NOTES
The Norfolk Arms is now a night club called The Blind Tiger. Oh, dear .. |
You may recall that a couple of years earlier, in the Summer of 1968, I had been evicted from the only accommodation I ever actually rented in Brighton, in Buckingham Road (see Chapter 59), as a result of putting up the exotic couple Angela and Marcus for one night. Well, from the Spring of 1970 onwards, and throughout the führer/guru phase described in the previous chapter, I began to bump into Angela quite often in the streets of Brighton and Hove, and in the pubs, particularly the Norfolk Arms, which was still functioning as one of the meeting-places for the large 'alternative' population of Brighton. |
| Angela had returned from a long stay in Morocco, to and from which she had hitched (alone, on the return journey). She was no longer with Marcus, although he was still in Brighton, and I occasionally met him in the street as well. It was not surprising that Angela and I met very often, as I was spending so much time strutting militarily all over Brighton and Hove, and Angela was actively involved in the countercultural scene, which also meant getting about quite a bit, from pub to pub and flat to flat. She was now more settled than I, however, insofar as she was renting bedsits (but quite frequently changing them). |
| Quite often, the many chance meetings with Angela during that Summer and Autumn resulted in our going to the Pavilion tea-garden, or sometimes back to her latest bedsit, to listen to records and commune with her Siamese cat, Beastie, who often went about the town with her on her shoulder. She was probably not very much aware of my peculiar status in a certain section of the student population, or else found it amusing. We couldn't agree on anything - it was a case of her spiritual way of interpreting the world versus my smash-all political way (I didn't dare try on the guru-cum-psychotherapist hat with her). To Angela, I was hopelessly bogged down in the base, the mundane and the trivial. To me, she represented the forces preventing real change by claiming that the only change necessary was in the level of awareness of the individual. She was by now practising Transcendental Meditation. We argued endlessly about these things, yet somehow became increasingly likely to be seen together. It was no doubt the desire to try to produce cogent arguments against Angela's way of seeing things that caused me to drift back to a revolutionary left position from my recent far-right aberration. Marx had written more than Hitler. |
| Angela introduced me to various extraordinary mini-scenes, such as that of Grace and Gordon, an elderly couple whose basement flat was the venue for fairly wild all-night parties featuring dope and dreadful still-fermenting elderberry wine, a combination that made people behave pretty weirdly. In fact, on one occasion, Angela threatened to hit a man for rattling something incessantly. There were also parties of a sort very different from the many I had hitherto been to. These were the he 'head' parties, where cannabis and LSD featured much more strongly that alcohol. I only just managed to resist frequent pressure from Angela to try cannabis and LSD. You may find it hard to believe, given the environment I was in, but it is a fact that I have never to this day tried either substance. I'm not quite sure why I stayed so stubborn about it, while remaining a loyal worshipper of Bacchus. I suppose it's a sure sign that I was always careful to preserve a certain cool detachment from the various scenes I took advantage of, whether the beachniks, the dossers, the students, Josie Klein's university sociologists, the troubled pre-raphaelite girls or the 'heads'. |
| As far as the National Hostel Fund was concerned, things began to fall apart in the Autumn, just as I was planning my biggest project. The idea I was working on was a massive sponsored walk, starting from Hyde Park in London, with thousands of participants from all over the south-east of England, I can no longer remember what the destination was going to be, but it was presumably going to be a very long walk. The hope was that it would be officially started by Peter Sellers, since he had offered to launch a fundraising event for me (see Chapter 68). I had hundreds of large posters printed and Hank and a newly-recruited battalion of volunteers stuck them all over Brighton, Hove and other Sussex towns. The plan was to send these enthusiastic bill-stickers further afield with many more posters well before the event, which was presumably to take place some time in the Winter, rather oddly. |
| The first blow was that Hank suddenly disappeared without trace, and I never saw him or heard of him again. This was not a remarkable event in itself, given that Hank had emerged, just like me, from the general pool of flotsam and jetsam, but it threw my schemes into chaos, since I had readily latched onto the idea that my role was to toss out instructions, in a fairly cavalier manner, and Hank's role was to carry them out. I was by now thoroughly locked into a self-image, wherein I was striding inexorably, but with a sort of drawling, carefree English aristocratic contempt for detail, towards fame and immense power. The detail, and the actual hard work, were for one's minions. That year of my history has long been a source of great amusement to me, when I compare what I thought was going on with the reality of what what was actually achieved - a small office, one assistant (even less stable than myself), a few student volunteers, a drawer full of letters from famous people and a crop of brief media appearances that seemed to attract little useful attention. A moderate amount of money was raised, yet there was never much in the kitty, due as much to my extravagant commissioning of leaflets and posters as to my drinking and fondness for Indian restaurants. There were, of course, those painfully intelligent but mixed-up girls who thought I might be able to give them some answers. I could have built on that following, but gradually threw that lead away. That was where a measure of fame, power, even wealth might have lain eventually, had I had the patience and the total lack of scruples required. |
| The second, perhaps more serious blow, was that Barry Biven, owner of the premises of which the office of the National Hostel Fund office was a part (see Chapter 68), turned up for work earlier than usual one morning and discovered that I was already there. I had to admit to him that I'd found a key. He was horrified and took it off me. He would have been even more horrified, had he found out that I'd been sleeping there for about six months. As it was, there was no question of his depriving me of the office. However, I could now only be there when he was on the premises, so I was yet again in the position of having to find somewhere to stay. Of course, this was not much of a problem, as there were many people I could ask and most of them were unlikely to refuse. |
| In the event I was put up by Jackie, the sister of Penny, a former Brighton Hostel volunteer. They were a delightful pair - generous, witty, intelligent and thoroughly good company. Tragically, Jackie had recently been diagnosed as having multiple sclerosis. She was renting a ground-floor flat in the infamous Norfolk Terrace. Architecturally, it was (and no doubt still is) a strangely grim place. The terraces of Georgian houses on either side were much too tall for the narrow street between, resulting in a menacingly gloomy canyon, full of echoes but little sunlight. The sensation of foreboding in that place was greatly exacerbated by the run-down state of the houses, and nature of the residents. Like most of Georgian Brighton and Hove, the once imposing houses had each been split into many bedsits. This street above all had attracted large numbers of junkies and semi-dossers. When someone rented a bedsit, they would allow anyone else to 'crash' there for the asking (or even without asking). It was often impossible to find out who was the official tenant. The absentee landlords simply collected the rents from Social Security and let the properties go to hell. Jackie let me have a large spare room to myself, but beings resembling crazed monkeys would scamper up and down the fire escape outside my window all night, with much weird hooting and screeching. There were used syringes all over the place in the jungle of a garden and a lot of bad smells. I felt obliged to take a large kitchen knife to bed with me every night. I suppose someone will tell me that Norfolk Terrace is these days inhabited by Americans who have paid a million or two per house? This situation was not conducive to going into the office every day and trying to pick up where Hank had left off. The pubs, or people's flats and bedsits (especially Angela's) were a more attractive proposition. |