Scourge of Britain’s youth

Routine: Masquerades, Barry there with his girlfriend (“I’ve got to go now” whenever he sees her alone).

Afterwards, Del and John finally went round to Broad Street and Lee, Lindsey, Stu and I went along too. Del and John subjected Barry to an hour-long verbal assault for his association with Jason and co. and his indifference towards what Turney kept referring to as his ‘true friends.’ I kept quiet, listening to the pointless wrangling and quite enjoying it. Then we all retired to Maynard Gardens to watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween III on Ian’s video. 


Endless afternoons and evenings at Westdorgan Road—TV, kitchen, collective apathy, Boredom with a capital B. More drugs tonight after Maynard Gardens—the scourge of Britain’s youth. 


I’m tired. My eyes are heavy and my mind isn’t feeling up to much. The effort required to put thoughts into words is too great at this late hour. I find myself rereading things I wrote a year ago and looking back regretfully at the ease with which I seem to have lost a whole way of thought/writing.

It’s slipped away.

I am £80 overdrawn, with £50 in the Building Society, and another £70 on my limit at the bank available. Here I am, 20, time flying by. Two years is such a long time at 16 but now, it goes before I’m even ready to savour the moment.

Enemies of the state

In Watermouth again at ten last night after a nine-hour coach journey enlivened only by the Pakistani man in front of me crouched miserably on his seat being sick into a plastic bag, the contents of which then leaked out across the floor much to the muttered, eyes-averted disgust of an elderly couple opposite.

Jeremy and Lee had traveled down on Monday night but I didn’t call at Maynard Gardens. Lindsey was in when I got back to Westdorgan Road and she filled me in on all that’s happened while I was away.

Susie is preparing to leave for Germany on October 7th; Stu is still away; John Turney is in Greece (Shelley and her sister too); Barry’s band Enemies of the State (snigger) are preparing for their debut at the Chelsea on Friday—Jason is still with them, ego bigger than ever; Lindsey is still working at the housing office and the Admiral, and Barry works at the Frigate now. Del Caraway isn’t coming to Watermouth this autumn after all. He’s still convalescing at home in Milton Keynes. Gareth is still in Peterborough.

This afternoon I called round at Gaveston Street after meeting Lindsey at the Frigate and getting slightly drunk. Paula and Barry were playing chess when I knocked on the window.

Barry told me about the band, showed me the posters advertising their debut and he claims they may even get to support New Order when the latter play at Medusa’s. Ade called round later, and Jason too, and I left at 5.30 to walk on Stoneways Road to see if Mo was in; I walked all the way back when she wasn’t.

Lindsey says that Pete has written Mo a letter from Plotinus and that he and Guy and someone else from Watermouth are sticking together and grumbling about everything. I got back to Barry’s at 6.45 and he and I went to play pool in the Chelsea.

Jeremy and Lee called round after we’d got back; Lee says that Alex is back with a £400 fine hanging over him, which he must pay off at the rate of ten pounds a week. ‘My’ room is currently being occupied by the bald Belsenite and Gav’s brother. Oh, and Ian caught hepatitis in Marrakech.

Barry, Jeremy, Lee, Paula, Elaine and I met Lindsey in the Green Man at eight and went to the Chelsea for more pool. Jeremy seemed out of things and ill at ease, but he and L. came along to L.A.’s Roxy night and we all had big laughs at the phallic jugs and pictures of naked he-men generously displayed behind the bar, no doubt appearing very ‘provincial’ in our reactions. . . .

Masquerade

A fruitless and half-defeated-to-begin-with search for work. I called in at the Job Centre down East Street and the one down Milton Street, scanning the ‘positions vacant’ boards with a resigned, unhopeful eye.

In the evening I got pissed with Pete and Lee at Masquerades, Pete, in the full grip of alcohol enthusiasm, suddenly deciding to go up to Easterby with Lee on Thursday. John Turney was there and we had a long conversation about Easterby, he just having returned, filled with Whincliffe Strangler, Lockley, and Volunteer Inn memories.

