Travels With Charlie

Chapter 12 - Friends

2010-08-06T04:53:00.000-07:00

Charlie's Birthday Party 1993

‘I love the friends I have gathered together here on this thin raft’ (Jim Morrison)

This blog about our beloved VW Van would be incomplete without mentioning those who have been an integral part of the journey. This is a pictorial & anecdotal tribute to the places we’ve been with friends, and the people who have enriched our often madcap adventures. There’s not a great deal in it about Charlie, so if you only want to read about him, you’ll have to skip through to Chapter 13, but part of the spirit & beauty of the VW camper van is about the people who’ve shared the trip, these are just a few of them and I crave your indulgence.

Part 1: Becki
Let’s start at the beginning. A very good place to start, according to Julie Andrews. It kinda began with Becki driving Charlie from Bexleyheath to our flat in Croydon the day we made the purchase I talked about earlier in the story. Neither Kath nor I had driving licences so Becki had been enlisted to be our chauffer for the night. It was one of the few times I sat in the back of Charlie in all the time we had him, and during the short drive all the euphoria of the potential adventures & possibilities that lay ahead of us once again enchanted me. One of the other times I was relegated to the back seat was when, hideously drunk after a lock-in in a pub in The Peak District, I was sternly admonished to leave my driving duties by the friend who was with me at the time. So concerned was he about the fact that, on top of the large quantities of ale I'd consumed in the pub, I had also quaffed half a bottle of green chartreuse – a vicious liqueur with an evil green appearance & a kick to match. The only problem was – having drunk more booze than me, as well as the other half of the vile bottle of chartreuse, he was only marginally less pissed than I was!
Anyway. Now, to get a driving licence!

Becki & I had been friends and lovers since just after Sam and I finally split up; due in no small part to Sam’s increasing tendency to hurl whatever items of crockery she could lay hands on at the time around the flat, usually at my head. I mentioned this proclivity of hers in a previous chapter, so if you’re intrigued by this you need to go back a bit and find it.
Anyway, I’d met Bex whilst working at Capital Radio’s ‘Kidsline.’ I deployed my major (and thus far, only) strategy for luring women into bed by inviting them to, ‘like, come & live with me, OK?’ This, amazingly had always worked in the past, so why not give it a shot? Nothing to lose, what.
Now Becki was (and still is) spectacularly gorgeous, and I didn’t really think for a moment that she was going to fall for that one, cliché number 52 in the failed lotharios’ handbook. Imagine to my stunned surprise that she actually, unbelievably, said ‘YES’ in big caps an’ all, jush like that. Yer man, Tommy Cooper, he had nothing on me! What I didn’t know was that she was trying to get away from a rubbish boyfriend with an implausible name like Tarquin or Tristram or Justin or some such thing.

All I knew was that this attractive & intelligent, albeit slightly ditzy woman had said she would come & live with me. To add icing to the cake, her dad was building his own air raid shelter in Somerset. Informed, as I was, by my anti-nuclear activities and the very real fear at the time that nuclear war may soon be upon us, a girlfriend whose dad had an air raid shelter in his garden might come in handy in more ways than one!
The only thing was that, in my state of numbed surprise and condition of dangerously heightened, hormone driven arousal, I agreed to her request: ‘yeah man I want an open relationship right,’ because I was, well, er, cool and trendy and down with women. So if that’s what the modern woman wanted, then who was I to disagree! The whole trip would be a rejection of our parents materialistic, prudish, Mary Whitehouse, lace curtain anti-sexuality; divorce driven suburban lives, so let the good times roll, or so I thought.

In fact, I really hadn’t thought this one through at all. I’d bought various books and pamphlets that advocated ‘open relationships’ & agreed with just about everything in them. They told me that monogamy was enslavement of women (and men, children & pets); a sterile festering trap that gnawed away at people until they turned to drugs, alcohol or daytime television in their despair. The only way to be was ‘free man’, but unfortunately after a couple of months or so the sight of Becki getting dressed up to go out on a date which didn’t involve me, became a torment. I tried, in the true spirit of the agreement, to try & go on dates of my own, but somehow my heart wasn’t in it. It wasn’t that she was being cruel, she just wasn’t a soul mate in that sense, and I began to realise what feelings of jealousy might entail. Joni Mitchell says ‘love is touching souls’ and I think that’s what I was looking for.

In fact, I realised with an inner sigh, that actually I quite wanted boring bourgeois monogamy, as well as a slightly less exotic & exciting lifestyle than the one Becki & I had been living. I could kinda cope with the need to smoke large amounts of weed during the day – it usually took both of us about two joints in the morning just to get out of bed (something I’ve now replaced with two cups of tea – different poison I guess). I was also usually entranced by the fact that people would drop by at all times of the day & night, usually to discuss intelligent & arcane subjects and the burning issues of the day such as: are Nepalese Temple Balls better than Acapulco Gold, or is the latest Pink Floyd album better than the last one, maaan – it usually was. I also enjoyed the number of people who seemed to like the food we cooked, and then because it was getting late – ‘and I am a bit stoned like dude’ decided to stay the night, usually on any bit of floor space they could occupy, sometimes including our bedroom. But the morning I woke up to find the entire front room and kitchen frequented by the previous evening's, now slumbering stoners, none of whom I remotely knew, I thought ‘enough is enough!’ I kinda decided there & then to call an end to my dissolute lifestyle, find a soul mate and settle down!

So Becki & I split up, and unknowingly, had already met the love of my life, my soul mate, on an anti-nuclear demo, but that’s for a different chapter. Becki & I have remained firm friends; she cherishes my kids, family, successes, endeavours in the same way I cherish hers, and although we don’t often get together as much as we’d like (she will insist on living in remote difficult to get to places such as The Philippines, Germany and, more lately Devon), but it’s still great when we get together. Her fella, Rolf, is German but despite the avowed rivalry between our two nations, he & I are both passionate football fans, and get on really well. He had every right to take the piss out of me during our World Cup humiliation, England losing 4 - 1 to Germany, but he's kinda like the brother I never had, so I don't mind too much. One day we'll get our revenge!

Part 2: John
It’s a cliché, but quite true; that sometimes when you don’t see someone for ages but when you eventually hook up again, if you start chatting away like you saw them only yesterday, then this is true friendship, mes amigos, and it is like gold dust so cherish it well.
(Bit of a mouthful that last sentence, but I hope you get my drift).
Anyway, I am enormously fortunate to have several friends who are like this; Becki is one and John is another. As related earlier, John & I first met up at University, and has been a constant in my life ever since. Not only did he introduce me to folk music, via Fairport Convention and Planxty, he is also one of the funniest and most erudite people around. An hour or so spent in his company will find the conversation touching on issues as diverse as Irish history & other history in general; folk music; travel; the latest must-read book; the clergy; the strangeness of folk and much, much more. All delivered in scattergun phrases; vignettes equally brushed in sarcasm, acerbic wit, & joyfulness; with just a trace of a Brummie accent betraying his original roots. He will blush when he reads this, but hey if I want to big up my friends, well it’s my blog innit? One day we’ll make it to his second home in Killenard, Ireland. He keeps inviting us, and one day we’ll make it but would have dearly loved to take Charlie, but sadly that is no longer possible (yet another Chapter – the last).

Part 3: Simon
One trip to Ireland we did make in Charlie was related in Chapter 5 - The Great Potato Famine of 1983. At the time Simon was a good mate & travelling companion. He was also the calming influence (the oil on troubled waters, if you will) that helped prevent Kath & I from tearing each other to pieces often when we went on holiday, which we usually did when he wasn’t there. To say we often argued loudly and incessantly is an understatement of gigantic proportions, and a small campervan in the middle of an unknown country, or even a known one, is not an ideal spot for conducting an all out war of words, but somehow, without Simon, we often managed it! He was our Henry Kissinger, whatever!

He was to become much more than this, & we now think of him as a member of the family. The loose-ish collection of people we’re honoured to call: thetribe. He’s really a second dad to the three lovely lasses referred to earlier as our daughters. He’s earned this respect through looking after the three of them while they were young; babysitting on a grand scale; changing nappies; rocking them to sleep; not complaining about the crying; helping to figure out what they might eat or not eat; what they might want or not want. It’s hard enough being a new parent, and kinda scary the first time round, bit Si did it at second remove all with unbounded enthusiasm & generosity, both with his time & spirit. He has helped us bring them up, and for this we are incredibly grateful.

Even now he buys them exorbitantly expensive presents, and leaps on flights to Edinburgh (where the older two live) to treat them to meals in gourmet restaurants, or just to give them a bit of support & encouragement when they need it and we can’t be there. He’s also great company, and knows just about everything about everything, without being a know it all!!

I’ll revisit more friends who’ve shared or journey with Charlie in a later chapter. To come: Paul, Ray, Alan, Ken, Andy and Angela, Dave and EV & Colette.
The next one though will be about Festivals!

Charlie, Me & KP

Simon & Charlie in Ireland

Chapter 11 - Kids!!

2009-10-24T12:02:00.000-07:00

Dick with Charlie Arran 1982

Kids (1983 – present)

Night arrives with her purple legions
retire now to your tents and to your dreams
tomorrow we enter the town of my birth
I want to be ready (Jim Morrison)

Your children are not your children
They the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself
(The Prophet Khalil Gilbran)

When Katharine and I bought Charlie, our idea was to travel via the fashionable ‘hippie trail’ through Europe and the Asian sub continent, and arrive back in in back in Oz, or more specifically in Dubbo. There we imagined living in rural splendour & sunning ourselves for the greater part of the year whilst doing the odd days work here and there to keep ourselves in style and suntan lotion. Having seen Katharine’s reaction to a two week holiday in Spain in 1999; average temperature about 35 degrees during our two week holiday there, I’m kinda glad that our Aussie odyssey never became a reality. To say she visibly melted would be an understatement! She never really liked the heat, being after all a Mackem (if you don’t know look it up); a native of a a place where they shun central heating and during the depths of winter fling open the windows as if it were a bright sunny day. If I told you that male football fans there will cheerily dispense with their replica shirts – ones they’ve paid half a million quid for - even in February you might get an inkling of what I’m talking about.

Anyway, I know for a fact (cos she’s subsequently told me) that she never had any intention of going overland to Australia, because, actually, she had other ideas. Or one idea – to get herself as pregnant as she could as quickly as she possibly could, and begin raising a family. So, one day after we’d been married about a year, she announced that she was indupitably and beyond all shadow of a doubt with child as the books coyly put it. Now this is what most blokes in their 20’s (I was 29) dread happening as a result of a ‘permanent’ relationship. Loss of freedom, loss of ability to sit round in the boozer talking about footie and birds; loss of ability to shag around; loss of ability to take off at a moments notice and disappear into the sunset; loss of chances for getting very stoned and listening to very loud rock music. Everything in fact, that a young virile male imagines to be necessary for a complete lifestyle – swept aside in instant to be replaced with howling infants, dirty nappies, endless nightly disturbances to feed, change or placate the small monster you’ve blamelessly spawned, and later the dreaded pipe and slippers, Steve Coogan cardies and teenagers who behave like Harry Enfield’s Kevin, communicating only in grunts.

Gosh, nobody then, was more surprised than I to actually feel a great sense of adventure and challenge from the expected arrival. Was I ready to give up my former pleasures? Only time would tell, but I had a good feeling about being a dad (although I’m still, even 26 years later, not really able to believe I’m a father).

Nothing prepares you for the joy of being a parent; the almost unbearable elation when you take part in the birth; for the first smile; the ridiculous interest in every tiny gurgle and noise; for being fascinated with what this small being eats (and more worrying, produces at the other end – yeuuch!) Later there is almost real communication – listen I’m sure she said your name, I think he just asked for more. Actually these are random noises but later become real, distinguishable, words, and then the fun starts. Ellie’s first word was pussy, but by the age of three she’d progressed to words like camouflage, shocking our friend Simon so much he nearly choked.

Being like, er, radicals man we agreed that we didn’t want a nasty fascist, oppressive, male dominated birth for our first child in some soulless hospital where Katharine would be subjected to the indignities of being treated like a patient or a number. No, we wanted the joy and nutaral-ness of a home birth (and up yours to the authorites). After all; we kept reminding ourselves that we’d been told that Chinese peasant women could give birth in the rice field they were working in and carry on with their toil unhindered – total bullshit of course but we believed it. All the magazines, pamphlets and booklets we read (one was by the Radical Midwives Association) assured us that birth was the most natural thing in the world, and that we must shun at all costs the nasty patriachial male doctors with their shiny steel implements of torture and gas and air etc.

Our doctor took a very dim view of this approach, pointing out – not unreasonably – that hospital births are safer than flying by plane or some such thing, and that if anything does go wrong we would have access to the best help available. His protestations fell on deaf ears, we were young, deeply in love, immortal and on a mission. As a result he made us jump through a number of what we saw to be totally unjustified hoops in order to secure the home birth we wanted so desparately. In fact, it transpired that the only thing he could find to quibble about was Katharine’s deficient iron level, and this was soon sorted. We discovered afterwards, when Parents Magazine arrived to interview us, that this had been the first home birth in Wandsworth for 35 years, we began to understand why the doc had made such a fuss about it.

