Promise of a Dream

by Sheila Rowbotham

  After Bernie had left I settled into the Monaco as a surrogate home, still hoping he might return. The café was frequented by exiles from the Spanish Civil War, a lingering Mau Mau fugitive from the Kikuyus’ resistance to British rule in Kenya during the late fifties with a deeply lined, stretched face who sat staring out at the passers-by and never smiled, a despairing Portuguese revolutionary who drank far too much and became morose and self-destructive. Various GIs drifted in. Bums and petty criminals (resting) sat next to writers, artists and musicians.

  Two kindly folk singers were the first to befriend me. Wiz Jones, then a street performer, would twang a guitar on which he had written ‘Give me a guitar and I’ll rock this old town, Archimedes’. Wiz, who had long, curling brown hair, big square glasses and a cowboy hat, played with Clive, a gentle banjo player with pale red hair and a limp. Clive used to sit outside the Monaco and sing ‘Blue Moon’ over and over again, and a mix of hope and melancholy would float towards Danton’s statue to mingle with revolutionary ghosts and the noise of the traffic.

  Wiz and Clive helped restore my self-esteem by discovering that I possessed a practical economic skill – taking the hat round when they sang. This was based on experience gained through chapel collections at Hunmanby and speaking French. I was chuffed, for I had quickly picked up that in the gossipy circles of the Monaco, where normal values were inverted, women who could get money were well esteemed. For example, a sensuous White Russian lesbian who lived with her tiny skinny partner in a nearby hotel was grudgingly respected by the men as a good hustler. I was aware that I had no hustle in me at all. Even Lolita, a young Indian woman who was only sixteen, was more worldly wise than I was and took me under her wing. Before she moved on, Lolita wrote me her address on the back of an envelope. Boreham Wood, Herts, was Timbuktu to me, so was the Northern Line and the 52 bus. But she added, ‘or leave note in Partisan, Carlisle St, Soho, nr Tottenham Ct Rd tube’. Now I knew how to find the Partisan.

  Snobbery being inside out at the Monaco, people who were already rich were considered to be the lowest of the low. A member of this despised smart set, a bumptious American artist who reminded me of Toad of Toad Hall, tried chatting me up, boasting that his action paintings had just been exhibited and that he owned an island in Spain. I suspected him of being a ‘phoney’ – the ultimate moral condemnation – reporting suspiciously to Tony, ‘He uses decorator’s rollers not brushes and squirts things on to massive canvasses.’

  As I moved closer towards the café’s social interior, I perceived its factional conflicts, particularly the major schism between drink and dope. I was briefly adopted by the drink contingent. The leading figure, a would-be rock star who had become a pacifist while serving in the British Army in Cyprus, before the country was partitioned between the Greeks and Turks, and then gravitated to the Partisan in Soho, decided to court me. His approach was direct, but miscalculated. He’d just grab my legs under the table and assume arousal would clinch it. Lust, however, was outside my ken. ‘Stop being daft,’ I’d bark. Eventually he and his friend, a retired safe-breaker who took great pride in his craft skills, while despairing of the fecklessness of humankind because they entrusted their valuables to locks which were so easy to force, adopted me on a younger-sister basis. I appreciated all the advice about how to defeat burglars, but found the firm resolve, which arose from sour grapes, to defend my virtue cumbersome. One night my two protectors took me with them to one of their favourite haunts, an all-night club on the Place de la Contrescarpe. Male prostitutes with breast implants flamboyantly seduced the clientele; a woman danced on the tables; the men shouted and banged their glasses to the music. Everyone got extremely drunk and had a good time except me, who retained my Hunmanby-instilled suspicion of alcohol.

  Methodists had, however, said nothing against magic mushrooms. Wiz and Clive, who belonged to the rival dope-smoking clique, held a black American GI called Dave in great respect because he had taken mushrooms, which he said were like the mescalin Aldous Huxley describes in The Doors of Perception. Dave and his friend Mel – the son of a Methodist minister from Batley, a little town near Leeds – were reassuringly calm and tolerant when they smoked their kief. Like Voltaire’s Candide, I applied the test of experience, sitting around with them observing as they got high. When Dave described taking his mushrooms up some mountain, I decided that this was a profound spiritual encounter, concluding that dope was OK because it encouraged mystical contemplation. I was biased, of course, because Bernie had smoked.

