Life in a coma

My life in my coma is probably doubted by most. You are unable to read your present, past or future. You just lie in a bed, you are fed, you are regularly looked at and considered for a coming round or a death. Your lights are not working, just your heart is keeping you alive.

I'm in the coma with God and just hear his voice. 'How are you feeling today?' 'I feel tired, seeing nothing, not moving, but I hear words - I also hear yours.'
'Are you feeling any pain?' God said.
'No pain, I feel peaceful though. I can hear many birds. My favourite is the blackbird. Then are the hushes and woo noises from the occasional wind. Then there are voices from people who speak to each other. Then there is you. You tell me much.'

I explained that I might die without coming conscious. Many people do not find a real consciousness at all. They live within a place that lacks thoughts. The people they know and even speak to, but there is no real understanding or even sense of importance. Strive your own life, is what they do, finish work and work for money, money, just money. So aspects of life fold away and are replaced by needs and demands. Even with my eyes shut I see the sky, the trees, the smells. 

We get shallow in a life with no time and care full of self. My coma teaches me this because I have been as bad as many people - full of self and anger at times. So in my mind I am taking on the importance of life as death approaches. 

xxxxto be edit

At the prefab Earliest memory is having a nappy change on the beach. I might have been a year? 18 months? We were in the prefab built just after World War2. My sister Vicky who was born five years before me in 1945, spent some of her first few years in 3 Salmon Road. The house was lived in by Aunty Ivy, her husband Fred Day and his father, Pop, as he was known. 

Me and my sister in the prefab garden  about 1953

When I was a little boy I was fascinated by the smells in 3 Salmon Road – the sweet, smoky smell of Pop’s pipe and aunt Ivy’s cooking. Salmon Road was across the road from the prefab – Brook Street is a steep (1:9) road forming a valley. Apparently my most significant journey up the hill was to the Erith Graveyard where my grandmother, Elizabeth Anne Miles, was buried. Rumour has it that Vicky pushed me up there in my pram and came back without it or me. 



Some of the people living in the prefabs were something like this: Peggy and Cyril Trenfield at the bottom of the strip of prefabs. They were the only ones with a car. Cyril was a lighthouse man on the Thames and in charge of a tug. Then there was the prefab containing the Bentley family. Anne, the mum, was large in all respects as was her son Peter. Next to them was Bob, his wife and the roundish daughter Pam. I remember being passed over their fence when they cooked minced beef stew with chips – something I adored. Going up the hill the next neighbour I cannot remember except we went in there on occasions to watch films on their tiny television. They were mostly Russian films, Ivan the Terrible, for example. On our TV, which was a 9-inch screen with a magnifier in front of it, I watched, Billy the Bean and his Funny Machine, The Flower Pot Men, the Cisco Kid and hid behind the sofa when the Quatermass series was shown. I think they used the ball shaped white buildings that scarily were visible on the way to Vic and Vi in Basildon.

Vicky 13 and me 8

Further up was the Simmonds family – Bob and Doreen with Peter, Derek (a bit older than me), Jean (a bit younger) and Jill. I used to go there for breakfast as mum had gone with Fred on his GPO BSA Bantam to the post job in Plumstead. I used to enjoy sitting on it when it was in the shed at Fred and Ivy’s house. It had a red button for the hooter that I loved using. I do not think it had a rear seat so how mum stayed on I can’t imagine. Breakfast at the Simmonds was usually a slice of white bread with sugar spread over its margarine. Vicky would take me across to Lesness Heath Primary School or I would go with the Simmonds.Beyond them was the Sugden family. I believe Mrs Sugden worked at the local bakers. Her daughter enjoyed playing doctor or nurse and patient games. I was totally agreeable to being the patient, laying flat on the lawn and being carefully checked by the Sugden girl.Other games we had round Brook Street include going to the chalk quarry and avoiding sliding down its sides into the white lake, investigating the pond in the wood and catching the little fish and frogs, carrying water to the gravel trench that led down to the stream at the bottom and making dams and water flows, sitting on corrugated iron pieces to slide down the trench, throwing stones from the gravel at each other – Peter Simmonds got one just above his eye from me and therefore had a permanent scimitar-shaped scar.The Brook Street collection of homes was about a dozen prefabs facing over the hill towards Salmon Road (Ivy and Fred) and Roberts Road (Perce and Dolly). I still wear the ring that was once Perce’s and then passed to my Dad with its black garnet stone and then to me after Dad’s death. Behind the prefabs were Nissen huts and behind those further prefabs – the people in those somehow seeming better off while the Nissen hut  families seemed very hard up.I remember the Lesness school for its slowest bicycle race and that is about it. I think I did pretty well at that and no, I was not using my tricycle, but Vicky’s bike I seem to remember. The tricycle I turned awkwardly and it bit into my thigh – I still have the scar about 58 years later. I remember using this tricycle to go with mum up to the shops in Nuxley Road – the butchers were called Buckinghams (I remember that lamb was cheaper than chicken – about six shillings against nine). I think the Cooperative was where we’d go occasionally. They gave tin receipts. The other old injury still showing is the damage to my fourth finger on my left hand. Pam and Vicky were on either end of a plank across a barrel and going up and down on this seesaw. I was fascinated and put my hand in the gap. The fingernail is still much smaller than it should be. We also had a cow ‘toy’ in the garden that had our interest, but no bad behaviour from it.
The pavement outside the prefab was always a place for games, for little toy cars to get in races. There were broom shrubs between the pavement and the wall leading down to the main road. One episode before 5^th November was that Vicky had a packet of coloured matches. She decided she wanted flames of a special colour and set fire to one of the bushes.

