by Alan Davies
The atmosphere was convivial though. It was exciting to be there, to be participating. No one really knew what was happening most of the time. We found a stretch of road with pine trees on either side and sat on a roadside bank awaiting further instructions. Everybody had to spread out to make the chain reach as far as possible, though there was confusion as to whether we were going around the base or not.
Enthusiastic runners charged up and down the line to keep us up to date. In some places, the crowd was too great and people were two or three deep. In others there were not enough. Passing us continually were streams of like-minded revellers, there to protest together. It was an uplifting gathering.
At one point a Loughton CND banner came past. We’d never heard of Loughton CND! There were so many banners from so many parts of the country that it was unlikely, and for some reason highly exciting, to see one from our own town. We ran over and took photographs of them and they of us.
Meanwhile two hundred of the ‘wimmin’, dressed as teddy bears, were at the main gate trying to gain entrance with a picnic. This was tricky one for the people on the gate since excessive force in the face of an army of teddy bears would be a publicity disaster.
We did not see any Russians, TV crews or otherwise.
As we waited for the signal to hold hands and complete the chain of protest I became increasingly smitten with Martin’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Becky. Tall and slim, beneath the baggy old coat and leg warmers uniform that we all favoured, she was quiet, but not unreceptive to my constant attention. Would it be wrong to try and get off with someone at the radical feminist peace camp? What would the ‘wimmin’ think?
They’d never know, being on the other side of the base singing, ‘If you go down to the woods today you’re sure of a big surprise.’ I’ll give you a big surprise, I’m going to get off with someone at Greenham, surely a coup. I can’t help myself, this is what happens if you let blokes in, that was your first mistake.
Should I not have been concentrating on the peril the world faced with thousands of nuclear warheads poised for launch? Probably. But Becky and I had matching CND badges. I intended to snog her as the day reached its climax. It had felt like an all-day party so snogging a girl at the end was not entirely inappropriate. In the end I settled for asking for her phone number.
Piling into the VW camper after the euphoria of the final hand-holding moment, we headed down a country lane past scores of coaches that had come from all over the country. In front of us an old red Citroën 2CV, with its vinyl top pulled back and happy protestors hanging out, ambled along, inviting attention from the stream of people hunting their coaches. A little gap allowed the car behind to speed in front of us and the 2CV. It then stopped and three or four angry-looking men emerged. They began ranting at the driver of the 2CV, apparently for being too slow.
Suddenly, the men lifted the side of the little car, whose occupants had now shrunk back inside and tried to tip it in to a ditch. People came and remonstrated, shouting things like: ‘We’re supposed to be here for peace, man!’
They dropped the car back on to its four wheels, went back to their own vehicle, and drove away. It had been a harsh back-in-the-real-world moment for us lefty college types about to re-establish contact with the unlike-minded.
Back at college we found out we’d been on TV. ‘We saw you on the news, tramping through the mud!’ they said.
It was very exciting to be on actual telly and not just the odd little programmes we made in the TV studio at college. We were national news, openly defying Thatcher and the state. MI5 were very likely poring over that footage and bugging my dad’s phone even as we regaled our fans in the refectory.
Me and Becky went out a few times and listened to The Doors while drinking Special Brew in her bedroom but, without the fervour of the demo to fan it, our flame burned less brightly.
Then, one night, outside the Horse and Well in Woodford (where I had once produced a photocopy of my brother’s birth certificate in order to be served underage), an old schoolmate asked her:
‘Do you spit or swallow?’
She didn’t complain, or even grimace, but we were a long way from Greenham.
We went our separate ways and, tactfully, I then went out with one of her mates. That was short-lived too. Staying over at her house one night, we were awakened by her ex-boyfriend breaking in to see if she was with anyone. For a moment I thought he might attack me but he began crying hysterically instead. Her parents ushered me into the spare room, where I came across several novels by Tom Sharpe.
I read most of Wilt that night and still regard Tom Sharpe as the funniest comic novelist of the ’80s. Every cloud and all that.