  My peculiar new social set at the Monaco was slowly helping me to ease out of my paralysed misery. I wrote to Tony, announcing grandly, ‘I exist as a being independent of him. I existed before and I can exist now without him.’ Nonetheless, I jumped at Mel’s offer to hitch with him to Brussels, thinking that perhaps I might find Bernie in the Welcome cafe, which, like the Partisan, had assumed a mythical status to me. The expedition proved a disaster; we arrived in pouring rain and could not find an hotel. ‘Pas avec une jeune fille!’ How to tell the tight-lipped receptionist that I was just travelling with Mel? We shuddered all night in the station and went back to Paris on the early train.

  I was so absorbed in myself and in the micro world of the café that the news on 22 April of an attempted coup against General de Gaulle’s government by generals in Algeria opposed to self-determination seemed quite unreal. The surrounding cafés were packed with taut-faced Parisians watching the news on TV, while de Gaulle called on citizens to get on their bicycles and be ready to go to the airport to defend Paris. The Monaco remained an oasis of oblivion. I could not comprehend either rebellion or invasion and simply did not take the political situation seriously.

  I knew, but was refusing to know because I didn’t want to admit it, that Mel was keen on me. A few weeks after the suppression of the putsch, he suggested that we should hitch down south. He could earn money chalking, I could fill in the corners and my French would be useful. I hesitated. I was nursing my romantic wounds, but I liked Mel and kidded myself that this was going to be a friendly business arrangement. I was weary too of Paris, with its chafing memories, while hitchhiking (despite the Brussels experience) still promised, thanks to Kerouac’s On The Road, a quintessential freedom.

  So I put on my flea-market Levi’s and stuffed my favourite tight brown dress and high heels into a little bag. Bar agreed to send on my letters to my parents, in order for it to appear as if I was still in Paris, and, one sunny morning in May, Mel and I took to the road. I had yet to see the fool on the tarot pack setting out with his little bag, but he could have been my imago.

  We were heading for Lyons, which Mel said was full of very kind French working-class people who gave generously to pavement artists. Hitching has so many dead waiting times, you can learn a lot about someone’s view of life. Mel had a clear-cut outlook about people. The rich were bad, the working class good, while clochards and prostitutes were the crème de la crème, being the people who would help you if you were really starving. He disapproved of my attachment to frippery and always called me ‘man’. ‘Look, man, if you wear a dress people will think you’re a prostitute if you’re with someone who looks like a bum.’ Mel was invested with considerable authority, for he had been a real tramp before doing his national service. I aspired to become a serious hitchhiker who would not be a burden. On the other hand, I remained far too Leeds not to want to get dressed up sometimes. Anyway, he kept praising prostitutes. ‘I don’t mind being taken for a prostitute,’ I told him, and he grumpily shut up.

  Things were going well in Lyons and we took a day off to explore the old town, high up on a hill with tiny cobbled streets and washing stretched across them in criss-cross lines. Mel thirstily drank a bottle of milk in the hot sun. ‘That’ll give you a fever, that’ll give you a fever,’ chanted a group of old women in high-pitched warning. They were right. Mel awoke soon after with a raging temperature. He was so ill I worried about doctors. After a few days he was obviously recovering. However, we ha
d consumed our margin of survival. Out of money, we needed to chalk desperately, but luck was against us. The weather changed and it rained and rained. ‘We have to get out of Lyons,’ Mel announced. Miserable and bedraggled, we tried to hitch, but no one would take us. We had no choice but to return to Lyons, where Mel chalked under a lighted window and I filled in the corners for all I was worth. The good people of Lyons rescued us again.

  We eventually reached Marseilles, where Mel drew David (popular there because of the statue). People in the old port gathered around and made flattering comments. I couldn’t imagine the English working class getting so involved in the aesthetics of pavement art. Mel and I celebrated by taking a cheap bottle of red wine down to the harbour after we had eaten and I relaxed into the unfamiliar softness of my first Mediterranean spring night. But Marseilles was fraught because of the conflict in Algeria. Flashing searchlights repeatedly prodded the darkness.

