Beatnik memoir
The Beatnik Story
12/12/08 10:11
I’ve told various editions of this
story at dinner parties and elsewhere for 50 years, and never
failed to capture a rapt audience. The latter part sounds like
science fiction or the script of some ‘Teen’ horror movie, but I
have never been accused of making it up. Audiences could always
tell by my voice that every word was true. Many have urged me to
write it up, and I have indeed had several goes at doing so, but
never to my satisfaction. A writer advised me to report it in the
third person, as if it happened to somebody else, but I could never
get the knack of that. So lest it fade away entirely, I report it
here.
In the early Spring of 1959 I hitchhiked from London down to Newquay in Cornwall to join a group of young people spending the summer season there. We were spread out among the hotels, working as waiters, cleaners, barkeepers, kitchen staff or washeruppers. We did not think of ourselves as Beatniks, but the tabloid press had trained people to derisively identify us as such by our clothing and hair style. In truth, neither attribute was all that different from normal, but this was the 1950s. Today, it is difficult to imagine that a person wearing tight trousers, a long black sweater and longish hair would excite general interest and occasional hostility in the streets and shops, but it was so, then.
Few of us had read Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg or other exemplars of the Beat movement. Most were from working class families like mine, and those who felt any literary preferences at all tended towards earlier writers such as Yeats, Dylan Thomas and T.S. Elliot. My particular favourite was Fitzgerald’s translation of Omar Khayyam. Musically, the group favoured traditional jazz, and most were habitues of the Cy Laurie club in Shaftsbury Avenue, London. Elvis had recorded ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ in 1956, and in 1959 Cliff Richard’s ‘Living Doll’ was permanently playing on every jukebox in England, but we generally cleaved to old jazz and other folk music, snobbishly rejecting any new wave as ‘populist’. Along with our semi-bizarre clothes, these music preferences further distinguished us from the prevalent youth culture: the ‘Mods’, ‘Rockers’ and ‘Hippies’ had yet to appear, and even the label ‘Beatnik’ we accepted under protest. While most other teenagers were vigorously aiding the birth of Rock and the future 60s revolution, my subgroup unwittingly belonged to the movement which would produce such folky/blues exponents as Bob Dylan, Martin Carthy, Joan Bias, The Pentangle, Wizz Jones and others.
The Ordeal of the Journey Down
I sharply remember waking up that first morning ‘on the road’. I was wrapped in a blanket under a sign on the A30 near Basingstoke. It was May and very cold. I had quit my job as a junior artist in an ad agency, stuffed a change of clothes and some books into a duffle bag, and hit the road with £5 in my pocket. From living at home with my parents, I was now living nowhere, and it felt dangerous. I had also left behind my girlfriend Janet, a grammar school student of 16 years who was my first love. It did not seem perverse to do so, but a proper part of the myth in which the hero was obliged to travel far away and to write beautiful poetry about his estranged love. I had been a little disappointed, though, when she received the announcement of my imminent departure with enthusiasm not tears. She had said it was just like Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, and that I would return weighty and tempered by grim experience.
My hitching companion was Kevin Murphy, a young man I had met in Cy Laurie’s jazz club. Experienced hitchers I had met there and in Soho coffee bars had advised me that the road was tough on two-man teams, and that it was much better to hitch with a girl. But neither Kevin nor I could find a girl, and neither of us were brave enough to go solo. So there we were, having taken 10 hours to travel 45 miles, bedded down at midnight under the baleful amber light of the road sign, and woken up near-frozen at the crack of dawn among diesel-burnt grasses and plastic litter. Kevin dealt with it by stamping and swearing, but I was too appalled to express my dismay. It occurred strongly to my 18 year-old brain that one could actually die of starvation and exposure out here. We shambled off, heading West, with Kevin still swearing and I seriously considering abandoning the quest. I would certainly have done so if a truck had not stopped to offer us a ride all the way to Amesbury. If this had not happened, my life would have taken a different course, and I would have become someone else. Fate’s messenger, in this case, was a rough diamond truck driver stinking of body odour. At Amesbury another long wait ensued before a fat lady in a Morris Minor gave us a ride to Yeovil. We arrived near starving in Yeovil at about 10pm, and decided (against all ethics of the Lore) to take a room at an hotel for the night. This decision was made with the implicit agreement that it would not be mentioned to anyone on arrival in Newquay: the community of Beats which had assembled there already would, we knew, have regarded it as akin to arriving in a limousine.
We walked along the deserted night time high street to a public house advertising accommodation, entered ‘Reception’ and rang the bell provided on the uninhabited reception desk. A young lady appeared, took one look at us, and screamed in exactly the same tones as heroines screamed when encountering extraterrestrial monsters in popular movies of those times. Kevin and I stood aghast as thunderous steps were heard descending unseen stairs heralding the arrival of a burly, red-faced landlord equipped with a mighty walking stick. He brandished this weapon above his head, and said that he did not want the likes of us here and that we should bugger off. We had not uttered a word. While his putative daughter cowered behind the counter, he continued to utter loud threats as we backed, apologetically gesticulating, out the door. In retrospect I consider that this reaction was unwarranted. Kevin and I were, I suppose, a little disheveled after our exposure to the road, but there was nothing in our presentation to account for such alarm. But this was nothing compared to the reception we received from the Yeovil community as we resumed our trek up the high street. Whole families peered from windows and even assembled on their doorsteps to witness our banishment. I do not know how they were alerted to our presence in their town, but I will never forget the faces of the children gazing blankly at us as their parents clutched them protectively.
Outside the town, we found a copse of friendly trees in which to sleep, stunned into mutual silence by our acclaim as public renegades. We had not imagined that our style could provoke such fear, and our separation from orthodoxy was enhanced thereby. I cannot speak for Kevin, but I liked it. It aligned me with the great rejected revolutionaries of the past and allowed my adolescent ambitions to march shoulder to shoulder with Voltaire, Baudelaire and Rousseau.