Vicky and me - looks like London Zoo

Seems Julie and I kissed on one occasion (I fancied her for many years after this) and Roger gave me a small punch while he and I were on this pavement – perhaps he fancied Julie as well. In earlier years Julie and I were taken to a fair, possibly in Erith. I do remember a show-diver climbing up a high ladder, diving off and then hitting the side of the tiny tank. There were screams and roars of shock from the crowd. I don’t know if the accident had killed or just injured him.ChristmasI remember a few Christmas parties while still at the prefab. I get reminded about many occasions by smells. What I associate with those first Christmases are smells of bath salts, chocolate (very sweet and in the shape of soldiers wearing beefer uniform), the pine smell of real Christmas trees, beer in barrels and those cooking Cornish pies and sausage rolls. The parties at 3 Salmon Road were typical of the family and probably most families who were working class and who’d survived WWII. There was always a large barrel of beer and every other drink that could be gathered. Food was not only the pies and rolls made by Nell and Ivy, but lots of cold meats, brawn from pigs’ heads, pickled onions, sandwiches – that is my small memory of what was a huge supply. Then there was music played by those who could and some who just about. I think it was Ron or George with the tea box, broom pole and string to provide the bass, a corrugated wash sheet (washboard), a homemade kazoo from tissue and comb, then voices for the songs of which I remember none, but loved them anyway. A tradition was devised for songs and who would sing them. Pat and George sang ‘Angel on my shoulder’, Ron sang ­­a song popular in the war, Fred sang Rosie I think it was. I remember doing the occasional poem – one I’d written that was supposed to be amusing. (After we had moved to Elmhurst I used to occasionally do a tap dance in a corner of the living room to a song by Tommy Steele “Put a Ring on her Finger”. I wish I’d been more shy.)There were many games played with the kids at Christmas parties. Harry was an expert at making everything fun yet embarrassing at the same time. There was the one where the kids were blindfolded and led to Harry and as a donkey he was on his hands and knees. One of our hands would be led down the ‘donkey’ from the head and our finger pushed into the donkey’s backside that was slowly revealed to be an orange. There was another experience for each child who was young (and light) enough that brought excitement rather than anal fear. This involved blindfolding the kids yet again, placing them on a chair and having two men take the chair into a terrifying flight that went high, low, left, right, swooping and rising quickly. Someone made the sound of a Spitfire. Bottle spinning seemed relatively easy to experience. A good proportion of the family sat in a circle and did the usual bottle spinning kiss finding. I remember that my favourites were Pam and Pat.I think that Ivy and Fred provided the house for Christmas for some time. When I was older, like fromthe age of eight, I remember the party at our house in Elmhurst and Ron and Nell’s at their flat. (Later Pam and Bill had at least one at their flat that was next to the Mother’s Pride bakery.) The thing they all had in common was a lack of rooms or beds to sleep everyone at the same time. The women would go to bed first and share single beds between two and double between three or even more. I think the plan was that the men would take over beds as soon as the women were out of them, but I think the men had more to drink and took a sleep in an armchair if they could hang on to one.

MusicI occasionally heard some classical music on the radio – it must have been BBC The Third station. I remember Mum getting irritated by classical music and called it ‘bloody earache music’ and changed it to the Light Programme or the Home Service. In the living room I remember hearing Doris Day, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra and the guy who sang Three Coins in a Fountain. I loved them all. On Saturday morning I would be in bed while the children’s music programme – Children’s Favourites - came through from the living room to our (Vicky’s and mine) bedroom. Tubby the Tubor by the American actor Danny Kaye, Changing Guards and the one about buying a dog from the window I think were repeated almost every week. Some time in 1957 and Pam and Bill brought over to us in the prefab a record of Jerry Lee Lewis’s Great Balls of Fire – some of the best rock n’ roll ever made and probably the first we’d all heard. It was probably a 45rpm single. A year or so later Harry gave us a 16rpm LP that had music from South America like that of Edmundo Ross. I think Vicky’s first LP was an Elvis one probably soon after we moved to Elmhurst. It was a fantastic LP I do remember, the songs I don’t. Vicky will help put this right. This is how she looked about the time she fell in love with Elvis but before Johnny Mathis (I think). It was Vicky who bought the Dave Brubeck Take Five pop jazz piece. I liked it so much at the age of 10 that I closed my eyes and got convinced that I was dreaming as I listened. When I was 10 my mum was a cleaner at the local old seaman's house in Belvedere. She started to bring back the occasional LP from an old Mr Peeg, the first being Sibelius 2 which I instantly adored. There was a Cossor record player in my sister's bedroom where I played, if she wasn't there, music of any type whether at 16, 32, 45 or 78 rpm. There was an ep which was blues music with a central harmonica, 10th Street or similar. I played it in Vicky's bedroom and danced, off the bed and on the bed.At The Black Prince in about 1967 were John Mayall, Georgie Fame, Zoot Money, Long John Baldry, even Jimmi Hendrix.My first school was 1B and my teacher Mrs Hutchinson. She was so pretty and with large breasts that I wanted to be her husband. The following year it was 2B and Miss James was the teacher. She was attractive too apart from a huge wart above her top lip with hairs poking out like a spider’s legs. I liked her teaching though and felt she liked my writing. She said I would be a writer one day. I was reading one of the few books at home – The Dam Busters. I started to rewrite it, not realizing this was so hard a job, so many words, so impossible to summarise, such a waste of time.

Me with mum about 1966. Like my sunglasses!

My last year was in 4A with a Mr Prescott. He looked exactly like The Third Man character in the TV series, Michael Rennie. He smoked so much he irradiated strong smoker smells even from the back of the classroom. It was this year that I took the 11 plus exam, most of which I just did not understand – shapes that had to be analysed, shapes I’d never seen before. I got a result that would have me go to a Technical School or a Secondary School (Picardy). The interviewers had asked me what I wanted to become and my answer was a doctor. Mum was bringing home Lancet magazine from the Old Seaman’s House. I’d read bits and understood not a word. I got through to The Dartford Technical School for Boys. Fortunately my best mate and the person I always dream about, Peter Arnold, was also going there.I was about 9 years old when I went to see where I used to live with my next-door neighbour and mate, Derek Simmonds. We went to the pond in the wood where we used to go and see the frogs, newts and dragonflies plentiful in and around the pond, but by 1959 there was none of these. Unfortunately, three boys older than us, forced us into their ‘tent’. One boy was clearly older than the other two. He told them to strike us with ‘whips’ that were twigs. I was terrified and just felt the fear that we would be badly injured, or killed! We were ‘released’ after a while of threats.Girlfriends and bikesMy first girlfriend was Jacqueline from Cumberland Road and at Bedonwell School – so about 11 years old. Her mum was huge in shape and her father amazingly thin – both Scottish.My first motorbike was using dad’s NSU Quickly around the garden when I was about 14. Apparently someone in Germany did more than 100 mph on a specially designed Quickly and died doing so. 
My next bike was a James 125cc. It cost £5 and really that was for its engine – the rest of the bike was unrepairable. The engine taught me a lot though. The timing was out and I knew nothing about how to start an engine that refused. I added a chemical to the two-stroke petrol and it made the bike start and give-off an interesting smell.  (menthol I think).