As the date of the confinement drew close we began to plan the music, invited friends (really), attended the odd NCT class, bought various books by child experts and gurus such as Sheila Kitzinger. There was a short lived plan to keep the placenta and cook it and eat it while dancing around in the moonlight, but mercifully we thought that this was a bit extreme and loopy even for us and the idea was quietly shelved.

What we didn’t do was worry, have Katharine go on strange diets or study the most auspicious times for birth, and I certainly didn’t give up smoking or drinking! Nowadays expectant mothers are beset with all sorts of dire warnings about eating the wrong foods (this kind of fish is OK but that kind will cause the baby to go yellow and have eye problems in later life etc etc) along with a huge number of possible complications and crimes against the potential long - term health and mental stability of the unborn infant.

Where does Charlie come into this, you may be asking, and I’m going to tell you. We were determined not to let the arrival of the firstborn cramp our style; we would still party with the best of them, still go see all our mates at odd times of the day and night, still go to gigs and festivals, take unplanned trips to nowhere in particular and generally live a free and unfettered lifestyle. There is a small problem here, as any experienced parent will tell you. Small babies and children require feeding, having nappy changes, sleeping and being entertained. You can’t just go out of the house on a whim. You are required to take a panoply (look it up) of baby support systems and items: cots, pushchairs, bottles, milk, changing mat, clothes etc etc.

So…Charlie became a kinda travelling nursery on wheels. We equipped him with nearly everything required for baby life support, even down to a travel cot which folded neatly away when not in use. Ellie invariably went to sleep in the cot almost as soon as the engine turned over, as did her sisters after her, which afforded us at least four hours of untroubled travelling time. This enabled us to venture forth to, well, pretty much anywhere that took our fancy. This usually overnight stops or festivals. I’m sure our girls thought of Charlie as a second home in the same way that Simon and Paul were their second dads (yes I know 1+1+1 = 3 and doesn’t add up if you include me, but I had to get a mention in here for them). I’m also sure that the distinctive chuga chuga sound of an aircooled engine also helped to induce sleep, and even years later if I hear one I get a sort of secure feeling of warmth and comfort.

Actually, in the depths of the English winters, Charlie was not particularly warm, given the inadequate level of heat from the heath robinson style ‘heat exchangers’ which ducted the warm air all the way from the engine (at the back) to the cab (which was at the front), thus affording it time to cool down to a point where it was only actually useful after a journey of about 50 miles or so. Also in summer they didn’t seem to turn off completely, which gave more warm air when it was least needed. Despite the fact I have huge admiration for all things VW and German in terms of mechanical engineering, I think they got this one wrong, and I searched in vain for the fabled petrol (petrol!) driven heater which had acquired urban myth type status among VW enthusiasts, but my search was always in vain.

Our family members will aways point out a VW van when we drive past one (usually in the overtaking lane, boom, boom!) and a general chorus of approveal will be registered with a resounding ‘There’s a CHARLIE VAN.’ That’s just how important Charlie is to us, and wherever I am in the world any site of a VW T2 is a good exultant feeling. Part of the extended Charlie Van family, if you like.

Chapter 10 - A Place Where Dreams really Do Come True

2009-07-25T15:54:00.000-07:00

Arwen & Charlie at Trowbridge festival

(A Place Where) Dreams Really do come True – France 1995

Katharine and I have three kids (and just a few weeks ago a grandchild). All of them are girls, all three feisty and full of hell. When younger, Arwen (the middle & most noticeably ginger one) was notoriously difficult to impress. Even at the tender age of three or four she’d summarise any experience: films; food; festivals; parties; TV programmes; games; days out, with the catch all expression s’pose it was awright, and that would be that. We gave up trying to do anything impressive safe in the knowledge that she was one of the most contented and placid people we’ve known. Her baby years were mainly spent playing happily for hours with pieces of string and pay doh – something she has pretty much continued latterly into her career as a sculptor.

So imagine our shock and amazement when at the age of nine she announced in hushed tones that implied an absolute sense of wonder, and which brooked no argument, that: this is the place where dreams really do come true.

Now what do you think that she might have been talking about. The Planetarium? Madame Tussauds? The London Dungeon? The Tower of London? Durham Cathedral? Alton Towers? No, these were all places that had elicited the usual response, and she had even reserved particular scorn for the Tower of London, since on the one day we’d visited, the room housing the Crown Jewels was closed and to add insult to injury a Beefeater had made her accompany him up the 100 stairs to see for herself the room that was closed, and count them all. Just for a laugh (ahahaha).

Need a clue? At the time an attraction across the water that was so glittering and wondrous it could only be entirely American in origin, was about to be unleashed on the unsuspecting Europeans and in particular the people living near Paris. For weeks the TV had regaled us with adverts, and although there were rumours that not all was financially well in fairyland, we were cheerfully told over and over that it was -a place where dreams…… – well I think you can guess the rest for yourselves! Our three sat glued even closer to the television than usual for the adverts announcing the launch of Disneyland Paris, and as a result we were subjected to almost continuous Bart Simpson style exhortations like Dad will you take us to Mount Splashmore, only this one went mum and dad, please take us to Disneyland Paris…please, please, please etc and on and on.

So of course we just had to go! At the time I cordially disliked the Americans - with their glitz and glamour and relentless proselytising of the capitalist dream – viewing them with the kind of disdain that you might expect of an anti-nuclear activist and practising hippie, and I warned all who would listen (which amounted pretty much only to the cat and she didn’t have much choice in the matter) that it would be total rubbish. Even she was right to doubt me, and despite the fact that I’d made up my mind not to like Disneyland Paris, it only took a sight of the golden Edoras glimmering in the distance, the luxurious reception area and a turn on one ride – Pirates of the Carribean (long before it became a film) – to completely change my mind! I mean, any organisation that can make water flow upwards, as it did in the ride that subsequently inspired the Johnny Depp version of Pirates, must be capable of some pretty awe inspiring feats of engineering and some serious inspiration and creativity, not to mention the application of extremely large sums of the old green stuff!

I was bowled over, as were all of us, and during a rest stop, taking shelter from the remorseless heat of an August afternoon, Arwen made her pronouncement – one that has passed into family mythology, and usually signifies something like, well, really, really, really special. We had been – or were about to go – on it’s a Small World After All; Big Thunder Mountain; Space Mountain; Star Tours; a replica paddle steamer straight out of Huckeleberry Finn, and at midnight there was a firework display of such magnificance and duration that we could only gasp in wonder. It had been timed – we thought wrongly, especially for us, since it took place at nearly midnight while we were taking the last trip of the evening on the the paddle steamer, and were in the middle of the enormous artificial lake that had been created for it to sail on. Our trajectory had taken us to to the middle of the lake, and the fireworks illuminated the night sky over the spot our craft had reached with luxuriant and undreamt of splendour.

We went back to the campsite, exhausted but exultant, tucked ourselves into Charlie and dreamed the dreams of the innocent. For the girls, I think it was what childhood should be about, and for Kath and I it was a return to a time of comfort, wonder and heedless laughter, and I think whoever coined the phrase ‘there’s a child in all of us’ wasn’t far wrong.

In contrast any journey in Charlie was usually edged with a degree of uncertainty and a small amount of danger. Even the ferry companies conspired to get in on the act. They could never decide whether Charlie was a large car, or having six seats and an elevating roof was in fact a small mini-bus and therefore should be charged for accordingly. In the days before the internet we were required to spend an eternity on the phone answering questions about our beloved vehicle, whilst waiting endlessly for lackeys in what we imagined to be windowless, dust filled rooms to pronounce upon the cost of tickets and the type of insurance that would be required. Height; length, width; number of seats; weight; elevating roof; spare tyre on front – all required further consideration by the powers that be, and our phone bill grew so large and my patience so thin that I eventually resorted to lying. A useful tactic, which proved entirely successful! Naivley, I believed that my deception would eventually be found out, and we’d get turned back at the ferry port, but very few, if any employees of ferry companies check to see if something that appears on their docket as a VW Station Wagon, is in fact a large 2 ton Kombi Van, so fortunately this never happened.

Then of course there was also the uncertainty that Charlie would deign to let us go where we wanted to. Breakdowns (fortunately rare); the often frequent need for the old screwdriver trick referred to in a previous chapter; the lack of heating in winter and cooling in summer; the reluctance to start on chilly winter mornings; the lack of power steering; all contributed to being what I fondly imagined to part of the adventure. The journey – according to the buddah – is more important than the getting there. I still firmly believe this but now we have a powerful and pretty reliable Audi with all mod cons, and I enjoy the journey just as much!

There was from time to time an agreebly sociable element to Charlie’s need for large amounts of TLC. Breakdowns usually elicited help from VW enthusiasts, some of who we stayed in contact with for many years; AA Patrols invariably went ‘above and beyond’ in their attempts to resolve the problem, doubtless taking pity on a bunch of helpless hippies and their young offspring, all of who would begin crying and sobbing on cue when such an events happened; complete strangers would stop and chat; people would offer us large sums of money for Charlie (which we invariably refused); and on one occasion Charlie drew larger crowds than our campsite’s entertainment menu. Admittedly this comprised a listless and not at all glitzy karaoke with a completely out of date song list, a tired ‘talent’ show and some films that dated back at least several centuries before even Charlie Chaplin. Even so, I felt quite chuffed in a way at being with Charlie the centre of attention.

Now, it seemed that the French on our particular campsite liked nothing better than the sight of an air cooled engine & carburettor being stripped down and (badly) re-assembled by someone they clearly regarded as being a bit like an English Gerard Depardieu, but not as the handsome devil he so obviously is, but rather of him in his Cerano de Bergerac incarnation as a bumbling if good natured fool. As I toiled in the blazing heat of the day to rectify a fault which had developed in the carburettor, a large crowd of French blokes, all wearing pencil thin moustaches and implausibly large cheery bellies, diverted from their usually endless game of boules and gathered to proffer advice, pass me screwdivers and wrenches, help turn the engine over, all accompanied by an amused air of tolerance and eyebrow jiggling that plainly said (in cod French if you please), ‘aha, ze English fool knows nuzing about ze carburettor, n’est pa’).

Larger crowds gathered whilst wives and partners of the assembled multitude spread picnic blankets nearby and produced French sticks, ham cheese and wine. Kids wandered round and tried to use Charlie as an adventure playground, and all the time the merciless sun blazed down, raising the temperature to a very un – English 35 degrees. Fortunately, the campsite was well equipped with a large number of sizeable willow trees, and Charlie had come to rest under the shade of one of them before signalling carburettor exhaustion and refusing to budge any further. My task was made slightly (and I stress, only slightly) easier by this, but by the time the bread, wine and cheese had been consumed I kinda didn’t care much anymore for my mechanical assignment anyway, so having agreed that my days labours had pretty much been in vain, I agreed to a re-run the next day. This time an even larger crowd assembled and even larger pic-nics were produced, but this time I nailed it; mid way through the afternoon one of my able assistants turned the key, put his foot on the gas, and eventually the engine turned over merrily accompanied by great cheers from the crowd. I did a sort of victory lap of honour, shaking hands with the foregathered multitude, and giving Macca style thumbs up signs to all in sundry.

I think they were visibly disappointed that the entertainment had come to an end, but the next day I managed again to become the centre of attention by cutting my foot in the river and bleeding copiously. A doctor was called for, but there were none on the campsite, nor were there any first aiders. Now what’s the best thing after a doctor or first aider when you’re bleeding to death – of course I hear you say – a Vet!! A vet duly arrived (no campsite should be without one), and pronounced me in me in the pink – literally, given the amount of blood I’d lost, and told me in a louche tone that no French vet should be without, well that, actually he didn’t really know, not having his vet’s bag and all, but that the cut looked clean, and that a hospital visit was unlikely to be necessary. How would I know if this was the right decision? Possibly by having my leg turn green and drop off in the night, but fortunately this didn’t happpen. So I was bandaged up and again became of no entertainment value whatsoever. The crowd once more dispersed and I was unable to rise to the dizzying heights of interest & debate again. I don’t think I was entirely disappointed no longer to be the centre of attention – I prefer not to be in the spotlight wherever possible.

Chapter 9 The great Irish Potato Famine of 1983

2009-06-23T13:56:00.001-07:00

Simon & Charlie in Ireland 1983

Chapter 9 (or: Be Prepared)!

