Bussing Singapore

OMG, WTF good grief and maybe even WOW, the wasp coloured double-decker bus to Singapore stung my sight. It was so posh that even had a Captain instead of a bus driver, boarding passes instead of tickets and those little screens in the back of seats that you sometimes get on international flights. My wife said – “Cool”. I agreed.

It had been many, many years since I had taken a bus to Singapore. The last time was a seedy looking rat trap of a bus from Klang (Selangor, Malaysia). That bus had partially working air-con and a driver who stopped every so many miles to deliver packages, take smoke breaks and generally delay my arrival to singular Singapore. This new bus was a whole other creature – sleek, shiny and straight down to Singapore with only one (small) stop for a little leg stretching. I was duly impressed.

The speedy bus was a little early as it arrived at Singapore Harbour front. I had a few hours before my performance that evening, and we had to find a hotel to rest weary heads. It was Easter, not Christmas, but still we got the no room at the inn scenario. We trudged around the old Arab Quarter looking for lodgings, getting wearier with each step. Five hours on the bus had left me a little groggy. The Singaporean humidity made the air into treacle with each footstep. You would have thought that eight years in Malaysia would have acclimatised me – it hadn’t. Underneath the mild tan I was still the very same Englishman who had stepped off of that twelve hour MAS flight back in February 2005, only older and heavier thanks to all that good Malaysian food.

The only ‘reasonably priced’ hotel available in the Arab Quarter was found. We ignored the stains on the ceiling, on the carpet and the trail of micro-ants to and from a slight residue of sugar on the aged dressing table. We breathed in to enter the room; for fear that we would not be able to u-turn once in. Later I quipped with the desk clerk “is that the larger of the two rooms”, “Yes, the other is much smaller” she said with a straight face. If the room had been any smaller we would have been spending the night half in and half out of Narnia, I thought.

That night, Arab Street was plagued with night cyclists glistening with sweat, their hard hats pointing backwards for Christmas. Those self-righteous cyclists smirked the smirks of the newly fit - all fitter-than-thou and scornful of our shovelling humus with pita bread into cavernous hungry mouths, swaying gently to the soothing Middle Eastern vibes.

My much-better-half and I sat at one of the myriad Middle Eastern themed restaurants. We were confronted by slyly spiced yoghurt, gleaming green and overtly jet olives, curious coriander and stiffly squared feta cheese amidst an array of lettuce leaves, cucumber and a mixed mezze squirted with freshly tart lemon juice. At that moment we were free as proverbial Beatles birds, lounging in a Singapore un-beset with meetings or other imposing necessities. My small performance was over, my Southern Comfort drank and we had exited back into the Singapore night unmolested by fans ( of which I have none) or any other even mildly interested party.

The Singapore Arab Quarter seemed to host a number of streets going by the vaguely exotic names of Kandahar Road, Orphir Road and Sultan Gate. Somewhere, nestled in there, was Kampong (village) Glam which, despite its name, was not a nest of 1970s, sequinned, aging rockers whose mascara had run for the last time. The morning eventually claimed us. After greeting the hotel room’s line of small ants with an enthusiastic ‘Good morning line of small ants’, we checked out – for you can have too much of a good thing, and strolled under a mild sun, past the vaguely Art Deco school of art and sought breakfast. We had forgotten, again, that Singapore – much like an ageing actress, does not do mornings. We grabbed a nondescript Nasi Lemak and instantly longed for Malaysia. But Malaysia it was not, for Singapore has not been part of Malaysia since 1965, and there we were roaming that Arab Quarter on a very quiet Good Friday morning.  

Amidst German tourists, Chinese tourists who seem to spend an inordinate amount of cash on large cameras and Americans with curiously cropped hair we skirted the Sultan Mosque and its compound. Outside that compound, eager merchants had gathered to ply their trade without the white lines seen in Egypt – to demark limitations for merchandiser and tourist interaction. Away to one side of the selling frenzy, two white-haired women sat. One was of Chinese descent, the other possibly American. They were imbibing coconut water, through plastic straws, direct from the weighty cut coconuts – “Isn’t it refreshing” the Chinese lady said to the other, her eyes shielded by oversized sunglasses.  A conversation ensued over the merits and demerits of coconuts and their uses. It was obvious that the Chinese lady was a little proud to be able to impart that knowledge to her friend; maybe she was a little proud of Singapore too, smiling as she spoke.

