2 The Triumph of Decadence

Sad Loves of a Seafaring Man

In late summer 1973 the minesweeper HMS Thames set out for Bordeaux in Gironde in the south west of France. It was my first voyage as an Ordinary Deckhand with the RNR and I was just seventeen years old. During the trip I made my best-ever RNR friend in the shape of a fellow OD  Colin who called me only a few years ago from his east London home to talk about old memories, including the time we became trapped by a gang of mangy-looking stray dogs late at night in la Rochelle in 1975 while searching for our ship after a wild night spent with locals at a bar, then a night club. Even more recently, another good RNR friend Taffy, who sailed with us to La Rochelle by way of the Ile de Re got in touch with me though Blogster. He could have knocked me over with a feather. After all the last time I'd seen him was close by to Waterloo Station when I was on my way to the Old Vic as an actor in the summer of 1980. Colin and his fiancee came to see the show, Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream", shortly afterwards, but I can't say how long. However, he did mention having spoken to Taff, who was his best friend. But I digress.
 I also became quite friendly with the most unlikely pair of best pals I ever came across in the RNR or anywhere else. One half was Jimmy, a tough-talking but essentially kind-hearted working class ladies' man of about 23 who was rumoured to be a permanent year-long resident of HMS Thames; the other, an older man, possibly in his mid thirties, but just as wildly social as Jim even though he boasted the super-posh accent and patrician manner of a City of London stockbroker or merchant banker. Jimmy took me under his wing with a certain intimidating affection: "We'll make a ruffy tuffy sailor of you you yet!" he once told me, even though we both knew that that I'd never be anything other than the most useless sailor in the civilised world. To make it clear just how much of a lubber I was, there was one occasion below deck during some kind of conference when, after having been asked by an officer what I thought of minesweeping, I replied that it was a gas...another when the ship had been prepared for a major manoeuvre and everyone onboard had retreated to their respective allotted positions, when I was found wandering on deck in a daze only to casually announce that I was taking a stroll. Incidents like these made me an object of good-humoured banter on the part of Jimmy and others for whom I was a sort of latter-day Billy Budd but without the seamanship.
 The crew spent its final night together in a night club in the port of Portsmouth, although it might just as easily have been Plymouth. The main attraction was a limp-wristed drag artiste who tried desperately to keep us entertained by singing cabaret style numbers in a comic falsetto, and telling bawdy jokes in a deep rich baritone, only to be remorselessly heckled. At one point he turned his attention to me, that is I think it was me; I was trying not at attract too much attention to myself at the time, because I was wearing glasses and I hated the look of myself in the cheap horn-rimmed specs that were the only pair I had in those days. My short sight always made me feel somehow defective, incomplete; so I refused to wear glasses except for when I really needed them until I was well into my thirties. "Ooh...you look pretty, what's your name?", I think he trilled. "Skin!" was what some of the sailors bellowed back, this being a nickname of mine, perhaps as in "a bit of skin" or something. It's all a bit of a blur to me now. Before too long, the bearded sailor seated next to me had collapsed face down onto the table with a thunderous crash. Only a short while earlier, he'd performed the theme from Rossini's "William Tell" on his facial cheeks while I held the mike for him. I don't know whether he ever appeared as a musician in public again, but he was certainly a star that night. The DJ said something about his next appearance being for Radio Thames, which was popular at the time.
 Back onshore, I resumed my growing passion for louche and shady music, art and culture. Yet, more and more in '74 I turned away from what I now saw as the old hat tackiness of Glam Rock, convinced that Modernist outrage had nowhere left to go. Instead, I turned my devotion to the more stylish glamour of previous Modernist eras and particularly the twenties and thirties. At some point I started using hair cream to slick my hair back in the style of F. Scott Fitzgerald, sometimes parting it in the centre just as my idol had done. I started building up a new retro wardrobe, which came to include a Gatsby style tab-collared shirt, often worn with black and white college-style tie; several cravats and neck scarves; a navy blue blazer from Meakers; a fair isle short-sleeved sweater; a pair of grey flannel trousers from Simpsons of Piccadilly, a pair of two-tone brown and white, or "correspondant", shoes; and a belted fawn raincoat straight out of a forties film noir.
 As the seventies progressed my passion for the decadence of the West and especially the continental Europe of the golden age of Modernism of ca. 1890-1930 grew to obsessive proportions. This was especially true of its leading cities, in terms of their being beacons of revolutionary art, and of style, luxury and dissolution, such as the London of the Yellow Decade, Belle Epoque Paris, Jazz Age New York, and most of all Weimar Republic Berlin. There were those cutting edge Rock and Pop artists who appeared to share my European love affair, such as Sparks and Manhattan Transfer, and Britain's own favourite lounge lizard Bryan Ferry. Much of the latter's work with his band Roxy Music was haunted by the languid cafe and cabaret music of the continent's immediate past. What's more, some of Roxy's followers sported the kind of nostalgic apparel favoured by Ferry himself, but they were rare creatures in mid-seventies London. As for me, I wore my bizarre outdated costumes in arrogant defiance of the continuing ubiquity of long hair and flared jeans. In 1975, I attended a concert at west London's Queen's Park football stadium in striped boating blazer and white trousers, while surrounded by hirsute relics from the Hippie era. The headliners were my one-time favourites Yes, whose "Relayer" album I'd bought the year before; but my passion for Prog Rock was a thing of the past. I'd moved on since '71, that is, towards far greater love of darkness and loss of innocence.
 But there was nothing remotely dark about the time I fell in love with a Dutch girl Maria while sitting Spanish "O" level in June 1974 in Gower Street, central London. She didn't look Dutch, in fact, with her tanned complexion and long dark brown hair, she was Meditteranean by physical appearance, and even had the name to match. It was probably Maria who first approached me, because I was so unconfident around girls in those days that I'd never have made the first move. Over the course of the next few days, I fell ever deeper in love, but I didn't have the courage to make my feelings known to her. This was so typical of me, to assume an attitude of diffident indifference when confronted by something or someone I truly desired. So, once we'd completed our final paper, I allowed her to walk away from me forever with a casual "I might see you around", or some other cliche of that kind. For about a week, I took the train into London and spent the days wandering around the city centre in the truly desperate hope of bumping into her. One time I could've sworn I saw her staring coolly back at me from an underground train, possibly at South Kensington or Notting Hill Gate, just as the doors were closing, but typically I was powerless to act, and simply stood there like a lovesick loon as the train drew away from the station. In time of course, my infatuation faded, but even to this day certain songs will recall for me those few weeks in the summer of '74 that I spent in hopeless pursuit of a woman I didn't even know. They include Sweet Soul standards, "I Just Don't Want to be Lonely" by The Main Ingredient, and "Natural High" by Bloodstone, with its pathetic lines: "Why do I keep my mind on you all the time, and I don't even know you, why do I feel this way, thinking about you every day, and I don't even know you..."
 Later on in the summer having recovered from my insane passion for a girl I hardly knew, I found myself once again in Santiago de La Ribera by the Mar Menor or little sea, this being a large coastal lake of warm saltwater off Murcia's Costa Calida in southeastern Spain, and the summer of '74 was one of the most blissfully happy summers I spent there. Every afternoon, we used to meet on the balnario or jetty facing our apartment on the Mar Menor which was more or less deserted after lunch, that's myself and my brother, and Spanish friends both male and female, to listen to music and talk and laugh and swim and generally enjoy being young and carefree in a decade of endless possibilities. To some youthful Spanish eyes back in '74-'76, I appeared as an almost impossibly exotic figure from what seemed to them to be the most radical and daring city in Europe, which of course London was. I played up to my racy image to the hilt, where in truth I was barely less sheltered and innocent than they were. There was a change with Franco's passing, and the birth of the so-called Movida, which could be said to be the Spanish and specifically Madridian equivalent of London's Swinging Sixties revolution. By my last vacation in La Ribera in the summer of '84, it was I who was in awe of the local youth rather than the other way around. They seemed so cool to me, dancing their strange jerky chicken wing dance to the latest New Pop hits from Britain. By then of course most of my old friends had vanished into their young adult lives, and my time as Charly the English prince of Santiago de la Ribera had long passed. I was yesterday's man, and I was sad about it, but I couldn't expect to be chased forever. Some people have to actually grow up.
