The Ned Wood Archive

Beyond the seas of thought

Beyond the realm of what

Across the stream of hopes and dreams

where things are really not

The Ramones

A guy stops just the other side of Winchester and tells me he’s going to Liverpool.  Cool.  It’s a ropey old van, but he’ll get me pretty near home.  What amazing luck.  The first ride had been quick – mind it always is from the roundabout at the top of the Avenue, even though there’s usually a queue of hitching students going north. And then I’d only been stood on the A34 at Winchester trying to get a ride for about five minutes.  He tells me he’ll be going up to the M4, then along to the M5.  He can drop me off at Gailey.  I wonder if it’s best not to commit to go so far with him, just in case I turn out not to like him.  I’d be stuck with him like forever.  But, like I’ve said with hitching, you go where life takes you.  If you get a ride, don’t argue.  Take it.

It’s been a busy week.  Three hours of looking at rocks on Tuesday.  Three hours of looking at slightly different rocks on Wednesday.  And finally three hours of looking at fossils on Thursday.  At least fossils look different.  At least I can tell a trilobite from a brachiopod.  But practicals were never my strong point.  I’ll pick up marks on the written papers.  Three practical exams and I’m exhausted.  

I sit back in the seat and eventually manage to avoid the stray spring and get comfortable. I watch the red poppy-filled fields float by my window and then close my eyes and think of Annie.  I must have fallen asleep, but like whenever you have a quick nap during the day, you don’t know how long you’ve been under for.  Anyway, this geezer who’s given me a lift asks me what I was dreaming of.  I ask him whether he thinks dreams mean anything and he says of course they do.  I tell him that I’ve been dreaming of Annie walking around a ruined abbey having fits of hysterics and ask him what that means.  I wonder if he’s going to give me some hippie shit about the meaning of life, and then I look at the faded tattoos on his forearms, his cropped hair, and sleeper earring, I think, surely this guy is not Church of Castaneda.  

He says: “It means you’ve fallen in love with a wonderful girl.  See dreams tell you exactly what’s in your mind.  No games, no lies, just what you are thinking about.  That’s all there is to it.”

So he gets me to tell all about Annie.  So I tell him about her lively eyes and her golden hair and her mischievous mouth.  But mostly I tell him about what she does.  The way she laughs.  The way she screams.  The way she respects nothing and everything.  The way she says exactly what she wants to say and how she always makes me feel better for having heard it.  I tell him how she has fun and how it spreads like fire when she’s around.

And he asks me why I’ve left her.  I try to explain that I’d made a promise to go back and see some folk that weekend and when I make a commitment, I have to keep it, no matter how hard it is or how badly I feel.  He says he can understand that.

He just says: “Take care of her.”

And he tells me about his life driving this van up and down England.  He sounds like a very practical guy.  He takes what he can get and doesn’t worry about the rest.  He has two kids in Liverpool and talks about them a lot, and each time he does, I see them smiling at me from the photo of `em on the dash.

And then we get to Gailey and I’m sorry to see him go.  Our paths have crossed but once but I’m all the richer for it.  He wishes me luck as I step down from his van and the his last words to me are “Stay Free” which said so much about him.

Even though it was getting late, I just needed a couple of quick rides after that and I get home in time for one of my mother’s great Saturday night fry ups and then I’m just about ready for a long deep sleep in my old bed.  

The next day, Sunday, I laze around reading the paper pretty much until after lunch when it’s time to start off for the gig.

