enthusiasms, though, and that may not have lasted long. I heard once, or maybe dreamed, that he had hocked it to buy a wedding ring) preferred ballads. We had several records by Mario Lanza, Malcolm Vaughan and others of that tenor (clever wording, cheers!), but the saving grace was that he loved the Platters, and I guess if anything qualifies for the accolade of first turning me on, it was My Prayer and Only You. Even now, nearly 60 years on, I can smell the dust gently frying on the valves of the record player as they heated up, see the 78s whizzing round, their labels a blur, and relive the way the harmonies and echo and Tony Williams's impeccable, soaring tenor not just filled the room, but expanded it, filled it with possibility.

As I said, though, it was Bob who turned me on to our generation's pop, to the idea of music as something important, defining. I remember him enthusing about Nut Rocker and Monster Mash, among others, and turning me on to Tony Hall's American Top 10 show on Luxy on Friday nights: the show was actually sponsored by Decca, who distributed the London, Warner Bros, RCA and Brunswick labels, and only featured stuff that had been released on those labels over here – which was admittedly pretty much most of the good stuff). And like I said, we set about finding out about the American sounds that we instinctively preferred.

Somewhere in 1962 to 1963, through nicking 45s and being advised and fed demos by the Modernists at the High Cross Record Centre, I discovered recent amazemements from Atlantic, The Everlys, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, the Drifters, the Impressions, Leiber & Stoller, Del Shannon, Buddy Holly, the Coasters, Little Richard, James Brown, Chuck Berry, the Flamingos, Jerry Lee and Timi Yuro, as well as contemporary Motown, Philles and soul divas such as Betty Harris, Irma Thomas or Dionne Warwick; I also discovered that Frank Chacksfield, Ferrante & Teicher and Lawrence Welk were better avoided. Bob & I schooled each other, swapped scraps of info, and went to (a few, but seminal) gigs together; we used to walk the two miles back home from school through Tottenham cemetery, arguing about music, and specifically about soul – which we understood as a vocal performance style from what we had read – and the merits of various vocalists, and squabbling over favourite versions of songs. Much like a pedestrianized BCB really.

- You've spoken quite a lot on here about your love of early 60s Brill Building and soul and you've developed a strong knowledge of the associated artists, producers and songwriters. I'm interested in how this early love developed. Was it important they were American? In other words was it part of a wider cultural love of things American, or was it purely about the intrinsic qualities of the music?

Well, there's certainly some truth in the idea that my cultural outlook was largely American. It produced the best movies, the best television, even the best comics – around 1960 I switched from the British story mags such as Wizard, Hotspur, Rover and Adventure to DC (Marvel later) and the magic that was Mad – and the best novels and poetry (although that came later). That's why I chose an American subject for my PhD and wrote an entire novel set in a cultural fantasy of the USA.

I don't think that's causative though. American records just sounded better, in the same way that the movies and TV shows looked, sounded, WERE better. It may have been the producers (in the UK at this time most records were produced by techy engineers in white coats, and although one of them graduated to suits and pullovers and became Joe Meek, he stood out precisely because he was the only one), the studios, or simply the musical traditions of the session musicians, but even now, with a handful of (non-Meek) exceptions – notably the lightning in a bottle of Shaking All Over – British records of the time have a sound that comes up short. And if you put even a good British recording up against the otherworldly crunch and impact of, say, Runaway or Cathy's Clown – well, no contest.

The Brill building sound and early soul did have a cross-over – basically a bunch of Jewish song-writing teams (Leiber-Stoller, Goffin-King, Mann-Weil, Barry-Greenwich, Sedaka-Greenfield, Pomus-Shuman) who were steeped in, or at least partial to, rhythm and blues, and loved to write for black vocalists – but they were essentially two separate interests (and not the only two, they're just the ones that tend to come up when I'm arguing with revisionists on BCB ).

