The Smiths’ house in Crawley was tucked away down a leafy cul-de-sac that dripped suburbia. They had moved from my grandmother’s street in Horley a few years back and now lived in one of the nicer areas in Crawley. That’s a bit of an oxymoron, but they had managed to find a pleasant refuge amid the general blandness of the new town.
Their house was hidden behind a screen of tall trees on a big lot. This meant, luckily for us, that they would be able to extend, should they wish, which indeed they did in the late seventies. It seems we had come of age at exactly the right time to make use of the extra room that was being added to the Smith residence. I still believe that Robert’s mum and dad, Rita and Alex, planned it that way, saw the writing on the wall, and with great foresight gave us our place, our woodshed that enabled us to become a proper band.
The summer of 1976 was extremely hot. Way before anyone was thinking about global warming, we had the hottest summer of the twentieth century in London and the UK.
Almost a decade after the hippies we had our own “summer of love.” We learned how to love what we did and formulate a plan to get out of dullsville. Most of that hot summer I rode pillion on Michael’s new Honda motorcycle, grateful for the cooling breeze that it brought while speeding down narrow roads to one of the many small country pubs that surrounded us in the outlying districts of Horley and Crawley. In hindsight, these were rural rooms full of bitterness and bile. However, we spent most of our time at the Smith house, plotting our next move.
If you looked around teenage Robert’s bedroom, you would have seen, among all the usual objects, the signs of future greatness.
A tiny black 30-watt Watkins Electric Music guitar amp sat next to his bed, doing double duty as his bedside table. It was very small and very discreet but precisely what he needed to learn to play the Woolworths Top 20 guitar he had saved up and bought for £20.
The most telling items in the room sat in a neat row on the shelf above his bed. Next to the existential tomes of Camus and Sartre, he’d assembled an unusual collection of every kind of tin can you could imagine. What seemed plain and ordinary in the corner shop had been cleaned, emptied, and elevated into punk art on Robert’s bedroom shelf: a minimalist show of everyday ordinariness that spoke to the greater longing for escape from suburbia, where commonplace items could stand symbolically for our teenage angst and as an absurdist counterpoint to the innate, inexplicable violence waiting on every corner for us in Crawley new town. Life here was rendered meaningless by default, and the teenage Robert knew that instinctively.
We would practice our songs and our cover versions at the Smiths’ and try to come up with new ones three times a week. Rita and Alex were blessed with great patience, as it must have felt like they were living next door to a little girl learning to play the violin. Except louder, much louder, especially after Robert became the proud owner of a black Marshall stack!
Those were a strange couple of years for us. I had left school at sixteen to work at Hellermann Deutsch (known as Hellermann’s to the locals) in East Grinstead, ostensibly to be trained as a chemist for their laboratory, which allowed me to study at Crawley College. I found out later they were much more than an electronics firm: they were a defense contractor that made missile parts. If only I’d known then what I know now.
Both Robert and Michael had elected to stay on in the sixth form (equivalent to the last two years of high school) until they were eighteen, but after that they joined me at Crawley College. We were not quite on career paths and were making do with a kind of halfway existence between teendom and adulthood, but out of that strange no-man’s-land came The Cure.
That long hot summer I helped both Porl and Michael obtain employment at Hellermann’s factory with me. I thought it would be better for us if we were all together. I had met Porl through his sister Carol, whom I had gone out with. I still recall our first conversation at his house where I was visiting his sister, and on that day I was desperately trying to ingratiate myself with her older brother. It went something like this:
Me: “Would you like a cup of tea? I’m just making one.”
Porl: “Not if it’s anything like your taste in shirts, mate!”
Of course, we became friends immediately. In fact, we were so engrossed in talking about music that summer that it wasn’t very long before Carol dumped me, as I was paying her too little attention and Porl far too much! At that point, I discovered he was a really good guitarist and hatched a plan to get him in our band.
As usual, Robert was way ahead of me and was already aware of Porl, as he’d met him in Crawley’s only decent record shop—Cloake’s, just off Queen’s Square, the banal 1950s pedestrian plaza in the middle of Crawley. Years later we would play on the tiny bandstand in the middle of Queen’s Square on the fast track out of there.
