By any standards, Pangbourne College was a deeply Christian school, with regular Divinity classes, daily prayers, and compulsory chapel on Sunday morning. Moreover while at college I was baptised and confirmed as a member of the Church of England under the aegis of the chaplain who was also my Divinity teacher. And yet sadly in '73 whatever faith I had was wholly powerless to prevent me from embarking on a full-blooded quest for earthly experience which began in earnest as I see it in that year. At the same time, surely it can't be wrong to suggest that a seed had been planted.
It was the year of my first trip with the Royal Naval Reserve at 17 years old on the minesweeper HMS Thames, destined as I recall for Bordeaux, during which I fell in with an immensely good-hearted Londoner of about 27, an Ordinary Seaman like me who went on to become one of my best RNR friends. I heard from him only a few years ago by which time he'd become a Chief Petty Officer. I also became friendly with one of the most unlikely pair of boon companions I ever encountered in the RNR, one half, a tough, wild but warm-hearted loner of about 23 who was rumoured as I recall to be a permanent year-long resident of HMS Thames, the other, an older man, possibly in his mid thirties, just as much of a lad as the first, but infinitely more refined and with a cut-glass accent and patrician manner to boot. The younger rating, who was an Able Seaman if I remember aright, was fond of me and took me under his wing, telling me on one occasion something to the effect that I'd be turned into a rough 'n' tough sailor yet, even though we both knew that this was but the remotest possibility, given my justified reputation as a decorative but incompetent adolescent, wholly unsuited to naval life. But I was amusing to the ship's crew, especially after I'd been asked by an officer what I thought of minesweeping, and replied that I considered it a "gas"...or the time when the ship had been prepared for a major manoevre such as a jackstay transfer, and I was found wandering as if in a dream, only to announce that I was taking a stroll...
The crew spent its final night together in a club in what might have been Portsmouth, or Plymouth, wherein a transvestite performer sang cabaret style songs and told bawdy jokes while being remorselessly barracked by the jack tars. At one point, the cross dresser turned to me, or at least I think it was me and trilled something to the effect of: "Ooh, you look pretty, what's your name?", whereupon I could have sworn some of the sailors bellowed back "Skin", this having been the name by which I was known by a few of them.
Back onshore, I persisted with my relentless pursuit of louche glamour, in the shape of the musical stars of Glam Rock, but also increasingly as the seventies went on, flamboyant artists from earlier stages of the Modern Age...poets, playwrights, novelists etc.
Once '73 had turned into '74, I became dissatisfied with seventies Glam which started to seem corny and old hat to me, and turned my attentions instead to what I saw as the more elegant glamour of previous eras, particularly the '20s and '30s, embracing a frenzied nostalgia which persisted throughout '74 and '75, and to a lesser extent thereafter. At some point in '74, I started using hair cream, combing my hair back 1920s style, and sometimes parting it in the middle; and building up a dandiacal new wardrobe. Throughout '74 and '75, some of the sartorial fruits of my new weltanschauung included a Gatsby style tab collared shirt often worn with black and white college-style striped tie, several cravats and neck scarves including a long white one, almost certainly silk, a navy blue Meakers blazer, a fair isle short-sleeved sweater, grey flannel trousers from Simpsons of Piccadilly, white trousers, white shoes, brown and white "correspondant" shoes, fawn raincoat etc. But sometimes, I dressed more casually, for example in tight V neck sweater worn without a shirt, set off by knotted silk scarf, worn at a jaunty angle.
These years were also marked by the birth on my part of a fascinated preoccupation with the continental Europe of recent times, and specifically its leading cities as beacons of revolutionary art, and of style, luxury and dissolution. And certain eras associated with these cities came to hold me increasingly spellbound throughout '74 and '75 and beyond, such as 1890s London, the so-called Yellow Decade, Belle Epoque Paris, '20s New York and London, Berlin in the 1930s, and the artists associated with these epochs.
