Goldsmiths College, as it then was
SOME anniversaries bring you up short. That can’t be right, you think. Looking back to 1975 is like that for me.
Once on a distant day a car drove from Cheadle Hulme to Lewisham in South East London. That car contained a young man about to turn 19, his parents and, if flickering memory holds true, one grandmother.
My luggage included a classical guitar, new pots and pans, and a small stainless steel teapot bought for me by the accompanying grandmother; that teapot always did spill but was treasured for years. More treasured was the guitar. The neck broke a long time later in a house in York I never knew I’d live in, with a woman I’d yet to meet, alongside three children who were but specks on the horizon.
As to the delights of having a granddaughter, oh, look I’m an insecure young man who walks around with the Times Literary Supplement sticking out of his pocket, on full show, so don’t expect me to think that far ahead. I have important posing duties to perform, beer to drink, friends to make, my virginity to lose.
The car went up the road to turn round, and by the time my family returned to say goodbye I’d hurried inside to see what this new life held. A lapse my mother was to mention more than once. Some lessons take a while to learn. Many years later, having dropped our eldest off at university, my wife and I drove to a grotty service station where we snivelled over cups of bad coffee, before continuing our journey home.
Yes, by some quirk of time, by a tear in the space-time continuum, it is 50 years since I went to university. In those days you couldn’t look up space-time continuum on Google to check its meaning. It was before computers, long before smart phones too, and a coin-box phone with a queue was your only link to home.
Again using what is available now but wasn’t then, I can see that Margaret Thatcher was elected leader of the Conservative Party in 1975; the Vietnam War ended; the first oil was pumped from the North Sea. Fawlty Towers and The Good Life were on the BBC. And…
Oh, you know, this doesn’t really help. Better perhaps to summon up the past as it seems from this distance. I did not keep a diary, so there is no record of the daily scratch and tick, just the swirls.
I’d rarely been to London before going there as a student. There was a school trip when we were advised not to stand too close to cars in case they blew up (true story, or so my memory insists).
For three years I studied English Literature at Goldsmiths College in New Cross, an institution now known as Goldsmiths, University of London. It’s fair to say those years shaped me or misshaped me or something. My newspaper life included ten years on the South East London Mercury, long since deceased, just round the corner from Goldsmiths.
A lifelong love of reading was cemented at that time, and I ended up working with words, wrote a few novels, and have never stopped pushing one word up against another to see what sound or shape is made.
Music was important then, a signifier, something to hide behind or argue about. Google tells me that Peter Gabriel left Genesis in 1975. In that student hall I used to be rude about Genesis, never having been a fan unlike so many others there. This was perhaps a bit of a nerve from a lover of the Grateful Dead, but in mitigation I would plead Elvis Costello, Joan Armatrading, Van Morrison, Ry Cooder and others.
Danny Thompson
Solid Air by John Martyn remains my favourite album, released two years earlier. By a quirk of timing, the brilliant double bass player Danny Thompson, who features on the album, has just died, aged 86.
According to his obit in the Guardian, Thompson, who was a member of the folk band Pentangle, formed with Martyn what the writer Mark Cooper called “a notorious double act as they slurred their way between sentimental tenderness and barely camouflaged rage”.
The hall where we lived, watched occasional episodes of Doctor Who, and listened to Henry play the piano was formed from three or four terraced houses. It’s not there now, although a small unfurnished one-bedroom flat in that road can be had for £1,650 a month, according to a local estate agent.
We used to trek up the hill to the heath, walk to Greenwich and a favourite pub. Or go past Greenwich Theatre, where I ended up reviewing plays in my Mercury days.
Many friends were made at that hall and at the university. Mostly they drifted to wherever it was we all ended up. Some died too young, including my great pal John. I speak to one cherished friend every Christmas, another lives in the US but we met in a pub in York a while back, another is in contact occasionally on Facebook.
It is a cliché of the interviewer’s art to ask someone what they would tell their younger self. Kirsty Young has even spun a BBC radio series from that query.
If I play that trick on myself, I’d answer – oh, don’t worry there are plenty of other people to be critics on the Guardian or to write the television column in the Observer. Others will write those great novels. You’ll still fill most days with what you want to do. You will fail sometimes and succeed at others; you will be great, you will be OK, you will be mediocre, you will be who you are and not who you thought you wanted to be. You’ll be a husband, father, grandfather.
Yes, you – you with the Jimi Hendrix hair and a copy of the TLS sticking out of your jacket pocket for everyone to see.
It is strange how clearly you remember what happened 50 years ago, unless, of course, I have the details wrong. Perhaps someone from the dim distance will point out any errors.