I look at the side of your face as the sunlight comes
Streaming through the window in the autumn sunshine
And all the time going to Coney Island I’m thinking
Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time (Van the Man)

So the next time we had a notion to go to Ireland we had a cunning plan. We’d go in luxury, comfort and motorised style in Charlie. To help avoid the arguments we’d take our good friend Simon – who was always up for a jaunt, and whose general amiable steadiness and common sense contrasted starkly with our somewhat tiggerish approach to everything. Anyway – he was great company, and is one of the most knowledgeable and intelligent people we know. The other part of the cunning plan was that rather than spending the whole two weeks on the road, we’d rent a cottage near Westport in County Mayo, and there explore the surrouding countryside and climb Croagh Patrick, the mountain named after Ireland’s patron saint.

Every year thousands of pilgrims make the not particularly perilous ascent to the top of the 765 metre high peak in honour of the great man, and for a long time they insisted in making it far more dangerous by not wearing shoes. Whether this was just out of a spirit of adventure, or because of deep seated religious beliefs, I’m not sure, but it wasn’t till a few unfortunate souls had taken a tumble off the mountain, and gone straight to meet their maker, that the authorities twigged what was going on and put a stop to it. They also had to change the time of the climb from Lent to summer after a particularly vicious storm in 1113 killed 30 pilgrims. Typically, the Christians actually stole the whole sacred mountain concept from the pagans and subverted it. There are many recorded instances of pagan artefacts which pre-date Christianity on the mountain, and, according to www.sacredsites.com: ‘it was common for early Christians to view pagan religious practices as devil worship; thus the legend of Patrick slaying dragons and demonic forces on the sacred mountain is actually a metaphor for his subjugation and conversion of the pagan priests.’ Fairly typical that a place viewed by the pagans as a ‘sanctuary for the giving of thanks and the celebration of life's abundance’ was turned by the Christians into yet another manifestation of the fear, guilt and control excercised by organised religion generally. Anyway, climb it we did, and I can reliably report that the view from the summit is breathtaking.

I digress. Back to Charlie & Ireland it is then. The great thing about Charlie is that he not only had a bed and a cooker and a table you could get four people round to eat at. There was also a sink, an elevating roof which gave much needed space when erected, a top of the range radio cassette player, and two bunk beds for use by kids or guests. He was literally a home on wheels, and it was hugely reassuring knowing that if we couldn’t find a campsite, we could always pull off the road into a field, and had everything we would need for a comfortable, well fed evening. Put the roof up, turn on the gas canister at the back, put the kettle on, groove on down to some sounds and presto! We used to say that if only we could find the right button, Charlie would fly; something that later fascinated our kids, who would spend hours looking for the magic flying button, until boredom intervened or another more interesting game came along. Charlie also had the equivalent of a priest hole. In the space above the cab, a space just big enough for a small child would reveal itself once the roof was elevated, and, as each of the girls grew up, until the age of about four they saw it as their right and privelige to use the space as a play room by day and as a hideout and sleeping area at night. At festivals this meant that all the under 4’s from nearby fields would be drawn to Charlie like moths to a flame, each desparate to join the accepted elite and be able to make the ascent to the promised land. For those who made it, there was the promise of cookies, chocolate and the kinds of fizzy drinks now banned for their lead and arsenic content, and the van was often crammed with hordes of small children, all of them high on sugar, and many in various states of being, as Private Eye would have it ‘tired and emotional.’ Our trip to Ireland in Charlie was about as perfect as any holiday could be, almost the polar opposite of our previous cycling fiasco. We revisited some of the places from that trip – Wexford, Waterford, Tralee, but at each place we went sailing imperiously through, mindless of the little undulations, impervious to the wind and rain, cowed no longer by thoughts of not finding a campsite; truly masters of our own destiny.

At this time Katharine was pregnant with Ellie, our first child, and somehow this added to the romantic and mystical significance of the Celtic and spiritual aspects of Ireland. Planxty have a song called The Pursuit of Farmer Michael Hayes, and whilst playing it one day we noticed that the towns and Counties mentioned in the song reflected almost perfectly our own itinerary: Dublin, Tipperary, Kilrush, Lisdoon, Miltown Malbay, Galway, Westport, Tralee, Clare, Mayo, Castlerock – we can still map our trip that year by playing the song. Of course we assumed Planxty had written it just for us, and it became a firm travelling favourite. It not only tells a tale of murder, mayhem and madness, it finishes the way most great travelling songs finish – with a solo whipping up a storm; pushing you onwards towards the next destination before the grass under your feet grows too green. In this case the solo comprises pipes, a bodrhann, and I think there’s something called a blarge in there as well, although for my money you can’t beat the classic rock guitar & bass type climax with several false endings and the kind of pounding drum fills that indicate the drummer’s imminent departure from the stage through the floor or disappearance in a puff of smoke.

One day I’ll write something about travelling songs – these need to conjure the spirit of the open road, get the passengers headbanging in true Waynes World fashion, and have the kind of beat that reflects the thrum of the motor and the slap of tyres on the tarmac. So Michael Hayes fits the bill perfectly, as does Night Moves by Bob Seger, Crossroads by Cream, Jammin or No Woman No Cry by Bob Marley, Voodoo Child by Hendrix, Coyote by Joni Mitchell, Cinnamon Girl by Neil Young, And it Stoned Me by Van Morrison and others too numerous to relate here. Doubtless you’ve got your own favourites. Let me know and I’ll incorporate them in a book, make a podcast, whatever. In Dublin – what a fabulous city – we called into the local record shop, and there purchased, on the original Tara Label, a vinyl copy of the album which contains The Pursuit of Farmer Michael Hayes. Up until that point we’d only had it on cassette (remember them), and our tape was becoming very worn. Beside, we needed a souvenir of our visit, and what could be better than some of the native music? Some people return from holiday with all sorts of artefacts – flags, dolls, biscuits, gold bullion, STDs, valuables of all kinds. Our sole item of value on return was this album – called After the Break, and we’ve still got it and its still great.

At one point, high up in the mountains near Cork, we stopped to pick up a hitch-hiker. She told as a fantastic tale of how she was on the way to meet her boyfriend and that on a nearby plot of land, hidden deep in this magical wooded countyside, they would begin building a house. The fantastic bit resided in the way they had come by the land. For years, she told us, she had looked after an old man who lived near her village and had vaguely known her parents. She cooked and shopped, cleaned his spartan house, and from the frugality of his existence, never suspected that he may be wealthy, or that he may view her as anything more than an unpaid housekeeper. Yet when he had died, he’d not only left her a large sum of money, but also a plot of land and detailed instructions of how she was to build a house and there bring up a family. Well, when some old geezer you hardly know goes and leaves you tons of dosh, a large tract of land, and directions about what to with it, you just have to get on with it don’t you? At the time I thought this was a manifestation of a peculiarly Irish phenomenon – people who are related only through necessity leaving each other lots of cash, and somehow this magnified the romantic notions I had about the country. Wow, they’re that cool they care nothing for money! I’ve since learnt that there’s an honourable tradition in many societies for this kind of thing to happen; particularly where there is old man, young girl interface, but that it isn’t necessarily always to do with some kind of sexual tryst or motivation. The old man in question had left our hitch-hiker a long letter, apparently detailing the many kindnesses she had shown him and how much these had inspired him. In life he had been, apparently, somewhat taciturn and withdrawn, but in dying had shown himself capable of having a generous and resposive nature. Demonstration, I guess, that we should all express our emotions and thoughts a little more, and not wait for when our wills are being read to reveal them.

‘Where does a potato famine come in to all this?’ I hear you ask. We all know of the desparate history of Ireland and the potato famines, and I really don’t mean to make light of any of this, but it is an engaging story, and indicative of the unfortunate effects of so called ‘globalisation.’ Where’s one place you ought to be able to buy potatoes? Ireland, right, they grow them by the cartload. Well wrong actually; they do indeed grow them in large quantities, but then they all get exported to South Africa or Australia or even England. See, the imperialist oppressors are still at it! What this means in effect is that the Irish themselves get to eat none of their own crop and have to import often substandard potatoes at artificially inflated prices from Holland or somewhere equally unlikely. This was bought home to us one evening when we attempted to buy some spuds to accompany our evening meal in a shop in a small town somewhere in County Cork. ‘Aint had no potatoes in a month’ the shopkeeper cheerily informed us; ‘and even if I did they’re usually rotten and cost too much.’ This led us into a general discussion of the iniquity of the worldwide potato trade and how many Irish farmers are paid handsomely by the EU to leave their land lie fallow, competing with each other with the determination of prize fighters to earn their place on next years ‘fallow’ list. Wine lakes, potato mountains, the net result was that night we had no root vegetable to go with our *bean stew (Don’t ask what its bean, ask ‘what is it now’, boom boom).

So that was it; our first real travel in Charlie, and it kinda defined the style of most future journeys. Late breakfasts, unpressured forays to places of local interest or towards our next stopping off point, evenings with sunsets unseen in the city, pubs where the wine, music and conversation flowed, and late nights, often fairly inebriated, before the snug refuge of our tiny sleeping compartments took us to the land of far flung dreams for the night.

*Bean stew joke courtesy of Dave Young, of whom more later

Chapter 8 Travels With Bikes

2009-05-31T04:00:00.000-07:00

Charlie in Arran 1984

When you got a good friend, that will stay right by your side
When you got a good friend, that will stay right by your side
Give her all your spare time, love And treat her right

Chapter 9 – NEARLY THE END OF A BEAUTIFUL FRIENDSHIP

One of the first trips Katharine & I took in Charlie was to Ireland, in 1983. We’d been to Ireland once before, disasterously – a year or so before. I’d woken up one morning just after we’d gotten together, and smitten by my new partner and a rekindled desire to see the world, had perused a map of (Southern) Ireland cursorily enough to decide that it appeared to be small enough to cycle round. Conducting exhaustive research – well, consulting our friends Janet and Malcolm, who were keen cyclists, revealed that it should be possible to travel about 50 miles a day on a bike. Great, that meant we could go nearly all the way round in two weeks, and still be home in time for cucumber sandwiches and a nice cup of tea. How wrong can you be?

Janet and Malcolm weren’t just keen cyclists; they were fanatical. We had of course failed to notice their equipment was hi-tech enough to launch several Challenger moonshots, their cycles made of such gossamer steel that they weighed practically nothing, and more ominously, that the pair would often disappear on their bikes for days on end, returning with bulging biceps and well developed outdoor tans. They had also perfected the obscure art of map reading, referring to Wainrights and elevations and sea level, kmph and OS maps and other technical mumbo jumbo that we knew would not possibly be useful in our quest round such a tiny country. To give Malcolm his due, he tried to warn us: ‘Listen you two’, he’d said ‘ Ireland has some serious elevations, make sure you can cope with them.’ I pretended this was gibberish to me, and patted him on the head as if he was a slightly errant – but much loved – dog, assuring him in cheery tones that the ‘elevations’ would easily be dealt with.

We arranged to borrow a couple of bikes, studiously failing to notice when they arrived that, in comparison to Malcolm and Janet’s sleek machines, ours not only weighed approximately five tons each, but that they also appeared to lack the requisite 25 gears in each direction, whilst sporting straight out style handlebars, unlike the racing ones favoured by our (soon to be erstwhile) chums. The term bone shakers probably described them best, but to us they were a portal to another dimension, and the promise of delicious adventures to come.

Naturally, it had gone pear shaped right from the start. Owing to some obscure by-law applicable only to English hippies riding bicycles weighing more than a ton, we were forced by the fascists working for British Rail to accompany our bikes in the luggage compartment most of the way to our destination - Fishguard, I seem to remember - thereby having to forego the comfort of the seats in the proper carriages. We eventually took our places on the ferry to Rosslare with the kind of smouldering indignation felt only by the seriously oppressed, and crossed solidarity with BR staff off our list of politically ‘right on’ characteristics to adhere to. This was one of the first times I’d heard the phrase ‘only doing my job’….it seems to be one I’ve heard now far too often.

We had also studiously timed the beginning of our grand adventure to ensure that our arrival in Rosslare co-incided with nightfall. Far too late to pitch our tents, even if we could find a campsite in the gloom of the dwindling day. Similar meticulous planning had also suggested from the comfort of our flat in Croydon that we were unlikely to need to resort to staying at hotels during our holiday. For one thing, we couldn’t reallly afford it, for another only the bourgeous stayed in hotels, for another, we were outdoors people, hardened to the call of the outside, honed to the exigencies of camping and ready to take on anything. Anything, except that is, the driving rain and howling gale that greeted our disembarkation at the ferry port.

So, a hotel it was, and after a thoroughly bad night’s sleep and a major dent in our budget, we set off the next morning to cycle to the nearest big town, Wexford, there further to refine our plan of campaign. We’d cycled only a few miles when we began to see notices advertising a Music Festival at Carnsore Point – not far from where we were. It was an anti-nuclear festival (what more could we ask for), and lured by promises of ‘Christy Moore, Planxty and the Chieftains’ we arrived at the Festival site to find a large muddy expanse of, well, muddiness really, and not much else. In the distance a few disinterested people looked like they might be about to embark on the perilous and tedious job of erecting a stage, once they’d finished their beers that is. ‘The Festival’ said the first person we made enquiries of ‘oh, that doesn’t start till Saturday, but if you like you can camp here and get free admission in exchange for digging the toilet trenches.’ This sounded like a great deal, and we readily agreed.