There were those cutting edge Rock artists who appeared to share my Europhilia, particularly Bryan Ferry whose work with his band Roxy Music was haunted by the languid cafe and cabaret music of Europe's immediate past, and certain of Roxy's followers affected the kind of nostalgic apparel favoured by Ferry himself, but they were rare creatures in mid-seventies London. I wore my bizarre anachronous costumes in defiance of the ubiquity of long hair and hippie-style clothing. By the spring of '74, I'd constructed a defiantly sneering persona to match, although I could still be exceptionally gracious and eager to please to the point of self-effacement.
I'd begun sitting the first of the GCE "O", or Ordinary Level exams I'd failed to take while at Pangbourne in '72 or '73, and continued with them in '74, taking Spanish over the course of a few days in June in central London, and while doing so, became deeply infatuated with a Dutch girl sitting the same exam and with whom I'd established a friendly relationship. I desperately wanted to get close to her and yet despite the bravado I was able to manifest back then in certain situations, found myself hopelessly inhibited in her presence, and so allowed her to walk casually away from me once we'd completed our final paper. Sick with amorousness, I spent several days thereafter haunting the streets of central London in the forlorn hope of encountering her. One time I could have sworn I saw her staring indifferently at me from an underground train, possibly at Gloucester Road, South Kensington or Notting Hill Gate, as the doors closed, but as usual I was powerless to act, and so finally abandoned my absurd quixotic quest.
Later on in the summer I found myself once more in Santiago de La Ribera, a little village on what is known as the Mar Menor or little sea, 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 in La Ribera. Every afternoon, we used to congregate on the jetty facing our apartment on the Mar Menor which was largely deserted it being the time of the siesta, that's myself and my brother Dane, and Spanish friends both male and female, to listen to music and talk and laugh and flirt. To some youthful Spanish eyes, I appeared to be impossibly exotic in those days, coming from London (actually suburban Surrey); while Spain was still relatively sheltered in the years immediately leading up to the death of Franco, but enchanting for all that. All this was to change with Franco's passing, whereupon Spain set about sophisticating itself to the extent that on my last vacation in La Ribera in the summer of '84, even though I'd just come from Paris, I was in awe of the young people rather than the other way around so intimidatingly cool had they become.
Returning to London in late summer '74 with a deep brown tan and hair bleached gold by the sun, and hanging long over my ears and forehead, I created something of a stir on my first day back on HMS President. To begin with I'd been hailed by a Scotsman in late middle age at Waterloo mainline station, which wasn't the bright tourist-friendly station it is today but a far rougher place with its own barber and pub, attracting not a few souls down on their luck for one reason or another. My new friend was an old former jack tar as I recall, and as he was a harmless old salt, making no attempt to act indecently towards me, I was more than happy to converse with him for a while. I even went so far as to agree to a meeting with him the same time the following week, and yet as sweet as he was I had no intention of keeping the appointment, despite his beseechments.
And then onboard HMS President, moored then as today on the Embankment near Temple station, I behaved affectedly in front of some of the older ratings which was unwise to say the least, given that I was due to sail to Hamburg within a matter of hours, and so boarded HMS Thames with freshly shorn locks, and a reputation as an oddball...although I ended the trip on good terms with pretty well everyone.
Once in Hamburg, one of the NCOs, a Chief Petty Officer I think advised me to latch onto a group of older seamen while on leave, for fear of what might happen to me. I duly attached myself to a group of about three or four sailors, and on the first night ashore we set off on a nocturnal voyage into parts of the city such as St Pauli, long given over to the pleasures of seafaring men, with streets, bars, night clubs as I recall characterised by an open licentiousness that stunned me at the time.
On another day we travelled by coach to the pleasant outer suburbs, ending up in a park where I had my picture taken by a reporter to be used in my local newspaper, and where I was accosted by a large group of giggling schoolgirls who breathlessly requested to have their photograph taken with me. On the way back to the ship, one of the tars mentioned that I'd been popular with the teenage Hamburg girls to which another retorted something to the effect of this being due to my distinctly Teutonic appearance. That may have been so, but their simple, unaffected joy of life stood out in stark contrast to the desperate pleasure-seeking that lay only a few miles away, and was all the more beautiful for that very reason.
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