Introduction

The various sections of "From Paris to Golders Green", formerly "Tales from a College that Disappeared" as earlier published in rudimentary form at FaithWriters, are intended to provide a stark contrast between my state of being during the first half of my time at Westfield College, London, where I studied for a BA degree in French and Drama between 1981 and ’85, and that during my final year, as well as to highlight my Parisian odyssey, more of which later.
“Gallant Festivities” was based on two pages of informal journal notes dating from 1982-’83. Consisting of two sections, the first refers to revels enjoyed in the wake of a performance at the college of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” in which I’d played Feste the Fool, while the second was collaged out of an assortment of diary entries from ‘83. Some of these were made in response to another night of revelry following the performance of a play; this time of Lorca's “Blood Wedding”, already mentioned in the previous chapter. Both evoke the feverish merrymaking that marked my golden years at Westfield, a college then in its twilight years, prior to being incorporated into Queen Mary on east London’s grim Mile End Road, far, far from the semi-pastoral beauty of Hampstead. At least, I hope they do. It is my fancy to see my first two Westfield years as symbolic of an entire decade given over to frenzied excess, with disaster approaching just beyond the horizon. In a general sense this came in the shape of Black Monday, the stock market crash of Monday the 19th of October 1987, which could be said to have put paid to the spirit of the eighties just as effectively as the Great Crash of 1929 had spelled the end of the “greatest, gaudiest spree in history”. As to myself in particular, it took form as the collapse of my health and the apparent end of my ability to safely process alcohol. This however would not occur until well into the far dowdier decade to come.
"The Children of the Sun" is a highly modified version of what was once a prose section of "Tales from a College that Disappeared", while "My Paris Begins" is recent, having been written some time last year. The second Paris piece, "A Paris Flaneur" was extracted in early 2006 from a passage from a projected novel, perhaps written sometime in the mid to late 1980s but then largely destroyed. Based on my actual experiences as an urban wanderer in Paris in the years 1983-'84, it was edited and versified before being published at Blogster as "A Paris Flaneur". Further very minor alterations took place in July/December 2007.

Gallant Festivities

It was my evening,
That’s for sure -
At last I’m good
At something -
27 years old
I may be, but…
“I’ve heard all
about you…”
“I have to meet
That guy…”
“Spot the
Equity card…”
“It’s your aura, Carl…”
I even signed
One of Phil’s friends’
Programmes -
“When are you going
To be a superstar?”
Said Luce
A few days ago -
That seemed to be
The question
On everyone’s lips.
“You got Feste perfectly,
Just how I
envisaged it”
“…Not only when
You’re onstage
but off too!”
At last, at last, at last
I’m good at something…

And so the party…
I danced first with P.,
"...Don't go away..."
Chloe called me...
I listened…
…To her problems…
References
To my “innocent face”…
Livvy said:
“S. seems Elusive
But is in fact,
Accessible;
You’re the opposite -
You give to everyone
But are incapable
Of giving in particular.”
M. was comparing me
To June M….
Descriptions by AN:
“She does not dare
To be herself…”
Everything I’d always
Wanted to be,
I now am…
“…She lives
On the reflections
Of herself…”
Partly of truth,
“…In the eyes
Of others…"
"...So long, Carl..."
“There is no June
To grasp and know…”
…Partly of myth.
I get kept getting up to dance…

