Wed, Jul 2nd - 10:13PM
1 Tales from the Halling Valley
From Tasmania's Tamar Valley
My ancestry is mixed English, Scottish and Scots-Irish. I'm English through my father, the well-known violinist Patrick Halling, born in Rowella in Tasmania's Tamar Valley to an English mother. While his paternity remains uncertain, he was raised the son of a Dane, my namesake Carl Halling, more of whom later. His mother my grandmother was always known to my brother and I as Mary, but she'd been born Phyllis Mary Pinnock possibly in the Dulwich area of south London where her family had been based for many years sometime around the turn of the 20th Century. I'll discuss the Scottish and Ulster-Scots side of the family later on in the story, but for now I'd like to concentrate on my dad's ancestry.
Around 1984, I surreptitiously taped the nostalgic ramblings of my great aunt and Mary's younger sister Joan Parrish who together with her Yorkshire-born husband Eric had come to my parents' house for lunch. Eric and Joan had only recently become friends of the family, together with her son Chris Parrish, Chris's wife Janet, and their three children. Many years later, Mary's niece through a brother who'd emigrated to the US dropped by the house for dinner. A resident of upstate New York, to my eyes she bore a striking resemblance not just to Mary and Joan, but to my my uncle and aunt, Peter and Suzanne. She also looked a little like Peter's daughter my cousin, Kristina Vals-Halling, known as Kris. I'll be referring to them all in due course of time.
According to Joan's testimony recorded that day, her maternal grandmother’s maiden name had been Butler, name which allegedly links the family to the Butlers of Ormonde, a dynasty of Old English nobles of Norman origin which had dominated the south east of Ireland since the Middle Ages, and so making it a lost or discarded branch. The Norman French were of mixed Viking, Frankish and Gallo-Roman stock, and their territorial conquests included England, and so Scotland, Ireland and Wales and southern Italy and the island of Sicily. The Norman conquest of England began in 1066 AD with the success at the Battle of Hastings of William the Conqueror which resulted in Norman control of England, and the introduction into the country of the Norman aristocracy. In other words, the Normans replaced the Anglo-Saxons as the ruling class of England and became part of a single French-speaking culture with lands on both sides of the channel. The Norman conquest created one of the most formidable monarchies in Europe as well as a highly sophisticated governmental system. It also changed the English language and culture forever while producing a sporadic but fierce rivalry with France, who became her bitterest enemy, remaining so for centuries. In his 1842 poem "Lady Clara Vere de Vere", Alfred, Lord Tennyson makes the valid point that "Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood." This of course inspired the classic 1949 black comedy "Kind Hearts and Coronets", produced by Michael Balcon, directed by Robert Hamer, and with photography directed by Douglas Slocombe, all legendary stalwarts of the Ealing Studios of the post-war years.
The Butler saga had begun in 1177 when one Theobold FitzWalter, who'd accompanied Henry II into Ireland, was created Chief Butler of Ireland, although the earldom of Ormonde was not created in the Peerage of Ireland until over two hundred years later in 1328. This for the benefit of James Butler, son of Sir Edmund de Botillier and Lady Joan Fitzgerald, who went on to marry Alionore de Bohun, granddaughter of Edward the 1st of the Norman House of Plantagenet, and the so-called “Hammer of the Scots”.
