Corsham

Bath with its Abbey, Roman Baths, Circus and Royal Crescent is one of the wonders of Britain but sadly for some reason I never really liked it very much. I wonder if there was just something too grand about the place which didn’t suit my simple ways.  The 18^th century has always been my least favourite age and I often wonder if this early dislike had something to do with all those wigs and Whigs, which made all the famous men look the same.  The writers of that most progressive century: Rousseau, Fielding, Goldsmith, Richardson and Tobias Smollett have never really excited me as much as those that went before and came after, and apart from Watteau, Goya and some works by Gainsborough it’s the same with the painters.  Despite this I retain some happy memories of the hilly place, which, along with many other students I would usually visit every two or three weeks, catching the Saturday morning bus from Newlands Avenue which would arrive at Bath well before midday. I might then spend some time wandering about among the tourists and then explore unknown parts of the city, up and down its hills, before visiting the music shop of Duck and Pinker near Pulteney Bridge looking at LPs, these wanderings would also include visits to bookshops; there was in those days a little old store situated in one of those narrow alleyways where I bought brand-new Penguin paperbacks including Crime and Punishment and Kafka’s Metamorphosis and something by Scott Fitzgerald. I think I must have always caught the same return bus in the late afternoon from near Pulteney Bridge for I well remember surveying the fine wide view of the weirs on the river Avon whilst loitering around there; at that time a huge cavernous high-ceilinged Edwardian place stood nearby; an odd mixture of an Hotel Lounge Bar and Restaurant with enormous windows which looked upon the river and up to wooded hills beyond. I have no idea of its name but I always called it for some reason the Empire Rooms. I would make my way to this impressive old-fashioned place, an establishment  which Dickens would no doubt have described as commodious, clutching  all of my latest acquisitions and hoping to find an unoccupied table by the wall (in those days for some reason I felt insecure and a bit vulnerable when occupying any table which stood out in the room—maybe it was  fear of someone taking the rise and making fun of me behind my back, or even worse being apprehended or attacked from behind) where I might glance at and skim through them whilst enjoying my usual teatime treat of a ham and tomato sandwich on brown bread, dry rock-bun and cup of tea. No doubt there were in that famous City far more charming old-world places and exciting cafes and restaurants to have tea, but having discovered it on my first visit and found that it suited me I doggedly stuck to it in my own stubborn unadventurous fashion.   

 Our other big town was Chippenham, which I remember as a solid stone-built market town with good buildings, very English and unpretentious. I particularly remember crossing the bridge over the Avon and the attractive Market Square. But how much more I felt at home there than the city of Bath for all of its Georgian splendour!  I don’t suppose I would have often visited Chippenham if they hadn’t closed Corsham railway station in the mid-sixties, as it was from here that we caught the trains back to London. One would think a small town like Corsham (Wilton, a similarly sized town near Salisbury which once had two stations also comes to mind) would be well worth keeping open, by that time it would have probably become an unstaffed halt, so gaining customers there would have provided a valuable service and also brought in revenue.  I find it hard to understand the reasoning behind this decision, but remember we were dealing with the newly branded British Rail, an institution whose bizarre aim seemed to be nothing other than to run the entire rail system into the ground, turn away as much freight as possible and discourage passengers from using the service. Today’s devotees of re-nationalization surely cannot remember what a misery travelling by rail was in the 1970s–late trains, with virtually no apology or explanation given, rolling stock in poor shape, wonderful examples of railway architecture torn down and replaced with box -like structures or glass bus shelters and a disgraceful buffet service both at stations and on the trains. Travellers-Fare was the brand name for this travesty; I will never forget those filthy smoky buffet bars with a few piss-heads hanging around- where the eatables consisted of little more than dreadful little sandwiches of egg, ham and plastic tasting cheese and packets of crisps.

The 31 bus to Bath didn’t go directly along the main A4 but first went left through the jumbled and broken country near Box tunnel where lay the housing estates of Hudswell, and Rudloe, a strange place of small factories, mine workings and army camps.  With the additional passengers picked up here including lots of squaddies, the bus would be pretty full by the time it re-joined the Bath Road at the top of Box Hill.  I remember my astonishment the first time I saw the view from that height­; all the way from Chippenham the land had risen, but not steeply enough to make you aware of the elevation, when suddenly you were confronted with an enormous view, with Colerne and its church tower across the valley and the chequer of small fields and the landscape receding all the way westward; in an instant it was an entirely different world; the countryside of the south had been left behind as the eye travelled down to Bath and Bristol and beyond to the mystic West Country, beauty of high Cotswold and far off Somerset and Devon. A shock of surprise certainly at the big view, but, that the vast deep valley could have been created by the tiny By-Brook also caused wonderment and was proof that these Islands long ages ago had a much wetter climate. Astonishing and beautiful it certainly was, but this scene will be linked forever in my memory with the smoky bus and the rowdy young soldiers with their horribly scrawny shaven necks covered with all sorts of rashes, pimples and blackheads and short back and sides haircuts. I had spent years amongst low and stupid boys at Tilbury school, but nothing I witnessed at that dump was as bad as the vile behaviour and inane horseplay of these young army recruits on their day off!

The railway station at Chippenham to the bus stop for the 31 to Corsham was a walk of about a quarter of a mile. I have no idea what sort of silly fear or superstition caused me to always catch the bus at that particular stop as I am pretty sure there has always been a connection at the railway station, but this wholly unnecessary trudge wasn’t much of a problem when leaving college at the end of term, however when arriving back in the West Country with the burden of my over-loaded ancient brown suitcase it became a sad ordeal. Suitcases didn’t have wheels in those days, and I remember after one particularly harrowing journey arriving at Corsham with blood blisters on the palm of my right hand. My mother was always worried that I might not be adequately feeding myself far away from home, so along with my neatly washed and ironed shirts and trousers she packed the sagging cardboard case with all sorts of food, Nan’s home-made jam, butter and tea as well as lots of tins which I had to struggle with up to my distant top of house room.  Cans of soup, baked beans, including those weird ones with pork sausages, and lots of fishy stuff; mackerel, herring in tomato sauce, pilchard, tuna and sardines. Rather nasty tinned meat products were even more plentiful, corned beef, Fray Bentos steak pies, and spam or pork luncheon meat as it was more politely called. Some years later in poorer and less happy days in London, Louisa showed how as a tasty alternative spam could be heated under the grill which although making the vile product tastier also somehow rendered it even more salty!

There was, I remember an International Stores in the High Street where we shopped for groceries, and I think there was a big Co-Op somewhere near the bus stop, while halfway to Beechfield was the old Priory Stores which stayed open until late. Just around the corner from my hostel was an excellent Bakery and further up the butcher which sold good quality local sausages and bacon and big crusty pork pies with lots of gelatine; I was warned more than once that if I saw just how much of the Pig went into the pies, I would never buy another. This sort of thing accompanied by egg or baked beans or the occasional chop eaten with some greens was about the limit of my culinary efforts.

But apart from at weekends there was little need to bother with cooking as the new college Refectory provided really good meals, with breakfast at 10am, lunch from 12.30, tea at 4pm and a substantial supper from 6.30 for those wanting to work late. The college bus did a round trip to Beechfield at lunchtime for those studying at Monks Park, so everyone was well served.  The strange thing is that although I enjoyed the food and must have over those years eaten in that light and spacious room hundreds of times, I cannot recall any of those meals. But the breakfasts- some of them hungover ones, and some very hungry ones, I do remember. Two friendly fellow painting students who were from the Roses counties of the north, Janet Rowland and Janina Cebertowicz would often in the mornings make comic banter about going across to canteen for bacon butties, these were rather good, thin white bread rolls covered in margarine and filled with a slab of under-cooked fatty bacon. I hadn’t until then heard anything of butties, where I came from in Essex, we simply referred to them as bacon rolls.

So much for the food. I mentioned that many of those breakfasts were hangover ones; fifty years ago, smoking and drinking in public houses was very much the pivotal point of the social scene in Britain, far more than is the case today and in those college years almost everything that was funny, grotesque or exciting occurred there and with alcohol relatively cheap and plentiful, over-indulgence and problems related to that were commonplace. Of course, there were a great many students who didn’t get regularly involved in the drinking scene and went through their college years in a more quiet and restrained way, working hard, studying, staying at home or getting involved in loving long-term relationships and I have a shrewd hunch that these fortunate ones enjoyed their nine terms in the West Country a good deal more than most of the hardcore drinking crew.