Porl and Robert had bonded over a recording of whale songs, of all things, and mutual admiration of The Sensational Alex Harvey Band (remember their guitarist Zal Cleminson and his crazy clown face in “Delilah”?). Pretty soon Porl made his way over to the Smiths’ house and we started playing together.
There was another enticement for Porl: Robert’s younger sister Janet. It wasn’t long before they became a couple. The plot was thickening . . .
For Porl, Michael, and myself, the Felbridge pub next to Hellermann’s was our comfort and respite from the heat in the airconditionless factory. We would be served by our friend Quincy’s beautiful older sister, who worked at the pub. We all sat adoringly at her feet, watching her pour foaming pints of solace. The pub was dark and brown and rumored to be run by the Scientologists, whose headquarters were not far away in Saint Hill. The sullen but exquisite factory girls would distract us occasionally, but we were much too weird and young for them, so they mostly left us to our own devices.
After a typical English winter of rain and cold, it felt liberating to bask in the near-constant sunshine of the highly unusual summer of 1976. Growing up as we did in near perpetual drizzle and gloom, I’ve always loved the sun, and I believe that particular year provided us with the energy we needed to create and be free in a way that might not have happened had it been a typical English summer. There was more than heat in the air.
Although the political climate was dire and we stood very little chance against our preordained future, this extra burst of life force charged us up. It made us believe we could dream, and if we could dream, we could escape. Anything was possible. One of the central ideas for us was not to have to live a normal life and not to go to a normal job. We were determined not to be “wage slaves.” We wanted to create our own future. Robert, especially, was dead set against anything that would set him on the path to a boring life.
When the career adviser at our secondary school, St. Wilfrid’s, asked him what profession he was considering, he had the effrontery to say “pop star.” But I knew he meant it and that the smirk would one day come off the adviser’s face. Michael wanted to study to be a writer and was told, “Not many openings in journalism. Try business studies.” In other words, forget your dreams. It’s not going to happen for you and your ilk, the lost boys of suburbia.
Back in the Felbridge, I was sitting at the bar in my torn Levi’s that had once been flared, but now, thanks to my mother’s dexterity with needle and thread, were punky skintight drainpipes. I was tapping idly against the barstool rail with my new black brothel creepers when I heard a noise coming from the back room of the pub. It seemed quite familiar, but at the same time oddly different. Music like we made at the Smiths’ house, but more muscular and polished in a way that I had never really heard before. Sure, we were regular attendees at the south London Greyhound Ballroom on a Sunday, seeing such disparate bands as Thin Lizzy, Can, and Stray, but I hadn’t heard something like this sound at such close quarters. The band, whoever it was behind the noise, was rehearsing, because they were stopping and starting to improve pieces of the music. There, in the middle of the pub on a weekday afternoon, I was hearing modern music being deconstructed in a way I hadn’t personally experienced before.
The drums in particular were of interest to me. The drummer soloed from time to time, and between songs I could hear him make fills and beats I had only ever heard before in conjunction with other musicians’ efforts. The mystique of making rock music was being unraveled before my very ears.
I drank the cold brew in sips and listened intently to the thumping tones coming from behind the bar, which eventually stopped when the door opened to reveal the perpetrators of this lovely noise. As the guys trooped out into the bar, I recognized one of them straightaway: Woody Woodmansey! Was this, then, The Spiders from Mars, David Bowie’s famous band? Were The Spiders rehearsing in our local pub? Maybe Bowie himself was there too?
It turned out that it was Woody’s new band, U-boat, rehearsing. Nevertheless, I felt like I had been blessed by rock royalty to be given a backstage pass to hear how it was done for real.
The passing of the torch, you might say, even though he never said a word to the group of dumbstruck teens sitting in the Felbridge that sunny afternoon. Woody looked regal in his full-length fur coat and various glam accoutrements as he swept through the door of the pub.
“Bloody hell, Porl. Did you see who that was?” I asked, wide-eyed.
Porl grinned back at me. “Woody bloody Woodmansey, I believe, Lol!”