My sister, her close friend Sue, my mum and me - Abbey Woods near Erith

The bike itself was got rid of, but the engine remained at home. About this time I was given a kid’s trolley made by Bill someone. He also worked at Woolwich Arsenal and he’d made the trolley for his son. It was scaffold-type tubes welded together, a simple steering design with a good steering wheel, a simple brake, but the most amazing feature were the four Spitfire rear-wheels making up, what was becoming not a trolley but a go-kart. Over time I added the engine from the James and got a friend to make a drive gear from an old bicycle. I enjoyed making with dad the brake and accelerator as foot levers. Still struggled with starting the engine. I somehow got the thing to Terry Gordon’s who lived on a busy road near Erith. The engine started and the cart shot out of the drive, crossed a busy road and hit the kerb.
When I was 17 I rode my BSA 250cc, C11G that for which I’d saved £15. I acquired a 125cc BSA Bantam, stripped off the mudguards and used it with a friend called John Scott on a field at the end of King Harold’s Way. We were chased by a poiceman on a Velocette police bike. John, to my great desire, had a two-cylinder Norton 200cc Jubilee.I went to Corinne Summer's house on a road near one that went from King Harold’s Way. We both were doing Virginia Wolf’s book that takes place in Cornwall and about a Lighthouse. We had cuddles after the exchange of thoughts about the novel and then I’d go back home. Her parents had stayed in the front room watching TV for the entire evening. Corinne was disappointed when I tried to get intimate on my parents’ bed during my 17^th birthday. My bedroom was being used by a friend called Steve (his parents ran The Wheatsheaf near Gravesend) on a girlfriend, so it had to be mum and dad’s. I was just making progress when I heard their Lambretta turn up outside – end of my/our attempts.

The Dartford Tech rugby team. Most socks didn't match.

I was 17 and the chairman of the debating club at school. Dartford Technical High School for Boys was my school. I wanted to do English A-level, but this was not available to us in 1967 and we  (myself, Peter Arnold and Alan Coffin) went across to the Girl’s Technical School and there I met Christine Smith who was head girl and a year ahead of me. I took her on my bike (now a Panther 325cc from Uncle Albert) around Dartford on an attempt to get public opinion on the war in Vietnam. We became instantly fond of each other and by summer 1967, while I suffered in bed from something with my chest.
Chris took up a job in an insurance company in London City basically so she could extend the relationship with me. I’d ride over to her home near Swanley on the Panther and then a new bike called a BSA Silver Star. I’d brought this back from Exeter to Warwick University when I was in the first year. The new 500cc bike had a great sound, a troublesome engine, but a great sound. Chris now was in Exeter doing a three-year course on Occupational Therapy. I travelled to Exeter frequently on my motorbike – nearly always with a fault occurring – like the gear lever falling off and me using a mole spanner, the chain breaking and me somehow fixing it. The bikes and their engines often went wrong in the 1960s, but unlike today's they could be fixed on the road - if you took enough spanners and a hammer that is.
I was made Head Boy for some reason I can't really explain. The school had 600 boys, most from working class homes with fathers who were more likely to be labourers than business men. I had to appear on the stage every morning and quote from the Bible then say what was coming. We had one memorable visit from a man in the MI5 to see who would be interested in a James Bond job. Most of the hands went up including mine. I also became the captain of the rugby team. It was the school's first rugby team and we won few games against the teams we played in Kent and Essex. I continued with my position as scrum half at University, but did not last long.  
My time at Warwick UniversityIt should really be called Coventry University so close is it to this fairly awful city. I tried Essex first of all for interviews. It seemed brand new in 1968, with tall towers that were famous as places for students to fling themselves over the edge. How true this was I have no idea, but psycho drugs were taking off in the late sixties and balancing on the edge of towers seemed a common effect. The position of Essex seemed distant from anywhere of interest. I then was interviewed at York University in an office being used by a famous critique whose name was FD something. The buildings looked superbly designed, which they were. I took Ned for an interview in 2005 and the buildings looked terrible, as though the white concrete walls had had mud thrown at them – it was simply their deterioration. I then went for an interview at Warwick University and it was the good looking, intimidating, a lady from Australia with a vast and always accurate vocabulary, Germaine Greer. I’d taken some of my poems and she thought I was too romantic for Warwick, but I could come anyway if I achieved an A, a B and a C. I’d seen her on TV in Nice Time with Kenny Everett before I’d even been interviewed by her let alone sitting in her office while she chatted with incredible knowledge and opinion on Shakespeare and modern literature. She ended up involved in the 1969 Warwick students’ problem with the Vietnam war within universities like Kent in the US and the UK plus many others. I was involved in sitting in, smoking in, drinking in and searching in the Vice Chancellor’s office. We indulged in many discussions in the evenings with Germaine Greer and many other lecturers. (Germaine now lives in a house just outside of Saffron Walden, as we do.) I was on the bar while this went on, handling it with a few students, taking on long, long lists of drink, supplying it, working out the totals in my head, picking up glasses through the evening and then washing up. The two gay bar owners then would spray us with soda water during hoots of laughter. The bar was in the Rootes Social Hall where everything else happened. The Who band played there destroying their guitars at the end – as per every show. The benefits hall was connected with Rootes eventually becoming part of Chrysler and then Peugeot. The first car I had was, oddly enough, A Rootes’ car – the Hillman Minx.
In 1970, just before Christmas, Chris told me she had a new boyfriend called Patrick. I was deeply upset and took it like a mauled child. This lasted a long time deep inside me, but I put it inside a psychological shed within a month or so and developed other ‘friendships’ firstly within the university.

