by Tot Taylor
‘… we did do that bit. We’ve done it. We did go through that… element – in detail. I know we did. You’ve got it in your notes. Was a really… well, it was a bad, bad old days bit, I seem to remember.’ The patient looked disappointed. ‘I know that you… I realise that you… have a lot of clients… patients. I know you have to listen to a hell of a lot of rubbish. As well as my old… but… but…’
Johanna slowly began to realise she’d cracked it. After all this time. This tormented, sad individual was actually showing a lot… of progress.
‘It’s good that you’re able to go revisit the old days like that… now…’
‘… well, that’s kind of in between the “old” old days and the recent old days.’ John let out a breath, aware that ‘good’ progress had been made. ‘Even that is a very long time ago, isn’t it? Long time ago; and the last time I saw her… we met. It wasn’t a good meeting I don’t think…’
‘You really can’t talk about that… “element” at the moment, can you?’
Johanna was hoping that he couldn’t.
‘can’t really… no need to either. It won’t “reveal” anything, babe… and, well… you’ve got it in your notes already.’
‘Now… if you look up there to the right John… see it up there?’
John could see it alright. It was the brightest thing in the heavens. Although his neck hurt and he was still wearing his school uniform with short trousers, beginning to feel the cold. His father removed his own scarf and wrapped it around his son.
‘Is that one always in the same place, Daddy?’
‘Always in the same place, John. What they call “fixed”, that one. A fixed star. You’ve got the Big Dipper over there…’ John Snr indicated towards a vertical point directly above the botanical gardens. ‘Find that one first, then look about a yard to the right of that corner star over there…’ John Snr fixed the position with his index finger then rotated it clockwise as if it were a radar arm. ‘See where I am now?’ The boy cricked his neck once again. ‘And you’ve got it.’
John Snr squinted through his old naval binoculars, delighting in the fresh, moonlit night and this first ever outdoor stargazing trip with his young son.
‘It’s a saucepan, Daddy.’
‘That’s right, John. Like your mother’s saucepans… a bit crooked! But a little bit bigger as well! You only have to remember two stars… there’s Dubhe, on the rim of the “bowl” there, look…’ Daddy pointed to the right again. ‘And Mizar, actually a binary star… Remember what we talked about? The one on the edge of the… “handle”, at the other end…’
John Snr looked to see if there might be any planets visible tonight. ‘But it’s not important to remember the names, John… I know you will anyway, with your memory…’
The boy stared up at the night sky, bending backwards at a most awkward angle. ‘Dubber and Myzar,’ he murmured, ‘like My Star!’ he shouted to his father.
‘That’s right John, like My Star.’
The boy turned to John Snr. ‘There’s a shooting star, Daddy – jetstar!’ John almost jumped out of his shoes.
‘Bit unusual, that…’ replied his father.
John peered further upwards. ‘The really bright one is Polaris?’
‘Yes. Same as in the book. If you went off at 45 degrees in the other direction from the bowl, just around to the right… but further round… you’d get to Capella. Over there on the right-hand side… Do you see?’
The boy blew his nose, swept his fringe away from his eyes, then pressed the binoculars hard to his forehead, making an indentation in his brow that would still be there next morning. John could see a very bright star indeed.
‘The only other one we’re going to try to remember – for tonight anyway, because I think you’re getting a bit cold – is that one. You see where I’m pointing? There’s a W shape. Way over there, across the midheaven point.’ John’s father gathered his duffle coat around him and checked his watch. Nine o’clock was just about the boy’s bedtime. Late arrival home would be an excuse for Frieda to berate her husband while making an extra special fuss of her son when they arrived back at the house.
‘Cas-si-opei-a… I can see it easy, Daddy. That’s the best one.’
‘Very easy to see, yes… Then tomorrow we’ll have a look at Orion, if it’s a nice night. That’s an easy one as well. Quite a lot of stars in it… and that’ll give you three good signposts.’
John’s father reached for his binocular-case and picked up the pair’s rucksacks ready to head back.
‘What’s that one, though?’ The boy stopped looking with binoculars and pointed to an orangey-yellow ball of fire. It looked shinier, more glowy than the others, and gave out plenty of local light.
‘What is it, Daddy… The really bright one?’
