Summer 1997: The Drift

It took a while to settle into the rhythm of that summer in the new house.
It had been a busy year so far; I had already moved house once already, back in January, and had to get to know a new social group (the first of whom, Al, I had met in an 18th century poetry lecture back in very early February. There had been the dramas of coping with living in the Narrow House and dealing with the fractious atmosphere generated by the fact that the original tenants hadn't really wanted anyone else moving in anyway. It had been a springtime (and preceding winter) of drinking, tarot cards, new people and new places. This would be the first time I had had chance to catch up on myself for a long time.

I do remember, shortly after moving in - it couldn't have been more than a week or two, that I ended up going to Glastonbury Festival with friends I knew from my time living in Southampton back when I was studying illustration. I don't remember much about it except that it was wet and muddy and we somehow managed to sneak in with false wrist bands. Completely by chance, we set up our tent only a short while away from Al who was also there - along with (amongst others) Sal and Ross, who would move into the house come the beginning of the autumn term.

I remember the night getting back from Glastonbury. I had been dropped off (the friends I had gone with lived in the nearby town of Redditch) and the house had been a mess of people whom had come back with with Al; sleeping bags in the hallway, all sofas piled up with people. We had gone down the pub -The Seabright, a few doors away - and had returned to continue smoking and drinking, Al playing and singing songs on his guitar. Sal went up to ask Paul if he wanted to 'join us to have a sing-song'. He looked at her with horror, and later admitted that he was worried a lot of evangelical Christians had moved in.

The next day, in bits and rags, everyone who didn't live there left, and the summer properly began.

Long days with nothing to do, wandering the rooms and hallways and landings of the house. Paul and Al spent their days working, -Al was packing customer orders at the Kays Factory on the other side of town. With so much time to msyelf - and nothing to fill it, I fell into a kind of luxurious melancholy. I suppose I should have got a job, but the wonderful torpor of that summer had sunk into my bones, and I had £50 a week to live on anyway. I played with the idea of spending the summer 'writing a novel' and made a desultory attempt at beginning one called 'The Followers'. I gave the first (only) couple of pages to Al to read who commented that it would be 'nearly impossible' to mantain the stream-of-consciousness style I had (without thought) written it in. The novel was to be about a student, who, over the course of one summer, whilst writing his dissertation on the English ghost story, became fascinated with a writer of ghost stories called Vincent James who disappeared in the depths of the English Countryside over the summer of 1956. The last story he wrote, shortly before he vanished, was called 'The Followers' and was about a writer who himself vanished, after a summer of awareness that he was also being followed... The seemingly infinite regressions in the story fascinated me. What escaped me at the time was that I was a part of this regression too - or would have been, had I actually written it. Perhaps if I had I would have vanaished at the end of that odd summer too, and would remain some unsolved mystery in Al and Joe and Sal's life... but I didn't and I'm still here, writing about that summer instead.

I would wake late - often well into the afternoon - with that heavy exhaustion of too much sleep working its way deep inside me, like an illness, and I wouldn't really feel awake until the summer-late nightfall. The evenings would be spent with Al and Paul if they were about, and when they went to bed, I was left alone with the small hours again. I would often see dawn, wander through the vast geography of the house smoking cigarettes in the strange metallic light of the 4am dawn. I remember one dawn being in the garden as the sun came up. No-one was about, nor were they likely to be for hours. I hadn't seen anyone since yesterday evening, an infinity ago, and the garden - that long lawn leading to the shed next to a rusted hulk of a car - adopted an odd dream-like feel. I remember the shock of the dew on barefeet, walking to the end of the garden, feeling inexplicably watched. I don't remember heading back indoors afterwards, but I would have had another cup of tea, another cigarette, before finally heading to bed. Sometimes on these mornings, these 'dawn-reaches' as I called them, I would run into Al, getting up for work.
An odd melancholy had settled over me, as they are wont to do and I remember Al, in the coolness of the shadowy living room one day, asking me if I was okay. I answered that this mood was in fact quite normal to me, and that, previously, Al had only either seen me drunk or hungover, and this was in fact my normal mood.

