The Gambolling Baby Boomer

Introduction:

In the course of this work, which I have elected to call an experiment in memoir composition in the form of a novella, I’ve significantly avoided using the names of third parties, but in the cases of those who have been named, at no point – with the exception of those I consider to be public figures, as well as members of my family - did I use their actual names. Rather, their names were changed out of respect for their privacy. At no point have I in any way wished to harm any person or institution during the writing of this work, but should I have inadvertently done so, I will be more than pleased to make the necessary alterations.

Birth of a Rock and Roll Child

I was born Friday 7 October 1955 at the tail end of West London's Goldhawk Road and my first home was in Bulmer Place near Notting Hill Gate.
My brother was born two and a half years later, by which time my parents had bought their own house in Bedford Park in what was then the London Borough of Acton. Built by Norman Richard Shaw, Bedford Park was the world's first Garden Suburb. By the 1880s it was a Bohemian centre for intellectuals and artistic free-thinkers its residents going on to include most famously the great Anglo-Irish poet WB Yeats. The painter Arthur Pinero was another resident; as was the actress Florence Farr, who like Yeats was deeply involved in mysticism.
Some time after the dawn of the next century the area had - significantly perhaps - declined to the extent that bus conductors would shout out "Poverty Park!" when their vehicles stopped on the Bath Road. However, the foundation in 1963 of the Bedford Park Society led first to the government's listing of 356 houses, and then much of the estate becoming part of the Bedford Park Conservation Area. During my boyhood it was still demographically quite mixed, but well on the way to being completely gentrified.
By '63, I'd been at South Kensington’s French Lycée for about four years and my brother (born on the 2cnd of May 1958) had since joined me there. The sixties' social and sexual revolution was already well under way; and yet for all that, seminal Pop groups such as the Searchers and the Dave Clark Five - even the Beatles themselves - were quaint and wholesome figures who fitted in well in a still innocent Britain of Norman Wisdom pictures and well-spoken presenters on the BBC Home or Light Service, of coppers, tanners and ten bob notes, sweet shops and tuppeny chews. It wasn't until the Rolling Stones achieved national infamy that the new Pop they'd first called Beat started to present a serious challenge to the moral establishment of the UK, and so perhaps start to evolve into the far more threatening music of Rock.
On the day I was born - 7 October 1955 - Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad reached the age of 58, and Scottish psychologist RD Laing, 28, while Beat poet Amira Baraka, revolutionary leader Ulriche Meinhof and Falklands hero Major Julian Thompson all hit 21. The future Colonel Oliver North celebrated his 12th birthday, Judee Sill her 13th, Paul Weyrich his 8th, Vladimir Putin his 3rd.
It was a day marked by an event which had a colossal if largely unrecognised influence on the evolution of our culture, when at San Franciso's Six Gallery about 150 people gathered to witness readings of poems by Allen Ginsberg, Phillip Whalen, Phillip Lamantia, Michael McClure and Gary Snyder. All went on to be leading lights of the Beat Generation, as did Jack Kerouac, the shy Canuck from Lowell, Massachusetts, who attended but didn't read, preferring to cheerlead in a state of ecstatic inebriation. His "On the Road" published two years later, and dealing with his wanderings across America with his muse and friend Neal Cassady remains Beat's most famous ever work. After the Six Gallery reading, the Beat movement which had existed in embryonic form since about 1944, left the underground to become an international craze, with the Beatnik taking his place as a universally recognised icon with his beret, goatee beard, turtle-neck sweater and sandals.
1955 was also the year in which Rock and Roll assaulted the mainstream thanks to hits by Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and others, although it's "The Blackboard Jungle", which, released on the 20th of March, is widely credited with igniting the Rock' n' Roll revolution, indeed late 20th Century teenage rebellion as a whole. It did so by featuring Bill Haley & His Comets' "Rock Around the Clock", over the film's opening credits. Originally a rather conventional blues-based song recorded by Sonny Dae and his Knights, Haley's version, which was remarkable for its earth-shaking sense of urgency, ensured the world would never be the same after it. In August Sun Records released a long playing record entitled "Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill", featuring the so-called King of the Western Bop who went on to become Rock's single most influential figure apart from the Beatles.
On the 30th of September, James Dean died in hospital following a motor accident aged 23 after having made only three films, the greatest of which, Nicholas Ray's "Rebel Without a Cause" emerged about a month afterwards. It could be said to be the motion picture industry's defining elegy to the sensitivity and rebelliousness of youth, with Dean its most beautiful and tortured icon ever. As such his image has never dated, nor been surpassed. The modern cult of youth was born in the mid 1950s.
Many theories exist as to how the staid conformist fifties could have yielded as if my magic to the wild Dionysian sixties, some convincing, others less so. For me, if a little leaven is present in a theory for me it leavens, or spoils, the entire lump, even when much of it may be sound. Far from being a sudden, unexpected event, the post-war cultural revolution has historical roots reaching at least as far back as the so-called Enlightenment, since which time the West has been consistently assailed by tendencies hostile to its Judaeo-Christian moral fabric. That said, its true source was the Serpent's false promise to Eve that through defiance of the Creator she and Adam could be as gods, knowing good and evil, which is at the heart of all vain, humanistic philosophy.
What happened in the 1960s was simply the culmination of many decades of activity on the part of revolutionaries and avant-gardists, especially since the First World War. Even Rock, a music which the celebrated American evangelist John MacArthur once described as having a bombastic atonality and dissonance was foreshadowed at its most experimental by the emancipation of the dissonant brought about by Classical composers of various Modernist schools.
Still, for all the change that raged around me in the sixties, my own little world of the leafy suburbs of outer west London was an idyllic one which had hardly changed from the day that I was born when the spirit of Victorian morality was still more or less intact in Britain.

