Villager, page 20
Judith Sparrow: Terence Black, in case you are wondering, the Nissan Micra who you didn’t thank when it made quite an elaborate manoeuvre down a farm track to let you pass the other day on the lane up to Hood Gate just beyond the sharp right-hand bend was driven by me.
Anne Cherry: Selection of old board (and other) games. Kerplunk, Downfall, Scrabble, Monopoly, Pictionary, more. All in excellent condition. £20 the lot. Individual prices considered if no takers.
Mark Laggs: When I was playing Downfall as a kid a bee once went in one of the holes on the turny bits, thinking it was a flower. I will always remember that.
Diana Wilson: Turny bits?
Megan Beaker: Someone said I once turned a man to stone. People retold the story, then embellished it. Even the unembellished version is untrue. I could not have done that if I wanted to (and I did want to, at times). But that doesn’t mean the stones don’t have a voice of their own.
Jennifer Cocker: Is Gary OK? I haven’t seen him on here in a while.
Mark Laggs: He’s been having a hectic time I reckon. Sorting the insurance and everything after his stone outbuildings burned down. I think he lost a lot of stuff.
Penelope Ralph: This year’s Ball In The Hall will take place on June 22nd. Outdoor catering will be provided by Miranda’s Kitchen. We are also very pleased to welcome Adverse Camber from Torquay, who will be enlivening proceedings with their mix of sea shanties, rock, ska and what the Plymouth Herald described as ‘solid peninsula reggae pop’ in a glowing 7/10 review. Tickets will be £10 and must be purchased in advance from the Stonemason’s Arms or the community shop.
Mark Laggs: In case anybody is going up by Riddle Bridge, the road is closed. Massive fuck off elm has come down.
Judith Sparrow: Brilliant news! Thomas’s horse rug has been found. Angela Paley from Wentworth Country Cheeses discovered it caught in a tree, a full half a mile from Hood Gate, and handed it in to Jim Swardesley at the post office. Jim called me and I went in and picked it up yesterday. Amazingly, it is only slightly torn. Of course, I’d got my Thomas a new rug in the meantime, because he can’t go cold, so now he has two. He’s an exceedingly happy horse!
Megan Beaker: Do you all sometimes hear me sing to you in your sleep? Do you notice how it intensifies when you are feverish and sick, how it becomes everything? Do you ever realise, as my song scores your dreams, that it has been the soundtrack to so many dreams in the past, too, but you never remember it when you wake up and are back in your surface world, which you laugh and shrug and joke your way through and pretend is the real story?
REPORT OF DEBRIS (2014)
I need a slash. I think I’ll do it here. Gap in the tree curtain. Well-trodden. Ah sweet Mabel in heaven it stinks. Should have chosen a country lane instead. How many people have wazzed in this layby? Must be millions. Billions. Ye olde travellers on the trunk road into the west, unable to wait until the next rest facility. Services: twenty-one miles and twelve miles. Always try to get your horse to last out until the furthest one. Invariably a mistake. God, what’s this ground made of. Weeds growing from pure urine. Don’t think I’ll kick off my new foraging career here. Let’s leave that a while, shall we. Plastic bag caught in a tree. Nothing beautiful about that, whatever that emo kid in the film reckons. I was a big emo fan as a kid too. Rod Hull. Brilliant. Convinced it was a real bird until I was at least eleven. OK, here will do. Crisp wrappers. Plus-size drinks cartons. Do you want to get large for an extra 20p? Sorry, I mean go large. Litter bastards, slurping their McDiabetes after their day out to a renowned World Heritage Site. Tiffany, look here, isn’t this remarkable, these larger blue stones were somehow transported all the way from the mountains in west Wales 4,000 years before cars or trucks or trains had been invented, although there is a conflicting theory that they are erratics which drifted in on Ice Age glaciers from their original resting place. No, Tiffany, leave it where you threw it. There isn’t time. We have to be at Aunt Jackie’s at six, and what’s the point when there’s loads of other crap there already and I’m sure there’ll be a little man to come and pick it up before long.