The hacienda must be built

In the afternoon Lee and I hitched across the Pennines.

Dad gave both of us a lift up to the top of Debdenshaw Road to the beginning of the A64. We made sure we were standing in front of the motorway sign and stuck our thumbs out. A car stopped almost immediately, the driver a thin faced balding man, puffing on a cigarette. I thought him a little stupid for stopping right in the slow lane of the slip-road and not pulling over, but climbed in happy to have a lift so quickly.

No sooner had we set off again than there was a police car, ordering us to pull over. I recognised the driver immediately as Mr. Harding, our next-door neighbour at Wintersett Crescent ten years ago. He didn’t seem to recognise me at first. The car driver was taken and given a long talking to in the police Range Rover before he was released, sullen and obviously annoyed, to tell us that it was our turn for the slapped wrist treatment. Mr. Harding told us that there could have been a fatal accident: he’d seen five cars come round the corner in the time it had taken us to climb in, and two of these had had to swerve to avoid a collision. He’d done the driver of the car on several counts—driving without due care and attention, stopping on a dual carriageway etc. I felt sorry that we’d caused this innocent bloke so much trouble.

When I gave Mr. Harding my name, slowly the realisation dawned in his face that he knew me and he turned around with an “Ohhh Paul!” He said I’d made him feel bad, and although he toyed with the idea of letting us off with a caution he decided he couldn’t take the risk and so reported us. We might get away with it, but if we do get done then Lee, as a second-time offender, could be fined £50.

Lee was quite pissed off by his bad luck and the possibility of such a large fine. Harding gave us a lift in the Range Rover to the next service station. I was quite blasé about the whole thing, apart from concern over Mum’s inevitable over-reaction and the ensuing worry she’ll suffer.

We got a lift into Debdenshaw after about ten minutes cold wait and were dropped about two miles outside the city centre and walked the rest of the way, through a predominantly Jewish area part of the way. Lee and I both felt quite despondent as we trailed around the busy streets.

Barry finally turned up in his Dad’s yellow Capri. Doug was with him. Barry’s parents are in Venice for a Christmas holiday and when we got back to the Duckworth household only his 17-year old sister Claudia was in. They live in an enormous house full of cherubs—incorporated into the lamp fittings, cherubs holding up glass coffee tables, cherubs swinging from the ceiling lights, masses of white sheepskin everywhere (rugs, chair covers . . .), acres of the stuff in every room, red and pink décor and Romanesque divans . . . The entire effect was one of kitsch decadence, a small-time recreation of Baroque splendour which didn’t quite hit-it-off.

Guy rang at around six and Barry picked him up in the Capri. Guy too had hitched up & had come primarily for the Hacienda in Manchester  and a meeting with a few friends of his. I didn’t say much to him and he seemed to be very remote in a thorny, cynical kind of way. Barry’s RCP friend Patrick and a few other people rolled up.

Free tickets for the Hacienda were produced and so that’s where we went for the evening.

The Hacienda was quite impressive, a large converted warehouse decked out in austere industrial grey with diagonal black and yellow stripes. We sat and watched the videos playing on the large screens at either end of the club, smoked the ready rolled joints Barry had brought along or played video games . . . nothing special.

How hard it is to really know anyone in this life

What have I done today? Very little.

I got up at two and sat about idly, winding Pete up most of the day. . . . I’ve done no reading lately and I’ve quite let work and other things slip. I started off the term well but things have deteriorated.

I’ve got to read the 200-odd pages of Hermsprong for tomorrow at eleven a.m., but it’s nearly half-ten already and I’m only on page 26 and so I may have to stay up all night.

Barry has gone to Masquerades by himself. Earlier today he went round to see the girl he met at the Cellar and she and her friends are going to the club tonight too, so Barry once again sets out with raised hopes. Ade returned today to tell us his “love life is just about going again”; he’s in Barry’s room listening to records.