In the morning we were picked up by another fat lady. We asked her specifically to drop us off at the nearest place where we could get food. She delivered us to a little restaurant on the road, but it was so early in the day that the sign on the door said ‘Closed’. We knocked, and it was opened by a man in a baby blue shirt with a matching brocade necktie who hesitated before admitting us, but did. We were quite literally starving, but politely ordered the ‘chef’s breakfast’, which arrived as microscopic pieces of toast overlaid with one poached egg and some unidentified sprinkle of greenstuff. This vanished down our maws like autumn leaves into a volcano.
A further ride brought us to Exeter, where at about 11pm we collapsed onto a grassy bank by the road, only to be awakened at 3am by police, who asked us to move on. We asked them to direct us to a source of food, and they directed us to a transport cafe barely 100 yards from where we lay. We went there and stuffed ourselves. Everything was delivered in giant proportions, as if serving giants. Even the tea was delivered in pint mugs. Gazing out through the windows at the trucks arriving in the pre-dawn hours, I realised that the social systems of my working classes were strong, and that the norms which I had taken for granted had been won by resentful peasants such as I. Envigorated by sustenance, I jotted this observation down in my notebook. Rising from the table, I saw myself reflected in a mirror behind the serving counter, and was both startled and gratified to see that our three days exposure to the road had transformed us from pallid Londoners into sunburnt and grimy explorers fit for any mythical adventure.
Kevin and I then had another confidential consultation. We decided to take the ‘Cornish Riviera Express’ train from Exeter to Newquay, and to arrive in town without mentioning this fact. If anyone were to ask about the trip, we were to comment that it was rough, and to leave it at that.
And that’s how we arrived in Newquay. Please understand that this was the town that the noted BBC Journalist Alan Whicker chose to visit in the following year of 1960 to run a TV expose on the persecution of Beats. I was there in the year that both preceded and promoted such media attention. But my story of that year has not been hitherto reported, largely because no one mentioned in the 1960 documentary that the 1959 Beat community had been involved in a murder investigation, and because the circumstances surrounding this event would have been simply too weird for the media of that time. For me, an intimate participant, this event became a seminal life experience.
The Arrival and the Unconsummated Liaison
The sun was shining at midday as Kevin and I walked from the station into the town centre and saw a gathering of about 20 Beats seated in a ring on the village green. Some I knew from Cy Laurie’s and Soho coffee bars, but most I did not. Wizz Jones was playing his guitar as usual, and several girls were dancing the ‘stomp’, an energetic choreography limited to traditional jazz enthusiasts. Holidaying families stood around watching appreciatively as we joined the circle and reported the edited version of our journey. The record was held by a boy who bragged that they had made it in under 24 hours, and who proudly described how his girl companion had thumbed at the roadside while he hid in the bushes. When vehicles stopped she had introduced him as her brother, who had just been for a wee-wee. Several drivers had driven off, but most had not.
Overnight lodgings and job prospects appeared easily. A boy called Mick said he had an appointment for tomorrow with the manager of the Byron Court Hotel, so we arranged to tag along. Two girls had already begun waitressing at another hotel, and offered us the floor of their double staff room, but warned that it had to be done covertly otherwise they would be sacked. That night, we sneaked over a back fence and through their window to enjoy whispered conversation with the giggling girls. When the lights went out, Kevin’s Irish charm and good looks soon promoted him from floor to bed. The other girl, not wishing to be outdone, extended a slender moonlit hand down to where I lay. The suppressed noises from the other bed indicated that Kevin was more than competent in this situation, whereas I was still virgin and inept and disappointing. Girlfriend Jan, back in London, had always drawn the line at the hem of her navy blue schoolgirl knickers.
Next morning, Wizz Jones, Kevin, Mick and I lined up for inspection in the sunlit back yard of the Byron Court Hotel. The saturnine manager, accompanied by an assistant holding a clip board, reviewed us holding his coffee cup. He indicated Wizz’s guitar case and asked for a tune. Stalwart Wizz declined, complaining of an injured left hand. The manager passed on to Kevin, who astonishingly spouted an impressive pedigree as a commis chef at several London restaurants. Mick reported helping his father on his Petticoat Lane barrow. The manager’s dark eye then fixed on the folder I habitually held, and he asked what was in it. I gave it to him, and he read some pages of my poetry. “Rather formal”, he said, handing it back. And that was it: Kevin was appointed as commis chef in the kitchen, and Wizz, Mick and I as plate room staff. The manager walked off and conversed with his assistant, who came back to conduct us to our lodgings. Inexplicably, my companions were delivered to a dormitory room of tiered bunk beds, while I was ushered into a private single staff room overlooking the hotel’s golf course. To me, this was a message from the gods that my quest was favoured. I placed my alternate clothing in the wardrobe and drawers provided, and arranged my folder and pens symmetrically on the desk. Then I sat down to write a high flown poem to my girlfriend Jan.
Washing up and the Vampire Episode
Our work was governed by the mealtimes of the hotel. We plate room staff were required to wash up the china and cutlery used by up to 200 guests every breakfast time, lunchtime and dinnertime. In between these tasks we were free to surf at the famous Fistral Bay, and to frequent the town cafes or pubs. Quickly understanding this, we devised a system to allow us the maximum free time possible. We identified that the most time consuming task was transporting the china across the 4 yard gap between the giant plate washer and the stacking shelves. The solution was to throw it across the gap. One of us would stand by the shelves and another would lift each dried plate from the washer and hurl it across to the catcher like a porcelain frisbee, thus emptying the machine and making it ready for the next load. We quickly became so adept at this as to resemble circus performers, and the senior kitchen staff came in to watch. They alerted the manager, and he came in to watch. One day, the manager stood in the doorway watching us as we performed, said nothing, and departed. I hereby testify that during the six months of such activity not one plate was shattered.
But as excellence in any trade attracts jealousy, so it was that the hotel Chef’s assistant, a man called Heinz, took against us. His sneering demeanor so annoyed us that I devised a plan to discountenance him. One night, when we knew he was on duty alone in the kitchen, I appeared dressed in black and face-powdered pale with flour, bearing a large steel bowl. I hesitantly asked Heinz for some blood. He did not understand, and I explained sincerely that I would like some of the blood which dripped from the suspended carcasses in the freezer. Somnambulistically, Heinz took the bowl from my hand, went into the freezer room, and returned with about two pints of chilled blood. I sniffed it appreciatively, bowed and thanked him and walked out of the kitchen into the staff room where my eavesdropping friends were writhing in suppressed mirth.
