The Ned Wood Archive

It was just like being on a fast ride at the Fun Fair.  The sort you wanna get off because it’s scary.  And then as soon as you’re off, you want to get straight back on again.

1977.  I walked home from the party with Elsa.  I can’t remember why we had to walk home.  Maybe some one had given us a lift there then disappeared.  Maybe we just decided it would be better fun to walk.  That way we’d have more time to watch the new year come in.  It had been a good party, I’d found someone I could enjoy dancing with, she even liked the same stuff as me – we must have danced to Let’s Stick Together five or six times, her pretending to be Jerry Hall, me Bryan Ferry.  She had the legs for it.  Long, slender, elegant legs.  She was a strange mix of elegance and ribaldry.  She looks like Sandra Bernhardt, often spices the conversation with crudities, enjoys taking her ale at alehouses, stays out late, and has a good time.  But when she wants to she can turn on the style, her long thin fingers dancing as she speaks, her neck weaving like a swan’s, her slim waist floating and her majestic legs moving gracefully as she dances.

We left the party as it closed down at about a quarter to one.  The way home lay across fields of grass and mud.  Elsa tried to tell me she cared that she was getting her gear dirty.  She made sure I didn’t miss the beautiful patterns the mud was making on her shapely calves.  We talked about the New Year.  Her about finishing school and going to University and life.  On the Threshold of a Dream.  Me about the FA Cup and Bowie’s new album.

1977.  What was it going to do for us?  January is when your thoughts turn to the Cup, if just for a minute.  You forget what you are doing in the league and convince yourself that this is the year you’ll win the Cup.  After all, Sunderland had done it from the second.  Southampton too had done it, only the year before.  We’d gone over to Swaythling to see them parade the Cup for what it was worth. Forest had Bristol Rovers in the Cup the following weekend, which should be easy.

1977.  Bowie had a new album coming out.  You heard about these things 3, 4 weeks in advance.  We’d also heard that Ferry and Gabriel were supposed to be bringing albums out, but Bowie’s was the most fascinating on account of it being him and Eno.  Two idols together.  I hoped for a cross between Ziggy Stardust and the Warm Jets.  That band that supported Patti Smith had a recording contract, so that was something else to look forward to.  Genesis were also producing an album, which we felt obliged to buy.  When you got into someone it always took you a couple of albums to let go.  Like with the Stones, Goat’s Head Soup was bearable, It’s Only RocknRoll was boring, but we still bought Hot Stuff.  Genesis was the band all the musicheads at school listened to.  They’d never been on the radio but, unlike Led Zeppelin, few people had heard of them before about 74.  Having their early albums was the height of cool.  Having the early albums with the pink Charisma label was impossibly cool.  I had a couple of pink Charisma labels which I’d bought second hand from an Amon Duul fan.  Annie took my Gabriel-era Genesis albums after she left me, but that’s another story.  They were a mix of pomp and whimsy.  Good tunes and elegant musical breaks here, tedious showmanship and monotonous choruses there.  When Gabriel left they carried on, but the lyrics died and the music faded, we bought their stuff for a year or two, then gave up.  

1977.  The year Else would leave home and head off to the great unknown.  Would she enjoy her first year?  Would she meet loads of fun people?  Even though it wouldn’t happen till October, you could tell she was excited about it.  More excited than I was when I started.

Else was fun to be with, she was intelligent, she and I had stuff in common and I could have looked at those legs all day, but she never made me lose any sleep.  I spent the odd hour here or there trying to persuade myself I wanted to go out with her, but my brain couldn’t turn my heart, and anything that could have happened didn’t.  We were perhaps both too eager to get on with the rest of our lives.  

The other thing that it’s difficult to know during those three years at University is when you actually leave home.  I mean mentally leave home.  That applies to girlfriends too.  You are in one place for 30 weeks and the other for 22 weeks of the year.  So, if you’re seeing someone, you have to be prepared to go half the year away from them.  In my first year, I’d had girlfriends at home, but those relationships had died, mainly on account of my being away.  But the very fact that they’d been at home meant that my world still rotated around home.  With Mary things started to change.  I now realised the cold statistic that she was the first girl I’d asked out at University.  My focus was changing.  And I knew that was why I wasn’t going to start dating Elsa.  Plus the fact that Else liked Joni Mitchell.  Sometimes I think love is just mythical.