However implausible it seemed, we took Woody’s presence in our midst to mean that we were on the right track. It had to mean something. It was a sign from the gods, surely?
Continuous sun in England is as much of an anomaly as regular rain in the Sahara. But the summer of 1976 was just like that, an anomaly. We were teenagers just starting to consider life as adults. It was a summer I would never ever forget. For one thing, we finally had our own room to practice in, despite the many attempts by the Smiths’ neighbors to shut us down.
One day the doorbell rang and there stood a portly, red-faced, middle-aged man. “Your son and his friends are making that noise, yes?”
“If you mean their band rehearsal, then, yes, that’s them,” Robert’s mother replied.
“Well, whatever it’s called it’s got to stop. They’re disturbing the community. I can’t hear myself think with that bloody racket going on!”
Rita considered this for about a millisecond.
“Well, I’ll tell them to stop playing when you tell your dog to stop pooing on my lawn!”
And with that, she firmly closed the door on the matter, and The Cure had in Rita Smith our first champion. Of course, the neighbor was quite right: we were disturbing the community. But that had been our intention all along.
In the middle of that road-melting summer, Alex and Rita Smith decided to go on holiday, leaving Robert in charge of the house and environs. A little unwise, on reflection.
We were delighted by this development and immediately sprang into action. We knew exactly what was going to happen now: band camp!
College was on holiday, and I had accrued a few days off from Hellermann’s, so with some careful planning we could play at the house for at least a week. A week or more of nonstop bliss for us.
Outside the thermometer was creeping toward 90 degrees—an unheard-of temperature in England. We had abandoned the stuffy annex to take up residence in the Smiths’ dining room, because there was a smidgen of air blowing through the house that we could trap there and use to cool the practice sessions. Many cables snaked across the dining-room floor, as we had wired up everything we owned to make as much noise as possible. Connecting all of our instruments together took a while, but the resulting cacophony was surely worth it. We had bought a green Roland echo box, which we could feed all the vocals through to give us what we felt was a very professional sound.
The heat was intense, so I stripped to my shorts and a T-shirt for banging the drums. We found the heat also required that we drink copious amounts of liquid to keep hydrated. Of course, this also meant that we had to make frequent forays to the local pub during breaks in our band practice.
The Grey Fox pub had an atmosphere familiar to any inhabitant of late-1970s England. Just having the temerity to walk into the pub was enough to enrage one of the local drunks. They were mostly bleary-eyed, middle-aged men whose light had been extinguished years before, and who now sought to intimidate and bully those who crossed their path. This usually meant anyone coming into the pub whom they didn’t know personally. These guys didn’t have a lot of friends.
A loud, red-faced man playing a harmonica very badly dropped the instrument from his lips as soon as we entered. He swiveled his head around, and with one squinty eye scouted out anyone that might be offended by his ineptitude on the instrument.
“What youse fucking looking at?” he slurred.
Once he caught your gaze, he would violently hurl his glass on the ground, or—more spectacularly—at the mirrored back of the bar, and start to fight anyone who came into range. We steered clear. He was like a captive monkey, playing to the crowd that was entirely inside his head. Yes, we had plenty of examples of the types of people we definitely didn’t want to become in Crawley pubs in the summer of 1976.
I walked across the carpeted room and out onto the patio beyond. It had been so hot for so long we had almost forgotten what England was normally like.
This was a country woefully underprepared for a summer like the one of 1976. There was no air conditioning to speak of and precious few ice-making facilities. We sweated it out night after night and day after day.
The tar on the streets resembled a molten black river. Kids sneaked eggs out of the fridge to throw on the ground and watch them fry in the sun.
We were gawky adolescents just getting used to our not-quite-adult bodies and minds, and like many teens we were trying to find our way through a jungle of conflicting information.