The fifth earl of this creation, James Butler, born in London in October 1610 became the Marquess of Ormonde in 1642, then the Duke in the Peerage of Ireland in 1660, finally becoming Duke of Ormonde in the Peerage of England 22 years after that. He was the first of the Butlers to assume the Protestant faith, which set him at odds with the remainder of Ireland's Old English ruling class which was resolutely Catholic. If the Old English families such as the Butlers, the Burkes and the Fitzgerlads had been more Irish than the Irish themselves, the New English who'd replaced them as Ireland’s ruling class by about 1700, were markedly Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. Below: Patrick Clancy Halling 
Phyllis Mary Pinnock
Again according to Joan’s testimony, her paternal great-grandfather had been a humble coachman. He was however left a large sum of money by a grateful employer, an extraordinarily philanthropic act which introduced some wealth into the family. Joan's own father lived as a gentleman, which means he didn't need to work. His eldest daughter Phyllis Mary Pinnock was born, probably on the 12th of March, sometime towards the end, or following the turn of the 20th Century. She grew into an extraordinarily beautiful young woman, with dark hair, green eyes, high cheekbones and an exquisitely sculpted mouth. According to my father’s account, her first true love had been a beautiful young man by the name of David Wilson. David, who looked a little like the young F Scott Fitzgerald, was allegedly a scion of the Wilson Line of Hull which had developed into the largest privately owned shipping firm in the world in the early part of the century. Tragically, like so many of the country's finest young men, he was killed during the First World War. She subsequently married an army officer by the name of Peter Robinson, and they had two children in quick succession, Peter Bevan and Suzanne, known as Dinny. At some point between Peter’s birth and that of his younger brother Patrick, Phyllis went with husband to Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, with the purpose of working as a tea planter. There she met the aforesaid Carl Halling. What followed next I can't say for certain but through family sources, I've been led to believe that at some point after becoming pregnant with her third child, Mary fled with Carl to the island of Tasmania, Australia, where my dad was born, although he was raised, as Carl’s son, in Sydney, new South Wales. It was in Sydney that Carl contracted multiple sclerosis, after which according to family accounts, Mary made a living variously as a journalist, and teacher. In the meantime, according to what Pat has told me Carl embarked on a desperate spiritual search in the hope no doubt that this would yield a miraculous cure. This search took in Christian Science, although prior to his illness I think, Carl had been a student of Eastern spirituality, which had resulted in his becoming fluent in Sanscrit. Presumably this is how he ended up working as a tea planter. Carl died immediately immediately before the second world war, at which point the family moved to Denmark, where Carl was buried. All three children had earlier displayed considerable musical talent, Patrick as a violinist, Peter as a cellist and Suzanne as a pianist. By the time Pat was nine years old he was already the soloist for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, with all his wages according to Pat being duly conveyed by Mary into the family account. Soon after Carl’s death, Mary and family set off for London in order that Pat and his siblings might develop their musical careers. Pat studied at the Royal Academy of Music, and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He joined the London Philharmonic 0rchestra while still a teenager during the Blitz on London, serving in the Sea Cadets as a signaller, and seeing action as such on the hospital ships of the Thames River Emergency Service, which had been formed in 1938 and lasted for three years, using converted Thames pleasure steamers as floating ambulances or first aid stations.
Below: Mary Halling, nee Phyllis Mary Pinnock 
All Equal in the Eyes of God
Through my father Patrick, known as Pat Halling, I'm largely English, and proud to be so, although the Pinnock name itself is common in Cornwall and may therefore be of Celtic rather than Anglo-Saxon origin. And yet, according to recent research, the inhabitants of the British Isles, whether English, Scottish, Irish or Welsh, have more Celtic, or Celt-Iberian blood, than anything else. Being of mixed English, Scottish and Ulter-Scots blood I am what could be called quintessentially British, although I self-identify as English. England was where I was born, and I feel a strong bond with people of Anglo-Saxon extraction, not just from England itself, but other nations where they are to be found, such as Scotland, Northern Ireland, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and so on; but not in an agressively nationalistic sense. After all, in the end, there is only one race, created by God, the human race, and we are all born equal in the sight of God whatever our race, colour or nationality.
The Watts of Vancouver
Through my mother Ann Halling, nee Angela Jean Elisabeth Watt, I am mainly lowland Scottish and Ulster-Scots. My mother was born in the city of Brandon, Manitoba, but while still an infant she moved with her parents and four siblings to the Grandview area of east Vancouver, Canada. Grandview's earliest settlers were usually tradesmen or shopkeepers, in shipping or construction work, and largely of British origin. My own grandfather James Watt was a a carpenter by trade who'd been born in the little town of Castlederg in County Tyrone, Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Grandview underwent massive change following the First World War when Italian, Chinese, and East European immigrants moved in, and still more after World War II with a second wave of Italian immigrants. It is still home to Vancouver's Little Italy centred on Commercial Drive.