Looking back (and perhaps being a revisionist myself), the Brill building thing was was about craft and cleverness and stories, about creating a beleiveable character and situation, even a whole world in a three minute single. The Drifters were past masters of this: listen to On Broadway, There Goes My Baby, Under the Boardwalk, just about any of their singles from 1958 to 1963; or Will You Love Me Tomorrow, or the You've Lost that Loving Feeling trilogy (with Just Once in My Life and Hung on You). It was like a movie, a communal effort from writers, producer and performers to tell a story, set a scene.

Soul, on the other hand, as we understood it then – James Brown, Ben E King, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Dionne Warwick, Timi Yuro, Irma Thoma, Marie Knight, Margie Hendricks, Tina Turner, Marvin Gaye, the Miracles – was, like Blues, which I was just beginning to hear via rereleases on Pye International and elsewhere, thanks to the nascent British blues boom, all about the performance. They could be singing standards, country and western songs, weird pop, all kinds of things, but you knew it was soul when you heard those fuckers sing; the raw emotion of it balled up in your solar plexus, transported you.
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- Following on from the above, you told me you'd get these exported records from a shop on the Tottenham High Road where the guys would keep the coolest records below the counter. What are your memories of all that? Did you rely on their recommendations? Did you go off to a listening booth with a stack of records? Were you after certain labels.etc.?

Two things conflated here. Yes I did get some imported records, and in the case of Timi Yuro's back catalogue, for example, ordered it and had it shipped over, as it was out of print, or unissued over here, but it was always from one or two shops in the Soho fringes that specialized in imports. I'm trying to remember the names of the shops, but can't, even though I kept going to them through the decade. I've got American copies of Dionne Warwick's and Laura Nyro's second albums, for instance, and Love's first two, because I could not bear to be without them until their scheduled release.

The High Cross Record Centre was the one nearest my home in South Tottenham, and I was always in there asking them about stuff I'd seen in Billboard, to be told it wasn't out yet. I remember waiting ages for the follow-up to the Four Seasons' Sherry (what a great record) to come out. THe HCRC was basically a hole in a wall, about 20 sq ft of floor space, and was staffed by guys who I recognize in retrospect as early modernists, but just seemed like smart older guys (late teens, early 20s) to me then. I think they were quite taken by the sight of Bob & me in our school uniforms asking after Motown obscurities, and they took to offering us the demos they had got for distribution to the local DJs (notably the guys at the Mecca ballroom, home base of the Dave Clarke Five, with was just down the road) for half price.

They'd play us the stack of demos – there were no booths (no room), just headphones, and we would yay or nay. This is how I acquired quite a large selection of collectable soul and Motown demos - I sold on about 15 of them for £700 a few years ago – but also how I turned down demo copies of quite a few Merseybeat things...

- You seem to have liked female voices in particular. Is that fair?

Yes. It's always been a bias. I tend to react better to treble sounds than bass as well. I find it more exciting. I don't really have an explanation as to why I'm like that. It's a bit like being left-handed; odd to others, perfectly natural to me.

- How important was live music to you growing up? Did you regularly see local bands or did you see 'name' artists?

'Growing up' is a big term. But I can't remember ever going to see live music on spec. It was always to see a specific act I already knew from records, and certainly while I was at school (until 1966) I never went to a club: I didn't drink, and wouldn't dream of going to a pub when underage. I only remember three package shows that I went to in that period – all with Bob, either at the Edmonton Regal or the Finsbury Park Astoria (later Rainbow): the Tamla-Motown Review with Little Stevie, the Miracles, the Supremes and the Vandellas in 1965, Little Richard with Duane Eddy & the Shirelles, and the Everlys, Bo Diddley and the Rolling Stones in late 1963. Also on the bill for those last two, incidentally, was Mickie Most, then a performer.

Basically, though, I'm not so much a lover of music as of records. I've never actually totted it up, but in more than 50 years I've probably been to fewer than 80 gigs (although I may have forgotten a few...) and I've acquired about 5,000 pieces of vinyl, maybe 2000 CDs and an insane amount of digitalized recordings.

- What was your reaction to psychedelia? Do you remember the first record you heard where you thought this is a bit strange?