There were three pubs along the High Street: The Pack Horse, Royal Oak and the Methuen Arms. The Pack was the main student watering hole; we spent many evenings in the tiny place which was little more than twelve feet across, it had a smelly loo out back beyond the tiny bar, and at the near end a juke box, pinball machine and a dart board. Old Bert Crotty and his wife Flo ran a tight ship. Although he was largely reliant on the student trade, which in itself meant he often had to put-up with a lot of nonsense, we all knew not to overstep the mark as he was adept at throwing out anyone mucking about and causing trouble. There was a sort of drinking party there almost every night in our first term as people got to know each other; the ringleaders in these happy revels were Pete Jenkins and a slightly older ceramics student Les Bowen who hailed I think from the Welsh border country; he was terrific fun but after that first term seemed to unaccountably fade from sight. Virginia Plain by Roxy Music was constantly playing on the jukebox and often by the end of the night everyone would be having raucous fun and dancing. As time went by the numbers of student drinkers naturally decreased, until I suppose the new year’s intake came along, but for those of us who continued drinking fairly heavily through all our college days things were never quite the same again. The Royal Oak situated in the middle of the High Street had the advantage of two big rooms, a singularly rough and dangerous public bar frequented largely by locals and some tough soldiers and a saloon where female students and couples in relationships who wanted some privacy would spend the evenings in reasonably genteel surroundings. Rocky Revell and his wife Jimmy were the landlords and were friendly enough towards students, unless Rocky had been down the cellar, where he periodically went, ostensibly to clear the empty casks but where he in fact emptied the dregs from plenty of others and became very dishevelled, abusive and incredibly drunk. I never liked the atmosphere in the Royal Oak, it was I think a Wadsworth house which sold a nasty warm and frothy beer, which though fairly strong wasn’t very good to drink, but nevertheless I would occasionally go there, especially if none of my friends were at the Pack.  Saturday nights could get a bit lively and fights often broke out- raucous nights with Whisky in the Jar by Thin Lizzie belting it out on the juke box. Right at the far end of the street was the Methuen Arms which unlike all the other Corsham drinking places was quite a respectable establishment that always seemed to us a rather a high-class, stuffy and expensive place, an hotel of some repute which comprised quite a number of bars as well as a renowned restaurant. A strange smell of cooked food, a dough and yeast and boiled cabbage sort of odour pervaded each of the rooms including the cold long room right at the far end which housed a skittle alley where often at the end of an evening of drinking and tipsy we would attempt to play. Attempting skittles after drinking a lot of beer, what fools we made of ourselves!

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Things didn’t really liven up in any of our Corsham drinking places until relatively late in the evening, so four of us decided one dark and wet Friday evening to go on a pub crawl around the circuit, starting from the Pack Horse at 6 o’clock and aiming to take in all nine, with a pint of beer in each and hoping to stagger home to the Pack for more mayhem well before closing time. Realizing a heavy evening was in store we took the precaution of protecting our stomachs from the alcoholic acids; for this stomach-lining, we eschewed the tatties and mince utilised so successfully by generations of Scottish alkies, opting instead for the more prosaic tumbler of tomato juice without Worcester.

Two inns, which no students ever entered, The Corsham Brewery and The Duke of Cumberland stood close to each other in Priory Street; we passed them every day on the walk to college. The Brewery was a tidy old four-square solid stone-built erection while the Duke was ancient and dilapidated and gave the impression of once having been a thatched farm cottage that had unfortunately seen over time the modern town grow up around it. A low front door led to a dark, low-ceilinged room which considering it was still quite early in the evening was surprisingly full. As, we had a lot of boozing ahead it was decided that ordinary pints of beer would be our safest bet, and it was thought best that we each bought a round in turn- so nothing exotic or too lethal was to be tried. We found a little round copper topped table at the farthest end, a long way from the blazing fire, a cold and draughty spot and we had only been there a while when half a dozen locals- big buggers- detached themselves from the noisy group by the bar and came across and started intimidating us with questions and threats, wanting to know what college twats, like us were doing in their pub. Low and unintelligent men tend to get very angry about insults to their mothers or infringements on their territory, and it was soon clear to me that unless we were pretty careful things were unlikely to end well. From my days at Tilbury school, I knew just how dangerous these transgressions could be, a group of us were once savagely beaten and rolled by older boys for having the temerity of going down Dock Road to Kits Café one lunchtime for a mug of tea and round of toast, which apparently was out of bounds for us littluns! Therefore, I thought it best to try and engage these louts in friendly conversation in order to mollify them in the hope they might see us as nothing more than decent and harmless fools and I made some progress, learning that one of them named Des worked locally at a place called Spafax whatever that was, and another had a missus at home and couple of little kids at the local primary school.  Unfortunately, one of our group, (who obviously had never attended a school like mine) just couldn’t understand what gave these buggers the right to turn us out and he began arguing our case, angrily quoting chapter and verse and proclaiming his human rights and pointing out that their aggressive behaviour was not just unacceptable in a free country, but was completely outrageous–all of which was fair enough but this was just about the worst way to go-on given the seriousness of our predicament. The result was that after allowing us to finish our beers we were taken outside and given a bloody good hiding, all I recall is being pushed into one of my mates and onto the wet pavement. We are so familiar with  choreographed mock fights on film and TV with all of the heavy punches and sound effects that when fights and scraps occur in real-life they often seem embarrassingly poor affairs-scuffles and skirmishes with lots of pushing and shoving and verbal threats rather than proper fisticuffs, and that is more or less how it played-out here, although they must have administered some pretty heavy blows for as we slunk sullenly and angrily back to our hostels for a wash and brush-up it felt as if I had been beaten mightily across the upper arm and shoulders with an iron bar so great was the pain. We went back with heads down, swearing vengeance and retribution, avoiding eye-contact in a state of funk and fury, but nothing came of it, in fact I don’t recall any of us mentioning the episode again! There ended one of the shortest Pub Crawls ever!

How I hated those Beechfield Student Union hut dances. On one dismal occasion I was awkwardly shuffling around the edges and slinking into darkened corners and consuming as much beer as would give me courage to go out and actually dance; Wild Thing by the Troggs was blasting out and the entire building pulsing, when a Welsh lad, a student of graphics and normally a quiet unassuming character, ripped his shirt off in a paroxysm of orgiastic joy at the dance – to reveal something entirely new to me- his bare back completely covered in curly pubic looking thick hair, rather like a beast!  Sickened by the sight of him I went out for a smoke and while loitering out back in a lobby area that was protected from rain but not the cold, I noticed, seemingly forgotten behind the serving area a large almost full plastic barrel of rough cider without a stopper, which I managed to purloin and roll away across the adjacent sports field and secrete beneath a clump of Fir trees.  The following evening, I returned with my friend Peter Jenkins and one of the gardener’s wheelbarrows and with some difficulty manoeuvred the opened barrel, marked Norton Fitzwarren down to my digs at Ethelred House, with the intention of keeping it stolleged-up in my room at the top of the house. Struggling in with our prize we were unfortunately confronted by Big John, who had a room off the kitchen and three of his friends. John Morton maybe owing to his physical stature was about the only Corsham student who befriended any of the locals-and unfortunately for us on this night Hank, Jake and Shake were hanging around smoking and having a few beers. Caught out! Etiquette demanded that we shared the stolen cider. Jake and Hank were former soldiers; Hank, fair- haired and slightly built was a friendly chap while Jake was big and brawny, guarded and reticent­-at least when sober; he had a catch phrase You Legless Bum, which when hollered out in his deep West Country burr caused them all great amusement.  Shake with curly greying hair was a bit older, rather dishevelled, with yellowish eyes and brick-red visage and as his nickname would suggest was clearly entering the later stages of alcoholic dependency. While I bemoaned the loss of a few pints from the top of barrel, one of them went out, promising to return with something they had hidden away at home –something to cheer us- something good, which happened to be a litre bottle of pure Polish Spirit, almost 100% alcohol, with which they proceeded to replenish the barrel, stirring it in vigorously with a ruler. In addition to this spirit, he laid a paper wallet on the table full of snout--best Moroccan and soon the room was filled with the smoke from roll-ups and the evil smelling reefers. We had all been drinking earlier and this mixture of very dry rough cyder and spirit with additional pine needles made an unpleasant but extremely potent beverage, which by the end of the night caused us all to be off our heads, smoking away, cursing and babbling. Hank, regaled us with a story of the time he was stationed at Pompey when one of his mates went behind his back and betrayed him and how revenge was meted out; a group of them found the informer in a bar one Saturday lunchtime. They beat him, stripped him bollock naked and kicked him in broad daylight down Cosham High Street. Hank assured me time after time as very drunk people will “Cosham High Street Mick, not Corsham.” As the contents of the barrel dwindled, big John, fed up with us talking rot retired to his room. The alcoholic fog began to descend. Hank rambled on about his days at Pompey.  Lots of shouting.  And laughter. Mayhem.  Increasingly angry Jenks tried to pick a fight.  Shake, with face a Beetroot colour was screaming “Shag a fucking Lemon,” over and over again, and it was about this time that I remember sitting back and reflecting with some satisfaction on the sordid scene and thinking just how much tremendous fun the evening had been so far. A regular Fred Karno’s turnout! Later our party issued forth into the dark and silent town to carouse and frolic some more, but I must have become separated from my companions and fallen.  I remember coming round, soaking wet and lying in a kind of gully in front of a house in Church Street. I was in a sad and soiled state, and to worsen my predicament, no matter how I tried my limbs simply would not obey the commands of my befuddled brain, and found myself for the first time in that undesirable condition familiar enough to the glue-sniffer; the almost complete loss of control of my leggie- weggies.  As I had now become a semi- invalid, disgust and panic and fear caused me to head for home, but for this purpose I had to employ a form of long-drawn-out zig-zagging and lurching motion just to get a little way along the street, before finally resorting to going down on hands and knees to complete the final few yards across the road to the safety of my hostel steps. In the wet and windy morning, the smelly kitchen was a scene of desolation; the empty Cider barrel lying surrounded by glasses and saucers full of dregs and cigarette butts, and further along Church Street, the overturned wheelbarrow.