Her mother was from Glasgow, Scotland, having been born there to an English father hailing either from Liverpool or Manchester, and a Scottish mother. My mother therefore was born with mixed lowland Scottish, Ulster-Scots and English blood. She was the only one of her family born in Canada, her elder sister Annie-Isabella, elder brother Robert, brother James Jr., sister Elizabeth, who died in infancy, all having been born in Scotland, while another sister Catherine had been born in Ireland. 
Miss Ann Watt, now Ann Halling, born Angela Jean Elisabeth Watt
Our Scots-Irish Roots
My paternal grandfather was probably a descendant of the planters sent according to the historical account by the English to Ulster, many of them originally inhabitants of the Anglo-Scottish border country, as well as the Scottish lowlands. Lowlanders are traditionally distinct from the highlanders, in so far as they are widely considered to be of Anglo-Saxon rather than Celtic extraction, although how true this is it is impossible to say. Sense dictates that they'd be a mixture in terms of blood, which is to say Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, Scandinavian and so on, not that I'm qualified to speak definitively on the subject.
Many of these Ulster Scots emigrated to the United States in the 1600s, and their descendants are to be found all throughout the US, but most famously perhaps in those regions of which the South is composed in a cultural sense. Indeed most of the original settlers of the Deep and Upland South were of British and especially English and Scots-Irish origin. Among those whites identifying as ethnically American today in the South, the vast majority are believed to be of English and Scots-Irish extraction. Additionally a sizable porportion of white southerners claim actual English, and to a lesser extent, Scots-Irish ancestry. The people of the mountainous regions of the South such as the Appalachian mountains are widely believed to be intensively Scots-Irish, with some insisting that that makes them Anglo-Saxon rather than Celtic. This is due to the fact that their first home was the region of Britain straddling the Scottish Lowlands and Anglo-Scottish Borderlands, one traditionally perceived as Sassenach. Sassenach or Sasenaig in Ireland being the Gaelic term for Saxon, or person of Anglo-Saxon origin.
From the Delta to the British Blues Boom
While the Southern gene pool has been reinforced over the centuries by successive waves of immigrants, including Germans, Scottish Highlanders, French Huguenots, French Canadian Acadians, and Irish Catholics, it remains significantly Scots-Irish and English. But it's also a deeply African-American area, despite the 7 million black people who emigrated from the South to the North, Midwest and West during the period 1910 to 1970 known as the Great Migration. In terms of their music, their most famous port of call was arguably the great Midwestern city of Chicago. The Chicago Blues, which was an electrified version of the original Country Blues created through new developments in amplification, flourished in that city in the 1940s. It went on to inform the development of Rock'n'Roll, which was equally influenced by Country music and most especially the variant known as Rockabilly.
The most influential Rock phenomenon of all time the Beatles were not overly influenced by the Chicago Blues, unlike their closest rivals the Rolling Stones. The Beatles looked to more recent and commercial trends in Popular music as Rock'n'Roll for inspiration, as well as the music which eventually became known as Soul and which was to some degree a fusion of Rythym and Blues and traditional Pop, with elements of Gospel. As such they were the chief architects of Pop Music which went on to form the basis of Pop culture and the entire Swinging Sixties scene. In this respect they differed from the prime movers of the British Blues Boom, who largely ignored Rock'n'Roll in favour of the Blues, and specifically the Delta and Chicago Blues. Out of this British Blues Boom, Rock was born although it would not be called this until well into the sixties. Many of these Blues groups jumped onto the Pop bandwagon created by the Beatles to form part of the British Invasion of the US Pop charts. They included the Rolling Stones, the Animals and the Who. In time, they all became known as Rock groups, whether British or American, although Pop survived as an alternative generic description. Today, however, Pop is viewed rather as a strain within Rock or a sub-genre, or as a different form of music altogether. From the grafting of anti-establishment values onto a music that seemed like little more than noise to many members of the older generation, a massively successful commercial phenomenon with millions of followers worldwide came into being. Its cataclysmic effect on the moral fabric of the Christian West cannot be underestimated. 
