2 The Trumph 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 the Blogster weblog. 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'm getting off the subject...
I also became quite friendly with the most unlikely pair of bosom buddies I ever came across in the RNR or anywhere else. One half was Jimmy, a tough-talking good-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 much of a hellraiser 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 somekind 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 southern city port of Portsmouth - known as Pompey - 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 with cabaret style numbers sung in a comic falsetto, and bawdy jokes told in a deep rich baritone, but the poor man was remorselessly heckled. At one point he turned to me - at least I think it was me...I was wearing glasses at the time and so cowering with shame - and camply trilled something along the lines of: "Ooh...you look pretty, what's your name?". "Skin!" was what some of the sailors bellowed back...this being a nickname I had at the time, perhaps as in "a nice bit of skin" or something...
Some time later, the bearded sailor I'd been sitting next to all night asked me to hold the mike for him while he performed "William Tell" on his facial cheeks. What a star he was...the only trouble being that he had to be half out his mind with booze before he could perform. Not long afterwards he collapsed face down onto the table with an almighty crash from a mixture of drunkenness and exhaustion. I don't think he was the last one to do that either...

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 went on 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 even had the gall to go to a concert at west London's Queen's Park football stadium dressed in striped boating blazer and white trousers, only to find myself surrounded by hirsute Rock fans. 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 in physical appearance, and even had the name to match.
It was probably Maria who came up to 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 an irrational adoration of a girl I barely 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 must have 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.
Only days afterwards I found myself on HMS President, moored then as today on the Embankment near Temple station. This involved 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 approached 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.
Besides, it wasn't long before HMS Thames was on its way to Hamburg, second largest city of Germany and its principle port. Once we'd arrived, one of the Chiefs - as in Chief Petty Officer - warned me not to wander alone in a city he called the armpit of the world, or rather something ruder. I mean me personally, what with the way I looked and all. So I joined up 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.
It was all so different to the quiet outer suburbs where an organised coach trip carried us possibly a day later. 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 pointed out 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 touching 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.
The regular Brooklands Disco was a special event for me. On one occasion early on in a 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 one of my great favourites back then Bebop Deluxe possibly with white silk scarf flailing in the air to frenzied cheers and applause. I just blew everyone away.
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 demented 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 writecreatively. 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 of which have since been destroyed but for a few fragments.
It was through Michael that I came under the spell of the Berlin of the Weimar Republic of 1919 to 1933. After I'd expressed interest in a copy of one of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin novels "Mr Norris Changes Trains", placed prominently in front of me on Michael's writing desk, he excitedy informed me that "Norris" had inspired the 1972 movie version of Kander and Ebb's musical "Cabaret" directed by Bob Fosse, itself somewhat based on the John Van Druten play, "I am a Camera". In fact, while a work of art in its own right written for the screen by Jay Allen, "Cabaret" had been largely informed by Isherwood's only other Berlin story, "Goodbye to Berlin", penned in 1939 but referring to incidents that took place between six to eight years earlier. Seeing "Cabaret" later on that year was a life-transforming experience for me, one of only a handful brought about by a film.
Weimar Republic Berlin has been likened by some cultural critics to the contemporary West, and it could be said that much of what's happened to the West since the end of the second world war was to some degree foreshadowed by the still horrifying decadence of post-war Berlin. Needless to say the Weimar era didn't spring out of nowhere. More than any other nation in the late 18th and early 19th Century Germany, birthplace of Luther and 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 most especially perhaps in Germany. All this contributed to the terribly debilitated condition of Christianity in Germany in the years leading up to and includingthe implementation of the Third Reich in 1933. Ruined by remorseless attacks on the fundamentals of the faith, the German Church of the Weimar and Hitlerian eras was ripe for deception to the point of putrefaction.
By the onset of the '20s, crushed by war debt and blighted by urban violence between mutually hostile extreme right and left wing factions, Germany stood on the precipice of disaster. However, some kind of reprieve came with an increase of affluence in 1923, at which point Berlin's Golden Age began, and she became the undisputed world epicentre of artistic and intellectual foment. Under her auspices, great artistic freedom thrived in the shape of, among other phenomena, the painters of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement such as Beckmann, Dix and Grosz, Berg's ground-breaking opera "Wozzek", as well as the staccato cabaret-style music of Kurt Weill, Fritz Lang's dystopian "Metropolis", the scandalous dancing of Cabaret Queen Anita Berber and so on.
But Weimar Berlin remains best known for its notorious sexual liberalism which still has the power to shock as seen in pictorial and photographic depictions of the cabarets and night clubs in which license and intoxication flourished unabated. Given that several other Western cities in the twenties were hardly less hysterically dissolute than Berlin, it's little wonder that this key Modernist decade has been described by some critics as the beginning of the end of Western civilisation. In its wake came the Second World War, the collapse of the greatest empire in history, and the rise of the Rock'n'Roll youth and drug culture, which could be said to be the very triumph of Western decadence.

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 singlewoman 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, who 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", the OYC was more like a cruise than a trial by water, utilising modern yachts rather than traditional tall ships.
My brother and I were quick to recruit 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 while passing through Calpe, Spain with our parents 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 made it pretty clear she 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've done any night of the week. Self-sabotage was fast becoming a speciality of mine.
A little later on in the summer I sailed with the RNR to La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast of France. 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'd 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 putting the final touches to my toilette in front of a handy mirror when one of the guys I was sharing a dorm with felt it necessary to remind me that I wasn't at a fashion show. He wasn't going to be coming along with me that night to the disco, or any night for that matter, cheeky beggar. But he was right.
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 they left me alone at a Gosport disco, dancing with a pretty girl with short blond curly hair and the unusual name of Shiralee, which just happens to be Indigenous Australian for "burden" or "duty".
Later in the night I escorted Shiralee along a busy main road leading back to Sultan, as she must have lived nearby. Cars sounded their horns as I kissed her good night. What a lad I was, eh. Then 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.
One of the last notable incidents of the year took place in December, when dressed in all-white with a fawn raincoat 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. 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 on 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 strong 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.

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