That’s better. Give it a shake for luck. Why is it they never do that in the films? Always goes back in the pants so quickly. Barely even a movement. No thespian concession to zipping up. Zero evidence of stains or droplets. Always a plot device piss, too, never just a piss. Is this a plot device piss too? ‘If he hadn’t have stopped, he would never have met that druid, and his life would never have turned around.’ Doubt it. Who needs turning around anyway? It just means it’s going to be that much more exhausting the next time, when you get turned back around the other way again. Could do with a drink. Just one. Three hours until the pubs open. The pubs where I’m going anyway. The Coach & Horses on Greek Street will be open by now. Johnny Slazenger and Steve Rizlas two pints of Fosters down, boasting about how they crushed another innocent with their knowledge of New York Dolls trivia. Pete Shapiro with another indie girlfriend, flicking peanuts into her cleavage ravine at last orders. Had a quiet word with the twat last time. Wanted to take her home myself and treat her good in good ways and bad in good ways but didn’t; just walked her to the Tube station, asked her if she was OK, told her not to date music journalists and find a nice lad instead, a scientist or botanist or oil rig worker. Sign on a lamppost: ‘LOVE CONQUERS ALL’. Arrow added between the ‘CONQUER’ and the ‘ALL’, leading to a ‘FUCK’. Walked back into the pub and it looked like a battlefield, smelled like a yeast illness, oozed the spotty defeat of an old armpit. I put the Pogues on the jukebox and leapt around a bit while everyone else died in corners. Won’t be doing that again. Not after last night. All gone now. You’ll never work in this town again. Or mosh boisterously again in this town to snaggle-toothed Gaelic punk rock.
Going 60 now. Feels like 80 in this. Pleasant Jesus, are those poppies over there? Is that even real, or some fake carpet someone put down for a laugh to wind me up? There’s a rattle that’s bothering me. Hope this thing is going to make it the last ninety miles. Bought it from a granny in Enfield. 1989 vintage. One lady owner. Lady owner made me a cup of tea. Strong like I like it. Never seen a builder drink it stronger. Six digestive biscuits. Forced me to take the three I didn’t eat home with me. Think the shady old crone might have turned the clock back, popped in a 1980 Lada engine. If it doesn’t get me past Yeovil I’ll sell it for parts and hitch the rest of the way. Better than the Renault 4 I used to have. Got nicked. Thieves changed their mind and abandoned it after 200 yards. Feck, I need MUSIC, but I’ve got no cassettes – who has, now, apart from hipsters and the dead? – so I’ll carry on amusing myself by watching the place names zip by. Tintinhull? What sodding kind of name is that? I’m picturing North Sea poverty meets intrepid French reporting but sensing that’s not what I’d find. Maybe that’s it, that’s why I became a journalist: reading all those Tintin books when I was ten. Never got the dog, though, did I, and it’s all over now, isn’t it, probably. Too late. Sorry, Snowy. Try an owner with a longer temper. You don’t go decking Richard Peck in the most popular pub for north London journalists at 7 p.m. on a Friday and expect to walk out of it as an employable metropolitan freelancer. Don’t regret it, though. Twat lied then tried to screw me out of a month’s pay then when I sold his feature – my feature – to The Times he said he’d make sure I never got work from anyone he knew ever again. Too much silence about this shit, too much fear about what not being silent about it might cost you. Too many people in that world not from money being pushed around by people from money and not paid by people from money because the people from money don’t understand the importance of being paid and the terror of not being paid. Too many people not from money complying and not sending the people from money sprawling across a lager-stained parquet floor, scrabbling for their glasses which they probably only wear as an affectation.
OK. Motorway now. Getting closer. Traffic slowing down. REPORT OF DEBRIS in orange computer letters. It’s OK. Twenty-five miles left. This will be better. New start. Can feel the country air clearing up my eczema already just from those three minutes in it. Give me a week and I’ll be a fully qualified country squire. Lazy afternoons of picnics and croquet and mild alcoholism. Looking forward to the pubs too. Saddlers and farriers and wheelwrights, sitting about, telling you about how they made their girth straps and shoe nails and spokes. You get the hippies down here, too, lots of them. Nothing hectic about anything. Very little aggro. A more meditative life. Finally get down to writing my bestselling memoir Mindful Fighting in which I explain how to stay totally in the present while lamping somebody at closing time.
Shouldn’t get too excited. Room above a garage. Not exactly going to be Daphne du Maurier, am I. Saw her on an old documentary, saying her house wasn’t too big just for her. Only 938 rooms. Quite modest, really, darling. Not as if it’s the kind of place one rattles around in. Different bit of the wild west but the same in some ways. More trees, less coast, fewer ghosts of children who died in arsenic mines. I’ll go down there too soon, though, Kernow. Loved both counties as a kid. Climbing trees. Any I could get into. As high as I could go. OK, off the main road now. Thank god. Left in such a rush forgot to do my road tax and was freaking out every time I saw the police. Always pulling me over, they are, perhaps sensing insurrection, despite my responsible adherence to the speed limit.
Giant rocks in the woods. Hobbitland. Came to a party near here in ’99 with Jen. Big farmhouse where capitalist hippies sold their homebrew. Tiny men everywhere. Me towering over them. Tiny men and willowy women. ‘You get taller when you’re drunk,’ said Jen. Correct, probably, as she is about everything. Best break-up ever. Still love her to bits, even though her family are poshos. Still looking after me even now, getting me out of tight spots. What are these things beside the road? Sheds? Look more like portals, bit charred-looking. Step in and everything spins and smokes and you fear incineration but actually just end up in 1968. Fine by me. It’s where I’m planning on going soon anyway. Is this a road? I think it is, just about. Ah! Polytunnels. This’ll be it. Jen said to come in the back way. So as not to embarrass him in front of his customers? I asked. No, because the main gate will be locked by that point, you prat, she said. Ooooh look at this, not what I had in mind when she said garage. I was thinking of the ones in Hackney. Don’t get this there. Stone, pretty big, little old wonky steps going up to the living quarters. Daisies, multicoloured ones, growing out of them. I can deal with this. The place is just an afterthought for her cousin Titus, one of many annexes. Done pretty well for himself. Two years younger than me, Jen says. Not as if he started with nothing, though. Wonder what the main house is like. I’m fucking well early. Two hours. Saw a pub a couple of miles back up the lane. Sounds like a plan.
*
Wednesday. Titus has been over, brought three cucumbers. I tried to be polite about them, thanked him, even though if you ask me they taste of all the most disappointing parts of British life. He walked over to the window, turned this big Indian jug around, possessive like, stamping his authority on the space. I don’t care which way around the Indian jug goes. It’s not my Indian jug. Asked me how I was settling in. Great, I said, not totally fibbing. Refrained from complaining to him about the way if you’re cooking a pizza in the oven you need to shove it right to the back then turn it around halfway through and even then it will probably burn on the edges and be frozen solid in the middle. He told me to put a rod down the septic tank if it gave me any problems. ‘We are a tad feral around here, I’m afraid,’ he said. He’s all right, Titus is. Voice oozes everything he’s from. Not super posh, laid-back Devon posh, as if the act of talking itself is a little tiring, as if words are a chair he’s constantly pushing the reclining lever on. Heard that sound a lot here already. Reminders of my ingrained peasanthood everywhere. Bit alone but made some friends at the pub already. Maurice, a thatcher. Almost broke my fingers with his handshake. Saw Bob yesterday. First time in six years. Good to be close to him again. Grumpier than he used to be. Looks even more like a terrier. ‘Mind out for newts,’ he said, as I walked in. ‘What?’ I said. ‘They’re breeding out the back,’ he said. ‘They seem to still think there’s a pond here.’ Some people really own a room when they walk into it; Bob used to really rent a corner of that same room. Different now. Sense a new unwillingness in him to please. Listened to some records, a blast of stoner rock, proto-metal, some of our old touchstones. Didn’t smoke. Drank tea. First time I’ve known him to be single. A good thing, too. Loved himself a loud, bossy lady, Bob did. Don’t know if he still does. Always going straight from relationship to relationship with no time to take his clutter to the charity shop in between. Never the healthiest state of affairs. Big barrier to meeting someone on equal terms for him. Wouldn’t have told him, though. Say something like that to Bob and he wouldn’t express offence; he’d just go a bit silent then you wouldn’t see him for an epoch. Hard to believe he ever lived in or near a city. Kind of bloke who whispers to sick trees and makes them well again. Told him I was trying to learn the names of the flowers. ‘You?’ he said, disbelieving. ‘Have this,’ he said, handing me a book. ‘I’ve got two.’ ‘What’s this one on the cover?’ I said. ‘Snake’s head fritillary,’ he said. ‘The ones next to it are marsh marigold.’ Took the book and wandered around a bit afterwards in the sun, steep steps, a water spout two inches above the pavement, ‘NOT DRINKING WATER’. Good job they told me that because I was just about to get down on my back and clamp my lips around it. Ginnels and jitties behind cottages, covered in daisies. Not daisies. Fleabane. Just learned it. Ugly name for a nice plant. Pictured this place, 1968. Thought about its ghosts. RJ. Was this one a street he walked along? And did the Countenance Divine shine forth upon these clouded hills?