The very next day, I was moved from my olympian private room into the dormitory. A friendly waitress reported that management feared I may disturb guests on the golf course.
I add two other episodes to this section because they are so sharp in my memory. In our breaks from work we used to go snorkeling and surfing off the coast around Newquay. While doing so one day I confessed to a companion that I feared looking down through the water at the long green seaweeds waving to and fro beneath me. He said that he had felt exactly the same until he had allowed himself to fall right into the underwater weeds, letting them wrap themselves around him. I went back into the water and swam out to where I could look down and see the dreaded weeds, and I swam down into them and allowed them to wrap me in their clammy clutches. Returning triumphant to the beach, I reported my experience to the advisor. He asked me if I had really done it. I said yes. He said that he would never do that for a thousand pounds. The second is when Wizz, David (a late joiner of our ensemble), Arnold, Mick and I were seated late at night around the staff room table where Wizz was teaching me how to play guitar. Kevin walked in, dripping wet, carrying a heavy sack, which he emptied onto the table before us. Thousands of green-tinged pennies and threepenny bits and sixpences and shillings spilled out over the table and onto the floor. Kevin had robbed the town’s wishing well.
The Hero’s Return
After about three months of separation, I became anxious that I had not received a single letter from girlfriend Jan, after mailing her at least one letter a week. In those days phones were not so broadly employed as they are today, and it simply did not occur to me that I might find her number and call her. So I presented my fictitious excuses and gained a week’s leave and started hitching back to London. I used the town’s Interflora shop to send two red roses to her address as heralds of my coming. I don’t remember much about the trip except for being driven at night slowly past a dead cow straddling the road across Bodmin Moor. After 36 hours I arrived at her address in North London in the morning and knocked on the door. A woman I assumed to be Jan’s mother opened it, and I explained who I was. The woman said that Jan was out. I asked when she would be back, and the woman said that she would be back in the afternoon. I asked if she would be arriving at the train station and she said yes. I went to a cafe opposite the train station and sat there watching passengers come out until 4.30pm, and then I returned to the house and knocked on the door. The same woman answered and broke down in tears and led me through to a bedroom where Jan was laying, pale in a white nightdress, with an enormous red pimple in the very middle of her forehead. She was in tears, also. I looked around the room and immediately noticed three red roses in a vase. I had specifically ordered two red roses. The shop girl had said that Interflora’s minimum order was six, and I had said clearly that I would pay for six but they were to send only two. But the fools had sent a meaningless three. At that moment I was separated from all the world. I looked on these weeping women as if at a painted portrait, admiring the brushwork and the play of light and shade. Jan choked back her tears to utter the words, “Why aren’t you angry?” The woman sobbed that Jan was studying at school and could not be romantically involved. I realised that they were not crying for me but for themselves: they had betrayed Mr Darcy! And they could never henceforth read romantic fiction in the same way again. I left, caught the tube to London’s Western outskirts and started hitching back to Cornwall, comforting myself with the conviction that this was exactly the sort of thing heros had to endure.
Tom’s Death and Mick’s Message from Beyond
The seasonal workers in Newquay that year included a number of Oxford undergraduates, one of whom was a slim and handsome young man called Tom, who worked as a porter at the prestigious Headland Hotel. He befriended us in pubs and cafes and spoke to us. He was sympathetic to and curious about how we felt about everything. We adopted him as an honorary Beat, but one who was upper class and happened to prefer classical music. All of us who met him recognised the patient intelligence in his eyes, and respected him for it.
One morning Tom’s body was found dead on the beach at the foot of a tall cliff. Nobody had come forward to explain how he had come to be there. A number of the Beat community were called to give evidence by the police, without result. On the night in question Tom had been seen drinking in a pub near the cliff edge, but no such witnesses accounted for his movements thereafter.
On the night after receiving news of Tom’s death, we were all seated round the staff room table at the Byron Court Hotel, talking about it, when all noticed that Mick had grown pale and silent, his head had stooped into his hands on the table. Someone asked if he was all right, but he did not reply. He stood up and was still and we all watched him. Without a word he turned and walked out, and by unspoken agreement we all followed. Mick walked out of the hotel grounds and along the silent street leading to the beach, then he collapsed onto the road, clutching his head and screaming in pain. We ran up as several lights went on in the dark houses and faces appeared at windows. Mick writhed on the ground shouting again and again that he had a key in his head and it was hurting him. We picked him up, carried him back to the staff room and sat him back down in his chair. I asked him what the key was like. Mick said it was an old fashioned key attached to a big brass tag with a saw-toothed edge, and that there was a number on the tag and that it was the tag that was hurting him. He grew calmer, and we led him to his bunk and he went to sleep. Kevin took me aside to whisper that Mick had fallen to the ground outside a Catholic church, and had stopped screaming when carried outside the area of consecrated ground.
Next morning we did the breakfast shift, but we covertly watched Mick. He did his work but was silent and withdrawn. I asked him how he felt, and he looked at me in puzzlement. We realised he did not remember the drama of last night, and none of us wanted to mention it. We went to the beach and he sat apart, sometimes looking across at us, puzzling about something.
That night in the staff room, exactly the same thing happened again. We were all waiting for it. Mick’s head stooped into his hands, he stood up and began to walk out the door. We stopped him and led him to the dormitory and sat him on a bunk. I asked him if it was the key again. He looked at us blankly and then started to speak to us in Tom’s voice. Mick was a cockney kid whose father was a trader in Petticoat Lane, and here he was addressing us in the accent and syntax of an Oxford undergraduate. Worse than that, it was Tom’s voice. We all recognised it. He said this: “I am walking towards the railing along the cliff edge. I fall over the railing and turn over in the air twice. My head hits a stone. Under the stone is the key.”