Tales of Tasmania, Manitoba (and a Child's West London)

By the time we moved to Bedford Park, My father had several successful years as a classical violinist under his belt, and so was in a position to ensure that my brother and I enjoy a far more stable childhood than his had ever been.
He'd been born Patrick Clancy Halling in Rowella, Tasmania, and raised in Sydney as the son of one Carl Halling from Denmark, and an English mother, the formidable Mary. She came into the world as Phyllis Mary Pinnock possibly in the Dulwich area of south London and sometime around the turn of the 20th Century, but she was always known as Mary to my parents, brother and I.
According to Mary's sister Joan, her maternal grandmother’s maiden name had been Butler, which allegedly links the family to the Butlers of Ormonde, a dynasty of Old English nobles of Norman origin which had dominated the south east of Ireland since the Middle Ages, and so making it a lost or discarded branch. If Joan was right then I'm related by blood to many of the most prominent royal and aristocratic figures in history, perhaps even all of them.
These would include her namesake Lady Joan FitzGerald, daughter of James Butler the first Earl of Ormonde, and alleged ancestress of Diana, Princess of Wales. Lady Joan herself was the grandaughter of Edward the 1st of the House of Plantagenet - who was "The Hammer of the Scots", and the king who expelled the Jews from England - while her mother Eleanor de Bohun was descended from Charlemagne, the greatest of all the Carolingian Kings who may have been Merovingian through his great-grandmother, Bertrada of Prum, the Merovingians and the Carolingians being two dynasties of Frankish rulers who supposedly upheld the divine right of kings.