From left to right: Jim Watt, Bob Watt and their sister, Ann Halling, nee Watt
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Wed, Jul 2nd - 10:11PM
2 Born on the Goldhawk Road
Introduction:
These two pieces set the scene for the entire work to follow, a kind of experiment in memoir writing with a spiritual core. Both deal with my childhood in London in the 1960s. The first was adapted from a Christian testimony dating from 2002, and published at the Blogster.com website on the 1st of February 2006, the second from an unfinished short story penned in the mid to late 1970s about a close friend from Bedford Park where I lived for some thirteen years between ca. 1957 and 1970. Once known as "Poverty Park" despite having been London's first Garden Suburb, Bedford Park is now a famous conservation area of the Southfields ward of Acton, west London. It was initially published at the Blogster.com website as "Wicked Cahoots" on the 15th of February 2006. Definitive versions of both works were created with further minor variations in July 2007, and then again in December.
Born on the Goldhawk Road
I was born in the autumn of 1955 close to the undistinguished source of west London's Goldhawk Road and my first home was in Bulmer Place near Notting Hill Gate. My brother was born two and a half years later, by which time my parents had bought their own house in Bedford Park in what was then the London Borough of Acton, and suburban west London was marked by a homespun simplicity back then that we can only dream of today. By '63, with my brother and I safe in South Kensington’s French Lycee, social change was in the air, though in truth it had been for some time, especially in Britain and the USA, at least since the rise of rock'n'roll, and youth culture, whose watershed years were '55 to '56, but for all that England in '63 was still apparently in black and white, and the first shaggy-haired beat groups fitted quite snugly into this innocent time of Norman Wisdom pictures, of the well-spoken presenters of the BBC Home Service, Light Service and World Service, of coppers, tanners and ten bob notes, tuck shops and tuppeny chews. I was an articulate child, cheerful and sociable in an idyllic world, although I went on to become a tearaway, both at school and at home, what you might call hyperactive today. Still, I managed to pass my common entrance exam, necessary for entrance into British public, which is to say private, schools, and so become Cadet RNR no. 173, at Pangbourne Nautical College in the September of 1968, officially a serving officer in the Royal Navy aged only 12 years old. In early 1970, we left Chiswick for good and took up residence even deeper in suburbia, where I remain to this day...a suburban dreamer if ever there was one...
Wicked cahoots
When he made
his first personal appearance
in the dirty alley
on someone else's rusty bike,
screaming along
in a cloud of dust
it rendered us all
speechless and motionless.
But I was amazed
that despite his grey-faced surliness,
he was very affable with us...
the bully with a naive
and sentimental heart.
He was so happy
to hear that I liked his dad
or that my mum liked him
and he was welcome
to come to tea
with us at five twenty five...
Our "adventures" were spectacular:
chasing after other bikesters,
screaming at the top
of our lungs
into blocks of flats
and then running
as our echoed waves of terror
blended with incoherent threats...
"I'll call the Police, I'll..."
Wicked cahoots.
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Wed, Jul 2nd - 10:10PM
3 A Child's West London
Introduction
"A Child's West London", the second and last of two pieces based on my childhood in the west London of the 1960s, is not so much a story, as fragments taken from spidery writings with which I filled four and a half pages of a school style notebook in what is likely to have been the year of 1977. However, before being published at Blogster.com on the 10th of March 2006, it was comprehensively edited, before being given a new title, and subjected to alterations in punctuation. Certain sentences were composed by linking two or more sentences from the original piece together. Mild grammatical corrections also took place, mild because I didn't want to alter the original work to the degree of making major ones. So, the first draft was carefully doctored, while retaining the spirit in which it was penned in '77. Finally, the name of the protagonist was changed from "Kris" to "Carl". In July 2007, I prepared a first "definitive" version of the piece which involved my making a few additional very minor alterations. Further corrections were made in December.
With regard to the content of the story, I see it as essentially moral in keeping with my Christian faith. The "Carl" character is a likable scalliwag, gaining with enviable ease the affection and trust of the older Wolf Cub boys as well as the Cub leaders, of Margaret Jankel and Mrs O'Brien, of Nevine and many other school friends. And yet, he makes a conscious choice to abuse the trust of others, including Robert Graham, and his Bedford Park friend/rival, also called Robert. By doing so, he creates a feud between his family and Robert's, where they had previously been close, and were thankfully to become so again. He aggressively asserts the superiority of certain Pop groups, and takes part in street fights which result in injury and suffering. Pretentious as it may seem, I like to view him as a symbol for the changing times in mid-sixties Britain, as the old post-war Albion with its sweet shops and bomb shelters, short trousers and ovalteenies yielded by degrees to a new, less innocent world with a Beat music soundtrack.
