The Ned Wood Archive

Get me to the world on time

You gotta get me to the world on time

The Electric Prunes

We were trying to get to London, Bernie and me. So far, we’d only reached Basingstoke. Basingstoke, that grey sunken armpit of the south. That soul desert of middle England. The sort of place we warned our parents against. A place like everywhere else in England. Only more so. We’d been left at the M3 Basingstoke exit by some sadistic plumber who was off to Reading for a dirty weekend and thought that we should sample the delights of an afternoon staring at grey concrete.

I hate Basingstoke. I’ve only ever been there once, this one time with Bernie, but I hate it. It has no redeeming features. We’re on the road, see. It’s supposed to be romantic. Where’s the beauty? Where’re the sights? Where’s the awe-inspiring scenery? I’ve been stood on the eastbound on-ramp for nearly an hour and I’ve seen enough of this place. Basingstoke. Ha! My legs ached. I’d taken the back of the van, crouched on the corrugated bare metal floor bouncing off U-bends and P-bends and copper pipes and radiator valves, while Bernie sat in comparative luxury up front. You owe me one Bernie, you long-haired git. Now, he’s stood next to me, hopefully eyeing all of the passing cars, trying to get a ride, his long black curly hair blown across his face by the sodden gusts that harried us, his curly black beard soaking up all the moisture in the air.

It is precisely because I’m with this long-haired git that the natives aren’t biting. We’d stood by the side of the A33 on the outskirts of Southampton for over an hour waiting for our first ride. Only time it took me more than a few minutes to get one there. Now we were stood by the side of the M3 on the edge of Basingstoke waiting for our second. Four-door saloon after four-door saloon cruises past us out of grey monotonous Basingstoke desperate not to give a lift to a long-haired git hitcher and his short-haired mate. Perhaps it’s not Bernie. Perhaps it’s me. My hair is just a little too short for May 1977. It hasn’t been this short since I was going to school in shorts. My ears are showing. No one else I know has ears. Ears haven’t been seen in England since Dave and Ansel Collins hit the charts. I’ve got a good inch of growth all over me head. Even if it doesn’t stick up straight, it’s still too short for 1977. It marks me out as one thing only. That and my lack of flares and my one inch wide tie and my felt-tip annotated white school shirt and my shiny white baseball boots and my too-small old suit jacket. To middle England, I look like Johnny Rotten’s brother.

No. It ain’t me. It’s Bernie. I get rides on my own. I’m not getting a ride today. The reason is that no-one ever stops for long-haired hippie gits.

Bernie’s got another theory. “This is a metaphor for life,” says Bernie. “An endless circle of trying to hitch rides, failing, and trying again. Just like life.”

“You mean analogy, not metaphor. Metaphor is something you write. An analogy is an actual concrete thing,” I tell him. I don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m just trogging to wind him up.

“Metaphor/analogy. Anaphor/metalogy. It’s all the same. We just keep doing the same thing over and over, thumbing/riding/thumbing/riding … not really making any progress. Life’s like that. You go through different stuff in life, but it all comes round again. Sleep, study, eat, repeat.”

“Now you’re telling me that my life is just a metallurgic cycle? What about football, is that metallurgy?” Bernie isn’t into football, he doesn’t understand it.

“Winning/losing. Promotion/relegation. Just another cycle.”

“So why are you here, not in bed doing nothing?” I ask, meaning why is he bothering with anything.

“What, Southampton? Just part of the cycle. At school, we’re all excepted to go to University, so we just go. Like Richard Hell says, we’re all part of the blank generation. We’re just doing what we’re told to. We don’t have our own identity. We’re just blanks.”

Wow. He must have got out of the wrong side of bed this morning. Was it true? Were we just going round and round not making any progress. Where we trying to get anywhere? Would we get there? And, if we did, would it mean anything? Sure it would. I’m a glass-half-full sort of person. We’re on the road for a reason.

“Don’t worry, Bernie. We’ll get there. Have faith.”

Bernie isn’t a git, by the way. He’s a really nice bloke. It took me a while to really get to know him. To get past the intense college kid that started the previous autumn. Now I’d warmed to him. Found his sense of humour, found that we had more than just a course in fossil bashing in common. Here was a man that swore by the Pistols and the Clash. Here was the guy who had turned me onto transatlantic punks like Television and Blondie. Here, in fact, was the reason I was thumbing up to London to catch the gig at the Hammersmith Odeon.

Come on you honourable people of Basingstoke. Surely someone is brave enough to give a ride to a punk and a hippie.

Actually, Bernie wasn’t a hippie either. Well not what I imagined a hippie to be. Tell the truth, he was more like a punk, like me. Although, maybe I wasn’t a real punk, just a weekender, just a guy with short hair. Maybe Bernie was a punk with long hair. A heart of gold, a wicked laugh, fine taste in music, and rampant black hair. But maybe it was time he got it cut. Yeah, I was about to ask him if he didn’t think it was time he got his hair
cut when one of those two-seater Mercs drove by with the top down. We both watched it sail effortlessly past, both of our reveries broken.

“I wonder, did they ever make a truly cool car?” asks Bernie.

Now Bernie may just have been trying to make conversation. Or he may have been trying to make a point, which is more typical. So I rehearse a few answers in my head.

He may want to say, there’re no cool cars, not even soft top Mercs. The only cool transport is your own two feet. Then he could rail against pollution and big American gas guzzlers.

Or he may think that your ’59 Chevrolet Impala or your ’56 Lincoln Premiere, or your ’58 Edsel were the coolest cars, and we’d get into some discussion about how the devil has all the best fins.

