Part 1. Balham, gateway to the south.

 My little flat in Balham was small, just one room really with a bathroom across the hall. There was a dividing folding wooden door that separated the kitchen area from the sleeping area, we’d close it if we had friends staying over. Brian lived with us for a while utilising the divided room, but the noise of the hamster (I’ve no idea how we ended up with hamster in a cage, its name was Baggins), running around on its squeaky wheel eventually forced him to find his own place. I worked odd jobs, it was easy in those days, get an evening paper phone up a factory, department store or a council department from its advert, get an interview the next day, work a month or so to pay the rent and change whenever you fancied. I made candles in the Kitchen to sell and my girlfriend made shoulder bags from off cuts of velvet and frayed curtain cord, we sold stuff into Miss Selfridge and boutiques on the Kings Road, in between jobs.

The goal was to get out, either travel or get a place so far in the countryside that you could try and live an alternative lifestyle. India was still a big draw, but increasingly we heard of like-minded people moving out to Wales. Agricultural policy had led to all the small farms being bought up by larger farmer/ landowners and that combined with all the younger people leaving to find jobs had left hundreds of empty farmhouses and cottages (not to mention deserted mansions) being left idle, they were often sold off for a song to finance buying a neighbouring piece of land to increase the larger farm holdings and their access to grants and grazing rights. I didn’t understand it then anymore than I do now, but it meant if you could raise £500 you could buy a ruined cottage in the middle of nowhere, if you could raise £2000.00 you could get enough land and ramshackle property for a smallholding, and if you just wanted to rent, the rents were tiny on places the Welsh didn’t want to live in. We heard of whole villages being mainly inhabited by young hippies, certainly people had old houses in the middle of woodland where if you could live without running water and electricity it would cost you hardly anything… people were bringing up families in ramshackle buildings with a minimum of modern convenience. It had become a kind of artistic exodus. Setting their own agendas, largely unencumbered by the rigours of consumerism, living on the edges of society from choice.

In May 1971 I was nineteen and bit, I had a temp job cutting the grass on Wimbledon Common for the council and my girlfriend was doing meditation sessions up at the local Mental Hospital, rehab department. We were forever trying to rescue people wrongly sectioned into hospital for just being a bit weird (all our friends were weird; it was just so unfair). We had a girl staying in the kitchen area with us, having been discharged, while she found a job and a flat,

Half way through my Grass cutting shift my shift manager told me to go back to the office to sort out some paperwork. When I got there my mother was sitting in the office, I hadn’t seen her for about 2 years. I Knew something was up.

The previous evening my father had died in a plane crash in the mountains approaching Yugoslavia.

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