Mary grew into a beautiful young woman, with dark hair, green eyes, high cheekbones and an exquisitely sculpted mouth. After losing her fiancé in the First World War, she married an army officer, one PW, and they had two children in quick succession, Peter Bevan, and Suzanne, known as Dinny.
At some point between Peter’s birth and that of his younger brother Patrick, she travelled with her husband to Ceylon - now Sri Lanka - to find work as a tea planter. There she met a Dane with a deep love and knowledge of the spiritual traditions of the East, the mysterious Carl Halling.
What followed next I can't say for sure but I've been led to believe that at some point after becoming pregnant with her third child, Mary went to live with Carl on the island of Tasmania where my father was born in Rowella in the Tamar Valley near Launceston, where Carl and Mary worked as apple pickers.
However, Pat was largely raised in Sydney as Carl’s son, where poor Carl
contracted multiple sclerosis, after which Mary made some kind of living as a journalist and teacher, writing for the Sydney Telegraph at some point according to my dad, and running her own school. In the meantime,
Carl underwent a desperate spiritual search for a miracle cure taking in Mary Baker Eddy's mystical Christian Science sect, but sadly it was all unavailing and he died just before the outbreak of World War II. According to his wishes, he was buried in his native Denmark, although by then he'd allegedly taken out dual citizenship, as had Mary.
All three children had earlier displayed considerable musical talent, Patrick as a violinist, Peter as a cellist and Suzanne as a pianist. Pat has told me that he was only about nine years old and a student at the Sydney Conservatorium when he served on one occasion as soloist for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
Soon after Carl’s burial, Mary set off for London with her three children in order that they might further develop their musical careers. Pat studied at both the Royal Academy of Music and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and joined the London Philharmonic 0rchestra while still a teenager during the Blitz on London, serving in the Sea Cadets as a signaller, and seeing action as such on the hospital ships of the Thames River Emergency Service.
By this time my mother the former Miss Ann Watt was already a highly accomplished and successful singer of both classical and light music, notably with Vancouver's legendary Theatre Under the Stars. She'd been born Angela Jean Watt in the city of Brandon, Manitoba. However, while still an infant she'd moved with her parents and four siblings to the Grandview area of east Vancouver. Grandview's earliest settlers were usually tradesmen or shopkeepers, in shipping or construction work, and largely of British origin. My own grandfather James Watt a builder by trade had been born in the little town of Castlederg in County Tyrone, Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Her mother Elizabeth was from Glasgow, Scotland, having been born there to an English father from either Liverpool or Manchester, and a Scottish mother.
She was the youngest of six siblings, namely Annie-Isabella, Robert, James, Elizabeth (who died in infancy), Catherine and herself, and the only one of her extended family to emigrate to the mother country. She could just as easily have ended up in the US, but a ticket came up for her to travel by boat to the UK and she couldn't resist it.
Within a short time of arriving she met my father through their shared profession, and they married in the summer of 1948. Seven years later, they decided to have their first child, and so I was born at the former Goldhawk Road site of Queen Charlotte's Hospital, which has since been moved to nearby Du Cane Road, Shepherds Bush.

I was an articulate and sociable kid from the word go, walking, talking early just like my dad before me, but agitated, unable to rest, what they might call hyperactive today. And at some stage in the early to mid sixties I became a problem both at school and home: a disruptive influence in the class, and a trouble-maker in the streets, an eccentric loon full of madcap fun and half-deranged imaginativeness whose unusual physical appearance was enhanced by a striking thinness and enormous long-lashed blue eyes. Less charmingly, I was also the kind of deliberately malicious little hooligan who'd remove a paper from a neighbour's letter-box, and then mutilate it before re-posting it.
I divided my time between the Lycée and my West London stomping ground of Bedford Park, Chiswick, Hammersmith, and soon. From a very young age I took Judo classes at the Budokwai in South Kensington, where one of my teachers, a former British international, said he always knew that it was Saturday when he heard Halling's voice. I was known as Alley Cat by the other kids at the Budokwai, after my surname of Halling, and it was a pretty apt name when you think of it. Later, I took classes at the Judokan in Hammersmith, but if I thought I was going to raise Cain there I had another thing coming, given that its owner was a one-time captain of the British international team who'd served as an air gunner with 83 squadron during World War II, later holding Judo classes in Stalag 383. He was a tough but fair man and I went on to study Karate with him, which I was still doing as late as 1973, when I got it into myself that I no longer wished to have anything to do with anything martial, precious budding aesthete that I was.
I was never happier than on those Wednesday evenings I served as what would today be called a Cub Scout in the 20th Chiswick Wolf Cub pack, where I was less of a menace than pretty well anywhere else. I remember the games, the pomp and seriousness of the camps, the different coloured scarves, sweaters and hair during the mass meetings, the solemnity of my enrolment, being helped up a tree by an older boy, Baloo, or Kim, or someone, to win my Athletics badge, winning my first star, my two year badge, and my swimming badge with its frog symbol, the kindness of the older boys.
Beatlemania came to London in 1963 and I first announced my own status as a Beatlemaniac at the Lycée in that landmark year, the very year I think I took a dislike to an American boy who later became my friend. I used to attack him for no reason at all other than to assert my superiority over him. One day, he finally flipped and gave me a rabbit punch in the stomach, but he wasn't punished...perhaps because the teacher had a strong idea I'd started the trouble in the first place.
By the end of the year, a single new group The Rolling Stones started threatening the Beatles' position as my favourite in the world, although I was initially disappointed by what I saw as a rough and sullen performance of "Not Fade Away" on Top of the Pops, having heard so much about them. However, during a musical discussion I can still see in my mind's eye, possibly in '65 with some of the new breed of English roses - who may have been flaunting mod girl fringes, mini-skirts and kinky boots - I proudly announced that the Stones were my favourite group in the world. I loved the way a martyred Mick Jagger sang "Lady Jane" on black and white TV with surly, ever-defiant lips surrounded by frenzied girl slaves as if she was a pagan deity and he her prostrate votary.
One of the girls was a loyal Beatles fan, another a lover of British Blues band the Animals, and she acted cooler than the rest as if the Animals were somehow superior to mere Pop acts like the Fabs and the Stones. But then Mick and co. had begun as a Blues band too...only to become side-tracked into the world of Pop.

