VT Coughtrey - Casting off

NOTES	Incredible though it may seem, I yet again embarked on a period of pretending to go to work while in reality combing London for the ever-elusive Introducer. This time I had quite a lot of money saved up (all carried around with me in my wallet). This enabled me to explore even further afield than the area covered by the Underground system. In fact, I discovered that it cost practically nothing to use the Tube, because paying at the other end was quite common in the days before ticket barriers. All you had to do was to arrive at the barrier, say you had come from the next station and offer fourpence (about 2p). The ticket collector would just shove it in his or her pocket and let you through (except for my mother's friend Mrs Tofts at High Barnet station, who took her job very seriously. You risked prosecution if she was on duty).
	On rainy days I gave up exploring and went to the pictures. In the few months of this period of exploration and search I saw many of the great British films of the era, such as The Servant, A Taste of Honey, Room at the Top and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. To me these films were excitingly British, in what was then a new sense of the term, and I sought them out all over London and beyond. Of course, I often returned home very late, but told my mother I had been on overtime. She was pleased that I was 'raking it in'.
	On some days I went off in the morning on my bike. Of coure, I could not go so far afield on those days and had to stay out of the pubs. One day, however, it started to rain as I was cycling through Hampstead. Temptation overcame me and I went into the Cruel Sea for a couple of pints (in those days you could leave your bike outside, unchained, with a reasonable amount of confidence that it would still be there when you came out). It was still raining hard when I got back on the bike and rode off, but after the beer I didn’t care. I turned into Blanch Hill and went careering down it at great speed, even though the surface of the road was covered with running water. At a point where the steep hill bends sharply I lost control, took off and headed straight for a brick wall. The next thing I knew was that I was sitting in the middle of the road. It just happened that there was no traffic at that moment or for a minute or two after. I was surprised to find that I was able to get up and walk. I was even more surprised when, having felt myself all over, I could find nothing that hurt and no blood. Only my glasses were broken. The bike, though, was completely wrecked. It made no sense at all. I dragged the wreckage across the road and flung it into the bushes. Walter was furious when I told him I had dumped the remains of the the superb bike he had built for me. He said he could have rebuilt it. Of course, I didn't confess to him the root cause of the mishap. I don’t understand to this day how I got away without so much as a scratch or bruise, but it’s a fact that although I have done a lot of drinking and a fair bit of cycling since then, I have never again been so stupid as to combine the two.
	After a few weeks, the cinema-going and exploration for its own sake somehow took over from the quest to find a way into exciting and wealthy society. It was almost as though I was managing to keep out of my mind the ugly fact that if I failed to find some way of replenishing my savings I would soon be in big trouble all over again. I began to develop more and more of a lust for travelling on trains and buses and prowling around new areas further and further outside of London. Plain-clothes police became a bigger nuisance than ever, stopping, searching and insulting me sometimes several times in a day. They seemed to be everywhere, constantly on the lookout for people who were walking about too much. I still occasionally reverted to my old habit of writing political tracts in libraries and one day two CID men became very threatening when they discovered some notes in my pocket with the word ’anarchism’ in them. I only just persuaded them not to arrest me or beat me up (it wasn’t clear which of these two courses of action they were thinking of taking).
	By December 1964 I had no money left. It seems that my mother still had no inkling that I wasn’t working. In desperation I did something that I had never contemplated doing in the various earlier crises of the same sort. I began selling my possessions. The first to go were my two tape recorders, two banjos and two or three guitars that I had by now accumulated. I sneaked these out of the house at various times and took them to the second-hand shops that used to abound, where I got very little for them (I later saw some of them for sale at three times what I had been given). When my mother remarked on the disappearance of these items I told her I needed the money to buy a really good guitar. She disapproved of this idea, but didn’t question the veracity of it.
	I can remember nothing at all about Christmas, except that after a week or so of not having to leave the house at 7.30 every weekday to embark on a day of wandering, I found to my surprise that I was almost dreading the resumption of this activity in January. It was probably that I had by now inwardly accepted at last that nothing and nobody was going to 'turn up' and that bleak times were ahead.