‘Ah well… that’s Venus, John. Bound to cause trouble. Troublemaker, that one. Thought you’d have to pick that one out. You have to remember that the planets go along on their own trajectory, their own… “wheels”, “rail tracks” in the sky. A bit like women do.’ John Snr pulled up his collar and took hold of his son’s hand. ‘Right then… we’ll have a look at that little lady tomorrow.’
October 1974: Dutch fans, trying to get closer to the Bay City Rollers, throw themselves into a canal during the group’s arrival in Amsterdam. The Rollers continue their assault on the UK pop charts with ‘Shang-A-Lang’. Stephen Hawking proposes his Black Hole theory and is elected Fellow of the Royal Society. David Jones dies in a nursing home in Harrow. Billy Fury (Ronald Wycherley) retires from music to open a bird sanctuary in Wales.
October ’74 was also something of a pre-Zero Point lull for John Nightly. When he was readmitted to the Center in Santa Monica, March 1973, he was still a ‘face’ around the local area. John had been quiet for a while but interest remained at a pitch. The magicien bought groceries from a wholefoods barn on La Brea, was sighted trying on a kaftan at the Village Spree on Highland Avenue, sitting on a moped outside LA GO! (John Nightly never learned to drive) and attending the premiere of Lost Horizon with Rafaella. The Center’s log from the beginning of the new year records that the boy rarely left the compound unless he needed to go to a regular practitioner in a regular hospital. In 1974 John Nightly was just getting used to liking being ‘no one special’ all over again.
Jonathan Foxley, Rolling Stone magazine (Retrospective Special Edition), May 1998. ‘A Very English Genius’. Interview by John Spring.
During the period you’re talking about I don’t think John listened to music at all. I did try, but I don’t know whether he heard it or not… I know I went to see him in California and I took him some records; Scott Joplin, John Cale, the Paris one1, a Bernstein record2… Todd Rundgren LP … whatever the new one was at the time. One of those records that everyone was listening to ’74… ’75 maybe3. There was a hi-fi in the room and I put it on. Him on one side of the room, just laying there on his bed, me on the other. Amazing, light-filled room, full of plants, huge window out onto a big lawn. Like a Grange… convalescent home. A bit like being at school as well – ‘here’s the new record to listen to’, you know? There’s that medley, great little bit… (sings, dada, hmm-mmn, trying to remember the bit)… his eyes lit up immediately. It was like electrons going on, because of that ‘two keys at once’ thing. He loved those chords… like Carole King, but… heavy… you know? He looked up at me: “Is it Todd?” Jonathan laughed, “recognising it straightaway. The sheer ambition of it, the easiness of it. The extreme musicality, of course. Just like John himself. Recognised a kindred spirit there, another kind of… I don’t know how you want to call it… “mad genius” is what they say, isn’t it?’
He had business problems at the time, didn’t he?
On top of everything else, yes. I’d actually gone not just to see him but to talk about… money, to be honest… if I’m honest. He… or his company, owed me… quite a bit… Royalties mainly. Tangled up with all the usual stuff. It wasn’t just
a… ‘philanthropic’ visit, I’m afraid.
His manager was… incarcerated?
Crazy as it sounds, for something like six weeks, I think. God knows who he came across in there… what happened to him… [Jonathan’s eyes glaze over] I would’ve thought even Pondy found it difficult to negotiate very much in prison. As if putting someone like him in a place like that was going to do anyone any good? He was moved to a place in St Albans. One of those asylum/free house… ‘open asylum’, you’d call it now.’ [becomes more distant and distracted as he continues] This is ‘off the record’, isn’t it?
[journalist nods]
After he got busted a second time, they put him in the Severs Centre. Pondy was in a pretty bad way. Not at all the ‘let’s-get-on-with-it’, sort of… ludicrous, but brilliant character he had been. There was no life to him anymore. As if his whole… reaction, had been – I mean his responses – everything, his senses… had been dulled. Wasn’t responding to anything, except perhaps the drugs they were giving him. [checks time]
I visited him… intended to go every week… or a few times a week, as I lived close by, but one visit was enough, to be honest with you. He was… pretty vile to me, I remembered he always owed me money. Very difficult to get a cheque out of Mr Pond. Not only for the Nightly stuff but for sessions I had done for his other bands. JCE work. Seeing him that afternoon… I don’t… I think I… I knew he would never be coming out of it… out of there… that situation. Awful place… nothing ‘free and easy’ about it as far as I could see. Abysmal. State-run… ‘urineperfumed’, as they say… graffiti and shitty [sniff]. Orderlies, the lot… really… very conventional, in reality [stares at the floor].