That kitchen was scene of another strange and memorable incident. After closing time a few of us were chatting over tea when a couple of friends who had been drinking heavily burst in, carrying in their arms some enormous dusty ancient books:  An Imperial Victorian Dictionary, a set of 18^th century Sermons and Discourses, a Historye of Wiltshire and what appeared to be a philosophical work by Kunrath in German. With drunken bravado they had, as a prank crept stealthily around the back of Corsham Court and managed to find an open way in, proceeded tipsily upstairs past the Library and Lord Methuen’s bedroom, through dark corridors and up a little spiral stairway to a loft area where among forgotten heirlooms was a quantity of ancient books. No thought had been given about what to do with the stolen volumes, so in order to help our friends we made hasty plans about hiding them until the following day, someone even mentioned our trying to sell them at Camden Market, but whatever happened we all solemnly promised to treat the affair with the utmost secrecy. Needless to say, by 10 o clock the next morning the entire college knew about it!  A hasty meeting in the main office with the two disgraced students attended by Joe Hope and Michael Finn was arranged; Lord Methuen, persuaded it had been nothing other than silly nonsense and drunken foolishness agreed to allow the affair to be swept under the carpet and the shamefaced but fortunate students escaped with a firm ticking off and a week’s suspension.

There was an oft-repeated tale of the poor scholar who after an evening of heavy drinking attempted to have sexual relations with one of the Corsham Court geese, an escapade that came, as most men deemed, to little good. The incident took place in a secluded spot at the side of the Court close to the little bathing pool and the student was accompanied by quite a few other revellers. Word must have got out that something bad was going to happen because having moved hurriedly through a rudimentary form of courtship and while giving the unfortunate bird ‘’A right good seeing to,’’ as an amazed local described it to me, he was apprehended by the authorities, taken away and eventually expelled by the college. Another variant of this story suggested that in fact the unfortunate bird was one of Lord Methuen’s attractive peacocks and not a goose.

We suspected that a cocktail of drink and drugs was to blame when one of our fellow students was discovered fast asleep or unconscious one Sunday morning after a rowdy dance held in the student union hut at Beechfield House the previous night. There were a number of tell-tale signs when a dancer was on drugs – they might be observed with pursed lips and with something darkly troubling about their fiercely staring eyes. Even more unsettling was that while attempting to move to the music they often employed a singularly jerky and robotic method, which often failed to follow or correspond in any way to the rhythms of the music. Overcome and unmanned by whatever it was he had indulged in; the inebriated student later had the misfortune to collapse outside the hut where our grumpy caretaker Bill Lane lived.  Old Bill, a former soldier took offence at finding a naked long-haired hippie, covered in vomit sprawled on his doorstep at seven in the morning and proceeded to splosh a bucket of cold water over the idiot, who maddened with shock jumped suddenly to his feet screaming wildly and rushed at Bill with his fists up only to be flattened and sent straight back to oblivion by a right hook.

On a pellucid April evening, an evening of gentle diaphanous loveliness, full of the sounds and colours of re-awakened nature, of butterflies newly hatched, of bees and birdsong and the bursting forth of lilac and leaf, an old woman walking her dog or a courting couple enjoying a late evening stroll arm in arm down Pickwick Road might have been surprised to notice a wild eyed and scruffily dressed student hastening past with a very rapid waddling walk, rather like an exhausted Olympic racer lurching toward the finishing line. He kept shooting anxious half-glances behind, and instead of turning left down the High St he carried right on past the Methuen Arms before, at the war memorial, going into the grounds of Corsham Park and proceeding stealthily along the darkening avenue of trees which ran parallel with the High Street before emerging fearfully into Church Street and rushing into the relative safety of Ethelred House.

The evening had begun quietly enough; finding none of my friends in the Pack, I slipped across to the Royal Oak, where I entered the Public Bar and sat on a high stool at the counter with my beer, which was unusual for me–I normally (at least early in the evening) avoided sitting at the bar lest I found it necessary to have to talk with the bar staff. Or even worse, a local! I had only just started my drink when suddenly at my side, a young man plonked down, I recognized him immediately as the local psychopath, who had recently been released from either Prison or Nuthouse. He had already, from across the street been pointed out to me as one to avoid, a violent person, described as a paranoid schizophrenic, which was the modern, fashionable term we used to cover a whole cart load of mental problems in those days.  “I know you, oh I seen you next door buying drinks for people one night there getting off your head you was-oh well I hope you going to buy me one now?” Reluctantly I bought him his drink of lager and lime, (girls drink) and he then went on to explain how he was out looking for some fellow-a local who was responsible for his recent incarceration.  Assuring him I had no idea who this dreadful person was, I thought it sensible to leave as soon as possible and claiming I had a date with a girl across the way I started to leave, but he was having none of it. He then with some ceremony withdrew from his jacket a dark bone handled knife, about four inches long saying that if he couldn’t find the culprit-the one who betrayed him- someone else was going to die that night ‘’And it might even be you.’’ His dress consisted of a black jacket, grey bell bottom trousers-ridiculously short, and a dark shirt, and around his neck a sort of red cravat or scarf which might have given him a dashing, racy air but which, given his dark and sullen mood made him look more than anything like a gypsy traveller. He wore his dark hair, (which looked at the same time both dry and oily) shoulder length as was the fashion in those days, his nose was broad and forehead villainous low, but other than this, his individual features I remember not.  Discoloured teeth? Bloodshot eyes, yes for completeness let’s provide him with red eyes. Realising I was in some danger and that one word out of place might be my undoing, I entered now into friendly small-talk, hoping to cheer him sufficiently that he might think twice about his vendetta. However before long, to my consternation, he began plunging the knife into the wooden bar which sent splinters flying up past my face- proof he assured me as to the sharpness of the weapon.  I think I bought him a couple more pints, (he said when his giro came through, he would repay me) and I kept babbling on and wasting time, hoping all the while for some of my friends to come in, and I spent this time trying in every conceivable way of befriending and pacifying him. I was all affability and attentiveness, and good humour (I don’t think I have ever smiled so much), my jaw was aching from it, but it soon became clear to me that he was a man of almost limitless resentments; against family, friends, the government and especially the police.  Other people were either twats or tossers and he loathed the lot of them!  He asked me about the college girls (or slags as he called them), how many I had screwed and so on and the only time he seemed to get really cross with me was when to humour him I made up some really lascivious stories (I won’t re-tell them here but they were very filthy and just about plausible) which turned out to be quite the wrong tactic. In my anxiety to please and get the ordeal over I foolishly agreed the following weekend to fix him up with a college girl (some hopes) and told him where I lived–taking the precaution of providing him with number of my unfotunate former roommate Chris Benson’s first floor room rather than my own. After what felt like a lengthy period of time that might best be described as harrowing, he suddenly had a bright idea that the sought after one might be found in another local pub- The White Lion, just up Pickwick Road–a drinking hole we students hardly ever visited, a clean and friendly place, as close to a family inn as any we had in those days. I was sufficiently frightened of the sharp blade to go along with him – (in vain hoping to meet on the way some others who might share my ordeal); the evening was warm and lovely and I remember across from the Cinema cheerily pointing out two little squirrels chasing each other up a tree, a cherry tree covered in blossom -all creamy white against the heavenly deep blue, but this drew from him no response.