We were terrified. Two of us immediately left the room, but I could see them standing outside, listening. I stuttered, “Is that you, Tom?”
Mick looked at me calmly, and Tom’s voice said, “I am able to communicate with you because a man is coming to this place who must be prevented from fulfilling his plans. He is a magician and he always dresses in white. A great destruction may happen if he is not stopped.” Then Mick lay down on the bunk and went to sleep.
Signs and Portents
While the normally cheerful Mick remained quiet and withdrawn over the following days, strange and frightening events began to occur in the Beat community. Members began to visit us at the Byron Court to report.
The two waitress girls Kevin and I had stayed with on arrival came to tell us that they had finished their lunch time shift and gone to their room to get changed for an afternoon at the beach. Three hours later, the restaurant manager banged on their door, and they found themselves sitting on their beds with no recollection of the three hours which had passed. They were so disturbed by this and by other reports that they quit their jobs and returned to London.
Sandy was a drummer who worked with a local dance band. He said that he had been walking down the high street one afternoon when an unknown man had greeted him like a friend. Sandy met lots of people in his job, and he had assumed the man to be an audience member at one of his gigs. The man had insisted that Sandy meet his friends, and had led him to a nearby bookshop. The shop was empty, and the man disappeared into the back section saying that he would bring his friends out. Sandy stood around for a few minutes, and then an elderly couple appeared from the back section and apologised that he had been kept waiting. Sandy explained about the man, but the couple had no knowledge of him. I asked Sandy to describe the man, and Sandy said that he had been short, balding and dressed all in white.
Kevin came into the staff room on the night following the ‘message’, and dropped a key onto the table. It was an old fashioned key with a heavy brass tag which had a saw-toothed edge. On one side of the tag was an engraved number, and on the other the logo of the Headland Hotel where Tom had worked. Kevin explained that he had found it at the base of the cliff where Tom had been found. We decided to go to the Headland Hotel and find out which door the key opened. We did not show the key to Mick because we feared provoking another visitation from Tom. So we walked out to the Headland Hotel and asked the doorman to show us which room it belonged to. He thought it an odd request, but he led us into the staff entrance and down to the basement and along a dark corridor to a door which bore the same number as the key, and he opened the door. It was a broom closet, and it contained only brooms.
These and other less-dramatic phenomena broadcast such an atmosphere of tension in the Beat community that many returned to London. Somehow it was decided that as many as possible of the remainder should assemble at night on the beach at the spot where Tom had been found. We did, and we stood in a silent group on that spot for a long while, waiting for something to happen. Some girls became frightened and left, and nothing else occurred.
But the next day something did happen.
The Coming of the Magician
Wizz Jones returned from a trip to the town centre and reported seeing a white Jeep driven slowly down the high street by a man dressed all in white. The Jeep was towing a white caravan, and stuck on the side of the caravan was a large poster advertising ‘Peter Casson’s Hypnotism Show’, with dates and times when the show would be presented at the Town Hall Theatre. Some loud speakers in the Jeep had been broadcasting military marching music, and the man in the Jeep had been waving and smiling.
The entire Beat community purchased tickets, and on the opening night occupied the whole back row of seats. I sat down between Kevin and Mick, and Kevin nudged me and pointed downward with his eyes to where his hand held his jacket slightly open. Sewn into the lining inside was a leather sheath holding a knife with a five-inch blade.
We all watched stony faced among the giggling audience as the Magician summoned sunburnt cheerful holidaymakers up on stage and made them believe things were true that were not true, and made them act in ridiculous ways to make the audience laugh at them. Here was the answer to our confusion and doubt. The magician who must be stopped had appeared as foretold. I turned to Mick, and said, “Is he the man?” But Mick just looked worried and upset.
The Confrontation
A conference was held in a pub after the show. It was decided that a confrontation was necessary, a confrontation between Mick and the magician. So next morning, after the breakfast shift, the Byron Court contingent kept a rendezvous at the caravan site with Beats from other hotels. About 15 grim young people sat in a semi-circle on the grass facing Peter Casson’s caravan door. I led Mick up to it and knocked. A woman opened it, and I started to explain why we were there. She interrupted to say that consultations were only available by appointment, but then she saw the silent assembly behind me, and called back into the caravan. Peter Casson appeared and patiently heard the whole story. He did not seem much interested. He said that it all was a fairly typical example of mass hysteria in an isolated community. He said that Mick had been attached to Tom in a deeper way than he understood, and that Tom’s death had shocked Mick into a temporary state akin to psychosis, in which he briefly took on Tom’s persona as a sort of compensation for his death. The close knit and exclusive Beat community had been a highly suggestible breeding ground for delusory beliefs to spread like a biological contagion. He asked Mick a few questions, and then said that he saw no reason to advise treatment but, if Mick would prefer, he could refer him for a stay in a nearby sanatorium with which he was associated. Mick declined this offer, and we all went home.
Epilogue
Every time I have told this story over the years, listeners have asked about certain ‘holes in the script’ which are seemingly not explained by Peter Casson’s analysis. Reflecting on these questions myself, I have come up with the following answers:
Q: How did Mick speak in Tom’s voice?
A: People experiencing psychotic breaks often exhibit behaviours and abilities which are unavailable to them in their normal state of mind. Before Tom’s death, Mick used to entertain us with imitations of TV and radio commercials - particularly one about Kraft Crackerbarrel Cheese - which were very funny. The psychological impact of the death seems to have amplified Mick’s talent for mimicry to truly extraordinary levels.
Q: How did Mick know about the key?
A: I was not aware that Mick had continuing meetings with Tom, but he must have done so to develop such a deep attachment. At those meetings Mick must have often seen Tom carrying such keys, which were common to the HeadLand Hotel where Tom worked. My cod psychology opines that the key image symbolised the mental pain Mick felt about Tom’s death.
Q: How did Kevin find the key?
A: He simply went down to the beach and found it where it had fallen from Tom’s pocket.
Q: What about all the other reports of weird happenings?