I knew so many people in that sort of state… at that time. Everyone was in a state! Somehow, I escaped that. Because of work I suppose. I was always working hard. Technical work as well. Orchestrating. Had to concentrate. Even if they weren’t clinically… ‘psychotic’ or whatever you want to… they behaved as if they were. [leans forward and rests his elbows on the mixing desk]. Everyone I knew was on Risperdal.
What would that… do?
It’s a… light antipsychotic. Everyone I knew was on it. I had a friend in another place, in St Albans, Villa 21. Jeremy, ‘Jez’… Trombone player. Great friend of mine. He played with… lots of people… Cat Stevens sessions… Georgie Fame. It was drink that did him, but he was on Risperdal… and another ‘acquaintance’ of John’s, the only girlfriend who managed to keep in touch with him – Raf – Rafaella, she was actually a countess, the contessa… was her correct… ‘title’… In a really bad way the last time I saw her. Raf had the same character as John. I think she was… well, there was something between her and Pondy too. Jonathan swings back on his chair, visibly relieved, now that he considered it, to have survived the late-’60s onslaught.
‘When I think about these things now, we could’ve all been in the same boat. In ’65 – I think it was ’65 – a lot of these things weren’t actually illegal, were they? People were reading books about it. Educating themselves about drugs. But you could get the stuff. [he leaned back and put his feet up on the console, as he cast his mind back thirty years] The Psychedelic Experience4… everyone had a copy, and the Laing book5 – the whole ‘new psychiatry’ thing… [takes a sip of coffee]. Then the World Psychedelic Centre6, in Pont Street. John went there… But that got a bad reputation quite quickly. Don’t know what happened to the people behind it’.
‘We saw the Beatles film Help! where they all lived in the same house, and we thought – that’s for us!’
Jim Dandy, Black Oak Arkansas
For a rock’n’roll household, very little music made its way through Trewin’s dense undergrowth courtesy of its residents. With no communal record collection, middle-of-the-road local-radio playlists emanated from Mrs Peed’s kitchen transistor and singer-songwriters from the stereogram Robert had installed in his bedroom. On the three nights a week he stayed over at Porthcreek, the CEO of Trewin Exotics was kept company by the ghosts of Gram Parsons, Nick Drake and Tim Buckley.
It was rare for John Nightly to play anything at all from his small ad hoc collection. Nothing remained from the old days, though every now and again a familiar riff could be heard leaking through the boss’s bedroom door. A bit of jazz, Graham Bond or Tubby Hayes; happy sounds, indicating that the whole house was about to experience an unusually ‘confident’ day.
The only genuine record fan was RCN, who boasted two bookcases full of ‘top-shelf classics and rarities’ by the likes of Rory Storm, Johnny Kidd, and the John Barry Seven, all lovingly preserved in their original paper sleeves, anti-static PVC outers and dust-free archival library boxes. Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett’s ‘The Monster Mash’ (Garpax 44167), ‘Transfusion’ by Nervous Norvus (Dot 15470) and a stack of crypt-kicking 45s by the incomparable Screaming Lord Sutch: ‘My Big Black Coffin’ (aka ‘Till the Following Night’) (HMV Pop Series 953), ‘Jack the Ripper’ (Decca F11598) and ‘She’s Fallen in Love with a Monster Man’ (Oriole CB1944), along with Storm’s ‘America’ (Parlophone R5197) were among the graveyard smashes which reverberated around the damp bungalow.
Although RCN was very much the employee, and the Johns were completely at ease in one another’s company, they spent little time together away from everyday business. A kind of communal method had evolved at Trewin; the family able to share their daily experience within the social group, managing to avoid eye contact when doing so by speaking to each other while at the same time staring into the television screen.
The inmates would congregate on a summer’s evening to catch up on bulletins of the news and weather, with favourites like South West Television’s Helpful Hints, in which a master furniture-maker might advise on how to get a teacup burn out of a piece of mahogany or a seamstress would instruct on the preservation of wartime pinafores and keeping bath towels fluffy. Sometimes there would be a black-and-white film, John Mills or John Barrymore; Mrs Peed’s favourites, in which case she would be summoned from the kitchen by the cry of ‘Black-and-white film!’ and would come running.