We spent a long time that summer on the Smiths’ patio looking out over The Guru’s chickens, which were clucking away at the back of the garden. Most of the time we played records from his collection outside on a little portable, from which we would glean various truths of rock-and-roll history and try on different styles. This was where certain elements of what was to become The Cure’s signature sound came from. And some of it will surprise people. For instance, one LP on steady rotation that summer was the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s second album, Birds of Fire. Other contenders included Nils Lofgren’s Cry Tough and the usual Brit rock stalwarts, like Pink Floyd, The Beatles, and The Stones. We all had our personal favorites. I recall that Robert particularly liked Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica. We were devoted acolytes of much that had come before, plundering The Guru’s precious back catalog.
More than anything we were united in our general dislike of most of the overblown pap that masqueraded as “progressive” music, plus the fact that it all seemed so far removed from our own experience growing up in Crawley. I couldn’t imagine The Moody Blues having a running battle with racist skinheads in their hometown streets. Then again, they came from Birmingham, so who knows . . .?
As the Smiths’ holiday wore on, we spent more and more time bashing out our sound in their dining room. I had the Pearl Maxwin kit, my first, and I loved it. Besides the aforementioned Marshall, Robert had added a brown Gibson Explorer guitar—a copy, I hasten to add, as none of us could afford the real thing at that point. British amplification and American guitar: the archetypal rock-and-roll setup. Michael completed his array with a brown Guild bass, and Porl with his black Les Paul copy. We were ready to make a lot of noise, and we did. In between songs, we drank the Smiths’ home brew and sometimes smoked the Gitanes we took from their beautiful blue box. When we were hungry, a trip to the fish and chip shop sufficed.
It was a beautiful time, without artifice or pretense. We were discovering our art. Life was very simple and pure.
Robert and I sometimes got ready for rehearsal by sneaking into The Guru’s room when he wasn’t about and playing a couple of tracks. We had plenty of opportunities to do that during the Smiths’ vacation.
Robert was flipping through the albums on the shelf when he asked me if I’d heard Ray Charles’s “Hit the Road Jack.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
He put it on The Guru’s expensive turntable. We listened intently for a couple of minutes.
“Pretty bloody great, right?” he said, grinning.
“It’s brilliant!” I agreed.
We were in awe of the power of that piano riff. Total genius.
You have to remember that in the late 1970s, there was no Internet to inform us how to become a band. Nor were there any helpful TV shows to show the way. We didn’t grow up in a big city where we could follow the example of others. We were on our own. This proved to be a blessing. We were allowed to flower on our own with fewer outside influences than most of the bands of our time. If we had been in the center of London, for instance, I feel certain we would have turned out very differently.
Where we grew up was as much a factor as anything else that influenced The Cure’s sound. For a start, there was the uniformly drab nature of the new towns after the Second World War, which had the overflow from bombed-out London mixed in with the more rural folks of Surrey and Sussex. Then there were the asylums.
Many mental hospitals operated in our area, mainly because we were close to a large population that would need their services. These institutions were tucked away in the pleasant southern English countryside where there would be more space for them.
Although there were high-security facilities like Cane Hill (where David Bowie’s half-brother was a patient for a while before he escaped and committed suicide), there were also more benign facilities, like Netherne, where, back in 1948, Eleanor Roosevelt had visited, proclaiming, “The United States has much to learn from a hospital like Netherne.” It was the first hospital to offer art therapy for its patients, which was a radical departure in an era that generally only offered a routine of heavy sedation or lobotomy for any extreme mental problems the patients might have.
On any given Saturday, some of the less disturbed patients might be allowed to get on a bus and come into town, where we would occasionally encounter them. They were strange, lost-looking people—men mostly, some of whom wore their jackets up over their heads as if to protect themselves from the outside world. They wandered the streets like ghosts, or sat hunched all afternoon over a single cold cup in the local tea shop. I suspect many of them were what we would now call posttraumatic stress disorder casualties from the Second World War, but back then there was no real treatment other than permanent institutionalization. However, our connection to this strange world got a bit stronger when Michael got a job at Netherne as a porter.
Although we were certainly old enough to go to London by ourselves and wander the streets of the capital, it was still a difficult twenty-five-mile drive with no motorway. A trip would take two hours or more through many small towns on the A23, which was invariably congested and slow as sludge. Sometimes we might go up on the train, but mostly I rode on the back of Michael’s bike, which meant that more often than not we just stayed in our local area and contented ourselves with the usual run of pubs before heading back to the sanctuary of the Smiths’ house and our musical discoveries.
