Introduction

An early draft of "The Sweetness of Wrens" was published as "A Dandy in the Land of Blue Denim 2" at Blogster.com on the 21st of April 2006, since which time it's undergone much modification, a final version being published at http://carlroberthalling.blog.co.uk in January 2008.

The Superstar Spirit

In 1975 aged nineteen I became a student at the technical college, Brooklands which lay then as now on the fringes of Weybridge, an affluent outer suburb of south west London. In semi-pastoral Brooklands as in my beloved Santiago de la Ribera, I learned to be a social being after years of semi-seclusion, first at Pangbourne and then in deepest suburbia as a home student. The regular, perhaps weekly, Brooklands Disco became a special sphere of play for me as I worked on my sophisticated false self in 1975-'76. On one occasion early on in Disco night I got up in front of what seemed like the whole college and delivered a solo dance performance to Bebop Deluxe's sleazy "Fair Exchange" possibly with white silk scarf flailing in the air to frenzied cheers and applause. On another, a triad of thugs who I suspect may have gatecrashed the Disco only to see in me the worst possible example of the feckless wastrel student strutting and posturing in unmanly white took me aside once the music had stopped clearly intent on some form of ultra-violence; but I stood my ground, insisting that despite what they may have thought I was just as straight as they were. Apparently convinced of this, after a few threatening words they promtly disappeared into the crowd. But despite these constant displays of flamboyant self-confidence, those who tried to get to know to know me on an intimate level found themselves confronted with a desperately diffident and inhibited individual. Having become as addicted to attention as if it was an actual drug, my true self was by now in danger of being annihilated wholesale by the superstar I presented to the world. It may be that the only thing that saved me from completely destroying myself was the fact that despite my deepest wishes, I never became an actual superstar.

1975 again...and my music, swimming and self-defence sessions were no more, but the private classes continued mainly with Michael, a quiet slim young man with darkish curly hair who lived alone but for a family of black cats in longtime Rock star haven Richmond-on-Thames. A musician as well as an academic, he went on to play drums for a fairly successful Contemporary Folk outfit. Michael exerted a strong influence on me in terms of my growing love of European literature and Modernist culture. Michael had a special feel for French Symbolist poetry, but it was the less known literature of Spain that we studied together, from the anonymous picaresque novel "Lazarillo de Tormes" (1554) onwards, and embracing Quevedo, Galdos, A. Machado, Lorca, and others. He was also an early encourager of my writing, a lifelong passion that was ultimately to degenerate into a clear case of cacoethes scribendi, or the irresistible compulsion to write creatively. In consequence, I was not able to finish a single cohesive piece of writing until well into the eighties, when I managed to complete a short story and a novel. Both have since been destroyed but for a few fragments of the latter which I recently incorporated into "The Wanderer of Golders Green".

All I ask is a Tall Ship

I made no less than three sea voyages in 1975, two as a civilian and one with the RNR, as well as spending a week with them docked at the Pool of London. The first of these was Destination Amsterdam via Edinburgh and northern France on the three-masted topsail schooner TS Sir Winston Churchill of the Sail Training Association, now known as the Tall Ships Trust. Based in Portsmouth and Liverpool, the TST was founded in 1956 for the character development of young people aged 16 to 25 through the crewing of traditional tall ships, originally Churchill and the SS Malcolm Miller. Among my shipmates were, apart from my 17 year old brother, press-ganged like myself by a dad determined that we wouldn't become spoiled rotten by an increasingly degenerate Western lifestyle, several young men from Scotland and the north, some recent recruits to the RN, and a handful of older "Mates" who'd been given authority over the rank and file of we deck hands. In overall authority was the langourously elegant Ship's Captain, who also happened to be an alumnus of my own alma mater, Pangbourne. It was an all-male crew, and I was quite well-liked at first, but that situation didn't last long. There was one young guy, however, who stayed a good friend after we'd tried to impress a couple of girls together during a brief stay in France; St Malo, I think it was. He was a little baby-faced southerner with long dark hair worn shoulder length like the young Jack Wilde. I'd boldly put my arm around the one I fancied, Martine, and she'd got violently upset with me, and wandering disconsolately around and desperate for her address soon afterwards, 'Jack' gave it to me after she'd scrawled it on a piece of paper either for him or one of the other lads. I was drunk with relief for a while, just walking on air, because there was the danger of me coming down with a serious case of lovesickness had Martine become lost to me forever. I got on OK with a few of the others, and some were merely indifferent, but 'Jack' was Churchill's true prince.
Serving on the Churchill was hardly a luxury cruise. There were storms which saw seamen sprawled all over the deck being violently sick attached to the ship only by safety belts. On more than one occasion, we were turfed out of our hammocks in the middle of the night to help trim the sails...something I never too part in, which can hardly have helped my reputation. I did climb the rigging once though, and that was just before we came into the port of Amsterdam, with dozens of us manning the yard arms, again attached only by safety belts. The Dutch metropolis was marked by the kind of open sexual license I'd witnessed only the year before in Hamburg, although without the same sinister vibrancy. I can remember a kind of perfunctory weariness about the decadence of Amsterdam, whose sad De Wallen red-light district is filled to the brim with hundreds of little illuminated one-room apartments, each with a single woman sitting in clear view of onlookers plying her lonely trade. As for Edinburgh, just before setting foot in the city for the first time, one of the lads, dressed to the nines himself in the trendiest seventies gear, all flared slacks and stack-heeled shoes no doubt, warned me not to go strutting about Edinburgh town centre in a flashy boating blazer. I completely ignored his advice of course, so, waltzing some time later into an inner city pub in broad daylight wearing said blazer and blue jeans tucked into long white socks, a grinning hooligan with long reddish curly hair asked me if I was from Oxford. Perhaps he was aware of the Oxonian reputation for producing flaming aesthetes, but I doubt it. I think he just took one look at my jacket and thought: "Who's thus flash ponce askin' tae ge' hus heed kecked in?", or worse. It may have been touch and go for a while as to whether he was going to inflict some serious damage on my angelic English face, but in the end he left me be. He may even have liked me. The unlikeliest people did in those days.

The Tears of a Woman

Within a few short weeks of our returning to London by train from Edinburgh, my brother and I were setting sail again, this time towards the Baltic coast of Denmark via Germany's famous Kiel Canal as part of what is known as the Ocean Youth Club. While we were once more supervised by "Mates" under the command of a Ship's Captain, the OYC was more like a cruise than a trial by water as in the case of the STA, utilising modern yachts rather than traditional tall ships. We wasted little time in recruiting Simon, a nice young guy from Wotton-under-the Edge in Gloucerstershire we'd actually first met on holiday in Calpe in Spain some decade previously, as our closest friend and crony. Soon after setting foot on Danish soil we got talking to two girls who, as might be expected, were natural blondes with hair the colour of Anchor butter, but while one was slim, the other was more voluptuous. The first was quite sweet on my brother so it seemed, while I had more to do with the second, but our efforts at romance were wholly innocuous, despite the reputation Scandinavia had for progressive sexual attitudes in the '60s and '70s. Later, the Captain, a real character, a brilliant lovable bearded loon who I once saw go berserk on a toxic mixture of drink and John Kongos had a go at us for keeping our dates to ourselves. He was one of those older guys who took to me, sensing the warm heart beneath the cool foppish exterior, but I think he may have misunderstood the situation, which had something of the innocence of the fifties about it. 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 was crazy for her, and she clearly liked me too, and yet I'd senselessly dumped her for the sake of a night of drunken idiocy with my brother and Simon, perhaps expecting her to run after me or something. Suddenly, overtaken by 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.

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 some who were, such as the madcap ship's captain described above. What united them was that they behaved with special protectiveness and affection towards me, and I've never forgotten them for it. 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, because I didn't see it as in any way malicious. But Brenda insisted that their mockery came from the fact that I was "better than what they are", as she put it, possibly in imitation of their cockney accents, but she was wrong. She'd been taken in by my pleasing appearance and manner, all of which made me more dangerous by far than they...not just to others, but myself. There was an honesty about these crude and rowdy sailors and in no way was I better than them. The qualities we value and covet most...beauty, charisma, talent, intelligence, charm...these can serve as terrible temptations to those "blessed" by them to take wrong and destructive paths. Little wonder that so many Christian thinkers see them as stumbling blocks placed in the path to saving faith which few souls manage to survive. 
I saw Brenda on only one or two occasions after this night that I can remember, and each time she greeted me with a manner that was at once sad and distant. I grew my sideburns long in '76, and I can remember her expressing slight distaste for my new "Teddy Boy" image as she called it. Perhaps there was something totemic about it in that it betokened a certain coarsening which turned out to be prophetic. By 1978, any pretensions to refinement I might once had been jettisoned in the vile name of Punk. How horrified she would have been to see her sweet little sailor man with a safety pin through his ear...for hers was a sweetness, a real sweetness, the sweetness of Wrens.

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, a strikingly good-looking blond seaman of about 30 I knew only by sight, had taken unofficial charge. Once we were all safely aboard, it was the turn of our self-appointed 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 vicious 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 wept the tears of one who instinctively knew what those who loved this poor man must have been feeling at the time, the true appalling tragedy of the incident hit home and I ran into the bathroom and sobbed my heart out myself. Thinking back on it, a line from that beautiful song "How Men Are" by Scottish singer-songwriter Roddy Frame comes to mind: "Why should it take the tears of a woman to see how men are?"

A Gosport Discomaniac

Still in '75 I attempted to pass what is known as the AIB or Admiralty Interview Board with a view to qualifying as a Supply and Secretariat officer in the Royal Navy. This involved my 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 potential as a future naval officer.
On one occasion early on in the long weekend just before one assignment or another, I was primping in the mirror putting the final touches to my toilette when one of the guys I was sharing a dormitory with brutally told me that I was at a naval base not a fashion parade. Something like that anyway. Whatever it was, he wasn't going to be coming along with me that night to the disco, or any night for that matter. He could stew back at Sultan for all I cared. Two guys eventually did agree to accompany me on one of the nights we spent at Sultan, but they really weren't all that keen. As things turned out I was left alone at a Gosport disco dancing with a pretty young woman with shortish blond curly hair and the unusual name of Shiralee (Indigenous Australian for "burden" or "duty"). 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 with someone in authority within the base, and I can remember passing through an officer's mess soon afterwards and briefly exchanging pleasantries with its airily affable occupants. Being English gentlemen of the old school, they kept their actual opinions of me 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. Ay, every inch the superstar.