Ok, moving along. Bob left in 1965 to go to Uni, and that was the last I saw of him. We had been taking different subjects at A-level and didn't hang out much after we got busted nicking singles in, I think, ’64. In the sixth form I started hanging out with two guys called Clive and Keith, both still my friends today. We were all big music fans, but with different core interests. Keith was into the blues, country blues mainly, and Clive loved the Beatles and other British pop, while I was all about Spector, soul and 'good stuff' (clive's term, not mine ) – basically American music. We would hang out in each other's houses playing each other stuff and arguing about it. For some reason, we all had an obsession about long tracks, and spent a lot of nerdish energy timing them, staring at second hands. All three of us had started buying albums by then. C & K weren't really into singles that much, while I had getting on for a thousand of the fuckers by this point.

In 1966, Clive went to Essex to study literature, while Keith and I to Kent for Social Sciences. And somewhere in there, either just before we went up, or soon after in a weekend back in Tottenham (although my parents moved out to Hertfordshire at Xmas 1964, I used to spend most weekends in Tottenham with C&K and a few others, and Keith and I and his brother John would go to Spurs together), my first psychedelic record crept up on me; East-West, from the album of the same name by the Butterfield Blues Band. I think Keith bought it first, and I did soon after.

And as someone who liked productions and American studio sounds in general, I was all over The Mothers of Invention, Beefheart, the Airplane, Love, Doors, Spirit and so on, as well as the VU and some bands with less cachet today. Although by this time I was also buying some British singles, particularly Dusty Springfield and various London bands – the Who, Yardbirds, Small Faces and Kinks. Of course, me and everyone I knew was drug-free at this point (except possibly my uni buddy Vic, who introduced Keith and I to jazz - Coltrane, Haden, Burton, Shepp, Miles), so I didn't so much see this material as wow-man-the-colours psych, just new and different sounds. After Bathing at Baxters was a favourite album. Because I no longer had a pet record shop, and I didn't listen to the radio, I began to lose touch with singles in Canterbury.

English psych whimsy just passed me by, although I did like the Floyd's singles. Part of the reason for this was simply personal circumstances; the death of my grandparents and, in particular, my father, and the circumstances thereabouts, knocked me off kilter in the middle of 1967. I was still buying records and going to gigs – it was around this time that I saw Cream at Manor House with Keith and Clive, the Mothers at the Albert Hall, and Beefheart at Middle Earth and the Doors/Airplane at the roundhouse with Martyn Dryden, another uni friend – but I lost any sense of being involved in any contemporary scene. I was completely fucked, basically, would be until the mid-1970s, and as the ’60s ended, I was more likely to buy second hand or cut-out singles than what was new, was picking up albums by disintegrating 60s bands (Brit and US) or 'oldies but goodies' style comps (then rare; the Cruising series imported from the States were a particular favourite), plus stuff by bands I've not listened to much since, just because I wanted something new. Once I moved back to London as a wage slave in 1974, spent most of my greatly increased budget chasing down remaindered doo-wop and soul singles from a south London specialist store called Black Wax, until I was Saved by Punk. But I'm getting ahead of myself again.

Around 68 music hit a schism between 'pop' and what was considered 'progressive'. Did you approve of this? Were you more an 'underground' man or did you consider it a needless dichotomy?

It didn't seem as clear-cut as that to me. I really hated the term 'progressive' when it emerged, as it seemed condescending towards the stuff I actually liked, and because at least one aspect or arm of it – earlier than ’68 by my reckoning – was to kowtow to classical music, get symphonic or operatic, get in orchestras. I HATED THAT SHIT. Didn't help that, with a few exceptions (Delius, Sibelius, Berlioz, Debussy) listening to real classical music was a physical trial for me, so much so that I referred to it as gut's-ache music (that was the later symphonic style; all that  mathematical and baroque stuff was 'headache music'). There was also the taint of the public school about many of the early prog bands, and I was quite the class warrior at the time. They talked smack about my faves in order to promote their constipated fatuities, so I filed said output in the oubliette.

