Bertha the Earthtruck

The Morning After the Night Before

2006-06-09T07:53:00.000Z

You know how it is when you’re on holiday.

There’s no rush.

You crawl out of your sleeping bag, all blurry eyed, whenever the mood takes you. The younger you are, the later in the day this is likely to be. Passing traffic, the dawn chorus, distant nuclear explosions: they all mean diddley-squat to your average 22 year old.

That’s what we did, on the morning of Friday 26th July 1974.

Crawled out of our sleeping bags.

Hauled on our jeans (no need to put on a t-shirt, since we’d have slept in those, I expect).

Stumbled to the sink, one after the other, and blinked at Brigitte as we directed a splash of lukewarm water faceward.

Flung open the back doors, and stepped gaily into the German sunshine (I’m guessing around about 10am, so the sun is already high in the sky).

Blinked in one direction, at the vista of vine-laden landscape stretching away down the hill below our cosy lay-by.

Blinked in the other direction, as a succession of German motorists passing down the road into Enkirch stared back in disbelief. ‘No, Helmut darling. Those are not Struwwelpeters. Those are hippies, from England.’

Blinked into our breakfast bowls, as we devoured the morning muesli. Quite probably we had a sackful of the stuff, purchased from the organic supplies shop in Prince of Wales Road, Kentish Town. We did that sort of thing in those days.

Felt better. Gathered up our pans and bowls and cooking stoves and checked that we were leaving the nice German lay-by in the condition in which we found it. Piled into the back of the Earthtruck.

On our way to Istanbul, and all right with the world.

Got some good sounds going on the stereo. Striking it Rich, by Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks (a memory of which I am exactly and precisely certain, for reasons which will become clear much later in this narrative).

Fired up the engine. Swung the wheel to the right, to turn back out of the lay-bv and begin our stately descent back to the floor of the beautiful Mosel Valley.

Stopped.

Let’s be more precise: came to a grinding halt, as Yaya slammed on the brakes to avoid us piling into the opposite verge.

Swung the wheel again, only to discover it swung just a little too easily.

Switched off the stereo, the better to collect our thoughts.

Got out.

Examined the undercarriage, to assess why the wheel swung too easily.

Noted the bits of British Bedford iron, dangling down.

Swung the wheel again, somewhat more gingerly, to assess the connection between the ease with which the wheel turned and the bits of iron clattering against the tarmac.

Panicked, since Bertha was at this point parked diagonally across the highway (albeit a deserted country highway).

Despatched some of our number up the road, around the bend, to wave at descending German motorists. Or perhaps deploy our regulation Euro warning triangle: I’ve no idea what the law was in those days, or even if we were carrying one.

Panicked a little more, and got out the jack, from the toolkit on the roof we’d never imagined touching or opening, let alone deploying in a genuine automotive breakdown emergency.

Slowly – very slowly – arrived at the realisation that some of us were shortly going to have to walk down into Enkirch. And look for a mechanic.

Who probably wasn’t inclined to speak English.

And that, dear reader, brings us neatly back to the image we first displayed right back at the start of this story…

That’s Yaya, by the way, wearing a small tree on his head, Struwwelpeter-style…

A Brief Travelogue

2006-06-03T10:22:00.000Z

The Mosel river valley lies just to the East of Luxembourg, in the German Mosel-Saar-Ruwer region. Look at it on the map, or Google Earth if you have the necessary software. You can’t miss it: a wiggling ribbon of waterway running between Trier and Koblenz that looks for all the world like a bunch of grapes hanging from a vine - and nowhere more so than right in the middle, round the small provincial town of Traben-Trarbach, where the river curls and loops back on itself in a manner guaranteed to make geography teachers the world over wax lyrical about the imminent formation of oxbow lakes.

It’s a wide, navigable river, lying at the bottom of a steep valley, and the valley sides are indeed covered with vines, because this is the heart of the Mosel-Saar-Ruwer wine district, where they produce the Riesling, the Müller-Thurgau, and the Kerner. It’s popular with tourists, too, which is presumably why Bertha the Earthtruck took a short detour in this direction in the summer of 1974.

I don’t remember getting there. I was still in the back. I do remember us stopping to stretch our legs, shortly after we turned off the main road near Koblenz. The road hugs the river all the way up the valley, and we found a parking place where we could walk down to the water’s edge, and it must have been a dry summer because the water was low and there were rocks exposed in the shallows, and I imagine some of us took off our shoes and dangled our feet in the water, and it all looked a bit like this…

It had been a long day. We’d travelled all the way from distant Amsterdam, and been held up at the German border, and by now the sun was starting to set. It was time to find a quiet spot away from the main road and get our heads down for the night. So we piled back into Bertha and drove on-a-ways, coming eventually to a little village called Enkirch. Here Yaya found a small road leading away from the river, back up into the hills and along a densely wooded ridge that bordered a smaller valley, running parallel to the Mosel. After about a kilometre we decided we were far enough from civilisation not to cause offence, so we swung into a convenient lay-by overlooking open fields and woodland. Then we unpacked the Primus gas stove, and set the stereo playing softly, and ate a hearty meal of vegetables and brown rice in the gathering twilight.

We were on our way to Istanbul. And all was right with the world.

Random, in its Myriad Forms

2006-05-31T17:28:00.000Z

Well, I’m back. I’m restarting the blog. It’s been months, I know: a lay-off so embarrassingly long I’d have sleepless nights about it if I didn’t have more important things to have sleepless nights about.

If you’re still tuned in, I apologise. Wholeheartedly and profusely. What I can’t offer is an explanation. It’s a writing thing. For some reason known only to my subconscious, the saga of Bertha the Earthtruck and her circuitous assault on the European mainland just slipped down your correspondent’s list of priorities and got forgot.

Then I cleared my desk, examined my priorities, decided everything was pointless anyway so I might as well work on the thing-that-is-most-pointless-of-all, and started thinking about 1974 again.

These things happen. Which kind of sums up the entire Bertha experience.

Where was I? We’ve left Amsterdam. It feels like we spent a year there, but it was only a couple of days, I swear. We’ve also left Pat in Amsterdam, and we’ll return to him in due course. Right now it’s time to crack on. Toot sweet, big time, with a following wind and our tails between our legs.

If I could, I’d describe our route from Amsterdam to Germany. Fortunately I was in the back, and hung over, so that’s spared you the nerdy details. All I can report about the short journey to our next stopover is the following:

1/ We’d decided to take a look at the Mosel Valley. Someone (I think Yaya) had been there on a family holiday many years before and remembered it as a beautiful spot. Quite how this gelled with our other stated ambition of driving Bertha down the Champs Elysee is anyone’s guess, since Paris and the Mosel were in opposite directions. Like I said, I was in the back.

2/ For at least part of our progress, Andy took the wheel. Yaya remembers being rather surprised that an ex-Royal Navy ambulance could actually travel that fast. I expect we hurtled past Nijmegen at all of 55 mph.