I borrowed me Mam’s car and drove round to pick Dusty, Elsa, and Sharon up.  God, they looked wonderful.  All three of them had bleached their hair.  Each of them had hair about two or three inches long and each of them had spiked it up.  And remember this was years before Birdland did it.  Dusty was wearing her Constable blazer that I lusted after.  Elsa was wearing these tight black drainpipes and black T-shirt, which made her look oh so tall and thin, and Sharon was wearing an extremely short black mini with fishnets and a leather jacket.  They’d all splashed black mascara on to emphasise the look.  You know what Sunday is like in middle England.  So sleepy and quiet.  I really think that these three were about the only thing that could wake it up.  We’d plenty of time before the gig, so they suggested we stroll around town and laugh at the locals.  I was wearing my blue Jamfan suit, white shirt, and a thin blue ribbon as a tie.  To be honest though, you couldn’t really tell what I was, so Elsa suggested I spike up what little hair I had.  We raided Dusty’s Mam’s kitchen and found some blue food colouring which we mixed in my hair and that gave it a deep rich blue colour which perfectly matched my suit.  Least that’s what I said, someone later told me my hair looked green, but I think that was jealousy.  Elsa and Sharon autographed my white shirt.  I wanted Dusty to paint me a picture like the Haywain she’d put on her school blazer, but she was eager to get out on the streets, so she hurriedly sketched a silhouette of Johnny.  I looked in the mirror.  Sharon had written ‘The Greatest Rock and Roll Banned in the UK’ across my heart.  I looked like the back cover of White Riot, only smarter.  And when I put my jacket on I looked like the back cover of In The City.

Dressed to kill, the four of us strolled down St John Street, past me old school and into town.  It was a nice sunny Sunday afternoon in May, and typically, no one was around.  No shops were open; only one or two cars were on the road.  Most folk like to spend Sunday lunchtime filling their fat faces with Roast Beef and then waste the best part of the afternoon sleeping it off.  The place was deserted.  We imagined it was on account of the four of us.  We walked down the road past the school like four gunslingers.  Locals cowered behind lace curtains, the only sign of their presence was the odd twitch as they watched us pass by.  Stray pedestrians turned back up side streets when they saw us coming.  Tumbleweeds rolled the length of the Friary as the clocks struck five.  Time to go.

But it was all so different when we got to Wolverhampton.  The Civic Hall is fairly near the football ground, but I really didn’t know my way around to well, so I’d parked in some back street and we’d had to walk to the gig.  We stood out like four sore fingers.  Local greasers had come out to watch the punks and we were the first ones to turn up.  We stood outside the Hall waiting for it to open.  Like homesteaders surrounded by red Indians, we huddled together to reassure each other, none of us taking our eyes off the locals circling round us.  We waited for the cavalry.  Slowly odd groups of real punks in bondage and tartan or leather and torn T-shirts showed up.  I stood proud in my dark blue Jam suit.  We must have been by the stage door because a coach pulled up a spilled a gang of youths out into our midst.  Some mingled with those of us stupid enough to have turned up too early, though whether out of friendliness or to have their egos stroked I don’t know.  A guy who they called Roadent grinned at me before going inside.  A little later they let us buy our tickets and follow.

Sharon announced that henceforth she wanted to be known as Dee Dee after the Ramone.  She used to use her first name which is Delia, shortened to Dee, but had got bored with it, so changed to Sharon.  Now in one afternoon she had changed back to Dee, had been inspired to rename herself DeeDee, and then became Delia Delia.

Dusty was jealous.  “God, I wish I’d thought of that,” she kept saying, so I explained at great length that there is no-one, absolutely no-one, in the history of popular music to compare with the mighty Dusty Springfield.

“Really, Dusty,” I said, “my knees quiver and my heart turns to jelly when I hear her sing ‘I Close my eyes and Count to Ten’”.  

She looked at me and saw I wasn’t lying.  She took out a black eye liner pencil and drew a heart on my sleeve with DS and NW on either side.  I took the pencil from her and drew another heart with AH & NW.  The heart wasn’t as neatly drawn, but the feeling was truer.  Dusty asked me who AH was, but the lights went down and the Slits came on before I got a chance to explain all about my new love.  All I said was that Annie had shown me how to have fun with food colouring.  Dusty said was in that case, it must be True Love.

It always happens when you’re not expecting it, I mean the first band coming on.  They were this bunch of girls, really young like fourth years from back at school, bouncing everywhere, except that the guitarist looked just like Dusty before she had her hair cut.  The crowd jumped up and pogoed to everything.  I didn’t catch a word that they sang and couldn’t remember a riff they played afterwards, just the fresh energy they brought to us.  Sometimes when you are determined to enjoy yourself you can just let go.  And the best was still to come.  