 I returned to London in late summer '74 with a deep tan and hair bleached bright yellow by the sun, and hanging long over my ears and down over my forehead. Within days I found myself on HMS President, moored then as today on the Embankment near Temple station. This entailed my passing through Waterloo mainline station, which wasn't tourist-friendly as it is today, with its cafes and baguette bars, but a dingy intimidating place complete with pub and old-style barber. There I was I was accosted by a hoary old Scotsman, a former sailor who kept going on about how good looking I was. He even told me that he loved me; but he was harmless...just a sweet lonely old guy who wanted someone to talk to for a few minutes, which I was happy to do and then move on. It was all very innocent. I even went so far as to agree to a meeting with him the same time the following week, not that I had any intention of keeping it.
 Only days afterwards, HMS Thames was on its way to Hamburg, second largest city of Germany and its principle port. Once we'd arrived, one of the NCOs, a Chief Petty Officer I think advised me not to wander alone in the city. I duly fell in with a group of about three or four, and on our first night ashore we set off on a voyage into parts of the city such as the red light district St Pauli with its infamous Reeperbahn, the so-called "sinful mile" which is lined with restaurants, discos and dives, as well as strip clubs, sex shops, bordellos and so on. On St Pauli streets and in St Paul bars I saw things I'd never even suspected could exist. It was all in such stark contrast to the pleasant outer suburbs to which a coach trip was organised at some point during our run ashore. We ended up in a park where I had my picture taken on a bridge by a reporter for the Surrey Comet; then a group of breathless giggling schoolgirls asked me to be in some photos with them. I of course said yes, ever happy to oblige, and it was a bit of an ego boost for me, as if I needed one. On the way back to the ship, one of the sailors remarked that I'd been a hit with the Hamburg teenyboppers, while another snapped back that it was only because I was blond and blue-eyed, Teutonic-looking in other words. Whatever the truth, there was something deeply moving about these sweet suburban girls and their simple unaffected joy of life, especially in the light of what girls barely older than they were subjecting themselves to in the sad lost northern Babylon of only a matter of miles away.

The Trumph of Decadence

In 1975 aged nineteen I became a student at Brooklands Technical College which lay then as now on the fringes of Weybridge, an affluent outer suburb of south west London. In semi-pastoral Brooklands as in my beloved Santiago de la Ribera, I learned to be a social being after years of near-seclusion, first at Pangbourne and then as a home student. So, attention went on to be a potent narcotic for me in the mid 1970s, but despite constant displays of flamboyant self-confidence, those who tried to get to know to know me on an intimate level found themselves confronted with a desperately diffident and inhibited individual. I remained a shy suburban boy at heart. The Brooklands Disco was a special sphere in this respect, and these were regular, perhaps even weekly events. On one occasion early on in Disco night I got up in front of what seemed like the whole college and delivered a solo dance performance to a fiery Glam tune by Bebop Deluxe's possibly with white silk scarf flailing in the air to frenzied cheers and applause. On another, a trio of thugs who I suspect may have gatecrashed the Disco only to see in me the worst possible example of the feckless wastrel student strutting and posturing in unmanly white took me aside once the music had stopped clearly intent on some form of ultra-violence; but I stood my ground, insisting that despite what they may have thought I was just as straight as they were. Apparently convinced of this, after a few threatening words they vanished into the crowd, my cherubic face intact. 