	Of course, the money from the sale of possessions soon went once I was out and about again. I was then obliged to sell my record-player. Since I could not now play records, it was time to think the unthinkable. I began to dismantle, bit by bit, my substantial collection of jazz records. I took about a dozen at a time to the famous Dobell’s Jazz Record Shop in the Charing Cross Road, where I actually got a very fair price for them. But this sudden disposal of what had been the central plank of my life for years felt like a cataclysm. There was a strong sensation, not necessarily unpleasant, that an era was over. I hastened the onset of the new era by spending most of what I got from Dobell’s in the surrounding pubs.
Dobell's closed in 1992 and the shop-front is now in the London Museum.It was loaned to Chelsea Space recently for an exhibition, which aimed to "recall an era when a specialist record shop helped shape the nation's underground cultural scene".	Around the end of January 1965 came the inevitable Friday when I had no money left at all to give my mother. I said that I’d left my pay packet in my overalls at work, but could easily retrieve it the next day, because I intended to put in some Saturday overtime. She was rather puzzled and suspicious about this because the next day was to be the day of Winston Churchill's funeral. A national day of mourning had been declared and all shops and factories were expected to be closed. I was crestfallen when reminded of this because my real plan was to go to Dobell’s the next morning and sell the very last of my records. The next morning I read that all shops in central London had been asked to close and turn off their display lighting. I set out anyway, in the hope that this would be one shop to defy the request. I was very relieved to find that Dobell’s was indeed defying the request with a vengeance. Charing Cross Road was deserted. All the shops were closed, except for Dobell’s. All display lights except theirs were out. Strangest of all, their door was open and jazz was pouring out and echoing up and down the street. Bizarrely, this was competing with the distant sound of military bands as the funeral procession passed through Trafalgar Square. Against that background I sold the last of my records and an era had ended.
	Of course, by the following Friday I had no money again. I can't remember what story I told my mother this time, but I somehow managed to persuade her that I would give her two weeks' money the following week. I had never attempted to go on the dole because of the system for claiming it in those days. Employers notified the Labour Exchange of vacancies and the details of these were written on little green cards kept in a box on the clerk’s desk. When you attempted to sign on as unemployed, the clerk would look through his green cards to see if there was a vacancy suitable for you. If you were young and male and had no qualifications, just about any unskilled job was considered suitable, and there was no shortage of green cards for that sort of work. You had to take the green card to the employer and apply for the job. Even if you could somehow persuade the employer that you were unsuitable, which was very difficult at that time, there would be another green card waiting for you when you returned to the Labour exchange. I had not thus far been able to force myself to think in terms of getting another job, and I certainly couldn’t face the idea of returning for a third spell at Maw's. But at last, in great desperation I went to the Labour Exchange and was given a green card for Vaughan’s plant nurseries in Arkley. The clerk said "Plenty of fresh air and hard work will do you a power of good, laddie." That’s what the snotty little jumped-up nobodies who infested such places as Labour Exchanges and railway booking offices were like in those days.
	Vaughan's lasted for ten days, during which time my mother though I was still going to Maw's. The pay was about half of what I had been getting at Maw's and the foreman was a bastard. He set me to pulling up old chrysanthemums with my bare hands (not easy). A whole field was to be done in a couple of weeks and he kept telling me in no uncertain terms that I wouldn’t manage it unless I got a move on. I would probably have stuck it out had it not been for the proprietor’s children, who for some reason were not at school and pestered me constantly. I felt they regarded me as some sort of beast of burden to be made fun of. Had I not disappeared one day at midday, I think I would have ended up doing the brats an injury. This employer didn’t follow the usual practice of keeping a week in hand, so at least I got a little money before I vanished. However, as I owed my mother for two weeks, I had to give her all of what I had earned, so I was again in dire straits by the following Friday.
	When that day came I set off in the morning as usual. I wandered about on Hampstead Heath all day in deep despair, yet still hoping against hope for a last-minute Introducer. I continued to wander round and round the Heath until late evening, by which time I could no longer have claimed overtime as an excuse. Feeling that dossing on the Heath for a few nights, then returning to Barnet to face the wrath and anguish of my mother (who would have researched the whole true story in the meantime) was just not an option this time round, I started walking in the opposite direction from Barnet. It would be nearly two years before I saw my mother and grandmother again.