The reference to 'underground' seems like a non-sequitur to me. The counter-culture had nowt to do with prog. Yes, I was well into all that (with the continuing proviso that I had lost my centre, was dissociated and alienated and generally fucked deep down). I was a regular reader of Rolling Stone, IT and Oz as well as Black Panther stuff and other pamphlets, was completely into the Civil Rights struggle in the USA, underground comics (I love comics as much as music), the whole counter-culture idea stemming from the Beats, the experimental poetry and writing and the religious weirdness (all of this pre-dope), but it didn't influence my taste in music much.

My taste kind of preceded it, opened the underground up to me, or me to the underground. I loved the cinematic story telling and sound-scaping of great pop, the youth and energy of rock and roll, the innocence and beauty of doo wop and harmonies, the excitement of R&B, the power and glory of soul, the unholy racket of acts like the Who, VU and Pharaoh Sanders, and the general attitude that, much later, I would find going back like a golden thread to the beginning of recorded music, the thing that I always respond to, and that I tend to think of, somewhat cringeworthily, as The Spirit, a creative fire that connects with some subliminal part of me. A part that loves a counterculture.

- So the druggy fools in their cottage...what would have been on the stereo? Who had the dj duties?

This is moving on a bit further on, into the 1970s. I stayed on at Kent to do a postgrad degree, but Keith and almost all my friends from my year left. Then, early in 1970, I took a room in a large Georgian house in Harbledown, and fell in with a group of druggy fools living in other rooms therein (three of the four still friends now and with distinguished careers behind them). In August of that year I took speed for the first time, in December acid. Never smoked anything until into 1972.

I assume, though, by the cottage you mean the 15th-century house in Faversham where I lived with various bozos from the beginning of 1971 to June of 1972. Well, first of all, there was no stereo, just my state of the art mono valve-amp record-player (NOT a fucking Dansette), which my dad had bought for me in 1965 (he was an electonics nerd, and actually worked at one time as a toolmaker for a firm making loudspeakers; he knew what he was doing). It played mono singles beautifully (not just my opinion, my friends still speak fondly of it now). I didn't get a stereo system until the 1980s.

And there was also my record collection, and the record cabinet custom-made for it by my dad, which I had brought from my mother's house because, as a postgrad, I was living in East Kent full time. Also, my mother and I were kind of estranged – after my father died, I was resolute about not being sucked in to being the doted-upon only son of a doting widow in a co-dependent relationship. I thought I might never get out of it, but my HGA kicked in and saved me.

I was the only one at 23 Abbey St who actually had a collection, even though I had collected it like a sump rather than an active gatherer. The other guys and gals who lived there had records, sure, but, as they were undergrads, tended to keep most of them at their parents' houses. So generally we played mine, but there was no dictatorship. We all had broadly similar tastes. Anyone could put a record on, it wasn't like there was someone standing beside the turntable.

- What is your problem with funk?

Would you believe me if I said I didn't have one? Because I don't, as it happens. I've got a thing against certain funk cliches, and I rather disdain the use of horns as rhythm instruments, but my basic beef is a semantic one; I don't think it has anything to do with (my idea of) soul, it's basically a form of R & B and dance music,'soul' without heart (although with added genitals). It's also heavy on the bass, which is not my core taste; I like a bit of treble with my joy.

- The seventies. They didn't make much sense did they?

Ha! Well for me, they didn't, but they basically took in my 20s, a complex love life that eventually led to no sex life for (no-)fucking years, my headlong, exhilarating plunge down the rabbit-warren, and, in 1974, a relocation back to London, at first to Putney, where I shared a ground-floor flat with a succession of old uni pals, and then, in 1977, to a mansion flat in Cricklewood. They are also, bizarrely, the best documented part of my life, as, in part inspired partly by falling in love for the first time, with a Georgian woman in her twenties who had grown up in Tangiers and met Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Welles, among many others, and in part by the idea of being a writer (I began what would become my novel Mbawe at about the same time), I kept a diary from 1969 to soon after I started my relationship with Chip, in 1982.