We left the Arab Quarter, travelled across Singapore on the spotlessly clean MRT (Mass Rapid Transit) and arrived in Little India as did the rain. Little India has become somewhat of a haven for authentic Northern and Southern Indian food, hence our opting to stay in that area for the majority of our time in Singapore. Once again accommodation was hard to come by unless, of course, we wanted to share a room, barracks style, with eleven other people of the same sex. I had no desire to do so. We trudged on until we eventually found a reasonably priced hotel. We later discovered that it was a hotel chain which had been infamous for selling rooms by the hour, sometime in its recently lurid past. But, on the day of our arrival, there seemed to be Chinese families and hordes of Malaysian tourists crowding out the hotel – no obvious hookers or johns evident.

The problem with hotels is that you are not at home.  In your unwisely chosen hotel room you are constantly at the mercy of other people’s behaviour. When neighbours arrive, noisily, at 1am, shout and wish each other good night in their various languages you are at their mercy. When the very same neighbours awaken at 7am, you are still at their mercy. Your sleep pattern, or lack of it, becomes guided by the thoughtlessness of others. Groggily, you lay awake to their stories unfolding - the children running along corridors, their banging on doors – and sometimes the right one. You hear, because you have been awoken by them, the grandmothers yelling at the children in foreign tongues, the children’s and their parents’ responses, the slamming of doors and the unnatural quite as the entire party is transported down to the lobby, in the lift. It is the quiet that disturbs more than the noise - the anticipation laying in wait within that quiet.

My much-better-half joined the Singapore Urban Sketchers for a morning’s sketching. We travelled across Singapore, on smartly on time buses, to arrive at Gillman Barracks, vaguely on time, to sketch until luncheon. Gillman Barracks was named after the British General - Sir Webb Gillman, a former General Officer Commanding-in Chief for the Eastern Command (1931), based in Singapore, he died in 1933. The barracks was built and named after him in 1936.

The posh art galleries which have claimed the old British Gillman Barracks didn't open until midday. There was no chance to gain succour there while my much-better-half sketched, so I skirted the closed galleries and headed for the sanctity of ARC (Alexandra Retail Centre). The one Gillman gallery to be open, as I passed, held an exhibition of psychogeographic images. I did a little head scratching and later ‘Googled’ to discover that, in this case, psychogeographic images meant road and footpath markings made in construction work. I was a little baffled and went to ask the young lady seated at a desk what it was all about. She was intent on watching a soap opera on her laptop, earphones plugged in. I wanted to ask if it was intentional that some of the postcard size images were peeling from the walls. Was it a statement on contemporary curation, or on the ephemeral nature of such markings, but I could not gain her attention and left none the wiser.

While others sketched away in a heat, nearing the noon day (when only mad dogs and other Englishmen are abroad), I was biding my time in coffee@room in the ARC mall, somewhere in Singapore. I was unaware that Saturday was live band day at ARC. My relative peace and quiet soon disappeared, as did I after finishing my tea. It is no doubt an age thing. But I just cannot fathom why live music, or entertainment, is necessary in a place designed for shopping. Singapore, and no less so the ARC mall, is a land of enigmas. Fusion mixes to the extent that if becomes confusion. Food and drinks are no longer bound by strict cultural rules. Rowan Atkinson's Mr Bean becomes a soft drink emporium, Vanilla becomes a muffin shop and the aforementioned live Chinese band plays pseudo prog rock into a mall distinctly lacking people – quite possibly due to the smallness of the mall and the loudness of the music.

Having at least partially sated ourselves with Indian food, good Art and good company it was time to climb aboard the yellow and black caterpillar and dash back to Kuala Lumpur. I say dash, though in reality it was a seven hour slow dash - due to it being the Easter weekend, raining and dark. Singapore by bus was an experience – more luxurious than ‘coach class’ in an aeroplane, cheaper but much, much slower. The trip was nice for fun, but probably not on a regular basis due to the huge amounts of time it consumes. We (mentally) waved fond farewell to the wasp coloured caterpillar and earnestly considered driving down to Singapore in the future.

Back to Manila

It was back to that old ex-US military base at Clark, Manila, The Philippines. And it was for no other reason than there was an available flight. On this, my second trip to Makati City, one of the accumulated cities which comprise Manila, a Dutch tourist injured his forehead on the door to the bus luggage compartment. Bright, foreign, blood sprayed over the wood and metal passenger bench, over that unfortunate man’s shirt and over the Filipino pathway. To all intents and purposes it was a superficial wound, yet it drew much attention and slightly delayed that bus from Clark airport to Makati. It was an interesting beginning to our two hour journey returning to Manila city.

