by Simon Barnes
“Why has it been taken down then?”
What? Interrupting the headmaster? Interrupting the headmaster in the middle of Assembly? Six hundred heads swivelled through 180 degrees and looked up at the gallery, the place sacred to the sixth form. In the very back row, shoulders against the wall, each with two feet on the chair in front, three wild and dangerous rebels: Ralph, the one who had spoken, long black curls like a judge’s wig, dangerous glasses and those ferocious whiskers; Ted making the entire concept of uniforms and uniformity meaningless; me. And no, it wasn’t a great moment of rebellion: rather, it was a great moment in the establishment of personal identity. We three: we rebels. (It turned out that the head prefect had taken the document down on his own initiative. He refused to return it, despite the headmaster’s overt approval. He said it was undermining Authority. Never mind what the headmaster said: it was immoral and it had to go.)
Ralph became part of my family. He was always around our house, and was a great success with everyone. We established running jokes: Ralph is part of family folklore to this day. His sharpest remarks, his always exaggerated – so he claims – faux pas, his jokes crop up whenever two or three of the family are together. It was one of those friendships of early maturity that is almost like a love affair, but with all sensual elements removed. There is a greater intimacy in such a friendship than is ever found in the alliances of maturity. We knew each other’s secrets. We knew each other’s weaknesses. We knew all each other’s jokes. We knew each other’s embarrassments, each other’s triumphs. We were, for a time, each other’s completion: each other’s validation.
Ralph started coming on holiday to Cornwall with us. We had been brought up to love the dramatic landscapes of that extraordinary place: but Ralph seemed to have a deeper and subtler understanding of it. It was not wildlife with him, not exactly. Rather it was the shape of the land itself that moved him: the sensation of the landscape as a narrative, as a tale still being told, as a place trodden by humans from one millennium to the next.
For our view of the world was changing. We no longer saw the way ahead as one of violent revolution. We weren’t Marxists or Maoists any more. We were now impelled towards a romantic anarchy. We sought instead a revolution in thinking, a revolution in seeing the world, a revolution in understanding life. Landscape was part of this: most especially, the landscape of Cornwall. Through this wild place, it was surely possible to reach a more important understanding of human significance and of human insignificance. Through landscape we could appreciate where we had come from: the better to understand where we had to go. It was from Eden we had come: it was to Eden we should return. Or at least die in trying.
Does that sound frightfully adolescent? Well, so it bloody well should. We were bloody adolescents. Why do we sneer at adolescence? Why, when we look back in maturity at the wild notions and the demented hopes and the illogical beliefs and the ephemeral soul-deep passions of our adolescence, do we feel it our duty to sneer? Or apologise? Why do we not instead believe that adolescence is not a cursed but a blessed period of life: a whitewater ride down the river of time. These rapids are not a place to spend a lifetime, but they are an essential transitional process if you wish to be an adult with any kind of life, any kind of passion, any kind of meaning. True, the stuff we came up with was half-baked: but then neither it nor we had been in the oven for terribly long. We were celebrating our newness, our rawness, celebrating the irrefragable fact that life was all before us: for us to change, for us to be changed irretrievably by.
So no: I don’t have a single regret for all the bollocks we talked, for all the guff and blather that had so much meaning for us back then. Ralph and I would sit on the bouncy pile-carpet of thrift by Seagull Gully, looking down at the white birds wheeling in and out, or go down at Basher’s Cove where the sea swept in with such style, or perhaps take our favourite spot at Bishop’s Rock, a seat in an amphitheatre in which the stage was the sea. And we would talk of girls and love and God and society and life and death and books and landscape and painting and music and Joyce and Lawrence and girls: and all around us, the sea shifted and the landscape stayed still and things grew and things lived.
