Ch-Ch-Changes

Sometimes, I'm sure, this blog does veer into the lane labelled "too much information". After all, why should anyone care about a succession of just-so stories about me, my rather uneventful life, and my inconsequential opinions? So be warned that this post is an edited extract from an ongoing project of "life writing", and there's no need to read it if you're not as interested in my life as I am... Although if your life has been even slightly similar you might enjoy the resonances.

Also, note that some of what is in here has been recycled from previous posts – apologies if you find yourself experiencing déjà lu – and the editing may have given a certain sense of disjuncture in places. All is true, but names may have been changed to protect the innocent, the guilty, and those subject to a "not proven" verdict.

Evidence...

If you've ever done any programming, you'll be aware of the concept of "epoch time". That is, a more-or-less arbitrary start date from which all other dates are calculated, generally by the number of seconds elapsed since or before the chosen zero point. It has always struck me as highly appropriate that in the Unix operating system (and thus much programming) the "epoch date" is January 1st 1970. My personal epoch may have begun, technically, early in 1954, but my own real life as an independent human being began in 1970. If ever there was a good time to be sixteen – debatable – 1970 may well have been it. In the sense that some people in the 1940s had "a good war", I had a good sixteen.

Of course, no year stands in isolation: everything that happens during a calendar year is the result of what happened in the preceding years, or is preparation for the future. Also, when you are of school-age, life follows the rhythm of the academic year, so the year I am remembering is really a fuzzy subset of the school years 1969-70 and 1970-71, divided and capped by the long vacations of summers 1969, 1970, and 1971. In my case, this span marked the transition from the end of compulsory education, when by far the majority of my contemporaries left school to find work, to the minority pursuit of voluntary sixth form studies. Ah, we few, we nerdy few, we band of brothers! For me, those years were the fulcrum around which my life turned, when the prospects of a wider world finally came into view.

In the years before about 1968, I was a quiet, obedient, and introverted boy who did well at school and, to the best of my memory, never gave my parents the remotest cause for concern. But the onset of my adolescence coincided with the turbulence of the late 1960s and some unexpected changes in our family circumstances that began my transformation into a more troubled and questioning youth. At that time we moved from our three-bedroom semi-detached council house into a fourth-floor, two-bedroom flat in a six-storey council block known as Chauncy House, one of the first edifices built in the New Town of Stevenage, which has since been demolished. It is strange to think, now, of that vacant space in mid-air that was once my bedroom, and the site of so much teenage hope, anxiety, excitement, and tedium. 

My parents were good, law-abiding people, very typical of the aspiring working and lower-middle classes of the time who – having grown up in the pre-welfare environment of the 1920s and 30s, and endured long wartime years of military service and the subsequent deprivations of rationing – were committed to doing nothing very much other than to enjoy the peace and material bounty of the 1950s and 60s, and to reap the benefits of conformity: a telephone, a fridge, a washing machine, a car, and for my father promotion from the shop-floor into an office job, which meant driving into work and wearing a suit, rather than riding the bus and pulling on overalls.

By 1970 they had also come into a new role as devoted grandparents, my sister having left home and married in something of a rush five years before. We spent an awful lot of weekends visiting her in a succession of locations as she and her husband raised their two girls while pursuing teaching careers, finally fetching up in deepest darkest Norfolk. Having always having felt something of an outsider in my family – my sister and our closest cousins were all the best part of a decade older than me – I now began to feel distinctly surplus to requirements. If I'm honest, at that age I found my parents and family deeply boring and, worse, clearly intent on cramping my style as the temptations of teenage life beckoned; I could not wait to leave home.

However, it had always been clear that education would be my route out of the tedium and limitations of an ordinary life in a small town, so leaving home would have to wait until I had got a decent set of exam results in my back-pocket. I had never doubted my abilities in the exam room and, as it turned out, not without justification: I finished the academic year 1969-70 with eleven O-levels, eight at the highest grade. True, I did also fail one (so-called "Additional Maths"), partly as a deliberate protest at having been made to do it, but mainly because I am profoundly mathematically-challenged. But that was a decent haul, by any standards. I remember buying a bottle of cider and drinking it in the sun to celebrate, sitting by myself on the grass beside the town centre pond where, eight years earlier, I had often gone fishing with my best friend from primary school, who may well have been somewhere else in town, celebrating his final release from school – in his case a "secondary modern" – into the real world of work.