The White Lion consisted of two bars, and we passed through the busier one to a small almost empty room at the back where the evening sun came streaming in. It was soon apparent the traitor wasn’t around, so we took bar seats and the conversational rigmarole started all over again. Although I was keenly aware that with each pint of beer his behaviour was becoming more unpredictable and my own probably increasingly reckless, frustration and tedium began to replace fear, that is until he once again produced the sharpened knife and started stabbing at the wooden counter which sent chippings flying just past my snout. I made the error now of attempting to do some counselling and came out with some cod philosophy; in a roundabout way pointing out that maybe, in a sort of way, perhaps it might be better for him in the long run to forgive (though not forget) the other man’s misdemeanour and move on with his life and that having made this great renunciation, in the fullness of time the other just might repent etc. He turned on me savagely – “Oh. So!  Who the hell are you – sounds just like a probation officer,” –and I then realised from the spiteful look on his face he was starting to enjoy the power he held over me. Fortunately, a little group of men leading a light brown spaniel now entered from next door, they brought their drinks with them and sat at the back of the room by the window and I thought at the very least that if I made a dash for it, they might (at a pinch) be capable of restraining my captor. I mentioned having owned dogs and that our mongrel Patsy had actually been a more durable and better all-round dog than our pedigree white boxer Oscar, though a lot less lovable. He agreed that pedigree meant nothing and that as a child there was a family pet, his brother’s dog, a big brown one- a Chaser he called it but I couldn’t ascertain whether this was its name or a sort of breed but when I suggested a Retriever or Labrador, he gave a slight inclination of his head. I thought at this point it worth mentioning that where I lived over in the remote marshlands of Essex there was reputedly a huge ghost dog, Black Shuck, with eyes that flamed like red hot coals and that if someone encountered it at night it was said to be a harbinger of misfortune. And I had the temerity (by now I was getting tipsy) to offer him up something else he didn’t know -that in East Anglia there were other phantom dogs, ferocious things much worse even than Black Shuck, sightings of which foretold disaster to crops, pestilence, sexual impotence, insanity or even death; well-known ones being Black Dogge and Padfoot in Suffolk and the Hateful Thing in Norfolk! And I bet he didn’t know anything at all about the spectral hauntings at Borley Rectory, or 50 Berkeley Square which was reputedly London’s most haunted house and then what about the story of the terrifying Brown Lady of Raynham Hall who was famously captured on film in 1936?  Though not a person of huge intelligence my captor now gave me deep and strange look; an appraising look full of viciousness and dislike but intermingled with cunning, as if he realised that with all of this babbling and nonsense, I might in some devious way be attempting to bamboozle him. Across in the other bar a group of young men were making a bit of noise and he recognised some of them (perhaps one who might help him locate the culprit) and telling me “Oi you wait on- you better,” he went over and started talking to them whilst continuing to look in my direction. There was no rear entrance to the garden so I was trapped, but on his way back around I noticed that he made for the gents which was quite a long way down a passage so I waited half a minute, picked up my fags and walked hurriedly out through the other bar and into the darkening street.

 A Blackbird or Robin or migrating Redwing resting on branch or twig or trellis amid the front gardens and umbrageous purlieus of Pickwick Road, might have looked up in surprise to see on this pellucid April evening, an anxious looking and scruffily dressed student hurrying past, looking more than anything like an exhausted Olympic Road racer desperately lurching for the finishing line….

I was returning from a successful day in the studio–success meaning I had managed to complete a good painting–a cause for excessive joy and elation in those days, when I more often than not drew a blank, which wasn’t all that surprising as I didn’t really know most of the time what the hell I was doing.  For us painters, joy is getting a new painting done, proving again one’s unique genius- failure to produce is utter misery, and it is this habitual neediness and insecurity, along with self-centredness that makes us fine artists so bloody insufferable.

It had been a fine cloudless early summer day during our first spell of really hot weather. I had already eaten a light supper and flushed with pride at my long-awaited artistic success and reassured that I was after all a bit special and different, I now looked forward to a stroll in the freshness of evening through the Court gardens and around Corsham Park, maybe wandering over toward Folly farm and perhaps even as far as Biddestone and having a quiet pint in the Cross Keys on the way home. Turning into High Street by the Town Hall I noticed a group of friends drinking outside the Pack Horse–Jenks was there along with Keeling, Bastable, Badger, big Adrian and Jerry, the two Amanda’s and several others. Now, all of a sudden, the thought of spending the evening dreamily wandering alone through the fields seemed a lot less enticing and being in an unusually buoyant mood anyway, I went straight over and joined them. You see in those days there was no easy way of communicating with your friends, no internet or mobile phones, so you never really knew if any of them would be around and on many occasions, you would sit around in the pub getting half-cut and a bit morose while waiting for company, or else after a pint or two you would go looking in the other pubs for some friendly face. So, when you discovered a group of your friends all huddled there together that early in the evening it surely meant a cracking night was in store!  ‘‘Hurry up! Get out of that! Let’s get stuck-in! Move over. I’ll get them in this time!”

It’s worth pointing out that in those days I wouldn’t usually bother with small-talk and chat and gossip about who did what to whom, but after a couple of pints I might become perhaps a little more talkative, four or five and I was getting voluble, some more on top of that and I had some real fire in my belly. From that point the evening might go one of two ways- continuing the revelry and high spirits until late into the night, with either afters in the pub or take-out drinks and smokes in someone’s hostel, in other words having a right good time, or as was just as often the case- creeping off into some dark corner of the bar, alone and deeply depressed with head down, flummoxed, with mouth hung-open, blubbery lipped and hopeless. The all too familiar trajectory of a night’s boozing.

But on this night, it was quite different, I was having none of that, I was so happy I even began mixing my drinks, a stunt I occasionally pulled and which I really enjoyed. I would return to the bar with my empty pint mug and just as Bert was about to pull a pint of ordinary I would instead ask for barley-wine, then while handing back the  empty barley wine glass just as he reached for another I would insist on scrumpy cider and so on, terrific fun for me, but not for Bert, who was clearly exasperated; on these occasions I remember him admonishing me with ‘’Bloody hell Mick you’ll make yourself right queer you will,’ not that he really gave a shit as he was busy all the while raking-in my money. How it ended I remember not, but all in all, a tremendous evening! 

But dearie me, how different I felt next morning. Horribly sick, nauseous and very frightened, and so dreadful did I feel that before too long I got out of my sweat-soaked bed and into the bathroom, and attempted a wash and shave. I had lathered-up the face when I suddenly began to feel ghastly, there was a commotion in the nether gut and before I had time to rush to the lavatory pan, I puked up into my shaving bowl a watery mass of hot sick. To my dismay along with the familiar tomato and carrot there floated what looked like half-digested lumps of fish, greyish and slimy, maybe pilchards or herring; the larger lumps I managed to extricate and flush down the loo while the smaller stuff I strove to force down the plughole. Giving up with the shave I rushed from that place and went down across the car park, entered the church and sat down in a pew halfway down the aisle. It was silent, dark and cool in there and I derived some comfort from this, and I even started repeating a little mantra– Jesus please please help me– until by the by a priest came in and after fussing about around the altar, he (as I knew he would) came and talked to me, asking if I was in any way in need of help or guidance. I assured him I was just fine, absolutely fine and didn’t require any succour and hurried from there, but I didn’t return to Ethelred House instead turning left into the park under the avenue of trees and then into the meadow beyond. The day had dawned as sunny as those preceding it, but there was something different in the air, the heat was more intense and oppressive, there was little or no wind and although the sky was once again cloudless the sun seemed a bit watery and as if filtered through a kind of haze. And as I hurried fearfully from one meadow surrounded by a blackthorn hedge through a kissing- gate into another meadow surrounded with yet more thorny hedges, an unsheltered green maze of meadows and hedges, I cursed the booze and the fags, the perfect sky, the boiling sun and those endless glaring green fields with their cows and cow pats and bloody awful flies and the whole shitty rural idyll gone wrong!

