Towards the end of my apprenticeship at Cheetham’s, Tommo, Mike Newell, and I went on holiday to St Ives for a week. We’d never been to Cornwall before, and it held the promise of eternal sunshine, that same eternal sunshine that had attracted artists and writers since year zero.
Obviously, the main objective of blokes in their early twenties on holiday is the acquisition of female companionship, and we were no exception. The other two got fixed up thanks to Tommo’s expertise in these matters, while I, as usual, was hit on by an art student. Her name was Christine – from Stretford of all places: yes, the same Stretford that gives its name to the business end of Old Trafford.
Christine was a seriously pretty girl, a few years younger than me. She really reminded me of someone, but I wasn’t sure who. We got chatting about Stretford, and before long Christine mentioned that I knew her sister. Then it hit me: she looked just like Lynn – yes, that Lynn, the same Lynn Tommo had copped off with at the MSG. Christine had visited her the previous week in Plymouth, where she now lived with her husband Brian, a splendid chap who worked as a teacher in the town.
I don’t know how quickly this thought process formed, nor do I understand how it persisted, but we got on reasonably OK, and I started thinking, ‘Well, Lynn’s out of the picture, but Christine looks exactly the same, so Christine it is.’
It turned out to be the holiday romance that got out of hand. After we got back to Manchester, Christine and I continued our relationship. We hadn’t been seeing each other for more than a couple of months when my apprenticeship ended and I was free at last to look for work elsewhere. I found a job at Shaston Printers, a small firm in Shaftesbury, Dorset, and we decided to get married. Life in a choc-box country town had never been on my agenda, but now it had some kind of cornball attraction; plus, married status equalled a lower tax rate. It was a way out of Manchester for both of us. You don’t need to be Claire Rayner to know that this was no solid basis for a lasting union.
We got married in Jackson’s Row register office in the centre of Manchester, and went to Stretford for our honeymoon. A week later Cousin Sid hired a van and moved us and our meagre possessions – i.e. a few clothes and our respective record collections – to Shaftesbury.
Shaston Printers was pretty quaint. We lived above the shop, in a terrific apartment for a very reasonable rent. I’d just bought Self Portrait, a double album of mainly covers by Bob Dylan, while Christine’s record collection largely featured artists who were unknown to me, and who I didn’t like the look of. There were however two records I was grateful to be introduced to: Astral Weeks by Van Morrison and Safe as Milk by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. If I call our home life to mind, those records would be playing in the background until we got a telly.
My new boss Mr Mowbray had a physical resemblance to Rex Harrison, and was an amiable, easy-going sort of cove. At that point letterpress printing hadn’t changed much since the days of the Gutenberg Bible, but the process had been speeded up with the introduction of electricity. I was working a massive Wharfedale flatbed machine. It was heavy work. These were the days of Laura Ashley and brown bread, and the latest metropolitan fad was a move to the countryside, so we were printing a lot of gigantic billboard property auction posters.
Other than smoking weed and having the odd drink, there wasn’t much to do in Shaftesbury, to be honest. Occasionally a shipment of LSD might arrive, and Christine was quite the enthusiast, so that provided a step into another dimension for a while. If you’re going to take that shit, you’re always better off in a place of butterflies, birdsong, and bluebell woods.
We had made some good pals there, some of whom I still see from time to time, but after a while the bucolic allure of Dorset began to fade. ‘The idiocy of rural life’, a faintly remembered phrase of the late Karl Marx, began to re-present itself in my idle moments. Christine shared my growing malaise, and in one of her regular letters from Lynn we learned of a vacant apartment on Albert Road in Plymouth, and decided to take it.
It was an absolutely ghastly place, on the middle floor of a very similar period house to the one I grew up in in Higher Broughton. Downstairs was a violent drunken psychopath called Kenny (aren’t they all), who looked like one of Henry Cooper’s Neanderthal ancestors, and his long-suffering wife Joyce, who on the two occasions I ever saw her, appeared to be the most oppressed woman this side of Saudi Arabia.
I never met Kenny when he didn’t have an axe in his hand. Although he would try to be chirpy, everything he said to you sounded like a threat, except once when I ran into him when he had a smile on his face, an axe in his hand, and he declared that he was ‘pissed as a puddin’. To which I replied, ‘Keep it up, son.’