Straight after they’d finished, Elsa came up and shouted at me: “How could you leave her?”

She said it like I’d really done something wrong.  Maybe I had.  All of a sudden there was this bond of sisterhood between her and Annie, even though she’d never met Annie, and now she was fighting Annie’s corner.

What could I say?  Suddenly, I thought about Annie’s feelings and not mine.  I wondered what she was doing.  Maybe she was hanging out with Viv.  Maybe she was out having fun.  See, I didn’t trust my dreams back then.  I guess Elsa saw the doubt flicker across my face and so put an arm round me.

“Cheer up Ned,” she said. “You’re not that special.  I’m sure Annie doesn’t need you around to entertain her.”  And she said it or maybe I heard it in such a way that I was relieved not insulted.  And she grabbed me hand and pulled me off the floor to get me to dance to the reggae on the sound system.

And then the Subway Sect came on.  I can’t remember much about the music, but I can remember that the four of us just danced, a sort of jerky, jumpy, pogo like everyone else in the Civic Hall, while the band played on.

You know it was weird.  Before we left home, we’d had great fun walking around teasing the locals, thinking we were wild and wacky punks.  But when we’d arrived in Wolverhampton, we’d all been apprehensive on the same account.  We looked like punks and felt we were surrounded by bikers and skinheads.  Now inside the concert I started to notice that we were outnumbered by the real thing.  We looked like tourists on a holiday in our weekend punk fashions, or in my case, in my blue suit which quite obviously didn’t pass as anything remotely revolutionary.  The folk that had turned up were spiky haired and for real.  They threw everything into enjoying the music and left us to watch and learn.  Once more I felt on my own.  A few weeks later Bernie said something about us being middle class kids that had got into punk for real.  He said how it had started as a working class thing and had then got nicked by the middle class and sanitised.  I’m not sure he was totally correct, because there was a time before it was sanitised when it had a real element and a rip off element running parallel.  And your McLarens weren’t interested in sanitising it and had revelled in it and made money from its extremes.  But Bernie always said, in the years after, that we were for real.  When Power Pop arrived for its 15 seconds of fame early the following year, he said that was when the middle class ruined punk.  I guess just like football after Hillsborough or even the Labour Party under Blair, it all got deodorised and repackaged for greater sales.  The Pleasers were the New Labour of the Punk Movement.

And then the Buzzcocks arrived with their pop tunes and speeding guitars.  And they were so young.  That was the shock of going to punk gigs.  The bands were so young.  And the other thing I remember about all those bands was their nervous jerky movements as though they were rats caught in a spotlight running every way to escape, their heads turning left and right, their eyes wide open, alert, and scared, looking for any exit they could run to.  They always played their songs so quickly as if to get off stage sooner.  Of course the Buzzcocks were stars.  You could tell that.  They had that song I’d already heard which I liked that just went “Boredom, Boredom” and then had this guitar solo like an alarm that went on for ever bebeep bebeep bebeep bebeep bebeep …..

And then it was time for the Jam.  I told the girls about waiting outside the Roundhouse back in April.  It seemed so long ago.  I invented this long crusade that I’d been on to see them.  I told them I couldn’t believe I was finally going to see them.  I straightened my tie and buttoned up my jacket in anticipation thinking that at least everyone could see I was Jamfan number one.

But the Clash came on.  After the gig there was a guy on stage explaining why the Jam hadn’t shown up.  Or at least fielding questions without giving anything away.  And then in the press there were arguments from both sides.  Some saying the Jam walked out because they didn’t get enough time to soundcheck.  “Bloody professionals” was what Bernie said when I read that bit out of the NME to him in the coffee bar.  Some saying the Jam had got thrown off because they wouldn’t cough up and help out the other bands like the Slits who hadn’t got a record deal.  Some saying they were too right wing now and all that jazz.  Me, I think they were waiting for the moment I could take Annie to see them.