 1975 again...and my music, swimming and Martial Arts sessions were no more, but the private lessons continued, mainly with a quiet slim young man with darkish curly hair called Michael. He lived alone but for a family of black cats in longtime Rock star haven Richmond-on-Thames, and was a musician as well as an academic who went on to play drums for a fairly successful Contemporary Folk outfit. Michael exerted a strong influence on me in terms of my growing passion for European literature and Modernist culture. He had a special feel for French Symbolist poetry, but it was the less known literature of Spain that we studied together, from the anonymous picaresque novel "Lazarillo de Tormes" (1554) onwards, and embracing Quevedo, Galdos, Machado, Lorca, and others. He was also an early encourager of my writing, a lifelong passion that was ultimately to degenerate into a chronic case of cacoethes scribendi, or the irresistible compulsion to write creatively. The result being that I was incapable of finishing a single cohesive piece of writing until well into the eighties, when I managed to complete a short story and a novel. Both have since been destroyed but for a few fragments.
 It was through Michael that I became entranced by Weimar Republic Berlin after seeing a copy of one of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin novels, "Mr Norris Changes Trains", written in 1931  on his desk. Micahel went on to explain that the Bob Fosse movie version of Kander and Ebb's "Cabaret" had been heavily based on this novel. In fact he was wrong; "Cabaret" had largely been derived from Isherwood's only other Berlin novel, "Goodbye to Berlin" which I purchased soon after I came across "Norris". Later on in the year I saw "Cabaret" on my own in a cinema in Kingston, Surrey, and its effect on me was quite literally life-transforming. The Berlin of the "Cabaret" years was the capital of a nation on the precipice of disaster and yet only recently she'd been the world epicentre not just of artistic and cultural foment, but of vice of every kind. By the onset of the '20s, crushed by war debt and blighted by urban warfare between rival left and right wing factions, Germany was a nation in ruins. With increased affluence, however, from about 1923 Berlin's so-called golden age got under way lasting until '33 with the creation of the, and she became a byword throughout the West for sexual vice of every kind. Needless to say this situation didn't spring out of nowhere. More than any other nation in the late 18th and early 19th Century Germany the great nation of the Reformation had played host to Higher Criticism, a school of Biblical criticism which flagrantly attacked the authenticity of the Scriptures. Moreover, late 19th century Europe had witnessed a significant occult revival in Britain, in France, but perhaps most especially in Germany. There are those Christian thinkers today for whom Weimar Berlin was a foreshadowing of the moral condition of the West as a whole in the last half century or so. But I knew no such moral principles in '75, and for me Berlin was the lost city of my dreams, a city of decadence trumphant.

The Tears of a Woman

I made no less than three sea voyages in 1975, two as a civilian and one with the RNR, as well as spending a week with them docked at the Pool of London. The first of these was destined for Amsterdam via Edinburgh and northern France on the three-masted topsail schooner TS Sir Winston Churchill of the Sail Training Association, now known as the Tall Ships Trust. Based in Portsmouth and Liverpool, the TST was founded in 1956 for the character development of young people aged 16 to 25 through the crewing of traditional tall ships, originally Churchill and the SS Malcolm Miller. Among my shipmates were, apart from my 17 year old brother, several young men from Scotland and the north of England, some recent recruits to the RN, and a handful of older "Mates" who'd been given authority over the rank and file of we deck hands. In overall authority was the elegant, distinguished Ship's Captain, who also happened to be an alumnus of my own alma mater of Pangbourne. It was an all-male crew, and I was quite well-liked at first although my popularity cooled in time. I kept a few pals though. One guy in particular stayed a good friend after we'd tried to impress a couple of girls together during a brief stay in France; St Malo, I think it was. He was a small baby-faced southerner with long dark hair worn shoulder length like the young Jack Wilde. I'd boldly put my arm around the one I fancied, Martine, and she'd got a little upset with me. Then, wandering around a little later in a mournful daze and desperate for Martine's address, 'Jack' gave it to me after she'd scrawled it on a piece of paper either for him or one of the other lads. I was drunk with relief for a while, just walking on air, because there was the danger of me coming down with a serious case of lovesickness had she become lost to me forever. I got on OK with a few of the others, and some were merely indifferent, but 'Jack' was Churchill's true prince. Life on the Churchill was no luxury cruise. There were storms which saw seamen sprawled all over the deck being violently sick attached to the ship only by safety belts. On more than one occasion, we were turfed out of our hammocks in the middle of the night to help trim the sails...something I never took any part in, which can hardly have helped my reputation. I did climb the rigging once though, and that was just before we came into the port of Amsterdam, with dozens of us manning the yard arms, again attached only by safety belts. The Dutch capital was marked by the same kind of open sexual license I'd witnessed only the year before in Hamburg, although without the same sinister vibrancy. I can remember a kind of perfunctory weariness about the decadence of Amsterdam, although that was only my impression as a 19 year old greenhorn. Today as then I'm sure the sad De Wallen red-light district is filled to the brim with hundreds of little illuminated one-room apartments, each with a single woman sitting in clear view of onlookers plying her lonely trade.