You had to keep him sweet: I used to lie awake at night thinking, any minute now that door’s gonna go in and there’ll be claret all over the walls.
He had a drum kit in the cellar, and a mate called Harry who would occasionally come round and give it a bashing. Drums have never been my favourite instrument, but I didn’t dare complain. Besides that, because they were both aggressive round-the-clock drunks, Kenny and Harry would have frequent punch-ups. One night, Kenny accused Harry of damaging the outer casing of his precious kit, which like many drum kits was dressed in that faux-abalone pearlised material often found on flush door handles, fountain pens, and most piano accordions. Kenny reckoned he’d knocked forty quid off the selling price, and Harry didn’t agree. On another occasion it kicked off when Kenny accused Harry of putting the move on Joyce.
Upstairs was Mrs Bullmore, who was also hard as nails, and belligerent with it. She had a face like a bag of spanners, but had obviously once been married. Now she had entered the sex industry, with a regular pitch outside the gents’ lavatories near the dockyard. She was the Plymouth Hoe. I was no stranger to hookers (I’d lived on Camp Street, don’t forget), but Mrs Bullmore had a tattoo. It sounds odd now, but that was the most shocking thing about her: a tattooed lady was the stuff of sideshows and Groucho Marx lyrics.
Mrs Bullmore had lived in our apartment before she moved up to the top floor. It was awful: no carpet, a greasy linoleum floor, lilac curtains made of some fire-retardant material, wallpaper the colour of baby sick, and the whole place stank of her tom cat. We couldn’t shift that foul reek, which took permanent residence in my olfactory epithelium even out of the house.
This vile creature had a bell round its neck, and it woke me up one Saturday morning running up and down the stairs jing-a-ling-a-linging all the way, until I got up, told it to fuck off, and threw a shoe at it. Unfortunately, Mrs Bullmore was lurking unseen on the landing upstairs and witnessed my outburst. She saw her arse about it, and you know what cat owners are like. I already dreaded leaving the apartment in case I bumped into Kenny the fucking psycho hatchet-man downstairs, but now it was agg from all sides.
I was looking for work in Plymouth. In the meantime, therefore, we had some cash-flow issues. I sold my only remaining decent garment, a made-to-measure three-piece suit, to a high-end second-hand shop for twenty quid. A week later we were broke again. I took stock of our scant possessions. I thought I’d done my bit. There was nothing for it: some of Christine’s vinyl had to go. I knew she would never agree to it, but it wasn’t up for discussion: while she was out, I gathered up all her Incredible String Band and Roy Harper albums and took them down to the shop where I’d sold my suit. I flogged the lot, killing two birds with one stone: we had money and I had rid myself of the stereo torture I’d had to endure on a daily basis. I don’t think Christine ever forgave me for that.
I soon got a job as a fire-watcher at the Royal Naval Dockyard, the main employer in Plymouth. If anybody asked how many people worked there, the answer was always the same: about ten per cent.
Before I could start I had to fill in a questionnaire, one of the questions being ‘Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?’ The full Joe McCarthy schtick. Given the fact that we don’t have a Fifth Amendment in this country, I answered honestly. My patriotism was consequently called into question to the extent that I wasn’t allowed anywhere near any nuclear subs, in case I was passing on military secrets to the Soviets. You can’t be too careful.
It was close to the perfect job for me. I just had to turn up and keep an eye on things when a welder or a burner was in operation on HMS Medusa or whatever ship was in the dry dock. I had all the time in the world.
I joined the Transport and General Workers’ Union, which was then the biggest and most powerful union in the country, run by the late Mr Jack Jones – no, not the ‘Shadow of Your Smile’ guy, but the veteran of the International Brigades back in the Spanish Civil War.
It was a good scene. My fellow workers were a chirpy lot, the ‘working’ conditions were great, and there were really good canteens. Every day it was a done deal: Cornish pasty. What else? They were gigantic, about a foot long, real proper stuff, chunks of potato and beef, lots of white pepper. There’s good eatin’, shipmates.