Woody Allen
Thaxted, in Essex, has a fourteenth-century church, thatched roofs and Morris dancers. It may have brothels and crack houses too but I refuse to accept that. It is pretty and idyllic. Or at least it was in 1983 when the nine students on the Loughton College media studies course visited for a residential study week.
As second years, we could be entrusted with a philosophical retreat. The theme for the week was ‘Culture’. What is it? How do we define it? Is it a good thing? These questions were intentionally open-ended to generate discussion between fag breaks.
We discussed the world we actually lived in, leaving me in danger of becoming over-stimulated. We talked about, read about, and wrote about ‘Culture’ all week, with enthusiastic teachers who enjoyed the discussions, appeared to be interested in what we said, used our first names and spoke to us without being demeaning, patronizing or threatening. Sometimes the teachers laughed at the same time as the students, unheard of at the Minor Public School, which seemed a long way away.
The unexpected bonus I found in Thaxted was a little shop with a rack of books on display including a copy of Side Effects by Woody Allen. I’d enjoyed one or two of Allen’s films, like Take the Money and Run, but this book made me laugh out loud even more than Spike Milligan’s War Memoirs had done, which was saying something. Particularly hilarious were Allen’s tales of Sandor Needleman, who fell out of a box into the stalls at the opera and went back every night for a month to repeat the action, so people thought it was deliberate. There was page after page of expertly wrought comic prose, which inspired me to try and write my own, though I never showed any of it to anyone.
Inside the front cover of books I would obsessively record my name, and the place and date of purchase.
Within Side Effects it reads:
Twelve months later I was a student at the University of Kent at Canterbury and found Woody Allen’s first book of prose, Getting Even, in the campus bookshop. I wrote another bizarre ‘note to self’ inside:
Six months after that I found Without Feathers, which I enjoyed as much, though you wouldn’t know from the sober inscription:
The jacket of Without Feathers carries a quote announcing Allen as a genius in the tradition of Groucho Marx and James Thurber. So I read Groucho’s Memoirs of a Mangy Lover and Thurber’s The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze. Both were enjoyable but, for me, neither compared to Woody.
I then discovered that he had recorded a stand-up LP. The internet makes life unimaginably different now compared to the 1980s. Without leaving the house it takes minutes to find out what an artist has produced and then to download it, or arrange to have it delivered. While you wait for the download, or for the package, you can scour websites where the character of your new interest may be eulogized:
‘I love him, he’s brilliant, he looks like my dog’
or assassinated:
‘He was in our hotel on holiday. After dinner he just went to his room. Miserable sod.’
Back then, trawling through book and record shops could result in unexpected finds and Allen’s double LP of stand-up, recorded in the ’60s, was one such gold nugget, discovered after lengthy sifting.
His crafted, hilarious monologues were surely scripted by a wordsmith, rather than having evolved through a natural t
alent to riff like Richard Pryor’s, or to playfully create a unique comic atmosphere like Steve Martin. That would be my ideal comedy club line-up. Allen, Martin and Pryor hosted by Morecambe and Wise with John Hegley and The Popticians to close.
I watched all the Woody Allen movies I could find on video: Annie Hall, Manhattan, Sleeper, Bananas, Love & Death. Through the ’80s there was a new gem every year. Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, Radio Days.
On the opening night of Hannah and Her Sisters in London when Max von Sydow’s character says: ‘If Jesus came back and saw what was being done in his name, he’d never stop throwing up!’ there was spontaneous applause in the packed cinema. Allen offered wit, satire, hypochondria and gags by the pound. He’s unsurpassed in the creation and execution of comic dialogue.
The trip to Thaxted wasn’t the first time I’d spent time away from home that year. I went out one night to a friend’s eighteenth at the Traveller’s Friend in Epping Green, where they had a regular singing duo on Mondays. They would always end with ‘Hey Jude’ and the whole pub sang ‘la-la la-lah!’ throughout drinking-up time. There were no classes in college until two the next day so I didn’t go home until the la’s had finished.
