The Ned Wood Archive

Still love remains

in some strong heart

keep your mind open

Kaleidoscope

So where was I?  Oh yeah.  April 18^th.  A Monday.  I’ve driven to Southampton and scored the Stranglers new album and now I’m at Chamberlain which is just opening up a week early, which is good news because I can stay in my own room.  I want to rush in and play my new album, but I bump into Helen and Chris who are walking out of the hall, each carrying a box of stuff.  They’re loading up this old Triumph Herald which it turns out belongs to Chris.  It appears they’ve found a place on Derby Road and are moving out, so I offer to help and, as they haven’t got much gear between them, just mainly books, we easily get all of it in the Herald and me Mam’s car which is what I’ve borrowed and have driven over from London in.

I’ve known Helen pretty much since she arrived the previous October.  Her room was on the floor above mine at Chamberlain.  She has this round delicate face neatly framed with dark brown hair, a bit like one of those mid sixties haircuts you’d see Cilla Black wearing if you can remember that far back.  She has a wonderful smile that never leaves her face.  A wide peaceful smile that shines over everyone and calms the world like a full moon on a balmy night.  It’s the face I imagine Beatrice has in Dante’s Divine Comedy.  A pure, happy, blissful, beatific face.

I started calling her Holly, when I first met her.  Well, I was going through a stage of giving everyone a nickname.  I think you pass through those kinds of phases when you’re a kid.  So why Holly?  Well, she was a holly hunter. She could have been a Holly Queen. Let me explain. Where I come from, we have Holly Queens every year. See, holly is thought to be a very important plant.  Like mistletoe.  It has powerful healing qualities.  It also symbolises deep and true love.  To give holly is to give a gift that will last forever.  It is to give a part of your soul.  That kind of sounds like Helen.

Back in the seventeenth century, just after the revolution, when Cromwell’s capitalists had entrenched themselves in England, there lived a rich landowner in Eastern Staffordshire who, among other things, managed to contrive for himself a monopoly in holly.  Well, it wasn’t a monopoly, but he had a lot and managed to cut down most of the holly trees he didn’t own, so the locals were forced to buy it from him at his prices.  Big deal, you might say, but the people of Eastern Staffordshire are a romantic lot and if they want to give a girl some holly, they’ll get it no matter what.  The folk that worked on the farms around him were always nicking it, which this fat cat didn’t like, so he tried to put a guard around his great holly bushes to stop it.  But the only folk he could get to do the watching were local lads who were only half interested.  At least that’s the way the story goes.  You get the feeling that it was a half-hearted sort of enforcement of the monopoly.  Not like Rupert Murdoch or Jeff Bezos.     

A tradition arose amongst the villagers.  It became a game.  They’d mount a raid on the squire’s holly.  Just a token raid, after they’d been down the alehouse, to show who was really the boss.  Once a year.  In spring.

Now the militia that kept watch over the holly could easily be distracted.  Some folk say the squire realised this and the importance of the holly to the people, so he partly played along with the game.  A bit like Murdoch putting Michael Moore on TV: give the people a little bit of dissent, but control it, and most of them will think they’ve got enough freedom and leave it at that.  So back home, it became tradition to select the most beautiful young girl and dress her up as an angel.  She would then appear to the guard at dusk and entice them away from their positions.  The villagers would choose a girl mature enough to attract the youths, yet small enough to escape through the maze of bushes that surrounded the holly trees, thus ensuring her own safety.

Well that’s the story they’ve propagated in recent years, because they’ve revived the holly hunt in an attempt to turn the annual fete into more of a tourist attraction.  So every year, in that village near us, they pick a “a woman of diminutive build, yet immense beauty” as the Holly Queen. Well, it’s better than that silly dance they do with their deer antlers just up the road.

So I started calling Helen ‘Holly’, because she too is small and beautiful.  And then I realised I was starting to sound like a Bruce Springsteen album.  Have you noticed that everyone in his songs has a name that ends in ‘Y’?  Like Sandy or Terry or Wendy.  It’s the same with me and Bernie and Mary and Dusty and DeeDee.  So I decided to call her Helen after all.

What else about Helen?  She has a lot of inner strength, a strong will, and plenty of resolve.  She knows what she wants.  But, probably because of her size and her apparent calm, some of the guys at the Hall treated her like a little kid.  Not to take advantage of, but to shield and protect.  And worse.  To treat her like a little sister that had to be stopped from getting into trouble.  One of them asked me when she started seeing Chris Raworth whether I thought we should stop them seeing each other.  He said it would be bad for her.  Of course he completely missed the point, which apart from it being Helen’s life, Chris was, in his own way, just as blissed out and spiritual as she was.  I’ve never seen Helen lose her cool.  I’ve only ever seen Chris lose his when someone was getting at Helen.