I keep pretending both to myself and to others that at the end of the year I’m going to shave my head and give up all drugs and drink, but I should realise that this would require more mental resolution and effort than I’m capable of . . . Why would I want to do this?. . .

It’s not important.

I still can’t decide about America—I wish I could make up my mind. I can’t even answer this simple question, so what hope for me? Decisions! Current financial position: £104 overdrawn . . . I look at Grant’s poems and they make me think how hard it is to really know anyone in this life.

This diary says so little. No doubt there are innumerable thoughts and passing shades of mood that have touched me and marked the last two days, but my words have such limited power against the great yawning gulfs of time they strive to combat. One day when I read these words again I’ll curse my lack of skill at fleshing out these transitory moments. What’s clear now won’t be when the surrounding chaff of living and peripheral thoughts have been swallowed up by the years.

This narrative is dull and uninspired because I’m a bit drunk on the whisky Mo brought back from London as her payment towards rent.

The zone

I handed in my essay, written up and altered and discovered that only one person had done the reading for Black Americans anyway. I bought Throbbing Gristle’s Second Annual Report at the mini-market (first side played backwards) and afterwards I met Lindsey and Susie in the library coffee bar.

We met up with Barry and Guy and went to the Cellar for something to eat, and then L., S. and I went into Watermouth; we had to make an effort. Lindsey and I ended up at Dizzy’s, a disco at The Zone—½ price drinks until eleven thirty—and we met Alex who was acting as doorman. Ian and Mick were inside too.

Ian came across to talk to us for a few minutes; he and Lee are holding a performance in the crypt of a demolished church near Blenheim Place a fortnight today. I was supposed to go with aforementioned to said crypt at one, but I didn’t get up until half-past.

After a couple of pretty uninspired hours at the disco L. and I left and I walked the mile or so home.

Soul-boy

We went out to the pub (The Quayside). Barry, Susie, Lindsey and I ended up at a depressing soul-boy disco near The Oasis.

Mix

During the afternoon, Barry, Ade and Christian Kemp, a bassist who Mo knows, had a jam together in the common room of Toynbee Hall. It sounded very muddy, not as ‘clean’ a sound as on the tapes Barry had brought down at the start of term. Barry was fairly disappointed with the results and thought that Christian’s bass-playing was crap.

In the evening Pete and Mo and I left for Shelley’s flat on Prince’s Way and she cooked us a meal, a mash of potato and chicken with onion sauce, rice and peas.

We were ushered in by Shelley's effusive flat-mate David and found her slaving away in the kitchen; her other flat-mate Jack was squatting in a chair, bearded, silent, and more intense than the blustering friendliness and chat of David. Jonathan, the fourth member of the household was away. Their house has a pretty impressive sitting room and thru bedroom, but the upstairs is comparable in size and condition to ours; they’re paying £25 per week. David left to buy some booze, Lindsey and Susie turned up, David returned, and we ate.

Afterwards we all caught either the bus or taxi up to the University for the much-publicized “Club Mix” in Blair Peach Hall (where Hendrix once played, according to popular legend). I forked out my £1 to get in and the very first person I saw was Del; since they left Watermouth, he and John Turney have spent time in Bristol, Newport and Reading, and returned to find a house, which they’ve done apparently.

John was already chatting up some blonde girl. Barry and Guy were there too. We had another good night out getting pissed and dancing along with a few hundred others. I felt rotten afterwards and so I made myself throw up by sticking my fingers down my throat. We got back and pissed about with fireworks before going to bed.

Idiot boy

Masquerades beckoned again in the evening. Lee came round while I was on campus rushing off notes for tomorrow’s tutorial on Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads.

We all had a great time and there were about twenty or so people there I knew – Lee, Barry, Pete, Guy, Shelley, Lindsey, Susie, Miles, Fabian, etc., etc., etc. . . .

Lee came back and kipped on my floor overnight.

Hexen definitive

I was up early and Ade and Pete and I drove into campus, to find the University in the grip of a hostage drama. Gunmen had raided the Barclay's Bank near the Mace and got away with £150,000, leaving a ‘bomb’ strapped to a security man’s chest.

