1978

Retrospectoscopic.....

We feel such a need to make sense of things - of life generally and of our own life specifically.

We wander through the days collecting memories like shiny pebbles and then later we try to arrange them, making patterns with them.

Poets are master pattern makers. The best poems are templates, helping readers see patterns in the chaos around them and perhaps - on a good day - even a hint of meaning.

This week I take a break from Poetry and I call a pause on nature and landscape and all the delicious beauty I usually drink from. I will return to them - I have so much more to share - but today I look way back to a younger me, self-catapulted across the world at the age of 17 to live in a strange city in a strange land and required - for the first time in my life - to try and create a pattern for myself.

Punk Rules Okay!" was spray painted on the walls and London was a cold and gritty city but I turned on the radio and there was a voice from another universe singing of Cathy and Heathcliff and a love from beyond life and from outside of time.

In the Tube, wherever I looked, there were posters of Kate Bush in a pink leotard staring into my eyes and I was - of course - transfixed.

I was walking the sleet filled streets in a winter storm on my way to a night shift at my first job but in my head I was out on the wily windy moors and I was rolling and falling in green. I had left my first girlfriend behind in Australia to come to London and her name - of course - was Cathy. We shared the same birthday.

By the end of the year I was in Australia again.

4 months later - her car wrapped around a tree on a long drive home after a weekend to see her family, and me - Cathy was dead.

I played Wuthering Heights each night and listened at my window through every storm.

Sometimes, I still do….

1978

Kate Bush keening, wailing out of stereos through windows and staring from posters down the cold dark tunnels of the Tube.  Up above,  the first girls of summer were shedding chrysalis clothes to sunbathe iridescently by the Serpentine in Hyde Park.

Lepidoptery.  I watched from the shadows but could never catch.  They lived in the sun.  I worked night shifts on strong coffee and walked the streets by day – looking and listening.   At weekends I tried to sleep.

My roommate drank lager in pints and never less than four.  I couldn’t understand what his girlfriend saw in him.  Maybe that’s why they kept the light off - so she wouldn't have to see anything.  That way too neither did I.  I was 17, wide awake  and desperate for them to sleep.

Outside The Clash was still 2 years away but London was already calling, waiting too - the squares and the parks, the carved up land and the people - the ordinary and the crazy - some so ordinary it was crazy itself.  I thought maybe it was the history; all those old buildings just squashing them down.  I was flattened myself.  I couldn’t learn how to live.  I just seemed to exist, slipping through streets and lanes and in between people, finding a little space in the overlooked interstices of their lives.

On our 18th birthday I posted Cathy a name chain with my latest letter.

My hostel was next door to the Moonie cult.  Clean young couples with clip boards lurked outside inviting us to attend a free seminar on life.  I accepted, coming home off a week of night shift.  I ate a plate of biscuits then slept through the whole talk.  Afterwards they asked me what I thought of it.  I said it was too short.  

Something was calling them.  I was hearing other things.  The rush and roar of the underground as it digested me each evening heading for Oxford Street.  The whir and clatter of printers all night.  The Tube again, excreting me at dawn at Lancaster Gate.

Sometimes I walked to work.  I was saving to escape.  I crept through the dark underpass at Marble Arch at 10 pm.  Voices echoed down dim tunnels yelling anger, whispering love.  The words were indistinct and always at the edge of understanding.  I didn’t want to meet them.  I never did.  Maybe there was no-one there at all.  

Like Ed who heard things -  the guy I worked with up on the third floor, three doors and two corridors from the nearest window.  Car sized computer dinosaurs lurked there chewing magnetic tape and spewing out paper.  We served their inscrutable needs all night while elsewhere technology evolved into a new age.  Even then our jobs were dying - already obsolete, soon to be extinct.  You could hear it, if you listened carefully, coded into the clatter of the punch card reader, but I was listening to a different beat instead, pulsed way down low below the din of the printers - my own telltale heart.
 
I was always listening for something.  At three am it was the boss, looking for Ed.  Ed worked like hell each night, for half a shift, but then he’d go real quiet and wander off, coming back an hour later, even two.   One night I followed him, sneaking up the fire stairs to the roof.  There he was, outlined against the glow, walking silently along the narrow parapet six stories up above the aching fluorescent pit of Oxford Street.  

He paused, stopped, leaned forward.   I waited for the fall.  

But it never came.  Turns out he was just spitting at the pigeons asleep on the window ledges below.  I asked him afterwards why he did that, up on the parapet at night.  He said he heard a voice telling him to.  

Each night I wondered when the voice would tell him to jump, what it would sound like, how it would feel.  I wondered where the voice came from and if it would come for me.

Only now do I realize, it must have been London calling .....

Cathy