Prologue

And still the rain came down. The relentless rain of early November, lashing the pavement, pounding the rooftops and sending folks scurrying for the great indoors. I stood and gazed down through the smeary window of Jenny’s flat as the street lamps flickered on. A woman in a purple plastic mac hurried around the corner struggling with an umbrella that the wind had turned inside out. Scraps of garbage floated along the torrents of water in the gutters on both sides of the street. The dustmen’s strike was into its third week, the rain into its third day.

I started to think about Reykjavik. I’d never even heard of the place until a couple of weeks ago when I’d bought my ticket, but apparently it was going to be the first stop on my journey. I felt a tinge of excitement at the idea that I was about to of fly off to faraway places I’d never seen before, and another, larger one at the thought that Maggie would be waiting for me at the other end. She’d left already to go and get the house sorted out, and I couldn’t wait to see her again.

Delicious aromas wafted in from Jenny’s kitchen, where she and Phil were concocting a farewell feast to send me on my way. Smelled like lamb chops—the speciality of the house. My bags were packed and waiting by the door, and right after dinner I’d be off to the airport.

I was going to miss my friends and all the old haunts, and I still felt sad and angry about the way Motorbird had crashed and burned. But at that moment, as I stood and surveyed the miserable scene in the street below, London was looking like an easy place to leave.

From Chapter 1

In chapter 1, Nigel and Phil sneak out of their boarding school late on a Saturday night, and head up to London with their friend Chiz. They meet up with Chiz’s friend Hamish in Earls Court, smoke some hash, and go to Middle Earth, an all-night psychedelic club in Covent Garden:

We went down the long staircase to the club, and the muffled rumble of music got louder with each step. We paid a few bob to the guy behind the desk and stepped through some doors into the vast cavernous cellar that was Middle Earth. Phil and I stood blinking, mouths open, trying to adjust to the sudden assault on our senses. I’d never seen anything like it. Liquid slides were projecting onto the walls, bathing the entire place in a sea of gently undulating colour that made me feel like I’d stumbled into the middle of someone’s dream, drifting in on a cloud of jasmine incense. Against one wall, elevated on a big long stage and soaked in a subterranean turquoise glow, some musicians were weaving a soundscape of unearthly tone and texture.

The poster on the stairs said they were Soft Machine.

I felt Hamish’s hand on my arm. “Come on Nigel,” he chuckled in my ear. “Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall.” We followed him deeper into the room and found a spare bit of wall across from the stage where we could lean and feel the full force of the sound system. There were no tables or chairs anywhere.

The band was amazing, like nothing I’d ever heard. They were jazz, they were rock and roll, they were neither, they were both. They sounded like something from another world, weaving drones of trance-like simplicity into hectic be-bop mayhem, making my head spin and my heart beat double-time fortissimo. I’d never heard anyone play music like that before. Every chord change, every unexpected semitone, was a revelation. The colours of the light show played on their faces and turned them into aliens. The drummer started singing “The days go by I watch the sky the days go by I watch the sky” over and over while the organ held an eerie chord underneath and the words began to summersault around my head until they became nonsense syllables and then a thunderous drum roll shot them off in a whole new direction.

I stood there mesmerized, wishing more than anything it could’ve been me up there playing. The sound pounded against my chest and pinned me to the wall and I realised that all I really wanted to do with my life was play music. To make people feel the way the band on stage was making me feel at that moment. Forget all the crap they were trying to shove down my throat at school. All I wanted to do was play.

A constant parade of London’s beautiful people passed in front of us. Young women in flowing robes and shawls of brightly coloured satin and velvet; guys in floral shirts and Nehru jackets, or antique military garb. Strings of beads and pendants hung off every neck, sparkling in the shadows. And hair – everyone had so much of it, cascading in ringlets over their shoulders or permed and backcombed into makeshift Afros. Every guy had a goatee or a Fu-Manchu. I felt so self-conscious standing there clean-shaven with my mandatory schoolboy haircut.

People were dancing, but not in couples – they just swayed around, arms raised, eyes closed, lost in the moment.

Chiz and Hamish wandered off to find some refreshment and as they left, a cymbal crash sent the music into a frantic discordant climax and all the lights went out except for two intensely flickering strobe lights, one on either side of the stage. The whole place became a bizarre black-and-white stop-frame movie.