Until I went to San Francisco and met some real ones, Chris was the nearest I came to a real hippie.  Or what I imagined a hippie to be.  Maybe he was what he imagined a hippie to be too.  Long Steve Hillage hair.  Vague, thin, goatee beard.  Baggy purple long sleeved velvet shirt, with a bit of lacing at the collar.  Flared loons.  More of a peacenik than Bernie anyway.  You could imagine Chris in a commune, but I think Bernie would have gravitated more towards the Grosvenor Square demo.

Now Bernie was the first genuine Dharma Punk I’d met, and the second was the number one Dharma Punk of them all and in fact it was he, Chris Raworth, who coined the phrase.  We were sat at this new place in Derby Road a few weeks later, me and Bernie and Chris and Helen.  Bernie and Chris were talking about Japanese rock gardens – neatly placed stones that Buddhist monks walk miles to look at just to gain peace of mind and Bernie, being a geologist like me, said:

“You know, whoever placed them in that certain way that’s so great is nothing to the great master architect of all creation who built the world and placed the rocks beneath our feet in the most peaceful relaxing correct way.”

And I had to agree that he was right, because if you go down to Bude or Millook Haven or Dartmoor, and look at the formations there, you have to admit they’re awe-inspiring.  And Chris had to admit it too.  But, he said, acknowledging that there is no match for natural rock, but getting back to his Japanese rock gardens, the point was that if you can create a Zen garden that is stripped down, minimal, and bare, then you could gaze at it and simplify your thoughts and by simplifying your thoughts take one more step toward nirvana.  To which Bernie said:

“You know, the most stripped down, minimalist, and bare thing I know is the Ramones album”.

And I had to agree that he was right.  With the deliberately dumb lyrics and the effortless drum patterns and the 1234 start, it is simple and pure rocknroll.  And Chris smiled because he liked Bernie and said:

“Get away Bernie, you’re nothing but a Dharma Punk”.  And it stuck.

When I remember what Helen and Chris’ place on Derby Road was like, I always see that place Pia Zadora and Ric Ocasek had in the movie Hairspray.  The two places were so much alike.  You know, the one Rikki Lake and her mates run to just after they’d heard Toussaint McCall sing ‘Nothing Takes the Place of You’ and they find this pad where Zadora & Ocasek are a pair of beatniks.  Chris and Helen aren’t the beat generation; they’re the beatific generation.  Bernie is part of the beat up generation, and I’m part of the beat music generation.  Anyway, the road Chris and Helen stayed on is exactly like the one in the film with terraced houses lining the pavement.  The front door opens straight into the living room, which in Helen and Chris’ case is almost all there is.  On that first day it was empty, and it pretty much remained that way whenever I went to see them, with the two of them using rugs to sit cross-legged on rather than chairs.  They made me a cuppa with the kettle on the floor after we’d unloaded their meagre belongings and we sat, the three of us, in a circle on the rug, just talking.  Every so often Helen would get up and arrange something, like pull a couple of books out of a box and put them on the floor in a corner along the wall or get a plate and put it in what became the kitchen.  She was more talkative than Chris and me put together, so she’d be saying things about us to sort of introduce us to each other like ‘Ned’s got this really amazing record collection’ (she said it and she don’t lie) or ‘Chris knows a lot about the Luddites, so you should ask him about what they did in Nottingham’.

And this is another thing that is so wonderful about Helen.  She has so much passion and love that it pours out when she’s talking.  You could see how much Chris meant to her as she told me about him.  His esoteric background in Cambridge where his Mam and Dad had been ‘Communist Intellectuals’.  His Zen Buddhist meditation.  His deep-seated love of everyone and everything.  His serene peaceful outlook.  I knew she was hooked.  Chris, meanwhile, sat, cross legged and relaxed, listening but not reacting as if not caring either way what Helen was saying.

Later on Chris asked if I ever meditated, but I wasn’t sure enough of myself at the time to mention Bernie and listening to the Ramones that night, so I let it slide and he threatened to play one of what he called his dissenting folk songs instead.

And then later, just before I left he said: “Ned, what you got to do is come and watch the full moon with us soon.”  And this he explained was another of his calming habits.  To go outside in the middle of the night and gaze at the moon and contemplate the simplicity of life.  And it sounded neat, so I said I’d do it.