This time we approached Manila in broad daylight. We had the dubious delight of witnessing the traditional city traffic jams. We neared the spot where we had been dropped off last time and, understanding that our hotel was but a walk away from where the bus dropped us that afternoon, we decided to walk. We were right, and thanks to the guide book embedded in my 7 inch Android tablet and we were able to navigate past over-dressed police guards – presenting badges, guns and curious smiles. We passed, or were passed by over-dressed jeepneys and Filipinas, seemingly all the same age, with long dark hair, brandishing either film star enigmatic sunglasses or eyes fluttering unbelievably false eye lashes.

That night's party was courtesy of one of Manila's upcoming conceptual artists. As parties go that would have raised the roof, were it not staged outside the Ayalal Museum. In that tropical heat, hot and cool jazz thrumbed through Makati's pleasantly floral Greenbelt eco-mall, and our bodies. Even hotter dancers cavorted to pounding drum beats and sexy saxophone sounds. We over-age and under-fit pedestrians gazed on in a red wine fuelled awe, wondering what had happened to our youth, and where and when we had mis-spent it.

My new chums from The Philippines gave us a night to remember amidst the brandishing of donuts and/or bananas, pulsing beats and celebrity portraits. The small ArtistSpace gallery, an adjunct to that Ayala Museum, fairly rocked that night. It was in true bohemian fashion, while Manila’s conservative elite tut tutted and urged for an early end to that party’s cavorting. Despite killjoys, the artist proved that there still was fun to be had in old Manila, and also in Art.

The very next day, amidst shopping which came in brown paper bags - yes in The Philippines you can still receive groceries in actual brown paper bags; we wandered the early morning Manila streets in search of jeepneys. There was, maybe, an hour to go before a day of meetings. I wanted to get a little closer to those big chrome-plated beasts, pat their shiny hides and remember my own jeep beast languishing in rural Malaysia. Wandering around the outskirts of the Greenbelt complex, we did manage to spot one of two of those mechanical dinosaurs as they dashed past our hotel, too quick to shoot (with the small cannon), and decided to lay in wait near a stretch of cooling buildings. Sightings were poor. The business meeting, replete with stuffed, preserved bull’s heads on the walls, swallowed half a day. It only finished in time to allow us to rest before I was to read my poems at that night's performance. There was no further time to stalk the infamous, elusive, jeepney.

It had been two days and I was still to find coffee that tasted of coffee. It was a quest left over from the previous visit to Makati City. Was I searching in the wrong places? The restaurants and cafes I frequented only seemed to proffer the weakest, most insipid coffee - worthy only of England and the dourest of cafes, in the most insalubrious of places. The best coffee I had in Manila, up to that point, was that which came in a 3-in-1 packet. Even that Spanish restaurant, bedecked with wall hangings of real, stuffed, bull's heads, only offered coffee with powdered milk. It was a shock. No small jug of fresh cream, or container of full-fat milk worthy of blocking the elitist of arteries - no, instead I was confronted with two small pots - one of sugar and the other - powdered milk. The contents of that meagre pot looked like finely powdered parmesan cheese. Luckily the very next day we were due to travel out of the city and towards fields where Robusta coffee beans were grown. My hopes of finding a decent cup of coffee were high.

That new day dawned.  We were hustled into awaiting cars to undertake a journey out into the countryside adjacent to Manila. It was a one-hour bumpy journey – bumpy because Filipino roads were becoming as ill-maintained as their Indian cousins, and we were approaching the town of Tagaytay. The digital guidebook hinted that Tagaytay was a great place to eat. We didn’t eat there. Instead, we drove up a hill, atop of which was a fruit small market and a large car park, rapidly filling with all means of transport from buses to cars, motorcycle and sidecar combinations and those elusive jeepney beasts. I was delighted in finally tracking down a herd of jeepneys and, camera at the ready; I was all set to pounce. Pounce I did. I snapped away until the smiles of patient jeepney drivers turned to laughs of derision at the sad, and quite possibly mad, tourist and his ageing camera. 

I lowered my Canon and took stock. Just why did I need so many photos of one jeepney. The answer was, of course, that I didn’t. I sobered up from my frenzy, calmed down and began to accept those part-jeep, part-bus vehicles in all their vehicleness. I had satiated my desire to be up close and personal with jeepneys, but decent coffee remained as elusive as ever. 

Bananas and pineapple appeared to be the favourite fruit of the market. Women of all ages and sizes reached out weathered hands, proffering tantalising morsels of sweet fruit to entice the unwary traveller to buy. We didn’t, instead we climbed the rest of the hill, on foot.