But that is to jump ahead. In many ways, one of the most important, shaping experiences of that time was, for want of a better word, romantic. For an entire year, from Easter 1970 to Easter 1971, I "went out", as we used to say, with one of the most vivacious and life-enhancing girls in town. How on earth did that happen? Well, there were two necessary preconditions. I'll need to back up a bit more.

I used to walk to school in the morning and back again in the afternoon, usually in the company of my closest friend of those years, Alan, who lived nearby. He'd call at our flat, and we'd walk the familiar mile and a bit that took us out of the New Town and through the streets of the "old town" to the back gate of our school, which had been founded in 1558 as a classic, Shakespeare-era grammar school on the Great North Road. It had been substantially refurbished in the 1950s to accommodate the New Town population as a state boys' grammar, and then in 1968 had become a non-selective, "comprehensive" school. After lessons ended at 4 p.m. we'd walk back, alternately talking earnestly and joking tastelessly as teenage boys will. Now, as it happened, a coach that transported the girls back home from their own grammar school – situated at the other end of town – often pulled up just as we arrived at a particular point on the route, and a few girls would disembark. They would look straight through us as we gawped, while the seated occupants waved and made various other gestures at us, and one of them would then walk diagonally across a scrubby patch of grass to her house on the far corner. I thought she was awesomely, unattainably attractive, and – although I didn't know it then – her name was Jane.

The second thing was that our school took part in an annual "exchange" with a boys' Gymnasium (the equivalent of a grammar school) in what was then West Germany. Stevenage was partnered with Ingelheim-am-Rhein, a pleasant small town situated in wine-growing country on a bend of the Rhine between Bingen and Mainz, and home of the Boehringer pharmaceutical giant. We would alternate home and away exchanges, and at Easter 1970 those of us who were studying German were hosting the second visit of our exchange "partners" in our family homes. Easter that year fell in March, and it was cold and snowy. By then we knew each other well enough to acknowledge that most of us were in utterly incompatible pairings – the single thing my partner Achim and I had in common was that, unusually for both towns, our families lived in a flat – so once the Easter break had begun we'd all go our separate ways, and meet up in more congenial groupings. Mostly, the German lads seemed to like hanging out together at the bowling alley or the swimming pool; there wasn't much else to do in Stevenage on a cold day, after all. In the evenings, though, there were parties and youth clubs and the occasional concert. I found I was more than ready to come out of my swotty shell and discover night-time social life. So that was where all the girls had been hiding!

One Friday night soon after that break-out Easter, in a scene worthy of Gregory's Girl, I was in the Undercroft, a youth club situated in the crypt of a church, when a girl came up to me and asked, "My friend wants to know, would you like to go out with her?" I glanced over at her friend and nearly fell over: it was her, the girl from the school-bus... Asking me if I wanted to "go out"! Well, yeah, I s'pose... Why not? Apparently it had something to do with the lurid green straight-leg cord jeans I was wearing, although it was possible she hadn't been looking straight through me all those times at the bus-stop after all.

My life changed. Quite apart from having a steady girlfriend, I now found myself included in a magic circle of "boys from the boys' grammar with girlfriends from the girls' grammar". As some of those girls were sisters of older, sixth-form boys whose families lived in the more upscale parts of town – of which there were few, and all previously terra incognita to me – it was like gaining entry to a secret parallel universe. It was great; I was suddenly visible, somebody in what seemed, at the time, like a highly-sophisticated milieu. How I ever managed to concentrate on those upcoming O-level exams is a mystery. It helped that Jane was not yet 16: her parents insisted that she be home by 10:30, 11:00 at weekends, when her mother would make us milky coffee in the kitchen, before leaving us alone for a while in their front parlour. I don't think I had ever before been quite so profoundly happy as when walking that mile home from their house, sometimes at midnight when all the town's streetlights switched off simultaneously, a magical moment. And no-one has ever made milky coffee quite like Jane's mum.