We went down to the Tuesday mini-market and I spent £9 on a couple of jazz albums and an LP by Dome, which I’ve been playing a lot since. Even Barry likes it. I also bought a pair of black fatigues for £4.

In the evening Lee, Lindsey, Liddy, Barry, Pete, Stu and I went to see The Fall at Livingstone’s on the seafront, near the Aquarium. Barry and I met Liddy and Lindsey at The Lord Raglan and Lee, Pete and Stu in the club. Livingstone’s is a small place, along the lines of The Wavezz Club in Easterby with a bar area that separates the building into one large and one small room. The bands played in the former, a low-ceilinged room with chairs and tables around its perimeter & no stage.

The support band was a three-piece all-female band from America and were crap and unoriginal in a monotonous, noisy, unskillful and boring way. Everyone sat down for their set, but as soon as The Fall appeared we all stood up and crushed forward, so that only Mark E.’s lank hair and gaunt face could be spied through the forest of heads. They played “English Scheme” off Grotesque, “Ludd Gang,” “Hexen Definitive,” and a whole lot of other things I’ve never heard before, and they played their new single “Kicker Conspiracy” for an encore. They were pretty good, although not as impressive as at Camden last May, and the people leaping about and pogo-ing right in front of me were annoying.

I think Lee found it a bit tedious and towards the end of the set he disappeared and went and sat down. Liddy felt sick and left early.

Dexys

It’s ten p.m. and I've just about recovered from the excesses of last night. Barry, Lindsey, Susie, Stu, Guy, Ade and Gareth and I—Gareth back after a couple of week’s seclusion through illness—went as usual to Masquerades. For once, Masquerades was crowded and I got drunk and took four small yellow pills—dexys—which Gareth got for six of us for 35p each from a couple of contacts of his.

We got back home at about two-thirty in the morning and one of those classic ‘peak’ experiences ensued. The effects of the pills had taken hold in a very subtle and undramatic way, but perhaps this was only because I was drunk when I took them.

We settled in Barry’s room and the talking began. Conversations raged at blistering pace on all sides, or rather monologues, for we directed long streams of words at one another, only shutting them long enough to let the other person speak, waiting until they stopped so we could begin the stream again. Guy and I talked at each other for four or five hours in an inspired way about school and family—Guy said he was “ecstatically happy,” and I was going through a great ‘Yea-saying’ explosion of optimism and excitement and felt so full of potential that I could only be happy. A delusion, but a good delusion to have nonetheless. Oh to feel so full and intense every minute of every day. Maybe I was glimpsing a higher plane of existence?

I kept going at a relentless pace all through the night. We carried on drinking too, constantly passing around a bottle of whisky Mo bought us as her contribution towards rent. Pete got up and joined us but eventually, after he’d slipped away back to bed, and as the grey unwelcome light of another day and Responsibility glared weakly through the curtains, the talking stuttered, and finally died all together.

And now we paid for our night of rare delights. Stu crept into my room to rest and the others slid into mumbling weariness. I wasn’t feeling too bad and neither was Guy, but Barry and Stu were suffering “utter hell.” Ade collapsed onto the sofa in the back room—Barry said he couldn’t move. We were almost delirious, cracking weak one-liners and saying ridiculous things, laughing weakly and stumbling into verbal dead ends and illogic. I had a tutorial at 11.30 too, so mid-morning, leaving the others lying down and spent, Guy and I emerged into sunlight like new men.

The world looked different, we were different, separate, removed from the people who had just got up and filled the quiet streets and shops. We were different by virtue of what we’d just gone through. Our secret knowledge set us apart. My stomach felt hollow, my eyes ached and my whole body felt weak. I felt a curious sensation of expectancy, almost like anticipation, as though ‘something’ was about to happen to me. Perhaps because I hadn’t slept the night before lent some significance to the new day, as if the Act of staying awake had been rewarded with a glimpse of a sense of PURPOSE. I walked slightly unsteadily down the road to the hitching spot opposite The Cat and Lizard willing something to happen and Be different, filled with that old yearning for more depth and meaning.

