VT Coughtrey - Brighton Hostel: Arch 141

NOTES	As soon as I was turfed out of 9 Regency Square I stopped bothering to turn up for the University refectory job. (Although term had ended, the refectory was still open for various functions.) I had got a few weeks' wages out of it, but didn't fancy doing it while dossing around. The Archways Venture that Arnrid and Sidge had told me about turned out to be based in two of the many seafront 'arches' that are peculiar to Brighton. They are actually wide caverns, with entrances only on the beach, and they run under the seafront road, which is much higher than the beach. They are used for a wide variety of purposes, but mainly for cafes or entertainment.
	The founders and leaders of the Archways Venture were sociology lecturer Josie Klein, tie manufacturer Barrie Biven, and postgrad students Leo Jago, Nick West and Joe Walsh. In the wake of the mods v. rockers riots on Brighton beach a few years earlier, this team had persuaded the government to part with a very large sum of money to fund research into why young people behaved like that. (It was very easy to get big grants for this sort of thing from the 1964-70 Labour government). With the weight of the government behind them, the Archways team had persuaded Brighton Corporation to allow the use of Arches 141 and 167 for their research.
	The idea was that young people could drift into either arch, help themselves to as many free coffees as they liked, and hang around chatting. One of the people they were chatting to would in fact be an undercover researcher, paid to memorize all conversations of the day, write them up in the evening and send them to a government sociological research centre in Leicester. The snag was that the team, particularly its senior members, Josie and Barrie, were steeped in sixties libertarianism, bordering on anarchism, so when all kinds of misfits, including dossers, 'beachniks' and mental cases drifted into the Arches instead of the 'ordinary' young people with jobs who were supposed to be the subject of this research, they were certainly not turned away. The sociological spy was thus obliged to concoct reports that were further and further from the true conversations he was having.
	By the time I arrived on the scene, the 'clients' had split into two camps. Those who were not actually sleeping rough, but were just mad, bad or sad in varying degrees, hung around in Arch 167. A few of Brighton's many dossers of the traditional type - the elderly winos, kitchen porters and schizophrenics with whom I'd been so much associated in spikes, hostels and on the road, also paid occasional uneasy visits to 167. But 141 had become the exclusive domain of the beach-dwellers, who had been known as beachniks during my 1965 stay in Brighton, but were now simply called 'The Beats' (never 'hippies' - that was regarded as a term fed to the 'straights' by the media). The Brighton Beats of 1967-68 were a completely different set to the Beachniks of 1965. The group led away into the West by Tugboat two and a half years earlier (see end of Chapter 30) had evidently never returned. Being now without a roof once more, it was to the Beats, and therefore to Arch 141 that I was attracted.
	It turned out that Arnrid and Sidge had misunderstood the Archways Venture, insofar as overnight dossing facilities were not provided. In fact, this was expressly forbidden by law in any of the Arches. But the Beats, now including me, made full use of 141 during the day, lounging on dirty mattresses, drinking coffee, smoking dope and toasting bread over the electric bar fire. Occasionally, my companions would go out on begging or food-stealing expeditions. I still had some money (which of course I kept very quiet about), so my absences from 141 were to buy food - very cheap stuff such as faggots, broken biscuits, stale bread and chip-pan scrapings. No doubt you can still get faggots, but these days there is probably a law against selling any of those other commodities, once so useful to the near-penniless. I brought a proportion of these goodies back to share, pretending that I'd begged or stolen them, but I secretly scoffed most of the food away from the Arch. Divall's cafe, near the station, regularly gave the Beats large containers of dripping from the ovens, and this was spread on the toast instead of margarine. I made damn sure of getting plenty of the toast-and-dripping. .
	The 'spy' appointed to gather information in 141 was a young woman who made no attempt whatsoever to disguise the fact that she was supposed to be writing up her conversations with us. It didn't matter, for the simple reason that she was able to assure us that nothing resembling any real conversations she had with us would appear in her reports. In fact she was hardly ever there. We were supposed to believe she was just one of us who happened to have been favoured with the keys and indeed, her only meaningful function was to usher the beats out at some time in the evening, and open up again at about nine in the morning. Like the others, I had to doss under rowing boats at night - at first, that is.
	I shall attempt to describe some of the Brighton beats of that winter (they will be the ones who stayed around throughout the following Summer, and some of them will feature in later chapters).
I'm sometimes contacted by people who remember all or some of the characters described here, but they can never remember me !	Joe Moses was a tall, once powerful character, with a great shaggy mane of curly hair, who was now so damaged by cocaine, that he was something of a wreck. His wits had become dull, his speech had almost gone and he had to rely on others to a large extent.