There was a point in the mid '60s when I was dubbed Le Général by a long-suffering form teacher at the Lycée in consequence of what she perceived as my dominance in the playground with regard to a tight circle of friends, and my tongue-in-cheek superciliousness in the classroom, which typically saw me at the back of the class leaning against the wall while smoking a fake cigar.
Certainly, I was not above organising elaborate playground deceptions. One involved me pretending to banish one of my best friends Bobby from whatever activity we had going on at the time. He played along by putting on a superb display of waterworks which had the desired effect of arousing the tender mercies of some of the girls who duly rounded on me for my hard-heartedness; but I refused to budge. Bobby was out. Of course it was all a big joke, and Rich and we’d never been closer.
I can remember going around to his house to lounge on his bed watching "The Baron" or "Adam Adamant" before staying the night, just as he stayed the night at mine; and in '67, by which time my wardrobe included a paisley shirt and a pair of purple cords - to say nothing of the obligatory peaked cap - he spent a week with me in the wilds of Wales as part of a course known as the Able Boys. This was a combination of a simple sailing school and what could be termed outward bound activities which involved us living in tents and cooking our own food under the supervision of mates.
If I was Le Général at the Lycée, back home I saw myself as the leader of the kids whose houses backed onto the dirty alley that ran parallel to our side of the Esmond Road in those days but has almost certainly vanished by now.
One fateful day I crossed the road to announce a feud with the kids of the clean alley, so-called because unlike ours it was concreted over rather than being just a dirt track. It was to cost me dear. Soon after the feud had thawed I went over to pal around with some of the clean alley kids who I now saw as my allies, but there must have still been some bad blood because before long a scrap was under way and I was . Finally I agreed to leave, and as I shamefully cycled off my bike squeaked all the way home in unison with great heaving sobs.
If Bedford Park’s number one tough guy had been with me it’s likely I would never have had to suffer in this way. He lived virtually opposite us in Bedford Park, but he was from another dimension altogether. He was a skinny cockney with muscles like steel who seems to me today to have been born to wage war on the bomb sites of post-war London. For some reason, he became devoted to me..."Carly", he'd always cry - this being his pet name for me - and he'd always be welcome at our house even though this brought my family some disapproval in the neighbourhood, but he had a good heart as the piece below makes clear.
It was based on an autobiographical story about my childhood written in about 1977, as was much of the material above as of the Wolf Cub section. I versified it in the winter of '06, publishing it at the Blogster website on February the 15th. It depicts my first meeting with this soft-centred rough in the dirty alley possibly in about 1965 or '66.

Wicked Cahoots

When he made
his first personal appearance
in the dirty alley
on someone else's rusty bike,
screaming along
in a cloud of dust
it rendered us all
speechless and motionless.
But I was amazed
that despite his grey-faced surliness,
he was very affable with us...
the bully with a naive
and sentimental heart.
He was so happy
to hear that I liked his dad
or that my mum liked him
and he was welcome
to come to tea
with us at five twenty five...
Our "adventures" were spectacular:
chasing after other bikesters,
screaming at the top
of our lungs
into blocks of flats
and then running
as our echoed waves of terror
blended with incoherent threats...
"I'll call the Police, I'll..."
Wicked cahoots.