One night we decided to go to the rolling lush lawns of Netherne for a party. It promised a distraction from our normal Saturday-night routine at the Cambridge. We all piled into Robert’s latest vehicle, a small blue Vauxhall Chevette, named perhaps after the American car of the same name, though it hardly resembled its stateside counterpart. It was a small-engine hatchback that four people could barely squeeze into.
Robert had access to several cars growing up, mainly because of his father’s job. There were always cars being retired from Upjohn’s representatives’ fleet. They were quite worn out, having been driven the length and breadth of the country several hundred times by the pharmaceutical company reps, but for young teens, they were just the ticket to take us out of our humdrum hometown.
The party was being held in one of the nurse’s residences, inside the actual grounds of the asylum. A little daunting under normal circumstances, but there was the lure of excitement and diversion from our normal activity.
We drove the seventeen or so miles north to Netherne Hospital. It was also closer to London, so we naturally associated it with adventure and action, as we did with most everything coming from the capital. We were suburban middle-class boys, and the city held the promise of the new world we were anxious to partake in. Even an old Gothic asylum on the edge of town would do.
The party was unremarkable and not in the slightest bit memorable. It was a dull affair with lots of drinking and little talking going on. We didn’t really know anybody, and our appearance, with our punky outfits, was at odds with the general attire of the other partygoers. They were still trapped in dismal disco culture, while we wore strange trousers we had found at village jumble sales, and mohair jumpers we had persuaded our mothers to knit. I had a black one with large holes in it and the aforementioned jumble sale trousers. This was looked on with a kind of apathetic anger by the locals, who avoided talking to us for most of the evening. I say most of the evening because occasionally they might attempt to interact with us, although you could hardly call it friendly.
“What do you call that getup?” one of the smirking yobs would shout, to much chuckling from his mates. “You look a proper dog’s dinner, you do! Are you poofs or what?”
Most of the time we tried to avoid replying to the unpleasant jibes. Not because we didn’t want to tell them to fuck off, you understand, but we knew instinctively that this line of questioning was usually the precursor to having a punch-up if you engaged with them in any way. Also, our being outnumbered meant it was not likely to go in our favor. So we decided to bite our tongues and ignore the ignorant baiting.
“You must be on drugs to dress like that, mate!” This was usually the end to the reasoning process for them. If you didn’t look like them, you must be either homosexual or on drugs or both. Stupid wankers.
Strangely, we were probably only slightly aware of what drugs were or even what they represented. We were babies, really. Everyone at the party got very drunk, including us. It’s been said that around 80 percent of the population in England drinks, and I can attest to the likelihood of that statistic based on this one night.
Robert, Michael, and I stumbled out to the waiting baby-blue Chevette. Through the haze of alcohol-impaired thinking the conversation went something like this:
“I don’t think I should drive right away. I’m feeling more than a bit pissed!”
Michael said he didn’t think he could drive either. I didn’t know how to drive, something I would not learn to do for many years. As the only two licensed drivers among us couldn’t function properly, we were at a little bit of a loss as to how to get home that night. Nobody was going to let me drive even if I could have done it. I hadn’t passed my test yet, and we were (at the core of our beings) still nice, law-abiding, middle-class boys.
“So shuuul we sleep ittoff on the grass?” I slurred.
Someone suggested we should sleep it off in the car. The small confines of the Chevette seemed a little uncomfortable as a solution, but we didn’t have much choice. We had no money for a taxi or a hotel, so unless we wanted an encounter with the local constabulary, our only alternative was to stay put until we sobered up enough to drive. We’d had our share of run-ins with the police, as we lived right next to London’s second airport, Gatwick. There were many more policemen on the local streets than would be usual for a small suburban town like ours. As they had nothing to do, they spent a lot of time harassing the local teens, or so it seemed to us.
Michael then came up with a solution. As he worked at the hospital, he knew of a safe place for us to hide out until we sobered up.
