Common Ground

by Rob Cowen

  Me? I only come in here for the coffee and to shake out the rain. Why else would I? This unholy sterility of the mass-produced, of decal-dressed glass, ranks of baked goods and leatherette seats. This ‘I’m-sorry-but-yes-you-need-keys-to-the-toilets’ sort of place. Privatised pissing. Steam-filled nothingness. It’s all that’s wrong with the world. They do really good coffee, though, and, like everyone else, I’m a sucker for it. A hangover from the bad old days. Time was when I used to insist the girls in my office got me a fresh cup every hour, on the hour, and I admit it still puts a spring in my step. I fairly bounce out of here, high on the Dominican bean. No matter how many times I’ve tried brewing up blanched and ground acorns over the campfire, I still yearn for the Java.

  The New York jazz has kicked in again. Second time in an hour. Sounds you don’t have to listen to. Playlists made up from car advert jingles. Non-dangerous opiate music, more dangerous than you can imagine. Men in square architect specs breeze in on the scent of citrus with fold-up brollies and order strong lattes or ‘flat whites’ – whatever they are. Each checks his mobile phone for emails, tapping his foot to the bleats and blares of a tenor sax. An aberration inside this sandstone Victorian building, but it fits the reverse-engineered exposed brick, I suppose. Hanging from the ceiling via wires are the faux patina-flecked sepia photographs of street scenes that this coffee shop’s very existence has abolished. It wears the images of its victims like a cannibal carries the ears of previous lunches around his neck.

  Now that makes me laugh. Sometimes out loud, but I can’t help it. See, it’s all here in front of our eyes, but no one wants to see it. No one wants to face it. No one wants to deal with the come-down. I’m talking the rise of clone towns, the uniform high streets, the dominance of global brands and corporations. I’ve seen it spread across this island on my rambles. The enslavement to growth. Profit rules. The high capitalist logic. The result? Oh, you know the result because it’s on the news every night, piped into your homes while you flick for the next dose of mindless cooking drivel to switch off to. Climate catastrophe, global warming, species extinction, floods and droughts, human displacement, wars over resources. The Great Ice. The Endgame of the Earth. Mull that over as you sip your cappuccinos.

  What? You think this isn’t our fault? You sit there with your coffees thinking, What’ve I got to do with global annihilation? Tell me this then: how does that coffee get here? How does it get farmed and produced? What resources go into the heating and lighting of this place? Oil, gas, coal. Fossil fuels. Carbon. You’re complicit. The lifeblood to the functioning of this whole mad circus is the very thing causing our planet’s death. And who’s on Mother Earth’s side? Who’s policing this wilful destruction? Governments? Brands? Businesses? Telling us to recycle and turn off the tap when we’re brushing our peggies? Don’t make me laugh. Smoke and mirrors. Seven of the ten largest corporations in the world are oil and automobile companies. That’s right. They control the means and the distribution. Expand or die. Drill the Arctic. Frack the seabed before rival corporations or countries get there first. Carbon junkies, the lot of them, all high on their own supply and keeping us fat and quiet with jazz, coffee and Range Rover dreams. Or worse, controlling us with depravation, poverty and the vainglory of lottery wins and talent shows.

  Truth is that too few care about what happens in the future or what went on in the past. Yeah, I’m talking about you lot, you coffee-shop clichés. I’ll bet not one of you knows that this place was a dance hall once and that over there by the sugars doomed soldiers lit cigarettes for hotel girls. Only I remember when the strip club at the end of the street was a Salvation Army Citadel. One day the seas will rise up and this’ll be a coastal town with nothing but ocean to the east. Oh, yes sir, I’m mad all right. Mad as a March hare. You should be too.

  It’s OK, Maria, don’t trouble yourself; I’m leaving. Rain’s stopping anyway. By the time Miles Davis starts on that horn again I’ll have drained the last drops of this Americano and leaped away from your Sani-Talk, your branded cups, your free Wi-Fi and your feedback cards. Down the high street I’ll catch a glimpse of myself in the mirrored windows of that international fashion store. Brown, thin, long-legged, wild-eyed, face dusty as a moth’s wing, my hair matted into a bird’s nest. My gaze will default to its usual position, my lip, hidden under the furze of a grey muzzle. All the time the blackbird in that ornamental cherry outside Greggs will sing. Paths to freedom, songs to the gods lighting up the sky. Oh and you girls – yes, you two mummies with your caramel lattes – you were right about one thing: spring is here.