This Glam Rock Nation

In September 1968 while still only 12 years old I became the youngest cadet at the Nautical College Pangbourne, a naval college situated near the little Thameside village of Pangbourne in the county of Berkshire. This probably made me the youngest serving officer in the entire Royal Navy at the time.
Founded in 1919, she was still known by her original title of the Nautical College Pangbourne, but by 1969 this had been abbreviated to Pangbourne College. However, the boys retained their officer status and spent much of their time in full naval officers' uniform. What's more, naval discipline continued to be enforced, with Pangbourne providing the hardships both of a military college and a traditional English boarding school. In 1996, she became fully co-educational.
The Pangbourne I knew had strong links to the Church of England, and so was marked by regular if not daily classes in what was known as Divinity, morning parade ground prayers, evening prayers, and compulsory chapel on Sunday morning. If you missed any of these you would have been seriously punished, although not necessarily with the cane. I was heavily disciplined from my very first term, but I'm indebted to Pangbourne for the values it instilled in me if only unconsciously. They were after all the same values that once made Britain strong and great; and yet, by the time I joined Pangbourne, they were under siege as never before by the so-called counterculture. While failing to fully understand the implications of the cultural revolution of the late 1960s, I passionately celebrated its consequences, and took to my heart many of its icons both artistic and political, and that’s especially true of the Marxist revolutionary leader Che Guevara.
In 1970, we moved from Bedford Park to a little industrial suburb close to the Surrey-London border. Our own street was relatively gentrified, and several of my parents' closest friends were from working class districts of West London such as Shepherd's Bush and Notting Hill who'd since "made good" and so had moved out to the suburbs like my dad.
I finally left Pangbourne in the summer of '72, after a decision had been made involving my poor dad and those directly responsible for me at the college. 1972 could be said to be the year in which the seventies really began as the excitement surrounding the alternative society and its happenings and be-ins and love-ins and free festivals and so on started to fade into recent history. For my part I couldn't wait to get to grips with the dismal new decade even if for the first two years, I'd despised the rise of the new commercial chart Pop and its teenybopper idols. I was of the school of Hard and Progressive Rock...Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Yes and so on, but I was changing, and for better or worse, this was going to be my era.
In late '72, I saw former Bubblegum band the Sweet on a long-forgotten teenage Pop programme called “Lift off with Ayesha”, and with all the passion of a former enemy I fell in love with their new camp image, all eye-shadow and glittering outfits and massive stack-heeled boots. Several months later a certain Rock chameleon - David Bowie of course - appeared on the chat show Russell Harty Plus in January 1973 with his eyebrows shaved off and my devotion to the strange culture taking over the land making even former skinheads want to look like Charlie George or some other flash dressing hard man became total.
So many of the popular songs of the era were like football chants set to a stomping Glam Rock beat. It was the golden age of the long-haired boot boy and every street seemed to me to be pregnant with menace in this Glam Rock nation, as if the spirit of Weimar Berlin with its unholy mix of violence and decadence had been resurrected in stuffy old England. It was a terrible time to be young; but I of course loved it, lapped it up.
In late '72 I was launched by my dad on an intensive programme of self-improvement.
Through home study and with the help of local private tutors I set about making up for the fact that I'd left school at 16 with only two GCE – General Certificate of Education - exams to my name, at ordinary level, of course, which is why they were called "O" levels.
I took Karate classes at the Judokan in Hammersmith, west London…and among my fellow students were hard-looking young men – some of them flaunting classic ‘70s feather cuts - who may have been led to the dojo by the prevailing fashion for all things Eastern such as the films of Bruce Lee and the “Kung Fu” television series.
There were swimming lessons at the Walton Swimming Pool where I fell hard for a beautiful elfin girl with a close crop hairstyle which made her look a little like a skinhead girl. I think she beckoned to me once to come and be with her but I just stood there as if frozen to the spot. My heart wasn't in the swimming though, and this soon became clear to one of the teachers who asked me why I was even bothering to turn up.