They also encompassed my entire employment history:two terms as a – very bad - teacher, then, after a year or two on the dole, five years as first, a market and advertising research guy for Reader's Digest, and then as an 'account planner' in a small ad agency working on the Boots the Chemist account almost exclusively. I gave it all up in 1979.

I don't remember much about music in the early 1970s, but I do remember having not a lot of money, which was pretty much decisive. I dumped my PhD in the summer of 1971, and in Summer 1972 we quit the house at Abbey Street. Mike S, who was the only one apart from me to have lived there the whole five terms, and I bought a house around the corner, 27 East Street (it cost £4k and we put in a thou each, mine donated by my mother), and got in lodgers from the uni to pay the mortgage.

Apart from those couple of terms teaching O level English to teenage police cadets (which led to some bizarre juxtapositions in my life), I lived blissfully on the NAB until September 1973, when I was more or less forced to retrain (I went to secretarial college to acquire madskillz as a typist and failed to master Pitman shorthand), my dole was stopped and I actually contrived to live on nothing for six months.

Many of my uni friends had graduated and moved on, including Mike, and I was generally having a shit time living on scrounging and borrowing until I got the job at RD in 1974, and eventually moved to Putney. So I wasn't really buying anything, there was nothing much to buy, and I was still listening to the classics of the 60s, or to the light American stuff favoured by the group of studes who had moved into 23 Abbey Street after us, and where I used to hang out a lot, mooning after one or two of the women and waiting for someone to roll a joint.

Once I got to London, paid down my debts and started a sideline as a kind of buying agent for a group of friends who weren't as well connected as I (which would eventually develop into a retailing business), I could buy what I wanted, go to gigs (Hammersmith Odeon was but a bus-ride away), but I still didn't have a pet record shop. I think I mentioned earlier Black Wax, but that was imports and oldies soul and black music generally. I used to go to Virgin Marble Arch (handy from work in Mayfair) and a few places in Soho. I'd stopped buying singles, except second-hand or bargain bin stuff, and much of what I bought (for 10p) I didn't like much.

I was still going American in the mid-70s (with Spirit's Future Games the highlight), apart from For Your Pleasure and the next few Roxy albums, plus a few odd obscurities such as Ninth Wave, but America wasn't putting it out like it used to, and a lot of it - black as well as white, was coke crap. I was casting about. I read the NME assiduously, remember the Mick Farren Titanic articles, and the ones they did about CBGBs. And then came Horses, which brought together dumb-ass rock & roll and modern American literature and made something wonderful and strange out of it, a third or fourth way for a record to be great. And then there were the Ramones. And Television. And Blondie. And Jonathon Richman.

I started to wake up.

- When punk hit, it was divisive to say the least, however you seem to have embraced it though. What did you think of the criticisms that it was too basic and inept? And why did it inspire you to write a novel?

Well, I know what yo mean about it being divisive, but everyone I knew who cared about music saw it at worst as a relief after what had come before. I had read about the Pistols in the NME in 1976, and their career thereafter, but I had nothing to do with the early scene. In fact, I remember the first punk I actually talked to was a guy called Jonathon Sage (later Jon Savage) who had been at some kind of solicitors training course with my gal pal Frankie. It was awkward to say the least; I was a long-hair suited and booted for work, and he was very wary of me.

As I said above, I was well into the NME at this point, and while I enjoyed reading about the Pistols, I never heard them – where was I going to hear them? they weren't exactly all over the radio – until 28 May 1977 at Hammersmith Odeon, in the interval of the Blondie - Television tour (both bands seemed unsure how to function on the huge stage, and TV looked uptight and nervous, while Debbie was on great form and the band punched above their weight). I was up in the balcony, looking down into what was a vaguely desultory pit, when the guitar intro to No Future came crashing through the PA, and this extraordinary surge of power went through the crowd, a communicable adrenaline hit that you could see, taste and feel. Everyone in the pit was on their feet, every hair I had was standing to attention. I immediately knew what I was listening to, and this extraordinary powerful sound and incantation gave the immediate lie to the idea that these people couldn't play.