Atop that hill was The People's Park in the Sky, which was badly in need of repair, love and maintenance. It reminded me of Clacton-On-Sea (UK) on a bad Sunday in July, only the crowds were Filipinos and Filipinas, not chapatti munching Punjabis. Having spent an inordinate amount of time on that hill, and getting no closer to coffee, we eventually sped off for what had become a late lunch. It was Sunday, family day, and restaurants were full. In a state of near hunger the decision was made to stop at a burger joint. But it was no ordinary burger joint. The name on the sign, looking suspiciously like an eastern rendering of McDonalds, bore the legend – MUSHROOM BURGER. That proved to be very literal, for the burger I received was a bun containing oyster mushrooms, and only oyster mushrooms. It was as advertised on that signboard.

A Filipino market came next, replete with stalls of a myriad dried fishes, luscious fruits and vegetables, and even a cow’s head stripped of its skin. The meandering rows of stall were clean for a market, as if an inspection had just taken place and the stall holders had not yet had time to get back to normal. I bought bags of dried fish of all types and sizes, and one packet of smoked fish smelling for all the world like Great Yarmouth Kippers (or Bloaters). I was getting nostalgic for the Yarmouth ‘Rows’ of my father’s boyhood, and the Tinapa (smoked Filipino fish) helped in a very small way. But there were no coffee beans evident. No piles of freshly roasted beans, no wafts of ground coffee, no coffee in evidence at all. I sighed a coffeeless sigh, and resigned myself for yet another trip to The Philippines and returning with no local coffee. And I did. To this day I have not tasted an authentic Filipino coffee, which I am certain must exist, if only to tease me. Perhaps, one day, there will be another trip, and another search for that Scarlett Pimpernel of all coffees, the home grown Filipino coffee. I await that day. 

33

At the grand old age of thirty three I was going back to school.

I had packed my school bag, grabbed my school lunch, doffed my school cap and swung my satchel over my arm as I headed off to my first day at school, remembering, of course, to take an apple for the teacher.

Only, in reality, my school bag was a briefcase, my school lunch was a few pounds in my wallet, my school cap imaginary and the only thing I had to offer the lecturer was an innocently scared face and a weak, unknowing smile.

First days are difficult anywhere, but more so when fellow students, ten years junior, mistake you for the lecturer, and hound you with the very same questions that you need answers to. It was like being on Mars. All the others spoke a common language - the language of youth, and I was without an interpreter. No babel-fish were there to assist me, no inter-galactic communicator/translator to blend me effortlessly into to the crowd. I and a few others were marked, stigmatised, cast aside as ‘mature students’, a totally unnecessary breed apart, quite possibly grossly inferior to the main stream twenty somethings.

It had been a monumentally hard decision to go to university at the age of thirty three. It was, naturally, a time when most sensible people are settled in their marriages, their careers, into paying mortgages, dreaming of not so fast cars and settling down with 2.4 children.

I, on the other hand, was on my second marriage, having to sell my share of a comic-shop business to support my future university life, and having severe doubts that I was doing the right thing. I had the twin demons of Casper the good ghost on one shoulder and Lil hot stuff on the other, each arguing a very plausible case.

After much deliberation, heart ache and soul exploring I had eventually driven to the university, taken the entrance exam and was left with a very hollow feeling, If I failed the exam – then what, and if I passed the exam what happens next. It was a time of indecision, when to looked into the black obsidian scrying mirror would it only bring reflections of the present? It was a time when little solace was to be garnered from the brightly coloured cards of the Tarot.

I was, once again, at an awkward age. In truth, it seemed all my ages were awkward. This time I was the requisite ‘over twenty five’, and not in possession of the same number of ‘A’ levels that my juniors needed to gain a place at university, and eligible for an entrance exam. Eventually, I sat the grueling three hour exam. I was later shocked, and not a little delighted, when a letter came stating that I was offered a place studying sociology (hons).
I hadn’t been long since I and my hugely enthusiastic partner had set up the comic-shop in town though, admittedly, and it was a horrendous decision to have to make. Should I just forget about my education and be satisfied with my lot, get on with the comic-shop and settle to a life knowing more about Batman and The Shadow than about philosophy, politics, economic and sociology, or throw it away and take a huge gamble on three long years at university. Eventually, I chose the latter.

Having the comic-shop had been a lifelong dream. It was difficult to give up that dream but, as is frequently said, we must all move on and move on I did. I put Spiderman, Batman, Superman, The Torch and sundry other superheroes (and villains) behind me and opened my arms and mind to Plato, Aristotle, Kant and Martin Heidegger. My second and third university years were subsequently devoted to philosophy after a change of heart after one extremely long year of sociology.

