The Story of John Nightly

by Tot Taylor

  item: Monthly Cultural Notes: June.

  June brings a marked change in the garden, with regular watering and feeding becoming essential. Don’t forget ’critter control’, with snails, slugs and all manner of unwanted guests dropping by this month. Use cane stakes and twine on your peonies and poppies. Feed flowering cacti. Cut back Regal Pelargonium and snip your patio roses. Prick out violas and pansies sown last month. Deadhead faded blooms and place hanging baskets outdoors. Remember to strim before mowing the lawn and borders this month as growth can be ‘triffid-like’!

  The inability to carry out any domestic task properly, in terms of devoting the correct amount of energy to it or having suitable tools with which to complete it, was a common thread running through all aspects of John Nightly’s existence.

  Maybe it was the fact that he had begun his recording career trying to create 48-track tapestries on a 2-track loom, never being able to either hear or see what he was doing; unable to physically realise the sounds he imagined. Maybe it was because the Nightly family, living on a fixed income, had never received any win, windfall or legacy to alleviate, even temporarily, the grim fixtures of debt imposed by the government on all of the people of England to control them and keep them down. John’s parents never experienced the luxury of spare cash or savings of any sort in order to enjoy very much… variety. From the basics: basic food staples, basic everyday clothes and basic British holidays – those spent sheltering in amusement arcades, fish-and-chip restaurants and pinball halls. For the Nightlys, life occurred – as it did in almost every British household of the late 1950s and early sixties – in the context of what was affordable. A quality of life possible within the economic constraints of the family income, rather than what might be achieved with a little imagination or… ambition. ‘Ambition’ was not exactly a byword of the times.

  At his secondary school careers talks had centred not around professional careers or vocations but a job, a steady job, to occupy your time and bring in a salary – though most probably not much of one. The kind of job which might one day be needed to ‘fall back on’. But John Nightly was an impatient soul. It wouldn’t have occurred to him that he might ever need to fall back. Failure was not something the boy had factored in. Not because he was in any way arrogant – he was barely confident most days – but because he recognised his own ability. Understood what he had. It was greater than most men’s; John knew that. And so, whenever people complimented him on how clever or ‘gifted’ he was, rather than put on a self-effacing, half-arsed smile and thereby, in a way, denying his gift, John would simply reply: ‘I know.’ A quick, dismissive acknowledgement of what talent and application had allowed him to achieve.

  The boy was stifled by the numbing conformity and social-ladder-climbing he found in the little satellite village of Grantchester and at his primary and secondary schools. John longed to get away from Meadow Road and its ponies and guard dogs, its acquiescent sons and daughters, nervous curtains and unforgiving tongues. John Snr and Frieda had no cash for anything but the most basic seasonal gifts. Soap, socks and shortcake biscuit for Christmas with perhaps a toy, book or a card for birthdays. The young Nightly and his very ascetic parents were therefore used to having to make do. Improvisation was the key to advancement. The key to survival. It became the key to John Nightly’s life.

  John would never begin any task, musical or otherwise, with preparation. He’d just start. At Trewin, the boss would walk into the rose garden and begin pruning vintage tea roses with an old potato knife. Why didn’t he ask Robert for secateurs? the nurseryman wondered. There were at least twenty pairs, old and new, lying around the kitchen/outhouse area. It would also have been worth checking with his gardener whether the roses had already been pruned…

  Of course, John Nightly didn’t have to ask the gardener for permission to do anything. John Nightly could do whatever he liked. He could take a rotavator to the rose garden if he so desired. But it would have been better, more sensible and, in the long run, cheaper to ask.

  In his second summer at Trewin, Kemp complained that the reason that year’s ‘Golden Dawn’ were showing approximately half as many buds as the previous season was the boss’s insistence on pruning a collection of the finest hybrid teas in the South West with nail clippers.1

  John would water huge swathes of dahlias and hollyhocks with bottles of expensive mineral water, removed from the fridge by the kitchen door because they were ‘handy’. This resulted in RCN instructing Robert to hide the plastic bottles on shelves in the main garage, thereby creating a nuisance for both Mrs Peed and Mawgan every time they needed one. John’s excuse was that either he could never remember where the outside tap was – there wasn’t one, except for the industrial pump by the meadow – or because he hadn’t been able to lay his hands on one of the tens of thousands of brightly coloured plastic watering-cans accumulated at Trewin over the years.