A: It doesn’t take much to trigger paranoia and delusions in a tight knit and socially estranged community. Check out the Salem Witch Trials: http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/salem/salem.htm
Q: What happened to Mick afterwards?
A: I never saw him again after that season ended.
Q: How did Tom die?
A: The coroner’s verdict was accidental death. No one knows how it happened.
Podcast
In the early Spring of 1959 I hitchhiked from London down to Newquay in Cornwall to join a group of young people spending the summer season there. We were spread out among the hotels, working as waiters, cleaners, barkeepers, kitchen staff or washeruppers. We did not think of ourselves as Beatniks, but the tabloid press had trained people to derisively identify us as such by our clothing and hair style. In truth, neither attribute was all that different from normal, but this was the 1950s. Today, it is difficult to imagine that a person wearing tight trousers, a long black sweater and longish hair would excite general interest and occasional hostility in the streets and shops, but it was so, then.
Few of us had read Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg or other exemplars of the Beat movement. Most were from working class families like mine, and those who felt any literary preferences at all tended towards earlier writers such as Yeats, Dylan Thomas and T.S. Elliot. My particular favourite was Fitzgerald’s translation of Omar Khayyam. Musically, the group favoured traditional jazz, and most were habitues of the Cy Laurie club in Shaftsbury Avenue, London. Elvis had recorded ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ in 1956, and in 1959 Cliff Richard’s ‘Living Doll’ was permanently playing on every jukebox in England, but we generally cleaved to old jazz and other folk music, snobbishly rejecting any new wave as ‘populist’. Along with our semi-bizarre clothes, these music preferences further distinguished us from the prevalent youth culture: the ‘Mods’, ‘Rockers’ and ‘Hippies’ had yet to appear, and even the label ‘Beatnik’ we accepted under protest. While most other teenagers were vigorously aiding the birth of Rock and the future 60s revolution, my subgroup unwittingly belonged to the movement which would produce such folky/blues exponents as Bob Dylan, Martin Carthy, Joan Bias, The Pentangle, Wizz Jones and others.
The Ordeal of the Journey Down
I sharply remember waking up that first morning ‘on the road’. I was wrapped in a blanket under a sign on the A30 near Basingstoke. It was May and very cold. I had quit my job as a junior artist in an ad agency, stuffed a change of clothes and some books into a duffle bag, and hit the road with £5 in my pocket. From living at home with my parents, I was now living nowhere, and it felt dangerous. I had also left behind my girlfriend Janet, a grammar school student of 16 years who was my first love. It did not seem perverse to do so, but a proper part of the myth in which the hero was obliged to travel far away and to write beautiful poetry about his estranged love. I had been a little disappointed, though, when she received the announcement of my imminent departure with enthusiasm not tears. She had said it was just like Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, and that I would return weighty and tempered by grim experience.
My hitching companion was Kevin Murphy, a young man I had met in Cy Laurie’s jazz club. Experienced hitchers I had met there and in Soho coffee bars had advised me that the road was tough on two-man teams, and that it was much better to hitch with a girl. But neither Kevin nor I could find a girl, and neither of us were brave enough to go solo. So there we were, having taken 10 hours to travel 45 miles, bedded down at midnight under the baleful amber light of the road sign, and woken up near-frozen at the crack of dawn among diesel-burnt grasses and plastic litter. Kevin dealt with it by stamping and swearing, but I was too appalled to express my dismay. It occurred strongly to my 18 year-old brain that one could actually die of starvation and exposure out here. We shambled off, heading West, with Kevin still swearing and I seriously considering abandoning the quest. I would certainly have done so if a truck had not stopped to offer us a ride all the way to Amesbury. If this had not happened, my life would have taken a different course, and I would have become someone else. Fate’s messenger, in this case, was a rough diamond truck driver stinking of body odour. At Amesbury another long wait ensued before a fat lady in a Morris Minor gave us a ride to Yeovil. We arrived near starving in Yeovil at about 10pm, and decided (against all ethics of the Lore) to take a room at an hotel for the night. This decision was made with the implicit agreement that it would not be mentioned to anyone on arrival in Newquay: the community of Beats which had assembled there already would, we knew, have regarded it as akin to arriving in a limousine.
We walked along the deserted night time high street to a public house advertising accommodation, entered ‘Reception’ and rang the bell provided on the uninhabited reception desk. A young lady appeared, took one look at us, and screamed in exactly the same tones as heroines screamed when encountering extraterrestrial monsters in popular movies of those times. Kevin and I stood aghast as thunderous steps were heard descending unseen stairs heralding the arrival of a burly, red-faced landlord equipped with a mighty walking stick. He brandished this weapon above his head, and said that he did not want the likes of us here and that we should bugger off. We had not uttered a word. While his putative daughter cowered behind the counter, he continued to utter loud threats as we backed, apologetically gesticulating, out the door. In retrospect I consider that this reaction was unwarranted. Kevin and I were, I suppose, a little disheveled after our exposure to the road, but there was nothing in our presentation to account for such alarm. But this was nothing compared to the reception we received from the Yeovil community as we resumed our trek up the high street. Whole families peered from windows and even assembled on their doorsteps to witness our banishment. I do not know how they were alerted to our presence in their town, but I will never forget the faces of the children gazing blankly at us as their parents clutched them protectively.
Outside the town, we found a copse of friendly trees in which to sleep, stunned into mutual silence by our acclaim as public renegades. We had not imagined that our style could provoke such fear, and our separation from orthodoxy was enhanced thereby. I cannot speak for Kevin, but I liked it. It aligned me with the great rejected revolutionaries of the past and allowed my adolescent ambitions to march shoulder to shoulder with Voltaire, Baudelaire and Rousseau.
In the morning we were picked up by another fat lady. We asked her specifically to drop us off at the nearest place where we could get food. She delivered us to a little restaurant on the road, but it was so early in the day that the sign on the door said ‘Closed’. We knocked, and it was opened by a man in a baby blue shirt with a matching brocade necktie who hesitated before admitting us, but did. We were quite literally starving, but politely ordered the ‘chef’s breakfast’, which arrived as microscopic pieces of toast overlaid with one poached egg and some unidentified sprinkle of greenstuff. This vanished down our maws like autumn leaves into a volcano.