It was chaos getting into Uni. because of a strike by BR men over a sacking. A dozen people were trying to get lifts and the buses sailing past packed full. I got to the tutorial room just in time. There are just two people in my Romanticism tutorial and it seems aimless and without a point. I left thoroughly dissatisfied. Our ‘discussions’ take place in a listless atmosphere. The things we say and the things we do don’t seem to be getting us anywhere or even near to approaching the core of Wordsworth’s experiences and feelings.

There has to be more to the study of Wordsworth than this, I told myself—I know there must be. Still, I couldn’t shake off the hopeless insight that perhaps there wasn’t anything other than what I’d just gone through, just second-hand, abstract intellectualising. I suppose I want to FEEL the emotions and sensations as Wordworth felt them in the raw, but then I suppose too this is just the “idealism of a bourgeois escapist mind” at work and is a fruitless point to make.

I met Susie outside the library and sat in the coffee bar with her. My words spilled out in a haste of enthusiastic talk, and after she had gone I even wandered around the library looking for someone else to talk to. I came home and feel utterly washed out, and so to bed.

No way is noble

Days roll by and I’m at a loss as to whether or not I should chart them in all their mundane detail.

John and Del left this morning to again look for places and were at their lowest ebb yet. The housing situation in Watermouth is worse than ever and John in particular seemed very down.

Ade came back last night from his few days in Bournemouth with a “sore cock” (to use his own words); he and Del and John don’t get along particularly well and after D. and J. left this morning, Ade was still lounging on his mattress in Barry’s room. Someone suggested that the three of them should share an £85 per week house advertised in the Herald, but this met with a poor response from him. I don’t see that he really has the right to refuse at this moment in time.

A feature in today’s Union News claimed that the compulsory year in the States has been scrapped for this year’s 1st year American Studies intake. The Union is fighting it all the way, but it’s obvious that if it’s not scrapped this year, then it will be next year. I’ve got in just in time.

Since last Wednesday at Masquerades, I’ve felt very satisfied with my prospects. It’s quite amazing how cold the Art History idea has become with me, and I think it’s just as well because it would be too late to change now anyway. Guy’s enthusiasm rubbed off on me I think.

Last night Barry, Guy, Lindsey and I went to the opening night of a new club, Roxy’s, held at the L.A., a well-known gay disco. I walked all the way to Shelley’s on Queen’s Road on the seafront but she was out so I trudged all the way back and found the others already there.

Roxy’s was free to get in before eleven; I was ushered in to an elaborate glittering foyer, complete with fountain, and found myself surrounded by a couple of characters who looked as they’d auditioned for a part in The Adams Family. Roxy's was quite impressive inside, with two bars, split level seating and spectacular lighting for the dance floor. It was crawling with the trendy post-punk crowd, crowns of dyed, spiky hair jostling for the attention, black, black everywhere.

I was in black too.

Across from us two seedy and forlorn looking men in tacky suits were deep in animated, intimate conversation. Someone called Guy a hippy, which annoyed him, and after this he was full of contempt for the place and the people. They are just a bunch of very conventional extroverts. “Experimental is conventional, conventional is experimental. And no way is noble.”

This applies to the Sanctuary and Roxy’s gang who’ve substituted the predictable uniformity of a more sophisticated kind for the Farahs and wedge-cut anonymity of the Saturday-nite soul-boy crowd. And the sickening thing is they all believe they’re being so different. “Art is not dictated by what coat you wear.”

I would do well to listen to this and practise what I preach.

The girls who lived at Jervis Terrace over the summer made an appearance, and Miles Beattie raced between us and the dance floor while Barry and one of the girls fell into a long conversation. Barry's band dominates conversation at the moment, and it gets a little tedious listening to their prophecies. Ade was saying when we got back that he “cannot wait” to get up on the stage, and I can see both he and Barry really getting into it.

