Part 3 ; The journey
With the cottage contract going through, back in Balham we had some preparing to do. We didn’t drink alcohol very much in those days, occasional half pints to be sociable meeting people etc . I tended to work with the old adage that people who drank would probably start a fight, but people who smoked a bit of weed occasionally were more likely to start a band or a painting.
The local pub was a place that I’d go to from time to time,
I think it was called the Railway Tavern but I could be mistaken. There was a
young West Indian guy we met called Leroy ( I know , I know ) who hung out
there and would drink with us , preach Rastafari and bring us the occasional smoke,
not very secretively. Balham was a predominantly Indian, West Indian and Polish
, young white folk blended into the minority Irish population and we always
felt welcome and safe, flats were cheap by comparison with other spots in
London and the busses and trains were great. It was a lovely multicultural
area, which in those days meant cheap houses and low rents. You still
occasionally saw ( by then, more discreet) signs saying no Dogs, no Blacks, no
Irish……, so there was tension, but we always felt as “minority “ as these other
groups and felt warm kindred spirit most of the time.
The flat above us was rented by what we would describe as a young
straight couple. They were both attracted to us and hated us in almost equal measure,
the guy had served with the SAS in Cambodia and he said, covertly in Vietnam,
he was very unstable. His partner was a sweet girl who was both devoted to and
frightened of him again in almost equal measure. They would come down once in a
while and chat in a friendly manner, he liked telling stories about his travels
and another time he threw a brick at us when we came in through the shared
front door. He was an outsider, pretty much like the ‘proud boys’ militia’
types you read about in the states today. He too had a dream to move to a
remote part of the countryside, but to gather guns and ammunition rather than
grow flowers and vegetables. When he heard we were moving he got very jealous
/angry and beat up his girlfriend, who had to hide in our flat until the police
came and took him away.
We needed a van to move all our stuff, we didn’t have much
so a small panel van would do for our belongings, the cat and a few things
people had given us for our new rural life, some wall hangings, a few tools and
flower pots and the like. We gathered a
few books on living a self-sufficient life, mostly US survivalist manuals and
mail order catalogues and I was given a manual on VW busses ‘ How to keep your Volkswagen Alive’, with
Robert Crumb style graphics and tales of Epic journeys across America, reminiscent of
“Easy Rider”, so I scoured the evening papers
for a used VW van or microbus.
I found an old rusty orange VW van in the back of a car
dealers in Tooting for about £50 ( no warranty, sold as seen), it started and
ran, had some road tax and I took it home to prepare for our exodus. We had a
couple of days to kill, the cat was booked for a sleeping pill, to keep it
asleep for the likely 8-hour journey, some hurried goodbyes to say and few road
snacks to buy.
The following day the van didn’t start, dead as a dodo, I
scoured alternative press for mechanics and got towed around Clapham common by
some helpful Hells Angels with a pick up truck, trying to bump start it, but it
needed a few things to make the electrics work, they looked at my manual and went
to a scrap yard and replaced all the bits needed charged us £10 and wished us
luck, promised to bike down and visit us in Wales….. we were set to go.
The cat had its sleeping tablet and was carefully packed
into a box with blankets wedged in on top of the essential of life that we took
with us, a mattress, duvet, crocheted bed-covers, a hand operated sewing
machine, candle making equipment, oil paints and easel loads of books and
scraps of sewing materials. We may have taken a couple of changes of clothes,
but looking back at the few pictures I’ve found, I’m not sure that we did that
very often, or maybe we just had two or three sets of identical clothes. We
drove, widows open, spirits lifted and full of hope down the A4. We got quite
close to Reading before the sun started to set and I switched the headlights
on. They didn’t seem to make much difference, I pulled over, Robert Crumb style illustrations in hand. The bulbs were lit but the reflectors were just bowls of
rust. We checked into the second Bed and Breakfast we came to. The first one
suddenly decided they were full (despite the vacant sign) when they took a look
at us through the chintzy curtains as we went up the drive. We checked on the
cat and promised ourselves to leave at first light to finish the journey in
daylight.
Like this but orange and much rustier
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