Dave Hodgkinson and Phil Simpson were two lads from Wales. They were in the Ceramics department. With Les Bowen they made up the three Welsh Wizards- joyous partygoers of our wonderful first term. We had quite a few Welsh students at Bath. It was after all relatively close, a little way over or under the Bristol Channel.  Phil was medium height with curly light-coloured hair.  An aggressive manner, a bit punchy and belligerent, but nice enough, while Dave was tall and lanky, with shoulder length dark hair, very easy-going and a good laugh. They were good drinkers too! For no sensible reason I can think of Phil and I decided to have a drinking competition one night in the Pack Horse, on barley wine, the winner to take ten pounds. I can’t think either why we decided on barley wine- the most nasty, sickly and potent Ale ever brewed. He had his little team of supporters and I had mine, Wales v England and free drinks for the victors. After a few hours of drinking, with ash trays overflowing and with the tally of little empty bottles reaching 26, Phil went out back to the loo and never returned. His seconds- Dave and Les eventually went out to see if he was alright-but it was over an hour before Dave came back in to retrieve their coats and cigarettes, handed me a fiver and explained that Phil ‘’Took a bad turn, had his head down the pan, sick as a dog he was,’’ but was now safely back in his hostel room. Whether he got back unaided or had to be helped across we never bothered to find out- but to provide a bit of a flourish and to give the story as it were a good and proper ending, the following day I put it about that the 13 bottles of barley wine had rendered the Welsh boyo almost imbecilic and that he had needed to be carried back up the High Street screaming and bellowing like a young bullock- totally Blotto!

The mental transformations a person undergoes under extremes of joy, depression, stress and fear, are widely known and are of no great mystery to us. We recognize the stages well enough from our own experience. Chemical changes the body undergoes are less known, we appreciate them only in their effects. That drinking alcohol will heighten well-being to the liveliest enjoyment and alleviate boredom and give courage to the terrified, is attested widely enough and beyond conjecture; that these transitions are but stop-gaps and of short duration may cause us doubt and misgivings, but this need not allow us to entirely lose a sense of wonderment in witnessing such uncanny alterations to the drinking person’s personality!

 On Saturday mornings I would visit the Corsham Bakery just around the corner in the High Street, an old-fashioned place with a low doorway and a large shopwindow where all manner of cakes and buns were on display- delicious stuff that smelt wonderfully– bread of every conceivable shape, sausage rolls and meat pies, pasties, rock cakes, sponges in fact all kinds of eatables which I would take from there and devour in my room, the leftovers, plentiful, would last me for many days. Invariably I was served by the son of the owner. He was a well-built, slightly overweight chap in his early thirties–a good server behind the counter and courteous, the sort of person it is easy to like, even though in a year or two of meetings in the shop or occasionally in the boozer; hardly any but the most rudimentary conversation passed between us- “Nice day, small Granary and an iced bun please.” But you know how it is with some people, without much ever being said, it’s clear that you like each other, and, he seemed to be on friendly terms with almost all the other customers as well–a popular man.

But by-the-by word got around that the baker’s son was ill, it was rumoured that it was a bad form of cancer which I think affected his throat, and for quite a while he wasn’t around. But when he came into the Pack one evening our fears were confirmed–he looked different, seemed heavier, now with florid complexion and wearing a wig–a poor mop-like brown wig with a straight fringe which came down far too low over the eyes.  From that time onward he became, in the evenings a pub regular, he would arrive around 8 pm and stay until late. The Pack horse consisted of just one bar, a long narrow room, but out back, on the way to the graffiti covered Lavatory which was a sort of half outdoors affair with a roof of corrugated plastic that rattled so when it rained, there was, on the right another room which was out of bounds to us students but into which the Bakers son would often disappear. I asked Bert about what went on in there ‘‘That’s Flo in there, she has a card school Mick- twice a week and a whist drive as well, her friends come from all around for it they do.’’ He was often accompanied by his fiancée, an attractive and delightful blond woman, and when he wasn’t in the card school he would be drinking and chatting at the bar with friends. We were pleased to see him there but we were sad as well, for we understood that the chatter and laughter and the booze gave him some temporary solace and relief from mental anguish and that the lively company of the pub was a far better place for him than sitting miserably at home. While we were all drinking and mucking around on the pinball machine and playing darts it was good to see him sitting there, seemingly happy with his mates at a little table near the bar playing at Dominoes; what fun they had, shouting and laughing and smashing the tiles down which caused the little three-legged table to roll around and the ash-trays and glasses of beer to spill over as one or other of them hollered out in victory!  The last time I saw him there he wasn’t playing at cards or Dominoes, but was sitting on a little wooden settle by the side of the Pin Ball with his girlfriend, they were drinking and chatting a little, holding each other’s hands and they were both crying.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried painting a picture after drinking alcohol? If you have, you will I am sure agree that just as when driving a motor vehicle, just a little booze, let’s say just a pint, no alright let’s make it two, will seriously affect your awareness and capacity to drive safely, so in the same way for a painter – a few too many drinks  will  begin to  interfere with the artistic sensibilities- balance, proportion, and sense of scale  are seriously compromised and impeded, not that the inebriated artist worries too much about that as he now feels liberated to attempt things normally beyond his scope; he finds he is moving into uncharted territory, elated, he tries out new and daring colour combinations, wildly improvised bits of scribbling or takes outrageous liberties with form, brushwork becomes incredibly fast and virtuosic, causing splashes and sploshes of  pigment and turps to go flying around the studio; all the while he is probably dashing around,  humming and singing along with the turned-up music, intense and heroic, with fag hanging from the mouth as we see in those photos of Jackson Pollock.  And then later on, or the next day, finding, instead of the hoped-for innovative masterpiece a chaotic failure and right rotten mess!

I know all about this because for a short while I got involved with this drinking and painting silliness. It was at the beginning of my final year at college, that is the early Autumn of 1974 and I had started working back at Beechfield after a pretty fruitless year over at Monks Park. They provided me with a studio in a tiny windowless room in the sculpture school which housed all the electricity meters, not an ideal place and airless, but I did eventually get used to it and completed lots of good things there, but in those warm days at the beginning of term I found it to be very hot and uncomfortable, so I was only too happy to find an excuse to get out and about. Peter Jenkins was by now lodging in Bath with David Harding who taught printing, they would travel in to college together and had become friends and it was they who invited me over to the Spread Eagle where they had started going for lunch.  We would  maybe have crisps and a sandwich or pasty and perhaps two or three pints- not a lot but enough certainly to ruin the afternoons painting, but for a short while we had some really good times- I well remember our discussing which of those Russian novelists was best, I put forward Gogol whose Dead Souls I had recently finished- they both pounced on that- saying Dostoyevsky, even in his shorter stuff beat him hands down and that I was talking perfect nonsense and so-on; the I Ching and its divinatory accuracy and how best to apply it in everyday life was also a topic and I recall Harding going on about the Russian mystic and teacher George Gurdjeff and the value he put on work–how he would make his students spend weeks doing nothing but manual labour, working in a group before attempting any significant psychic work on themselves. A few other students and tutors might join in, John Repper and Peter Green were often there and I remember Mike Simpson raging on one day about how British geniuses like Stanley Spencer and John Cowper Powys had been so unfairly overlooked by the art establishment and comparing their tremendous output with so much of the unimaginative modern art dross from across the Atlantic which was being pushed and promoted at that time.