We were wild rebels: so obviously, we needed drugs to prove it to ourselves. Eventually, we managed to buy some. We got hold of some dope, or shit, as it then was called. We were staying in Cornwall, we had the cottage to ourselves (and if you don’t leave it immaculate you will never go there again). We had left school by then, but we made a ceremonial return visit and, with splendid appropriateness, we arranged a deal in the tuck-shop. As a result, a package arrived at the cottage by post, humorously addressed to CC Kuper. It held an instruction: Do Not Burn. Generous of him to put that in: for this was grass, not shit, and we were hardly capable of telling them apart. It would have been a sad thing to set these expensive leaves on fire.
We had smoked before, but never really got off on it. Now, clumsily, with unpractised fingers, we skinned up a joint and daringly smoked it. We smoked until I noticed I was high. By the time this important fact had sunk in, I was, as we were to learn to say later, out of my head. I had to lie down for, it seemed, several weeks, half appalled and half delighted by the state I was in, half in terror and half in joy. Ralph, however, didn’t smoke tobacco, and was unable to inhale the smoke. Instead, he swallowed it. While I was seeing visions and dreaming dreams, Ralph kept belching out great plumes of smoke – an alarming sight under the influence of mind-altering drugs – and complaining bitterly that it had no effect.
But a couple of weeks later, Ralph and I reconvened at Ted’s house. We sat in his sunlit garden and smoked the rest of the stuff. Ralph had been practising hard with cigarettes, and had cracked the inhalation thing. Within a matter of moments he was out of his own head. I don’t think I have ever seen anyone so sublimely happy: at the triumph of getting high, at the highness itself, at the garden, at what the garden revealed to him. The afternoon was, for all of us, a kind of ecstasy, the kind of ecstasy that unperplexes, but for Ralph, lying stretched out on the grass, it was a moment of ultimate perfection. After that, he was always keener on drugs than I was: mainly, as he has said many times, in a doomed attempt to refind that brief, but endlessly stretchy moment of joy. He kissed the earth, again and again: he could feel every blade of grass, he could feel the great movements of the entire planet shifting underneath him. He was at one with the earth. And he laughed.
It was, as we also learned to say, good stuff.
Drugs were part of life for a while. We dropped acid together: a great and fearful adventure. I hated it, to tell the truth, but because of the exigencies of the time, I had to pretend I loved it. In truth, my only good memory is the coming-down: a moment of soul-deep rejoicing in the fact that it was all beginning to be over. I seemed to be in a hammock in Ted’s garden on another sun-filled day, transfixed by the beauties of a hoverfly. It hung in the air above me, motionless as time: a wild and beatific vision of everything that I loved.
Ralph and I were in Cornwall again. We had hitched down as usual. It was a beautiful day in May. Everything was perfect. Ralph decided to drop a trip; I declined his offer that I join him, though I pretended to think about it. But Ralph was in sublime form, and I revelled in the contact-high of intimacy and acid. After a while we went for a walk along the cliff-tops: and we lay in a little hollow where the wind never penetrated. It was suddenly and astonishingly warm. Ralph stretched himself out to soak in the sun, to drink in the air, to embrace the landscape. And then a moment of high drama.
Ralph was on his feet, uttering a strange and fearful cry, one that chilled me as I turned to look at him: and there was a snake flying through the air: slim, slight, a couple of feet long, patterned unmistakably in black and white. “Christ! Oh Christ!”
“It’s all right,” I told him. “It was a grass snake. You were never in danger.”
We sat for a while as Ralph thought this through. “You know, I wasn’t frightened at all,” he said eventually
. “I only jumped up and shouted because I thought that was what you were supposed to do. I didn’t really want it to go. I was rather disappointed. It felt beautiful. It crawled over my arm; I could feel it in such detail. It was… rather voluptuous, really.” I didn’t tell him it was an adder till the following day. Didn’t want to upset him in his exalted state. Plenty of people drop acid and imagine that there are poisonous snakes crawling all over them: with Ralph the poisonous snakes were real. Talk about being at one with the earth.