Every week I would receive £50 into my account, and I would always buy myself an album. I only have one of those albums now (Tiamat's 'A Deeper Kind of Slumber') but I also remember buying Gehenna's 'Malice' and Emperor's 'Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk'. The latter album, despite being made by a band steeped in a Norwegian landscape of Fjords and mountains, described to me the topography of the summer that I myself was caught in, an English summer of green hedges and green trees, green woods on pale, indistinct horizons. Everything deep and feeling like it would last forever, a world of eternal, haunted, emerald green, a fecund fever. I could not remember spring, and nor could I imagine autumn. Such things seemed heresies. The empty rooms of the house felt as if they would be empty forever too, and that this odd life of mine would stretch into other seasons that would be just be summer under other names. Time had stilled, and swelled, and refused to flow. Summer flooded and possessed me, and all there was was the house, the local parade of shops, phone calls that lasted an hour in the cool of the hallway with Nileshvari who I had gone to college with at Southampton and whom I had a secret (or not so secret) crush on. Lying on the hallway floor, listening to the calm and quiet of the house during the day, everything stretching out and no rush or need to do anything or be anywhere at all, and Nileshvari's voice, full of the south coast and the sea and the shadows of living just underneath London.

Paul would tell us - he had been living there since January that year - of how the house had once been a 'treasure trove' of things; antiques, masks hanging on the walls, piles of video recorders at every turn. The people who had lived there before us - he only referred to them as 'sports students' - had treated the place so abominably that the Landlord had removed most of the stuff.

Not all of the stuff though - there was a huge horn type thing hanging on one of the hallway walls, and a cupboard in what was to become Sally's room - attached to the basement living room- yielded all manner of treasures. Well, a pile of old papers, letters to our landlady from her university days and a self published book of poems dating from 1900 or therabouts. The book of poems was written by a local farmer, Jesse Shervington and were, to be frank, unremittingly dreadful. In the preface the author declared that he was 'one of the greatest living writers in the world'. His masterpiece was a lengthy series of long and rambling verses about how fiction was one of the evils of the (then) modern day, an Edwardian Daily Mail reader perhaps. I wonder what it was like for him then. I always imagine that time -those summers before the Great War- steeped in shadows, but I suppose it would have been like any summer I've ever had, free of premonitions and omens. Actually that isn't true. the summer of 1999 was steeped in portents of war... but the premonitions were faulty, and there was only autumn at the end. I still have the booklet of poems somewhere though, come across it intermittently, wherever it is, perhaps in an old suitcase I rarely open, or in a box of old papers I don;t know why I still insist on keeping. The front and end papers contain pencil annotations by the poet himself, dedicated to one of his chidren. Spidery thin letters, about to collapse. the writing of an old man whose health is failing. very unlike the photograph of the author himself, a hearty, if somwehat severe looking character, sat at a table with an unreadable expression on his face. Perhaps one of his chidren lievd at 136, or maybe one of his grandchildren. These things will never be known now.

We would see our Landlord occasionally, who would be engaged in the house on some kind of unspecified repair work. He was a cheery middle aged Indian man who would tell us of various unrealistic adventures that he had been involved in, of how he had seen a Pteradactyl in the Gobi desert, or of how he once knew Jimi Hendrix quite well (who was 'always laughing and joking'). We quizzed him about the rusting car at the end of the garden. He said that he didn't want to remove it as he was afraid that there was a body of a woman buried there. He said that in the 1970s a young woman had disappeared and was never found. She had come over here from Sri Lanka or India or Pakistan to be married. The Landlord had a suspicion that she may have been murdered and buried at the back of the garden. If this was the case, quite why he didn't want her to be found was a question we failed to ask him, and we never much thought about 'the body in the garden' again.
I did think about it though the next summer, when I found a book of poems in the shed. The poems were written in a school exercise book, by, as far as I could work out, a school girl in Kuala Lumpa. There was (presumably) a teacher's comments on the front saying that the viewpoint it offered was 'privileged'. The handwritten poems had the dates blacked out in felt tip pen, but holding them up to the light I could see that they were written in the seventies. I'm not sure about 'privileged' but the poems were certainly odd and unique things. I only remember one poem though, which stated that dances were 'outrages against discipline', shades of Jesse Shervington and his anti-fiction crusade perhaps. I still have that book of poems somewhere too. I think it's in my parents attic down in Perranporth, lost amongst my own old sketchbooks and old paperbacks I'll never read, another piece of driftwood that will never see the light of day.
I have no photographs from those summers on London Road, but I have enough poems though.

((A Name or two may well have been changed)