Then in the long summer of that year I had two memorable holidays.

The first was a week camping in California with friend Alan. No, not that California, sadly: this was California, Norfolk, five miles north of Great Yarmouth, on a campsite situated on a low sandy clifftop that was inexorably crumbling into the cold, land-hungry North Sea; a precarious spot that finally vanished from the map in a storm some years ago. It was the first time we had been away from our parents without other adults in loco parentis. Our O-level exams were over but the results were not yet in, so we were in that pleasant limbo that lies like a lazy, sun-baked borderland between life's phases. To paraphrase Wordsworth, bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be sixteen was fucking brilliant, with everything turned up to maximum volume. The juke-box and radio hits of the time instantly bring the good feelings back: "All Right Now", "Big Yellow Taxi", "Lola", "Tears of a Clown" – all brand new yet somehow all already classics. We'll pass quickly over the inescapable earworm of summer 1970, "In the Summertime" by Mungo Jerry.

With our parents 120 miles away, we savoured that first, heady thrill of simple freedom. We marauded up and down those five miles of coast between California and Great Yarmouth, drinking, hanging out in amusement arcades and the bars and discos of the holiday camps and caravan sites strung along those precarious clifftops. Provincial and unsophisticated stuff, it's true, but however limited the imagination of youth may be in scope, it is nonetheless intense in application. One evening, separate adventures caused us to stagger off on different paths. Later, exhausted by the weary slog back up the beach, I fell asleep in the sand dunes amongst the marram grass and cigarette ends. I woke up, hung-over, damp and covered in wind-blown sand, as the sun cleared the bleary eastern horizon far out to sea. I found my hand was clutching a smooth, palm-sized rock, which on closer inspection turned out to be the worn heart-and-star fossil of a sea-urchin. I still have it, half a century later.

The second holiday was the last I would ever spend with my parents, a ten-day package holiday in a hotel in Cala Millor, Majorca. It wasn't great – as a surly 16-year-old who had just tasted pure uncut freedom, I behaved like a sullen half-wit with an unappeasable grudge – but it did have its moments. There were some memorable group trips, such as a descent into the caverns and lakes of the Cuevas del Drach, and a simple barbecue in a light rain shower, with freshly caught fish grilled right on the beach, raindrops spitting as they splashed the hot griddle. I also had my own room for the first time, so I could slip out at night and sample the nearby bars. ¡Rum y Coke, por favor! Most memorable, though, was one of my earliest and closest brushes with death.

Rather than sit with my parents lazing on the beach, I had got into the habit of going for long, solitary walks into the Majorcan countryside which, away from the hotels and bars, is truly amazingly beautiful. One afternoon I was walking along a nearby rocky peninsula, Punta de n'Amer – head down, dazed and dazzled by the heat and lost in my own thoughts – when I nearly stepped straight over the cliff at the end of the promontory. I can still recall the shock of gazing between my feet at the waves lapping jagged rocks seventy feet below. I particularly remember the dramatic change in the ambient acoustic: one second it was all shrill insects, up close and intimate like the tinnitus I now endure, the next it was the vast echoing antechamber of a lonely, painful death, narrowly avoided. It would have been a true "Musée des Beaux Arts" moment: out to sea a fishing boat was chugging by, and you can imagine the fishermen remarking (to paraphrase Auden, this time) "something idiotic, a boy walking off a cliff", but sailing on, with a fresh catch to unload.

So, that was the context into which my O-level results fell: it couldn't have seemed more natural, more appropriate. I had tasted freedom, I had tasted first love, I had even tasted mortality, and now the academic world had stamped my passport with a provisional visa to anywhere. Or, at any rate, to the sort of freedoms and privileges that can be obtained in exchange for paper credentials earned in an exam room. I experienced those middle months of 1970 as an escalating rush of self-awareness and exultant justification, and it changed me, I think. I probably became insufferably cocky for a while. My father, a patient and tolerant man, clearly found living with the bolshie know-all his quiet little boy was turning into a bit of a challenge, and we nearly came to blows several times. But the next year, 1971, would deliver some blows of a sort calculated to restore a measure of humility and self-questioning.