	Bob Stokes also had a great mop of curls, but he had a bushy ginger beard to go with it. He was tall and imposing, intelligent and cunning, and dressed in more stereotypical 'hippie' fashion than any of the others.
	Dublin was also tall and imposing and as intelligent and cunning as Bob, but he dressed extraordinarily, in smart long overcoat, tie and bowler hat, and carried a silver-topped cane. He had a very smart accent to go with the apparel, and always looked very clean. His flowing locks were carefully groomed. It was a complete mystery to everyone how he maintained this appearance while sleeping rough. He and Bob seemed to be the main sources of supply of a wide range of drugs, though they themselves used only cannabis, as far as I know. (Obtaining drugs such as amphetamine and barbiturate was very easy at that time in Brighton, as there were two GPs who for some reason handed out these things like sweets, just for the asking. They could then be shared or sold. Their names were constantly on the lips of the Beats. I later heard that at least one of these GPs got into big trouble for this indiscriminate generosity).
	Charlie was a big, burly man of about my age, dressed in the dirty remains of a suit and wearing his hair almost disgracefully short for that company. His strength was legendary. On the one occasion when I agreed to go on a food raid in the small hours, I discovered that Charlie's job was to wrench the locks off the backs of parked food lorries with his bare hands. You probably don't believe that, but I saw him do it! What's more, I shared the pies that were the fruits of his strength on that occasion. Charlie was a very pleasant and amiable character.
	Shep was a very small middle-aged man, almost elvin, with his red cheeks and twinkling eyes, his voluminous hair and long beard, his cloak with ornamental clasp and his twisty stick, which he waved about like a wand. He had a strong rural West Country accent and a bright and energetic manner. He also had a terrible temper, of which he lost control fairly often, but his high-pitched rantings only made people laugh.
	Tom and Janet were actually married. They were unlike the rest of us in that they appeared to have no awareness of being rebels or 'drop-outs' or even inadequates and no desire to wear any of those badges. They were not only too dim to sort themselves out out with somewhere to live or any source of income, they were also too dim to recognize themselves as can't-copers. They were quite uncannily like Ron and Eth in the old radio show Take it from Here. The big difference was that Janet was pregnant.
Since writing this, I 've heard a rumour that Geordie was found dead in the street just a few years later.	Geordie was a rough, tough teenage girl, fond of mixing drugs, often with alarming consequences. She was said to beat men up from time to time, although I never witnessed it.
Since writing this I've been contacted by Maurice, who now lives a long way from Brighton. Although he has disputed only one specific point (which I have since removed), he's surprised by the general tone of the account and feels that I must have badly misinterpreted his character and failed to see that it was all just a bit of fun. He also protests that he was not leading Dave and that it was mostly the other way round. No doubt all his criticisms are pretty much correct. Throughout this site I'm mostly trying to recall my feelings about people and things at the time - feelings which often reflect badly on me rather than them!	The two most sinister of the Beats have to be taken together. They were in their thirties and were known as the 'Devil Worshippers', because that's exactly what they thought they were. The dominant one of this duo was Maurice. He had read a lot of Dennis Wheatley, and took it all as gospel. He tried to cultivate an evil look (mainly by growing a sharp-pointed beard and developing a mad stare) and was an authority on the various rituals described in the novels. Dave, who copied Maurice's beard and stare, but to less effect, just went along with whatever Maurice wanted him to do. On certain nights they went up onto the downs, into lonely copses, where they lit fires and practised rituals to bring catastrophe to their enemies, or even to invoke the Devil. The rituals often involved the sacrifice of virgins. Evidence that this was only symbolic was that the teenage girls they somehow managed to lure into the copses at midnight always came back, as far as was known, but in one case at least, the victim was definitely changed for the worse. This particular girl, who was probably no more than fifteen, and not a Beat herself, frequently visited Maurice in Arch 141, following her 'sacrifice'. She seemed strongly to dislike or fear him yet to be in his thrall, and it was said that she had been unhinged by whatever had happened up on Devil's Dyke that night. I was to become fairly well acquainted with the Devil Worshippers a bit later and was convinced that they were harmless enough, even funny, provided you were not at all taken in by their dramatic skills or chemical tricks. But that was probably not such an easy attitude to take when alone with them and their mad stares in a remote copse under a full moon.
	Christmas Day 1967 was spent in Jaconelli's restaurant on the seafront. The owner had thrown the place open to the Beats and any other dossers for the day, but had not provided food. This problem was solved by a great expedition (excluding me, for some reason) on Christmas Eve, which must have required a veritable tour de force on the part of Charlie. They returned with a wide variety of edibles, including a brace of pheasants. The result of that night's hard work by these worthies was a memorable banquet.