Me with mum about 1966. Like my sunglasses!

There was a girl called Rebecca. She was very nice, very intelligent, but not my idea of beautiful. She was keen because her relationship with her boyfriend at home was shaking. Mine with Christine had collapsed.  One weekend my neighbour in Belvedere and someone I’d known all my life, Jean Simmonds, came to my flat above a doctor’s surgery in Leamington Spa for a weekend. Then there was another girl and friend of Rebecca called Christine Hampshire who was very good at French and the same course as me – English and American Literature. She lived in the same house as Rebecca in Leamington Spa. I thought she was attractive and amazingly comical not to mention highly intelligent. I’d bought a car having sold the BSA in December 1970. It was £50 from Bobby Hayward – a Hillman Minx.We stayed together from about February 1971 until after the graduations in June. Above is a photo of her and me at the Warwick Uni car park wearing a borrowed cloak and board. We should have arrived at Coventry Cathedral at 11am not IIpm (read as 2pm in Roman style!). Then I had a little affair with the cousin of a friend – John Kilkenny, called Kate Kilkenny. This remained until I went down to Exeter to start an education year education at Exeter University. I travelled there in the dodgy Minx.                  
Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) and Cordoba We did some English language teaching in Exeter with boys from the ETA and also from Athens. It was useful for when we went to stay at my home. We worked nighttimes for a butter company in lower Belvedere to earn some money to help us pay for EFL. It was a six week course and we both got certificates. I tried to go to Japan first, then Brazil and I was offered Cordoba in Spain. Jackie and I were going to take dad’s Lambretta to take us down Spain, but because of my own servicing it exploded into flames just before Portsmouth where we caught the ferry to Bilbao. From there we thumbed cars down to Cordoba – to an ancient run-down hotel in the main square. Jackie took on a teaching job at the school called Britannica where I taught for all of £12 per week from 9am – 1pm and 6pm – 9pm. We lived in 7 Zapatero, near the Mesquita.At the Britannica school we met Linda Sonntag and she became a close friend. Jackie left in February 1972 returning to Australia. She told me she was going to meet a very wealthy guy from New Zealand and then come back to Cordoba. After a few letters it became obvious that she would not be returning to Cordoba.

The Dartford Tech rugby team. Most socks didn't match.

I’d started some private teaching of English. One of them was a jewellery importer, most of it coming from India. We had little chats about what we were each doing. Unless his English was so bad, he told me he was having an affair with a 15 year-old girl connected to the family. When I told him that I was thinking of going to Australia to find Jackie, but I had too little money to get there, he offered the flight cost as a loan that I could repay when possible. He described himself as a ‘pearl pirate’ and came across as such.Australia - first timeLinda and I had an affair and I thought my leaving Cordoba was the end of our closeness. I went home for a week or so and took a flight to Sydney. The Jumbo stopped in Rome, Karachi and Jakarta. The journey took 36 hours in a jumbo flight with a thick cigarette smoke cloud. I smoked a few Dunhills myself, quite a few. I found a cheap hotel in Kings Cross and slept until 1am. I got up to have a walk around. On the corner just outside the hotel was a woman standing there completely naked. I decided to go back to the hotel and find some sleep.I had $A100 in cash. I hitched journeys in cars, trucks and in one instance, a VW van full of hippies and marijuana. They were really friendly and generous. The reason for going to Queensland was because I knew that Jackie lived there with her parents considerably inland. More hitched drives got me to her house early one morning. Their cute dog squeaked at me from the house door when I arrived at the farm’s-looking gate. The door opened and Jackie was there in her dressing gown seemingly not surprised by my arrival. Her father was a captain in the RAAF and her mother stayed at their huge wooden house and rode the horses they owned. The following day I rode with her on one of their well-behaved horses. It was a small view from a 1950s US film or maybe the Australian TV based series called Whiplash.I left the Foskett’s impressive house and land, permanently, and was taken by Captain Foskett to somewhere I could get a train to Brisbane. There, I went to the government offices to talk about a teaching job. They came up with a job at a place called Coalville, not far from Townsville, where my cousin, Pam, lived with her husband Bill and two daughters. In a caravan park in Bowen they had a large caravan and I was accommodated under a stretch of canvas outside it. I slept in a thin, rough, plastic bed. During the night flying foxes shat on the canvas a few feet above my face. One morning I woke with my back being unmovable. I was taken to the nearest chiropractor. Within minutes of their treatment I was cured. Somewhere I still have the X-rays showing a slightly bent spine and a chain with a cross round my neck.