A regular stop-off on the way home from school would be a couple of stores in the Town Centre where empty 12" LP sleeves were kept in protective plastic covers, alphabetically arranged in racks that you could flip through. Those LP racks were a sort of library: for small-town, working-class kids like us, short of cash and cultural capital, the record displays that sat at the back of those shops offered a free creative education in art, photography, design, and typography, one square foot at a time. In a town like Stevenage there was no such thing as a "record shop": the first LP I ever actually bought came from similar racks in an electrical store, which otherwise mainly sold TVs, radios, and toasters. As it happened, it was the studio half of Cream's Wheels of Fire, with its psychedelic silver sleeve by Martin Sharp, but I had already handled and pored over many, many more, admiring and absorbing their pictorial styles, the more excessive the better, along with all the small-print details of music I would never actually get to hear, often made in places I had never heard of, never mind expected ever to visit. I mean, where the hell was Nashville? Or Detroit? Why did people keep going on about them? Like travel brochures to exotic destinations, or the copies of National Geographic in the dentist's waiting room, record sleeves were documentary evidence of and an invitation to a fuller, more colourful world that existed out there somewhere, if only you could break free of the gravitational pull of small-town life. And along with that invitation came a huge, new challenge: did you dare to be different?

For most of us boys who wanted to remain at school to secure the all-important higher-education passport, and yet who also wanted to be visibly part of what was going on in that wider world, this usually came down to hair. School rules are a good index of post-war teen fashions: in 1970 there were already rulings against excessive grease, sideboards (sideburns), exaggerated quiffs, and hair below the collar. "Conformity" and "non-conformity" were keywords of those years. Schools saw an important part of their social role as enforcing the conformity that so many of our parents had bought into so willingly, or that had been drilled into them in the armed forces. It seemed it was not enough to attend lessons, pay attention, and pass exams: you were required to wear a uniform, be obedient to what often seemed arbitrary rules, and to take part in the "life of the school". Well, for many of us that ran counter to the spirit of the times. Those who were too cool for school left, and took their A-levels at the local FE college. The rest of us resisted as far as possible. I wish I had a group photograph of some of the hairstyles that could scrape by on a technicality. The best I can offer is that "International Student Identity Card" from 1972 above, a finely-judged display of collar-length topiary; if only my hair was that bushy now.

In fact, my most frequent conflicts were over shaving. I was one of those boys who had to start shaving relatively early and, worse, I had a substantial growth of tough ginger stubble the entire length of my neck, which would get sore under the razor. I hated shaving, and would put it off until taken aside by a teacher, and told not to come in to school tomorrow looking like that. What sort of example did it set the younger boys? My fast-mouth replies about 12-year-olds growing beards never did go down well.

I suspect I was only tolerated because I was an Oxbridge prospect – nothing mattered more to the old state grammar schools than a handful of Oxbridge successes every year, unless it was victory on the games field – and refusenik tendencies that would have led to a swift exit from school in other cases – and did – were accommodated as mere eccentricity. Sandals? Suede walking boots? Provocative hair-length? Wrong tie? Won't shave? Don't worry: he's one of our academic "characters". Wait and see how the A-levels pan out... I wasn't the only one, of course, and it must have been around then that I realised that the "awkward squad" was my natural home.

Of course, it was also around then that, for perhaps the next couple of decades or so, the awkward squad became the coolest gang to be in. Certainly, sporty types and tough guys could command a certain respect, but the combination of exciting new music and the novel, non-physical kinds of daring introduced by the "counter culture" – stuff like long hair, drugs, loud music, poetry, and radical politics ( at least as filtered down into the imaginings of naive small-town teenagers living well away from the major cultural centres) – meant that the disaffected, the bespectacled, the nerds and refuseniks – the Whole Sick Crew of misfits in general – finally had their place in the sun. Although many preferred the strobe-lit darkness of a concert hall or youth club, where you could perfect your slouch and sneer of disaffection, and even "idiot dance" to Led Zeppelin like an electrocuted marionette.