And the funny thing was that when the Clash came on, they looked like the Jam.  They were all dressed up in their neat combat clothes.  They honestly looked like a professional band.  Not like the three enthusiastic sets of amateurs we’d just seen.  The Clash were the business.  But, I’ll tell you this.  They put as much energy and commitment into that gig as I’ve seen any other band put into any other show ever.  Strummer was trying so hard to put feeling into every word, he couldn’t catch his breath.  He couldn’t really get any of his words out coherently.  Not that it mattered.  Every throat in that hall was shouting out all of his words for him.  And every body was thrashing about to those glorious riffs that Jones was throwing from his axe.  And every soul in that audience left that gig lifted and energised.  You could tell from the light that shone out of Dusty’s eyes and Elsa’s and Dee Dee’s as we all walked back to the car.  We were all in love with the rocknroll world.

The next morning I lay awake in my old bed as I listened to Mom and Dad go to work and my kid brother go off to school.  I lay there after they’d gone in the silence that shouted through the old house.  I could hear the sounds from the previous night again.  I could see Strummer’s anger and Ari’s crazy energy and Pete Shelley’s twitchy nerves.  Like when you see a really good film and all of the good bits keep repeating, I lay there savouring the gig again.

And then after a long leisurely breakfast of cornflakes followed by loads of tea and toast, I went outside into the old dears’ garden.  My Dad really loved his lawn.  He cut it twice a week or more from April to October.  It was always beautifully green.  The sun was up now, so I lay back on the grass right in the middle, closed my eyes, and let the day pass me by.  Summer lawns should always be like this.  I loved that phrase ‘The Hissing of Summer Lawns’ without even knowing where it came from.  To me, it always meant my Dad’s grass simmering in summer.  That neat smell of freshly cut grass, the faint hum of insects, the quiet of small town England, the brightness of May skies.

But Elsa’s comment about abandoning Annie troubled me.  I tried to imagine what she was doing.  I realised that just the thought of her quickened my pulse and started a buzz somewhere in me.  Rather than analyse my feelings like I usually did, I let them come forward of their own accord and explain themselves to my subconscious mind.  I understood with a slow, sure, knowledge that part of me was flowering that had never flowered before.  As if a fairy was flying about in my cavernous body magically bringing buds to life, I felt the warmth of Annie’s memory fill my being.  I knew then that for the first time in my life I loved someone.  And in knowing it, my joy grew even greater.

I got up and walked over to the old oak that I’d loved to climb as a kid.  There’d hardly been a weekend between the time that I’d first mastered its south-eastern face and my leaving for University that I hadn’t climbed it.  Today I pushed myself as far as I could.  Right up into the highest branches which swayed dramatically as I climbed.  Up as far as I dared go as the thinning branches bent under my weight.  I looked around my old neighbourhood, seeing into gardens and houses all around me.  And further, I could see the streets I’d played on as a kid, the rec at the end of the road where we’d played football, the churches of the town to the west and the rolling countryside to the east.  And I was master of it all.  I couldn’t resist shrieking out a war cry to let everyone know I was back and in charge.  Boy this was fun.  I wished Bernie could see me.

That was a good trip, those few days I spent at the end of May.  I had the long days to relax at home or walk round the old fields.  And then at night, we had the gigs.

One of the good things was that I patched things up with Els.  She called me up on the Monday from a phone box after school and asked me to come into town and meet her.  So we met and grabbed a cup of tea before the tea shop ion town closed and then strolled through the park in the evening sun.  She wanted to talk about university and all that jazz.  She was also a bit wound up about her A levels which she was just about to take.  She was a scientist like me, so she had loads to take, not one or two like Dusty and DeeDee.  I guess she wanted to get some sympathy from someone who knew what it was like.

Anyway, we soon moved on to talking about other stuff.  I wanted to be open and honest with her and I felt I owed her an apology for what had happened after Christmas.  I told her my side of the story.  About Mary and Annie.  About how I’d really liked her when I’d met her at Christmas, and so had hung around with her.  But at the same time, I’d been carrying a torch for Mary, so I’d put up barriers to stop Els getting too close.  I told her that I hadn’t been able to say how I felt, so had said nothing with the result that I had given her so many wrong signals.  I told her about how I’d met Annie at the start of that term and how meeting her had given me a proper perspective on everyone else.  Which meant that although I liked Elsa, I now knew, since I’d met Annie, that it wasn’t enough.  To which she replied:

“I know exactly what you mean.  I liked you too and you hurt me a lot.  But now I’ve met Rob [her Jim Morrison type].  Now I’ve fallen in love with him, I know exactly where you and I stand.”

So that cleared the air and made us both feel so much better.  I told her that one of the things I’d discovered that term was that you really needed to know yourself before you could be happy.  Know how you feel, know what’s important to you, all that jazz.  And when you do find out who you are you have to be true that.  I told her this new rule that I’d learned.

“Be strict in what you send, but be tolerant of what you receive.”  

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, when I say ‘what you send’, I mean what you give out, what you do, how you behave.  If you believe in something, be strict in following it.  Like, we all have rules we try to live by.  Serious stuff like not killing and not thieving, but smaller stuff too that makes us what we are.  Like you and me both believe in dressing up smart and turning up on time if we say we will.  We both make an effort, even though some other folk don’t.  So that’s what I mean about being tolerant of what others give out.  Some things aren’t negotiable, like the serious stuff.  But some things you have to be more tolerant of.  Like when DeeDee shows up half an hour late like she always does, you don’t nail her to a cross, you just try and train her so she cuts it down to 20 minutes the next time.  The world would run more smoothly if we could all relax the rules we apply to others.”

“You mean ‘Forgive those that trespass against us’”.

“Yes – you got it.  When it all boils down, there is only the One Way!  We’re all in this together!”

So we talked a bit about religion.  Heavy stuff for two scientists.  She said:  “All religion is about how you live and how you die.”

I said: “How you live and what you think happens when you die are your beliefs.  The rest are just club rules – the things you have to do to be a member of the club.  That’s what organised religion is all about – club rules.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” she said.  “You’ve just told me two of your club rules.”

“OK.  Fair enough.  So you know my club rules.  And you know how I think we should live.  Now tell me what happens when we die.”

“Who knows?  It’s funny – none of us knows but every single one of is gonna find out.”

So that’s how we left it.  But it strikes me that we all live on.  We live on in the memories of the people we’ve known.  We live on in the effect we’ve had on those people.  We live on in the changes we’ve made.  That’s why we have to make sure everything we leave behind is positive.  If you’d have asked me then I’d have said it would be incredible to think that one day, Joey and Dee Dee and Tommy and Johnny were gonna die.  But even back then, they’d already changed the world. 

So, on the Tuesday night, the four of us, me, Elsa, Dusty, and Delia Delia, met up again to cruise into Birmingham in me Mam’s trusty Morris 1300 to pay homage to the gods at Barbarella’s.  Dusty knows I’m royalty now because she presents me with her red school jacket complete with fine art.  Elsa gives me a wonderful hug, and Dee grabs my arm and hardly lets go all evening.  They’re all glowing with their freedom from school, but I’m glowing even more.  They can tell.  The light poured out of me.  The light from the flame that Joey, Tommy, Dee Dee, Johnny, and Annie had lit. 

And, my children, it was everything I had expected it to be.  It was truly a most glorious gig with which to celebrate.  The Ramones AND the Talking Heads.  I can still remember the back of David Byrne’s neck where his mother had just scrubbed him.  I can still remember Joey’s long thin hands walking up and down the mike like a crane fly.  I can still remember the petrified glare of Tina Weymouth caught in the house lights.  I can remember the announcements that prefaced each song.  “1-2-3-4” or “The name of this song is…”.  But most of all, I can remember the songs.  The perfect coupling of the Talking Heads making sense and the Ramones making pure fun.   

