Leaving London, in search of a dream 1971/74 and 1975 /79

I’ve had to reflect a bit on the 19-year-old me. While I was able to talk you down from an intense acid trip, tell stories from the Bhagavad Gita, recite poems from Kahlil Gibran, interpret your reading of the I Ching, or prescribe you the correct Bach flower remedy, I had only basic practical skills. I could wire up an amplifier, change a plug or replace a piece of fuse wire. We were jointly about 95% cerebral and looked at the cottage as place in another universe, on a parallel plane. Bleancwm (the house at the head of the valley) was going to present some challenges. Summer was magnificent. Nothing seemed a problem. We found a valley by a stream where we could walk and sunbathe naked, read uninterrupted, and indoors we could sit cross legged in silence for hours. We had the electricity connected, so we had light bulbs and plugs for a record player. We never had TV, and the nearest phone was in a box about 2 miles away. The local shop had a van which came round once a fortnight, ther...

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 tho...

After my mother told me that my father had died, we had coffee in a nearby café and I took the underground back to Balham. The lunchtime edition of the papers had front page stories about ‘75 Britons killed in air crash’, there were even some photos. I didn’t buy one. The next couple of weeks were a bit of a blur. The flat was crowded with people, not much space for reflection or grief. My sister had dealt with all the gory stuff, identifying fathers’ belongings and voice on the black box recorder, dental records for I.D. I came from a dysfunctional family, most of my life my parents had lived in the same house in separate parts, my mother, with what I can only describe as a bed sit downstairs, and my father shared a bedroom with me and had use of the front room downstairs, when he was home. We all shared the kitchen, my three sisters and the separate parents, until my eldest sister moved out and mother moved the rest of us out to Flat in East Croydon when I was about 12 or 13. I move...

  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 fa...