The Children of the Sun

During my second year at Westfield I lived in an upper floor apartment in Powis Gardens, Golders Green, with my two close friends, Andrew and David. They were both French students, although Andrew also studied Drama like myself, and hailing respectively from Darlington in the north east of England and the Yorkshire city of Kingston-on-Hull. Soon after moving in, I decorated the walls of my room and the lounge (which doubled as David’s bedroom) with various provocative images including reproductions of Symbolist and Decadent paintings, and icons of popular culture and the avant garde. We all three went on to organise a “salon” which while well attended only ran to a single meeting being a desperate attempt by three pretenders at aping Oxford-style decadence in the upstairs apartment of a tiny little dwelling in suburban north London. One thing is certain, we were not part of any revived Brideshead Generation or anything of that sort. We drove our ebullient landlady half-crazy at times through heavy-footedness and other crimes of upper floor thoughtlessness, although she only rarely complained.
In common with most of my friends I drank heavily at night, but almost never during the day. In fact, self-doubt was not a serious problem for me in the early eighties any more than was depression. My first two Westfield years were a neverending round of plays, shows, concerts, discos, parties set against the background of one of the most beautiful and bucolic suburbs of north London. I'd go so far as to say that I was a genuinely happy person back then, with clouds only starting to appear in my life once I'd left Westfield in the summer of '83 with a view to travelling to Paris the following autumn to work for a full academic year as an English language assistant in a French secondary school. This meant that I'd not be seeing my friends at Westfield again, that is in the capacity of fellow student, nor joining them in their final year celebrations. An alternative existed in the shape of a few weeks abroad, one which Andrew perhaps wisely opted for; but accepting this would have deprived me of the chance of spending more than six months in Paris, a city I’d long worshipped from afar as the only true home of an artist with a capital "A". So, in the autumn of that year, I took lodgings on the grounds of the Lycee JP Timbaud in Bretigny-sur-Orge, a commune in the southern suburbs situated some sixteen miles south of the city centre, and remained there until the following May. I was hardly innocent by the time I first set foot in Bretigny. I'm almost certain, however, that at some point not too long after my arrival I felt a sense of self-disillusion, I can't say why for certain. Perhaps I felt I’d let people down, people who’d loved and trusted me because of the way I looked, with such an "innocent face". At the same time, paradoxially perhaps, I'd never been vainer, to such a degree that some of the Lycee kids affectionately likened me to Aldo Maccione, a comic actor of Italian extraction whose absurd affected swagger he referred to as "La Classe". Yet there seems little doubt to me today that that my conscience had long started to scream out in protest and pain. It may also have been the case I was aware if only unconsciously that by severing myself from a vast network of highly gifted friends, many of whom looked to me as a colossal and charismatic talent and who cared for me deeply as I did them, I'd squandered yet another opportunity for social advancement. Whatever the truth, a certain melancholy set in during my residence on the edge of my beloved City of Light.

Poems of Paris

1) My Paris Begins

...my paris begins with those early days as as a conscious flaneur i recall the couple seated opposite me on the metro when i was still innocent of its labyrinthine complexity slim pretty white girl clad head to toe in denim smiling wistfully while her muscular black beau stared through me with fathomless orbs and one of them spoke almost in a whisper "qu'est-ce-que t'en pense" and it dawned on me yes the slender young parisienne with the distant desirous eyes was no less male than me dismal movies in the forum des halles and beyond being screamed at in pigalle and then howled at again by some kind of madman or derelict who told me to go to the bois de boulogne to meet what he saw as my destiny menaced by a sinister skinhead for trying on marie's wide-brimmed hat and then making my way alone to my room in in the insanely driving rain getting soused in les halles with jane who'd just seen dillon as rusty james and was walking in a daze jane again with judy at the cave de la huchette jazz cellar the cafe de flore with igor who asked for a menu for me and then disappeared back to bretigny cash squandered on a gold tootbrush two tone shoes from close by to the place d'italie portrait sketched at the place de tertre paperback books by symbolist poets such as villiers de l'isle adam but second hand volumes by trakl and ernest deleve and a leather jacket from the marche de puces of the porte de clignancourt wandering the city alone or with andrea or igor or david or dom or astrid and sandra i still miss her losing rory's address scrawled on a page of musset's confessions d'un enfant du siecle walking the length and breadth of the rue st denis what a city as anna-justine once wrote me so yes what a city so thrillingly lovely and yet so soulless an exquisite yet empty beauty...