Carnsore Point

Now, dear gentle reader, I need to take you on a mini-detour within a detour
(yes I do realise this chapter is supposed to be about going to Ireland in Charlie – we’ll get back there, promise). You see, this will come as a shock to the more sensitive of you, but in the days before Glastonbury became world famous, there were no such things as portaloos at festivals. To go to the toilet, you squatted under a canvas awning over a trench, supported only by a rudimentary platform, and went that way. People fell in – a fate much worse than death, but it was all taken in good spirit, and no one had yet realised that they could make fortunes catering to the toiletary requirements of a bunch of unwashed hippies.

Anyway, we made camp, helped dig trenches, and joined the stage hands in consuming the seemingly inexhaustible supply of (free) beer. Somehow the stage got built, amplification arrived, food & beer tents were erected, and a general air of jollity began to prevail. Now, I can’t remember much about the music – I’m pretty sure Christy Moore did play, and possibly Planxty and Van Morrison at some stage, but alcoholic intake and fading memory have erased most of the proceedings after the first night. Doubtless, there will be someone out there with a festival programme and a studiously annoted set of critical reviews pertaining to all the performances (do send me a copy if you have one), but I can provide no such enlightenment. I do have a rather fetching photo Katharine took of me on the nearby beach, wearing just my birthday suit, but I realise that this will not be much consolation to most of you, and its certainly not suitable for publication in this family oriented tale.

There’s Gold in them Hills

The festival duly ended, and we were forced to confront the unpalatable truth that had been nagging away in the dim recesses of our minds all weekend. Namely, that we’d have to get on with cycling round a country which now seemed far larger than it had from the leafy comfort of our pad in Croydon. Also, that the so called ‘elevations’ were really hills. Now, having received a reasonably ‘proper’ education, I had known this all along, but like all obsessive control freaks; and I make no apologies for this, I had chosen to ignore the facts that didn’t fit in favour of my own idealised version. Why, Ireland was a country of thatched cottages, winding country lanes, pubs where musicians were not only welcome, but given free beer by the publican & clientele whilst ‘jamming’ till dawn. It was full of colourful gypsy caravans & emerald wearing characters who were always ‘up for the crack.’ Why should a small detail like hills get in the way of all this?

Well, mainly because the so called hills turned out to be small mountains, which we encountered with monotonous regularity every few miles. What appeared on the map to be a few gentle undulations turned out in reality to be a rollercoaster of peaks and troughs between one anonymous collection of American ranch style houses and the next. Riding bikes which weighed a ton and had no gears to speak of, whilst heaving rucksacks weighing a similar amount up these inclines very quickly became more than we could endure; the first day I think we managed eight miles, and this amount decreased steadly day by day from then on. So of course we started doing what any new couple encountering problems does, we blamed each other and argued ferociously. It was nearly the end of a beautiful friendship – one that fortunately has now flourished for over 25 years!

There were a couple of really low points. One came in Waterford – where we came across a fair and I thought it would be fun to go on one of those rides which spins you round at a hideous speed whilst simultaneously rising and falling in gut wrenching fashion. I’d kinda forgotten that such things do me no good at all, and Katharine said I looked green when I got off, which I think was probably an understatement given how near to death I felt for some time afterwards. It was an experience I vowed never to repeat, but when you have kids, and they’re clamouring for you to take them on ‘California Screamin’ or ‘Space Mountain’ or some other such fiendish contraption at Disneyland, and they can’t go on without an adult, well you have to overcome such fears. This of course happened years later, and you can read all about it in the chapter entitled ‘Dreams Really do Come True.’

The other down point had an upside as well as a downside. We’d been cycling steadily for hours, going uphill all the time, and at about lunchtime we realised thet we would never make it to the nearest sizeable town – Clonmel – before the banks shut at 3.30. In the days before cash machines this meant something, and what it meant for us this day was that we wouldn’t have enough money to pay for a campsite when & if we found one. Sometime after we reached the top of yet another massive ‘elevation’, and the view stretched out before us was truly resplendant. Mile upon mile of sun drenched summer countryside, and our holy grail dimly illuminated by the heat haze, nestling in a valley far below us. It would take hours to reach it, even down hill (as it was) all the way. Seething with impotent rage I threw down my accursed tormentor – bike, not partner that is - and went off for a pee in some nearby bushes. There, twinkling in the sun, but generally hidden from view lay a crisp untarnished £20 note. It was truly manna from heaven and meant that not only could we afford a campsite that night, we might even be able to stretch to a hotel room. In the middle of a jumble of memories, this one sticks out most clearly, maybe because it confirmed my long held belief that, in the words of Bob Marley: ‘Don’t worry, cos every little thing’s gonna be alright.’

Another memorable moment came when, in a town whose name now eludes me, we were confronted by a river which had no bridge over it. Tied up to a small jetty, there was a rudimentary raft come ferry, with a board adverting crossing times as being every few hours. We duly waited for the next scheduled crossing, but no ferry-man was to be seen, and after having waited another hour or so we began to make enquiries. ‘Oh – he’ll be in the pub’ came the reply from the first person we asked: ‘he only crosses when he’s got enough people.’ By now a few other hopeful punters were hanging around the jetty, so we felt emboldened enough to go in search of the pub. Sure enough, that’s where we found him, and he good humouredly agreed that six of us was just about enough to constitute ‘enough for a crossing’, put down his unfinished pint and ambled outside. The crossing itself took a matter of only a few minutes, but the prevailing mist and huge swathes of trees on either side made me fancy that we could well be crossing the River Anduin, or perhaps have journeyed back to Arthurian times to join the court of the King.

I think the furthest we got that holiday was Tralee on the East coast. It was a distance of less than a hundred miles as the crow flies from Rosslare, it had taken us over a week to get there, and bedraggled, angry and humiliated we gave up and caught the train home. It taught me the virtue of proper planning – a virtue I’ve studiously continued to avoid ever since!

Chapter 7 No Nukes

2009-04-20T14:25:00.000-07:00

Chapter 7– The BC (Before Charlie) Years Part 2 - No Nukes

(in which our hero fights the good fight, smells Jonathon Porrit's feet(!) and generally gets up no no good).

It was a fairly thankless task – attempting to save the world in 1979. By day my journey to ‘work’ would lead me to a dingy and unprepossessing room in a large community building in Clerkenwell, where the Anti-Nuclear Campaign had its offices. Here I planned the next demo, schemed the next outrage against the establishment, and plotted what should appear on posters, leaflets, placards and t-shirts. I didn’t get paid for this, but believed passionately in the cause, one that would see the ‘squares’ and ‘death dealers’ swept away and replaced by the peace lovers of our generation. Next to our office the sisters of ‘Spare Rib’ resided, and my abiding regret was that I never met Germaine Greer as she swept majestically to – or from – editorial meetings. I actually had no idea whether or not Germaine had any connections with Spare Rib, but I just assumed she must have.

Sam had moved in with me by then, and by night, the large kitchen in our Croydon flat would be occupied – if not overrun - by revolutionaries of all denominations and sizes. Endless meetings on a variety of subjects were fuelled by copious quantities of coffee, tea, fags, blow and vast amounts of righteous indignation - booze of course was completely bougeous and therefore generally to be avoided. This rule could be broken only if working class ‘ale’ was imbibed in the local pub, OK because that’s where the ‘real working people’ met, and the ‘real working people’, heck, they were going to be the harbingers of the revolutionary tide that would soon dispose of the tyrants and oppressors.

These get togethers, which sometimes lasted all night, generally resulted in more disagreement between the various factions (SWP, WRP, Militant etc) than actual concrete planning, but we all felt that, well man, we were making a stand. We once argued until three or four in the morning about whether or not Nuclear Power stations could be construed to be a ’good thing’ as long as they were run by workers who were armed, and could therefore, at the moment of insurrection, sieze control and execute the bosses. The weapons it was generally agreed by those in favour, could be stashed safely in broom closets, away from the prying eyes of the idiot bosses, who obviously were too stupid to tell the difference between a broom and a bren gun. I was violently opposed to this whole idea (as much as I could get violent about anything), but failed to recognise the completely delusional nature of the discourse in general.

Don’t Believe What you Read in the Papers

Alexi Sayle tells a marvellous joke in his stage show about how his parents, being members of the CPGB, were charged with selling a certain number of papers every week. This they signally failed to do, and would put the unsold papers under his bed as a way of ‘hiding’ them. ‘ I woke up one morning with my nose touching the ceiling’ runs the punchline, and I think that one reason there is so much enthusiastic appreciation of the gag is that a lot of his audience have been there, and got the same scars. Week after week Sam and I would pretend that we’d sold the requisite number of ‘Socialist Workers’, and week after week we’d be in meetings or otherwise engaged – sometimes going down the pub and engaging in questionable supping of non-approved substances such as the aforementioned ‘ale.’ Almost anything, in fact was preferable to standing in the cold and rain of Surrey Street Market, competing with the woman who would shout in approved fishwife fashion every thirty seconds or so ‘get yer luvverly mushrooms ‘ere. Only 20 pee a panhnd! This injunction to purchase the old edible funghi was always followed with the complete non-sequitur ‘Yer must be berlind.’ Why she was insulting the visually impaired element of her clientele we never found out, but trying to sell Socialist Worker was a non starter in terms of competition. In fact, we were quietly secreting the papers in a box room in our flat (described in the agency particulars as a ‘bijou second bedroom’), and secretly hoping they’d just go away.

This mad irresponsibility could only have one outcome – a demand from the local SWP branch organisesr for the requisite amount of money to back up our claimed sales. This poor man – who in another life might have been a used car salesman, pencil mustache, ferret face and all – was sympathetic but firm in a way only bureacrats the world over can be. ‘I’m sorry to hear about your problems’ he’d whine at us, after listening patiently to our latest range of pathetic excuses, ‘but I really need the money to give to the Central Committee by next week.’

Ah – the Central Committee. How we hated them. Every week they dispatched one of their faceless minions to our meeting, and this soulless and often acne ridden individual would spend an hour and a half telling us about the latest position on Russian grain harvest production, and what to think about the crisis in Afghanistan. How little times really change – this is now a hot political issue once again. We’d listen with bored indifference, and hope he’d go away quickly, but unfortunately there would always be one brown-noser in the audience who’d ask interminable questions and vigorously nod in agreement when treated to the interminable replies.

I think the crunch for me came with the SWP when we were exhorted to support the ‘Right to Work’ march which would be coming through Croydon that week. As a result of my involvement with an organisation called NATTA (Network for Alternative Technology), I had spent weeks before researching renewable energy (before it became cool), reading Undercurrents magazine and getting fired up by the brilliant example of the Lucas Shop Stewards - who had put their bankrupt factory to use making kidney machines. With my head stuffed with ideas about sustainability and socially useful work, I mildly enquired of our latest Central Committee visitor what sort of work he was thinking about. ‘Any work where they can unionise and overthow the dictatorship’ came the stock reply. ‘Crap’ I rejoined wittily, ‘what about socially useful and enjoyable work. Why can’t that be a priority? What’s wrong with trying to make stuff that benefits everyone?’

This mild and inoffensive plea was greeted with what can only be described as a tirade of abuse and derision. I was by turns accused of being a ‘revisionist’, a ‘Trotskyite’, a ‘capitalist’, and judging by the escalating hysteria in my accusers voice, the most heinous crime of all, ‘a Bennite.’ ‘Oh yes’ thought I, ‘in that case I’ll find out more about Tony Benn – sounds like a good guy.’ I did, and he was, and still is. A quintessentially decent, honest and principled English man, not to say gentle-man in the true sense of the word, unfortunately fast disappearing as a species in a way that, if replicated in the animal kingdom, would bring David Attenborough out in hives.

My inability to fake political orthodoxy, allied to the ever increasing and completely unpayable amounts of money owed for the non-existent paper sales combined to end my tentative relationship with revolutionary politics. I resigned there and then, a move away from delusional politics that I never regretted.

Looking back, Monty Python got it completely right in ‘Life of Brian’ on at least two counts – the ludicrous divisiveness of The People’s Front of Judea versus the Popular People’s Front of Judea type non-distinctions so beloved of the left as well as religious zealots everywhere, and the endless need to have meetings which reach no conclusions, but look good in the minutes. Since my split (splitter!) with the SWP I’ve adopted Groucho Marx’s dictum that ‘I wouldn’t be a member of any club that would have me as a member.’