  Thanks to me.

  I was the youngest of four brothers but the only one blessed with cheiloschisis. People tell me that the preferred term nowadays is ‘cleft lip’, but back then even facial surgeons called it a harelip. In the end it doesn’t matter how you dress it up, it’s the same thing: a fissure, a rift in the tissue of my labium superius oris that happened before I was even born, a non-union that occurred in the womb. I often wondered why it was hare-lip. Turns out it’s because, as they get older, the skin that covers a hare’s gnashers splits into two, exposing their front teeth. Oh, they had a fair go at stitching mine together, the doctors – best they could at the time – but it’s always looked funny. The scar gives me a sneer when I smile. Mother hated it. Poor John, she’d say. There was superstition in her Irish blood; too many folk tales floating around somewhere back there about hares and witches. She tried to hide it, but I was always aware of something behind those flyaway specs. Disappointment probably. Father was different. He made jokes, but that was just his way with everything. He loved me every bit the same as my brothers; in fact, he insisted on my education first and foremost, even above theirs. He used to read to me every night, sometimes in the mornings before school if he’d finished a late shift on the railway. From as early as I can remember he celebrated this old lip. Called me ‘Sir Hare’ after an ancient poem his grandfather and he used to recite before they’d go out poaching. He bowed to me every time he said it. ‘Sir Hare, an honour,’ he’d say. And the name stuck.

  Maybe it was because of this lip, but I worked hard, a damn sight harder than my classmates at Bilton Endowed School. It’s a nice detached now, a smart one too, but it’s heartening to see the old waffle-glass windows still run with condensation on cold mornings. And those gnats from the sewage works besieging the laurels like returning holiday-makers. While the other kids galloped around in the grass meadows out back, I used to stay in and practise my speech, writing and reading. And it paid off. When the school was built in 1793, the only condition of entry was being able to read the New Testament. By ten I had memorised all the gospels and could recite them standing on a chair. ‘Look out,’ Mr Wallbank used to say. ‘Here’s Sir Hare, the Bible Basher.’ But he was proud of me. He even gave me a book token for stepping in and recalling the whole of Luke 12: 16 to 31 at Harvest Festival after Celia Taylor did her ankle on the transept steps.

  Growing up I was hardly spoiled for friends, but I didn’t care. After school my brothers and I had the run of Bilton, all the way through willow wood, over the railway – still puffing with the narrow-gauge coal engine in those days – and through the meadows. We’d hunt for adders in the hay fields and go bird’s nesting. Best was finding a lapwing’s nest down in the grass. There were plenty back then in the fields, little straw bowls with their black and yellow speckled hoards inside. Even in those days I’d insist we put all the eggs back. Used to drive my brothers mad. Arms gashed and our lips purple from the blackberry bushes, we’d pick eyebright, ragged robin, crane’s bill, speedwell, poppies and cornflowers and, on hot days, swim off the sweat of our labours in the cool, brown waters of the Nidd.

  Of all us Longthorne boys I was the only one likely to go to university and I did, on my father’s insistence, in 1964. By then Mother was a wreck of barbiturate- and television-dependency only a few months away from being lowered into St John’s churchyard. Dad had retired and was slowly becoming
indiscernible from the herbaceous border of his beloved garden on Red Cat Hill. That’s where we’d sit together and talk flowers, plants, insects and birds. One afternoon when I was reading in my bedroom, he called out to me and lifted up a flint arrowhead unearthed by the edge of his trowel. I told him that, given the short supply of flint in the region, it was most likely brought from the south or the east and used as a stabbing spear for fishing. They wouldn’t have thrown flint away. Too valuable. He put both his arms around me. ‘You run, Sir Hare,’ he said as green-finches flocked the bird table over his shoulder. ‘Go to university. See the world a bit. It’ll do you good.’

