Rebek Without a Clue

 I can remember the moment, well, perhaps not the exact moment, but the time when I first romanticised about leaving home. I was paring a leather strip to craft a headband, and as my paring knife bit into the pigskin Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Highway chile’ came over the workshop radio and ‘just blew my mind away’, as we used to say in 1968. After college I managed to get a job as an apprentice to a bookbinder, repairer and restorer. The pay was low and the apprenticeship was for six years, which seemed a ridiculously long time at the age of seventeen. My boss was good, relaxed, intelligent and easy going, he eased me into the job by letting me scrape the old dusty leather off the backs of antiquarian books, it was great, I loved books, I always had. But the job wasn’t glamorous, my boss was twenty years older than me and there was just the two of us in a small outhouse, at the rear of a Tudor house, some ten miles from the village where I lived. My working life felt cut off, isolated from the exciting new friends I had made, and only saw at weekends. This, coupled with a love/hate, mostly hate, relationship with my ex- Sergeant Major father, made me a very disgruntled teenager. At the weekends my new mates and I would lounge around listening to the latest Doors album, or the Quicksilver Messenger Service, Fugs or Mothers of Invention, talk about the London clubs – The UFO Club or Middle Earth - places I had never been to, but had heard about. My musical tastes had moved on past The Kinks and The Who and my days as a parka wearing pseudo-mod merged into the new daze of psychedelic and ‘underground’ music, mostly owned by my new mates. I couldn’t afford the ‘imported’ albums they played, and so only heard that music when I was with them, and had to make do with The Beatles otherwise. My parka with the fur-lined hood was cast aside for a military jacket, bought in a small antique shop in town, a la Beatles Sergeant Peppers, and I became a wannabe flower child. The military jacket phased passed slowly and a black corduroy frockcoat with black knee length patent leather boots became my weekend garb, ever the dedicated follower of fashion desperately trying to grow my hair longer. The jacket and boots cost me over a month’s pay, but were well worth it. My multi-coloured late teen days seemed to move very quickly then. Vivid weekends became times of exploding excitement as the gang of us visited the newly built university outside of town and listened to more mind bending music from the hallucinogenicly innovative Pink Floyd to the rawness of the electric Velvet Underground, with Nico and John Cale’s electric viola, or the deep dark beauty of Leonard Cohen’s poetry. Then we all bundled into the back of an aging rusting Land Rover (called Dame Celia Molestrangler, after the character from a popular radio series) and sped up to the smoke (London). There was, in fact, more smoke inside the Land Rover than there was in London, as, it seemed, everyone smoked in those days. In the glorious depths of London we visited the old Covent Garden, which was then still a fruit and vegetable market and home to the IT (International Times) offices, and to half of London’s hippy elite, or drove across to Brixton with the exact same aim in mind – to buy dope (cannabis), only then, for some unknown reason, dope was called ‘shit’. I confess my innocence at this point. The nearest I had ever been to ‘shit’ at this point was in a toilet, and the rest was sheer bravado, I wouldn’t have known cannabis resin from an Oxo (beef) cube, and, in fact, didn’t. On one mad hurtling sortie up to the ‘swinging’ city, a dented and battered Land Rover full of young late teens and those in their early twenties visited Brixton, the West Indian home in London, and made a deal with some curious characters around a street corner, bought some dubious, foil sealed, brown substance and hightailed it back to our own ancient Roman town. The little, unchecked, package of goods was divided up between us, and my close friend J and I took away a small foil wrapped package, a little smaller than the size of an Oxo cube. The next day J and I unwrapped the tiny foil package, he, knowing what was what, expertly broke off a piece, skewered it with a bent safety pin and proceeded to burn the substance until it gave off an Indian smoke signal to say it was ready. I have to admit that it did smell familiar, but then it could have been anything, and I was far from being an expert. J, the expert, rolled a long, loosely packed, cigarette with three cigarette papers and added the substance liberally to the Golden Virginia tobacco, and, after due ceremony - we smoked it. I didn’t know what to expect, but in for a penny in for a puff, and the rest of the day was all “Wow man, too much, groovy baby, like yeah, wow man” as we suitably adjusted ourselves to our new psychedelic environment. At some point we were listening to Jimi Hendrix’s Bold as Love and my mind was bent travelling through time and space to the tune of Hendrix’s uni-vibe and backwards played guitars, J and I were in our own British small town psychedelic world. The mind has a strange consciousness; you can, should you so wish, persuade your mind to believe almost anything. If you tell your conscious mind that you are having a wonderful psychedelic trip on cannabis, it produces the atmosphere, the senses and the feelings and that is exactly what you are having, the colours become brighter, the music more musical and life seems, well, more, more of everything. Not having a car in those days I had to walk from J’s house, down Church Lane, past my old college, to get to my bus stop. As I walked the quarter mile or so the effects of the ‘cannabis’ wore off, but I felt on top of the world, I was proud, I counted myself as being ‘in’, part of the ‘in crowd’ - a member of a whole new scene, man. I had become a real, true to life, ‘hippy’. My initiation ritual into the bizarre world of the British ‘Underground’ movement was complete now that I had been courageous enough to imbibe in illegal pot, hash, cannabis - only I hadn’t. In true rebel without a clue style; while J and I were getting high on our hand-made cigarette replete with dubious brown substance, the others in our little group had already discovered that it was all bogus, fake. It wasn’t cannabis at all but some bizarre mixture of substances which had included, strangely enough, at least one Oxo cube. It was a few weeks after the embarrassment of the spurious pot when news reached us that friends were forming a commune just outside of Halifax, Yorkshire. A gang of us had decided to be founder members and go either in the old ambulance or in the Land Rover. I ended up, with my fiancé, in the back of the old ambulance, the two of us sharing a sleeping bag for the six hour journey. We mooched off with me having romantic notions of lakeside poets or American Indian tribes, and with the lyrics ‘He left home when he was seventeen. The rest of the world he had longed to see’ singing in my mind. I had gathered up a sleeping bag, an old canvas and leather rucksack, some oddments of clothing and money then joined the fellowship of the ambulance to head towards Mill Bank, Triangle, Halifax, Yorkshire and further adventuring. Not so much a ‘Highway Chile’ but more ‘Up from the skies’.