3/ On our way, we discovered that Holland does have a few hills. They’re right there, on the German border: up and down undulating things that astonished us so much we must have talked about it for all of… well, two minutes. Which only goes to show that the memories that stick aren’t always breathlessly memorable. They’re just memories, and random at that.

4/ When we crossed the border into North Rhine-Westphalia, the evening rush hour had started.

I know this last because we had to queue. Right there on the plains of Northern Europe, where the A77 becomes the A57 and Holland merges seamlessly into Germany, was a customs and immigration post; at which everyone travelling to and from their places of work in Wijchen and Heesch and Duisberg and Essen had to stop and prove who they were and where they were going.

I expect they don’t bother nowadays, with the European Union and everything. I imagine it was a fairly routine procedure even then, for commuters and border guards alike. Join the queue, shuffle forward for ten minutes, wind down the Volkswagen’s window, flash your passport with a cheery smile, and off you go.

Of course the word routine only applies if you’re not at the wheel of a Royal Navy ambulance with a two foot high flaming sun mandala hand-painted on each side.

I’ll leave it to Andy to encapsulate the moment, as the eagle-eyed German border guards spotted us drawing to a halt at the back of a queue of thirty or forty cars.

‘Oh look,’ he said. ‘We’re the one in a hundred random sample.’

Looking back, I like to think we introduced a little variety into the lives of Customs and Immigration Deutschland that day. To say nothing of their lovely Alsatian dogs, who were immediately invited on the grand tour of our unusual-looking vehicle and the myriad possessions we’d been invited to unpack and display on the side of the road. Naturally, being young and blonde themselves, the guards were exceeding taken with the decorous picture of Brigitte Bardot we’d thoughtfully left hanging over the sink: one of them even went to the trouble of lifting it up to see if there was anything hidden behind. And of course they enjoyed themselves enormously taking everything apart and then getting us to put it all back together again.

The only slight blot on the proceedings? Seasoned Bertha hitchhikers will instantly recall a post from many months ago called The Great Escape, which concerned the Earthtruck’s arrival at Knebworth Festival and the great convenience of having a six inches by twelve hatch, opening onto the road, in the middle of the floor.

Never did figure out that hole, our border guards. They tried, of course. They clustered around it. They tut-tutted amongst themselves in German. They interrogated us, individually and collectively. They muttered darkly about drugs and weaponry. They gingerly ran their hands rounds the underside of the aperture. They even volunteered one of their number to get his border guard uniform all scuffed and dirty looking at the hole from underneath the truck.

All to no avail. The dogs grew sullen, the sun sank low in the North-Rhine Westphalian sky, and the guards were finally forced to the reluctant conclusion that the hole, like so much in life, had no apparent purpose and offered no prospect of advancement in the immigration service.

What’s worse, they had to let us in.

Hang in There Folks

2005-12-16T15:14:00.000Z

As anyone with a modicum of awareness will have noticed, Bertha has been on hold for rather too long a time. This has not been out of laziness on my part, but because I am currently deep in what we corporate scriptwriters laughingly refer to as the 'silly season'. Which this year has proved to be rather sillier than usual, I may say.

Hang in there, chaps. The 'ole battlebus will get rolling again some time in the new year, I'm sure. This story has been 30 years in the telling, so I figure a couple more months ain't a-gonna make THAT much difference.

Love, Mark

All Astrology is Bunk, of Course

2005-09-30T17:04:00.000Z

OK. I promised. We’ve left Amsterdam, we’re on our way to Istanbul, and there’s six of us on the bus. All good mates, naturally. All with the same jolly youthful objectives in mind.

Well, not quite. Couldn’t really happen, could it? What we really have here is six entirely disparate blokes, in varying states of youthful confusion, crammed into the back of an ex-Royal Navy ambulance with very small windows and their hormones teeming, and all, I suspect, with entirely different motives for being on board. Unless you take the hormones as an indication that we probably all had roughly the same motives.

So – like all good novelists – I’ve been trying to get inside my characters. And finding it damnably difficult, frankly, for the following reasons:

A/ I know them all as friends, albeit a little distant in some cases.

B/ They’re all still alive, and I’m not here to upset anybody. I like these people, dammit.

Time for a cop-out, I reckon. Which means, dear reader, that before we get cracking on the next stage of the journey, I’m going to give you the briefest of character profiles – strictly as I remember them and linked to their sun sign.

Tee hee. That way, if anyone thinks I’ve slandered them, I can blame it on a false impression arising from too much study of the dark art of astrology, way back in my wasted youth.

Brilliant. Here goes:

Yaya

Sagittarius. I’ve already mentioned the travelling, right? Sag likes to travel, I’ve been told. Yaya did it first and still does. Also exceeding affable, kind-hearted, and inclined to becoming saturnine when drunk. Which translates as a tendency to pour you yetanotherdrink with a wicked grin on his face.

Andy

Aries. See the airplane in the previous post: of course Andy has an airplane. Sharp-witted, intellectually challenging, knows what he wants to do and doesn’t piss around before he gets on with it. One of my over-riding memories of Andy comes from a few years later, when he fetched up in London with the deliberate intention of making some sort of success of his life. Promptly did exactly that. And you should see what he can do with fireworks.

Stuie

Sagittarius. Just like his brother. Equally sociable, but slightly less well-travelled. This is because at this stage of our story, he’s one of the two youngsters of the party (a relative term that doesn’t mean much nowadays, but a couple of years makes a big difference when you’re twenty). Even then, a grafter – I remember Stuie having a succession of real grown-up jobs that would have had a wimpy student like me running in fear.

Mark F

Scorpio. Stuie’s best mate. Still is, I suspect, though at a considerable difference. Our other youngster. A perpetual schemer and planner, always looking for new and better ways to make money. Later, this will translate into hydroponic farming in the Canary Isles, production management, and lots of things to do with computers, mainly in Australia. The only person I ever knew who actually got a Sinclair ZX Spectrum to do something.

Paul

Virgo. At the time a vegetarian law student. Consequently the only one of us who knew how to cook with any competence. This may have had something to do with spending a lot of time hanging around a sort-of-maybe start-up kind of organic commune the other side of Chelmsford. The vegetarianism survives to this day, the law went the way of all flesh the minute he started taking pottery classes on the side. Now a potter of some considerable reputation.

Your Correspondent

Virgo almost Libra. I’ve been warned off saying ‘on the cusp’. Instead I’m right at the back end of the third segment of Virgo which allegedly makes me atypical. Venus in Libra makes me a big softie, Mercury in Virgo makes me chattery (usually whilst writing), Moon in Scorpio represents my dark emotional fuck-up side, and there’s Mars sitting over there all on its own in Sagittarius making me inclined to take great big dramatic risks at crucial and inappropriate stages of my life. Anything else you want to know about me can probably be figured out from reading my previous posts.

Pat’s a Gemini, but we’ve left him back there in Holland twinning it up with the Amsterdam girls and experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs. Of which more later, no doubt.

Right now, it’s time to go to Germany. Accompanied, even today, by a strangely apprehensive feeling…

Technical Update #7. Flown in by: Andy.

2005-09-10T13:22:00.000Z

The Bertha story’s gone a little quiet recently, hasn’t it? No apologies, but I do have an explanation or two.

Partly, it’s been summer. And sunshine makes you lazy.

Partly, I’ve been trying to figure out the lovely contents list that has now arrived on the sidebar, to help new readers (if there are any) catch up with the story.

Partly, I haven’t yet checked in with everybody. And I’ve been feeling guilty about ploughing ahead with the story while the research (such as it is) remained unfinished.

To be specific: I’ve been a bit slow about getting in touch with Mark F and Andy.

Mark F’s in Australia. I’m ringing him as soon as I remember that his evening is my first thing in the morning (which is not my best time of the day for remembering such things).

Andy’s in Herefordshire. Just a little off the beaten track. Sure, we did a couple of emails, but it’s always better to talk face to face. So I figured I’d wait till I was driving to Cornwall some time but one thing kept leading to another and somehow I never quite managed to engineer the requisite detour.

Fortunately, there are people in the world more resourceful than I…

Captain Fielder

Ladeeezungennelmunn!!! You appreciation please for the legendary Cap’n Andy Fielder, former prog-rock keyboard player, world authority on technologically sophisticated firework displays and pyrotechnic special effects, and now a genuine Herefordshire Flying Ace.

Apparently Herefordshire and Hertfordshire aren’t so far apart after all. Not if you’ve got an aircraft and somewhere to land it. Turns out Andy has the requisite aircraft, and we’ve got a grass airstrip not five minutes’ drive away that I didn’t even know was there. It’s up behind the clay pigeon shooting ground (didn’t know that was there either) right smack dab in the middle of our local World War II American Flying Fortress air base (which I did know was there but didn’t think of because it’s now 99.9% returned to the wild).

So Andy dropped in for lunch, one sunny recent Saturday. Just like that. Bringing with him an assortment of memories every bit as random as everybody else’s, but which nevertheless prove all too conclusively that you should always do your research before setting pen to paper. For example:

1/ Andy wasn’t at Knebworth, despite my protestations to the contrary. He’d only just got back from college in York and hadn’t been invited to join us, even though Knebworth was only a week before we left.

2/ Just like everybody else, Andy doesn’t remember Brussels. I may have made this part of the journey up, in a dream. But what the hey – this is my blog. If I say we went to Brussels, that’s where we went.

3/ Andy remembers nothing whatsoever about Amsterdam. Zilch. Nada. However he did bring with him on his cross-country jaunt the following item…

Andy's 70s Scrapbook

Aaaaah. Cute, I hear you say. The story of Andy’s misspent youth, lovingly recorded with detailed annotations and extensive footnotes. How useful.

Well, not quite. Andy’s Holiday Scrapbook contains no chronicles, no memoirs, no clues to what was going through his head as he zig-zagged his way around Europe in the early part of the 1970s. What it does contain is an assortment of black and white photos – some of them dating back to the summer of 1974, and some bearing out what I think I remember and struggled to write about in previous posts.

Here, for example, is a small corner of the flea market…

Waterlooplein

Here’s the Dam Square, and a load of hippies…

Dam Square

Here’s Bernard Phillipus’s legendary Magic Bus, touring the city…

The Magic Bus

And here’s the equally legendary Bertha the Earthtruck, parked by the canal, exactly as I remember her being parked (Stuie, Paul, and Mark F at bottom right)….

At the Canalside

Finally, a personal favourite: Yaya sleeping off the effects of the Heineken Brewery in the Moses en Aaron Kerk…

Hangover Forming

Please note the authentic early 70s ‘desert boots’, fashion freaks.

That’s it. We’ll return to Andy’s scrapbook later.

We’ve been long enough in Amsterdam. We’ve deposited Pat in the Vondel Park, still eyeing up the girls. We've sobered up. Now it's time to blunder onwards, into the past.

(I’ll do the astrology in the next post, I promise…)

The Night After the Morning Before

2005-08-08T17:38:00.000Z

No-one has any recollection of what happened next, but this is my best guess.

We went to the Vondelpark for a bit. Highly likely, since it’s just round the corner from where the brewery was. No doubt we were in the mood to cast an appreciative eye over the lovely young women of the global youth movement. No doubt (being in no state to chat up said lovely young women) we settled for a stroll in the sun and a cone of chips with mayonnaise (the Low Countries’ greatest contribution to international cuisine).

I vaguely remember a lake. That’s it. Then I expect we blundered back to Bertha and went to sleep.

I don’t know where we were parked but I do remember it looked a bit like this…

Leafy Amsterdam

(Imagine the white van on the right is a 1950s Royal Navy ambulance with a two foot high sun mandala on the side. You get the idea.)

I’m not sure what the parking restrictions are like in Amsterdam these days but I bet it’s not as easy to bag a spot alongside one of the Grachtengordel canals as we seemed to find it in 1974. We lived there for two or three days and no-one batted an eyelid. Never even had to feed a Pay n’ Display machine or nothing.

It was while we were parked there that I sat in the front seat, idly gazing out over the still waters of the Prinsengracht / Herengracht / Keisersgracht / Whatevergracht as a particularly lovely Dutch girl cycling by on the opposite bank, and wrote the first of several short poems documenting Bertha’s trip to Istanbul.

Fortunately for the literary world, only two of those poems have survived.

Fortunately for readers of this blog, I chose to keep this first poem secret from my friends. I imagine the moment wasn’t right, with the impending hangovers and all. So there’s no need to reveal it. Yet.

The poem’s time will come.

In the meanwhile, I feel duty bound to remember something even more awkward and uncomfortable.

You know how it is. With the possible exception of people born under the sign of Aries, we’ve all got half a dozen moments in our life that were so downright embarrassing that the old subconscious ain’t never going to let us forget.

Like the time I was hitch-hiking from Boston to Maine to stay with a friend deep in the woods and I got a really long lift with two enormous rednecks who had a gunrack on the back of the pickup cabin and beerbellies the size of Mount Tamalpais and a big smelly dog but they turned out to be really nice and went way out of their way to help me find my friend’s cabin deep in the woods very very late at night and I felt really sorry for them because they had a couple hundred miles more to go and so without asking my friend who was female and lived alone I cheerfully invited them in for a cup of instant coffee.

Forgetting that I was in America, and about to stay with a woman who was no more likely to have a jar of Nescafe in the cupboard than fly.

The coffee had to be brewed. On the stove. And that takes time.

Rather more time, as it turns out, than I had topics of conversation to entertain two rednecks with a gunrack and a friend I hadn’t seen for two years and didn’t frankly know much about anyway. Cue long. Awkward. Silence.