At home, my dad confronted me because I was ‘half-cut’, we argued and he said he’d wake me up at seven o’clock the next morning as it was a ‘work day’.
Before seven, I was on my way to Gill Bucknall’s house in Waltham Abbey. She’d become like an older sibling to me at college and I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. She answered the door and listened with concern to my woes before going upstairs to talk to her then boyfriend. When she came down she said she was sorry, that if it was up to her I could stay as long as I liked, but that he wouldn’t have it. I rode my bike down to college and fretted in the refectory until another classmate, Jamie, said he knew of a ‘safe squat’ I could use. I went with him that evening.
The squat was in a dilapidated Victorian mansion in Buckhurst Hill. It was derelict but one room was occupied by a large skinhead called Mark and a lad with a mohican known as Strawb. Not much explanation was needed for them to accept me. Jamie stayed as well. We had to be careful going up to their room, as there was a hole through the stairwell from top to bottom, where a safe had been pushed off the top landing when the house was being cleared.
Out on the roof we looked over grand gardens that were wild and overgrown. Some large greenhouses tempted us and we hurled roof tiles at them. The distance was considerable but the tiles spun and cut through the air in great arcs down into the undergrowth. Eventually Jamie hit the target and we listened to the eerie sound of distant breaking glass.
Mark and Strawb had sleeping bags. Strawb went to start a fire in the big old fireplace. As the flames grew, a huge shadow of him, with his mohican spike hanging out over his forehead, was cast up on the wall. We lay down four abreast and slept.
Around three in the morning, there was much banging and crashing in the house and I became increasingly fearful in the darkness, as the noise came nearer. The door opened and a man entered, holding a hatchet. He stared at the four of us. Thankfully, Mark the Skinhead stirred and spoke to him. He was stealing the Victorian fireplaces. Mark asked if he’d mind leaving ours and he decided that he would.
At seven the door opened again and a man in a suit with a clipboard came in and asked for our names. Mark broke the silence:
‘Mark,’ he said.
We all gave our names to the bailiff who had come to evict squatters.
Walking down the Epping New Road, Jamie was apologetic that the accommodation he’d laid on had turned into such a temporary solution. I was grateful for what he’d done though, it was just bad luck. Walking past a boarded-up house, Mark and Strawb spotted a way in. We said goodbye and watched as they clambered through a window with their bin-liner each of belongings. I never met them again.
At college, Steve Caley, my tutor, sympathetically lent me a fiver and offered to speak to my dad. Piers said that he was going home to Matlock for a week and, with remarkable generosity, offered me the use of his flat in Forest Gate. I had £5, my motor bike, keys to a flat and a tin of Big Soup. Things were looking up.
I went to Newham Council to speak to a housing officer who asked me:
‘Would your father take you back in?’
To which I had to answer: ‘Probably.’
No flat for me.
Steve asked me if it was OK for my dad to ring me at Piers’ place. He sounded quite worried when he rang and said how much my sister was missing me, which was surprising. He then asked what I wanted for my seventeenth birthday, which I’d spent at Piers’s flat.
When my £5 ran out, and Piers returned, I went home. There was a new stereo in my bedroom. I sat in my room and played records. If I’d had that Woody Allen LP then, it may have been just the tonic. Though, for cheering-up purposes, it’s hard to top the scene in Broadway Danny Rose where Allen, as Danny the talent agent, is showing off an act to a promoter. She plays music on wine glasses filled with water, while Danny stands behind her saying:
‘Never took a lesson. Self-taught.’
Twenty-five years later I went to visit Gill in hospital. Her cancer meant she only had a few days to live:
‘Forty-nine, Al, I’m not even fifty, it’s not enough.’
We laughed about the time I’d arrived at her house one February morning, with a bag of clothes and a tin of Big Soup bungee-strapped to my fizzy, saying that I’d run away from home. I’d dug out some pictures of us all at Thaxted and we reminisced happily about that week. For both of us, Loughton College was a saviour. I’d only just dropped out of school but Gill had been through various jobs and was twenty-three when she returned to college. She was as good-natured and helpful as anyone I ever knew.