I was not without doubts. From the moment that the university offer letter arrived, right until I had cleared my final exams – three years later, I was convinced that the university authorities had sent the letter, and the offer, to the wrong person.

I was besieged with doubts. It was hard enough having to complete with students ten years younger without also having the thought of being discovered, and politely ejected from the university at any second, hanging over me like a veritable sword of Damocles .
In that first year I had not only to learn the various subjects – nearly failing in economics, but also had to learn how to write. It had been a very long time since college essays, some seventeen years in fact, and although I had attended vocational graphic design school in the interim, I had written no essays as it was an entirely practical course. I was beset with all kinds of insecurities due to my age and lack of preparation.

Within that one year of being thirty three, which seemed as though it might go on forever, I had resigned from a job as Planning Assistant with the local council Planning department, started a comic-shop which opened on July 4th, took and passed the entrance exam to university and, in the October, began the epic adventure of university life.
Talk about a year of living dangerously. In the following January, with ice and snow blocking most of the main roads around town, my hairy little daughter was born and some weeks later my wife was rushed into hospital with a dangerously low blood pressure, due to internal bleeding. I had found her pale, collapsed in the bathroom, oozing blood and, as it turned out, barely minutes to live. Ambulance men rushed my wife to hospital. I was left to attend to a child of a few weeks.

My wife survived, our daughter survived, I survived university but that is one year I shall never forget.

Virginity

Not so much a ‘wham bam thank you mam’ but more of a ‘oops’, and there it was, gone.

It was 1967; I was fifteen with two weeks to go before my sixteenth birthday. For me it was a year of firsts, first motorbike, well, second-hand Honda 50cc hand-me-down from dad, first addiction to nicotine, first time at technical college, and within but a couple of weeks to go before the English age of consent I lost my virginity. Oh yeah and it was the year that the BBC ousted the innovative pirate radios and gave us all Radio 1, bummer.

Needless to say sex was a brand new experience, and with all my nervousness and unfamiliarity with carnal matters I couldn’t honestly say it was all ‘wow’, and ‘too much man’ just, well, a bit messy. The sticking zip-fastener on my jeans just added to my general embarrassment, so instead of being Don Juan I came across more as Don Quixote, but without my Sancho Panza.

It was the second day we had actually met.

She and I had been corresponding for a while. She was at a catholic boarding school - in the south of England, and I had just started technical college, studying of all things rudimentary science, but it wasn’t to last. Her sister-in-law-to-be, Mary, was studying with me and arranged for me to write to her as a sort of pen-pal thing. Mary obviously knew that she was looking and knew that I was without any form of partner albeit it female or male, and probably would do.

The writing continued – that is physical writing because back then there was no internet, therefore no e-mail, no hand phones and therefore no SMS either. It went back and forth to boarding school in Hastings, then it was November and she was home. There was a firework party organised, and a bunch of us - all wrapped cosy in warm clothing to keep out the November chill, bundled into a Land Rover and sped off to the party. There, we consumed hot fire-roasted jacket potatoes and warmed beer, only the warmed beer was a mistake for me as it re-visited me later that night, and was not as nice coming out as it was going in. The night, however, had not been entirely without success. She and I had a chance to eye each other up over those singed hot potatoes, and she must have either liked what she saw, or was so desperate just coming out of boarding school that anyone would do.

The next day I decided to walk to see her. I wasn’t too enamoured with the motorcycle, it had a tendency to faint at corners leaving me with road rash on my hands and jeans, and being a little particular about small matters like blood and gravel on my person - I felt safer to go on foot. I walked the twelve miles to see her, singing merrily to myself – a habit I have never gotten out of despite much derision and encouragement to quit.

The preliminary talks over, and an introduction to my new bestest ever friend – a Bang and Olufsen Beogram, simply the most divine musical experience I had in my nearly sixteen years, she took me out for a walk. Ok, I was a little innocent and expected a walk to be a walk, maybe a little hand holding and, perhaps, the first kiss. We walked and talked. Went down this small road to the back of the village, and there she stopped and kissed me. Was that my first kiss? Probably not! But within the context of what followed, it was significant.