I know. Not that bad. No-one minded really. Only me, and the small but disproportionately dusty corner of my mind that will be forever reserved for my first night in Boothbay Harbor, Maine.

It’s a bit like that with the ‘Danish’ incident in Amsterdam.

We slept it off, as you do when you’re 22. By 5 o’clock, we were raring for more. So we continued our day of culture. We went to the Walletjes, to drink more beer and look at more girls.

Actually there were two types of girl to look at. One kind sat in the windows that lined the streets round the back of the Oude Kerk. Very impressive they were too, in a kind of aren’t-I-glad-I’m-still-young-enough-not-to-have-to-pay sort of way.

We gawped. We tried to guess what the girls cost. We watched seedy Dutchmen slip in and out through the doors that led to the room behind the room with the window. We ate more chips with mayonnaise.

Then we snuk out of the red light district and went looking for real girls. It being summer in Amsterdam, finding them wasn’t difficult. The hard part – as always – was chatting them up.

‘Just smile,’ Pat said. ‘Then they have to smile back.’

Of course Pat also had a genial and sunny disposition, and probably made lots of friends this way. I spent the next ten years trying to smile at young women in the street without coming across as some kind of leering halfwit. Never made it work.

Things got better when we went for a beer. Picture the scene, if you will. A warm night in central Amsterdam. A jolly tourist bar, with tables in the back. Seven jolly hippies, gathered round their Heineken, taking in the sites.

A small group of (rather attractive) American tourist girls, sitting at the next table.

First the beer flowed, then the conversation:

- Where were we going? (Istanbul destination v. impressive opening gambit)

- How were we going to get there? (Bertha plays her by-now-familiar role as singular conversation piece)

- Were we enjoying Amsterdam? (Well of course we’re well into our second drinking session of the day hey hey hey)

- What part of America were they from? (No, I don’t remember)

- Where were they staying? (We may not have got a clear answer here, girls being canny about this sort of thing)

- What countries had they visited? (Denmark, as it happened)

- Wow gee are you really English? You look more like you a Dane to me…

This last directed at Your Correspondent. For his exclusive benefit. In skilled hands, probably a great conversational opener and a guarantee of company for the evening.

‘Gosh darn,’ I said. ‘I’ve always wanted to be Danish.’

Cue hysterical laughter.

Looking back, I’m still not entirely sure why everybody found this so damn funny.

It may have had something to do with my name. Gamon equals Gammon equals bacon equals Danish bacon (then the most popular brand in the shops). For a brief while I was even known as ‘joint’ at school. It had nothing to do with marijuana.

Or it may just have been the gauche way I said it.

Whatever. The Danish incident has forever since occupied a permanent dusty corner of my subconscious, and it ain’t ever gonna let me forget.

Needless to say, we failed to pick up the girls…

Technical Update #6. Posted by: Mark

2005-08-03T16:54:00.000Z

Funny thing, memory. I suspect it gets funnier the older you get.

For the past couple of weeks there’s been something about the Bertha blog that’s not quite right. Not for anyone reading, but for me.

Here’s the thing: I know Bertha was slow, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how in the Sam Hill it took us two whole days to get to Amsterdam. I know (see ‘On the Cusp’ below) that we stopped in Holland for the night, but every time I looked at a map I couldn’t figure out why it took so long. We should have gone Bishop’s Stortford to Amsterdam in a day, no question.

So: last night I had one of those nights we call the Irish Glooms, when you wake up at 4 am and can’t get back to sleep no matter what and the slightest letter from the telephone company represents imminent financial ruin and the slightest ache in your elbow is the onset of a major heart attack and the slightest twittering of a jolly tweetybird celebrating the dawn outside is the equivalent of being dumped abruptly into the moshpit at a Motorhead gig and to calm my mind and bore myself back to sleep I started thinking about the Bertha problem.

Funny thing, memory. It’s where dreams come from isn’t it? And when you’re half-awake at 4 am it’s a little easier to circle over the dreamscape and pick out one or two details you thought you’d forgotten.

It suddenly came to me. The reason we took two days to get to Amsterdam was because we went via Brussels. And stopped there, for a beer.

This should have been closer to the surface than it was. I’ve been back there recently: last year in fact. Not only that, I went to the Grand Place and stood on the corner outside the very bar where we drank our beer in 1974 and thought to myself how the place looked exactly the same apart from being a little smaller than I remember.

Then – in between my recent visit and starting this blog – I managed to completely forget everything about Bertha passing through Brussels. Until last night, and my latest neurotic tour of the dreamscape.

I suspect this happens a lot more, as you get older. In fact I’m beginning to form my own little theory of Alzheimer’s. They’re just old people who get stuck in the dreamscape; so busy sorting through memories that they forget to surface.

There’s not much else to say about our stopover in the Grand Place. We went there. Parked nearby. Found a bar and had a beer. Oh, don’t be silly: had two beers. Watched the girls. It was very pleasant.

Then we got back in the Earthtruck and set off for Holland. Which wasn’t, after all, that far away.

That’s the chronology sorted out then. Normal service will be resumed shortly. Or as close to normal as any of this gets…

Attractive Women Not Required (For Now)

2005-07-30T17:45:00.000Z

I worked in a brewery once. I’ve liked the smell of breweries ever since. Even though Rayments of Furneaux Pelham were on the verge of sacking me 24 hours before I (ahem) resigned.

It was not for the smell that we chose to tour the Heineken Brewery at Stadhouderskade in July 1974. Nor was it for this…

Vats

Or indeed for fascinating technology like this…

Taps

No. There was one reason and one reason only why we lined up outside the brewery at 9 am on our first morning in Amsterdam – and that was because they served you lots and lots of this…

A Glass of the Cool Heineken

Of course we had to do the tour first. No doubt we learnt a lot about hops, wort, and secret strains of yeast. Being well brought up English boys, we murmured in appreciation on being shown the special fermentation tanks where the sugar turns to alcohol and carbon dioxide. We chuckled every time the tour guide made a joke about ‘the parts other beers cannot reach’. And we resisted the urge to cackle in an impolite manner when he got to the part about bottom fermenting.

Little did they know it was all part of a cunning plan. We only went on the tour because we knew at the end we’d get our hands on the good stuff, fresh from the bottling plant and probably (excuse the competitive adverb, Mr Heineken) brewed only yesterday.

Oh boy, did we get our hands on it. As we came to the end of the tour they showed us into an enormous hall filled with tables and invited us to sit down and sample the most famous beer in the world. If we weren’t satisfied with the first sample, they brought us another. And another. And another and another and another and another.

On an empty stomach. At ten in the morning.

But that wasn’t all. In the centre of each table was a container filled with free cigarettes. As many Camels as a man could smoke.