All the incidents depicted in the tale definitely took place, although certain mild inaccuracies that my '77 self may or may not have included have to be taken into account. What's more, a certain amount of exaggeration crept into my writing in the the very last section. For example, "hoodlum" is far too strong a word to use when referring to a few small boys causing mayhem in a quiet west London suburb. At least, I think it is...
Snapshot 1
I remember the 20th Chiswick Wolf Cub pack, how I loved those Wednesday evenings, the games, the pomp and seriousness of the camps, the different coloured scarves, sweaters and hair during the mass meetings, the solemnity of my enrolment, being helped up a tree by an older boy, Baloo, or Kim, or someone, to win my Athletics badge, winning my first star, my two year badge, and my swimming badge with its frog symbol, the kindness of the older boys.
One Saturday afternoon, after a football match during which I dirtied my boots by standing around as a sub in the mud, and my elbow by tripping over a loose shoelace, an older boy offered to take me home. We walked along streets, through subways crammed with rowdies, white or West Indian, in black gym shoes. "Shud up!" my friend would cheerfully yell, and they did.
"We go' a ge' yer 'oame, ain' we mite, ay?"
"Yes. Where exactly are you taking me?" I asked.
"The bus stop at Chiswick 'Oigh Stree' is the best plice, oi reck'n."
"Yes, but not on Chiswick High Street," I said, starting to sniff.
"You be oroight theah, me lil' mite."
I was not convinced. The uncertainty of my ever getting home caused me to start to bawl,
and I was still hollering as we mounted the bus. I remember the sudden turning of heads. It must have been quite astonishing, for a peaceful busload of passengers to have their everyday lives suddenly intruded upon by a group of distressed looking wolf cubs, one of whom, the smallest was howling red-faced with anguish for some undetermined reason. After some moments, my friend, his brow furrowed with regret, as if he had done me some terrible wrong, said:
"I'm gonna drop you off where your dad put you on."
Within seconds, the clouds dispersed, and my damp cheeks beamed. Then, I spied a street I recognised from the bus window, and got up, grinning with all my might:
"This'll do," I said.
"Wai', Carl," cried my friend, "are you shoa vis is 'oroigh'?"
"Yup!" I said, walking off the bus. I was still grinning as I spied my friend's anxious face in the glinting window of the bus as it moved down the street.
Snapshot 2
One Wednesday evening, when Top of the Pops was being broadcast instead of on Thursday, I was rather reluctant to go to Cubs, and was more than unusually uncooperative with my father as he tried to help me find my cap, which had disappeared.
Frustrated, he put on his coat and quietly opened the door. I stepped outside into the icy atmosphere wearing only a pair of underpants, and to my horror, he got into his black citroen and drove off. I darted down Esmond Road crying and shouting. My tearful howling was heard by Elisabeth, the 19 year old daughter of Mrs Jankel, the philanthropic Jewish lady whom my mother used to help with the care and entertainment of Thalidomide children. Helen Jankel expended so much energy on feeling for others that when my mother tried to get in touch with her in the mid 70s, she seemed too exhausted to be enthusiastic and quite understandably for Mrs O'Brien her cleaning lady and friend for the main part of her married life had recently been killed in a road accident. I remember that kind and beautiful Irish lady, her charm, happiness and sweetness, she was the salt of the earth. She threatened to "ca-rrown" (crown) me...when I went away to school...if I wrote her not...
Elisabeth picked me up and carried me back to my house. I immediately put on my uniform as soon as Margaret had gone home, left a note for my Pa, and went myself to Cubs. When Pa arrived to pick me up, the whole ridiculous story was told to Akela, Baloo and Kim, much to my shame.
Snapshot 3
The year was 1963, the year of the Beatles, of singing yeah, yeah in the car, of twisting in the playground, of "I'm a Beatlemaniac, are you?"
