Characters, on the road (out of Clare)

Raised in Clare, West Suffolk, here are some characters from my childhood and other encounters as  I attempted to leave the village, mostly using my thumb.

Transcript

Removed as a toddler from London in 1955, I lived in Clare, Suffolk, until 1975. 

My father Tom was a picture restorer and artist and my mother Muriel taught part-time at Grenville College, Stoke-by-Clare, and as an artist.

All my formative years were spent in a dream. And perhaps years after too! At first, the village of Clare seemed huge but grew smaller and smaller as the years rolled in.

At seven or eight, I got to realise that the village had, what used to be termed, ‘characters.’ I had a big cat Domino. Though it spent much of the time in our barn and the field out the back, we fed it regularly. Mum noticed though, it was growing fat, really fat; and then it disappeared for days at a time.

Domino was being fed by the two “old spinster ladies” who lived in a big house across the road from us. That’s what my mum called them – “spinster ladies” and who knows or cares if they were gay! I don’t know if their poaching was premeditated but several cats enjoyed meals out at their house! 

I remember feeling sad: why would Domino want to go away? At first, perhaps, our cat wanted excitement and encounters we couldn’t offer – and food, more food! Unfortunately, our macho cat grew obese and was sadly run over, perhaps no longer able to sprint across the street…

Our chimney sweep was Charlie and my dad paid him to sit for a portrait in his working clothes. I remember the painting, Charlie was marked with soot of his trade but Tom painted him as a proud man – as proud as any in the village. The painting was snapped up and I have no idea where it is now – London? Paris?

In 1960 over twenty-percent worked on the land in West Suffolk and Old Bill, always dressed in threadbare cap, collarless shirt and tweed suit hanging off his skinny frame, told tales of farming life, of his life in the village at the tail end of the Victorian era. 

Bill was in his mid-eighties in the 1960s and I thought he was built of rock rather than flesh. He could remember a time in the village when only horse drawn carts rattled along the roads. I listened in as Old Bill told my dad about funerals. If you were poor, your old cart (if you had access to a cart, hauled by a horse or by hand) carried the coffin noisily on the road to the funeral; but if you were rich, you’d line the roads of the village with straw to quieten the wheels of the hired horse-drawn hearse.

My dad, particularly in the 1960s, preferred drinking in the White Hart in Chiltern, for here the older farm-hands and labourers gathered, where Dad could absorb their stories of the countryside. Dad’s main source of income was picture restoration and when he finally stopped working every week in London and brought his work back to Clare, all manner of “characters” turned up at the house – from picture and antique dealers to Lords and Ladies. 

I can remember walking back from school and as I reached the brow of Snow Hill, a gleaming grey Rolls Royce was parked outside our house. Here was Lord Gort. I disappeared to another room as the voices of the upper classes were so different from the children I mixed with and their parents. Yet, I was afforded a seat in his Rolls Royce, just for a moment, aware of the shiny leather upholstery and splendour of this mighty car.

In my childhood, it seemed much of the outside world came to us and there was no point in travelling thereby. We had our own intrigues too.

As a schoolboy among other boys, we’d walk by the house of the bearded lady – yes, a bearded lady – like a Mona Lisa you’d draw a beard on! We were on our way to school. 

If we saw her, we’d maybe snigger to ourselves but not call out. In those days, it seemed adults could clip kids round the ear – any kids – for anything – so we kept our opinions to ourselves. However, something more astounding than a bearded lady occurred: this middle-aged bearded lady was bearded no more – and had got married! 

Had she taken a bus out of the village and in some exotic place found love – and a barber? What had happened?

It seemed the village was a real mish-mash of characters, rich and poor – with me blissfully unaware until I had to work.

As a trainee reporter, I got to interview those with money. Sir John Wedgewood was one such. I was 17 and he offered me a Manhattan cocktail at 10 am in the morning! His house was huge and loaded with Wedgewood treasures. I can remember all the antique-bling whirring around in my mind as I left and bought a Mars bar from the Co-op for my lunch – you know, the Co-op on the market square, run by Mr Swan?

“I’ve got to get out of this place!” now an old song, crackled on the pub’s old juke box.

Hitching back to Clare from Sudbury one night at midnight, a black “roller” drew up slowly by my side. I opened the door and a posh middle-aged man beckoned me inside. He drove very, very slowly away and began to talk. 

Carefully at first, he told of his problem – “I am a beastly homosexual.” Perhaps he wanted to create a scene, to masochistically re-enact an assault on him from pre-1967, when homosexuality was illegal. I just said “Right-ho – we’re all different!” 

I think it was the “Right-ho” which unsettled him – as I sounded a little bit posh despite my jeans and long hair! He began to explain that, in his position as a senior physician, he had to hide who he really was. I said, it didn’t matter who he was but I could see him shaking and his face, in the light from his splendid dashboard, looked like a crumpled paper bag.

Nearly in tears, he stopped to let me out: he wasn’t going to re-enact the oppression gays suffered in the 1960s nor was I going to be his rent boy for the night. The world was changing. I waived him goodbye. This was the last roller I ever sat in.

Hitching was obligatory – for me. Sometimes in twos but often alone, day or night. I was hitching from Colchester to Clare when my friend and I were picked up by a very elderly couple in a Sunbeam, I think. They hurried us into the car with smiles and fed us chocolate. I thought – this is bloody marvellous! Just as we were getting settled to answer their questions – Where are you going? What do you do? etc. – the car suddenly stopped and we were hastily asked to leave. In the layby where we stopped two girls were hitching.

We watched as the girls got in to the car and the warmth of the elderly couple’s greetings were familiar – as the chocolates were offered and they moved away. I saw the elderly couple a few times after that, on the road: this was their weekend hobby, picking up hitch-hikers, vicariously enjoying others’ experiences, ‘on the road.’

Usually, to get out of the village, I would catch the last bus from Clare to Sudbury but on one occasion I missed the bus and decided to hitch out of the village. After quite a while a Renault or such screeched to a stop. A young hippy couple invited me inside.

I asked: “Are you going to Sudbury?” They laughed: “We’re going to Paris! You wanna come?”

Paris!? That really would be ‘on the road.’ 

“Sudbury will do, thanks.” I said pathetically.

The spliffs came out and by the time I got to Sudbury I was floating! Well, it wasn’t Woodstock, or Paris but, thankfully, it wasn’t the village either. 

Indeed, I’d hitched into Sudbury because a crowd of us were off to the Gainsborough to watch the film of ‘Woodstock.’

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden