Notes of a provincial boy... a sporadic series...

I left home for the first time when I was sixteen – the summer of 1963 – when the school holidays spent hitch-hiking around the country just – got extended. It seems so long ago... and it is, after all, looking back on those days from the vantage point of 59. I was moving fast, fuelled on a cross-cultural mix of beat writers, jazz, folk and blues, and poetry, that fed into my own artistic aspirations – music and writing – plus some burning need to break out of the environment I was living in – which in hindsight was not so terrible – but at that time seemed to me like being shackled in a dungeon. I ended up sleeping under the pier at Bournemouth with a disparate crew of other similar souls, participating in something – we could not completely articulate what but it was the nascent youth counter-culture, maybe. Then I went to the Edinburgh Festival on the thumb with, as I remember, the odd combo of Eliot's 'Four Quartet' and Jack Kerouac's 'The Subterraneans' in my pocket – roamed the city and met Scottish beats, took in the Delacroix exhibition(hardly Jackson Pollock – but it was stunning – I still remember it clearly) and most vivid of all, the Joan Littlewood Theatre Workshop version of Henry 4 – a modern day reworking that bounced off the zeitgeist so well – actors with long hair and mod/velvet clothes. I met a girl there and we became very involved in that pure and white hot teenage intensity – she had a couple of friends and two other guys took up with them – so we then had a group of six. The girls came from somewhere on the edge of Manchester – and I still remember the night ride in a lorry with her nestled into my shoulder as we travelled back to her home ground. She had a small flat and came from wealthy parents – unlike the other two girls who were Northern working class. But none of that mattered – it seemed as if we were participating in a breakdown of the old order. It ended in tears of course – her parents inevitably sniffed us out and she was forbidden to see me and dragged off home – it sounds now like some bizarre Victorian melodrama. I was devastated and angry – they could not quite make me out as I must have looked like their worst nightmare of daughterly despoliation – long hair and scruffy clothes – yet talked better than they did and was fiercely articulate. I and one of the other boys ended up staying with one of the other girls and her folks – who were generous, unfazed and gave us more respect than we deserved. Which offered a certain insight into the old white working class of the North. (And elsewhere – in Wales for example, the chance encounter with a lorry driver and his wife who were nudists and believed in free love – but that's another story...) After I went home for a while, due to a run-in with the law, we still kept in touch by phone – until it all fizzled out. I still wonder what happened to her. Especially as I spent a grim six months up in Blackburn in 2001 and realised that I was not far away from the geographic site of early doomed and long dead teenage love. The memory? Still fresh in its intensity...