It was like a rebirth. No, really.

I was coming up to 29 years old, fundamentally unhappy and out of love with – out of innocent joy with – music, and suddenly there was this extraordinary demonstration of the redemptive power of electric sound. Within just a few weeks, I had tracked down a version of Anarchy, bought the Damned album and thrown myself into the records – singles, glorious singles. I had cash, I'd just moved to Cricklewood, and it was a couple of short bus rides to Ladbroke Grove, where Rough Trade became my emporium of choice, and I eventually got on first-name terms with Judy, Pete and Nigel, who took over the shop when Geoff Travis decided to concentrate on the label.

I was never a punk, though, any more than was ever a hippy, a rocker or a mod. I didn't do the fashions, or the clubs. Off-hand the only British punk bands I remember seeing were the Clash at the Mean Fiddler and the Undertones at Aberystwyth Uni, although I was still drinking as well as smoking so may have just forgotten some. I was just thrilled that, for the first time ever, there was a scene going on in the UK that I could relate to, the indie labels were setting up and there was this extraordinary do-it-yourself ethic taking hold: that horrid cosiness that the Beatles-loved-by-mums-and-dads had introduced, albeit inadvertently, was blown away, and there was a real ferment of creativity. That was the inspiration for the novel, btw; not the writing of it, which I finished around this time, but the self-publication in the early 1980s.

Oh, and the criticism about it being 'too basic' and 'inept'? Beneath contempt. Muso shit. I railed against it at the time. It was perhaps the best thing about punk, for me, along with the rediscovery of The Spirit; you don't have to be a virtuoso to make a record; there's more to music than musicality, and art is more important than craft. And Matlock, Jones and Cook were all good players, anyway. 

-What are your memories of post-punk?

Well, first of all, punk and post-punk bled into each other, and I didn't really make the disconnect until much later. I tended to think of most of the stuff released on the indie labels such as Factory, Stiff, Fast, Postcard and Rough Trade as punk, even though it wasn't the full three-chord amphetamine ramalama – because very little was that basic for more than about three or four months in 1977 anyway. I embraced punk as an attitude, rather than a style of dress – or music really. Just a sense of youthful creativity, Romanticism and iconoclasm swirling around, and unlike in any previous scenes, I had the money, time and inclination to indulge, so I did.

In April 1979, for various reasons, I jacked in my job at the ad agency and said goodbye to paid imprisonment for good. I never took on a salaried job again. I wanted to write, and thought, at 30, I ought to give it a go. I had an agent for Mbawe, and got some good comments, although I was never sanguine about finding a publisher. I thought I could support myself by retailing (well, it supported my intake, at least) and doing those casual jobs that look good on the dust-jacket of a novel – Kelly Girl (I did secretarial college, 60wpm typing), home cleaner (for an agency), doorman, nightwatchman – don't remember them all. I also wrote stuff for my former employers and for media mags. And bummed off my mother if things got difficult; it was she who lent me the money to get Mbawe printed in 1983.

Basically, though, the retailing was my most reliable source of support in the post-punk years. I knew three other retailers, and we occasionally wholesaled to each other, but each of us had another, deeper source somewhere. Mine was a guy I knew vaguely from uni, a friend of a friend really, who was very well connected, but preferred not to get too involved on a day to day level. He lived a distance away, in the south-west of London - round the corner from an Operation Julie house, as it happened – but fortunately his main business was antiques, and he had a stall in the Portobello Road. I fell into a regular habit on Saturday mornings of bussing in to the market, having a cup of tea and a transaction in a cafe, or plain sight - wads of notes and stuff passed across in carrier bags was a commonplace there – and then walking up to Rough Trade to see what was new there. They knew what I liked, and pulled out stuff to play me. It was just like the High Cross Record Centre all over again.

And another thing about this arrangement that impinged muscially was that my business was with a wide circle of mates who had known me for at least a decade, so there were always people coming in and out of the Mansions, who already looked to me as someone who would play them new – and old music as well as sell them dope (and get them stoned, feed them curry and provide a slide show, candle spectacular or video - it was a bleeding son et lumiere in that front room some nights.)

