Part 2 of the Union: 1973

Part  2 Of The Union (1973 a year to remember)

This particular year seemed to be full of twists, turns and moments when I drifted from maturity to childish ways and back again.  I suppose most seventeen-year-old males oscillate from one extreme to the next as they journey into full adult thinking (whatever that may be!) and a more settled outlook.

I mentioned in 1972 that I encountered a ‘rite of passage’, but in truth part of it lay at the beginning of the following year.  I am and was then a born romantic.  I had hopes and dreams that never strayed far from fairy tales and utopian love.  I thought myself to be in love with a girl with whose parents I had spent Christmas 1972 and as such a couple I planned a brief trip to my mother’s native city of Nottingham.  We visited a friend of mine who was at Leicester University at the time and during a walk with that friend we passed a student residence where a former boyfriend was apparently staying. My ‘girlfriend’ seem drawn and distant and shocked my mutual Uni friend with some wistful longings over her former relationship with him.  I never met him and never did, and the events that occurred at our B & B later that night in Nottingham blinded me to  the truth I clearly didn’t want to face.  I was later to find out that back in Chelmsford she had been delving the deepest depths of passion with someone else during the later stages of our own indulgences.  Despite her clear signals she was dumping me she continued to bestow her favours so to speak.

So in the February I applied for a Secondman’s (Train Driver’s assistant) in Norwich.  I arrived there in the March, initially staying at a B & B before taking up a bedsit in the North of the City.  I was effectively running away and joining the Foreign Legion in metaphorical terms.  I broke off all contact with the girl who still wanted to remain ‘friends’ and had some wonderful times in Norfolk.  I still miss the area and the people.  There was a rustic charm back then and the blended in with my own personality.  I even spoke like them and continue to this day to assimilate dialects and phrases into the way I speak.  I continued to visit my parents and my sister back in Chelmsford and began to realise just how homesick I really was.  I began to return with ever increasing frequency and would even travel from Chelmsford to Norwich for individual shifts.

I had run away from the pain of young love, but it followed me in my mind.  I just wasn’t mature enough to move out of my childhood home and in the December, I resigned from my post, but on my day off went back to Stratford in East London to be reappointed a week later; still as a Secondman and back at a workplace I had become comfortable During the Summer of 1973 I attended a youth camp as a junior officer in charge of six younger teenagers as part of a gang working as volunteers on the rebuilding of the Ffestiniog Railway.  I fell afoul of the leader of the camp and was not invited as an officer for 1974.  That was to be a truly divergent event.  In the next year I will explain why and how it reconciled me with my Utopian dreams.