We were really impressed by that. We filled our pockets with giveaway fags. There’s a TV ad that ran recently in which a young man goes into a bank and asks for a loan. Beautiful women attend his every need, the manager does some serious sucking up, and at the end our hero walks out with twice as much as he asked for and the understanding that he doesn’t need to pay it back until he feels like it.

It’s ‘probably’ the best bank in the world. There’s another one where the young man and his mates go on ‘probably’ the best holiday in the world. And another where they order takeaway from ‘probably’ the best Chinese in the world.

The ads are for Carlsberg. Which is odd, because back in 1974 the best (probably) brewery tour in the world was the one you got at Heineken in Amsterdam. The only reason they didn’t lay on attractive hostesses to suck up to us was that after about – oh – five minutes we were all too sozzled to care.

Then they tipped us back out on the street. Imagine, if you will, seven young men all weaving in different directions at once. Accompanied by an assortment of seedy-looking Dutchmen who had also just participated in the world’s best brewery tour.

We stood scratching our heads and looked in fourteen different directions at once and wondered what to do next.

The seedy Dutchmen turned right around and went back in for a second helping. Because Heineken, in their philanphropic wisdom, gave two tours every morning.

And every drunk in Amsterdam knew it.

I’ll be honest: the rest of the day is a little hazy…

Amsterdam: a Pocket Guide

2005-06-30T09:51:00.000Z

Things you could do in Amsterdam in 1974:

1/ Sleep in the Vondel Park, in the company of like-minded travellers

The Park

Hard to imagine this happening today. In 1972, out of the goodness of their hearts (and possibly a touch of devil-you-know pragmatism’), the Dutch stopped walking their dogs in the city’s largest park and ‘gave it over to young summer visitors’.

The young visitors accepted this gesture with the grace of a kid grabbing an ice cream and proceeded to erect so many tents that by the end of the first summer the entire park was an ecological disaster.

In the UK, that’d have been it. But the Dutch, being Dutch, gave it another try. This time they restricted the sleeping area, banned the tents, provided a medical centre and police post, and started a government campaign to discourage young people from coming to Amsterdam without any money.

By 1974 it seemed rather tame. I remember a bucolic scene with girls in floral dresses and tousle-headed young men threading their way through the crowd muttering about tabs and Moroccan and Nepalese Temple Ball. I may have noticed these things for selfish reasons: I expect the luminaries of the Vondel Park Foundation had an entirely different point of view.

2/ Sleep in a Sleeping Boat

The Boat

A kind of upmarket Vondel Park, for better-heeled hippies. Your correspondent has no personal experience of these establishments.

3/ Sleep in a Sleep-In

The Vondel Park, but with a roof. There were three of these in Amsterdam in 1974: non-profit, no curfew dorms of upwards of a hundred people, all paying around 3 guilders a night. Bring your own sleeping bag.

4/ Visit the Moses en Aaron Kirk, behind the Waterlooplein

The Church

Deconsecrated Catholic Church transformed into incense-burning freak temple, with the help of a subsidy from the Youth and Tourism department. Music. Carpets. Flowers. Colourfully-dressed worshippers. Marijuana tea and cakes. Indonesian food. Even a free market, with hippy ‘artefacts’ for sale at rock-bottom prices.

We went here, on our tour of the city. I imagine the other Berthlings peering wide-eyed through the incense smoke. Your correspondent was of course an old hand at all this, having been in Amsterdam the summer before with Libby. And being with Libby meant spending an awful lot of time at the Moses en Aaron, partly because it was a great place to buy vegetarian nutroast, and partly because it was adjacent to the Waterlooplein, which meant we could also…

5/ Visit the Waterlooplein Flea Market

The Market

Imagine ‘Bargain Hunt’ directed by Cecil B de Mille. You’ve never seen so much junk in your life. Divided roughly 50/50 between old-fashioned Jewish market traders selling anything that’d sell and incoming hippies selling tie-dye t-shirts. Also a great place to get clogs, which hurt.

It’s still there, I gather. But shrunk by government, to make way for a Town Hall and other municipal buildings. Go figure.

6/ Take a Ride on the Magic Bus

Oh God, if only I had a picture of this. Bernard Phillipus was a freelance tour guide who got fed up with talking about Rembrandt’s wife and decided instead to set up his own multicoloured dope-smoking three-hour acid-head guided tour of freak Amsterdam. Highlights included:

- A trip to the camel-dung storage bin at Amsterdam zoo, to help hippies tell real dope from the fake

- A ride around the Hilton to stare at the straights

- A side trip to a windmill outside the city, to stand in a circle and practice yoga exercises

- Sampling grass tea at the Lowlands Ween Compagnie boat (in those days only dry marijuana was illegal in Holland)

And all for the princely sum of 8 guilders. It must have been good, because I was out of my head the whole time but I still remember (almost) everything. Money well spent.

Naturally, we didn’t lower ourselves to any of this wonderful nonsense on the Bertha trip. We had our own Magic Bus.

7/ Visit a Club

The Paradiso. Or its sister meditation club, Fantasio. Or the Melkweg. Or the Hobbit, for macrobiotic food. Or the t’Cloppertje folk club. All I can remember about these places are the names. Don’t get me started on the streets.

8/ Eat Chips with Mayonnaise

The staple diet of visiting hippies.

9/ Get to know the Locals

The Culture

*************************************************************

All of which amounts to a bewildering choice, I think you’ll agree. And yes, we did go to the church. I've no idea how briefly, but Paul remembers eating Indonesian food for the first time there.

As for the rest – nope. Nada. None of that. Diddley-squat. Zip. Zilch. Total lack of recall.

So what did the Berthlings do in Amsterdam in 1974?

You guessed it…

10/ Visit the Red-light District

A Wanton Woman

11/ Tour the Heineken Brewery

The Brewery Tap

By my calculations, we were in Amsterdam for two nights and one day. But I can’t be sure because we were to some degree inebriated for the entire duration of our visit…

On the Cusp

2005-06-26T17:43:00.000Z

It’s a precarious form of writing, this blogging. Nowhere to hide, no pause for breath. That’s presumably its appeal: the unedited emotional nakedness. Weblogs fanatics frown on revision, and if you go AWOL for longer than a week or so it feels like you’re letting down the voices in your head. Listen carefully enough and you can almost hear a silent chorus of tut-tutting disapproval spreading to the far corners of the blogosphere.

What the heck. This is a blook, not a blog. I’ve been sneakily changing the odd word here or there and I’m not afraid to admit it. And every story has its break points. Sometimes you just need to stand back and consider where you’re going.

I imagine a break point in Bertha’s life round about now, on the cusp between England and France. We took the hovercraft, from Dover to Boulogne. That meant leaving our comfortable truck deep in the hold while we sat up top in a hideous lounge where the seats were laid out theatre style. Except there was no stage, and the only entertainment was the spray breaking over the windows as our Mountbatten Class SR.N4 lurched like a wounded elephant across the waves. Flump-flump-flump, stomachs heffalumping in sympathy, for 35 minutes non-stop.