“The home farm!” he exclaimed. “It’s very quiet and nobody goes there at night. We can park next to the runner beans until we can drive home.”
I looked a little unsure about staying overnight at a psychiatric hospital. “Um, everyone’s locked up for the night, right?”
Michael assured me it would be fine, and so Robert and I grabbed a few last bottles of beer from the party and we quietly drove over to the home farm, basically a really large vegetable garden where the hospital’s inmates could help grow some of the food needed on a daily basis for the patients and staff alike.
We sat on the side of the Brussels sprouts, talking and drinking a bit more, until we crawled into the seats of the hatchback, the wan moon glinting slightly through the clouds off the dusty windscreen. We attempted to get comfortable in the confines of the Chevette. It was a little like one of those old contests you see where thirty people get inside a Volkswagen Beetle, except it was just three drunk Imaginary Boys. Eventually sleep came, or rather a kind of sedation, brought on by the booze.
I think my foot went to sleep first, because it was wedged under the front seat and pinned down by a metal rod. I felt the unbearable tingle of pins and needles, so moved it slightly to get relief. That’s the last thing I recall.
The interior of the car had that pale morning glow familiar to any stop-outs or all-night revelers. That point where you’re not sure if the morning is coming, yet in fact you can’t quite believe it actually is. The windows were misted with our combined breath, so I rubbed a small patch clear on the glass and noticed that we were tucked under the hanging branches of a tree drooping with early-morning drizzle.
Another day. I could start to feel my limbs now in the cold car interior as I attempted to stretch out a little straighter. Robert was sprawled across the front seats with an almost beatific look on his sleeping face, while Michael was stuffed deep into his jacket across from me. The atmosphere of a thousand teenage Sunday mornings—stale beer fumes mixed with tobacco—wafted in the old car as we all gradually came to.
At first I thought a falling branch from the overhanging tree had struck us. The sound was loud and startling. Looking up, I saw that it was in fact a large flat hand pressed against the window. Followed very shortly by another hand, then another and another. Suddenly there were at least six separate hands on the windows of the car, slapping against the glass. Wiping the misty windows, we peered out into the early-morning gloom. Faces! Then a low guttural grunting sound as the hands continued to slap on the glass.
It was the first shift of inmates, who had noticed the rather churned-up tire tracks leading directly under the tree. Yes, we had been quiet coming in last night to the home farm, but hadn’t noticed the muddy conditions underfoot. It probably looked to all intents and purposes like we had just slid off the hospital driveway in the rain and crashed into the tree at the side of the churned-up rows of cabbages and sprouts.
We quickly cleared parts of the misted windows to look out. This meant the patients could see that there were occupants in the car, which surprised them and made them feel anxious. This was something different and disturbing to them. Then one picked up a large cabbage and threw it in the direction of the Chevette.
At that precise moment, Robert’s voice croaked: “Shit! Let’s get the hell out of here!”
He slid over into the driver’s seat and turned the key of the Chevette. It sprang into life, which surprised me for such an old car. The immediate effect of this was startling to the inmates, who now started to back away from the vehicle. Robert, sensing that our chance of escape was thin, gunned the engine.
“Crap!” he shouted. “The wheels are spinning in the mud!”
It seemed to us we might be stuck here with the angry inmates of the hospital, who were about to cabbage us to death for disturbing the delicate equilibrium of their morning. But right then the wheels spun free and we lurched forward to freedom. The car got a little more purchase on the sodden ground, and then we were bumping along the rutted track up to the home farm gate and out of the vegetable patch at last. We held our breath until we passed the guard hut at the front entrance, and drove out onto the A23 and back into civilization.
“So we weren’t in any real danger back there?” I asked Michael after we had put a couple of miles between us and the farm.
“No, they’re not like the lot at Cane Hill, Lol. These are just depressed or confused people, mainly sent here to recover in the bucolic English countryside.”
I heaved a sigh of relief and settled down into the back seat of the Chevette. In the rear-view mirror I caught a glimpse of Robert’s grinning face and we started to laugh.
“Bloody hell, you couldn’t write this stuff!” I exclaimed, and then the car was filled with our teenage laughter and the boyish excitement that we had somehow managed to find in this very bland and boring place we lived in.
