A Surrey Idyll

1975 was the year I resumed my studies at an official place of learning, or Brooklands Technical College as it was known then. Some time later, it was renamed Brooklands College. Then as now it was to be found on the semi-rural fringes of Weybridge, a beautiful outer suburb of south west London. I enjoyed a full and perfectly idyllic social life there for nearly two years. Like Spain, it was an Edenic playground for me, in which I learned to be a social being after four years of boarding school followed by a further two years or so of leading a semi-reclusive existence. 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 festivities might truly begin, and once they did, anything could happen. However, those who tried to get to know to know me on a truly intimate level were confronted with a desperately timid and diffident individual. I hated being so shy, even if discretion and reserve ultimately became part of my formidable array of social skills. Then there was the other me, the anarchist, who seemed to resent the simpering courtier his airs and graces, and to delight in sabotaging his efforts at self-improvement with a strident: "Don't get above yourself, burb boy!"

In the Bleak Mid 1970s

1975, and my self-defence, guitar and swimming classes had long dried up, but I kept up with the private tuition, notably with a taciturn but charismatic guy called Michael 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. I clearly suffered from a chronic case of cacoethes scribendi. That means the irresistible urge to write.

'75 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 these 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 sexual decadence I'd witnessed only the year before in Hamburg. Only it wasn't as lively; I can remember a kind of weariness about the place. It didn't have Hamburg's dark charisma.

As for Edinburgh, I remember being warned by one of the more easy-going lads not to go strutting about the city in a striped college-style blazer with jeans tucked into long white socks. Unfortunately, these were the only clothes I had with me. This was before our first or second stay in the city, I can't remember. The kid was right to warn me, because while Edinburgh may be one of the most beautiful and cultured capitals in Europe, it can still be a pretty tough town. I refused to listen of course, and was duly rewarded with a pretty hairy situation which took place in an inner city pub. It wasn't the sort of place to go lording about with a English accent in a flash boating blazer. Soon after setting foot in the place in broad daylight, a hard young Scotsman with long reddish curly hair wearing what I remember to have been a menacing grin asked me if I was from Oxford. It was probably touch and go for a while, but somehow he ended up leaving me alone. He may even have liked me, or admired my nerve.

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 pleasant young guy called Simon from Wotton-under-the Edge in Gloucerstershire as our closest friend and crony. 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 real character, to have a go at us with tongue firmly in cheek about selfishly keeping our dates to ourselves. Little could he have known how innocent our efforts at romance had in fact been.
A rather less than sweet and innocent incident took place 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 dumped her for the sake of a night of drunken idiocy with my brother and Simon. Suddenly, overtaken by the sickly pangs of remorse, I set out to find her, and at some point during my search, 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 but originally from the north of England, to a dinner dance at London's Walford Hilton Hotel. At some point we were joined there by a couple 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. Early in the evening, Brenda became furious when a group of older seamen started taunting me from their table. It didn't bother me that much, and 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, Brenda 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. Her fair-haired friend told me that all they had to sling their arms around that evening were their pints.

It was only a matter of weeks after returning from the OYC trip to the Baltic that I sailed with the RNR to La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast of France,and then shortly after that I was with the RNR again, this time in the Pool of London, subject of a famous British crime film directed by Basil Dearden in 1951 and referring to that stretch of the Thames lying between London Bridge and Rotherhithe.
In order to reach my ship, I had to board some kind of launch with a group of other seamen, one of whom, an incredibly good-looking blond sailor of about 30 I knew only by sight, had taken unofficial charge. Once we were all safely aboard, it was the turn of our leader to join us, but as he stepped off the launch, he somehow lost his footing and slipped into the Thames beneath him. Within a matter of minutes his heavy clothing and boots, helped by a truly ferocious current, had dragged him beneath the river's surface and he was lost. Soon after returning to London, I told my mother what happened, and as she broke down in tears the tragedy of the incident was brought home to me for the first time. Thinking back on it, a line from that beautiful song "How Men Are" by Aztec Camera, which was a British hit in 1988, comes to mind: "Why should it take the tears of a woman to see how men are?" If I'm not mistaken, I ran into the bathroom soon after myself and sobbed my heart out.

A Gosport Discomaniac

Still in '75...yes, my life was actually pretty full back then...I attempted to pass what is known as the AIB or Admiralty Interview Board in the hope of becoming a Supply and Secretariat officer in the Royal Navy. This entailed me taking the train down to HMS Sultan, the Royal Navy's specialist training centre in Gosport, Hampshire, where I spent three days attending various examinations and interviews intended to assess my potentiality as a naval officer.
On one occasion early on in the long weekend shortly before one assignment or another, I was looking in the mirror, putting the final touches to my dress, at which point one of the guys I was sharing a dorm with reminded me that I was at an AIB not a fashion parade. Something like that anyway. Not the sort of man I wanted coming with me to the disco that night to get to know some Gosport girls. In the event two of my fellow interviewees were up the task. I asked one of them what he was expecting out of the night, and he told me whatever he could get or something, but he really didn't seem to keen. I know now that he was uncomfortable being out so late and understandably anxious to return to base. As things turned out I was left alone at the club dancing with a soft-spoken local girl called Shiralee. A little later I accompanied her along a busy main leading back to Sultan, with several cars sounding their horns as I kissed her good night, only to discover that Sultan's main entrance had been locked and was now being manned by an armed guard.
If the young man nervously trying to reach someone in authority within the training centre on a walkie talkie was wondering exactly what kind of person returns to base dressed to the nines after a night's disco dancing when he was supposed to be in the midst of three days of gruelling tests and interviews that were vital to his future career, then he gave no indication of it. He did however eventually make contact, and I can vaguely remember passing through an officer's mess soon afterwards and briefly engaging in some genial conversation with its occupants. Their actual opinion of me of course they kept to themselves. It may just be me, but I can't help thinking that had I returned to Sultan that night before being locked out, I might have been in with a better chance of passing the AIB, that is, as opposed to failing it, which I perhaps rather predictably did. But then again, not necessarily...