Chasing girls...

This all gave an additional edge and substance to one of the happiest moments of my young life, which took place around 12:40 pm on my 17th birthday in  February 1971. I was by then in the lower sixth form, and at around 12:30 I was hanging around in our common room, with its usual noisy, hormonal lunchtime hubbub. However, I became aware of a quietening, a tension, and then whispers of "Where's Mike? Where's Mike?"

I looked around, not a little apprehensively, only to see three familiar grinning girls in the uniform of their grammar school standing in a line, each holding a chocolate cupcake with a lit candle in it. It was Jane, and her two best friends, Pat and Anne. They proceeded to sing "Happy Birthday" and then each gave me a birthday kiss, right in front of the astonished, envious, open-mouthed sixth form, before muttering a few words of explanation, and scampering off. It was a coup de théâtre that left me feeling like the proverbial dog with two tails. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

I should explain. In an operation worthy of Mission Impossible, these three girls had broken their school's rules by leaving the school premises, crossed from one side of town to the other on public transport, entered the grounds of an unfamiliar boys-only school, found the sixth form block, entered into its inner sanctum, found the lucky boy whose birthday it was, performed the ceremony described above, and then reversed all the previous steps without mishap, detection, or detention. I'm not sure, being a typical teenage male dirtbag, whether I ever expressed an appropriate degree of gratitude to Jane, Pat, or Anne, or even how far I believed I was worth all that trouble. Certainly, it never even occurred to me to reciprocate with some similar act of imagination. Duh... But I'll never, ever forget that day.

It is almost certainly not entirely unconnected that, sadly for me, the relationship with Jane that had begun just after Easter 1970 had run its course by Easter 1971. She "chucked" me, as we used to say, on my return from that year's away exchange visit to Ingelheim. I didn't see it coming, and it broke my heart at the time; the first cut really is the deepest. We had become close and – as I realise now, reading through a diary I was keeping at the time – surprisingly and perilously intimate at times. But I think she was simply bored with me and the routines we had fallen into – 17-year-old boys know nothing about keeping the unsteady flame of romance burning – and there may have been parental intervention, too: nobody wanted to see a pair of promising young people follow Route A to truncated lives of frustration at such an early age. So, much of the rest of my transformative year had a dark cloud over it, even if somewhat dispelled by a couple of briefer romances, and the company of good friends.

Unless you too have been to a single-sex school, you probably won't understand the almost surreal hunger that can develop for contact with the opposite sex. I can't speak for any gay pupils at single-sex schools, of course, but then nobody – absolutely nobody – would ever have dared to openly express same-sex longings at a state boys' school in those days. For me, there were times when simply seeing the word "girl" in print was mysteriously mood-altering. Sadly, and sometimes alarmingly, many pupils of single-sex schools enter the wider world with the mystery of gender still wrapped inside its enigmatic packaging, but during that year I had discovered that I was one of those fortunate boys who found girls fun to talk with and listen to, and that they – who'd have thought it? – could be the best of friends. Luckily for everyone concerned, I was too short and too plain-looking ever to exploit this facility but it may, I suppose, have made it much easier to throw off the casual misogyny of my upbringing in my university years.

There were more changes in store for me. For example, one Saturday night later that year I found myself around the back of a pub on the High Street of the "old town" in the company of three or four friends, all crowded into the small lobby that contained a pay-phone and doors to the bars and the toilets. I can't remember what we were doing there; that pub was not one that we drank in – not all Stevenage pubs welcomed underage drinkers – but I suppose we may have been using the telephone. The door to the public bar opened suddenly, hitting me in the side. By reflex, I must have said something along the lines of, "Ow, watch it, mate!" as the door-opener headed to the toilet. A minute or so later he re-emerged, a small, wiry man, probably in his 40s or older. "Do you have something to say to me?" he demanded, in an unmistakably Irish voice. "Um, no, I've got nothing to say ...", I began to reply, interrupted by a crashing right-handed punch to my mouth that swayed me backwards like one of those free-standing inflatable punch-bags. By the time I'd recovered my wits he had vanished, and I was spitting teeth onto the floor. Those three or four friends had meanwhile been mere spectators to the whole event, frozen to the spot in open-mouthed disbelief.