Emboldened and fortified, after lunch I would take a leisurely schmie around the docks, pumping certain people for information concerning any horses running that afternoon, and what have you. I’d go for an explore up on deck, and became quite the agile matelot, sliding down the ladders, shimmying up the rigging, darting up for’ard, back aft, and amidships, a-coiling in the ropes. All the more authentic being among these West Country yardies who all had the generic pirate accent. ‘Aaarrr, back aft, up for’ard, up top, and down below,’ ‘Ahoy there,’ and ‘All right, my handsome’ – everybody called each other that. They’d even use the terminology when complaining of digestive upsets after a night on the piss: ‘Spot of trouble amidships, my handsome.’
Eventually, I’d return to my watching station and settle in for the afternoon. I was a big fan of the French existentialists at that time, so I read the entire oeuvre of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Most of the other guys were ‘grabbers’ – meaning they were available for any overtime that presented itself. They would fall out about it. What they liked about me was that I wasn’t interested in working a minute longer than my eight to five. They couldn’t understand why anybody would turn down the extra money, but I’d had enough, tired out from reading Being and Nothingness next to a welder all day.
Some people are always gonna take the piss. Nothing changes. The best example I saw of this was when my colleagues were talking up the joys of working the night shift. ‘You don’t have to do anything at all,’ they said. But I already didn’t do anything at all. ‘You don’t even have to pretend to be doing anything.’ But I already didn’t pretend to be doing anything. The fact was, the night shift was the biggest skive available. Apparently, nobody checked up on you, you simply clocked in and clocked out. You just had to be there. As if that wasn’t cushy enough, they had to push the envelope a bit further. They started showing up with flannelette pyjamas and alarm clocks, so they could actually go to work, go to bed at work, and set an alarm clock to wake them up in time to go home from work. Then they were bringing in blow-up mattresses, duck-down pillows, reading lamps, hot-water bottles. They had it real sweet until, predictably, they got rumbled. The superintendent did a spot check one night, and there they all were, Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Each one of them was rapidly reacquainted with his P45.
Being the main employer in town, the Royal Naval Dockyard had an obligation to employ a certain amount of certified nutters – people who, while not insane enough to be in a secure institution, had no future in the world of public relations. Thousands of people worked there, and most days you would find yourself with a different gang, so one daily entertainment was ‘Spot the Nutter’. Some of them were perfectly plausible, and thus hard to identify. Occasionally, unbelievably, I myself fell under suspicion.
I had a particular workmate called Roger Spettigew: unusual name, top bloke. He was about my age, and had started the same day I did. We’d meet every day over pasties and chips and go for the odd drink after our shift; he had a good sense of humour, so we became an island of sanity for each other.
One of our daily rounds involved a visit to the guys who worked in a hut on the side of one of the dry docks. I don’t know what their specific occupation was supposed to be, but I never saw them doing anything. The only man there who seemed engaged in any work at all was an elderly tea boy, a man with a chronic nervous condition, which meant he couldn’t operate any machinery other than an electric kettle. Even that proved hazardous – his jittery demeanour was such that you’d only ever get half a cup of tea. I don’t know if it was a symptom of his condition or what, I’m not a neurologist, but his reactions were slowed to the point that I once watched somebody come up behind him and tap him on the shoulder while he had a full mug in each hand, and a minute later he was still standing as if in freeze-frame, his face a mask of shock and anxiety. I knew what would happen, I had plenty of time to warn the other guy, but I didn’t. I just watched it unfold: it took him a full minute to react, throwing each mug of tea simultaneously over his shoulders, the scalding contents splashing into the face of his unwitting co-worker.
I became quite pally with a bloke in the hut called Ray Kortz, who had a bit of a sideline in wet fish. He’d stick his line out of one of the windows, and the nervous wreck took the orders. They did quite a brisk trade in whatever fish presented themselves, usually mackerel, which they wrapped in sheets of Daily Mirror. It was all very fresh, that much I knew, but everyone involved had to be careful. Fishing was prohibited from Her Majesty’s naval waters. If you didn’t have written permission from the Queen’s Harbour Master, it was instant dismissal.
At home, I lived in dread of Mrs Bullmore and Kenny, and didn’t want to alienate them in any way. For this reason, I obviously didn’t want to use the communal bathroom. Luckily there was Agnes Weston’s Sailors’ Rest between our gaff and the dockyard, a seamen’s hostel with bathing facilities that were open to the public for a small price. They were ship-shape, as you might expect, very well maintained, spotless and disinfected, so that became part of my routine. I especially liked to have a bath on a Friday evening, when I could also gain access to the Sailors’ Rest’s full-size snooker tables. Friday night bath and a game of snooker was something to look forward to all week.