  But it wasn’t just gardening matters. Sometimes, in the kitchen, much to Endy’s alarm, John would cut a slice of bread not by placing it flat on the breadboard like everyone else but holding the loaf in the palm of his right hand while he sawed vertically down into it with his left. If the knife slipped, the boss risked either a very nasty gash or possible death were the blade to pass through the loaf and into his main artery. On these occasions Mrs Peed would stand over him, teeth on edge, imploring John to please let her do it for him, which he would of course refuse. At which point she’d run out into the back garden shouting: ‘I can’t watch him! I can’t look!’

  Other times, instead of taking his coffee cup to the sugar bowl, like the rest of Porthcreek, John would carry a heaped teaspoonful of loose granules all the way across the kitchen en route to the cup. Spilling half of it in the process, which meant that Endy would have to firstly pretend she hadn’t noticed and then wait for him to leave the room before she got out the vacuum cleaner to sweep up the sticky white mess.

  The solution for the put-upon housekeeper was to greet her employer every morning, and indeed every time he wandered into her domain, with the words, ‘I bet you’d like a nice cup of coffee… or a piece of toast… wouldn’t you?’

  Thereby avoiding an unnecessary outing for the Hoover and the possible sudden demise of a sixties legend.

  In another annoying little habit, John would make notes and sketches on any scrap of paper that was handy, using a dead match, somehow never able to locate one of the hundreds of writing implements lying around the house. Sheets of newspaper doubled as dishcloths and safety-pins became trouser zips in John Nightly’s make-do habitat. He never complained about any of it, of course, except for the odd ‘Can’t find a damned pen!’ or ‘Where is the watering can? I had it a minute ago…’ and never, ever, not even once, would he shout or give any sense of displeasure in the direction of either RCN or his faithful housekeeper. John Nightly understood very well where his real bread was buttered.

  The boss never had any problem with his other half. Without his roadie/nurse-cum-companion/minder, John Nightly, the real John Nightly – the one we’re interested in – couldn’t have existed. It was that simple and also most likely true in reverse. The doom and gloom of Nightly and the ‘Lux Eterna’, unfailing optimism, of Daly. Without each other, one would have been dead long ago while the other would be sat in a care home somewhere, maybe close by, earning the minimum wage as he attended a ward of vegetation, the human kind. If not that, they’d both be sweeping the streets. The thought must have run through both men’s minds many times over the past thirty summers. So generally, and with very good reason, as though a No Moaning agreement had been entered into long before, neither John ever complained or found fault with anything at all.

  But then, there was literally nothing to moan about. Because in terms of where they were ten or fifteen years back… this was a big improvement. A whole lot better. Bliss consciousness superseding even that outlined by the Maharishi. Because this, this loony state, this soft, spineless life – no pressure, no rush – or,
as Mawgan said, almost constantly, ‘no worries’, was reality. This way of going on, getting from one flickering frame to the next, one dislodged event to another, became Daly and Nightly’s ‘normal’.

  And look what they had to show for their pain. Carn Point had become their true Savenheer, their haven, their ‘normal’. At least as normal as it ever could be – for the two Johns.

  The new domestic environment provided the first taste of regular living either of them had experienced. Nine-to-five normal. Weekend normal. Extended-family, TV-meal normal. Giving a damn about anyone else normal. Boring normal, in the very best sense.

  When John Nightly was in a playful mood, which he was roughly once a year from ’73 up to around early 2002, and this very subject – ‘normality’ and the cares and woes of everyday – came into conversation, the former megalomaniac would sit down and serenade his good friend and companion with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘Cockeyed Optimist’. A couple of lines were sufficient. No big deal. Just a jaunty sing-along of what was most certainly the pair’s least favourite song from the whole ‘normal’ world.