That’s plenty of time to consider where you’re going, when you desperately need something to take your mind off the contents of your stomach.

Up to now, the Bertha trip had all been preparation, but we were shortly to disembark in darkest Europe. Ahead lay Amsterdam, Paris, the South of France, Italy, Greece, and Turkey. Not the most direct route, but we did have a couple of months. We were going to need that long just to get to know each other.

And here a thought occurs to me. I knew everybody pretty well, for one reason or another, but maybe not all of the relationships forming in the Earthtruck were so well-founded. Pat, for instance, barely knew anybody except me and Yaya. He must have found it all a bit weird, coming late to the project and only for a short while at that – but then Pat spent most of his time in a state of grinning bemusement, so I imagine he took it all in his stride.

Did everybody else feel the same? We’ll see, in due course. Meanwhile, here we were in Europe at last, and no doubt barrelling up the coast towards Ostend. No-one remembers doing this, but let’s face it: the Pas-de-Calais coastline ain’t anything to write home about. We were probably happily playing cards for matchsticks in the back.

We did stop at Ostend, though. Or we drove round it, so Yaya could point out the landmarks he remembered from trips there with his parents. Somehow Paul came away from this rapid guided tour with a story about Yaya and Stuie’s parents leaving Ostend in a hurry during the war (the Nazis were coming) and having to throw their best paintings and a whole ham into the sea because they weren’t allowed to take their valuables with them.

I’m fully expecting a whole series of comments putting me right about the above, but it’s only a random memory. Accuracy is neither here nor there. The point is, that’s what Paul remembers about Ostend; for the rest of us, the short journey through Belgium on the 27th July 1974 has no meaning whatsoever. We’ve erased it for ever – no doubt because our minds were already fixed on the fleshpots of Amsterdam.

And here we come to something we all remember. Not Amsterdam itself – Bertha was slow as a slug, and I expect the roads weren’t as zippy as they are today. But towards the end of that day we found ourselves on a back road in Holland, looking for somewhere to park and sleep the night.

The sun was sinking low in the sky, the air still and warm, the landscape flat except where it was bisected by distant low dykes. I expect it was a bit late in the year for tulips, but you get the idea. When we stopped, it was on the grass verge alongside a canal. In the shadow of a windmill.

We’d had a long day, and many days of close personal truck travel lay ahead of us, so we did what any self-respecting tourist does when faced with a warm summer’s evening and a tranquil waterway.

We went swimming. Washed our hair and everything. Then we sat by the canal and fired up the calor gas stove and watched the sun go down.

Let’s hear it for whoever had a camera…

A Low Countries Idyll

Day One, passed into history. Next stop the Nieuwe Zijds Voorburgwaal.

Brief Holding Note

2005-06-09T07:35:00.000Z

And here the journey pauses. Even more than it has already. Your correspondent will be unable to blog for a ten day period, for reasons explained over on markgamon.blog.

I hope you can bear with me. Bertha has a long way to go (and yet such a short way too). But like her, I need to recharge my batteries after a period of frantic activity.

Keep on truckin', as we used to say (no. We really did. I kid you not)...

And Ye Shall be Fishers of Men…

2005-05-30T15:58:00.000Z

By the time we got to Sawbridgeworth, we’d already broken the trawling record.

We had to go via Sawbridgeworth because the (afore-mentioned) M11 had yet to be built. In fact it’s entirely possible that people we knew were labouring over its many layers of tarmacadam as we sailed out of Stortford with the stereo singing and the prospect of many weeks of leisure on our collective horizon.

The lack of an M11 also explains why that first day felt so long.

(NB: Anyone not fascinated by the constantly changing pattern of the UK transport infrastructure would be well advised to skip the next paragraph).

We had to start our journey on the old A11, now cunningly renamed both the A1184 and the B1383 for reasons that only road planners understand. And we had to plod right through the East End and out of London via the Blackwall Tunnel too, on account of there not being an M25 in those days either. None of this sailing merrily over the Elizabeth Bridge at the Dartford Crossing for us. We did it the hard way. I’d love to be able to tell you how we got from Blackwall to Dover, but I’m losing the will to write here.

The other reason that first day felt so long is that Bertha was awful slow. Even slower, when fully-laden with rucksacks and bedding and spare tyres and Swiss Army knives.

The combination of heavy payload and no motorways is what gave rise to the obscure practice of trawling: namely seeing how many other vehicles you could get stuck behind you, unable to overtake as you footled along at 30 miles an hour. Doubtless removals vans still play a similar game today. Especially in Devon.

That day, in Sawbridgeworth, we caught 24.

It passed the time, looking out the tiny back windows of Bertha the Earthtruck. She also had tiny side windows, but since the seats faced inwards, most of the passengers spent their time staring at each other rather than admiring the passing countryside. Only Yaya, at the wheel, and whoever had currently blagged the other front seat got to enjoy the outside world with any clarity.

Still n’all, there was a lot you could get up to inside Bertha as she bowled (or rather footled) merrily along.

You could play cards. Oh boy, could you play cards.

You could read. Until you remembered that reading in a moving vehicle makes you queasy.

You could admire the picture of Brigitte Bardot hanging over the washbasin.

You could smoke. Marlboro were popular. Or roll-ups of Golden Virginia. Dope was doubtless present, as we hastened to clear the stash before we got to any of those pesky border controls they had down at the Dover International Hovercraft Terminal.

You could talk idly of politics and international affairs.

You could talk, with rather more interest, about girls.

Or you could tilt your head back and let the cares of the world and the last six weeks a-labouring pass you by, and listen to the playlist.

I’ve asked around, and I’m pretty certain our onboard tape collection wasn’t that big. The ones we clearly remember go something like this:

- JJ Cale: Naturally
- Joni Mitchell: Court and Spark
- Tim Buckley: Greetings from LA
- Ray Manzarek: the Golden Scarab
- Barefoot Jerry: Barefoot Jerry
- Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks: Striking it Rich
- Frank Zappa: Apostrophe
- Steely Dan: Countdown to Ecstacy
- John Martyn: Bless the Weather

Plus the radio. Somebody had brought a transistor. Within a few days the BBC World Service was going to start playing an unexpectedly prominent part in our lives as well.

However many tapes we had, the omens were good. The sun was shining, Bertha was trawling, and we were on our way to the Champs Elysee to turn Paris onto Joni Mitchell.

A few miles short of Dover, we stopped to fill up, wisely calculating that petrol was cheaper this side of the channel.

As it turned out, it wasn’t just cheaper – it was free.

Seems we chose exactly the right moment to visit the only petrol station in the South of England that was having a problem with its pumps. To wit: fuel flowing freely and unstoppably from every hose, but nobody getting charged.

There must have been some staff there somewhere. No doubt they were hidden inside, feverishly trying to cap the petrol well before Esso went bankrupt. Meanwhile a steady stream of vehicles queued at the pumps, cheerily filling their tanks tout plein before driving away without so much as a by your leave or a penny changing hands.