The Spread was situated on the busy and difficult to cross Bath Road just over from Beechfield, a scruffy old place and run-down- you entered the single large room straight from the street, there was a long bar which ran all the way across the back with the rest of the open space taken up by a few wonky little round tables and a couple of stout wooden tables with old settles along the walls. The dreary scene was complimented by a greasy carpet, deep brown woodwork and ceilings of an attractive nicotine and cream colour. The usual few bits of horse-brass and old copper bed warmers hung at jaunty angles completed the decorations. While the college people invariably occupied the tables, by the bar there would always be a group of locals- all of them oldish fellows, as was the rather cheeky barman.  Of this group one man stood-out as leader, the funniest (he thought) and the loudest. He was a Baker by profession, he would be up working the bread-ovens in the early hours, and he not only baked the bread and cakes but delivered them as well- he usually managed to time it so that Pickwick at lunchtime was one of his final calls. He was a short stocky man of late middle age with a bit of a paunch, he often wore a brown apron and had white waxy skin and thinning hair, crew- cut, the short grey hairs coming straight out from his head like bristles, a pair of bug-eyes with pale lashes, a shapeless putty nose and big soft sensual lips. A bully who ruled the barroom, but also a real wit- a comedian.  The locals just loved his jokes and foolery. The college people less so. He didn’t speak directly to you as any ordinary person might but rather made a series of pronouncements–and when he addressed you, he had a disconcerting way of leaning backwards, which gave the impression he was talking down to you, even though he was in actual fact just a pathetic little short-assed twerp. Most of the ale house crew became at one time or another the butt of his jokes and seemed to take their humiliation well enough, but the Baker singled out for his most vicious and unkind attacks one old chap who always sat alone at a little table at the far end of bar. Old Jock was a Scotsman, who hailed from Aberdeen, the granite City. I think he arrived in the Corsham area with the forces during the war and stayed on- I chatted to him a few times and he reckoned North Wiltshire a good deal better place than over the border. A softly spoken man of few words, he had a military type moustache and was always well turned-out with soft trilby hat, whiteish shirt and tie and an old rumpled brown suit- he looked very much like Professor Borg in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries except that he wore dark glasses and walked with a white cane. He had clearly arrived at some grim, late stage of alcoholism, the fire and glory days were long-gone and he drank his two or three pints of lunchtime scrumpy purely as an essential medicine, living proof as others often remarked, that too much rough cider makes you go blind. He told me once about his love of music, his passion was Operetta and he spoke with enthusiasm about Pinafore and Franz Lehar and his favourite, the very best thing in all music, Die Fledermaus by the younger Strauss.  Just what caused the Baker to turn his caustic wit and fury on this quiet inoffensive old man none of us knew. If the Baker wasn’t around the other locals treated Jock in a more or less friendly  manner, but once the bully started making fun of the stricken man–“Look at him the bloody lazy tow-rag,” or  “Here I am, I’ve been up working since two o clock this morning just to earn a living, and I’m giving the bloody Government most of my money so that fucking scroungers like you Jock can get enough on the social for cider and to get your rent paid, you bloody useless twat,” their attitude changed  and they didn’t take long to eagerly join in the vicious teasing and taunting.  We all looked on uneasily, and being decent and liberal minded people shook our heads and grumbled and growled at the spectacle, and I think Peter Green, who said he was filled with disgust actually stopped going there because of it, but none of us did anything about it. Under this onslaught Jock remained absolutely impassive, sipping away at his drink and he maintained this composure even when as a final insult, with him still sitting there, the Baker got them all to put down five-pound bets; with plenty of his cronies eager to side with him in betting that Jock would be dead by Christmas while others placed counter bets on the wretched man staying alive beyond that time.

The lunchtime drinking sessions in the Spread interfered with my painting so by mid-term I had stopped going. Then one freezing cold day not long before the Christmas holidays while sheltering from a hailstorm outside Joe Hope’s office I met Dave Harding who broke the news that he was dead. But no! Not old Jock. The Baker!  Apparently early in the morning of the previous day, whilst putting his loaves in the oven he had a massive heart attack and went face down in his dough- stone dead. With his tormentor dead and buried and all bets off, old Jock, still sipping his cider and impassive as ever behind his dark glasses lived on past Christmas and contentedly on into the New Year!

                                                                                *

Those magical Corsham nights! 

The studios at Beechfield remained open until 10.00 pm and I would often work late especially on dark winter nights and could get a lot of good things done when everyone else had left. Suppers were served at the canteen from 6.30 which was ideal for anyone wanting to stay late. I set up a pattern of painting then which became my favoured mode in later years, fiddling around with stuff already under-way in the mornings followed by a couple of hours painting in the afternoon and a really concentrated effort later when there were no other distractions. There was a record player with loads of LPs. Jazz, Rock, Folk or Classical. Music while painting, what could be better.  Apart from painting those evenings were also the ideal time to visit the other studios and check the progress of fellow students, seeing how they were doing became an important part of the learning process and a lot easier without the artist being present. Not that we shied away from discussing each other’s efforts; I remember some very good frank exchanges but never with any nastiness or bitchiness. Looking back now it’s clear to see that we really were despite a certain roughness quite a decent good-natured and tolerant bunch.

The library which was situated in an upstairs set of rooms toward the back of Corsham Court stayed open until the same late hour and in winter I would often spend evenings there, occasions when even if one or two other students were present all was virtually silent, except for the faint soft sound of wind or rain outside. I have always had a desire to be (without ever bothering to spend anything like enough time studying) a learned scholar; to have a life wholly given over to study, secluded in some ancient dimly lit monastery or turreted gothic university surrounded with high piled books and those many nights at the Court reading were about as close as I ever came to realising my fantasy. We had to complete a couple of essays as part the diploma course in fine art; one was a study of modern English literature and I think my other was a survey of British landscape painting and I worked on the early drafts there. The library was well stocked and I particularly remember looking at the huge monographs on various artists and poring over the coloured pictures. Many of these very expensive books were published by Phaidon: books on Pollock, Leger and Bonnard come to mind as well as the then recently published three volume set on Matisse by Louis Aragon.  Impossibly expensive and valuable these tomes seemed to me then but forty years later I found a funny man with a stall at the covered market in Dorchester selling them as second-hand junk for as little as two pounds.

My bedroom at Ethelred House overlooked the hostel garden, the folly at the entrance to the Court, the extensive gatehouse and St Bartholomews Church. It was a good room and large, with a bed over by the far side, a table and two chairs before the window, a chest of drawers, a little bookcase and an old wicker armchair next to the gas fire. There was also my record player and a pile of LPs, in short everything a student might wish for. I always returned from visits to London or Bath with some new books. Lolling around indoors in decent weather has always seemed to me sinful and wrong when you could be enjoying the fresh-air outside, so nearly all of my reading apart from holidays between terms and long train journeys would have been done in that upstairs room during those weekends when the incessant Wiltshire rain came pouring down, or during cold winter evenings huddled over the gas heater. It was a lovely little fire; you used a match to light it and then had to treat it very gingerly as sometimes there was a mini explosion as it lit up; but just having a tiny living flame and source of heat made that room so much more comfortable and inviting.

 I used to indulge in those days a very bad habit of galloping through novels- absolutely devouring them; I read all 540 pages of Crime and Punishment over two long weekends in that upstairs room and despite skimming over it at a ferocious madcap pace and towards the end suffering a form of severe mental fatigue I was very impressed by Dostoevsky’s great novel, though shortly afterwards I had unfortunately forgotten almost the entire thing!  Thank goodness I did eventually learn to take things more steadily- not that all books are best read in that manner, it would be ridiculous to subject something by Jack Kerouac or Hemingway for example to ponderous scrutiny, but in general to read novels properly you need to give yourself over and live the book as deeply as possible and for this slower reading is almost always best.  Big books that are long enough to get really involved in and which convey a sense of place and contain lots of convincing descriptive passages are for me always the most memorable; Wuthering Heights, Moby Dick or The Magic Mountain- complex full-blooded stuff with plenty of meat on the bone!  I nowadays try and avoid anything too stylized and clever like James Joyce or where dialogue predominates as in Trollope. The vagaries of memory remain a real mystery. During the 80’s in an attempt to update my reading I waded through a number of works by Garcia-Marquez, Milan Kundera and other magic-realist writers; enjoyable they must have been, but I am afraid thirty years later I remember virtually nothing of any of them; neither characters, dialogue, place nor plot!

Lest I give the impression that my hostel bedroom, situated at the back and right at the top of that imposing and historic edifice which stood  boldly, four square and so proudly next to the folly and gatehouse was an appealing and cosy retreat, it needs to be said here that it was (despite the much-maligned cleaning ladies coming in twice a week) also a dirty, smelly hole and squalid.  Except for early mornings in summer, it was a dark and sunless room, a gloomy place of disturbed sleep and nightmares where on winter evenings the sound of wind and hiss of the gas sometimes intermingled to make it sound like seductive women’s voices were calling my name and attempting in some occult way to communicate with me. Even worse, a story got back to me that my bedroom was haunted by the sinister and malevolent ghost of a man who hanged himself there in the years just after the Great War. One morning after going to the bathroom for a shave I found it impossible to re-enter my room, my key wouldn’t work, a local locksmith was called and when he eventually managed to get it open, to his consternation he found the deadlock had been put-on, a locking mechanism which could only be operated from inside the empty room!