Ha Ha Ha. Smelly Socks, Camberwell Carrots and other Assorted Wierdness

Still, there were some lighter moments: ‘I had that Jonathon Porritt geezer in the back of my kitchen once.’ The now Sir Porritt, adviser to that paragon of green, sustainable thinking David Cameron, graced our flat to take part in a Croydon Friends of the Earth meeting, but I’m afraid that my abiding memory of him was not his rapier like dissection of establishment failings, but rather that he took his socks and shoes off and put his feet on our kitchen table. Not very well bought up, I thought, subconciously reverting to my mum’s social mores, and I haven’t spoken to the man since.

It was a lot of fun living in Croydon. By then we had acquired friends like The One Armed Bandit, and Mark, a stoner very like Danny out of Withnail & I (‘If I medicined you, you’d think a brain tumour was a birthday present…’). Mark rolled joints a lot like Danny’s Camberwell Carrot, and having smoked a few we would invariably repair to the Blue Anchor (‘Eric Clapton played here once you know’ the barman informed us every time we went in) or to the flat owned by the aforementioned ‘Bandit.’ This was a weird one, in all the other wierdness: the Bandit wasn’t called that for no reason; he had indeed lost an arm in a motorcycle accident. Thing is, he’d also lost part of a leg, on the same side as the missing arm. If ever anyone had an excuse for a lop-sided and bitter view of life he did. On the contrary however, in between consuming alarming quantities of dope and smiling a great deal, he was to be seen every night down the pub, or by day out at the market or record shop, letting his disability trouble him not a jot. His cheerful demeanor may have had something to do with the dope, but I think the fact that he was always surrounded by multitudes of gorgeous women, hanging on his every word and tending to all his needs, probably helped as well. There were two in particular, lithe limbed, bronzed, implausibly wholesome godesses, who to the amazement of every male around, seemed to share the Bandit without jealousy or rancour, and would regularly repair to bed with him for a threesome. Every red blooded male’s dream, but alas, one we were never destined to participate in.

The Bandit also liked his animals. He kept a number of ferrets, but unlike most people who have small furry creatures in their houses, he let these athletically supercharged friends have the run of his flat. A visit then, was quite an adventure, between the Bandit hopping around on one leg, the two godesses floating serenely by in the background preparing food and rolling joints, and everywhere, lightning quick flashes of fur zipping in between bits of furniture and diving in graceful pirouettes off the sofa. I was petrified, in line with the joke about ferrets and trousers, that one of them would indeed try to invade my nether regions, but fortunately it never happened.

One of the Bandit’s favourite tricks was to wear what appeared to be an oversized jewelled brooch on his velvet jacket. He would hold court in the pub and wait with barely suppressed anticipation until the ‘brooch’ moved. The general merriment that ensued was generally down to the fact that whilst most of the regulars were in on this little trick, there would always be some hapless punter who would choke on his beer at the sight of a moving ‘brooch.’ The brooch was of course a small animal – a monitor lizard – renowned for remaining motionless for considerable periods. Unfortunately for the Bandit, these pesky creatures kept getting too large to be of use in the trick, so he had to continually replenish his supply of reptiles.

Camberwell Carrot Mark also favoured cold blooded friends. In his case, a six foot python which he kept in a large glass case in his tiny bedsit room. Local children would be drawn from miles around when the python was given its weekly meal of a live mouse, but I could never bring myself to witness what I regarded to be a somewhat over the top spectacle of barbarism and bad eating habits. What’s wrong, for goodness sake with a good vegetarian bean stew? The python unfortunately nearly got the better of Mark one day when the latter had one of his regular epileptic fits, and fell aginst the glass case, breaking it and releasing the reptile. The python, with an asounding lack of gratitude for all the live wriggling mice Mark had fed it, proceeded to attempt to do away with him, and it was only the fortuitous intervention of a would be punter – come to share some Carrot that saved Mark from a terrible fate. The snake subsequently had to be destroyed, and we could all see that it affected Mark quite deeply. If you can’t trust your pet snake for goodness sake, who can you trust?

Freedom for Tooting - er Croydon

I never did cotton on to the innate ridiculousness (is there such a word?) of trying to save the world whilst based in Croydon. Land of imposing grey concrete monoliths, home to the ugliest and most exposed shopping centre ever (the Whitgift Centre) and boasting several impassable underpasses, Croydon has been unfairly maligned as being bland and tedious, like Worthing only without the beach and the night life (alright, I made the night life up). To my mind however it was the hub of the counter culture, having as it did a variety of ‘head’ shops, a wholefood co-operative which had a zen tea garden out back, and a great market – the aforementioned Surrey Street Market. In my imagination I was the Wolfie Smith of Croydon, every day just minutes away from bringing the whole capitalist conspiracy crashing down, putting the pig dog conspirators and running dogs of imperialism to the sword, and having my handsome mug tie-dyed onto a million t-shirts just like good old Che Guevara.

Besides, being a revolutionary was also a brilliant way to get girls! Jo had left me, and Sam was soon to follow in her footsteps, but Ruthie, Becki, and most importantly Katharine – all fell at my feet in adoration! But more of that later.

Why am I boring you with all this political nonsense in a missive allegedly about VW camper vans? Well for one thing, I need to pad out the number of words in the vague hope of turning this whole exercise in self indulgance into a successful book, for another I hope you might find it interesting, but mainly, because it gives me a great excuse to show you pictures of Charlie with our range of huge smiley sun No Nukes stickers. Every so often we’d get one in a new language, so ‘Nuclear Power – No Thanks’ gradually morphed into ‘Nucleaire – Non Merci’, and just to show that we’d totally gotten over the horrible war and all and loved the Germans really, ‘Atomkraft – Nein Danke’! I haven’t been able to find any pix of the last one, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Also, and let’s be frank about this, the title you’re dealing with here is ’Travels With Charlie – Life with a Volkswagen Van’, so elements of my life in general are bound to creep in somewhere along the line. And, if you don’t like it, you know what to do.

Chapter 6 It's Been a Long Time

2009-03-13T10:19:00.000-07:00

Dick and Sam - Croydon 1980

Sorry I haven't added anything to the blog recently, but I've been away somewhere there is NO ACCESS to the internet! Unbelievable, until I tell you I was in hospital -a place where they haven't heard about the internet, let alone wi-fi networks.
Dick

Part 1 - Harvest Time and a Special Lady

On arriving at the farm, armed with only a handwritten introduction to the the proprietor, we gathered that the Vendenge had already begun, and that he had all the hired help he needed. Our friend had been meant to phone her uncle to let him know we were coming, but had forgotten to do so – this was the first he knew of the arrangement, and thus he had obviously not prepared for it. Something in our pitiful expressions touched his romantic French heart however, as after a whispered conversation with his wife he announced that he would take us on. This would mean shortening the harvest, which in turn meant less work (and pay) for the others, but ‘c’est la vie.’ We were inordinately grateful to the other hired hands who accepted with incredible generosity and modesty being worse off financially in order to be hospitable to a couple of strange English people. We were totally useless as grape pickers of course, and the work was back-breaking, but we enjoyed three weeks in idyllic surrounds, adjourning from our labours in the vinyard every day at lunchtime for two hours to sit beneath awnings and scoff copious amounts of bread, cheese and wine. At sunset, we lolled in the back of the cart containing the days harvest, as it slowly wound its way via winding country lanes to the local co-operative wine pressing plant. Not much beats passing slowly through Dordogne countryside as the sun sets, in a rustic cart being towed by a French vintner who really did wear a beret and smoke endless Gauloises. At night the food and wine would flow even more freely, neighbours would drop by, the labourers would bring out a variety of instruments and play Gallic jigs and reels, whilst political discourse wound around us in crescendos of passion and friendly disagreement. The level and intensity of this, and the readiness of the French to become deeply immersed in political debate was truly wonderful to behold, even if I understood very little of what was passing. Our exemplary host had no land free to use as a campsite, but instead directed us to a neighbour, who had a field and some rudimentary washing facilities.

One morning I woke to the chugging sound of a VW engine – a sound which would one day become only too familiar – and gazed bleary eyed out of the tent to see a golden yellow split screen camper van, and a driver whose long hair was only marginally less golden alighting from the cab. In a moment, I was transported back to my parent’s place in Australia all those years before. ‘Another reminder’ I thought ‘how many more do I need……’ The driver’s name was Trevor – he and his girlfriend hailed from Leicester, and were touring France in a van which nowadays, being an original split screen variant would sell for tens of thousands of pounds (think of Jamie Oliver’s purple version), but which Trevor had picked up for just a few hundred. It was battered and rusty and I guess that VW purists - such as I would become - would be outraged at it’s generally poor condition, but in those days VW campers were primarily seen as a useful, and cheap, mode of transport, rather than the icons of cool they’ve now become. As our new friends prepared dinner on the tiny built in two ring cooker and regaled us with stories of faraway romantic places they’d visited – Malaga, Frankfurt, Rome, Manchester, Slough, Bradford etc - a vision began to form in my mind. Not only would I own such a van and drive it round Europe; I would embark upon the overland trail to Australia, known at the time as the ‘hippie’ trail. There and then I renewed my vow to own such a vehicle on our return to England. It would be another three years before the idea became a reality.

Part 2 - Heartbreak in Suberbia

On arriving back in England on a cold dismal English summer day my girlfriend suggested we could talk to her dad about finding somewhere to live. He was a carpet fitter, and worked for a property company in south London. Without too much difficulty, he found us a top floor flat in a large house in Croydon, and there we settled down to a life of cosy domesticity – or so I thought. Bear in mind that this was my first serious relationship, and I worshipped my girlfriend with what could retrospectively be diagnosed as puppy like sycophancy. I was pretty boring really, always agreeing with her, always doing what she suggested, and never wanting to engage in argument or conflict. So it should have come as absolutely no surprise when after about eighteen months, she announced she was leaving me for an Irish bloke she had met in the pub. There was also an incident with my best mate from Australia which is probably best glossed over in what is supposed to be a cheery tale about campervans (remember them? Don’t worry, we will get back to the main topic in hand, promise).

So she moved out, and left me in solitary, so to speak. This was around February or March in 1979, during one of the coldest winters since records began – oh well since 1963 according to a particularly informative website about weather I’ve found (www.personal.dundee.ac.uk/~taharley/1979_weather.htm). It had snowed for what seemed like weeks although in fact was just a few days, and I wandered the slush encrusted streets of South Croydon, my mind hotwired like spaghetti, going over and over in my head what I had done to deserve such calumny and what I might have done to avoid it. Not putting her on a pedestal about ten foot high would have helped, but I was unversed in the ways of the world in those days. Also, there’s nothing quite like your first love, that is until you meet your soul mate, which I did a few years later. My torment seemed never ending, I was stuck in a loop - with the snow renewing itself each morning - just like in Groundhog Day, and me seemingly fated forever to plough a lonely and desolate furrow through the bleak midwinter landscape. Well, you can’t really call South Croydon a ‘landscape’ – this term conjures up images of fields, cows, daisies and butterflies and other rural delights whilst South Croydon is more in keeping with post modern ironic industrial chaos, but whatever you want to call it, I was marooned in it, and began to despair of ever finding refuge. Salvation arrived one night several months later in the form of a ring on the door-bell. I scuttled downstairs, eager to converse with a visitor – any visitor – and was practically binded by a golden haired vision of beauty, framed in what seemed like a halo, but which was in fact, the light from the streetlamp behind her. ‘Hi’, she intoned in a part cheeky, part demanding manner; ‘Do you wanna talk about socialism. I’m in the Militant – ‘I’m selling papers. Wanna buy one?’ Did I want to buy one? I would have been mad not to! I would also have been mad not to have invited her up to the flat, and mad not to have used my ultimate weapon of seduction – a nice cup of tea and a biscuit. Her name was Sam, short I learned later for Fidelma, and she favoured a style of dress which I guess could be called ‘military lipstick chic.’ Her endless tresses of blond hair would have done credit to the ads of the time ‘I bet she uses Harmony hairspray’ etc etc,…except Sam would never have been caught dead using anything so obviously part of the anti-feminist, pro-capitalist agenda. Having quickly succumbed to my wiliest cup of tea and biscuit overtures, she decided to stay for dinner, and of course after that we spent the night together…..talking about the best way to bring about revolution, the true nature of communism, the innate unfairness of the class system, why England were rubbish at football and so on. Erotic stuff. Sam was just the tonic I needed. She moved in with me after about a week, and proceeded to turn the flat into a cross between an artist’s attic studio and a social centre for all the revolutionaries, misfits and dodgy characters in Croydon. She would sit up late at night, long after I’d tired and gone to bed, discussing consumerism or Trotskyism or some other ism with an a phalanx of mostly male admirers, or crouched over an easel, painting, which was her other great love. She told me, with a frankly furtive air of intrigue, that she had once been married, but that her husband had died a horrible death by drinking huge quantities of beer whilst dosed up with antibiotics. Her real name was Fidelma, obviously Irish and with strong religious connotations, but she thought it decadent and old fashioned and renamed herself after a bloke. She tried to appear tough and ‘artistic’ but she had a smile of huge intensity, and when happy her eyes would laugh with light hearted mischief. I was inordinately happy with her, even though she had quite a temper, and would often shout, rage and throw things when annoyed with me. The kitchen wall in our flat bore the marks of a teapot which only narrowly missed my head for years after she hurled it at me, for all I know the indentations are still there.

