NOTES
There are no notes for this chapter yet. Some of the notes on other pages are based on info YOU send me. |
My little triumphs over the unofficial Hostel committee and Tom Gifford, combined with the continuing success of the begging letters to celebrities, and my increasing number of appearances on radio and television in connection with my fundraising campaign, conspired to stoke my ever-present desire for power and importance. Certain other factors added fuel to the fire, including the smart location of my office, the long hot summer of that year, my severe u-turn to the vague direction of the extreme right (see Chapter 67 - the section about Hank), and that pervasive 'Sixties feeling', still strong in 1970, that you could do any damned thing you decided to do. |
| What really caused the conflagration to get out of hand, was the discovery of a work that was fast becoming one of those books everyone had to have on their bookshelves, along with The Complete Works of Shakespeare and Keble Martin's Concise British Flora. The difference in my case was that I actually read it - avidly. It was William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I found Shirer's account of Hitler's rise from teenage misfit and semi-dosser to Führer, bizarre and fascinating. My strutting about the town began to take on just a hint of the goose-step, which must have fallen somewhat short of comporting with my almost waist-length hair, wild beard and tattered jumble apparel. As I continued to march about my business of dropping in on acquaintances all over Brighton and Hove, mostly at meal-times, I now found myself keeping strictly in step by non-stop humming of The Horst Wessel Song. I designed a logo for the National Hostel Fund that was subtly suggestive of a swastika, and Hank made some very large translucent versions for the office windows. Eventually Hank fixed a sign - DER FÜHRER - over my executive chair. I didn't consider at the time that it was meant to be humorous or sarcastic, and left it in place. |
| I visited three or four towns where there were as yet no Simon or Cyrenian units and found that in each one there was already a group working towards setting up some such project, and my involvement was neither welcome nor needed. Looking through the charitable constitution I had so hastily pirated (see previous chapter), I noticed that it said nothing about opening and running hostels, only about raising money for them. I therefore decided to forget about trying to start new projects, and to concentrate purely on becoming a fundraising giant for other people's projects. Indeed, hostels in various parts of the country began to apply to the National Hostel Fund for money. Fortunately, their applications were so tortuous and grovelling, that it was an easy matter to turn them down, in every case. They clearly expected to be turned down. It would have been much trickier had they simply said "we claim some of the money you say you've been raising for hostels". Curiously, though, I was no longer really interested in raising more and more money for my personal use. I was now quite happy just to get by, with the help of the usual rounds of people's flats. What I really wanted was to be the supreme leader of a powerful and sinister organization, even more powerful and certainly more sinister than Oxfam or Shelter. |
| You may be thinking that as I stormtrooped and bombasted into every corner of town, often fired up further by drink, I must have stirred up a degree of antagonism. Far from it. In the eyes of many, especially female students of a certain pre-Raphaelite type, I became increasingly some sort of a guru or mind-mender. At first, I revelled in this, and brought the simple tricks I had learned from psychotherapist Vic Robinson (see Chapter 53) into play. It was a novelty, and a very pleasant one, to be a major attraction at parties and dinners, and to have girls turning up on spec at certain addresses where I was known to spend time. One such address was 19 Ship Street, which I have already mentioned several times as being the home of Carolyn Holland and her flatmates. But now, instead of my going there because there were usually girls there, girls started to turn up in the hope of finding me there. I learned the important difference between putting on an act (Hank did this and was eventually thrown down the stairs by the Ship Street girls) and genuinely believing in your own power, however delusional. Delusional power becomes real power all too easily. Your desperate followers can detect acting, but not delusion. |
| Before long, however, I became quite depressed by this growing and largely young female following. When I'd heard the claim "I can talk to you in a way I can't talk to other men, not even my boyfriend" enough times, and after witnessing the angry disillusionment caused by my occasional and quite reasonable attempts at seduction, it dawned on me that I had been exalted to a sphere above and beyond the merely fleshly. Frankly, in this respect, I was looking for a lower position. |