2) A Paris Flaneur

I took the Metro
To Montparnasse-Bienvenue,
Where I slowly sipped
A demi-blonde
In one of those brasseries
Immortalised by Brassai.
Bewhiskered old toper
In a naval officer's cap,
His table bestrewn
With empty wine bottles
And cigarette butts,
Repeatedly screeched the name
"Phillippe" until such a time
As a pallid, impassive bartender
With patent leather hair,
Filled the old man's glass to the brim,
With a mock-obsequious
"Voila, mon Capitaine!"
I cut into the Rue de Bac,
Traversed the Pont Royal,
Briefly beheld
Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois,
With its gothic tower,
Constructed only latterly,
In order that
The 6th Century church
Might complement
The style of the remainder
Of the 1er arrondissement
Before steering for the
Place de Chatelet,
And onwards...les Halles!

The Happy Highways where I Went...

I think it's true to say that much of the wistfulness displayed by the final piece, "The Wanderer of Golders Green (1985)", formed from notes committed to paper in 1985, and largely centring on an evening I spent sauntering in a mournful daze through the titular north London suburb, was born of a long-established infatuation on my part with Bohemian melancholy. In other words, my joy of life was still very firmly in place in that mid-decadal year. Yet, as I remember it, this same natural-born exaltation was being compromised as never before by a tendency to unbelievably intense depressive attacks. What's more, I was seeking comfort as never before through a far deadlier Bohemian favourite than mere affected discontent, alcohol. It may have been that given I'd mishandled so many opportunities of achieving my dream of fame by 1985 that I was now starting to see it as little more than the remotest possibility. Whether this was so or not, it merely served to increase my desperation for it, as well as my addiction to attention, this bringing me increasingly into contact with unsavoury environments and potentially dangerous situations in which I used alcohol to quash my natural fear and inhibitions. Mine became a largely nocturnal existence in consequence, and I regularly anaesthetized myself with booze and cigarettes, not just as a means of forgetting the fact that my dream of fame had not come true after thirty years or more on this planet, but of coping with a psyche that was rapidly coming apart along with my life.

...And Cannot Come Again...

...I recall in particular the fact that had I not disgraced myself during a gratuitous little gig I staged for fun with a couple of friends by displaying superstar temperament in the face of justifiable heckling I could have served as I'd been asked to as lead singer for a boy from Buenos Aires who went on to become of the of the world's leading guitarists and as such to play and even write for a great auteur of the art of Rock yes I knew future luminaries of msuic and comedy in fact can think of two who personally invited me to be present at the birth of brilliant careers yes I met aristocrats and minor royalty legendary figures of sport and the silver screen of rock and the theatre still from the middle of the eighties I seemed interested above all in drowning out the memories of a past of such promise as my life started to hurtle along what looked like a one-way road to an early grave...

The Wanderer of Golders Green (1985)

I awake each morning
With fresh hope
And tranquility
I might go for a saunter
Down quiet London backstreets
Soon my aimlessness
Depresses me,
And I realise
I’d been deceiving myself
As to my ability
To relax as others do.

After my Special B.,
I bought a lager
At the Bar
And chatted to Joy.
Then Paul
Bought me another.
I appreciated the fact
That he remembered
The time he,
His gal Carol,
And Rory Downed
An entire Bottle
Of Jack Daniels
In a Paris-bound train.

I awoke around one.
I slowly got dressed.
Chatty as ever
Before the exam:
French/English translation.
Periodically I put
My face in my hands
Or groaned or sighed.
I finished my paper
In 1 hour and a half.
As I walked out
I caught various eyes
Sandra’s, Judy’s (quizzical) etc…
I went to bed…
Slept ‘till five…
Read O’Neill until 7ish…
Got dressed
And strolled down
To Golders Green,
In order to relive
A few memories.

Singing songs
Brought voluptuous tears.
I snuck into McDonalds
Where I felt At home,
Anonymous, alone.
I bought a few things,
Toothpaste and pick,
Chocolate, yoghurts,
Sweets, cigarettes
And fruit juice.
Took a sentimental journey
Back to Powis Gardens,
Richness
And intensity,
Romantic
And attractive…
Sad, suspicious and strange.
I sat up until 3am,
Reading O’Neill
Or writing (inept) poetry.
Awoke at 10,
But didn’t leave
My room till 12,
Lost my way
To Swiss Cottage,
Lost my happiness.
Oh so conscious
Of my failure
And after a fashion,
Enjoying this knowledge.