‘I see your car’s got Devon rash already,’ Titus asked later, when I saw him by the polytunnel, stirring an organic nettle and comfrey-based fertiliser.
‘You what?’ I said.
‘Devon rash. It’s when the left side of your car gets scratched up from all the time you spend pulling over into hedges and banks to let other people pass.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Yeah. It’s a good job people don’t drive here like they drive in Manchester or London. I’d be dead by now.’
‘Did you know?’ he added, as if we’d been talking about it for a while. ‘Apple used to just mean “fruit”. It didn’t mean “apple” until relatively recently – a few hundred years ago or so.’
Every day’s a school day here.
Excerpt from rough draft of Wallflower Child: The Ballad of RJ McKendree
You don’t realise you’re part of history when you’re in it. If you live in a time in history where you walk down from your village to defecate alongside your compatriots in a communal mire, you are not squatting there wishing 1596 would hurry up and arrive and Sir John Harington would outline an idea for the first flush toilet. By a similar measure, if you live in 1967, and are renting a house for an affordable price in a beautiful part of the world, near dozens of other artists who you rub up against every week and spark off, you probably do not think ‘Hey, I am in the sixties when everything was better!’ There is no awareness in you that everything will not always be this way, that you are part of a blessed generation, sprinkled with stardust, and in a few decades’ time artists will auction several of their internal organs for the freedom you have.
But that stardust is only part of the story: the story of the Woodstock Generation that has been told a thousand times. We know magic filled the air. We know that it was a rare time when artistic bravery intersected with popular appeal and – frequently – vast ensuing wealth. But there are different stories still to be told of the same era. In a way, there were quite simply too many great records made in the sixties and seventies. The foyer got too crowded, and not everyone had room to move around and do their thing. Some less assertive souls, perhaps feeling that they could not breathe, decided to leave. What it means is that many records made during that era are only now getting the respect and love that they are due. Some of them are yet to receive it. This is a book about one of those records and about the man who made it. But it is a little more than that too. It is also an adventure in itself, a road trip, after which nothing in my own life was ever quite the same again.
‘What it’s probably hard to get your head around for people now is that we were not worried about money back then. We were just a little British folk band really yet we were playing huge venues, touring Australia and Germany, we all had big detached houses, and most of us had paid off the mortgage before very long. Of course, a lot of what we earned got squandered on beer. You’d go to Dick and Sheila’s house and wait while they got ready to go to the pub – Dick and Mick always had to live within a mile’s walk of a pub, it was part of their rules – and, as we were leaving, Dick would grab a wad of pound notes from a gap in one of the walls or a cranny behind one of the beams, which was also later where he kept his weed because after some of the other folk bands got busted, he started getting paranoid. Of course, Oliver and I had money coming in from The Gribblins and Mingle the Tingle by then. But we hadn’t, a few years earlier. When Oliver had first started making them in his shed. It all happened very quickly, the change. Four years, something like that. But everything changed quickly back then.’
I’m sitting in a farmhouse kitchen. The room is full of ceramics and they’re great ceramics – full of abstract slashes and curves and runes in bold primary colours – and I’m trying to stay calm but it’s not because of the greatness of the ceramics that I’m trying to stay calm. It’s because the kitchen belongs to Maggie Fox, the Maggie Fox, who is sitting right there in front of me on an Ercol chair talking to me. Maggie Fox, whom I watched present Blackbird when I was a kid. Talking to me about Equinox, my favourite folk-jazz band of all time, and about the costumes she made for The Gribblins and Mingle the Tingle and – later, slightly less successfully – Brock of the Wood, and about her ex-husband Oliver. And I’m also trying to stay calm because all of this interests me, all of this is a book in itself, and every story leads to another story, and every one is enthralling, but it’s not even the real reason I’m here, and I want to talk to Maggie about the real reason I’m here, but I also don’t want her to stop talking about the other stuff, but I also don’t want to keep her all day.