‘Is it a flashback?’ the housekeeper would ask. ‘I love flashbacks!’ she’d cry as the drama, a tale of disenchantment fuelled by unrequited love or perhaps alcohol, would begin in the ‘present’ – i.e.1942 – then unwind and unfold by flashing back to the past, delighting this connoisseur of Gothic monochrome.
During the commercial breaks, Mrs Peed would serve her coagulated fudge or boil a few damsons as the community relaxed around the TV set, gorging themselves while complaining about the lack of flavour in supermarket fruit and the quality of life in Britain today. As Trewin’s residents generally ate at separate times, these films, or Helpful Hints, anything to do with gardening – watched in awed silence – and the regional news (rather than the dramatised BBC edition) were the only activities that united the group in terms of family get-together or common experience.
If the boss bothered to engage at all until the appearance of Mawgan – or ‘Jesus’, as Robert referred to him – it would be for a quick teatime chat in the kitchen with Endy, who would regale him with tales about historic Cornwall; shipwrecks around Land’s End, the usual smuggling stories (John’s favourites), embroidered more elaborately by the housekeeper with each retelling, and tales of childhood days in the fishing colony close to where the Peed sisters had been brought up.
Sometimes Endy would have horticultural news about other estates in the area – grand houses at Godolphin or Sancreed – where she and her sister had been in service as children. And then workaday tales about local head gardeners, many of them holders of Chelsea Gold Medals and National Rose Society medallions.
One morning, during her first week in residence, the feisty housekeeper had impressed John Nightly when she took him and Robert for a walk through the side meadow. Here she was able to identify ragwort, teasel, dog-rose, toadflax and pignut, speaking knowledgeably about their life-saving and death-giving properties. Thanks to her, John was, over
the coming months, finally able to put a name to many of the wildflower species he’d known as a boy in Grantchester.
Mrs Peed had a stock of tales about nurserymen selling boxes of lavender and meadowsweet to landowners in Bristol and Plymouth, which would end up in the baskets of the simplers of Piccadilly, and about the medicinal qualities of speedwell and knapweed, a cure for painful cold sores but also for a broken heart.
Endy said that in some places in Penwith they still used tonics made from the spoon-shaped leaves of ragged-robin. And that for superstitious reasons she always carried about her person the last packet of pipe tobacco produced by her father from the purplish stems of coltsfoot. On one trip, the tough-as-old-boots octogenarian pulled up a heavy clump of St John’s wort to take back to the house which she said would do wonders for Robert’s thinning hair.
It wasn’t long before Endy assumed a kind of cure-all, problem-solving role within the group. Firstly, with regard to practical domestic matters, then, as time went on, in more of a philosophical capacity, advising and giving the benefit of her wide experience regarding what might now be referred to as ‘lifestyle’. But Mrs Peed’s lifestyle was the style of her parents and of generations before. Her appearance was wartime, the lady having been isolated for so long that she’d gained a kind of ‘need no one’ outlook. Self-sufficient, independent and in apparent rude health with all of her wits still about her, she quickly earned the respect of the family and began to be seen as something of a household guru, rather than the paid-help-cum-skivvy she’d been engaged as. In many ways Endy then became the Boss. The residents worried about abandoned coffee spoons – ‘Now where’s that spoon I was just about to wash up… ?’ – and the remnants of late-night drinks, cigarettes (and joints). ‘That’s one of Mr John’s, I hazard…’ the housekeeper would huff and puff, aware that there were limits to the type of behaviour or lifestyle she was able to impose on her fellow residents and employers.
Soon after her arrival Mrs Peed was consulted about an infestation of nocturnal hawk moths that had been busy pollinating honeysuckle sticks along the kitchen wall. The quandary being how to remove the creatures without inflicting damage on the deciduous shrub, which Endy announced was a guarantee of good luck. The problem was solved by an application of diluted Fairy Liquid, the glistening mucus making the moths lose their grip while leaving the shrub unharmed. Endy had risen at five one December morning in order to dig out a patch of enchanter’s nightshade that was threatening to choke the bed of asparagus outside the pantry.