Holding my hand like it was life-jacket and she drowning, she pulled at me to follow her through a gap in a far from enticing hedge, and further - into a small barn. The barn, I have to say, was replete with the necessary amount of scattered hay. It may have been straw, but I really wasn’t taking note at the time. At the end of the barn was a small room, a sort of barn annex. We went in and she closed the wooden door. It was at this point that my small male brain began to think. I was nervous, untutored and was probably in the hands of a much more experienced person, even though, technically, I was two months older than her.

We kissed. We landed on the soft dried grass item and kissed some more. Hands, quite possibly mine, groped and grasped for something female to play with and eventually, beneath pink pullovers, pink blouses, and quite possibly pink bras too – I couldn’t see the colour, female flesh was found. It was then that I discovered females like to play with male flesh as much as males like to play with the female variety; it came as a surprise, and amidst the fumbling and stumbling so did I.

Interesting, and quite probably – embarrassing, are the two adjectives I might care to use for that experience. I couldn’t honestly say it was passionate, nor a product of lust, certainly not on my behalf, but as experiences went it was ok, apart from the zipper let down. Later, in the twenty-four months of our relationship, she was to teach me many more things I hadn’t a clue about before I had met her and, I suppose, she was the one who introduced, seduced, me into the whole free love aspect of the swinging sixties.
Coming out of the barn, adjusting clothing, we walked some more, this time to the kiddies’ playground and relived our childhood by playing on the swings and talking. She told me she had boyfriends before, and wanted me to know that she was straight with me, so she told me.

She told me that she had been to see her doctor, who confirmed, in secrecy, that she was pregnant. Fifteen years old and already pregnant with another chap’s baby, good grief. Surprisingly enough, and maybe it was the aftermath of having a quite pleasing bodily release; I felt sorry for her and pledged to keep her secret, and to keep seeing her too. This I did. Eventually she told her parents, who did the math and realised it couldn’t be mine, and we settled into that relationship - me learning from her all the time. On reflection I’m not too sure if it was the sex I was there for, or just to be close to that Bang and Oulfsen Beogram – it could have been either and both were good.

Washers

To the four year boy that I was, the majesty of that imposing grey flour mill - stained with eons of white flour, stood proud like some unscalable Norman castle Keep. To me it seemed romantic, but impenetrable, an enigma, yet I was to witness trucks laden with floury sacks heave past me, dragging up that small road, past our house with the green door - 11 Mill Lane.

In the early 1950s my father worked as a mill hand. He laboured at the flour mill for seemingly unimaginable hours, appearing home then disappearing back in a mist of flour dust. For a while my father became almost legendary, mythical, as we barely saw him, and when we did he would grasp my hand and run it roughly on his beard stubble. When I tried to snatch that delicate hand away, he held it fast, letting his beard bristles scratch my young skin. To him, no doubt, it was a game. To me it was brutish – I cried and was chastised for being a baby. His hand was like the vice he later used to tie plugs and lures for coarse fishing, his browning fingers – steel, his breath reeking of Woodbines.

My parents had moved out from the confines of Clapham. My father recently de-mobbed from the army and repairing Harley Davidson’s left over from the American occupation, wanted to give his children the benefit of the country-life he had never experienced. As a Norfolk boy he worked at fish gutting, then on North Sea trawlers. His single mother encouraged him to undergo Merchant Navy training. My father-to-be sailed off into a shrinking world. Years later he regained his land-legs as a career soldier, washed up in India.

That mysterious mill beckoned to me. As a pre-school, I had little to do with my time but to wander around that old mill. There were few children in Mill Lane - about four, and only one other my age – Peter.

Immediately beyond the mill - on the estuary, floated barges - they came up to from the sea, but I wasn’t to know that age four. I would sneak through the mill to get to its riverside. There, amongst mud and brush I would hide, watching white dusted men load or unload barges like some edited, and forgotten, scene from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. The coarse flour sacks weighed heavily. The men would trudge them out slowly, from the mill, and carefully load them onto the waiting barges, the white flour dust sprinkled over their head protection, over their burly shoulders, emphasising the darkness of their jackets, the brownness of their overalls.

I’d made friends with the old blacksmith. If he was in a good mood, not too busy, he would allow me to pump the leather bellows, or watch him work as sparks of metal few to the tune of his hammer on metal. It was fireworks, magic sprinklers, shooting stars in the privacy of the forge - bearing life for just a few seconds, leaving that curious afterglow on the retina which appeared just as real as the sparks themselves.

Opposite the blacksmith’s forge was a mill pond. In that turbid pond were copious treasures. Metal sprues from the forge, sharp metal shavings, odd shaped clinkers from the forge fire and a multitude of small objects - used as ballast from the wooden barges, intermingled and intertwined in a fascinating array.