A further ride brought us to Exeter, where at about 11pm we collapsed onto a grassy bank by the road, only to be awakened at 3am by police, who asked us to move on. We asked them to direct us to a source of food, and they directed us to a transport cafe barely 100 yards from where we lay. We went there and stuffed ourselves. Everything was delivered in giant proportions, as if serving giants. Even the tea was delivered in pint mugs. Gazing out through the windows at the trucks arriving in the pre-dawn hours, I realised that the social systems of my working classes were strong, and that the norms which I had taken for granted had been won by resentful peasants such as I. Envigorated by sustenance, I jotted this observation down in my notebook. Rising from the table, I saw myself reflected in a mirror behind the serving counter, and was both startled and gratified to see that our three days exposure to the road had transformed us from pallid Londoners into sunburnt and grimy explorers fit for any mythical adventure.
Kevin and I then had another confidential consultation. We decided to take the ‘Cornish Riviera Express’ train from Exeter to Newquay, and to arrive in town without mentioning this fact. If anyone were to ask about the trip, we were to comment that it was rough, and to leave it at that.
And that’s how we arrived in Newquay. Please understand that this was the town that the noted BBC Journalist Alan Whicker chose to visit in the following year of 1960 to run a TV expose on the persecution of Beats. I was there in the year that both preceded and promoted such media attention. But my story of that year has not been hitherto reported, largely because no one mentioned in the 1960 documentary that the 1959 Beat community had been involved in a murder investigation, and because the circumstances surrounding this event would have been simply too weird for the media of that time. For me, an intimate participant, this event became a seminal life experience.
The Arrival and the Unconsummated Liaison
The sun was shining at midday as Kevin and I walked from the station into the town centre and saw a gathering of about 20 Beats seated in a ring on the village green. Some I knew from Cy Laurie’s and Soho coffee bars, but most I did not. Wizz Jones was playing his guitar as usual, and several girls were dancing the ‘stomp’, an energetic choreography limited to traditional jazz enthusiasts. Holidaying families stood around watching appreciatively as we joined the circle and reported the edited version of our journey. The record was held by a boy who bragged that they had made it in under 24 hours, and who proudly described how his girl companion had thumbed at the roadside while he hid in the bushes. When vehicles stopped she had introduced him as her brother, who had just been for a wee-wee. Several drivers had driven off, but most had not.
Overnight lodgings and job prospects appeared easily. A boy called Mick said he had an appointment for tomorrow with the manager of the Byron Court Hotel, so we arranged to tag along. Two girls had already begun waitressing at another hotel, and offered us the floor of their double staff room, but warned that it had to be done covertly otherwise they would be sacked. That night, we sneaked over a back fence and through their window to enjoy whispered conversation with the giggling girls. When the lights went out, Kevin’s Irish charm and good looks soon promoted him from floor to bed. The other girl, not wishing to be outdone, extended a slender moonlit hand down to where I lay. The suppressed noises from the other bed indicated that Kevin was more than competent in this situation, whereas I was still virgin and inept and disappointing. Girlfriend Jan, back in London, had always drawn the line at the hem of her navy blue schoolgirl knickers.
Next morning, Wizz Jones, Kevin, Mick and I lined up for inspection in the sunlit back yard of the Byron Court Hotel. The saturnine manager, accompanied by an assistant holding a clip board, reviewed us holding his coffee cup. He indicated Wizz’s guitar case and asked for a tune. Stalwart Wizz declined, complaining of an injured left hand. The manager passed on to Kevin, who astonishingly spouted an impressive pedigree as a commis chef at several London restaurants. Mick reported helping his father on his Petticoat Lane barrow. The manager’s dark eye then fixed on the folder I habitually held, and he asked what was in it. I gave it to him, and he read some pages of my poetry. “Rather formal”, he said, handing it back. And that was it: Kevin was appointed as commis chef in the kitchen, and Wizz, Mick and I as plate room staff. The manager walked off and conversed with his assistant, who came back to conduct us to our lodgings. Inexplicably, my companions were delivered to a dormitory room of tiered bunk beds, while I was ushered into a private single staff room overlooking the hotel’s golf course. To me, this was a message from the gods that my quest was favoured. I placed my alternate clothing in the wardrobe and drawers provided, and arranged my folder and pens symmetrically on the desk. Then I sat down to write a high flown poem to my girlfriend Jan.
Washing up and the Vampire Episode
Our work was governed by the mealtimes of the hotel. We plate room staff were required to wash up the china and cutlery used by up to 200 guests every breakfast time, lunchtime and dinnertime. In between these tasks we were free to surf at the famous Fistral Bay, and to frequent the town cafes or pubs. Quickly understanding this, we devised a system to allow us the maximum free time possible. We identified that the most time consuming task was transporting the china across the 4 yard gap between the giant plate washer and the stacking shelves. The solution was to throw it across the gap. One of us would stand by the shelves and another would lift each dried plate from the washer and hurl it across to the catcher like a porcelain frisbee, thus emptying the machine and making it ready for the next load. We quickly became so adept at this as to resemble circus performers, and the senior kitchen staff came in to watch. They alerted the manager, and he came in to watch. One day, the manager stood in the doorway watching us as we performed, said nothing, and departed. I hereby testify that during the six months of such activity not one plate was shattered.
But as excellence in any trade attracts jealousy, so it was that the hotel Chef’s assistant, a man called Heinz, took against us. His sneering demeanor so annoyed us that I devised a plan to discountenance him. One night, when we knew he was on duty alone in the kitchen, I appeared dressed in black and face-powdered pale with flour, bearing a large steel bowl. I hesitantly asked Heinz for some blood. He did not understand, and I explained sincerely that I would like some of the blood which dripped from the suspended carcasses in the freezer. Somnambulistically, Heinz took the bowl from my hand, went into the freezer room, and returned with about two pints of chilled blood. I sniffed it appreciatively, bowed and thanked him and walked out of the kitchen into the staff room where my eavesdropping friends were writhing in suppressed mirth.