We did the same. It seemed propitious, seeing how far we had to go.

At this point students of the laws of karma will no doubt start muttering ‘what goes around comes around’. This correspondent couldn’t possibly comment. Not yet, anyway...

Hooray! Hooray! It’s a holi-oliday!

2005-05-22T20:08:00.000Z

27th July, 1974: the great adventure begins.

We met round the back of 123 Hadham Road, and doubtless spent much of the morning on last minute preparations. The photographs below show Stuie and Mark F lashing various items to Bertha’s roof. Look closely at the middle one and you can see part of the two foot high sun mandala on that side of the truck...

Finishing Touches

I should, of course, have used colour film. I should also have pointed the camera at more of my fellow travellers than these two: perhaps the rest hadn’t turned up yet, or perhaps I was impressed that Stuie and Mark F were doing all the work.

However crap the photography, it does jog the memory. I’ve been zooming into these in Photoshop, and I’m struck by three other details:

1/ The size of heel on Mark F’s boot. You can’t tell by looking at the denims, but 1974 was also the tail end of the dreaded glam rock era. Which gave us David Bowie (dead good), T. Rex (better than we were willing to admit), Gary Glitter (whose name was unmentionable even then), and platform boots.

We’ll be coming back to these later.

2/ (in stark contrast) that cute little leather pouch hanging from Stuie’s belt. Hippy gear, de rigeur. We all had those for some reason. Come to think of it, I still have mine: it was just the right size for a passport, travellers’ cheques, and a Swiss army knife. It’s in the attic somewhere.

Stuie’s looks a little smaller. I can’t imagine what he kept in it.

3/ The sturdy straps holding the roof rack in place. We’d obviously never heard of bolts, but those are no ordinary belts, mate: those are Brown Lines: fantastically strong lengths of unbreakable webbing of the sort used by Transmeridian Air Cargo to lash generators and other scary engineering kit safely to the floor of a Hercules cargo aircraft.

I point this out because at the time they were doubtless technically still the property of Transmeridian Air Cargo. I still remember stealing two of them from the equipment cage in Transmeridian’s hanger when I was putting in a few hours as a loader on one of those casual job nights that may or may not have been the same summer we took Bertha to Europe. I’m 100% certain Stuie ‘borrowed’ the rest.

Naturally, I’d like to say a big ‘thank you’ to Transmeridian. I just Google’d them and of course they don’t exist any more, but if any of the shareholders are still kicking around and happen to find themselves reading this I want you all to know we’re really sorry about the extra equipment shrinkage in 1974 but your contribution to our European holiday has not gone unnoticed and I guarantee your reward will be in heaven.

We probably set off around lunchtime. Various parents came to wish us well. Certainly Monique and Rollo were there: they’d been providing the sandwiches throughout the fitting-out and I expect they were looking forward to more peaceful evenings. I’m pretty certain Paul’s Mum and Dad came too.

I’m not sure about the rest but I do have a small memory from Stuie that sheds a little light.

Apparently both my parents were there. Strange, that: they were divorced at the time. And Guv being Guv, he naturally saw the departure of Bertha the Earthtruck for the far Indies as a good excuse for a drink.

So he came bearing gifts: two bottles of Champagne. Being ex-Merchant Navy, he may have been thinking of breaking at least one of them over Bertha’s bows as she sailed onto the A414. Or perhaps he thought we all ought to down a flute or two to settle our nerves.

It didn’t happen. God, we must have been psyched up. Stuie distinctly remembers, as we finally took our leave, looking out of Bertha’s rear window at Guv waving two unopened bottles of champagne over his head.

He’d have enjoyed them that evening, I know. And Bertha’s crew were shortly to embark on more than enough serious drinking to redress the balance…

The Big Decision

2005-05-18T17:21:00.000Z

Allow me to recap (now we’ve got all the fun in the sun out of the way)…

On the Bus:

- Yaya
- Mark G
- Mark F
- Stuie
- Paul
- Pat (hitching a ride)

Possibles:

- Libby
- Andy
- Simon

Available Spaces:

- One

Hmmm. Tricky.

Advantages of taking Libby:

- She could cook.

- She could sew.

- She was my sort-of on-off never-quite-sure-where-we-are girlfriend.

Disadvantages of taking Libby:

- She was my sort-of on-off never-quite-sure-where-we-are girlfriend.

- She spent a lot of time with Liney and would have wanted to bring her too. Available spaces: 1.

- We’d have had to eat a lot of brown rice (we did anyway, as it happens).

- Six male, one female. Sure. That’d have worked.

- She’d have hated all that sewing and cooking.

Advantages of taking Andy:

- Great bloke, bright conversation.

- Not a bad pianist, if ever we stumbled across a piano.

- Accomplished performer in alternative political theatre, if ever we stumbled across any alternative political theatre (actually more likely than it sounds).

- Must have had the necessary cash.

- He could drive. It seems hard to believe, but at this point Yaya was the only person who’d actually done this with Bertha.

Disadvantages of taking Andy:

- He could drive. And often did, extremely fast.

Advantages of taking Simon:

- We all loved him. Let’s face it, Simon’s that sort of person.

Disadvantages of taking Simon:

- Nothing obvious.

- Nothing you could put your finger on.

- No, really. Probably had the money and everything, what with all that motorway-building.

Nevertheless...

- Simon usually went everywhere with Martin. Who we liked too. But. Available spaces: 1

- Simon hadn’t actually done anything for Bertha. You know: tapes and foam and welding and paintwork and tapestry curtains and suchlike. Somehow that rankled.

And then…

- There was that business with Sally. We think. Maybe.

I mean it’s not like Yaya was actually going out with her at this point or anything. But he did, for a long while. And then there came this time when she couldn’t get back to Ponders End and had to stop over in Bishop’s Stortford and Simon offered her a space on the floor for the night. And one thing led to another.

And that was something that tended to happen around Simon.

Which brings us to another possible disadvantage of inviting Simon on the bus:

- Where women were concerned, the rest of us would not have got a look in.

We took Andy.

Not really such a difficult decision after all…

Postscript the first:

To this day, Simon claims the decision not to take him was a public school conspiracy against the oiks from Newport Grammar. He’s forgotten that Paul was also an oik, and Bishops Stortford College was a pretty crappy minor nonconformist public school in any case. It’s not like we all went to Eton.

It’s also amazing that this sort of thing ever mattered. But if we get into the undercurrents of English class division we’ll be going round in circles till Doomsday, and I’d much rather get Bertha the Earthtruck on the road to Istanbul at last.

Postscript the second:

At the time of writing, Simon is the proud owner of two large trucks, including a seven and a half tonner. The rest of us go round in bog-standard family saloons.

Granite and Quartz

2005-05-15T12:10:00.000Z

The Allman Brothers played for many hours.