Ralph went to live in the West Country. He has been a teacher, worked on a sheep-ranch in Wyoming, he has done research on vernacular buildings, he has worked in recycling, he has completed a doctorate (The Politics of Local Food) and is currently working for the Devon Wildlife Trust. He has, in short, spent his life doing what he planned to do at school: working against the grain of society in order to make the world a better place. He was best man at my wedding, and is a friend to this day. I owe more to him than practically anyone else on the planet. We are united not only by our shared adolescence, but also by our love of the wild. This is something that we both learned over the course of years, but then I think we knew all along, even at the beginning, in Ted’s garden and along the dizzy cliffs, that life wasn’t really worth living without it.
6. Blackcap
Sylvia atricapilla
Room Six was the heart of it. Room Six had the view over the garden. Room Six was the place where we greeted the dawn and its songsters. Room Six was the place where the time that we wasted passed so very slowly. Ian Dury sang about the great trio – or should that be quartet? – of life’s essentials, but looking back, I can see now that I never really cared for drugs or rock or roll. I just pretended to. I convinced myself that lying down on my back with a head full of Paki black listening to Emerson, Lake and Palmer was a meaningful experience. Remarkable what you can do when you put your – to use the term loosely – mind to it.
Room Six was in Burwalls. Burwalls Hall of Residence was in many ways an awful place. It was part of Bristol University, but it pretended that it was part of Oxford University. It had formal dinners, occasions on which we were served unpleasant food while wearing academic gowns: no doubt a quintessential Oxfordian experience. Some of the girls who served the food were pretty, which was good, but someone said grace in Latin before we ate, which wasn’t. It betrayed a too-flagrant wish that we were all in another place and were all other people.
But the Burwalls garden was a thing of wonder. It had mature trees and well-organised shrubs, formal beds, brutally pruned roses and a perfect lawn that rolled down from the main building in a series of steps, like agricultural terraces tilled through countless ages. It had an air of timeless devotion: as if gardens and the men to look after them were a prescriptive right of humankind. It was located just on the far side of Clifton Suspension Bridge; we crossed the bridge several times daily: we were on first-name terms with the wild gorge and its stern cliffs and with the River Avon far below. We had always before us the dramatic shape of the landscape: and we had a garden to walk through, gowned or ungowned as occasion dictated.
There were six of us in Room Six, at least to start with. Room Six was at the summit of the main building, which represented admirably the High Victorian Streaky Bacon School of Architecture. Room Six was tall, and had three lengthy sash windows, one of which led to a balcony on which three people could, with difficulty, stand. It was a good place to stand, because it overlooked the garden: the trees and shrubs falling away athletically.
Simon’s really into nature, Brian told me, meaning not me but another. This Simon – sometimes referred to by Outsiders as Simon Heavy – was the lord of Room Six. “I wish I could get into nature like him,” Brian said. And indeed, I had seen Simon, standing on the balcony of Room Six, favouring the garden with his solemn gaze, pale red hair about his shoulders and a Players Number Six in the hand that rested on the stone edge of the balcony. Gazing at nature: getting or being into it. To him was given the best room in the hall, to him was given the coolest room-mate, the aggressive, stocky, drug-gobbling Dave. Why was Simon Heavy in Room Six with Dave, while Simon Light was down in the Cottage annexe with an economist from Leicester called Mick? Life, it seemed, had its favourites. Why did Brian not take other people aside and tell them that Simon – no, not him, the other one, the one from the Garden annexe – was heavily into nature? And come to that, why wasn’t I?
Simon and Dave actually lived in Room Six. They soon became accustomed to visits from the rest of us. We would troop up each evening after the unpleasant meal, and we talked and smoked cigarettes and listened to unpleasant records and drank instant coffee, shards of dried milk spinning on the surface of the liquid: me and Brian and Jim and Tony in there with Dave and Simon. We smoked dope when we had any and established a dominance hierarchy, with one Simon at the top and the other on the bottom. Still, at least it was the right hierarchy. And the important thing to do was to smoke dope, which proved that we were superior to everyone else.