Chris circa 1969

My time at Warwick UniversityIt should really be called Coventry University so close is it to this fairly awful city. I tried Essex first of all for interviews. It seemed brand new in 1968, with tall towers that were famous as places for students to fling themselves over the edge. How true this was I have no idea, but psycho drugs were taking off in the late sixties and balancing on the edge of towers seemed a common effect. The position of Essex seemed distant from anywhere of interest. I then was interviewed at York University in an office being used by a famous critique whose name was FD something. The buildings looked superbly designed, which they were. I took Ned for an interview in 2005 and the buildings looked terrible, as though the white concrete walls had had mud thrown at them – it was simply their deterioration. I then went for an interview at Warwick University and it was the good looking, intimidating, a lady from Australia with a vast and always accurate vocabulary, Germaine Greer. I’d taken some of my poems and she thought I was too romantic for Warwick, but I could come anyway if I achieved an A, a B and a C. I’d seen her on TV in Nice Time with Kenny Everett before I’d even been interviewed by her let alone sitting in her office while she chatted with incredible knowledge and opinion on Shakespeare and modern literature. She ended up involved in the 1969 Warwick students’ problem with the Vietnam war within universities like Kent in the US and the UK plus many others. I was involved in sitting in, smoking in, drinking in and searching in the Vice Chancellor’s office. We indulged in many discussions in the evenings with Germaine Greer and many other lecturers. (Germaine now lives in a house just outside of Saffron Walden, as we do.) I was on the bar while this went on, handling it with a few students, taking on long, long lists of drink, supplying it, working out the totals in my head, picking up glasses through the evening and then washing up. The two gay bar owners then would spray us with soda water during hoots of laughter. The bar was in the Rootes Social Hall where everything else happened. The Who band played there destroying their guitars at the end – as per every show. The benefits hall was connected with Rootes eventually becoming part of Chrysler and then Peugeot. The first car I had was, oddly enough, A Rootes’ car – the Hillman Minx.Pam got me a job at the local abattoir – not legally I should add – where I had to use a broom to keep a long line of concrete free of blood. If a butcher stepped into gelled blood with a sharp knife, he could slip and fall onto it. The butchers sharpened their knives each time they finished their task on a cow and then placed the knife in a large jar filled with boiling water. They would occasionally remove a lymph gland that would then be boiled in the knife cleaner, dusted with curry powder and eaten as a snack. I was given a piece to try and found it delicious. I was being converted into a horrific, blood-sweeping labourer. My other task was to pick up severed ears and drop them into a bin that was tipped into the basement each time it filled.I went to Townsville and to the job office. I was given a teaching job in Mossman. Pam and I have driven to a place called Coalsville to meet the head teacher of its school. The town was a sort of isolated 1930-looking collection of old buildings and factories. Mossman was very different and in the middle of rain forests, wonderful beaches, fields of corn and aboriginal sites. I had a job of teaching English, French and maths, the first subject being the only one I was qualified for.

Christine Hampshire 1971

Graduation in borrowed cloak

Initially I lived in an old hotel in Mossman. A girl called Judy smiled at me broadly as I moved into one of the first floor rooms. I was there for a few weeks getting to know Judy (she became Miss Queensland in the following year). I had an intimate relationship with Judy and we’d spend a lot of my spare time on the 4-mile beach outside Port Douglas and in the bungalow.  I’d moved to a house for a few weeks in the middle of the cornfields with an English couple who provided a bed in their pottery-making shed. Then a bungalow in Port Douglas with a fat guy called Wally. It was a small quiet village on the coast then lived in by prawn fishermen. Very different and commercial it is today, sadly. One of the teachers at the Mossman school was Jean Doornekamp who was kind, very practical and about ten years older than me. We had a relationship and I went to live in her house about a mile outside Port Douglas. I sometimes would go out with her along the coast in a tiny boat along with her Alsatian – Cerskia. I bought a Suzuki trail bike while I was there and used it for a trip with Wally and Jean north of Mossman through Daintree and up to Blue River(?) through forest.  Jean had a Honda 50 and Wally borrowed the bike of the pottery man. This bike had a disaster to its engine so Wally took over the Honda and Jean was pavilion on my Suzuki.  Jean and I both left Mossman School at the end of 1973 in her VW Beetle and in hurricane rain. There was not much room in the Beetle with Cerskia on the back seat and all our travel gear in the front boot. I left Jean in New South Wales Aldbury I think) though before this I bought some land in New South Wales. I bought a beach land somewhere outside Adelaide. It was a superb bit of finance – a few years later I used it to buy my first house in St Mary Cray (£11k). In Perth I bought my first Holden E series. It was a driveable wreck.

My Hillman Minx at house Mevagissey

We stayed together from about February 1971 until after the graduations in June. Above is a photo of her and me at the Warwick Uni car park wearing a borrowed cloak and board. We should have arrived at Coventry Cathedral at 11am not IIpm (read as 2pm in Roman style!). Then I had a little affair with the cousin of a friend – John Kilkenny, called Kate Kilkenny. This remained until I went down to Exeter to start an education year education at Exeter University. I travelled there in the dodgy Minx.I really enjoyed the Exeter Education department. It was in an old building close to, but not in the University. The lecturers (Geoff and Paddy) were good fun rather than highly academic like my Warwick tutors like Germaine Greer and Bergonzi.I first met the woman named Jackie Foskett from Australia when walking up and down the little mountains on the Exmoor barrows and tumuli. We stayed together from about November 1971. I was 21 and Jackie 25. Jackie had been a lover of an admiral in Australia. He was the captain of the Voyager. In 1963 the Voyager accidentally sank the Virgin with the loss of several hundred Australian sailors. I think he was fired from the navy.
Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) and Cordoba
We did some English language teaching in Exeter with boys from the ETA and also from Athens. It was useful for when we went to stay at my home. We worked nighttimes for a butter company in lower Belvedere to earn some money to help us pay for EFL. It was a six week course and we both got certificates. I tried to go to Japan first, then Brazil and I was offered Cordoba in Spain. Jackie and I were going to take dad’s Lambretta to take us down Spain, but because of my own servicing it exploded into flames just before Portsmouth where we caught the ferry to Bilbao. From there we thumbed cars down to Cordoba – to an ancient run-down hotel in the main square. Jackie took on a teaching job at the school called Britannica where I taught for all of £12 per week from 9am – 1pm and 6pm – 9pm. We lived in 7 Zapatero, near the Mesquita.
At the Britannica school we met Linda Sonntag and she became a close friend. Jackie left in February 1972 returning to Australia. She told me she was going to meet a very wealthy guy from New Zealand and then come back to Cordoba. After a few letters it became obvious that she would not be returning to Cordoba. 