  * * *

  1 In 2005, the National Council of Rose Breeders completed a five-year long trial into methods of pruning roses. The results showed that a randomly wielded chainsaw produced exactly the same results as meticulous deadheading and topping, laying to rest centuries of mumbo-jumbo, myth and method. (NCRG Council report, 1 September 2005.)

  Life was quiet. So if any exciting event occurred – like the Friday John almost burned down the house after covering his fan heater with a damp copy of the Cornishman (he was trying to dry it out before reading it) – news would leak and circulate around the community faster than you could say ‘the house on the hill’.

  Friday was also delivery day for local tradesmen – so the ‘bread man’, the ‘organic man’, the ‘apple man’ and the ‘egg man’, along with the Penwith recycling teams, night-time truck drivers and the two ‘fish men’ all came under suspicion as leakers of the amazingly uneventful tale.

  During the event itself, it had taken longer than it should have for anyone to notice the puffs of smoke emanating from the widely-read newspaper because Robert was outside attending a bonfire and Mawgan was in the music room on headphones and spliff, oblivious to the outside world. But the story became the talking point of Porthcreek and beyond for most of the summer, archived in the collective memory of the inhabitants of both the village itself and the wider local area. Eventually becoming dramatised, and embroidered with all manner of detail, until, as with most other stories involving John Nightly, mutating into complete fiction – i.e. it was not a copy of Playboy magazine, it did not happen in the middle of the night, the perpetrator wasn’t on a wild acid trip and the house did not actually burn down.

  In September, with the holidaymakers gone, things were quieter still. Endy and Mawg would sometimes take a mid-afternoon walk up through the fields overlooking the ocean bay. Not the grazing area along the coast path, but the couple of acres of potatoes and barley a little further up, where the cotton lavender gradually changed from a deep purple to a streaked lilac as it sloped down to the sea.

  Armed with her British Birds Handy guide, a recent buy from the Sue Ryder shop in Penzance, Endy spotted sparrowhawks, black-tailed godwits and even a dunlin or two on the lavender slopes.

  The hawks loved to build nests around the little orchard where Robert mixed red loam with tomato compost so it could be broken down to a fine tilth for sowing. Up in that part of the property there was also a patch of Japanese flowering cherry, rosary vine and blue geranium, the latter turned this unusual colour by Robert making a series of small incisions into the roots with a rusty razor blade. These aberrations, cultivated specially to adorn John RCN’s new dining-room conservatory, were much admired by the bread man, both fish men, the egg man and the night-time truck-drivers.

  ‘Silence, ye troubled Waves, and thou Deep, peace!’

  John Milton, Paradise Lost (Book VII)

  Only local people winter by the sea. So the regular inhabitants of the farmhouses along the headland brought the area’s seasonal population to around forty. The coastal fields shimmered in the soft October light and the white foam roared in the distance, as always. In the low branches of the Sequoia, redpolls purred and bleated, while up above, storm petrels took flight, making bat-like changes in direction, as Endy and Mawgan tracked them in the dappled sunlight, fascinated by their instinctive navigation systems.

  Every band or group has a member who is popular with every other member of the band, the ‘brilliant bloke’ or ‘glue’ within the set-up. Someone who everyone likes, gets on with and respects. In creative terms, this is not necessarily the most talented recruit. At Trewin, Mrs Peed soon became that glue, that centre. The Johns often wondered how on earth they’d managed before she arrived. How had they? With her flesh-coloured spectacles and faded pink sunhat (which she quickly renamed a ‘rainhat’ whenever the weather changed), she rushed from room to room creating a kind of life at the white farm somehow. Mainly because of her unflagging industry, her domestic wisdom and her obsessive attention to the very highest standards of cleanliness and hygiene. Endy wasn’t getting any younger, though, and so, on the odd occasion when she would have one of her ‘turns’, a hot flush followed by slight dizziness, the company would gather round, suddenly become believers and offer anything in the world as long as the former housemaid from Quethiock would magically become ‘alright’ again, ‘back to normal’ as soon as possible.