 I often dreaded going back to my messy and lonely room, so after working hard at college I sometimes went wandering in the Court gardens and grounds, around the meadows and along overgrown footpaths and bridleways; lovely gentle strolls on evenings in April and May or early Autumn, along the lanes to Upper Pickwick, Monks Park or towards Easton. Once returning from Neston in twilight and the evening chill I was stopped by two men in a police patrol car who simply couldn’t understand that a 20-year-old might be walking about the countryside purely for pleasure and thought I must be up to some kind of mischief such as thieving and I remember the offensive taller one suggesting that maybe I was prowling about because of domestic problems “Had a barney with your folks-your missus, eh?” and other such nonsense and it was only when I finally admitted to being connected to the art school that they grumpily returned to their car and went off.  Memories of those evenings come back to me: returning home from a walk at twilight and approaching the town past the first few isolated houses and dark lorry yards, the smell of diesel, the site of the railway station, then uphill past a straggling row of old stone houses and peering over the drystone wall at the allotments and the cricket field before entering the main street of the town, where the first lights were beginning to come-on in house and shop window—our friendly old pubs, Church Street, Ethelred House and the age-old relief and contentment of homecoming at nightfall.

Sometimes in Winter I would even go night walking around the country-lanes. I have always found it easier to work out ideas and mull things over while in motion and whether it was day or night, hot or cold didn’t matter to me. I recall a windless frosty night walking by Neston to the Ridge, darkness intense, an icy shining road, hooting of Owls, scratching of some small creatures among the frozen dead leaves and the blackness above crowded with constellations of winter- Perseus, Gemini and Taurus, with Orion and Sirius marching in solemn majesty across the southern sky.

 One dark and misty winter evening I went for a stroll down the Lacock road where for almost a mile it follows the high stone wall around the Corsham Park, a long dreary expanse broken at intervals by little bays which were provided with wooden benches. Turning off toward the left at the end of this long stretch you come to an unprepossessing area of open meadowland, a place of scattered farms, low hedges and stone walls; a gently sloping tableland that looks across the valley of the Avon toward Lacock and Chippenham.  Apart from the small untidy villages of Westrop and Easton this was a remote and little-known area which made it ideal country for a solitary walker like me; always anxious to avoid his fellow man, but on this evening as I made my way between those villages the thick mist suddenly became an impenetrable fog and I found myself enveloped in darkness, in murk and in silence, almost total silence with no traffic or lights anywhere to show the way. It was becoming increasingly chilly, so before long I decided to cut my adventure short and head home, to the warmth and security of the Pack where my friends were probably having a good time. At the first fork I turned right and the road went straight and a little uphill and I assumed since I was walking in a westerly direction that this would soon lead me to the Lacock road and home. The muffled sound of an express train meant I was still in the area close to Thingley Junction where the Trowbridge branch leaves the main Paddington to Bath line and before long I came to another crossroads without a signpost where I had half expected to find the lonely Roebuck Inn, but to my consternation there was no sign of life and not a single light of any kind to be seen, so instead of once again taking a right turn I pulled myself together and decided to go straight across into the  darkness and gloom.  Increasingly puzzled and anxious the dread thought occurred that I might have been going around in circles or perhaps I had wandered much further in an easterly direction toward Chippenham, as despite quickening my steps there was still no sign of the main road.  The surface of the narrow way now seemed to deteriorate with a grassy area running down the middle denoting lack of use, trees rose up eerily and I began to have the uneasy feeling of one hopelessly lost, as the way led steeply downhill, over a stream and past a huge dark mill-like building that loomed up on my left. More than once I swore to myself and considered going back, but back to where? Where the hell was I? The rough lane now went around a sharp series of bends and steeply up between high hedges when thankfully at the top of the rise the fog cleared a little and after ten minutes I came to a larger roadway. I turned right and within a couple of hundred yards came to a signpost on the main Melksham to Corsham highway. I must have originally walked a lot further east and when I did turn it was southward that I wandered, but I have always found it hard to understand just how I had managed to mistakenly go right across the Corsham road and over the railway bridge into that unknown region. Perhaps my anxiety about having a motor appear suddenly from out of the pitch darkness and incredibly thick fog and run me down had caused me to hurry along with eyes firmly fixed on nothing but the road ahead and the road right behind, and so I had failed to look about properly.

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Scattered about in various dark holes and corners of half-forgotten memories, images of those old days come back to me. Beechfield with its Monkey Puzzle tree and that curiously bent-over conifer outside what was known as the Boris Hut. Middlewick Lane and Upper Pickwick- an old cottage and farm with a view southward across miles of Wiltshire, and ahead the steep valley that led far away to Castle Combe. A walk further up that lane in a storm with bits of twigs and branches falling from the avenue of trees while I stood at a field gate sketching. The grounds and gardens of the Court with the folly by the entrance and those huge Cedar trees and the sound of Peacocks screeching. The walks through Corsham Park to the lake or to its northern extremity where in the woods could be found a little ornamental stone bridge, and those meadows with the shy, but inquisitive cattle, and at the field corners wrought iron kissing gates where in wet weather deep puddles formed.  I remember the Park best in the cold of Winter, in rain and strong wind, the leaden sky, grass bright green, soaking huge cow-pats and flocks of low flying black birds. The familiar colours of Corsham come to mind: stone, lichen covered grey stone which became golden in sunshine, deep blue sky with white clouds, the green of moss, pale dry grass blowing in the wind and the shiny bluish green of daffodil time, with highlights – silver and yellow in Spring, in Autumn tawny.

My favourite walk in that dry upland around Corsham and one of the loveliest things I know of in that part of England was along the little road which after leaving the busy Bradford-on -Avon highway at Chapel Plaister went eastward along a ridgeway by Wadswick and Neston to where the heights ended at our college annexe of Monks Park. In those days this was a little frequented spot. To the northward the land sloped down to a shallow valley behind which arose the dark woods of Box Hill- a broken and wooded country of old mine workings, scruffy little farms and military bases through which ran the railway line to Bath. Over on the other side was an uninterrupted view across the valley of the Avon from west of Bradford right around to Chippenham- the smoking cement works chimney at Westbury, the long line of Salisbury Plain as far east as Pewsey, ahead toward the wooded slopes above Lacock and beyond to the distant Marlborough Downs. It is one of the peculiarities of southern England that so often relatively low hills like this ridgeway afford a tremendous view over miles of open country; but whilst this most southerly outlier of the Cotswolds certainly did provide views of a vast tract of country, I was always aware of another world, a huge hidden world beneath my feet. A good many of the enormous local Limestone quarries were still operating, but many disused workings had been taken over by the MOD, you would in those days find lots of shut-off areas with security fencing and guard posts and sometimes you could spy in the middle of  field  or meadow  large enigmatic concrete erections, reminders of the last war and evidence of the dismal fact that in the event of the German invasion the government and many of our treasures would be housed in subterranean cities in this part of North Wiltshire. During my time at Bath these hidden facilities were still being added to as the Cold War was still raging and rather than crazy Nazis it was then the Communist nutters we were hiding from. The industrial archaeologist might have also found much of interest in that region; huge blocks of stone could be seen piled up around the working mine entrances and most quarries had internal tramways which used little Simplex diesel locos to haul the trainloads of cut stone blocks. At one time a system of what I have always assumed were horse-drawn tramways radiated from the stone wharf at Corsham station and served many of the mines southward to Moor Green and Neston. Perhaps the best-known of these mineral lines was the standard gauge siding that ran for a mile alongside the Paddington main line and had its own bore alongside the entrance at the eastern portal of Brunel’s famous tunnel at Box. I spent many happy hours exploring the few remnants of these forgotten wagon ways, finding an odd bit of rail or charting the course of a cutting or embankment through woods or across a field. At the Ridge the route of the lost tramway to Monk’s quarry can be easily traced where it once crossed the road to Neston – two drystone walls four feet apart with no footpath between marks the way–or at least it still did fifty years ago.