We danced all night.  The DJ played everything you could imagine and more.  He played the Clash and the Buzzcocks, of course.  He played Bowie and Roxy Music.  He played the Electric Prunes and the Seeds.  He played Devo’s first single on import and Mick Ronson’s Billy Porter.  Dee fell in love with him and was forever dragging me over to ask for stuff with her.  And he never failed her once.  They’ve got three kids now.  I see them when I can, not least because I always find new music to listen to up there.  It’s like knowing Andy Kershaw.

Then, right early on Wednesday, me Mam dropped me of at the A38 roundabout near Swinford.  She gave me a worried look and asked if I’d be OK.  Of course I would be, I said.  I’d got up pretty quickly on the Saturday.  It wouldn’t take me long to get back.  Anyway, like I said, she’d got me up early just in case.

It was pretty busy with working folk going into Birmingham, so my first ride came quickly.  I got out at Bassett’s Pole and got another, this time going all the way to Warwick.  But after that, things slowed down a bit as the rush hour stopped.  I stood by this long, straight stretch of road, the wrong side of Warwick and waited for my next ride.  I had a bit of time to think – how far I was from Southampton, how I didn’t really know the names of the roads I needed to take, how I’d never really seen any of the places I was going to pass through.  Like Warwick.

Then this guy stopped and said he’d take me to Evesham.  I’d heard of it, but I didn’t know where on earth it was.  Then I thought, why the hell not, I might learn something.  Turns out he was some teacher or lecturer or something cos he liked to try and educate me!  He told me about Warwick Castle, and then about Shakespeare when we passed through Stratford.  And about Evesham.  And then he dumped me on the road to find my own way.

I really didn’t know where I was, not having a map, but some salesman in a Ford took me to Oxford, which I guessed was in the right direction.  Strange thing was, we passed loads of places that me Mam and Dad had taken me when I was young and could remember the names of, like Moreton in the Marsh and Stow on the Wold.  I’d see these sign posts and remember sitting as a passenger in me Dad’s car and him reading out the names.  I remember the quaint old villages we’d pass through made of that wonderful golden brown stone.   

At Oxford I got dropped off on the by-pass, which I recognised, so that was cool.  There was a service station there, so I had a bite to eat, seeing as it was getting on for two and I was pretty hungry.  This long-haired student came up and started talking to me as I was sat drinking my tea and started telling about how he was trying to hitch down to Cornwall, because he’d had enough of studying.  I believed him, but for all I knew, he could have finished for the year.  We walked back out to the road together.  He had this long Oxford type scarf.  Like what we called a college scarf at the football, but instead of it being red and white, it was mainly black, but with maybe a yellow stripe and a green one.  And it was longer than my football scarves.  It was wrapped two or three times round his neck and still managed to cover his knees.  And another thing, he was carrying a beat-up old paperback book about being on the road stuffed into his jacket pocket that he kept referring to as if it was a hitch hiker’s guide to the south of England.  I hadn’t really decided whether to try to thumb with him or avoid him, but a van stopped and offered both of us a ride to Marlborough which meant nothing to me, but Rich, this Oxford type, told me I should take it.  Funny thing was, that Rich had the driver go around all these back roads up on top of this hill, and even had us stop and get out because he wanted to show me this white horse that some guys had cut into the hillside.  You couldn’t really make it out, only lines here and there, but Rich told me it was Important.  And Old.

We got out at Marlborough, which has this one long main street, and walked up and down it a couple of times just talking.  He said he’d decided to try and find somewhere to stay outside of town – like if he just started to walk, he’d bump into a nice farmhouse that would put him up.  He sounded so confident that I almost believed him.  But then, he had managed to persuade that van driver to mess about looking for that stupid horse.  Marlborough was too quiet and it was getting late, on account of our having wasted time coming down from Oxford, so I was getting worried.  But Rich walked with me to the main road and saw me get a ride within two minutes of sticking my thumb out.  Then he set off to the west, looking, he said, for old stones, while I got a ride down to Winchester, and then, just before it got too dark, my last ride, into Southampton where I got dropped off on the Avenue, about five minutes walk from Chamberlain.