Robert’s parents had been away a few weeks when it occurred to us that they might come home soon. So, we decided to have a bit of a party and figured we could tidy up the next day. For some reason I still can’t fathom, I elected to sleep in the nude under the Persian rug in the Smiths’ living room.
It was hot. I was drunk. The most absurd notions always seem like a good idea when you’re a drunk teenager.
Light was just starting to come through the curtains of the living room, and as it was summer, there was a warm tinge to the light. The summer had outstripped all expectations and many originally porcelain-pale limbs were gradually turning brown in this most unaccustomed sun and heat. Shorts and T-shirts were the order of the day—except when I stripped down to sleep under a rug, apparently. Just as I was coming to and considering my position on the floor, I heard it:
“This place smells like a dirty lavatory!”
It was the unmistakable voice of Rita Smith that reached around the door and slapped me firmly about the head with her disgust. I don’t think I have ever moved so fast either before or since.
Getting up from the floor and into my shorts was accomplished in barely a wink of the eye, and then it was a few short steps to the partially open French doors in the dining room, where I escaped into the back yard and hid behind The Guru’s chicken coop. The chickens were already outside, clucking and scratching in gay abandon in the early-morning light.
I realized at this point that I had no shoes or T-shirt on, and that meant they were lying on the couch or under the rug as a makeshift pillow. Oh my God, Rita will see them and put two and two together, surely? I could not flee any farther, stuck as I was on the edge of the property. I sat there catching my breath and heard the sounds of . . . laughter!
Looking from my vantage point behind the chicken coop, I slowly ventured out to see Robert holding my T-shirt and shoes in his hand by the French doors. He motioned to me and I gratefully took the clothing from him.
“How are they?” I hissed under my breath.
“It’s probably better we don’t practice today, but I’m sure it’ll blow over.”
As parents, the Smiths never ceased to amaze me. If my parents had stumbled upon the mess we’d left all hell would have broken loose, but Alex and Rita weren’t my parents and Robert was right: the incident was never mentioned again.
The life-changing summer of 1976 was nearly over, and soon enough autumn would be around the corner. Shortly we would be forced back into the routine of normality that we were trying so hard to escape. Back to work for me and Porl, back to college for Michael and Robert. It was not something we relished.
“I mean, it’s just not what I want to do with my life, you know?” Robert said.
We were sitting in Milton Mount Gardens, a small park near the Smith house. Just Robert and I. It was late at night. We had decided, on a whim, to come and sit in the park with a couple of bottles of his dad’s home brew—the totally inebriating concoction that Alex Smith had perfected over many years of experimental brewing. We just wanted to enjoy these last summer days as long as we could before horrid reality intruded again.
“It seems really worthless to slave at some job for the rest of your life and then just die,” I said.
I had seen it with my own father. He didn’t really seem to be alive to me, just an eating and sleeping machine that didn’t have much purpose in his life apart from going to work and the pub. It was not a future I wanted for myself. It seemed like he wasn’t living, just existing.
It was warm still. The dark gardens were completely empty except for the two of us and the birds that made their home in the reeds of the small lake. Aware of our presence, they made suspicious bird noises to ward us off.
We had brought a guitar and a pair of bongos with us, so we sat on the grass cross-legged, Robert with the acoustic guitar across his lap and me with the bongos in front of me. T. Rex live at the BBC. Sort of.
We both took long drafts from the bottle of home brew, and Robert gently started to strum the nylon strings. I listened intently to the cadence of the chords Robert was playing. I got the rhythm and started to play along with him, and together we got a kind of rudimentary musical mantra going out there in the park, late at night. I was entranced by the music; the warmth and the home brew helped with that. I felt as if we should sit out here forever playing in the balmy night air. Robert started to sing quietly—words, or maybe they were just word sounds—as we sat in the gloomy park. It didn’t seem to matter much. After a while we stopped, and both of us just lay back on the soft earth looking up at the starry night sky glimpsed over the dark treetops. I don’t recall anything being said by either of us. There was no need. We knew what we wanted.