Strange to recall how important that was. It was not a matter of pleasure. It was a stern duty. We smoked to make the world a better place. We were all just about to rebuild the world with beauty and peace replacing aggression and ambition. Was that really such a terrible idea? Was it really so risible, to spend one’s youth not looking to enjoy oneself but to try and improve the lot of humankind?
No doubt it was. All I can say was that it didn’t seem so. Straight society was finished: the new society we were building was what mattered. Pass the joint, turn the LP over. Yes, what was it Joni said? We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden. We all agreed with that. Growing up is supposed to be about the loss of innocence: our growing up was an attempt to find innocence. We believed that dope was the key; actually, at least for me, the key was as obvious as the garden all around us. Reaching keys is always a hard thing, as Alice had already shown me. Instead, we told each other that dope held the answers, and would suggest that what the Burwalls principal, or the housekeeper, or my tutor, or the president of the United States needed above all was a really good stiff joint. Then, presumably, they would see sense, declare peace, turn off their minds, relax and float downstream. This really wasn’t the pursuit of pleasure: this stuff was the answer to every difficult thing the world had ever thrown up. The idea that everything – absolutely everything – was better when you were stoned was a core belief. When you were stoned, everything had a higher meaning: everything was more real: everything was more beautiful.
Simon failed to last the first term. He was kicked out of Burwalls after the cleaners discovered him enjoying a back-to-the-garden moment in Room Six with a girl called Miriam. Somehow, Tony and Dave managed to get themselves thrown out as well. By the time the second term began, Simon and Tony had a flat on the far side of Clifton, while Dave had joined a wild and anarchic establishment just the other side of the Suspension Bridge, a place I was to join myself a few months further on.
That left the rump of the Room Six Six marooned, leaderless and uncool in Burwalls. Brian was lightning swift, establishing a claim to Room Six and bringing Jim in with him. I was still, then, bottom of the hierarchy, but I was morally a part of that room. Each evening as supper ended we repaired to its heights. I would sit cross-legged on one or other of the beds, an album sleeve across my lap, and commence the ritual magic of the Rizlas and the shredded Number Six and the rolled cardboard and, of course, the hash itself. We were seeking something: but also, Jim and I were perhaps trying to recapture something.
Jim and I had shared a night in Room Six with Dave and Tony in the first couple of weeks. Dave and Tony were “doing acid”, which was far beyond my ambitions at the time; Jim and I were there as supporters, disc jockeys, joint-rollers, good-vibes bringers. At a certain stage, it was decided that since it was so late, the only thing to do was to stay up and see the dawn. This was, of course, a Cosmic Experience. That’s what the times were about: a search for experiences with meaning and beauty,
moments about which there was a touch of eternity. Jim and I would sometimes smoke a joint on the Suspension Bridge, gazing at the gorge’s immensities… failing to understand that for me, at least, the answers, and for that matter, all the interesting questions, were to be found, not in the confusions of the drug but in the certainties of the gorge and the wildness of nature all around it. I see now that I was entirely taken up with the wrong kind of grass. And so, joint smoked, we would drop the roach over the edge and watch it tumble down and down and down, red ember winking at us as it fell, like the indicator on a car’s headlights. No left turn unstoned, we said to each other, and giggled.
That’s the only thing I miss about dope-smoking. Ah, the helpless laughter, the real, unending, weeping laughter, all dignity gone, when you beg for it to stop because your belly aches so, and you and your companions are united by something beyond mere hilarity. Was it the laughter of Mozart that we read about in Steppenwolf? Was it the laughter of the spheres? Jim once said: “I know some very noisy sheep,” and we laughed for a couple of hours. Could anything be better, be richer than that? And was this laughter the gift of dope, or the gift of youth? Either way, I will never know it again: times when it seemed that God was in his heaven and smoking joints alongside us. All on the same side. And all into nature.