Near Cordoba - me on the left and Jackie on right

I’d started some private teaching of English. One of them was a jewellery importer, most of it coming from India. We had little chats about what we were each doing. Unless his English was so bad, he told me he was having an affair with a 15 year-old girl connected to the family. When I told him that I was thinking of going to Australia to find Jackie, but I had too little money to get there, he offered the flight cost as a loan that I could repay when possible. He described himself as a ‘pearl pirate’ and came across as such.
Australia - first time
Linda and I had an affair and I thought my leaving Cordoba was the end of our closeness. I went home for a week or so and took a flight to Sydney. The Jumbo stopped in Rome, Karachi and Jakarta. The journey took 36 hours in a jumbo flight with a thick cigarette smoke cloud. I smoked a few Dunhills myself, quite a few. I found a cheap hotel in Kings Cross and slept until 1am. I got up to have a walk around. On the corner just outside the hotel was a woman standing there completely naked. I decided to go back to the hotel and find some sleep.
I had $A100 in cash. I hitched journeys in cars, trucks and in one instance, a VW van full of hippies and marijuana. They were really friendly and generous. The reason for going to Queensland was because I knew that Jackie lived there with her parents considerably inland. More hitched drives got me to her house early one morning. Their cute dog squeaked at me from the house door when I arrived at the farm’s-looking gate. The door opened and Jackie was there in her dressing gown seemingly not surprised by my arrival. Her father was a captain in the RAAF and her mother stayed at their huge wooden house and rode the horses they owned. The following day I rode with her on one of their well-behaved horses. It was a small view from a 1950s US film or maybe the Australian TV based series called Whiplash.
I left the Foskett’s impressive house and land, permanently, and was taken by Captain Foskett to somewhere I could get a train to Brisbane. There, I went to the government offices to talk about a teaching job. They came up with a job at a place called Coalville, not far from Townsville, where my cousin, Pam, lived with her husband Bill and two daughters. In a caravan park in Bowen they had a large caravan and I was accommodated under a stretch of canvas outside it. I slept in a thin, rough, plastic bed. During the night flying foxes shat on the canvas a few feet above my face. One morning I woke with my back being unmovable. I was taken to the nearest chiropractor. Within minutes of their treatment I was cured. Somewhere I still have the X-rays showing a slightly bent spine and a chain with a cross round my neck.
Pam got me a job at the local abattoir – not legally I should add – where I had to use a broom to keep a long line of concrete free of blood. If a butcher stepped into gelled blood with a sharp knife, he could slip and fall onto it. The butchers sharpened their knives each time they finished their task on a cow and then placed the knife in a large jar filled with boiling water. They would occasionally remove a lymph gland that would then be boiled in the knife cleaner, dusted with curry powder and eaten as a snack. I was given a piece to try and found it delicious. I was being converted into a horrific, blood-sweeping labourer. My other task was to pick up severed ears and drop them into a bin that was tipped into the basement each time it filled.
I went to Townsville and to the job office. I was given a teaching job in Mossman. Pam and I have driven to a place called Coalsville to meet the head teacher of its school. The town was a sort of isolated 1930-looking collection of old buildings and factories. Mossman was very different and in the middle of rain forests, wonderful beaches, fields of corn and aboriginal sites. I had a job of teaching English, French and maths, the first subject being the only one I was qualified for. 

Me near Port Douglas 1973

Initially I lived in an old hotel in Mossman. A girl called Judy smiled at me broadly as I moved into one of the first floor rooms. I was there for a few weeks getting to know Judy (she became Miss Queensland in the following year). I had an intimate relationship with Judy and we’d spend a lot of my spare time on the 4-mile beach outside Port Douglas and in the bungalow.  I’d moved to a house for a few weeks in the middle of the cornfields with an English couple who provided a bed in their pottery-making shed. Then a bungalow in Port Douglas with a fat guy called Wally. It was a small quiet village on the coast then lived in by prawn fishermen. Very different and commercial it is today, sadly. One of the teachers at the Mossman school was Jean Doornekamp who was kind, very practical and about ten years older than me. We had a relationship and I went to live in her house about a mile outside Port Douglas. I sometimes would go out with her along the coast in a tiny boat along with her Alsatian – Cerskia.
I bought a Suzuki trail bike while I was there and used it for a trip with Wally and Jean north of Mossman through Daintree and up to Blue River(?) through forest.  Jean had a Honda 50 and Wally borrowed the bike of the pottery man. This bike had a disaster to its engine so Wally took over the Honda and Jean was pavilion on my Suzuki.  Jean and I both left Mossman School at the end of 1973 in her VW Beetle and in hurricane rain. There was not much room in the Beetle with Cerskia on the back seat and all our travel gear in the front boot. I left Jean in New South Wales Aldbury I think) though before this I bought some land in New South Wales. I bought a beach land somewhere outside Adelaide. It was a superb bit of finance – a few years later I used it to buy my first house in St Mary Cray (£11k). In Perth I bought my first Holden E series. It was a driveable wreck.

My temp job in Perth

After a few jobs including grave digging, selling coupons, travelling with people in a Jaguar to sell marked match boxes etc. to garages (the girls with short dresses were successful at their sales, I was not) and selling fizzy drinks from a truck, I got a teaching job in Harvey which is about 90 miles south of Perth. There was a woman in her late twenties called Jane who seduced me – and not the other way round. The Smoker couple Lawrence and Piet also seduced me. In spite of that were great friends. At first I stayed in the local doctor’s surgery each night sleeping on the narrow and high medical table. Then I lived alone in a wooden house leased out very cheaply by the head mistress. The tiny house was invaded each day by mice. I played the guitar I bought in Spain as a way of keeping me entertained. My cooking was done each night in a frying pan with an electric lead. This was all I had. It meant my tea and coffee, using water boiled in the frying pan, always tasted of fried meat and potatoes. My E Holden had lost its silencer. One of the teachers (he used a video machine on his dash as he drove) gave me some help and put on a silencer that did little silencing so the estate car sounded like a Harvey Davidson – ironically given the town name. Jean Doornekamp came over to Harvey at the end of my one and only term at the school. We drove back to Aldbury in the worn-out Holden that gasped its last near Adelaide. We drove to where I would enjoy my first skiing experience – having failed to do so with Jackie Foskett near Granada with not enough money – but the slopes had more mud than snow. I left Jean and flew to Athens. I met some of the Greek students I’d been teaching English in Exeter after my Education Certificate was won. One of them recommended the island Ios. I had two weeks there of absolute sunshine and pleasure. I read the John Fowles book The Magus. It could have been written on Ios so comparable was the island to his fictional one.Two Americans a few years older than me took me as their pet on Ios. He was a writer of scripts for TV and cinema and his girlfriend Nancy was a dancer. We remained good friends and kept up letters for some years. They introduced me on Skiathos, where we’d taken a ferry to, to a Canadian woman a few years older than me called Susie. She also kept up letters for some time after we’d had a short Grecian affair. Back in England, Linda and PublishingI was met at Heathrow by mum and dad probably end of August 1974. I stayed at home for a few months, though it was difficult as mum had  extreme drinking problems. Dad, Vicky and I joined the local Al-Anon society in a desire to help dad rather than mum. Dad, at this stage, especially before I came back home and after I left, often went to aunt Nell’s for the night, or up to the Heath to spend the night in his tiny Mini Traveller. For a while I had a Riley 9 – a lovely car and mass of problems. It spent most of its life with me up ramps while dad tried to fix its clutch, its brakes, its pretty much everything. A great car though.I lived with Linda for a few weeks. She had a one-room flat in East Dulwich. Since Spain she’d lost weight and her hair was now curly. She worked for Sphere publishing in Gray’s Inn Road. She got me some ‘reader’s’ work from her boss Angus Wells. My summaries were far too long and detailed at first and then I received an interview at Macdonald Education in Poland Street (just off Oxford Street). Dan Grisewood had been its Managing Director just before I joined and formed Kingfisher publishing. Peter Usborne left soon after I joined and formed a very competitive publisher of children's books using his name. My first editing at Macdonald's was Engines which was harder than I thought it should have been for your average 12 year old so I changed it. The author was in his sixties and worked for the BBC in their oldest building - Bush House. I went there a few times to sort out problems with Arthur, the author and was impressed by the building's feel of the 1920s. My next book was Tennis with the John Osborn (?) who became a well-known presenter at Wimbledon. He was incredibly posh especially with my boss - Anne Furniss. She was attractive, intelligent and had a voice of amazing poshnesss.I was living near Holloway prison (as it happens). I rented a room from a girl who was an NUJ assistant official and girlfriend of the guy who was head of the trades union. Her teeth pointed out in the extreme, but she was very nice. I remember Linda coming near my 25^th birthday and gave me freshly made ginger cake. I had some and was almost instantly sick and had diarrhoea as a result.Linda and I decided to move in together. We rented a small flat in a road in Clapham called Clapham Manor Street. It had a tiny kitchen, a tiny bedroom and a tiny living room. I bought a Suzuki twin 125cc 2-stroke. Like the old Panther it produced smoke more than anything else. I used it to get me to Macdonalds. We even used it to get us on summer holiday in Normandy. The engine stopped during a ride down a road in the countryside. It was the burnt over contacts that had stopped working. Luckily I had a file on some nail clips and used that on the contacts – it worked to my surprise.

Linda about 1982

After three months we moved to Crystal Palace to a much larger flat and a more complicated journey, still to Poland Street, though they would move to Worship Street near Liverpool Street, before long. While in Crystal Palace I bought a replacement bike – a 250cc Honda twin.  We’re in 1975 and by the winter we’d moved out from the flat and bought a house in St Mary Cray using the Australian profits I’d made. Just before the move I sold the 250cc and bought a second-hand 400x4 Honda. A brilliant bike I was convinced it was a good machine by seeing a yellow one with drop handlebars. Mine was red, fast and low enough for my shortish legs. I loved it. At Macdonald I had been doing books with Thames TV – Mary Berry mostly on the Good Afternoon programme with Judith Chalmers. I interviewed Neil Tennant who worked at the Marvel comic company and took him on as my assistant. My secretary was Rosie Black, an Australian girl and having an affair with Neil. They used to come to St Mary Cray and Neil would bring his guitar. He sang his own songs as well as some from where he was brought up – Newcastle.  Linda and I had a difficult time and we had an emotional trauma that broke us up making us sell the house we had in St Mary Cray.  I bought a flat in Willesden she shared with me until she could buy a flat in Dollis Hill – just up the road. I had an affair with an Australian girl called Susan Mitchel who worked for the Macdonald production department. She was amazingly quick at typing. Her strong Australian accent and good looks lured me in. I’d been approached by Viv who had worked at Thames and moved on to the US company CBS. They were in the early stages of producing a partwork on the Natural World. Someone called Peter Godwin ran the small company. He was an Englishman who stayed a long time in New York and now had an in-between accent. He also was a friend of Felix Dennis. I went to see him for some reason. He had an office just off Oxford Street and running porn magazines. In those days he was up-himself, so to speak, and pretty much ignored me as someone not high enough on the CBS Co is how I took it. I was better paid there than at Macdonald, but had little work to do. The little group of editor, designer, secretary, governor, and Peter produced the first partwork on Natural World while I did research and sample articles on World War II, it being 40 years since its start. I enjoyed it. Sadly, the ITN that normally advertised the partworks, went on strike for 9 weeks. CBS were unable to take this lack of earnings and closed the little company. Ironically while I researched the second world war Kate Paris was working at Marshall Cavendish on World War II Letters.A few weeks after Linda left my flat I became sad and had a sense of guilt and loneliness. I tried to phone her – no joy. I went to Dollis Hill on my 4x400 and rang her bell of her first floor flat – no joy. Her car was there (one of the many minis we had as a result of her dad’s company gifts) and somehow I knew she was in the flat. I went back to my flat and picked up my electric drill. I spoke to the people who had a ground floor flat under Linda and told them I was deeply concerned about her, so therefore I would open her front door with a drill, so could I use their electric connections. I had virtually removed the entire Yale lock when she opened the door.

Our wedding in 1981. Neil Tennant is on the left, Linda on the right

This was my restart to the relationship. I moved in to her flat eventually and sold the one in Willesden. I had a job with Pony Express delivering parcels on my motorbike every day mostly in London. It was tedious and frequently dangerous. I did it for three or four weeks and was surprised how well it paid. We got married on December 9^th 1979 and went to Bude in Devon for our honeymoon over Christmas. The hotel we stayed in was terrible with the majority of guests being in their seventies. 

