50 Years (My Brain Hurts A Lot)

50 Years (My Brain Hurts A Lot)

Trending on Twitter recently was ‘the worldwide phenomenon known as The Hum’. An inexplicable low-pitched sound that only some people can hear and which causes them physical and mental distress.

I had forgotten, but I believe I also heard it – or something very similar –at least twice in my childhood. For me, it was a more high-pitched, continuous and persistent tone.

The first time I experienced it was in the early 1960s, at the height of Cold War paranoia. I was out playing with my friends when I was stopped in my tracks by a loud, distinctive signal. As clear as an air raid warning, which I had also heard being tested in recent times. At first I was puzzled, then afraid. Was it the 4 minute warning?

My friends humoured me and obviously thought I was play acting.

It stopped as suddenly as it began, but not for several minutes. The Bomb never dropped.

The second time I can place more accurately as being in May 1966, when I was staying at my grandma’s house while my mother was in hospital.

I was left on my own for a few hours while grandma went to her part time cleaning job.

The Hum began when I was amusing myself in the back garden. Again, it began suddenly and I recognised it straight away. (Which implies there must have been other occasions I don’t recall as clearly.) This time, I wasn’t afraid. But the sound carried on and on, without wavering. Even when I went indoors, it continued undiminished. And still it went on and on and on.

I remember laying in the floor, cuddling my grandma’s dog, thinking it was going to drive me mad. Like those torture scenes in spy movies.

But eventually it stopped and I blithely got on with being a young boy, knowing it would be pointless trying to tell anybody.

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Another recent trend was the 50^th anniversary of Ziggy Stardust.

At the beginning of 1972, I was 16 years old and had not long dropped out of secondary school. The study of English, Pure Mathematics and Economics at A Level was no longer of interest to me, if it ever had been.

Academically, I had always performed well at school and consistently scored in the top 3 of my class at exam time. Having gained 9 O Level passes the previous year, there was some assumption that I would go on to study at University.

But whose assumption was it?

My family was unashamedly working class. I didn’t know anyone with a white collar job. The highest qualification held by some of my relatives was a driving license.

I’m not sure my parents knew what to make of me: a quiet, shy, bookish boy with no interest in sports who liked to draw spaceships and monsters and superheroes, and who had started to write stories of his own devising, rather than for homework.

No mention was made of university. No discussion was held about a career. Just the occasional nudge to get a job.

My teachers were hopeless. Having passed the 11 Plus, I went to a Grammar school. But in 1970, it merged with 2 Secondary Moderns to become a Comprehensive. And somehow transformed overnight into something reminiscent of Lord of the Flies.

In the ensuing chaos, I slipped through the cracks and became a dropout, for the want of pastoral care.

While skulking at home, lacking direction, ambition and any sort of clue, I completed writing my first full length work of fiction. Not a book, but certainly a novella. And like any other piece of juvenilia, it was a mash-up of all my contemporary influences: Glam Rock, 2001 A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange and Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion, to name the most obvious.

The ‘hero’ was a rock star who, at the height of his fame, decided to withdraw from the world and lock himself away with his girlfriend in his London penthouse. The streets below descended into gang violence and anarchy as society collapsed. But that’s enough spoilers.

His name was Jonathan Kopek and he became my alter ego, in fiction at least. My personal Ziggy.

For years afterwards - as I succumbed and got ‘a proper job’, eventually emerged from my shell and found a girlfriend, left home, married, had children, etc – I lived an alternative life in the Kopek Continuum.

So this year is also his 50^th anniversary, which is an apt time to compile all his peradventures into a single narrative.

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