That year, I was very prejudiced against an American boy Robert Graham who later became my friend. I used to attack him for no reason at all, like a dog does, just to assert my superiority. One day, he gave me a rabbit punch in the stomach and I made such a fuss that my little girlfriend Nevine wanted to escort me to the safety of our teacher Mademoiselle Brachet, hugging me, and kissing me intermittently on my forehead, eyes, nose, cheeks. She forced me to see her:
"Carl didn't do a thing," said Nevine, "and Robert came up an gave him four rabbit punches in the stomach".
Robert Graham, pronounced in French like Gramme the unit of weight, and that's how I used to refer to this new boy, was not penalised, for Mademoiselle Brachet knew what a little demon I was, no matter how hurt and innocent I looked, tearful, with my tail between my legs.
Snapshot 4
By the end of '63, I was frequently involving myself in arguments with people who tried to say that some secondary Beat combo or another was destined to swamp the Beatles. No, I disagreed. Only one new group truly roused my interest, though not immediately for I was disappointed by a rough and sullen performance of "Not Fade Away" on Top of the Pops, having heard so much about the Rolling Stones. Public opinion, however, swayed me, and discussing Pop music at the end of '64 with some of the new breed of English roses with their mini-skirts, kinky boots and Marianne Faithfull tresses or Twiggy crops, the Rolling Stones were my new favourites. I loved the martyr Mick, bathed in light with surly, ever-defiant lips, surrounded by his frenzied slaves.
Snapshot 5
Bedford Park was a semi-Bohemian, artistic quarter of London on the outskirts of a rough district of the western suburbs, Acton. Therefore, my boyhood surroundings were half Boheme and half hoodlum. The hoodlum influence was stronger than the artistic, which could account for the frequent street feuds, stone and stick and dirt fights that took place, and the day I stole magazines out of my neighbours' letterboxes, and mutilated them, before putting them back, and the day I informed my best friend's mother, from one end of the street to the other that "Robert was a _______ _______". Those words caused a long and furious confrontation to take place between Robert's mother and mine on the doorstep of our house...
Frightful day, which I regret...even to this one...
Late 1950s
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Wed, Jul 2nd - 10:09PM
4 Gambolling Baby Boomers
Introduction
"Gambolling Baby Boomers", the first of a series of seventies-themed pieces, tells how I came to be conditioned by my environment in the early 1970s after leaving Pangbourne College, a traditional British public school of military kind situated near the little Thameside village of Pangbourne in Berkshire. I'd been a boarder there between about the 9th of September 1968 and the last day of the summer term, 1972. It was first published as "Genesis of a Gentleman" at Blogster.com on the 10th of March 2006. In July 2007, it was subject to further minor variations, which persisted until the April of the following year.
The Nautical College, Pangbourne
Pangbourne was founded in 1917 as Pangbourne Nautical College, originally preparing boys aged ca. 13 to 18 to be officers in the Merchant Navy, and then the Royal Navy.
I joined in September 1968 as Cadet Carl Halling RNR. I was only 12 years old, making me probably the youngest serving officer in the entire Royal Navy at the time. The college was still known by its original title of the Nautical College Pangbourne, but by 1969 this had been abbreviated to Pangbourne College. However, the boys retained their officer status and spent much of their time in full naval officers' uniform. What's more, naval discipline continued to be enforced, with Pangbourne providing the hardships both of a military college and a traditional English boarding school. In 1996, she became fully co-educational.
The Pangbourne I knew had strong links to the Church of England, and so was marked by regular if not daily classes in what was known as Divinity, morning parade ground prayers, evening prayers, and compulsory chapel on Sunday morning. If you missed any of these you would have been seriously punished, although not necessarily with the cane. I was however beaten on numerous occasions although with never more than four cuts, or swishes of the cane. I was heavily disciplined from my very first term in fact; but I'd like to go on record as saying that I'm indebted to Pangbourne for the values it instilled in me if only unconsciously. They were after all the same values that once made Britain strong and great; and yet, by the time I joined Pangbourne, they were under siege as never before by the so-called counterculture. While failing to fully understand the implications of the cultural revolution of the late 1960s, I passionately celebrated its consequences, and took to my heart many of its icons both artistic and political, Che Guevara being a special idol of mine for a good amount of time.