Or he may have some boy racer inside him. And we’d talk about when I’d turned 18 and wanted an MG or a Spitfire, but couldn’t afford the insurance. Me Dad had given me a tidy sum for passing me A levels and I’d checked out the ads. I could have bought the car, but not driven it, so I got a saxophone instead. Lot of good it did me, I still can’t play it, but at least it didn’t need a no claims bonus.

Or he may be thinking about some nice little European buggy. “What about a beetle?” I suggested? “Or a 2CV? Or a beautiful blue-with-wooden-panels Moggie Thou Traveller?” Predictable enough answer. They were all cool cars. I’d moved on since my boy-racer days. “I thought you had a bit more style, Riff old boy,” he said. “What about one of those?” A Jag was coming toward us. A big 4.2 Sovereign. The sort me dad drove.

“Bloated Plutocrat,” I shouted. “Exploiting Capitalist,” he shouted. “Bourgeois Tyrant,” we chorused, each of us waving pairs of fingers in its direction. Then we realised, too late, that the Jag had been slowing down on the hard shoulder to offer us a ride, but had put his foot down on the gas when we’d given him the punk equivalent of the peace sign.

Bernie thought it was hilarious.

“Ever thought of getting your hair cut Bernie?” I asked.

You know, I’d done a lot of hitching that term. On my own, with Annie, with Sonia. Usually with better luck. Actually, always with better luck. But then I’d take what I got. One thing I learned was to go where the traffic would take you. And always say thank you. If someone wants to take you where you are going, but in a roundabout way, you’re better off following them. Or even if they aren’t going your way, let them pick your route, even your destination. Life’s too short to waste on the wrong slip road. See, that plumber going to Reading was a sign. That’s they way we should have gone.

“We should try to get to Reading and hitch up the M4,” I suggested to Bernie. That’s what Rich would have done. He would have gone up to Reading with the plumber. That was Rich’s motto, Oxford Rich I called him: just go where life takes him. But you don’t know Rich, do you? I’ll tell you about him some day. Bernie agrees with my suggestion, so we cross the road and start trying to get a ride from folk leaving the motorway and heading into Basingstoke and beyond. But this doesn’t feel right. I’m trying to decide whether we know what we’re doing, Bernie and me, when Victoria drives by.

You don’t know Vic either do you? Victoria was, and probably still is, one of the most wonderful women on this planet – you know, eternally beautiful like Charlotte Rampling – and at that moment I felt both a deep love and an intense hatred for her.

For a start, like I say, she’s one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever known. I could look at her for hours. In fact once I did. A couple of years after I’d left university, Jo invited us back to Southampton for a party and put a crowd of us up on her floor – me, Debbie, Sniff, and so on – all the old gang. There were about ten of us in sleeping bags on the floor. Anyway, I woke up early the next morning and noticed that Victoria was sleeping about three yards away from me. I spent the first few sunlit hours of that drowsy Sunday morning gazing at her sleeping face until Jo spoilt everything by waking everyone else up. Did you hear about when they had that Tilda Swinton sleep in a glass cage in the Serpentine Gallery and everyone was arguing about whether it was art or not, and I was thinking of course it’s art. It’s Tilda Swinton. She’d be art having a fag behind the bike shed. Well Victoria was the same. Her face lay there expressionless like a porcelain statuette, noble, clear, beautiful, and pure.

Well, here she is, the most beautiful woman in existence and she drives past us in a Morris 1000 Traveller. A beautiful, dark blue Moggie Thou traveller with wooden panels. The single coolest most desirable car on the planet. This woman is an angel.

And she drives straight past us. Bernie and me are trying to get out of Basingstoke and Victoria Bloody Carson drives past us. And waves. Bastard.

“Was that…”

“Yep.”

“And she just…”

“Yep.”

“Why didn’t she give us a lift?”

“I don’t know, Bernie. Why don’t you just stop her and ask?”

So that was it. See if I care. Besides, I was in love with Annie at the time.

No, really. I was in love with Annie. It was the real thing. This whole book is about her. I’ll get round to telling you. We just have to do this in the correct order.

Well, anyways, Bernie and me had only just recovered from the shock of seeing someone we thought we knew drive past and not give us a lift, when the cops arrived and moved us on. Apparently we’re still on the motorway. Even though we are fifty yards from it on a small roundabout, we are still officially on the motorway and you can’t hitch on the motorway. Years later, when I was driving myself, I stopped to give a ride to a couple of guys thumbing on a slip road off the A1M and got stopped by the cops. They didn’t say anything to the hitchers, but fined me forty quid. Justice for you.

So we get moved on by the pigs. Me and Bernie leg it across town looking for another road out, any road, but hopefully the road to Reading. Bernie starts on about the moral worth of thumbing. ‘The Dignity of Hitching’ he calls it as if he’s quoting from some ancient text.

“You know Riff,” he says, “this really is the way it has to be. You take your chances on the open road and just accept what fate sends you. Go where the rides take you. See the world.”

Isn’t that what I was trying to say? We’re trying to find a signpost, a
main road, anything that we could use to get out of that dreary place. I don’t want to see the world; I just want to see any part of southern England that isn’t Basingstoke.

“Of course,” he continues “it really doesn’t mean anything if we miss the gig tonight. What difference does it make? We’ll have lived on the road for a day and we’ll have learnt so much.”

Whatever. At about four o’clock, we get bored of looking for the road to Reading and we decide to take the train.