I was taught the basics of the Rock guitar solo by a soft-spoken family man whose old-fashioned short back and sides and baggy trousers belied a deep love of the rebel music of Rock and Roll and I probably learned more about music Rock from him than anyone alive or dead, with the possible exception of a Pangbourne friend whose songs I stole with their simple chord progressions...C, A minor, F, G and back again to C and so on.
In late '72, I joined the London Division of the Royal Naval Reserve as an Ordinary Seaman, attending classes once a week on HMS President on the Embankment, and at some point thereafter, it became clear to me that I'd been singled out for my budding pretty boy looks. I think this came as a bit of a surprise, but I was flattered rather than offended, as if a seed of narcissism had somehow become implanted within me in late adolescence. I can only wonder what effect this had on my healthy development as a normal male human being.
It's not that I wasn't aware of being good-looking before '72, because there had been the occasional comment about my looks on the part of female friends of the family for some years; and I'd even been made aware of being handsome as a very young boy by some of the Lycée girls. However, none of this had ever really registered with me, because I'd always been a typical feisty ruffian of a boy in a lot of ways.
Having said that though, I was dreamy and imaginative to an extreme degree, which points to what would today be termed a feminine side; and I’d never gone through a phase of finding girls drippy or whatever. In fact, from as far back as I can remember I'd been prone to falling hopelessly in love with them especially if they were somehow unattainable to me.
What’s more, I was a born romantic, cherishing a grossly sentimental streak all throughout my teens that placed me somewhat at odds with my peers. While still only about fifteen and pretty thuggish for the most part I nonetheless was capable of becoming entranced by notorious tear-jerkers such as "South Pacific", which I saw with my mother at the cinema. John Schlesinger's film version of the Thomas Hardy novel "Far from the Madding Crowd", which I saw at Pangbourne, was another film that affected me very deeply indeed, too deeply perhaps for an adolescent boy and it may have been partly responsible for an obsession with lost love and high romantic tragedy that remains with me to this day.
I’d an almost mawkish side to my character even as an adolescent and this must surely have exerted some kind of influence on the course of my life, but in no way was I a typical delicate sheltered milquetoast, far from it. For this reason, to realise that I was perceived by certain other men as a pretty boy genuinely took me back, and I hadn’t seen it coming, although – and I can't emphasise this enough - it was a source of fascination to me, not shame.
The cult of androgyny was a powerful force in Britain in the early ‘70s, having been incubated first by Mod and then Flower Child culture, as well as Rock acts such as the Stones, the Kinks, Alice Cooper, T. Rex and David Bowie. Furthermore, it was reinforced in the cinema by several movies featuring angelically beautiful men. And yet, you still took your life into your own hands if you chose to parade around like a Glam Rock star in the mean streets of London or any other major British city – to say nothing of the countryside - and therefore few did.
One of my big heroes as a boy had been all-American actor Steve McQueen, who incarnated an uncompromising tough guy cool. And yet in '73, many of my new idols were "prettier than most chicks" (as T.Rex kingpin Marc Bolan once described himself). I can only wonder what effect this had on my healthy development as a normal male human being, and the same goes for all of those who worshipped at the altar of Glam.
I fantasised about fame and adulation as a Rock and Roll or movie star as never before throughout the Glam era, and built an image based on David Bowie, spiking my hair like him, and even peroxiding it at some point. Not surprisingly then I didn't fit in at all in my new home town, unlike my brother who was far more suited to the area than me with his strong cockney accent and laddish ways, and he wasted little time in becoming part of a local youth scene centred mainly around football, traditional sport of the British working classes.
For my part, I came into my own in Spain, or rather Santiago de la Ribera on the Mar Menor near Murcia, where the family had been vacationing since about 1968. I think it was towards the end of my summer '73 holiday that I finally started to be noticed in a big way by the local youth, most from either Murcia or Madrid, and so la Ribera became vital to me in terms of my becoming a social being among members of both sexes. A large ever-evolving group of us became very close and remained so for four summers running. Spain was such a sweet and friendly nation back then in the relatively innocent early seventies, and the youth of La Ribera as happy and carefree as I imagine southern Californians would have been in the pre-Beatles sixties.
What a time it was…a time of constant, frenetic change when everything seemed to be mine for the knowing and the tasting in the wake of a social revolution that had been all but bloodlessly waged on my behalf only a few years before…but there was a high price to be paid for all that gambolling…