On New Years Day we beat Blackburn 3-1 away from home (Withe, Bowyer, Woodcokck).  We’re fourth.  We’ve been there or thereabouts all year.  We must be in with a chance of going up.  Please.

The week after New Year is pretty boring.  You have settled into the easier life, letting your Mam do everything and quietly wishing you didn’t have to go back to look after yourself.  There’s not much to do at home, just cold days sitting trying to talk to your folks.  I kept changing my mind about Else, wanting to phone her and hang around, but knowing that it wasn’t going to work.  Then Mary called.

I didn’t even realise she’d got my number.  What had I done to deserve this – she was coming to see me.  She’d planned to come down from Chester by train, hang around for a couple of days, then go down.  She suggested we both went down to Southampton together on the train.  Excellent idea.  I started to run around like mad, cleaning the house up, making sure the best of everything was laid out – best sheets on the spare bed, get me Mam to lay on a posh meal with our best china, all that jazz that I’d been trained by my folks to do for guests, not realising of course that to Mary it was almost an insult.  It was a reminder of how our class had prospered on the back of hers.

I met her at the station and drove her round town, eager to find stuff to show off.  We went to the cathedral. We walked around the pool.  We went to me Dad’s shop.  I drove her round the places I used to hang out, especially the countryside near our place.  The fields I used to play in, the cut we used to walk along.  Except none of them look so good in January, just cold and unused.  We went back home and I showed off our house.  All she could say was “Don’t you think you’ve got too much money?”

She was just as I’d remembered her – dark, mysterious hair; impish, cheeky face; teasing Cheshire accent; blue unfaded denim dress.  But there was a barrier that I could sense.  Even though she didn’t say it, her attitude was “Just Good Friends”.  Right from picking her up, I could sense that she didn’t want me to start getting any more stupid ideas.  So, I controlled my feelings.  You know me, will of iron.

What I decided was this.  OK, she was born working class and had been trained in all of this class solidarity and socialism.  She couldn’t help it.  But under that hard shell she had this wonderful inner warmth that shone through when she spoke to me.  She joked about me and my naiveté and sometimes she was telling the truth, but she did take care of me.  She treated me gently.  She liked me.  I told myself she really liked me and she was struggling between doing what she wanted to do and doing what she thought she should do.  That’s why there are all of these contradictions.  She thought that if she went out with me like she wanted to, she’d be letting herself down.  That’s what I think.  Her heart says yes, but her brain is 2 nil up and there’s only five minutes to go.

She told me she’d got herself a house the other side of Portswood – that’s where she’d been the last two days before Christmas.  She asked if I’d come and see her, which of course I promised to do.  All of a sudden, she was moving further away from me.  I wished I’d taken advantage of her being just round the corner when she was at Glen.  Now I couldn’t nip over for a chat after supper.  I regretted not having done so in the nine or ten weeks I’d known her.

I took her into Birmingham shopping on the Saturday.  I bought meself a sweater from a sports shop.  It was a Tennis sweater.  I thought I looked good in white.  I was going to buy a couple more, slightly different, one with buttons, but she stopped me.  “You’ve spent enough money already” she said.

I woke her up early the next morning with a cup of tea in bed, determined to treat her right.  She looked incredible in the big bed, half asleep, her hair black on black, deep on the pillow.  She let herself enjoy the luxury just this once.  And then, too soon, we were off on the train back to Southampton. I always got the same feeling heading off back on the train.  The feeling that I was once more stepping out to an adventure, slightly uncertain, slightly excited.  We were both growing up.  She was starting her second term, full of confidence.  I was starting my fifth.  The further we moved away from home, the more animated our discussion got.  At our house, she’d been a little reserved, a little too critical, and I’d been a little too nervous.  Now, as we travelled south, back to the uniformity of our student lives, the differences between us faded.  We started to chat about things like we’d known each other for ages.  And we had.

After Winchester, on the last leg of the journey, we both fell into that contemplative mood you get just before reaching your destination.  We both stared out of the window watching the fields flash by.  I tried to sort out my feelings, where did she fit, where did Elsa fit, where did I fit.  And what would I find out in the next twelve months.  1977.