This Glam Rock Nation
In the summer of 1972, it was mutually decided between my poor dad and those directly responsible for me at Pangbourne that I leave after a year in the fifth form and four years in the college itself.
My parents, brother and I had moved to a largely working class suburb some dozen miles from the centre of London at the turn of the decade, which made me something of a fish out of water once I was finally freed from Pangbourne. After all, I was no longer either in west London where I grew up, nor at the boarding school that had been my whole world for four long years and where I'd formed some of the deepest friendships of my life.
1972 could be said to be the year in which the seventies really began as the excitement surrounding the alternative society and its happenings and be-ins and love-ins and free festivals and so on started to fade into recent history. As for me, I couldn't wait to get to grips with the dismal new decade even if for the first two years, I'd despised the rise of the new commercial chart Pop and its teenybop idols. I was of the school of Hard and Progressive Rock...Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Yes and so on. But I was changing. For better or worse, this was going to be my decade. In late '72, I saw former Bubblegum band the Sweet on a long-forgotten teenage programme called "Lift off with Ayesha", and with all the passion of a recent enemy I fell in love with their new tacky camp image, all eye-shadow and silver stack-heeled boots. Several months later a certain Rock chameleon appeared on the chat show Russell Harty Plus in January 1973 with his eyebrows shaved off and my devotion to the strange culture taking over the land making even former skinheads want to look like Charlie George or some other flash dressing hard man became total. So many popular songs of the era were like football chants set to a stomping Glam Rock beat. It was was the golden age of the long-haired boot boy and every street seemed to me to be pregnant with menace in this Glam Rock nation, as if the spirit of Weimar Berlin with its unholy mix of violence and decadence had been resurrected in stuffy old England. It was a terrible time to be young; but I of course loved it, lapped it up.
In late '72 I was launched by my dad on an intensive hothouse programme of self-improvement. I studied various martial arts at the Judokan in Hammersmith, west London. Among my fellow students were shaggy-haired hard cases who may have been influenced by the prevailing fashion for all things eastern, what with the cult of Bruce Lee and so on. Some of them had feather cuts. I also went to swimming classes at a local baths. I had a fierce crush on one of my fellow swimmers, she looked a bit like a Skin girl with her cute short haircut, but my heart wasn't in the swimming, and one of the teachers told me so, wondering why I was wasting my time even turning up. She had a point. I learned how to play basic Rock guitar from Gary Verth, a kindly soft-spoken man who taught Rock guitar from his little house near the Thames in suburban Surrey, and who looked so square with his short back and sides and baggy dad-style trousers; but he loved his Rock'n'Roll. He taught me the basis of the Rock solo, which involved going up and down the Blues scale in whatever key you chose. I was as lazy as they came, but I probably learned more from that man about the guitar than anyone, with the possible exception of a Pangbourne friend called Steve, whose songs I stole with their simple chord progressions...C, A minor, F, G and back again to C and so on. And then there was Deep Purple's "Black Night", whose simple bluesy riff I'd once played to a pal at Pangbourne, at which point the kid turned to whoever else was present and announced something: "Hey guys, we've got a natural here!". Also through home study and with the help oflocal private tutors I set about making up for the fact that I'd left school early at 16 with only two GCE (General Certificate of Education) exams to my name; at ordinary level, of course, which is why they were called "O" levels. Then in late '72 I joined the London Division of the Royal Naval Reserve as an Ordinary Seaman, attending classes once a week on HMS President on the Embankment. At some point soon after this, some of the older ratings, Able Seamen perhaps, or Killicks (Leading Seamen) made some remarks about my looks, implying that I was the new shipboard pretty boy or something. I think this came as a surprise to me, but I was flattered rather than offended, as if a seed of narcissism had somehow become implanted within me in late adolescence. The effect this had on my healthy development as a normal male human being must surely have been disastrous.