  Early November and the tides had changed, giving the bay a high stretch of water at lunchtime, the warmest part of the day. November brought the area’s annual surfing competition, so with Julian Tregan deserting the waves at Fistral beach, and Mawgan in possession of a new balsa board, the entire household – minus the boss, of course – decided to brave the slimy, lichen-covered path leading to the old graveyard as they wandered down through the dripping caves.

  Mawgan, Robert and Endy made themselves as comfortable as possible on a hard granite recess. Buttoned up top to toe, they followed the action from the safety of the rocks. Some fifty yards out, the line-up waited patiently for a big enough swell. As the water gently lapped over the competitors and their boards, Julian, ever the showman, checked his ankle-leash as he waved back towards the headland. He looked every bit the champion with his 9-foot board – a white single-fin pintail – attached to his wrist by what appeared to be an oversized curly-wurly guitar-lead.

  Mawgan’s ambition was more modest. As he rested on the slippery rocks beside the overheating Endy, his rubber flippers tied to each ankle in a loose-knotted bow, the Mink Bungalow theme swirled around in his head.

  ‘Get yourself drowned out there if you don’t tie them up properly!’ Endy motioned to the kid to move closer, indicating a large hollowed-out space in the rock.

  Mawgan’s flipper ribbons dangled on the slime. His hair, the longest he had worn it since his arrival at Trewin, was matted with seaweed and sand. The kid looked like a member of Jethro Tull. Out there in the ocean a neat line of dudes and several respected elders – a seventy-year-old lady from Portreath had won last year’s St Ives Bay one-day championship – awaited the next wave.

  The sun beat down, playing tricks with perspective, phasing the sea-line, as a parade of marshmallow lighthouses appeared along the coast; the light bouncing from the vibrating sands to the topaz waves, reducing the visually complex scene to two parallel strips of tangerine and turquoise – sand and sea. The wide horizontal of the shore and the ocean beyond it reverberating in the sheer noise of the heat, resembled nothing so much as the slick graphic of a Visa card.

  Mawg ambled down to the water, his half-size board tucked under his arm. Splashing through rockpools in his oversize flippers, the kid waded knee-deep through the foam, dragging the board behind him to take his place in the line-up.

  ‘Dudes!’

  A lone dude twenty yards further out shouted back along the line, as the water sparkle
d and swelled behind them.

  ‘Here’t comes!’

  As if choreographed in some aquatic chorus line, Julian and his compadres twisted ninety degrees onto the swell in order to hit the wave head-on. Suddenly it was beneath them. Julian jumped straight on it, paddling halfway down the face; then, as the oxygen of the wave increased, he stood up straight, assuming a classic ‘fencing’ position as he attempted to ride it, diving left and right, flexing every muscle in his lean body to pick up the curl, utilising the energy of the water to try to slip into the tube of the powerful wave.

  So elegantly poised was he, skimming along on the breaker to the delight of Endy and Robert until… in an instant… the wave beneath him collapsed, as if someone had suddenly pulled its plug. The rider was given no choice but to dismount and turn inwards on the thing, letting his board go. Julian was left bobbing up and down, abandoned in the foam, distraught to be suddenly breathless and cold – literally deflated.

  Mawgan had already been licked. With nothing like the experience of his referee, Mawg had hit the big one head-on and simply crashed into it, picking up nasty bruises from the hard bank of water. The kid was left swilling around in its wash while Julian was already back at the line-up, waiting for the next one.

  item: ‘Wave Dragon: the first Danish Wave Energy Converter’, Wave Dragon APS press release. January 2003.

  Erik Friis-Madsen got the idea to Wave Dragon in 1987. The Wave Dragon prototype was successfully launched in Aalborg, Denmark. The Wave Energy Converter will soon be deployed at the test site in Nissum Bredning and tested.

  The launch of the 237 tonnes prototype Wave Dragon was a milestone in the rewarding development and cooperation between the Wave Dragon inventor Erik Friis-Madsen, coordinator Hans Sørensen, SPOK AsP, Aalborg University and companies from Denmark, UK, Ireland, Austria, Germany and Sweden.