Some came every week. One of these, Ed, was a relatively new friend who married someone I'd known at Kent. He lived in Notting Hill, and was into dance, hip hop and people like the Cabs as well as punk and general raucousness (he had been a room-mate of Paul Mellor, Strummer, when studying photography at art college). Like me, he wasn't remotely musical, but loved records. He'd come round to the Mansions once a week with a six pack to pick up a quarter and play music. He also picked out my first stereo system (he was a studio technician by trade) in the early 1980s sometime, although the record player still saw sterling service.

In the 12 years I lived at the Mansions, I must have had a dozen room-mates – most of them old friends, who had their friends over, while those from the Kentish diaspora who had got further than London found my place a good one to crash in overnight on their way to Heathrow or to stay in if they fancied a bit of excitement they could not find in whqatever wretched provincial hole they had ended up in.

Generally speaking, I was more excited by, and involved in, records in the years 1977-1983 than any time before or since, a kind of second teenhood. Not just post-punk; early hip hop, disco, synthpop. Insane dark rock bands like the Only Ones and Doll by Doll. All those British bands that channelled not just the VU, but also Beefheart, Love, the Doors (but never, disappointingly, the Airplane). All those girls picking up guitars, making an unholy racket and demanding to be heard. Not just the Slits, but the Raincoats, the Mo-Dettes, Lilliput, Mambo Taxi, reinventing the girl group sound. Loved the huge sounds of the 12" single, too, the remixes, the dub versions, a grand time to be alive.

- You've spoken before on here about your late wife Chip and this relationship was clearly a defining moment in your life and a huge part of your story.

You can say that again. Chip and I met around 81-82 through my work (rather than tell the story again, it's here: http://chipandray.blogspot.co.uk/2013_0 ... chive.html) and our relationship changed everything, eventually, but there's thirty years of it, nearly half my life, so it's not always possible to say what changes came from that and what from just simply getting older and living. The circumstances of our lives together affected the way I listened to music, but it was never really an issue between us one way or the other.

- How similar/disimilar were your tastes? Was music one of the things that bonded you? Did you have a song?

Chip loved early ’60s American pop, Motown and soul from her teen years – she was 15 months older than me – and we both liked to listen to that in the early years of our relationship, while her record collection was an odd mix of sixties folkie stuff (I've written before about her connection with that scene in the early 60s; she grew up in Soho, knew the folk clubs well, and some of the musicians better - Royston Wood of the Young Tradition took her cherry, at a time he was sharing a house in West Hampstead / East Kilburn with Bert Jansch and John Renbourne. She also had an affair with Martin Carthy, knew Paul Simon, Jackson C Frank, Annie Briggs, and so on pretty well, and was on nodding terms with the other figures in that scene), random singles that had caught her fancy, and early 70s Americana – Little Feat, the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, many of which had been 'donated' by her first husband, Michael the coke dealer.

We didn't really do much listening together, on our own, though, and we didn't bond over it. I never went to a gig with her – in fact, I more or less stopped going at all. Once we moved in together (married in 1988, but didn't manage the house together until 1990), and I'd built afloor to ceiling cabinet to house all my vinyl (didn't get a CD player until 1997), music was something I did in a separate room. She wouldn't have a record player in the living room. Occasionally Chip would come in and ask me to play something over if she heard anything she liked, and if she had a favourite, she really loved it. Hey Leroy by the Jimmy Castor Bunch always made her smile, and that, along with Perdido by Snuff Smith, and Who Knows where the Time Goes were the music we chose for our second wedding in 2006 (she had divorced me in 2002), and I guess any of those could be our song - or Stay With Me by Lorraine Ellison. We both loved that.

- Has moving to the wilds of the west country changed your tastes in music?