Chapter 5 The Years BC (Before Charlie) Part 2 - Uni and After

2008-10-20T13:33:00.000-07:00

Ellie drives Charlie (age 1) into Glastonbury 1984

Part 1 - Women have always proved to be my downfall....

And so it proved at University. Cast your mind back to the GUURLS of earlier in the Last Chapter. I really had a bit of a problem with these girls. You see, growing up in Oz, and going to boarding school, which I did until I was 16, is generally a very poor preparation for relating to women. Oh, we had the odd ‘mixed dances’ when busloads of the poor giggling creatures were shipped in to my school – St Joseph’s College -for our entertainment, but the zombie De La Salle Monks who ran this august establishment would hover just feet away all night, their black carrion cloaks threatening to vapourise any lad or lass who so much looked like they might be having fun. Alchohol was naturally forbidden, as was dancing in any ‘lewd or suggestive manner.’ These same monks had actually destroyed a Jimi Hendrix poster I’d bought on a rare trip into Sydney for ‘portraying immorality and lasciviousness’ or some such rubbish.

As a result of this conservative and sheltered upbringing, up until the point I started at University all my conversations with girls had been pretty stilted, and by that time it was too late. I spent all my time at Sussex putting them on ‘she couldn’t possibly fancy me’ pedestals, and imagining them all to be divine goddesses who wouldn’t, in any circumstances , want to go out on a date with a lowly worm like me. What I did really well was get them to talk about themselves – something they were usually only too keen to do – and encourage them to think of me as ‘a friend.’ Of course this is the kiss of death to any potential non-platonic relationship, but I liked to think I was manouvering myself ever so skilfully towards plucking up the courage to ask them out. In the course of this ill directed manouvering I discovered that nearly all of these divine creatures would holiday in some impossibly far off destination, usually paid for by their rich daddies, but cunningly disguised as ‘hiking’ or ‘roughing it’ type adventures in order to make their sojourns more glamorous and exciting. ‘Ya, went on the overland trail to Indja last year – only ate brown rice for nearly three weeks’, or ‘didn’t like that Dalai Lama chap, doncha know’, or ‘hiked round Orstalya in the vac, fabby’ were the general kind of stories I’d hear related. Of course, being young and impressionable - even at the ripe old age of 19 - I began to forment my own plans for travel but, wanting to do it in style and comfort, I was reminded of my parent’s friends and the beautiful vehicle they had oh so briefly parked up in our back yard when I was younger. Toad and his gang would have nothing on me I vowed, as I roved the world, Boldly Going Where No Man etc etc.

Part 2 - Work, Work, Work...

However, before getting down to the demands of a roving life, I had to get my degree; something which ended up relying on writing a dry as dust 10,000 word dissertation on ‘The Rise of the British Labour Movement Between the Wars’ and an essay which I got really, genuinely excited about, called ‘Freedom not Licence’ – an exposition of A S Neill and his school Summerhill, which at the time was in the vanguard of the ‘free school’ movement. This meant I reached a point midway through my second year when it became obvious that, in between hanging out at the Virgin shop, getting stoned on the Sussex Downs and listening to Pink Floyd late at night with the lights turned off (scary, man), I would actually have to do some work. So I moved home, enlisted the services of my mum and her trusty typewriter, and began to apply the kind of serious thought processes that the government was generously paying me for, via my grant cheque. My mum was heroic, but in the days of blue copy sheets and Tippex, my juvenile musings would often have to be altered or amended, and she stuck with me stoically and uncomplainingly until the process was complete.

I recently discovered two of these these magnum opi, the laboured results of having applied myself possibly for the first time in my life, tucked away in the back of a folder in a storage box in the loft. The folder was immediately identifiable as a 70’s artefact since it had been covered, in the fashion of the times, with paisley patterned fablon, as well as paisley style doodles obviously crafted during some of the less entertaining sections of the lectures I was obliged to attend at Sussex, but which I often found excuses for avoiding. On re-reading them, I was struck by the high level of intellectual argument, cogent reasoning, skilful exposition and youthful exuberance, not to mention large amounts of pomposity and dogmatism. I was a believer, oh yes, and woe betide anyone who disagreed with me! Fortunately the people who marked my efforts were broad minded enough, and accustomed enough to the ways of callow students, to forgive my rant inspired stylisms, and shock horror, gave me a 2.1 when I graduated. Community Politics On graduating I forgot about globetrotting, and became immersed in local community politics. The fascisti of Brighton Council were intending to close down the local community centre, so I threw myself into a round of campaigning, leafletting, and mini demos which would prepare me well for my looming career as a left wing apparatchick and anti-nuclear activist. This, plus helping out at the old people’s lunch club and socialising left me little time for fantasising about travel – there was important work to be done at home!

Part 3 - French Kisses

So it was, I found myself several years later having done nothing more earth shattering on the travel front than hiking round France and picking grapes for three back-breaking weeks. A friend from University had an uncle who had a farm where they needed some help with the Vendange, and armed only with a trusty female companion I took the ferry to France, and began the arduous and, given my complete inability to speak French, slightly ludicrous task of hiking to Bergerac (no kidding) in the Dordogne region of Southern France. Ah yes; by now I had a girlfriend. Granted she had done all the hard work when we got together – I was still my usual tongue tied self, she had to ask me for a date rather than vice versa, and of course it’s entirely usual for the girl to initaite the sexual agenda, but nonetheless, she was a girl and she was going out with me! Also, her French was brilliant, and between us we managed not only to hike south, but to make lots of friends and have some strange adventures on the way. Ahh.. France! One of these involved a French post van and weapons of mass destruction, and I don’t think you could make it up. We’d been offered a lift by a delivery driver whose cargo was possibly worth more than the annual turnover of Securicor, given the amount of weaponry he sported. In hushed tones he explained to us that he wasn’t really allowed to give lifts, and that if we were involved in an accident of any kind, it was likely to be part of a carefully planned hijack, and that we were to hide behind the seat in the cab whilst he awaited the arrival of the supporting SWAT team, police helicopter etc. Sure enough, after descending a particularly winding mountain road, our Gallic chauffer managed to lose concentration long enough to run into the car in front, and he was immediately out of the cab, waving his shotgun and shouting indecipherable French profanities. We hid for a while, and then in the confusion, crept away, vowing never to enlist the help of the French postal service again.

In another incident which I believe could only happen in France, we were given a lift by a lorry driver, who vowed to make sure that we’d get to our final destination for the day, despite the fact that he was only going half way. How could he make such a promise, we wondered, but was all was revealed when, as he was nearing his drop-off point, we began to career crazily after the lorry in front. The other driver, naturally seeing this as a challenge in time honoured bloke fashion increased speed, and so began a hair raising chase. It ended only when our driver, by repeatedly blowing his horn and flashing his lights, managed to get the other driver to pull over. The ensuing conversation went something like; ‘What’s that all about then?’ ‘These are my friends from England and you must take them to Rouen. I’m not going that far but I see that you are.’ ‘Oh OK then, hop in you two.’ The new driver could see, from our ashen features and staring eyes, that this experience had slightly traumatised us, and he repaired immediately to the French equivalent of a roadside caff, where he bought us a large meal and some fortifying coffee. Afterwards, he took us where we were going, even driving several kilometers out of his way to make sure we got to a campsite by nightfall. Such events restore faith in human nature.

Chapter 4 - The Years BC (Before Charlie)

2008-09-23T10:55:00.000-07:00

Charlie, Ellie and Paul - Glastonbury 1986

The BC (Before Charlie) Years Part 1 - Uni

In 1970 my mum decided that she’d had enough of Australia, and decided to settle back in the ‘old country’ in Brighton. At the time I had just ‘matriculated’ (very painful Australian way of passing exams) to Sydney University, but Brighton’s proximity to Sussex Uni led me to apply to do a history degree there instead. I was accepted, having been interviewed by a cigar smoking FEMALE professor (hi, Carol Dyhouse), and started in 1971.

The main trouble with University is that it’s just stuffed full of girls. Well, GUURLS and DRIIINK as Father Jack Hackett would have it, but mainly girls. In the summer they’d sashay by in tight fitting see through cheesecloth shirts and impossibly figure hugging blue jeans, in winter would resort to velvet dresses with chokers and afghan coats, and all had long blond hair and were called Sarah, or Deborah, or Natasha, or Katharine, or anything from a Dostoevsky novel. They’d simmer in provocative style in tutorials for which I was more than adequately prepared, having read myself into a stupor of knowledge the night before, but on catching site of them my mind would descend into a fog of fevered ‘cor baby’ style Austin Powerisms, and I would have to be led out later, dribbling and drooling and muttering incoherently.

Girls were the main reason that I did absolutely no work in the first two years at Sussex, although I must also confess that my copious ingestion of ‘mary jane’ didn’t help matters. Oh, that and hanging round the Virgin record shop for hours on end listening to mind altering albums by Can, Gong, Matching Mole, Caravan and Joe Cocker (are you sure). I think Richard Branson came in one day and tried to buy some weed off me, but then, people always (mis)took me for yer average friendly neighbourhood dope dealer in the Virgin shop, so I could be mistaken.

At the time I think the store in Brighton was one of only two, and may well have been the first. Absolutely no expense has been spent researching for this, so loads of you are going to write to me telling me that hey man, the first Virgin shop was in Bognor Regis or Outer Mongolia or something, but that’s not the point. The point is that the place was absolutely fantastic. It had a long semicircular reclining area where you could sit on cushions and listen to the music of your choice, and staff who were actually interested in music, and could tell you the exact chronology and track listings of all Jimi Hendrix’s albums, or the exact year Spirit recorded ‘The Twelve Dreams of Dr Sardonicus’ (not difficult really - 1970) as well as the lineup and the reason that one of them looked so old: he was someone’s uncle apparently.

They would also take pity on you if you could plead poverty skilfully enough. ‘Like well man, my grant cheque’s late this term, my rent’s late but I gotta have this cool album by Pink Floyd, I’ll pay you when the dosh comes in’ usually elicited a favourable response, and as a result the shop ran on a level of trust and understanding impossible to believe nowadays apart from in some remote rural areas, where they’ve resisted the coming of post modern urban cynicism and mistrust quite successfully. I always paid my tab, but then I’m an honest geezer.

From this grew the mighty Virgin empire we know today. Although they’ve long given up on the music side, it often strikes me as sad that today’s glass and chrome flagship stores have almost completely betrayed the original vision of what was once musical innovation and passion, content as they are to flog us X Factor nonsense or offerings by Boyzone or Take That by the bucketload. Charmingly however, I have discovered a couple of staff buried deep in the bowels of the Oxford Street store (that’s in London, England for all you American readers) who still love music in all its forms, who understand the ‘deep magic’ and are as conversant in John Coltrane or Charlie Parker as they are in Led Zeppelin or Roy Harper or the Clash. These are people to be treasured, lest they become extinct.

The other big problem with university is that from day one you just know that everyone there is sooo much smarter than you are. In fact, logical evaluation will reveal that you are a completely moronic idiot who is lurking on campus under entirely false pretenses – like those guys who live in airports for years on end – and that you are likely to be found out and thrown off site at any moment. This feeling usually reaches it’s zenith (or nadir or whatever) on your first day. You don’t know where anything is, what the hell is ‘Cultural and Community Studies’, why is everyone else ‘reading’ applied geo - astrophysics or studying the ‘alliteration, metaphor and resonance inherent in the writings of J R R Tolkein?’ What will I do if Asa Briggs (revered historian and Vice Chancellor of Sussex at the time) pops out of the bushes and questions my bona fides by setting me a multiple choice quiz on the rise of the British trade union movement between the wars? All I’m here for is to ‘do’ history, and I don’t even know which period of history I’m supposed to be ‘doing.’

Sitting on a bench in the splendid grounds – spoilt only slightly by the weird Henry Moore sculptures – of Sussex University on a crisp Autumn morning in 1971, all these thoughts, and more, were going through my head. I was rescued from my internal reverie of negativity and self abasement (look it up) by a tall, thin, impossibly English sounding guy with huge amounts of hair, flares and a smile as big as the moon. ‘Mind if I share your bench?’ he enquired in the plummiest sounding accent I’d ever heard. I immediately thought ‘ah – this is a proper English hippie come to talk to me’ and the cares of a few moments ago melted away as we got chatting, realised that both of us were interested in ‘folk’ music, and discovered that he felt as unsure and lacking in confidence as I did. His name was John, and we became, and remain to this day, firm friends.