If the walk just described by Wadswick and Neston was the loveliest, the trek all the way to Roundway Down near Devizes and back one bright and windy October Saturday was by some way the longest. Roundway was the scene of the battle during the Civil War where Cromwell’s Roundheads were routed and is also the site of an Iron Age hill fort, a familiar landmark visible for miles around. I packed the old blue duffle bag I used for my football kit with jam sandwiches, packet of crisps, a Kit Kat and a Bar Six along with some watered-down orange squash and a packet of fags and as I reckoned that I had at least twelve miles to reach my goal I got-up early and left Corsham around 9 am, getting close to Lacock before midday. Never happy to retrace a country route I decided to tackle the steep climb beyond the village by the little-known Nash Hill and while traversing the dirty track past gravel pits at top of the hill I was overtaken by a sudden cold squall and soaked. It had become an afternoon of intermittent sunshine and brisk wind as I went down through Sandy Lane with its thatched cottages and the straggling village of Heddington and began the steep ascent to the landmark of Kings Play Hill at the western edge of the Marlborough downs.  Apart from a few clumps of beech, the occasional bush of thorn or elder and farm-tracks lined with barbed wire this was an austere landscape of continual hill and dell, of rounded bluff and shallow coombe, a place of solitude and simple beauty. I went towards distant Avebury and managed to get almost as far as Morgan’s Hill before taking a bridleway back toward Roundway and the scene of the Civil War battle. As I made my way up this rough track I noticed to my consternation, coming in my direction a man with a dog. Damn! There seemed no way to avoid the bugger in the open downland and I now went through the familiar torture of the socially inadequate when coming face to face with a stranger- just how to properly acknowledge him, if at all and what to say, if anything–all shamefaced and awkward.  In the event the brown spaniel ran to me first, after giving him a quick pat to the head the overjoyed dog sped off across the turf this way and that, sniffing and snuffling. The man soon came up, middle aged and scruffily dressed rather like a country gentleman with long grey hair sticking out strangely from under a tartan flat cap. I asked about the battle site which he said we were most probably actually standing on and he went on to grumble and bemoan the lack of sheep nowadays on the downland, and spoke about how a hundred years ago this country was one vast sheepwalk. I said I had seen some evidence of cattle-muddy ground trodden down around a trough in the corner of an enclosure and we talked then about the amount of land now under plough, cattle and corn, disastrous for the downland turf. He used the word glorious more than once to describe the surrounding scene and told me to get a move on when he learnt I had trudged all the way from distant Corsham. A pleasant, friendly man and interesting, but I was pleased when he finally hurried off down the chalky path and I once again set my sights on the hillfort of Oliver’s Castle. I spent quite some time looking about the ancient Camp, peering down over the steep sides of its ramparts and examining the few old trees that clung to the chalky soil and wondered what battles with gales of wind they had witnessed over the centuries since the Romans pushed their own road past there, before finally dropping down under a steep bank into a grassy hollow which was protected from the wind and ate the remains of my food. The afternoon had become quite overcast and chilly as I sat and looked about me, and I realised that at this time on a Saturday down there in the other world, the everyday world, happy people were returning from shopping, having tea, preparing dinner and anxiously waiting for the teleprinter to give the football results on BBC Grandstand. And as I sat there under that steep grassy bank a feeling of melancholy came over me, and something more – a feeling of real fear at the awful isolation I found myself in, tired and weary as I was, and surrounded by the heavy uniform greyness of the Autumn day, with the wind howling about those desolate trees and the pathetic remnants of a long-vanished people and I thought of how terribly alone we all were, utterly alone in what was most probably a Godless world; a bunch of pathetic pigmies, selfish and snarling, clinging on by gravity alone to a planet whirling at speed through a limitless universe.  Faith in a benevolent Higher Power, half believed in childhood was by that time gone, as was the security of a loving home and family and it seemed to me then that any Deity (if one existed at all) must be quite indifferent if not hostile to the fate of mankind. I was not at all sorry to stub out my cigarette, hastily pack my bag and leave the old place behind and get back down to civilization. My descent to Heddington was by way of a convoluted series of rutted tracks; those who have walked much on downland will be familiar with old sunken ways, but here the ancient paths and cattle tracks had caused incredibly deep fissures in the hillside chalk 30 or 40 feet deep which were clearly visible for miles around. There was evidence that this chaotic maze of roads had at one time been the main turnpike road to the west-the Bath Road as a number of stone mile posts giving distances to London, Marlborough and Bath could be found in the deep dry grass at the roadside.  I thought for some time about this old road, imagining the stage coaches making their bumpy and perilous way over that inhospitable waste and wondering what little comfort must have been afforded the unfortunate passengers, especially in the freezing cold of Winter and I thought then about the young and at that time unpublished Charles Dickens coming along there by coach and of how he decided to spend the night at the Hare and Hounds at Corsham rather than continuing to Bath where the accommodation was more expensive. That was in the year 1835 during the reign of the least regarded of our monarchs William IV.  The archaic means of transport by stage coach was very soon to be a thing of the past as just over five years later Dickens would be able to complete his entire journey west by train on Brunel’s new broad-gauge railway via Swindon and Chippenham and by the mid-1840s almost the entire railway network as we know it today had in a tremendous rush of a single decade been completed-the modern age had come in. The stage coaches no doubt continued to use the turnpike for some time before realising that their time was up and the lonely old road was forgotten and finally abandoned to nature and to silence.

I congratulated myself on my early start which had allowed me so much time for wandering about the lonely uplands with only a few scattered sheep and black crows for company but I was already hungry and tired and still had to complete the long walk home in the darkening night. By the time I reached the precipitous edge of Bewley Common that looks down over a vast tract of country–the valley of the Avon and much further away to Somerset, the sun had dropped below the horizon with a streak of yellow and gold beneath heavy night clouds.

As most of my way home to Corsham would be undertaken in darkness, I decided to take the little back road by way of Gastard in order to avoid traffic and glare of lights, and this long weary slog allowed me time to review the day’s adventure. It had been an interesting walk; the various landscapes influenced by the underlying soil: Cotswold Limestone, a narrow belt of Cornbrash, heavy Oxford Clay through the Avon valley with the wooded heights of Bewley consisting of Upper and Lower Greensand and the Cretaceous Chalk of the Downland. My walk had also taken in many elements of British history: Corsham and its Court, Brunel’s railway to the west, ancient Lacock with its Abbey where photography started, the grandeur of the Georgian estates around Bowood, the Saxon Wansdyke, the old Bath road and scene of Civil War slaughter at Roundway Down and the ancient Iron Age Camp of Olivers Castle, and as I trudged wearily along in the gathering darkness, I began to wonder how on earth the richness of experiences such as those I had witnessed in that long walk could be translated into art, into the painting or assemblages or whatever else I hoped to complete. Was such a thing even possible? It was a kind of habit with me then to fall into a reverie of speculation about a vast work of Art that encompassed all of my various interests, but just what this enormous creation would look like I don’t think I ever really worked out.  I seem to recall it being a complex work full of contradictions with perhaps something of the look of the assemblages of Robert Rauschenberg but with more of beauty about it. I developed at that time a sort of existential greed where I wanted just everything. No sooner would I settle on something, let’s say a colour scheme than I would start to worry about the drawing and then once that was settled, I would get concerned about making clear the literary meaning or maybe the works lack of naturalistic representation.  As soon as I came to a certain fixed position, I would consider its opposite then challenge and overthrow it. Making a statement with straightforward figuration remained of course a possibility (as it still does) but I felt that way was barred to me; it seemed too old fashioned and simplistic, and too limited and I was looking beyond to a more complex vision. All these years later it’s clear to see that while plenty of the tremendous energy of youth was evident, this ambitious creative work- founded on the resolution of conflict and opposition would probably never be possible to achieve, and so it proved; I never did complete the hoped-for masterwork.  But many years later, once I stopped trying to force a resolution and allowed contradictions to stand, and even deliberately encouraged an attitude of plurality and multi-mindedness, I eventually found an unusual degree of creative freedom. For the artist to stand aside for a moment, to rest amidst the tumult, and stop acting as ringmaster, whipping everything into some form of stylistic or thematic unity, but instead, to simply keep the wellsprings clear and watch over and lightly order the teeming mass of imagery now coming through;  a new way is found, an opening that is not brought about by making choices or conscious decisions, but is caused by alterations within the psyche, changes which do not occur suddenly, but rather evolve slowly over extended periods of time. Unity through diversity- success from failure. But that’s a story for another time.

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