There was a coda to this story. One of those friends was the son of the local organiser of the builders' trade union, UCATT, and described the assault to his father, a tough guy of some standing locally: it seemed likely my assailant was working on one of the building sites in town. So he asked around the sites on the following days: "Anyone know anything about hitting a little guy in the White Lion last Saturday night?" To which eventually came the reply, in that same Irish voice: "He wasn't that bloody little!" Which is true: my memory is that he was actually rather shorter than me. As far as I know nothing came of this self-incrimination: it certainly never occurred to anyone to prosecute the man. You didn't back then, did you? Besides, my own father was quietly disgusted that neither I nor any of my mates had got any retaliation in before the guy had managed to disappear from the pub. Young people today...

The less amusing long-term consequence has been that those two broken front teeth – one replaced with an implant, the other crowned – have been nothing but trouble ever since, constantly falling out, and I was glad to have to lose one of them permanently a few years ago. I think the gap adds to my charm; others may disagree, but I am never going to use the pink plastic partial plate my dentist made to replace it, with its single tooth. You'd have to be very vain (and a very careful eater) ever to feel it was worth putting up with that.

The final summer of this sort-of year set a pattern for the next few years. I and a friend would head off into Europe – in this first instance in 1971, it was the son of that UCATT organiser, Tony – crossing the Channel by ferry, then hitchhiking or Eurorailing to wherever took our fancy (but avoiding France, which had a terrible reputation as a hitchhiking deadspot). The roads from Amsterdam and all points south were swarming with young backpackers in those days, and youth hostels and "sleep-ins" lined the major routes. There were two types of sleep-in. First, there were the cheap dormitories with bunks and basic facilities, not unlike youth hostels, and plentiful in popular destinations like Amsterdam. These were oriented to youth culture, and usually had a few very basic rules like "no dealing on the premises; no tripping in the dormitory". Then there were the emergency municipal sleeping spaces, often a school hall or gym, aimed at getting the young summer backpackers off the streets as they passed through town. This was European civic-mindedness at its tolerant best: pretty much anywhere you ended up you would be able spend the night in your sleeping bag on a hard floor alongside maybe 50 or more other young pilgrims. Gibt es hier ein Sleep-in, bitte?

It was a lot of fun, but at times dangerous and anxiety-provoking, especially for female and solo backpackers, but few who wanted the experience let the dangers put them off. In fact, one of those briefer "romances" I referred to above came about when two young women we knew from our home town who were travelling together broke up for reasons I don't recall, and one of them travelled solo across Germany on the off-chance I might still be staying in Ingelheim at the house of a former exchange partner, having sent a letter that I only received there the very morning before she arrived. Things like getting woken up in the small hours on a railway station with a prod from a nightstick and then being interrogated by American MPs looking for deserters – these were the Vietnam years – could be scary, as could the occasional lunatic driver, or getting lost at night in the sketchier districts of large cities. But at that age "danger" is spelled "adventure", isn't it?

Probably the most memorable of these for me was the trip in 1973 with another girlfriend that took us far down into the Greek islands, oblivious to the military coup taking place there, as described in the post Blue, but each of those four late-teen summer excursions was an adventure in its own right that deserves a proper account. Another time, perhaps. It is amazing in retrospect, though, that our parents were willing to go along with all this, but then I suppose if you had spent six prime youthful years enduring the boredom, privations, and dangers of wartime military service, hitching lifts through peacetime Europe and occasionally sleeping rough must have seemed fairly benign. Perhaps littering Europe's towns, cities and roads with their scruffy, ungrateful, and impecunious kids might even have counted as some sort of revenge. Although whether on Europe or on us is an interesting question. Certainly, though, in those days before mobile phones and the internet it would have given them a well-earned break from our restless generation with its baffling concerns, idiotic fashions, and exasperating self-importance.

Rotterdam, 1971