Merrie England

John introduced me to English pubs – bear in mind I wasn’t long off the plane from Oz, where we still had sawdust on the floor – and to a level of musical sophistication I’d not thought possible before. Mind you, on the way there was the pub where time stood still, dominated as it was by one of those huge mock antique timepieces with faded nicotine stained yellow edges and slightly disfigured hands, which had permanantly stopped working at just short of 11pm one night. Whether this was in homage to chucking out time, or simple mechanical frailty, we never discovered, but the ale was good, and I resisted John’s attempts to get me to drink wine fell on deaf ears, because in Australia, wine was for blokes who are ‘really comfortable’ with their sexuality, or for sheilas, and I was neither. Nowadays I’m much more comfortable with both my sexuality, and wine, of course.

He was more successful in his musical choices, all of which were folk flavoured. Overnight, Planxty became one of my favourite bands, and Alan Stivell and the Watersons weren’t far behind. One misty, magical night we went to a student party somewhere in Hove via the Victorian England of Sherlock Holmes, Hound of the Baskervilles and all. The people hosting the party only seemed to have one album – but what an album! Leige and Lief by Fairport Convention played continuously, and we were transported back in time to a land of jesters, minstrels, earth spirits, duels to the death and medievil banquets. It was the very apotheosis of merrie England I had imagined in Oz, and I became a Fairport fan for life.

John also introduced me to Lewes Folk Club, and the Lewes Bonfire. One night every year the good people of Lewes come together to have the most extravagent ‘no popery’ celebration, commemorating the memory of 17 Protestant martyrs who were burnt at the stake in the town during the Marian Persecutions of 1555–1557. This is an ancient tradition going back many years, and involves fireworks, blazing tar barrels being rolled through the streets, various floats based on topical subjects, hog roasts and at least one huge effigy which is burnt as the evening culminates, usually accompanied by even more fireworks and much rejoicing.

To mark the demise of the 17 martyrs, 17 burning crosses are carried through the town, a grand and slightly surreal sight. The whole evening assumes a dream like quality, possibly as a result of the constant effects of large amounts of smoke from the fireworks, the blazing torches, loud explosions, steam from the tar barrels which end their journey in the river, and the reduction in vision that results from all this. In 2001 an effigy of Osama bin Laden ensured that the annual event received more press attention than usual, and unfortunately, over the years the evening has become such a huge attraction that the little town of Lewes is swamped each year in a welter of tourists it cannot possibly sustain. The Lewes Bonfire Society website now pleads with would be visitors, urging ‘people living outside the town not to try to attend the annual 5 November celebrations.’ More encouragingly, it has safety advice for people who are likely to ignore this, so I guess the public nature of Bonfire carries on.

This was also the decade where because of the striking miners the lights and the tele went off at 10 each night, everything came in either brown, cream or orange, Leibfraumilch was the height of wine drinking sophistication, and holding fondue parties or holidaying in Spain was something to aspire to. This all passed me by – I was too busy enjoying my version of merrie England.

The Students are Revolting

University authorities in England in the early 70’s were running scared, and Sussex was no exception. Looming large in the background were the student riots and protests of 68, and the powers that were had decided to liberalise the curriculum in an attempt to appease the ‘revolting students.’ What this meant for me was that I was given an impossibly diverse choice of courses to sign up for, even though my major subject would concern Britain Between the Wars. As a result I found myself studying, amongst other things, The Cultural Revolution in China, Epistomology, The Romantic Poets, Ancient China and Understanding Children.

I’m not sure why I did this, other than that I could, but I’m glad that such eclecticism was available; it helped shape my world view in a way that my narrow and confined courses in Australian High School never would have. I had gone from a fairly staid and somewhat oppressive background to an environment where people discussed Marx, Engels, Mao, the rise of the working classes, philosophy, music and politics, with enthusiasm and real insight, and I loved it. We once spent a whole morning discussing whether or not the tree outside the lecture room really existed (Epistomology), and were then asked to write a poem about how it made us feel. Scary stuff for a country boy from Dubbo, but at the same time, brilliant!

Chapter 3 - Mechanical Interludes (Part 1)

2008-08-27T02:45:00.000-07:00

Charlie at Glastonbury 1984

Mechanical Interludes (Part 1)

About six months after Katharine & I had bought Charlie, the engine started making a faint popping noise. Now when you live with a VW aircooled engine long enough you begin to be able to diagnose the difference between the normal chugginess – as someone once said ‘it sounds like a tractor’ – and the portent of something more serious. I could tell that this was more than Ron’s ‘blowback’ gotten worse, but was not yet sufficiently versed in the specific sounds that emanated from the rear of the van to be able to make a firm diagnosis.
At the time we were members of the ‘South London Anti Nuclear Group’ and a bit of what is now called networking established that the man we needed to talk to was Christof, an infrequent attendee of the monthly meetings, but someone who apparently knew his way around anything & everything mechanical. Christof lived in a squat in Stockwell, South London, having moved to the UK from his native South Africa a few years before. He was one of the biggest people I’d ever met, almost as broad as he was tall, but all muscle, and a constant smile of delight and merriment illuminated his bearded, bear-like countenance. He posessed a booming voice to go with his physique, and no feat of physical or mechanical engineering was ever a problem to him. In fact, as far as I could tell he wasn’t constrained by the same universal laws as you or I, and could easily have been a member of an advanced species of beings from outer space, sent to help us puny earthlings. In the time I was privileged to know him, I saw him lift a VW engine (Charlie’s actually) unaided, demolish almost the entire side of a house extension in a day and re-build it in almost as short a space of time, install plumbing and heating systems of fiendish complexity, and drink more home brew in one evening and remain standing than anyone reasonably has a right to. He was one of those rare people who seems to know something about everything without being a know-it-all, and who lights up your life for a brief period and then is gone – in Christof’s case back to South Africa, about two years after arriving in the UK.

He was also a qualified VW mechanic, and his initial dignosis of Charlie’s popping noise was not encouraging. ‘Missing on one cylinder’ was all he had to say after a cursory inspection and a brief period listening to the van. ‘Probably a blown valve’ he added after a while, ‘need to take the engine out and get at the heads’, and then, seeing the look of anguish on my face as I contemplated a hefty mechanics bill, added kindly: ‘Won’t take more than a few days, shouldn’t cost much, you can do it in the garage round the side, and I’ll give you a hand.’ He went on to expain that VW aircooled engines almost invariably had problems with the inlet valve on the No 3 cylinder – mainly because this is the one which gets the least amount of cooling from the fan. I suspect its also part of the cosmic joke inflicted by the VW engineers which dictates that everything that is most important is almost completely inaccessible and that everything that can go wrong will involve having to remove at least three other pieces of kit before you can get to the real culprit.

Whilst the offer of help was mildly encouraging the idea of me giving Christof a hand, rather than vice versa, was pretty disconcerting. Did he not realise - I was afraid of oil, and had never used a spanner in anger before! I was also less than enamoured with the ‘garage round the side’, which turned out to be a very basic ‘lean to’ type structure with a leaky corrugated metal roof, no doors to speak of, and a dirt floor. I agonised about security, picturing the local populace visiting my precious vehicle at night and removing anything of value, or even spiriting the whole van away – busted engine and all. When I explained this Christof raised himself up to his full six foot ten height and assumed a look of such ferocity that I immediately knew the local criminals would never contemplate such rashness or temerity, and was reassured.
While we were working on the van Christof found time, in amongst holding down a job and regularly raiding Smithfields Market for out of date fruit and veg, to put up some doors. In true Christof style, they were beauties, strong and well crafted, and certainly had the effect of deterring any would be villains from attempting to steal my beloved machine. We began work one balmy Saturday afternoon. Christof in fact took charge, and I did very much become his assistant during the whole process. He worked with dazzling speed, barking orders and keeping up a running commentary. I was required to fetch tools and label various parts, including nuts and bolts, as we went: ‘so that you’ll know what to do when you’re putting it back together’ smiled Christof, and I hoped he was only being semi-serious. We had the engine out in under three hours, but he told me this was ‘very slack’ as the official time in a VW garage was about 35 minutes. Despite having a state of the art set of ‘Snap On’ tools, he was unfazed by the lack of a hoist or any of the the other hi-tech gizmos found in most modern workshops, and once all the ancillaries had been disconnected lifted Charlie’s engine out using only a makeshift trolley and a huge amount of brute strength. Once we’d gotten the engine out the serious business of stripping it down began.
This is probably a bit of a petrol-head moment, so for all of you who aren’t interested in the interior workings of of the aircooled engine, I’ll cut straight to the chase and tell you that Christof’s initial diagnosis about the blown valve was correct, and that eventually we replaced several valves and had the heads re-polished. This all took a week or so – we had to wait for parts, and my mentor could only work on the job in the evenings. Once back together and re-installed, the engine purred in a highly satisfactory manner, as much as an aircooled engine can purr, and it was several years before we needed any further major work on the engine.

Mechanical Interludes (Part 2)

This didn’t however spare us from some of the other tricks Charlie had up his sleeve. On the first trip to Ireland for example, a roadside picnic was followed by a complete refusal on the part of the engine to start. By this time I had considerably more mechanical knowledge, and armed with ‘The Compleat Idiot’s Guide to the Volkswagen’ by John Muir, I eventually diagnosed a stuck solenoid on the starter motor. This is a fairly common intermittent fault, and all that was required to get the engine turning over was for someone (me) to crawl under the van with a screwdriver and cross the two terminals on the solenoid. Muir’s longer term advice on this is fairly obvious; replace the solenoid you idiot – a fairly easy and cheap expedient – but in fifteen years I somehow never got around to doing this, and from that point on Charlie would regularly refuse to start - often in the most inconvenient situations – in traffic jams, on ferries, going through customs while smuggling dope, in motorway service stations, on muddy camp sites, usually in the pouring rain. I (and it was always me) would then have to perform what became known to the family as ‘the old screwdriver trick’, bringing entertainment and amusement in varying degrees to whoever comprised our touring party at the time. My response was always depressingly similar – bitter complaints followed by an avowal to ‘get a mechanic to fix this as soon as we get home’, but it all came to nought. Eventually we came to think of it as Charlies’s way of reminding us about the uncertainty of all things, and learned to live with it, if not to love it.

On this last note, I think we’ve lost something in our digital propelled, jerky video, soundbite driven age, something that people used to understand instinctively. I’m talking about the idea that things can take time, that the unexpected is often just around the corner, and sometimes we need to embrace life’s by-ways, diversions and frustrations, and not expect everything to work perfectly. We’re so used to getting in our cars and driving long distances without any problems that we’re offended by any difficulties that may arise, preferring not to think about the people we might meet and the challenges that might ensue if our mechanical contrivances did not function so perfectly, and we were to be thrown back on ‘the kindness of strangers.’ Every journey in Charlie was an adventure, partly because we always picked up a hitch-hiker or two along the way - and they were nearly always interesting, but mainly because we were never absolutely certain of reaching our final destination, and this turned every trip into an exploration of life on its edge, rather than on its periphery. As the sage probably didn’t say: ‘its better to travel than arrive.’
Charlie may have liked playing tricks on us, but in the big things he never let us down. No matter where we were in the world, even severe mechanical failure was seen by Charlie as just another challenge to be overcome. He never failed to get us home, and for this we were always inordinately grateful.

Perhaps the best example of this came in Scotland in 1984. Storm force weather on the Isle of Arran meant the cancellation of what remained of the summer programme of ferry crossings, and we were lucky to be on the last boat to leave the island before two weeks of complete suspension of the service. Back on the mainland, it was raining in pretty much tropical fashion, while a gale of hurricane like proportions began to blow. Charlie was clearly uncomfortable with all this, and stalled several times in the first fifty miles of driving, necessitating ‘the old screwdriver trick’ in atrocious conditions. Being wet and thoroughly miserable, it didn’t improve my humour to discover on my second sojourn round the back that the engine had developed a crack in the crankcase through which large amounts of oil were being forced out under pressure. In any conventional engine this would have been a death knell, and knowing that its approximately 500 miles from Glasgow to London, my usual optimism began to desert me. Surely not even an engine as sturdy as Charlies’s would withstand such a journey? I was not relishing telling the others about this, but they would have to know, and with a heavy heart I explained what had happened.......(to be cont)

Chapter 2 - How Not to Purchase a VW Camper

2008-08-09T15:59:00.000-07:00

Kath in the Peaks - honeymoon 1982

Part 1 - (Dis)organisation

'The fact that one day this schoolboy dream eventually became a reality, was due almost entirely to one man’s lack of organisation and the quick thinking of another…..'

Few people are foolish enough to purchase their first serious car in the dark, and without having driven it! Yet this is exactly what myself and my partner did in 1981 when we invested what, for us, was a considerable sum of money in our first Kombi van. In fact it was a 1972 Camper van – known as the Type 2 or T2, converted by a company called “Devon”, with a cooker, sink, coolbox, and two bunk beds in the roof. It had a radio cassette player – a fact the owner was proud enough to record on our receipt – and came with the original instruction manual and service record. It cost £1500, a princely sum in 1981.

That the purchase was made in the dark, without a test drive, was due almost entirely to my impatience to own a VW camper…any VW camper, as well as a complete ignorance of all things mechanical. It could have cost us dear, but in fact was probably one the best decisions we’ve ever made. Responding to an ad in Loot – in the days when ads for air cooled VW’s in Loot ran in the hundreds – I had a brief telephone conversation with the owner, and heartened by the fact he was an expat Aussie on his way home, agreed that he would bring the van to our flat in Croydon for a viewing.

Not completeley unaware of our mechanical naivety, we had hatched a cunning plan. In the flat downstairs from us lived a driving instructor called Ron, and in our eyes, well, a driving instructor must know a thing or two about motors, surely! Ron had agreed, in what I retrospectively diagnosed as a furtive manner, to give our prospective purchase the once over, hence the need for the mountain to come to Mohammed. By day, Ron was a mild mannered driving instructor, but at night and at weekends he became Medallion Man, replete with shirt unbuttoned to the waist, a chest wig, and more gold jewellery than is healthy for the average adult to wear. He had only two records – one by Demis Roussos, and the other Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield - which he played continually, at volumes loud enough to be heard clearly in our upstairs flat (god, how I grew to loathe those records), but he was generous of nature, and had clearly taken pity on us and our state of mechanical virginity.

So there we stood, in the street, on an early spring evening in leafy Croydon, watching the time slide by, and waiting expectantly for the bus to arrive…..and waiting…..and waiting….'till night arrived with her purple legions' as Jim Morrison puts it, with still no sign of the van. Then in the distance, the (what was to become) familiar chunter of the air cooled engine announced its arrival. The owner apologised profusely for the lateness of arrival, got lost at Bexleyheath, terrible traffic etc etc, but he may as well have been talking Martian, because by this time I only had eyes – and ears – for the awesome vehicle in front of us. ‘It’s got blow back Dick” Ron’s voice rudely interrupted my reverie, “It’s blowing back.” Ron had astutely diagnosed an age old failing with VW vans – the heating to the cab is piped in through vents running from the engine, and sometimes as metal fails and pipes corrode, the proximity of this system to the exhaust vents results in an acrid – and potentially poisonous - cocktail of fumes swirling around the interior. My only previous experience of ‘blow back’ however involved illegal substances and unhygenic practices, and I brushed Ron’s protestations aside with a feeble, albeit determined, wave of my hand.

To say I wanted this vehicle would be an understatement, I was drooling with the kind of fanatic desire that only afflicts the truly deranged, and my partner, Katharine, who has a profound understanding of what drives me, gave the go-ahead. It was in fact her money financing this mad indulgence of mine, and she was entited to her one condition. This was that we see the van by daylight, which we duly did the following day. The sale was sealed, our friend Becki (of who more later) was enlisted to drive it home for us – neither of us had licences at the time - and in due homage to John Steinbeck, we named the vehicle ‘Charlie’ after the great author’s final book: ‘Travels with Charly’. We mis-spelt ‘Charly’ but what the heck, the idea was a good one.

Part 2 - Organisation

I, of course was the disorganised man in this story.

The quick thinking one had made a decision some 35 years earlier which was to have profound and far reaching effects, not only for Volkswagen the company, but also for millions of people who subsequently had what can only be described as irrational, but passionate love affairs with VW campervans. His name was Ivan Hirst, and he was a Major in the British army tasked just after the war with producing some cheap, easy to manufacture vehicles to transport army personnel around Germany. Since the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg came under British jurisdiction this seemed like an ideal place to start, and rather than start from scratch, Hirst decided to use the materials he had available.

Popular legend has it that since the Wolfsburg factory was in a badly bombed out state, all the machine tools necessary to make VW’s were seconds away from destruction (by the ignorant, unromantic Yanks of course), but that Major Hirst intervened, stopping the demolition crews at the very last minute, thereby single handedly saving the VW brand, including the campervans so loved by hippies, surfers and counter-culture revolutionaries everywhere. This story has to my knowledge not been verified, even so, seen only as an apocryphal tale it is still fantastic, and I for one, firmly believe it!

It is also slightly amazing that a vehicle now synonymous with peace, love and surfboards was inspired by one of the great monsters of the 20th Century – Adolf Hitler. In 1933, Hitler proposed a people's car that could carry 5 people, cruise up to 62mph, return 33mpg, and cost only 1000 Reich Marks. He enlisted car designer and manufacturer Ferdinand Porsche to come up with a vehicle that could be purchased for the equivalent of an average working mans yearly wage. It was as much an opportunity for Porsche to push his idea of a small car foward, as it was to help Hitler get a real people's car for the citizens of Germany, and in 1938 pre-production of what was to be known as the KdF Wagen began. With the onset of war this never progressed past prototype stage, although the factory at Wolfsburg produced many vehicles known as the Kubelwagen. The Kübelwagen was a simple looking military vehicle that used the same parts as the KdF Wagen, but had a flat-sided body, and increased ground clearance. It was basically Germany's jeep in WWII. Within a year of the end of the war, and with some revisions to Porsche’s original design for the KdFwagen, some 10,000 VW’s had been produced. The British renamed the factory Wolfsburg – the name of the local castle - and the company became Volkswagen. The rest, as they say, is history.

History courtesy of: http://www.pre67vw.co.uk/history/history2.aspx

Chapter 1 - The Old Main Drag

2008-07-22T11:14:00.000-07:00

Charlie in Arran 1984

This is kinda what I call a 'Histoblog.' In other words it's about stuff that happened in the past which I hope some people might find interesting. I'm going to add to it every few weeks, and tell the story of my family's life with a much loved VW camper van.

Part 1 - Discovery

In 1967, when I was 14, a momentous event took place that was to affect the course of much of the rest of my life. Friends of my parents, who were travelling the world in what I later discovered to be an early model Volkswagen camper van, came to stay with us at our home in Dubbo, Australia. Dubbo was at that time a medium sized town in New South Wales, slap bang in the middle of the wheat – sheep belt. The earth for many miles around was bright red, sandstone in origin, and indeed Dubbo is the aboriginal word for ‘red earth.’ Farms were so massive we talked proudly of owners who had to drive 50 miles to the front gate to pick up the mail (almost certainly an exaggeration), or who took most of a day just to drive round the perimiter fence (almost certainly true).

To be 14 in such a town can only reasonably described as long periods of tedium interspersed with longer periods of tedium. This monotony was ocasionally interrupted by the odd bout of sheep rustling or kangaroo invasion, and once, most famously when when the population reached the dizzying heights of 20,000. This landmark event inspired the powers that be to declare Dubbo a city, and begin a week long jamboree of celebration involving the Premier of NSW, a circus, dancing girls, an official launch, a parade, and a motorcade which toured regally up and down the two main streets - Macquarie St and Talbragar St – for most of the day.

For all I know they’re still at it: the ritual was well known, and probably survives to this day - up Macquarie St, turn right into Talbragar St, chuck what is affectionately known as a uee (u-turn) at the end of Talbragar St, left into Macquarie St, uee (pronounced ewe ee ) at the end of Macquarie St and so on, until terminal boredom or death intervened. I always hoped that girls in short skirts would intervene – but it rarely happened.

Given that the nearest cinema was a mere 45 miles away in an even smaller and marginally less interesting town called Narromine - this ritual was a popular pastime the local (male) youth used to mistake for entertainment on a Friday and Saturday night. It involved sitting in bright metallic purple utility trucks (Utes), and parading slowly up and down the above mentioned circuit – the main drag – smoking, trying to look hard but casual, and whistling at the local girls, who carried out a similar perambulatory pattern, but only on foot. On such small things are childhoods built, and mine was certainly enriched by this weekend promenade, but somewhere at the back of my mind I suspected that there should be more to life, and I was soon to be proven right.

Of course, at that age I was still slightly too young for girls, and instead had put my faith in musicians such as the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Cream, and my romantic – but hazy – idealisation of all things English: Carnaby Street, swingin’ London, football - although I had little idea of how this was actually played - and for no particular reason, fish and chip suppers, which I imagined fondly to be enjoyed by salt of the earth types on their way home from the football through the mean - but still romantic - streets of Bradford or Bingley or somewhere similarly industrial. As far as I was concerned (and still am, having now lived here for 30 years) England was the cradle of civilisation, the font of all things good, and home to some wicked rock music.

Part 2 - Slight Diversion

I know that by now you’ll be tapping your fingers and thinking to yourself “when is he going to tell us about this ‘momentous event’ – bet it turns out to be a damp squib”, but I need to digress slightly in order to explain the background to all this. You see – and invariably people in the UK are shocked to find this out, believing completely in the Australian twang which even after 30 years remains in my voice – I was born in England. Ipswich to be precise, but I guess nobody’s perfect. My hankering after the ‘mother country’ was therefore fuelled by not only by rememberance of a former life but also by the smouldering indignation that I’d been removed from all the happenings at home, just as they’d started to, well, happen.

It had come as a complete surprise, when, at the tender and impressionable age of ten, my parents - who had never previously done anything more interesting than getting out of bed - announced we were to circumnavigate the globe and settle in a small town in the middle of Australia. My father – a doctor opposed to the NHS just as everyone else in England was getting into the idea, had met a man in a pub who turned out to be another doctor, and in a rash, presumably drunken moment the two had agreed to join forces to set up a practice in the smallest, remotest place they could think of – in this case Dubbo.

I don’t really remember a great deal about life up to that point, but I do remember having been quite content in Ipswich doing the usual stuff that kids did in those days – playing marbles in the school playground, listening to Round the Horn and The Goons on the radio, playing cricket, football or any game involving small spherical objects in the street, playing with my go kart (also in the street – why were the streets so much safer then?) and hearing for the first time the strains of She Loves You wafting out of someone’s kitchen window. This latter event was also fairly momentous, but is another chapter in this story.

It followed then, particularly given that I shared the innate conservativeness of most young people, that I didn’t really want to leave Ipswich, but felt that humouring my parents was probably the best policy. Subsequently – following an eight week voyage that involved the Suez Canal and stops at various exotic locations - we found ourselves in a strange and inhospitable looking country where huge water tanks and strange metal windmills inhabited a landscape made up of of red earth, red dirt that blew with every gust of wind, roads that ran straight for hundreds of miles, scrubby bits interspersed with more scrubby bits, and houses built on stilts with wooden verandahs all round. Australia is of course so much more than this, as I later discovered, but it’s amazing how much of an impact early impressions make on us and how long they stay with us.

And so back to where I began. You may have guessed from the title of this tome that whilst this uprooting of home and country was certainly a momentous event, it is not the one referred to earlier. The one I’m talking about was of an entirely different magnitude, being an inspirational rather than physical jolt to my comfortable location in the space /time continuum. Just a few times in an average person’s life they feel lifted, transcendent and aware of something almost spiritual, and nothing had quite prepared me for the experience I was about to encounter. In later life I encountered it again when I got married and when each of my three children was born, but until that point I had no idea that anything quite as uplifting could exist.

That the feelings of entirely new possibilities, of endless open roads and windswept locations, of driving through the night for no other reason that it was possible, of different cultures and exotic beaches, were engendered by the squat and somewhat dusty object that had come to rest like a beached whale under the canopy leading to my parent’s garage, came as quite a surprise. I’d always been aware, in a Roy of the Rovers way, of the role played by discoverers and adventurers, but they’d always seemed distant and remote and required to wear ridiculous pith hats or say things like ‘This tomb is cursed, I can just feel it.’ This was not a particularly cool or desirable way to carry on in my view, but the vehicle that sat in front of me now was decidedly cool and pointing to a future of seductive shininess.

It had a slightly menacing split windscreen, giving the appearance of an aeroplane (a Messerschmitt I decided, which given its origin was quite an educated guess), and this impression was heightened by the small cooling fins that ran across the side doors and down the sides at the back. It was obviously a vehicle intended for transporting people in style, but it was also more than that. It had – oh joy - a cooker and a sink and sometimes in the evenings my parent’s friends would sit in it on the step, cooking meals which evoked images of far away places. Particularly important in my estimation, it had bunk beds where you could sleep, which suggested this was a travelling home you could take anywhere – something we now take for granted in the age of huge American motor-homes, but at the time completely revolutionary. It carried the spare tyre on the front, giving it the rakish appearance of something that really meant business, and I was told, although I never got to see this bit, it had a roof which could be elevated, thereby making the inside so large you could stand up.

It was love, or maybe lust, almost at first sight. Like Toad I could see myself thrilling to the joys of travel, proceeding through deserts, mountain ranges, rainforests with equanimity, always with a “yarn” to tell, always being bought a pint in some far away outback bar. I decided, before my parents’ friends drove away into the sunset, that one day I would own such a wonderful machine.

The fact that one day this schoolboy dream eventually became a reality, was due almost entirely to one man’s lack of organisation and the quick thinking of another…..