Something a little different from my usual
stuff. It’s been said that if you can remember the 1960s you weren’t there and
this is a hazy, collective impression from four and a half decades ago that’s a moment in
time from 3 years living in a seedy basement flat in Notting Hill, which was an
unplanned hospice for a transient flow of musicians, artists, writers, freaks,
bohemians, pedlars of mind-expanding substances and ideas, and weary pilgrims
on the hippie trail from California to Kathmandu, most of whom are now more
phantoms than memories.
Reflections:
Notting Hill, 1969.
Years away in those wild
days and time was not an issue
when an eternity of hopefulness
stretched onwards
and memories were not yet
cruel captors.
Then we had no past to
speak of and the future was of dubious concern.
In the high, wild days of that
brief halcyon,
we were freer than we knew
or ever would be all our lives;
our hearts blissfully
unencumbered
and our minds
were seldom mindful of the
later rotten preconceptions,
preferring, then, to trust
our new-born liberties
to Leary-induced reflections
on the holy scriptures preached
by Hendrix, Kerouac and Baudelaire.
Always drunk – that’s it!
Drunk on our own
exuberance, impertinence and arrogant imaginings,
drinking in the seedy,
sweating nights of Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove,
where couplings were short
and inconclusive,
in artless striving between
unremembered thighs,
but lovely, too, in light
of retrospective mornings
as cracks of heavy sun broke
through the basement railings
into rooms of tossed,
disordered minds
where scents of Lebanon hung
warm and sweet to our naked senses
and patchouli-infused
clothing lay strewn across the floor.
Lost nights began in faded
hostelries on cracking leatherette banquettes,
our Cuban heels protruding
out of Lord John flares,
as heavy, dimpled glasses
left wet rings on time-rubbed Cuban wood
and our laughing,
hair-framed faces leered, distorted, from the tarnished brass
and, fragmented as our
thoughts and conversations,
reflected in between etched
letterings of India Pale Ales.
The words were loose and
easy as we drank, and rolled like handmade cigarettes,
expressively between the
fingers and the mouth.
How’s
Jonah doing?
He’s
been screwed since that last trip on acid scored in Finchley Road.
He’s
done too much, his mind’s completely blown.
Another
round here?
Might
as well. The Elgin will be packed by now.
And
get some skins for later. I’ve none left.
The
green ones, man, and score ten No.6. I’ll pay.
Have
you read The Dharma Bums? It’s pretty cool.
I
found a Penguin copy in the bin, John must have chucked it there.
Probably
because the last few pages are torn out.
So
now I’m curious to know what happened after Desolation Peak.
Anyway,
I’m reading Malcolm Lowry now. He got wasted even more than us.
And around the smoke-saturated
room,
faces scored with age stared
into solitary drinks,
pulling on
nicotine-stained tabs, sucked, like life, until the bitter end.
Was this a cloudy crystal
ball that showed us as we would become:
impotent, dim-memoried and
grim,
without the consolation of
a firm, round breast under a sleeping hand?
A glimpse, in fact, of the
end of everything we’d gain through life,
sitting on the other side
of destiny and seeing our incipient selves
across a bar in Notting
Hill?
It's gentrified now and flats cost in excess of £1 million, but in the 60s Clanricarde Gardens was a run-down cul-de-sac inhabited by an eclectic mix of eccentrics, part of the wonderful urban village that was Notting Hill.