I’m in the throes of starting several books, among them Colin Wilson’s The New Existentialism and The Magus. I also want to read some more Nietzsche, and the chapter on N. in Lukacs The Destruction of Reason. All this and course work too? Probably not.

The luxury gap

I was up early. Dad dropped me off at Moxthorpe so I could get my hair cut. This done, I walked home and we set off for Nanna B’s.

The weather was again very hot and muggy, too warm for comfort. Nanna B. was unchanged and  quite entertaining, but I sat there feeling uncommunicative, apart, and totally removed from this circle. She fell to reminiscing, reciting school rhymes word perfect from sixty one years previously with all the rush and enthusiasm of a little girl.

She also revealed more tantalising fragments of family history: William John Martindale, my Dad's grandad, committed suicide in Loney’s Dam early one Sunday morning in 1906 following the death of his wife Emily, leaving their three children orphans. Eldest son Ernest grew up to die in WW1, Harold became my granddad and Esther, battered by her husband, died one day in 1926: the incident was hushed up and passed off as meningitis.

N.B. gave me £2 for my birthday and with the empty fussings ringing all around, we left. Dad dropped me in Easterby. It was too warm to move.

Later on in the evening, Dad and I went down to the station to pick up Andrew but his bus was late, leaving Dad and I to wander through the station to the incongruous strains of military music over the PA. Eventually there was that familiar self-conscious half-smile, sliding in aboard the coach. He looked tanned and we settled back into our well-worn ways immediately.

Dad dropped me off at Jeremy’s ½ an hour later than I’d arranged.

We went up for a drink at a noisy crowded Kerforth pub, The Adelphi, which was filled to overflowing with beery affable groups of loud people. Jeremy and I sat inconspicuously on a bench to one side while the crowd swore and laughed and talked and screeched, the girls fashion conscious in the pastel shades of their smart ‘going out’ clothes, the blokes all in jeans, tight T-shirts, white socks and low slung shoes. A handful of Hell’s Angels hung about in the obligatory denim waistcoats, their girls in tow.

Jeremy and I reminisced and bemoaned our lack of a social circle here. He seemed to have limitless resources compared to me and quite happily bought me drinks and kept my glass filled.

By closing time I was in a sloppy mood and as we walked down Whincliffe Road we were intercepted by two flat-capped drunken occupants of a red open-topped Triumph Herald. Jeremy knew one of them. Terry and Kevin were both pissed and, as they said they’d give me a lift home, we clambered into the back of the car and roared off doing eighty at least while I shivered in my thin shirt. Jeremy laughed unbelievingly as we screeched through Farnshaw, a Heaven 17 cassette at full volume, the two in front jeering drunkenly whenever we encountered a lone figure wending his or her way home.

We stopped at the petrol station near Moxthorpe roundabout, and curses were directed at the pale-faced petrol attendant in his glass cubicle. I was persuaded to stay in the car and go down to Jasper’s, an ominous sounding nightspot in Easterby. As we hurtled along the main road I was amazed no one stopped us, for Terry drove like a madman, overtaking on the inside, screeching to a halt at junctions, cursing and laughing as the traffic lights changed on us.

Just beyond Lodgehill he screeched to a halt and threw up over the side of the car. A hundred yards or so further on it happened again, but he drove off right as rain, laughing, spitting and wiping his mouth on the imitation leopard skin steering wheel cover. Somehow we made it to our destination in one piece and Jeremy paid for me to get in.

Jasper’s a typical Easterby night club, the mating game in full swing inside, couples snogging and dancing. We stood about drinking (me on Jeremy’s money) and left after about an hour for a curry up by the poly, where our hosts entertained us with beery bombast.

Kevin enthusiastically described for us in graphic detail his day spent in the shower with his girlfriend Alison. “It were real!” he said, with a raucous laugh. I had a chicken curry and ½ a prawn curry too, and we watched an Indian film on the TV along with the intent, white-coated staff.

At two a.m. we raced back to Egley and I am writing this. . . .