  Abruptly they stopped, holding us pinioned in unrelenting light. I froze, rabbit-like, my back against the stone wall of the old port. Mel’s instruction, ‘Don’t move else they’ll shoot!’, was unnecessary. I stayed put for what seemed like a long, long moment, staring at the soldiers’ machine guns across the black lapping water. The possibility that I could just dissolve into light, annihilated, flashed through my consciousness and logged into memory. I realized that a faraway reality, which I understood only hazily, could ricochet from an arbitrary hand and explode the disconnected bubbles of personal experience which had seemed to me the sole sources of truth. Then the instant of incongruity and fear vanished into inconsequence; the light moved on. This was not our war.

  Our troubles proved more mundane. The truth was that Mel and I were not really economically viable. I increased costs and de Gaulle’s regime had tightened up the laws on clochards. Chalking was still legal in the old port, but it was packed with competition. With our David and his green backing, we had to contend with a Cuban who did the head of Christ and a gawky Dane who was continually chasing pigeons away from his picture. I wrote a letter to Tony headed ‘Pavement, Marseilles’, adding, ‘The above address is too literal for comfort.’ Mel was implacably reassuring: ‘Don’t worry, man, something will turn up.’ His words would return throughout my life whenever things looked really bleak.

  I learned to adapt to taking every day as it came, accepting the evenings when we could afford only bread and relishing the pleasure of the good times when money jingled in Mel’s pocket and we could get a hot meal in a cheap restaurant. I was developing a few skills of my own. I acquired a sharp eye for the cheapest hotels and restaurants, and my French was handy for the menus – though one dreadful time we ended up eating brains, while another bad guess resulted in tripe. It was in Marseilles too that I taught myself how to be invisible. Mel would be sitting round with groups of men, smoking, and it would be my turn to get the sandwiches. Complaint would have revealed me as a dependent chick, so I would hunch my shoulders, put my head down and, unseen, march through the chaotic clamour of the prostitutes’ street to the sandwich stall.

  The sun and bustle of Marseilles encouraged light-heartedness. Boatmen inveigled surplus chalkers on to their boats in order to convince tourists they would fill up soon. Impersonating members of the public, we would go rocking contentedly back and forth over the sea to a nearby island. But on the bad days, as more and more chalkers packed into the old port, we could afford only bread and I would feel the hunger pressing against my ribs. Mel tried to get me to play a game he had devised while he was a tramp of imagining menus, but fantasy food was not as good as real food. My time in Marseilles helped to undermine my inclination to mystical idealism and made me see that materialists had a point.

  Occasionally my Kerouac hitchhiking androgynous persona would be blown. I was taking the hat round one day when a member of the French Foreign Legion approached Mel. He was offering to buy me for a Foreign Legion ‘farm’. I couldn’t believe my ears. He pressed a deposit into Mel’s hands, telling him to bring me back that evening.

  We fled to Toulon, where we ran right out of money but into good luck. Our hotel-keeper was a lovely woman in her forties who happened to have a soft spot for artists. Because Mel could chalk, she supported us with aromatic Provençal stews until Bar sent on some money and we could pay her for the room. While I never met one of the mythical existentialists, my travels with Mel left me with a profound gratitude for the small kindnesses of strangers and an intimation of interconnection. Many years later on a train to Calcutta, I told the sweeper he could keep a plastic pill phial I had thrown away. He took it with delight, saying philosophically, ‘We all take a little from one another and give a little to one another in this life.’ He had summed up the outlook I had absorbed filling in the corners of Mel’s drawing of David.

  I was to find my own interpretation of E. M. Forster’s exhortation in Howards End, ‘Only connect’, on that journey. My stance in Leeds as the defiant outsider on the margins of society was tempered by the realization that some kinds of social acceptance could be precious indeed. One night in a Toulon bar an American sailor stormed out of the lavatory complaining that homosexuals were in there having sex. The whole bar surveyed him with equanimity. He demanded that the barman should call the police. Slowly the barman responded with an eloquent shrug of absolute indifference. The sailor looked round, expecting support from the crowd. Incredulous and still bellowing in moral disgust, he found himself encircled by ironic smiles. Two men sauntered like lascivious heroes out of the lavatory. The sailor, realizing that he was the outcast among these mad foreigners, slunk out of the bar.

