A Surrey Idyll

1975 was the year I went back to "school", which is to say Brooklands, a technical college secreted within the semi-rural beauty of Weybridge in the furthermost reaches of suburban south west London. There I enjoyed a full and perfectly idyllic social life for nearly two years. Like Spain, Brooklands was an Edenic playground for me, in which I learned to be a social being after four years of boarding school, and military school at that, followed by a further two years or so of semi-reclusiveness. As much as Pangbourne means to me, I emerged from that school as a deeply backward adolescent.
At Brooklands, I was able to perfect the persona of a wildly eccentric good time guy, a ceaseless and absurdly successful attention-seeker. Come disco night and there were friends of both sexes who would actually wait for my arrival in order that the true revels might begin, and once they'd begun, anything could happen. However, those who tried to get to know well really well would eventually be confronted with an essentially timid and diffident individual. In time I was able to put my boyish shyness to good use, combining it with the exquisite politeness of which I was capable back then to create a formidable social tool. This ultimately enabled me to charm those far above me in terms of wealth and status and place me on the very pinnacle of social success more than once. Not bad for a no mark kid from the sticks. However, the other me, the flamboyant attention-addict, he resented the simpering courtier and his pretty-pretty airs and graces, and delighted in sabotaging his efforts at self-improvement. Time and again it seems he went to work doing just that. He was good at it too.

In the Bleak Mid 1970s

1975, and my self-defence, guitar and swimming classes had long dried up, but I persisted with the private tuition, notably with a taciturn but charismatic guy called Michael G. from Richmond in Surrey. A successful musician as well as a teacher, he exerted a strong influence on me in terms of my already passionate interest in European literature. The Europhile Michael had a special love for French Symbolist poetry, but it was Spanish literature we studied together...Quevedo, Machado, Lorca, and others. Michael was also an early encourager of my writing, a passion of mine in the mid bleak mid 1970s that was ultimately to career out of control so that I was unable to finish project after project due to my feverish cacoethes scribendi.
1975 was also a predictably maritime year for me, and no sooner had one ocean voyage finished than it seemed that I was setting sail again. The first of the long series of sea trips that marked the year was destination Amsterdam via Edinburgh and northern France on the square rigger TS Churchill of the Sail Training Association. Among my shipmates were, apart from my 17 year old brother, several young men from Scotland and the north of England, a couple of youthful naval ratings, perhaps more, a handful of "mates" who'd been given authority over the rank and file of deck hands, and the smoothly elegant captain, who also happened to be an alumnus of Pangbourne College. It was an all-male crew, and I was initially quite well-liked, but little by little my popularity died. However, there was a southern lad with dark shoulder length hair a little like the young Jack Wild...he liked me after we'd bonded over an attempt at romancing two girls during a brief stay in France and stayed loyal, bless him. I'd come on a bit strong and spoiled everything with Martine, the one I liked. I was desperate for her address, and I think he eventually got it for me. I was elated...walking on air.
The Churchill was a tough experience...what with the storms, which saw seamen sprawled all over the deck being violently ill attached to the ship only by safety belts, and which resulted in us being roused out of our hammocks in the middle of the night on more than one occasion to help trim the sails or something similar, but it should have been character-shaping, and probably was. However, I only climbed the rigging on a single occasion, and that was just before we entered the port of Amsterdam...which was marked by the kind of blatant fleshliness I'd witnessed only the year before in Hamburg. As for Edinburgh, I remember being warned not to strut about in a striped college-style blazer with jeans tucked into long white socks, this either in our first or second stay in the city. Wise words of warning, because while Edinburgh may be one of the most beautiful and cultured capitals in Europe, it's still a pretty tough town. However, I refused to listen, and was duly rewarded with quite a hairy situation in an inner city public house, not the sort of place to play the little English fop. No sooner had I set foot in the said pub when I was greeted by a question on the part of a hard man with longish curly hair wearing what I remember to have been a deeply menacing smile along the lines of: "Y'all right, shun, are you frae Oxford then?". Somehow I succeeded in talking my way out of trouble, but it was probably a close run thing...one of many I might add. Going out at night was a risk for someone like me, but it was a risk I was more than prepared to take, over and over again.

In the Waters of the Kiel Canal

Within a few short weeks of our returning to London by train from Edinburgh, my brother and I were onboard ship again, this time a yacht taking us to the Baltic coast of Denmark via Germany's famous Kiel Canal as part of the Ocean Youth Club, and once more we were supervised by "mates", or the equivalent. We wasted little time in recruiting a nice young guy called Simon from Wotton-under-the Edge, Gloucerstershire as our closest friend and collaborator, and soon after setting foot on Danish soil all three of us sought out the company of two classically Scandinavian blondes. This caused the Captain, who was a true character, warm, eccentric and funny, to have a go at us with tongue firmly in cheek manner about selfishly keeping our dates to ourselves. Little could he have known how innocent our efforts at romance had in fact been.
A somewhat less than sweet and innocent incident occurred towards the end of the trip, which saw me in pursuit of a pretty German girl, Bettina. I liked her so very much, and she clearly liked me, and yet I'd senselessly sidelined her for the sake of a night of drunken madness with my brother and Simon. Suddenly, overtaken by desperate remorse, and longing to be with her again, I set out in search for her, and at some point during my travels, while walking along some kind of wooden pontoon I lost my footing and fell fully clothed into the waters of what must have been Kiel Canal. I wrote to Bettina, but she never wrote back, and I can't say I blame her. To this day I can't understand what possessed me to ignore her so callously, just in order to tie one on with the boys which I could have done any night of the week. Self-sabotage was fast becoming a speciality of mine.

The Sweetness of Wrens

It was later in the year I think that I took my friend Brenda, one of the London Division Wrens, originally from the north of England as I recall, the word Wren being derived from WRNS, or Women's Royal Naval Service, to a dinner dance at London's Walford Hilton Hotel.
She became incensed when a group of older seamen started taunting me from their table, but it didn't bother me that much, as I didn't see it as in any way malicious or threatening. I was used to their banter, and it was all a big joke to me. However, she insisted that they were only doing it because I was "better than what they are", as she put it possibly in imitation of their strong London accents. At our table were two of Brenda's close friends, a fair, bearded man in a suit, and his dark, extrovert wife. The husband was one of those deeply gentle men I came across from time to time in the 1970s. They weren't all bearded; but I can think of two who were; and several who weren't. What united them was that they behaved with special protectiveness towards me; and I can recall this particular man telling me that all my tormentors had to sling their arms around that evening were their respective pints of beer. The sailors who ribbed me that night weren't at all mean-spirited; it was just their way; but that is not to take away from the kindness demonstrated towards me by Brenda and her two friends. That was exceptional, not usual. The man with the beard I would characterise as one of life's true gentlemen...the type who chooses to show kindness towards someone barely known to him when doing so doesn't benefit him in any fundamental way. Ay, every inch a king.

Windsor, 1974