The music stuttered to a close, people cheered and whistled as the coloured slides came back up and the strobes lights dimmed. The musicians left the stage. Hamish and Chiz returned with bottles of Coke, handing one each to me and Phil. I took a long, much-needed swig.

A scruffy, earnest-looking guy in jeans and a kaftan climbed onto the stage clutching a notepad. He cleared his throat and stepped up to the microphone.

“Children of Aquarius!” he yelled. “The way ahead hangs heavy with the fetid rubble of the fools of yesteryear!”

He proceeded to recite a long poem of rage and frustration against the injustice of the political systems that held our world in the constant shadow of nuclear annihilation.

“Brothers and sisters—we must stand as one and tear down the walls of oppression!”

He began punching the air and calling out: “Fuck Big Brother! Fuck Big Brother!” until everyone in the place was stamping their feet and shouting along with him.

Next up was a tall, stern-faced American woman who let fly a fiery ten-minute diatribe on feminist issues. She ranted and raved about injustice and inequality and all kinds of stuff I’d never really thought about before. Nobody had ever told me that I’d been born into a conditioned existence of male dominance. As I tried to figure out exactly what she meant, she was joined on stage by a dozen or so other women —blondes and brunettes, tall ones, short ones, chubby ones, skinny ones — who began slowly and deliberately removing their tops. I blinked several times, but they didn’t go away. To my amazement they all unhooked their bras, swung them around their heads and tossed them off the stage into the crowd. People cheered. Phil and I looked at each other in disbelief.

Most of the women in the audience joined in, took off their bras and made a big pile of them in the middle of the floor. Someone sprayed lighter fuel onto it, lit a match and within seconds half the women in the place were dancing topless and defiant around a pile of smouldering underwear. It smelt a bit weird, but who cared? Everyone was cheering – the women with their newfound freedom, the men because, well – it was a beautiful sight to behold. All those breasts.

The band played another set, a dance troupe performed in masks and tie-dyed body stockings, and before I knew it I was leaping around with my arms in the air, light as a feather, laughing and whooping with my friends to the loud music, wishing we could stay there forever.

But we couldn’t. Phil and I had to be back at school before the sun came up. At two-thirty Chiz pointed to his watch and shrugged. I wasn’t quite ready to leave, but Phil pushed me towards the door and we turned for one last look into the place. The band was still going full bore and a shapely young woman was standing on the corner of the stage completely naked and smiling as a guy painted flowers all over her body. I sighed and climbed up the stairs, stopping to buy a “Make Love, Not War” button from the bloke behind the desk. Would this hash ever wear off? I was still pretty out of it as my feet hit the sidewalk and I breathed in the cool night air.

From Chapter 13

In chapter 13, Nigel and his friends attend a Vietnam War protest in Trafalgar Square. and march to the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square.

It took almost half-an-hour to reach Grosvenor Square. We turned off Regent Street onto Hanover Street, which turned into Brook Street as the sound of the protesters grew steadily louder. Everyone was marching and chanting, beating drums and tambourines and it all blended together into one massive, deafening roar.

The pace slowed down as more people joined in and the street grew narrower. I’d never seen such a vast seething mass of humanity in my life, and I’d certainly never been part of one. I was in the middle of a whirlwind of crazy, infectious energy.

We turned the corner into Grosvenor Square and the atmosphere suddenly changed. We’d arrived. Now what? A hint of tension crept into the air.

The square was much bigger than Trafalgar, green and grassy with a few stark trees and hedges around the perimeter. At the far end stood the imposing facade of the American Embassy, and in front of it a huge cordon of police was lined up along the entire length of the building. Way up ahead of us the front line of protesters came to a standstill and stood a few yards from the cops, chanting and waving their banners.

Suddenly without warning, or any kind of provocation, the police charged at the protesters, trying to grab their banners and tackle them to the ground. They caught a few, pulled them down and started kicking them. It was outrageous. The demonstrators fought back. They hadn’t done anything wrong. It was the cops who were breaking the law.

“Bloody ’ell—looks like a bit of a barney,” said Joe. “Let’s go see what’s going on.”

“Not me, man,” said Stanislav. “No police. I stay back. Keep nose clean.”