The very next day, I was moved from my olympian private room into the dormitory. A friendly waitress reported that management feared I may disturb guests on the golf course.
I add two other episodes to this section because they are so sharp in my memory. In our breaks from work we used to go snorkeling and surfing off the coast around Newquay. While doing so one day I confessed to a companion that I feared looking down through the water at the long green seaweeds waving to and fro beneath me. He said that he had felt exactly the same until he had allowed himself to fall right into the underwater weeds, letting them wrap themselves around him. I went back into the water and swam out to where I could look down and see the dreaded weeds, and I swam down into them and allowed them to wrap me in their clammy clutches. Returning triumphant to the beach, I reported my experience to the advisor. He asked me if I had really done it. I said yes. He said that he would never do that for a thousand pounds. The second is when Wizz, David (a late joiner of our ensemble), Arnold, Mick and I were seated late at night around the staff room table where Wizz was teaching me how to play guitar. Kevin walked in, dripping wet, carrying a heavy sack, which he emptied onto the table before us. Thousands of green-tinged pennies and threepenny bits and sixpences and shillings spilled out over the table and onto the floor. Kevin had robbed the town’s wishing well.
The Hero’s Return
After about three months of separation, I became anxious that I had not received a single letter from girlfriend Jan, after mailing her at least one letter a week. In those days phones were not so broadly employed as they are today, and it simply did not occur to me that I might find her number and call her. So I presented my fictitious excuses and gained a week’s leave and started hitching back to London. I used the town’s Interflora shop to send two red roses to her address as heralds of my coming. I don’t remember much about the trip except for being driven at night slowly past a dead cow straddling the road across Bodmin Moor. After 36 hours I arrived at her address in North London in the morning and knocked on the door. A woman I assumed to be Jan’s mother opened it, and I explained who I was. The woman said that Jan was out. I asked when she would be back, and the woman said that she would be back in the afternoon. I asked if she would be arriving at the train station and she said yes. I went to a cafe opposite the train station and sat there watching passengers come out until 4.30pm, and then I returned to the house and knocked on the door. The same woman answered and broke down in tears and led me through to a bedroom where Jan was laying, pale in a white nightdress, with an enormous red pimple in the very middle of her forehead. She was in tears, also. I looked around the room and immediately noticed three red roses in a vase. I had specifically ordered two red roses. The shop girl had said that Interflora’s minimum order was six, and I had said clearly that I would pay for six but they were to send only two. But the fools had sent a meaningless three. At that moment I was separated from all the world. I looked on these weeping women as if at a painted portrait, admiring the brushwork and the play of light and shade. Jan choked back her tears to utter the words, “Why aren’t you angry?” The woman sobbed that Jan was studying at school and could not be romantically involved. I realised that they were not crying for me but for themselves: they had betrayed Mr Darcy! And they could never henceforth read romantic fiction in the same way again. I left, caught the tube to London’s Western outskirts and started hitching back to Cornwall, comforting myself with the conviction that this was exactly the sort of thing heros had to endure.
Tom’s Death and Mick’s Message from Beyond
The seasonal workers in Newquay that year included a number of Oxford undergraduates, one of whom was a slim and handsome young man called Tom, who worked as a porter at the prestigious Headland Hotel. He befriended us in pubs and cafes and spoke to us. He was sympathetic to and curious about how we felt about everything. We adopted him as an honorary Beat, but one who was upper class and happened to prefer classical music. All of us who met him recognised the patient intelligence in his eyes, and respected him for it.
One morning Tom’s body was found dead on the beach at the foot of a tall cliff. Nobody had come forward to explain how he had come to be there. A number of the Beat community were called to give evidence by the police, without result. On the night in question Tom had been seen drinking in a pub near the cliff edge, but no such witnesses accounted for his movements thereafter.
On the night after receiving news of Tom’s death, we were all seated round the staff room table at the Byron Court Hotel, talking about it, when all noticed that Mick had grown pale and silent, his head had stooped into his hands on the table. Someone asked if he was all right, but he did not reply. He stood up and was still and we all watched him. Without a word he turned and walked out, and by unspoken agreement we all followed. Mick walked out of the hotel grounds and along the silent street leading to the beach, then he collapsed onto the road, clutching his head and screaming in pain. We ran up as several lights went on in the dark houses and faces appeared at windows. Mick writhed on the ground shouting again and again that he had a key in his head and it was hurting him. We picked him up, carried him back to the staff room and sat him back down in his chair. I asked him what the key was like. Mick said it was an old fashioned key attached to a big brass tag with a saw-toothed edge, and that there was a number on the tag and that it was the tag that was hurting him. He grew calmer, and we led him to his bunk and he went to sleep. Kevin took me aside to whisper that Mick had fallen to the ground outside a Catholic church, and had stopped screaming when carried outside the area of consecrated ground.
Next morning we did the breakfast shift, but we covertly watched Mick. He did his work but was silent and withdrawn. I asked him how he felt, and he looked at me in puzzlement. We realised he did not remember the drama of last night, and none of us wanted to mention it. We went to the beach and he sat apart, sometimes looking across at us, puzzling about something.
That night in the staff room, exactly the same thing happened again. We were all waiting for it. Mick’s head stooped into his hands, he stood up and began to walk out the door. We stopped him and led him to the dormitory and sat him on a bunk. I asked him if it was the key again. He looked at us blankly and then started to speak to us in Tom’s voice. Mick was a cockney kid whose father was a trader in Petticoat Lane, and here he was addressing us in the accent and syntax of an Oxford undergraduate. Worse than that, it was Tom’s voice. We all recognised it. He said this: “I am walking towards the railing along the cliff edge. I fall over the railing and turn over in the air twice. My head hits a stone. Under the stone is the key.”
We were terrified. Two of us immediately left the room, but I could see them standing outside, listening. I stuttered, “Is that you, Tom?”