 As for Edinburgh, just before setting foot in the city for the first time, one of the lads, dressed to the nines himself in the trendiest seventies gear, all flared slacks and stack-heeled shoes no doubt, warned me not to go strutting about Edinburgh town centre in a flashy boating blazer. I completely ignored his advice of course, so, waltzing some time later into an inner city pub in broad daylight wearing said blazer and blue jeans tucked into long white socks, a grinning hard man with long reddish curly hair asked me if I was from Oxford. Perhaps he was aware of the Oxonian reputation for producing flaming aesthetes, but I doubt it. I think he just took one look at my jacket and thought: "Who's thus flash ponce askin' tae ge' hus heed kecked in?", or worse. It may have been touch and go for a while as to whether he was going to inflict some serious damage on my angelic English face, but in the end he left me be. He may even have liked me. The unlikeliest people did in those days.
 Within a few weeks of returning to London by train from Edinburgh, my brother and I were setting off again, this time towards the Baltic coast of Denmark by way of Germany's famous Kiel Canal as part of what is known as the Ocean Youth Club. While we were once more supervised by "Mates" under the command of a Ship's Captain, the OYC was more like a cruise than a trial by water, utilising modern yachts rather than traditional tall ships. The captain was a lovable bearded larger than life true character with a weakness for freaking out to John Kongos' "He's Gonna Step on You Again". My brother and I wasted little time in recruiting a nice young guy from Wotton-under-the Edge called Simon as our chief crony who as it turned out we'd actually first met him on holiday in Spain about ten years previously. Soon after setting foot on Danish soil we three got talking to a couple of girls who, as might be expected, had natural golden blonde hair. Our efforts at romance were wholly innocuous, despite the reputation Scandinavia had for progressive sexual attitudes in the '60s and '70s.
 A less pleasant romantic episode took place towards the end of the trip, which saw me in pursuit of a pretty German girl, Bettina. I was crazy for her, and she clearly liked me too, and yet I'd senselessly dumped her for the sake of a night of drunken idiocy with my brother and Simon, perhaps expecting her to run after me or something. Suddenly, overtaken by sickly pangs of remorse, I set out to find her, and at some point during my search, while walking along some kind of wooden pontoon I lost my footing and fell fully clothed into the waters of what must have been Kiel Canal. I wrote to Bettina, but she never wrote back, and I can't say I blame her. To this day I can't understand what possessed me to ignore her so callously, just in order to tie one on with the boys which I could have done any night of the week. Self-sabotage was fast becoming a speciality of mine.