I was inclined to agree with Stan, because I didn’t want to be part of any riot. But everyone else wanted to go, and Phil grabbed my elbow.

“C’mon, Nige—we can’t miss this.”

So we left Stan leaning against a wall and took off towards the action fifty yards ahead.  Almost immediately a couple of dozen young guys came running in from a side street, yelling and throwing bricks. They had really short hair, big boots and sneering angry faces, and they looked more like yobs trying to start a punch-up than students protesting against a war. One of them threw a smoke bomb into the middle of the action.

A column of mounted police emerged from beside the Embassy as we got closer, and they waded into the crowd on their big powerful horses as the barricades were tossed aside and the police and protesters went at it.

A huge cheer erupted as a helmet was tossed high into the air through the mists of more smoke bombs. A couple of cops came slowly towards us on horseback, one shouting into a megaphone about how we should all disperse and leave the square immediately, the other swinging his truncheon indiscriminately at anyone who got in his way. They came really close to us, so close that they knocked Lucy off her feet and the truncheon caught her a glancing blow on the side of her head. She screamed and fell to the ground.

Hamish ran to where she’d fallen, cursing loudly. Chiz and Joe picked up the poles from a banner that was lying discarded on the ground and ran after the cops, swinging the long wooden posts at them. Chiz sent the megaphone flying out of one cop’s hand, and Joe smacked the other one hard on the back of the head, making him lurch forward in the saddle and dig his spurs into the horse. 

A bolt of adrenalin surged through my body as every single thing that had ever pissed me off in my life – every injustice, every hypocrisy, every authoritarian figure who’d ever tried to beat me into something I didn’t want to be – came rushing into my head, a barrage of pent-up anger like nothing I’d ever felt before. I picked up a rock and hurled it at the closest cop. It missed him but thumped into the flank of his horse which reared up whinnying on its hind legs, sending more people flying. I threw another one and hit him on the helmet. People were running in every direction shouting and screaming and as I looked around for another rock, two bobbies came rushing towards me on foot, pointing and yelling “Oy—Come here, you!” 

I turned and ran, dodging between crowds of panicking people and snorting horses with the smell of damp turf kicked up by their hooves and wafts of acrid smoke swirling all around me. I could hear the boots of the bobbies getting closer. A hand grabbed hold of my collar and pulled me back.

“You’re nicked, you little bleeder!”

A gang of protesters immediately started pushing and punching the two fuzz, trying to get them off me, and all hell broke loose. Something smacked into my shoulder and sent me stumbling to one side as everyone was yelling and boots were swinging and the cop pulled my collar so tight I nearly choked. His grip loosened as he lifted his other arm to protect himself from the mob and I quickly unzipped my jacket, wriggled out of it and ran off as fast as I could towards the far end of the square, away from all the action.

Hundreds of marchers were still pouring in along the street where we’d arrived. It was hard to get very far against the current, but I kept going until I reached the edge of the square, where I stopped and looked around. I’d lost the two bobbies. I stood and caught my breath, my heart beating a crazy fast tempo as the fight raged on in front of the Embassy.

Good thing it was only my old corduroy jacket, I thought. What little money I had with me was in my jeans. But I’d left my cigarettes in the jacket, right when I really needed one.

Surrounded by strangers, I had no idea where my friends were. The roar of the battle kept resonating around the square, and for a second I thought I could still feel the grip of the law on my collar. I was standing close to where we’d left Stanislav, but I couldn’t see any sign of him, and I could well understand why he’d made himself scarce.

But what I cared about most of all at that moment was Lucy. I had to find out what had happened to her. The memory of seeing her get hit on the head by that truncheon made me tremble with anger again. Those bastards. My first thought was to go back into the thick of things to find out what was happening, and see if there was anything I could do to help.

I looked over towards the seething mass of fighting people with smoke billowing all around them. Cheers rang out as more helmets flew into the air. Sirens wailed as paddy wagons carried away arrested protesters and ambulances rushed the injured off to hospital. Things weren’t easing up at all. They were getting crazier. More police had poured in, and I realised that if I went back into the battle, the chances were I’d either get my head kicked in or get arrested. Or both.

I decided against it, and instantly felt bad, like I was letting my friends down. I also started to feel ashamed of what I’d done a few minutes before.

What ever happened to peace and love, and the spirit of ’67?