I thrilled at playing with both the new and rusted metal washers, skimming them across the dank, rust coloured pond, making them jump, one, two, three jumps until they landed on the junk pile at the other side. I would pull thin twists of metal out of a tangled heap and watch them spring coyly back - shavings from either the blacksmith or from the ballast. I would twist those shavings, turn them with all kinds of imaginings fuelled by adventurous Superman stories.

When mum came back home from working at the electrical plug factory and found my grey shirt and shorts dirty with the pond’s rusty water I’d get a clip round the ear, and told to stay clear of the mill - it was dangerous, I’d come a cropper. I was an adventurer with little concept of the word dangerous.

That day, the day I remember the most, a fresh barge had unloaded its ballast. It was ready to be filled with sacks of flour. Unwanted metal was dredged from the vessel, tipped into the ‘pond’. I sifting through the new treasure, finding small metal bars, more springy shavings and this time found some quite curious washers. I hadn’t seen washers like those before; they were round like the others, but heavier and chunkier and made of an altogether different metal. In the centre, around the hole, there was an engraved square and worn squiggles, which even to my child brain registered as some kind of writing. These were fascinating objects quite unlike any others I had seen. I took some, put them in my shorts’ pockets, along with all the usual accoutrements of a four year old boy’s pocket, and carried them home to be carefully squirreled away.

A couple of years later, those long since forgotten objects were rediscovered - at the bottom of a wooden draw. We were about to move. My father had a new job as a tractor driver, on an apple farm. My mother was to work in the owner’s house as a housekeeper. The table was cleared, ready to be loaded onto the removal van - and there they were; those curious washers, only they weren’t washers at all - but Chinese coins from the days when Chinese coins were strung onto metal rods, as part of the finishing process. It was my introduction to races outside of my own.

Later, at the manor house where my mother worked, I encountered the gentleness of the Chinese maid – she came with the family back from Hong Kong. She taught me how to write my name in Mandarin, introduced me to silk worms and mulberry leaves, stroked my hair and called me Ma Din. I never saw the mill again, the pond, the washers and sometimes wonder if it was all a fiction, the dream of a small boy left to his own devices and encumbered with too much imagination.. The mill still exists - but my parents are gone, the Chinese maid grown old and only extant in a black and white photograph taken at her wedding where I smiled a cocked-head smile, before the maid moved to America with her new husband.

Dope

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. My paring knife bit into the pigskin and Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Highway Chile’ came over the workshop radio. It ‘just blew my mind away’.

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 six years. It 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 life felt cut off, isolated from the exciting new friends I had made, and only saw at weekends. I had a love/hate, mostly hate, relationship with my ex- Sergeant Major father, and it 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. Musical tastes moved 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.

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 and 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. Vivid weekends exploded with excitement as the gang of us visited the newly built local university and listened to more mind bending music from the hallucinogenicly innovative Pink Floyd to the rawness of the electric Velvet Underground, We all bundled into the back of an aging rusting Land Rover (Dame Celia Molestrangler) and sped up to the smoke (London).

In the glorious depths of London we visited the old Covent Garden - then still a fruit and vegetable market and home to the IT (International Times) offices, and to half of London’s hippy elite. 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.

Rubbish

The morning sun shone cleanly, brightly and warmly for once.

Putrid discards of meat, rotted and were awash with maggots. They nestled amidst tea and coffee grinds, worn and holed female tights. Which in turn sought to strangle empty baked bean tins and flattened empty milk cartons sprinkled with left over breakfast cereal, and browned cigarette butt-ends from the week’s smoking. Sweet decaying odours mixed with sharp rancidness to form the not so delicate aromas of household rubbish. The rubbish truck stank, the rubbish bins stank, the rubbish in the rubbish truck stank - and I stank.

Insistent flies targeted me like the walking rubbish I had become. They formed buzzing satellites around my head, like some two dimensional cartoons or comedy comic book. My shoulder-length hair was matted at the back of my head, where the dust of ash had fallen from the heavy rubberised skips we used to transfer rubbish from the galvanised metal bins to the business end of the noisy, stinking, rubbish-truck. Those discards caked themselves into my freshly washed hair, at the juncture of my black Led Zepplin T-shirt, and my increasingly moist neck. My new blue (French look) beret was equally covered in ash and dust, and served little purpose except for a quaint sense of the aesthetic. My aesthetic failed, and I looked less like the French existentialist I wanted to be than the newbie rubbish man which I was.