When I couldn’t stand it in our awful accommodation any longer, we found a new apartment further up on the same side of Albert Road, but the other side of the universe. This one was quite well maintained, with a handsome yucca plant by the entranceway. The girl who’d lived there previously was a descendant of the late great Maréchal Ney, a man who fought a hundred campaigns on behalf of Napoleon, so the interior had been agreeably and fashionably Frenchified. Every room was painted in Adam cream, and there were floor-to-ceiling windows with louvred shutters giving out onto a generous front garden, home of the afore-referenced yucca.
Christine was the last of the official flower children. She was into all that floaty stuff: floral-print chiffon maxi-dresses, tie-dyed kaftans, and cheesecloth tops worn with tatty jeans. All her Plymouth friends were also keen practitioners of the hippy lifestyle, and in the main they were pretty ghastly.
I didn’t like the clothes, the music, the attitude, the lifestyle advice, and especially the food (think Weetabix). Their politics were wilfully ignorant and proud of it. Everything that they wanted to achieve, I wanted to stop happening. There were more fucking rules in their fucking godless pagan fucking arcadia than in any of the Abrahamic faiths. I remember saying to one of them, ‘Fuck me, you guys are hard work. We’ve only got ten commandments.’
Their mantra of communal harmony was so divisive it would have sent any right-minded person running for the exit.
The guys were all sticking it to the man in some way or another: selling dope, signing on, living off the earth.
The girls were like the Stepford wives. Cat maniacs who didn’t believe in doctors.
It was as if they’d all watched the wrong bit of Easy Rider, where the agrarian hippy commune of dungaree-wearing shit-kickers get serviced by this gaggle of earth mothers who wait on them hand and fucking foot. That sort of promiscuous idyll offered women nothing except having more kids than they would prefer to have, while at the same time leading an over-analysed life: every move they made was subject to scrutiny. Three years of all that free-love crap and it’s no wonder Germaine Greer took off.
Invariably, these people were the disgruntled offspring of the bourgeoisie, irreparably traumatised by their luxurious childhoods. Back then I was quite the little class warrior. I was simply too chippy for hippy.*
The application of a class analysis to any topical situation was met with disapproval, usually expressed in a disappointed tone of voice, as if they had expected better of me, followed by a reminder that the class system was all in my head. When it came to semantics, I always seemed to carry the burden of proof. I was once accused of being a capitalist for drawing a weekly wage. I tried to explain that the capitalist is the person who pays the wages, although in my case this didn’t apply because my boss was the Ministry of Defence, a fact that surprisingly didn’t seem to trouble them.
Christine’s love crowd didn’t like my poetry at all. Not only were they not encouraging, they were positively hostile. They thought any poetry that didn’t speed the progress of their arcadian vision was worthless. Especially mine: it was too cynical, urban and harsh, devoid of medievalism, dryads, or rainbows, or whatever these morons were interested in. In short, I was wasting my time. I hadn’t dropped enough acid. I hadn’t listened to enough Roy Harper to see the world as it could be.
These herberts were always putting the hurt on me one way or another. Their favourite threat involved someone called Gareth, whose imminent return from Kathmandu* I was encouraged to regard with mounting dread, e.g. ‘Oh, yeah, Gareth. He’s a real customer, he is. I’ll tell you what,’ they’d say, pointing at me, ‘he’ll suss you out for a start.’
The only thing I knew about Kathmandu was written by J. Milton Hayes sixty years previously. Here’s an excerpt:
There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,
There’s a little marble cross below the town;
There’s a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,
And the Yellow God forever gazes down.
The return of Gareth from Kathmandu was a constant menace. How best could I avoid this Damoclean blade? Obviously, I’m being sarcastic. What was there about me to suss out? It wasn’t like I had a hidden agenda or something. As you can see, my life’s an open book.
I never did get to meet Gareth. Upon his return he was immediately admitted to Freedom Fields Hospital, where he was treated for serum hepatitis with gastro-intestinal complications. Let’s just say there’s a guy who’ll never shit right again, and draw a discreet veil over the subject.