Mick looked at me calmly, and Tom’s voice said, “I am able to communicate with you because a man is coming to this place who must be prevented from fulfilling his plans. He is a magician and he always dresses in white. A great destruction may happen if he is not stopped.” Then Mick lay down on the bunk and went to sleep.
Signs and Portents
While the normally cheerful Mick remained quiet and withdrawn over the following days, strange and frightening events began to occur in the Beat community. Members began to visit us at the Byron Court to report.
The two waitress girls Kevin and I had stayed with on arrival came to tell us that they had finished their lunch time shift and gone to their room to get changed for an afternoon at the beach. Three hours later, the restaurant manager banged on their door, and they found themselves sitting on their beds with no recollection of the three hours which had passed. They were so disturbed by this and by other reports that they quit their jobs and returned to London.
Sandy was a drummer who worked with a local dance band. He said that he had been walking down the high street one afternoon when an unknown man had greeted him like a friend. Sandy met lots of people in his job, and he had assumed the man to be an audience member at one of his gigs. The man had insisted that Sandy meet his friends, and had led him to a nearby bookshop. The shop was empty, and the man disappeared into the back section saying that he would bring his friends out. Sandy stood around for a few minutes, and then an elderly couple appeared from the back section and apologised that he had been kept waiting. Sandy explained about the man, but the couple had no knowledge of him. I asked Sandy to describe the man, and Sandy said that he had been short, balding and dressed all in white.
Kevin came into the staff room on the night following the ‘message’, and dropped a key onto the table. It was an old fashioned key with a heavy brass tag which had a saw-toothed edge. On one side of the tag was an engraved number, and on the other the logo of the Headland Hotel where Tom had worked. Kevin explained that he had found it at the base of the cliff where Tom had been found. We decided to go to the Headland Hotel and find out which door the key opened. We did not show the key to Mick because we feared provoking another visitation from Tom. So we walked out to the Headland Hotel and asked the doorman to show us which room it belonged to. He thought it an odd request, but he led us into the staff entrance and down to the basement and along a dark corridor to a door which bore the same number as the key, and he opened the door. It was a broom closet, and it contained only brooms.
These and other less-dramatic phenomena broadcast such an atmosphere of tension in the Beat community that many returned to London. Somehow it was decided that as many as possible of the remainder should assemble at night on the beach at the spot where Tom had been found. We did, and we stood in a silent group on that spot for a long while, waiting for something to happen. Some girls became frightened and left, and nothing else occurred.
But the next day something did happen.
The Coming of the Magician
Wizz Jones returned from a trip to the town centre and reported seeing a white Jeep driven slowly down the high street by a man dressed all in white. The Jeep was towing a white caravan, and stuck on the side of the caravan was a large poster advertising ‘Peter Casson’s Hypnotism Show’, with dates and times when the show would be presented at the Town Hall Theatre. Some loud speakers in the Jeep had been broadcasting military marching music, and the man in the Jeep had been waving and smiling.
The entire Beat community purchased tickets, and on the opening night occupied the whole back row of seats. I sat down between Kevin and Mick, and Kevin nudged me and pointed downward with his eyes to where his hand held his jacket slightly open. Sewn into the lining inside was a leather sheath holding a knife with a five-inch blade.
We all watched stony faced among the giggling audience as the Magician summoned sunburnt cheerful holidaymakers up on stage and made them believe things were true that were not true, and made them act in ridiculous ways to make the audience laugh at them. Here was the answer to our confusion and doubt. The magician who must be stopped had appeared as foretold. I turned to Mick, and said, “Is he the man?” But Mick just looked worried and upset.
The Confrontation
A conference was held in a pub after the show. It was decided that a confrontation was necessary, a confrontation between Mick and the magician. So next morning, after the breakfast shift, the Byron Court contingent kept a rendezvous at the caravan site with Beats from other hotels. About 15 grim young people sat in a semi-circle on the grass facing Peter Casson’s caravan door. I led Mick up to it and knocked. A woman opened it, and I started to explain why we were there. She interrupted to say that consultations were only available by appointment, but then she saw the silent assembly behind me, and called back into the caravan. Peter Casson appeared and patiently heard the whole story. He did not seem much interested. He said that it all was a fairly typical example of mass hysteria in an isolated community. He said that Mick had been attached to Tom in a deeper way than he understood, and that Tom’s death had shocked Mick into a temporary state akin to psychosis, in which he briefly took on Tom’s persona as a sort of compensation for his death. The close knit and exclusive Beat community had been a highly suggestible breeding ground for delusory beliefs to spread like a biological contagion. He asked Mick a few questions, and then said that he saw no reason to advise treatment but, if Mick would prefer, he could refer him for a stay in a nearby sanatorium with which he was associated. Mick declined this offer, and we all went home.
Epilogue
Every time I have told this story over the years, listeners have asked about certain ‘holes in the script’ which are seemingly not explained by Peter Casson’s analysis. Reflecting on these questions myself, I have come up with the following answers:
Q: How did Mick speak in Tom’s voice?
A: People experiencing psychotic breaks often exhibit behaviours and abilities which are unavailable to them in their normal state of mind. Before Tom’s death, Mick used to entertain us with imitations of TV and radio commercials - particularly one about Kraft Crackerbarrel Cheese - which were very funny. The psychological impact of the death seems to have amplified Mick’s talent for mimicry to truly extraordinary levels.
Q: How did Mick know about the key?
A: I was not aware that Mick had continuing meetings with Tom, but he must have done so to develop such a deep attachment. At those meetings Mick must have often seen Tom carrying such keys, which were common to the HeadLand Hotel where Tom worked. My cod psychology opines that the key image symbolised the mental pain Mick felt about Tom’s death.
Q: How did Kevin find the key?
A: He simply went down to the beach and found it where it had fallen from Tom’s pocket.
Q: What about all the other reports of weird happenings?
A: It doesn’t take much to trigger paranoia and delusions in a tight knit and socially estranged community. Check out the Salem Witch Trials: http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/salem/salem.htm
Q: What happened to Mick afterwards?
A: I never saw him again after that season ended.
Q: How did Tom die?
A: The coroner’s verdict was accidental death. No one knows how it happened.
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