Wedding with Linda - Dad and Nell

We now bought a house in Wimbledon – at some point in 1980 after months in Dollis Hill. I’d left Pony Express and joined the strange company of Charles Letts roundabout June 1980. They had their fame for diaries, but they also had a publication section that was successful with education books specifically for GCSEs. That is where I spent a whole year, a terrible year The Christmas we went for a few days to Wales with Leo and Lesley – long-term friends slightly younger than us.Angus Welles, the editor at Sphere, at one time Linda’s boss and a successful writer of westerns, was deserted by the woman he’d married called Chloe or similar. He was desperate and came to Wimbledon to be a tenant at our house for what seemed like a long stay, but probably just a few months. He had a Yorkshire terrier that seemed a nuisance every minute of the day. (Sadly Angus was killed in a house fire, in Nottingham, some time in the 1990s.) The world trip 1981

The VW travelling home.

By summer 1981 I’d left Letts, bought a VW left-hand drive campers van from Southside for £400, we had Wimbledon up for sale and a plan to save our new marriage and old, shaky relationship.We set off in the VW with a steering wheel that went a loose quarter of a circle with each turn or attempt to drive in a straight line.  It left a puddle of oil whenever it stopped. I used masses of STP that was supposed to thicken the oil and prevent its release from the engine. We had the following movements from September until near Christmas: through France in sunshine and via Switzerland into Italy; down to Rome, then Naples and across to Trieste; into Yugoslavia and down the coast to Split and Dubrovnik; across the country into Uzice and then Skopje. We drove into Greece. We went down to Athens and then Piraeus where we met with Lesley and Leo. We crossed to Crete which we drove round over a two-week period of sunbathing, drinking and rowing.

Me, Lesley and Leo near Chania. My first of many visits.

Linda and I went back to Athens and had to garage the VW until we returned and picked it up. We crossed from Piraeus to Cyprus for a day and then to Israel (Haifa). We went around Israel for a couple of weeks and then across to Egypt – Cairo, then Luxor by the German luxurious train, then down to the Aswan dam on the river, up to Alexandria (that was as cold as we became) and then back to Cairo where we took a flight to Sri Lanka. It was a fabulous place that we went round going from Columbo, to Galle, a short ‘safari’ through the centre, then flooded Trincomalee, then the Jafna – the opposition’s centre, then Christmas in Negombo. We took a flight to Singapore, visited Malaysia and at the Changi airport we parted. I went to Sydney and Linda to Perth – quite a distance. We’d met and travelled in Israel and then Egypt with a young guy called Peter. He was a pleasant Australian who was a Mormon, but very relaxed about it. Linda went to Freemantle to meet up with Peter. In Sydney I met a girl who’d been the secretary for Bernard Fisher(?) – a guy who ran Business Education Ltd. I worked on two magazines for him – one was the BTA tobacco company and the other was something like Tektronix that was a magazine for an IT company. Both produced me good extra income as I worked for Quarto. I stayed with the secretary for a few days until the New Year and then moved to a place in Paddington and started getting together with Sue Mitchell who lived in Sydney. She had a good job there, a flat and a large, smart car. But then I started to get messages from Linda who I deeply missedI went to Freemantle where we stayed for three months. Peter was just a good-looking and helpful friend. I liked him enormously. I found a job teaching, but only Saturday mornings. Hardly produced enough money to keep us fed, buying wine boxes, running another Holden E, paying for rent at a flat in Freemantle etc. In the Spring we moved to Sydney. On the road from the west across to Adelaide the car packed up. We were dragged by a guy using wire from the fallen fences and who drove a powerful Holden. We ended up in Bondi and spent some weeks therei – a Jewish area and not far from the dirty and crowded beach. We went to recover the VW van from the garage it had been in for months. It was covered in dust, the tyres were flat and there was a tiny red light showing what was left in the battery. It started with my first turn of the ignition! We drove into Belgrade (capital of Serbia) and then Ljubljana (capital of Slovenia) – no signs of what would soon follow in the 1990s in Yugoslavia.Back to England 1982

The School House in Heveningham, Suffolk, built in 1860

We travelled through a freezing and slippery road into Switzerland. It was in Switzerland that the four-stroke engine in the old dear, threw out a spark-plug and its worn-out receiving tube. Somehow we got it fixed. It allowed the engine to work again, but the rest of the weakened VW lost bits and pieces as we headed home. We went into a café near Paris on the day the Falklands war started (April 2^nd 1982) and received wordless stares from the French. ‘Home’, by the way, we did not have anymore. We went and stayed with Lesley and Leo while we attempted to buy, not one property, but two. Linda, meanwhile, went to Orbis to work (where Lesley worked as an editor). While this was going on I bought a house in Stoke Newington that was near to where Lesley and Leo lived. I worked, some of the time with Leo, on this terraced home. By moving one bit of wallpaper I ended up removing all of it. Then I started on putting in internal heating. I slept there sometimes once the heating worked, otherwise in Lesley’s and Leo’s flat. Linda meanwhile had left their flat and had bought one in Clapton. By the end of 1982 we put our disruptive marriage back together. I sold the half-finished house in Stoke Newington and bought the School House in Heveningham.

We are in Aldeburgh about 1983

So I owned the old School House and Linda the Clapton Pond flat. We went to Heveningham at weekends and both stayed in the flat during the week. We held some of 1983 and some of 1984 together as a marriage. Linda gave up working in London and moved, more or less, into the School House. We had chickens up on the glebe field next to the house that was between us and the fat actor Alan Stratford-Johns who used to be the main character in Z-Cars, the police series (1962-1978). I spent much of my time up there making chicken huts and weeding the garden between us and the church. Linda in 1984 began an affair with the local farmer and wrote a romantic book based on it. She was writing a lot of successful books about sex published by Orbis and other publishers that I can’t recall. I don’t intend that as an accusation, but sex to her was important – a way to start new relationships in a way that damaged ours. I did something similar and that damaged us as well. By the time we split permanently we'd been together for 12 years - a time in our lives that was good and bad, but never ugly.