 It was later in the year I think that I took my friend Brenda, one of the London Division Wrens but originally from the north of England, to a dinner dance at London's Walford Hilton Hotel. At some point we were joined there by a couple of Brenda's close friends, a fair, bearded man in a suit, and his dark, extrovert wife. The husband was one of those deeply gentle men I came across from time to time in the 1970s. They weren't all bearded; but I can think of some who were, such as the madcap ship's captain described above. What united them was that they behaved with special protectiveness and affection towards me, and I've never forgotten them for it. Early in the evening, Brenda became incensed when a group of older seamen started teasing me from their table, which didn't bother me at all because I knew these guys, and they meant no harm. Military life after all, is fuelled by this kind of raillerie. But Brenda insisted that their attitude stemmed from the fact that I was "better than what they are", as she put it, possibly in imitation of their cockney accents. She'd been taken in by my appearance, which made me more dangerous by far than they, not just to others, but to myself. With them, what you saw is what you got, and if it wasn't always pretty, then at least it was honest.  I didn't see much of Brenda after that night, in fact on only one occasion I can clearly remember, and she seemed a little sad and distant. I had long sideburns at the time and I can remember her expressing some distaste for my Teddy Boy image as she saw it, perhaps sensing a certain new coarseness, Teds being the British equivalent of 1950s juvenile delinquents. How horrified she would have been to see me two years from then as a full-blown Punk with cropped hair and a safety pin through my ear.
 It was only a matter of weeks after returning from the OYC trip to the Baltic that I sailed with the RNR to La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast of France,and then shortly after that I was with the RNR again, this time in the Pool of London, subject of a famous British crime film directed by Basil Dearden in 1951 and referring to that stretch of the Thames lying between London Bridge and Rotherhithe. In order to reach my ship, I had to board some kind of launch with a group of other seamen, one of whom, a strikingly good-looking blond seaman of about 30 I knew only by sight, had taken unofficial charge. Once we were all safely aboard, it was the turn of our self-appointed leader to join us, but as he stepped off the launch, he somehow lost his footing and slipped into the Thames beneath him. Within a matter of minutes his heavy clothing and boots, helped by a vicious current, had dragged him beneath the river's surface and he was lost. Soon after returning to London, I told my mother what happened, and as she wept the tears of one who instinctively knew what those who loved this poor man must have been feeling at the time, the true appalling tragedy of the incident hit home and I ran into the bathroom and sobbed my heart out myself. Thinking back on it, a line from that beautiful song "How Men Are" by Scottish singer-songwriter Roddy Frame comes to mind: "Why should it take the tears of a woman to see how men are?"
 Still in '75 I attempted to pass what is known as the AIB or Admiralty Interview Board with a view to qualifying as a Supply and Secretariat officer in the Royal Navy. This involved my taking the train down to HMS Sultan, the Royal Navy's specialist training centre in Gosport, Hampshire, where I spent three days attending various examinations and interviews intended to assess my potential as a future naval officer.
 On one occasion early on in the long weekend just before one assignment or another, I was primping in the mirror putting the final touches to my dress when one of the guys I was sharing a dormitory reminded me that I was at a naval base not a fashion parade. Something like that anyway. Whatever it was, he wasn't going to be coming along with me that night to the disco, or any night for that matter. Two guys eventually did agree to keep me company on one of the nights we spent at Sultan, but they didn't really seem all that keen. As things turned out I was left alone at a Gosport disco dancing with a pretty young woman with shortish blond curly hair and the unusual name of Shiralee (Indigenous Australian for "burden" or "duty"). Later that night I escorted her along a busy main leading back to Sultan, as she must have lived nearby. Cars sounded their horns as I kissed her good night. Shortly after doing so, I discovered that Sultan's main entrance had been locked and was now being manned by an armed guard.
 If the young man nervously trying to reach someone in authority within the training centre on a walkie talkie was wondering exactly what kind of person returns to base dressed to the nines after a night's disco dancing when he was supposed to be in the midst of three days of gruelling tests and interviews that were vital to his future career, then he gave no indication of it. He did however eventually make contact with someone in authority, and I can remember passing through an officer's mess soon afterwards and briefly exchanging pleasantries with its airily affable occupants. English gentlemen of the old school, they of course kept their actual opinions of me to themselves. It may just be me, but I can't help thinking that had I returned to Sultan that night before being locked out, I might have been in with a better chance of passing the AIB, that is, as opposed to failing it, which I perhaps rather predictably did. Ay, every inch the superstar.