The end of the 1960s, its dreams and romance left me forlorn and back in my home town, broke. I had subsequently married young and now had the responsibilities adulthood coupled with sensibilities of a not yet grown child. I felt so out of place in both worlds, but further out of place in the world of rubbish collection. It could not have seemed stranger had I actually been transported to Mars, and frequently thought I had been.
Gone were the dope and music filled days and nights. Gone too were the passions which left me seeing the dawn in over multicultural West London. Gone the free concerts and the sham camaraderie of the flower children underground with its International Times, Oz and Friendz.

The death of The Beatles ushered in a new age. The flower power revolution bubble burst and, while some managed to continue their hedonism for a few more years, for many of us the starkness of reality hit us well and truly. It was very much a man’s world, a world rejecting romantic, poetic, notions of communes and tribes, replacing them with heavy labouring where little thinking was involved.

In the world of rubbish, all the men on the truck wanted to do was to get the round over as quickly as possible, then drive the fragrant truck to the even more fragrant rubbish dump and dispose of the days’ stinking load. After that, providing the round was properly finished, they were let loose on society for the rest of the day.

I was twenty. I was in the only job I was qualified to do and, surprisingly enough, I hated ever single un-poetic minute I was there. The only saving grace to this bad situation was that I was not alone. My friend J, also moneyless and lacking the credentials of diploma or degree, joined the borough refuse department at the same time and, sneakily, we would try to engineer working together by us both arriving late in the morning. That meant that we had to be put together either on a rubbish truck, a pick-up van, or street sweeping. Of course the rubbish manager was not as stupid as we supposed - having spent most of his life working with human rubbish. He soon caught onto these pathetic ruses.

The worse scenario was when the rubbish truck crews were so depleted that there was little choice but to go on separate trucks for that day. I wish that I could honestly say that I made friends on all the trucks I worked on – I didn’t. Ex-hippies were as strange to the earnest rubbish collectors as they were to us. It was not a marriage made in heaven, but some other place, hotter, and with no air-conditioning.

On the days when J and I went our separate ways I was acutely conscious of just how bad a rubbish collector I actually was. The constant bruising to my left knee and left shoulder were testimonials to this. There is a knack, a technique that a rubbish collector learns pretty quickly. In a sweeping motion he jerks the rubberised skip, full of other people’s waste materials, from the ground, bumps it with his left knee and swings it to his shoulder – the left shoulder. From that position he is able to walk, or stagger, the distance to the rubbish truck and hopefully tip the waste in there. But it takes practice. Practice and a certain dexterity that only some newbies have – I didn’t, hence the bruising of the left knee and left shoulder.

A further point which needed to be learned was timing. A rubbish man does not have a lot of time to perform the above mention function. Speed is the essence. Should, for whatever reason, the rubbish man delay, dilly dally, lose speed or just engage on a go-slow the truck will not wait. This effectively means that the slow rubbish-man necessarily has further to travel with his stinking, full, rubbish skip and each footfall means that the skip is feeling heavier and heavier and the day hotter and hotter, and the truck further and further away. Not to mention that your fellow rubbish men will now be starting to pick up your rubbish bins and empty them into their skips – effectively doing your work, as they must finish the whole round before departing. This means that the slow rubbish man becomes very unpopular with his fellow workers, and begins to gain a most unfavourable reputation.

And so it was.

From the dizzy heights of the rubbish truck collections I was down-graded, or elevated, depending upon your viewpoint, to the pigs-swill truck. This rusting yellow truck was less tall than the rubbish trucks, and had side openings which slid upwards. These were more multi-purpose vehicles used to transport anything from the debris from house clearances, pigs-swill from various restaurants and the charmingly perfumed effluence discarded from abattoirs - it was my honour to help shovel and transport it all.

Gone were the dubious perks of broken and discarded radios - which almost worked, the dress that “will fit the Mrs, it just needs a little darn here and there” or the dead and corroded car batteries which could be traded in for cash, providing you had enough of them and really didn’t mind carting these weighty items around. The only benefit to be earned amidst all this glorifying effluent work was a one pound bag of sausages each, for the yellow truck driver and me his temporary mate, for clearing the abattoir waste and not vomiting into the paper masks the abattoir provided. These plump, freshly abattoir produced, succulent goodies were often proudly presented by nice young men in white overalls, wearing white hats and white aprons sprayed and splattered with cooling animal blood.

Rubbish days lasted for nine months – a pregnancy length and time enough to seek less putrid employment. A man was born. I turned twenty-one while working with eleven old men and their incontinence, at a home for the elderly. I had traded animal excreta for human – I was on my way up.