  There were still many things that perplexed me. Both Bernie and Mel were egalitarian in their attitudes to women, so I assumed that as long as I respected clochards and renounced cakes I would be treated as an equal according to beatnik mores. But beatniks had their anomalies. Sitting smoking one night on the beach with a group of young Americans, I was asked out of the blue by one of them, ‘Have you always been wild?’ Wild? Wasn’t he sitting there quietly smoking just like me?

  I had drifted into a sexual relationship with Mel based on proximity and affection. I had done with unrequited passion. But I remained as ignorant as ever about sex. Mel was not forthcoming on the topic either; it was sheer luck that I didn’t get pregnant. He did make one sexual observation that puzzled me. Once in a bar he nodded towards the prostitutes having a break from their clients. Their tight skirts revealed bulges and Mel maintained their bellies stuck out because they had sex with so many men. This struck me as rum, but I pulled my tummy in. In fact I’d been eating so much bread that I’d put on several pounds. I started doing the Canadian Air Force exercises we had learned at school.

  In Nice Mel insisted that we eat in the tramps’ restaurant to economize. The food was so bad it made the bread-only days seem a treat. The clochards, for their part, considered us a peculiar pair, staring as we walked in – Mel, his long hair and beard even blonder in the sun, and me, ginger and fiercely freckly. Walking along by the sea one day, we bumped into Wiz, from the Monaco, still with his hat and the guitar, but looking rather sheepish and subdued because he was with his mother, a middle-aged English woman with permed hair, a long pleated skirt and a pacamac. The sight of Wiz’s mother and her strange entourage striding along the Promenade des Anglais created a stir of astonishment in fashion-conscious Nice.

  We headed back to Paris, with Mel singing ‘Cocaine all around my brain’ over and over again and telling me about the kind of folk musicians he admired. I knew none of the names then – Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Derroll Adams, Davy Graham – all influential in the early-sixties folk revival, the ‘missing link’ between Woody Guthrie, folk blues and Bob Dylan. But I stored them away, along with the rest of my new-found learning. A few weeks away had turned me into a seasoned, sunburned veteran of the road and I listened wryly as two men walked by debating whether to buy me while we were chalking in Lyons. Shaking their heads, they decided I was too scruffy.

 
It was late June when we returned to Paris and I rushed off to meet Bar in the sunny courtyard of the Sorbonne, bursting with travellers’ tales. I sobered up when she handed me a pile of letters from Leeds. As the weeks had gone by, their tone had become more and more insistent that I should come home. My mother was seriously puzzled. My letters home, all written in beatnik lingo, had failed to respond to her news that my sister-in-law had given birth to a baby girl. I was being recalled.

  Back in Leeds, I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for Latin translation or Gibbon and Macaulay. In the neighbours’ view I had gone to the dogs: ‘Sheila’s come back all beatnik.’ Unfairly, they blamed the French. Tony and Danielle came to visit and we took snapshots of ourselves on the Roundhay lawn in black sweaters and jeans like a plague of big black beetles which had mysteriously landed on suburbia. My father would bristle whenever a shaggy-looking Mel passed his beloved rose bushes on the garden path at Ladywood Road. My mother, however, liked Mel. Beard or no beard, she saw a man who, she decided, had looked after her daughter.

  I visited Mel’s parents in the Batley manse, where his father proudly showed me his copy of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Sure enough, he began to try and save me, and I reflected on the irony of putting all that effort into distancing myself from Hunmanby’s flame of purity to end up with yet another Methodist minister talking about redemption. Listening to him and looking out at the yellow scrubbed steps of Batley, I began to understand Mel’s clear-cut take on the world, his reserve about discussing sex and that strain of puritanical severity which his endeavours towards a laid-back lifestyle had not melted.