Does Bristol count as the Wild West? because I lived thereabouts for 20 years before five in Devon. And my tastes in music changed, developed, shrank and widened over the quarter century – how could they not? – but I think it was more to with being in my 40s (and indeed, later, in my 50s), and married, and having quit dealing, and having a pet for the first time, discovering gardening, and living with someone who was ill for pretty much the whole time and who eventually found all loud sounds difficult to deal with...

By the 90s, my career in partworks – which had come about because I had given a copy of the self-published Mbawe to a friend of Chip, Yvonne, who, on the strength of it, recommended me as a writer to an editor called Sandy Carr (ex-wife of Ian Carr) who worked for Marshal Cavendish, and I proceeded therefrom to get commissions and editorial work for the next twenty-odd years – was well established, and I fell into a pattern of going up to London for a couple of nights, crashing with friends such as Ed or Howard, fitting in a week's work into a couple of long days, perhaps scoring from one of the three retailers, then buzzing home. I would sometimes fit in a gig, such as the first time I went to see Mercury Rev, or go to shops such as Sister Ray that were close to where I was working in Soho, or Rough Trade West in Covent Garden.

My big thing then were American bands such as Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr – and later YLT and Mercury Rev – and pretty much everything on the Shimmy disc label (Howard was also, and remains, a big fan), but it was only later in the ’90s that I found a record shop connection in Bristol, when Dean, a guy I met through joining an ultimate team in Bristol because I was desperate for a disc fix and no longer found it easy to get to see my Frisbee oppo, Jim Boone, in Brighton, introduced me to a former schoolboy international footballer and rasta who was working as a reggae DJ and dealing green on the sidelines at the time, but soon after got a job in Revolver in the bus station in Central Bristol, which I could reach on a bus from outside my door.

I got on well with the de facto manager, H, who played bass in band called The Heads, and I was shopping there pretty constantly, mainly buying back catalogue CDs from their second-hand racks, but also picking up some tasty vinyl, such as Beefheart's Grow Fins set. I bought myself a CD player for my 49th birthday, in 1997. The spark for this was a new fortnightly partwork I was sub-editing, called Jazz Greats. Each issue featured an essay on some artist or scene, and some great photos, but mainly a selection on cover-mounted CD or cassette of newly remastered out of copyright material by the artist(s) in question. 

While I had taken my music appreciation, through reading and some archive vinyl, back into the 1950s, and before, to Robert Johnson, say, and was vaguely aware of Glenn Miller and not liking Dixieland much, I had never really listened to popular music from before I was born. And when I heard this material, at first on tape, and later, once I had succumbed to the new-fangled tech at last, on CD, I realized that The Spirit I thought had risen out of the American soil in the post-war boom in fact ran back like a golden thread all the way to the 1920s, at least, and probably earlier, although there were no recordings of it; it is the great joy of the digital age that all this decades of stuff is out there to be enjoyed and wandered in.

Things changed with the advent of the interwebz and, to an extent, the boom in back catalogue releases on CD. I slowly realized that it was indeed what was in the grooves that counted, the sound rather than the artifact: with a few exceptions (none of Phil Spector's 60s productions have had perfect digital remasters), I came around to the idea that the vinyl was disposable if the sound was still available, and selling those demos in 2007 or 2008 was more a case of someone offering silly money, than my actually needing it.

And sometime in the last five years, in a slow and subterranean fashion at first. I've moved my stance from accumulation to disposal. I hardly ever listen to music when I am on my own – which I usually am – and tbh I suspect I'll never listen to 99%+ of my 'collection' again. The only reason I still have most of it – I've given some away to friends and the children of friends – is the logistical problem of selling it. I'm very resistant to the idea of selling the whole collection, as I'd likely get less than a tenth of what I could get if I sold piece by piece, and to some extent I saw the collection as my savings fund. 

It's not so much the cash, though – I've got enough to sustain my current lifestyle for ten years, by which time I'll be 77, if I survive (plus you never know what might Turn Up) – it's the sense of handing something on, rather than dumping stuff that I have loved and cherished and kept for over 50 years in some cases. Plus, there's not leaving it for my son to deal with. 

I'd be perfectly happy to sell on individual items for a fair price.

Any offers?