  London was already getting drunk on the good times when I arrived, although I didn’t realise it at first. The early months were still a black-and-white 1950s world for me, a miasma of flannel ties and woollen suits, received pronunciation, smart hair, sensible careers, dinner-dances on the King’s Road; if you knuckled down, there were promises of one day making the down payment on a Mark 2 Wolseley Hornet and a detached in Surrey. My digs were on Gower Street, a hop, skip and a jump from UCL and the hallowed corridors of the history department. If pushed, I could roll out of bed and be in lectures in ten minutes. And, as that decade erupted into glorious Technicolor, I regularly tested those timings, often with a swirling wine headache and the taste of Avon’s Unforgettable still fresh on my tongue. My record was stubbing out a post-coital cigarette to presenting a paper on Saxon polytheism in less than eight minutes. I’ve always been a fast mover. Believe me, my successes with the fairer sex were as much a surprise to me as to my close-knit group of bookish pals, whom I’d tease with tales of removing bras one-handed in the library. I’m sure that most of the time the girls liked me because I listened. The lip worked in my favour too. Damaged goods. They liked all that in those days. It was a good time to be different, and own a stack of early Lead Belly records. My nickname was reborn; I was known as ‘Sir Hare’ on campus, this time for entirely positive reasons.

  If you were lucky enough to graduate in the summer of 1967 you emerged into a new land that fizzed with a kind of limitless freedom and opportunity. England’s fields were virginal. Ours for the taking. At least, that’s what the Dean told us. My exam grades ensured no shortage of job offers either. Even notoriety gleaned from nights holding court in Soho’s music clubs couldn’t dent the reputation. In fact, if anything, it helped. Sir Hare was a ‘solid chap’ with the intelligence and constitution to out-drink Eric Clapton at the UFO and then, still spinning with the final flourishes of lysergic diethylamide, ace an exam the following afternoon on the consular functions of ninth-century witenagemots. I was courted left, right and centre – the civil service, law, even the Foreign and Commonwealth Office sent their suits knocking – but I rejected them all out of hand. Before leaving academia I’d made up my mind to immerse myself deeper into the glorious Dionysian madness unfolding all around me. Those were good days. Days of innocence. The happenings, openings, music, parties, drugs and wonderfully experimental girls erupted together in a throbbing, seething nest of counterculture and creativity that spanned a radius of four miles around Oxford Street. My means ran out eventually, but if you had the brain, skills and charm, business seemed an easy game to master. Anyone could see there was money to be made. The communication revolution was hitting full swing and suburban dreams were engorged by the wealth and convenience of limitless oil reserves from pliant foreign allies. Cheap, centralised electricity was slung across the country. Our unstoppable consumer culture was swelling faster than the liver of a foie-gras goose, fed by TV, radio, newspapers and magazines. It occurred to me that the world of advertising had ‘Get Rich Quick’ written all over it. Tap into that, Sir Hare, I thought to myself, and you have it made. Easy Street.

  The agency I founded, SHA! (I never divulged the ‘SH’, but the ‘A’ was for ‘advertising’), was an immediate success. By spring 1970 I was signing an office lease covering four floors in Charlotte Street paid for by a client list of thirty-plus major corporations this side of the pond. A fair few the other side too. Things get hazy around the same time we ran the ad campaign for the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers. Everything began speeding up. I felt like I could move between years as easily as opening the doors of a corridor. Heroin-fuelled months would disappear in minutes. I have blurry recollections of delivering lengthy monologues taken from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to employees while standing on our picture desk. Someone complained when I devised a series of outrageous perfume storyboards involving ritualistic slaughter. Then there were the obligatory post-work private members’ club lock-ins. I let the reins slip, but always managed to hold on just enough. Meanwhile, the drugs got dirtier, the sex more aggressive, the deaths more frequent. By the mid-seventies most contemporaries had moved out to follow a new rural dream of radishes and rotavators. It was The Good Life and all that. Me, I continued to chase a particularly destructive narcotic habit around Fitzrovia for God knows how long. My father died at some point but I have no memory of attending the funeral, although I’m told I did. That must have been 1978 or ’79.

  Oh, I knew the game was up but who has the willpower to walk away from that? Certainly not me. At least, not then. It was like one long scene from Caligula. The epiphany came when driving home with a girl around dawn from a party in Weybridge. Sally or Sandy, I think her name was. No, it was Sandy. Mortimer. Nice girl. Married an MP in the end, I read later in the papers. We were both wired on Courvoisier and cocaine and I was gunning my beloved Lotus Esprit around the back roads somewhere near Meadowlands on the A317. The headlights picked out a shape frozen in the road. It was just there for a second – then thump. We skidded to a halt and after a moment Sandy started screaming. I remember the thick grey mist as I threw open the door and staggered back. I remember the smell of the exhaust. Lennon’s ‘(Just Like) Starting Over’ blaring out from the stereo. And there he was, lying in the road.

  ‘What is it?’ Sandy yelled. ‘What is it?’

  ‘A hare.’

  ‘Oh, thank God,’ she said.