The Innocence of pre-Movida Spain
The dreamy, introspective aspect of my nature became increasingly marked in 1972-73, and I fantasised about fame and adulation as Rock or movie star as never before, and so throughout '73 built an image based on one of my greatest Glam Rock idols, spiking my hair like him, and then even peroxiding it at some point. Given this over-refinement, I didn't really fit in in my new home town at first, unlike my brother who was far more suited to the area with his strong London acccent and laddish ways, and he wasted little time in becoming part of a local youth scene. However, I came into my own in Spain, or rather Santiago de la Ribera on the Mar Menor near Murcia, where the family had been vacationing since about 1968. I think it was towards the end of my summer '73 holiday that I finally started to be noticed in a big way by the local youth, most from either Murcia or Madrid, and so la Ribera became vital to me in terms of my becoming a social being among members of both sexes. A group of us became very close and remained so for four summers running. Spain was such a sweet and friendly nation back then in the relatively innocent early seventies, and the youth of La Ribera as happy and carefree as I imagine southern Californians would have been in the pre-Beatles sixties. It was really a great time, and probably signalled the start for me of a lifelong love affair with the Spain and the Spanish people, indeed with Latin and continental Europe as a whole.
In the early 1970s, everything seemed to be mine for the knowing, for the tasting, for the taking. It was a time of constant, frenetic change and I greedily eyed the fruits of a revolution that had been all but bloodlessly waged on my behalf in the sixties. I was soon to feast on them...never once considering the welfare of those fated to follow in my wake, to come to maturity in a world in which baby-boomers like me had lately gambolled like so many senseless, sensuous fauns. Pity their poor souls.
Pangbourne, 1972. Photo: Peter Kingsford.
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Wed, Jul 2nd - 10:08PM
5 Innocence in Hamburg
Introduction
"Innocence in Hamburg", the second piece in a series of seventies-themed writings takes place in 1973 and 1974 in a variety of locations. Among these are London and its suburbs, the French city of Bordeaux, Murcia's Costa Calida, and the port of Hamburg, current capital of the German province of Schleswig-Holstein. It was first published (at Blogster) on the 26th of March 2006 as "A Dandy in the Land of Blue Denim 1". Allowing for further minor corrections, a final version was published at the blog.co.uk website in January 2008.
Toilers of the Thames
1973 was the year of my first voyage as an Ordinary Seaman with the RNR onboard the minesweeper HMS Thames. Late in the summer it set out for Bordeaux in Gironde in the south west of France. 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. Although Colin and I already knew each other quite well by the beginning of the trip. Even more recently, another good RNR friend Taffy, who sailed with us to La Rochelle via 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. On with the story. I also became quite friendly with one of the most unlikely pair of cronies I ever came across in the RNR or anywhere else. One half of the partnership was Jimmy, a tough-talking but essentially kind-hearted working class loner and ladies' man of about 23 who was rumoured to be a permanent year-long resident of HMS Thames. The other was a far older man, possibly in his mid thirties, but just as wildly convivial as Jim even though he boasted the super-posh accent and patrician manner of a City 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 pathetically effete sailor in the civilised world. 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. 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 queen 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 savagely heckled. At one point she turned her attention to me, or rather I think it was me. I was trying to hide at the time, it being one of those rare occasions when 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. Myopia 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?", the cross-dresser might have 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 time earlier, he'd performed the theme from "William Tell" on his facial cheeks while I held the mike for him. I'm not certain whether he ever appeared as a musician in public again, but he was certainly a star that night.
A Dandy in the Land of Blue Denim
Back onshore, I resumed my growing passion for louche and shady music, art and culture. Some time in 1974, however, 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 eras and particularly the twenties and thirties. At some point in '74, 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 Fitz had done. I also built 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 I became more and more entranced by the continental Europe of recent times, and specifically its leading cities, as beacons of revolutionary art; and of style, luxury and dissolution. Certain key eras became very special to me, such as the 1890s, known as the Yellow Decade in England, and the Mauve in the US, Belle Epoque Paris, Jazz Age New York, and 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.
Take to the Sky
It was while I was sitting Spanish "O" level in June 1974 in central London that I became deeply infatuated with a pretty slim Dutch girl called Maria. She didn't look Dutch, in fact, with her tanned complexion and long dark brown hair, she was Meditteranean in 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 would 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 a week or thereabouts, 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 have 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 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. All this was to 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. During the Movida, Spain set about sophisticating itself to the extent that on 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'd become so intimidatingly cool, 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 the dashing 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.
An Innocent in Hamburg
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.
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Name: Carl Halling