Gill went on to university but promptly dropped out of her sociology degree, when she was told the Marxist angle she’d found so compelling at Loughton was not in vogue in her new environment: ‘Basically, Al, they’re telling me that everything I’ve learnt in the last two years at Loughton is wrong.’
So she left and had a productive three years at Middlesex Poly before devoting over twenty years to charity work and fundraising. After her death, UK Fundraising announced that their Fundraiser of the Year award was to be renamed the Gill Astarita Award in her honour. I was grateful to her husband, Mark Astarita, for contacting me and giving me the chance to say goodbye.
Jimmy Cliff
The New Musical Express (every Thursday, 40p) created compilation cassettes which you could send off for. In 1983 they produced NME 010, Smile Jamaica, ‘a musical celebration of 21 years of Jamaican independence’. There were two other tapes produced at the same time, both excellent, one of blues and soul, the other of new contemporary artists like Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, The Smiths, Billy Bragg and The Art of Noise.
Smile Jamaica featured a song from every year since Jamaican independence, beginning in 1962 and going all the way to a Black Uhuru track for 1983.
Soon after my seventeenth birthday I began to have driving lessons and soon after that my dad bought me a second-hand Mini. He wanted me to have a Ford Escort like my brother but I was adamant about wanting a Mini 1275GT. This was the clubman version of the Mini Cooper, the British-designed and British-built classic, tuned by John Cooper and utterly dominant in the Monte Carlo rally in the mid-’60s. My dad and his driving partner entered, and finished, the 1964 Monte Carlo rally, in a Mini Cooper.
In the garage at home, my stepbrother was putting a roll cage into an old Mini Cooper, with a view to entering it in rallies himself. I took photos and completed a project on Mini rallying for my general studies O Level. The entire text was plagiarized, but the rallying books I had found in the local library were so obscure, I imagined I was undetected. The reality was a blind eye turned by my tutor. I’d been gratefully copying for all of my last year at the Minor Public School (usually from affable Marc Freeman) and hadn’t yet shaken
the habit.
With Smile Jamaica in the cassette player, I drove around suburbia singing, ‘Do you remember the days of slavery?’ along with ‘Burning Spear’. I didn’t of course. Nor had there been ‘police and thieves in the streets’ round our way in living memory but then I didn’t imagine Junior Murvin’s Jamaica resembled Essex too much.
Until I passed my driving test I had to have a passenger with a full licence next to me in the Mini to offer guidance. This was daft given the excitable teenagers who were available to volunteer. Pulling away from the zebra crossing on Loughton High Road one afternoon, the front-wheel-drive Mini squealed its tyres on the black and white strip. ‘Wheelspin!’ shouted my seventeen-year-old passenger. It was the day before my test and I was being supervised by a kid whose nickname, Wally, was appropriately granted.
Wally spotted friends of ours in a Triumph Herald. Kneeling on his seat, facing out of the back window, he tried to organize a liaison with them. He yelled:
‘They’re behind us, turn in to the car park! They’re following, go, go, go!’
I spun the wheel and accelerated, still in first gear, in to the car park behind the shops on the High Road.
‘They’re turning in!’ shouted Wally, as the Mini, with its lively 1275 cc engine revving freely, jerked and then bolted forward under my untrained right foot. I went for the brake pedal, hit the accelerator instead, and drove into the back of the Co-op.
Once the pride of Loughton, the Co-op had opened its doors as one of Britain’s largest supermarkets in the 1960s. It was an immovable object.
Minis are hopeless in a frontal impact. The radiator is immediately in peril and the engine is inches behind it. The front wheel arches are inevitably near the impact and are likely to bend in to the tyres.
Our friends pulled up in the Herald, with barely concealed glee all over their faces. You could hardly blame them. I had driven into the back of a shop and they’d seen the whole thing.