  Thank God? How could she say that? I could feel tears coming; my chest was tightening. I sank to my knees and tried to stop shaking. You see, I saw myself lying there in that road. It was me. It was my flank heaving like the clappers; it was my legs all broken. Blood was bubbling from its nose, over its lip. And that eye. I saw the whole world in that eye, like a mirror. I understood everything in an instant. I saw what I’d become but even worse than that, I saw what we’d become. I was ashamed. I picked up the hare and walked off into the fields, carrying it in front of me like a sacrifice. Sandy was going crazy at me – What the hell are you doing? I shouted to her to drive herself home. Told her to keep the car. Keep everything. I had no need for it any more. I think it was somewhere near Staines when I realised the hare had stopped wheezing and I buried it in the soil of a rapeseed field and waited for sunrise. In the glow of a new morning I headed north, subsisting on the little cash left in my wallet until I threw it into the River Meden just north of Markham Moor.

  I’m not ashamed to say that I cried frequently on my slow pilgrimage through this country; I cried for the way-wardness of humankind and the part I had played in it. Huddled beneath an old canal bridge I watched links of multicoloured traffic splashing endlessly over the rain-washed asphalt. I slept under the murky concrete of flyovers and crossed septic streams that reeked of disgorged chemicals. At dusk, I saw how the houses and tower blocks shimmered with wasted energy. I passed power stations and factories whose spewing funnels arrogantly hazed the sky with carbon dioxide, methane and chlorofluorocarbons. Rummaging for sustenance among field edges, I found the dock, plantain and bindweed dusted white and dying with pesticide residue. The corpses of harvest mice, titmice and sparrows lay limed in mass graves under hedges. Mixed in among them were crushed Coca-Cola cans, the sodden and torn bare-breasted pages of the News of the World and the flayed black skins of burst tyres. I was walking through a grey, choking world of the infantile and facile whos
e caretakers had become sick with greed and lust. I saw a paved-over land populated by people whose minds had forgotten the very ground they came from, who took the gift of life for granted. Humankind was atomised, enslaved, forced to compete with one another for jobs, for housing, for education. Numbed by alcohol, drugs, golf club memberships and shiny falsities, there was no thought for our place as part of the greater organism. Mother Earth had reached breaking point. Even she could no longer stand idly by and watch her spoilt son tearing apart the biosphere. I saw her rage manifested in the eyes of a poisoned sparrow-hawk flapping out its death throes on the verge of Common Lane, a mile to the east of Tickhill. My love is not unequivocal, I heard her scream in the clap of thunder that broke overhead. With each footstep my vision and understanding became clearer until, around Doncaster, sleeping rough in a belt of larch by the A1, I woke with everything straightened out in my mind. That was Saturday 21 March 1987.

  By the time I tramped back here to Harrogate I was physically exhausted but my mind was gripped with righteous energy. I set about explaining the need for a new global ecological consciousness to the bored commuters parking their Rovers and Volvos at the railway station. Climbing onto the footbridge’s handrail, I hailed them from high over the tracks: ‘Brothers and sisters,’ I said, ‘stop what you are doing before it’s too late. Everything in our sick civilisation is either made by or moved by fossil fuels. Fertilisers, pesticides, building materials, medicines; your fine suits and clothes, your power, your heat, your light, these transportation infrastructures, all are made of carbon. This will be the world’s death. It will be your death … ’

  I didn’t get much further before the station staff hauled me down, restrained me and issued a platform ban for life. I tried more subtle approaches after that: knocking on residents’ doors or shadowing shoppers as I weaved through the crowds of the high street. I begged and pleaded that people looked at themselves and the world and recognise what was happening. Some laughed; some shouted; some pushed change into my hands; others punched, kicked or urinated on me as I curled up to sleep among the flat-pack boxes behind Woolworths. There were spells in hospitals and police cells. Once, when I was stricken with flu, an elderly lady kindly let me sleep for a week in her spare room until her son, a local estate agent, found out and threw me into the road. I took to handwriting pamphlets and petitioning the local council. Surely they’d see sense? But when reception staff began to routinely call the police upon my arrival, I adopted more guerrilla tactics, hiding out in the elegant gardens of local Conservative MPs’ houses on the Duchy Estate and flyering their cars each morning. I was threatened with arrest on charges of vagrancy. Then trumped-up charges of sexual deviancy. In my absence, steps were taken through the county court to detain me permanently at High Royds mental institution on grounds of lunacy.