And so would anyone. You’re an Allman Brother, playing at the height of your powers. Why would you want to stop?

They did, of course. And those of us returning in Bertha shuffled footsore and happy back through the security fencing and out over the crushed grass of the car park and climbed aboard and rolled a final spliff and slipped something mellow into the tape deck and waited.

And waited.

And waited some more.

Parking logistics were never well planned in 1974. Leaving the car park also took many hours.

And here comes one of those perfect nuggets of memory, worming its way through the muddled synapses of your correspondent’s brain like a sliver of translucent quartz breaking through grey granite.

I’m sitting there, in the back of Bertha. I’m on the right-hand bench, leaning back with my eyes closed. Opposite me, at the end of the left-hand bench, is Yanni Flood-Page, head bent forward, face hidden by thick waves of hair. It’s dark, and Bertha’s crawling forward, two yards at a time.

Then Yanni starts singing, in note-perfect harmony with the stereo. All the words, all in the right place, all a third above, just where you’d want a harmony to be.

End of memory.

Here’s the curious thing. Until I started writing this down, I was convinced the memory of Yanni singing was purely visual. I could see it, but I could not have named the song.

It just came to me, literally as I wrote the picture down:

John Martyn, singing May You Never.

Can’t recall a damn thing about the rest of the journey back. Give me a break: I was that stoned and exhausted I’m lucky to remember anything. We all were, which explains Yaya’s one nugget of memory about the journey: when he got to Bishop’s Stortford he was too tired to drive any further, so Libby and Liney had to hitch-hike on to Dunmow in the middle of the night.

That’s about ten miles. Hey, we used to hitch-hike a lot in those days.

Yaya’s been feeling guilty about that ever since.

Curiously, Paul has exactly the same memory, from an entirely separate occasion. Been at a party in Stortford, exhausted and wanting to get home to Much Hadham (the opposite direction), dropped Libby and Liney at Hockerill traffic lights to hitch-hike through to Dunmow.

Felt guilty about it ever since.

Libby and Liney are emerging from this story as two of the most tolerant people I’ve ever known. They must have been well ticked-off with us a lot of the time.

And I suspect they’re about to get even more ticked-off. We’re a week away from Bertha leaving for Istanbul, and I’m pretty sure that by now the big decision has been made…

Technical Update #5. Posted by: Pat

2005-05-10T08:12:00.000Z

It may be a crowd shot to you, but I was photographing the chicks.

Note the one smiling back in the centre.

The Novelty Headgear Report

2005-05-08T17:22:00.000Z

This post has taken a little while to arrive. There are three reasons for the delay:

1/ I’ve been waiting for Pat, who rashly let it be known a few days ago that he had some pictures of Knebworth somewhere. Of course this necessitated finding them first – and Pat has many more important things to do with his life than rummage through boxes in the garage just to keep me happy.

He came through. Thank you, Pat.

2/ The arrival of the pictures kicked off a technical crisis with the scanning technology that’s far too boring to go into here.

3/ The arrival of the pictures kicked off a minor emotional crisis that I’m still trying to get to the bottom of.

Let’s try.

These pictures make me sad.

Say what?

That’s what they do. I’d never seen them, you see. So I haven’t had 31 years to get used to them, like so much peeling wallpaper that’s been around so long you don’t even notice the pattern. These came through as fresh and startling as if they’d been taken yesterday.

There’s not much there, for the disinterested observer. A crowd scene, with people trudging past the corrugated iron on their way to the undoubtedly terrifying toilet facilities. A man I don’t know holding up a sign that indicated singular bad planning on his part. Someone else eating an ice cream cone and wearing a knotted handkerchief on his head, for all the world as if he was sitting on the beach at Skegness.

And then there’s a shot of the legendary Jesus, leaning on a railing at the front of the crowd. Which is where he always was, at every 70s rock festival I ever attended. Always came alone, always the first to idiot dance, always wore a kaftan. Here he’s stripped down to his swimming trunks to impress a passing lady, but I’m sure he didn’t arrive like that. Besides, it was a hot day. I hadn’t realised how hot till I saw these pictures.

Those pictures I can cope with. They’re like something out of Pathe News: a disembodied clip from the history of our times.

The others are more problematical. There’s Paul and Mark F, side by side and lost in thought. There’s a back view of Stuie, sipping Coke. There’s Yaya, blurry and grinning. There’s Pat himself, in a truly 70s yellow shirt. There’s Andy Bunny, picking his way through the crowd in his finest Easy Rider shades. There’s Penny, who I didn’t realise was even there, leaning on an unknown shoulder. There’s Libby knitting, as she so often did, even at rock gigs. There’s my brother’s floppy leather hat, right next to Sizi Pargeter’s equally daft woollen headpiece. There’s Flash, modelling not one but two silly titfers (we forgive him on account of him being from Newcastle and all).

And there’s Libby again, asleep against your correspondent’s pale and interesting torso. We were in love once, in a way you can probably only be when you’re 19 years old and barely able to understand what relationships mean. But I think by now we were just hanging on to the threads.

It didn’t ruin the day. Why would it have? But seeing these things again now, suddenly and without much warning, makes me want to run stumbling backwards through the dark wood, scattering faded snapshots like fallen leaves. So I can find my way more easily next time.

Music fans will remember there was much else to be joyous about on the 20th July 1974. And you’d be right. All the visual evidence Pat could muster lies at the bottom of this very long photoblog. We’ll get back to the narrative when the Allman Brothers have finished their set.

And yes: it was a semi-religious experience. Even without Duane…

The Knebworth Photo Log

2005-05-08T17:08:00.000Z

Paul and Mark

A Gumby

Men in Hats

Flash

And Flash Again

Andy Cool

Pat

Jesus

A Man in Need

Penny

Libby

Stuie

Yaya

The Crowd

And Libby. Again

Full Running Order

2005-05-08T16:58:00.000Z

The Tim Buckley Band

The Sensational Alex Harvey

Van Morrison

The Mahavishnu Orchestra

The Doobie Brothers

The Allman Brothers Band

Move With Me

2005-05-04T08:36:00.000Z

Mr Buckley at Knebworth

'Well he finally walked in
And Lord that man filled up the doorway (whooooh)
And he grabbed me by my throat
And he bounced me down the stairs (ooo-ooo-ooo-ooooh)
And Lord I swear (huh)
He broke every bone in my body (aaaaaaaah)
But it was worth every second (uh)
That I was there (yeah... yeah.... yeah......)
Cause she would whisper to me...'

(We'll get off this in a moment. I just came across the picture, that's all...)

Jeff's Dad

2005-05-03T22:14:00.000Z

Here we have to leave Bertha for a bit. She’s over there in the field, parked neatly under a line of trees, safely out of the sun and doubtless receiving admiring glances from the stream of freaks making their way into the campsite. Who knows – one or two of them may even have rested in her shadow for a moment, to share a refreshing glass of Lucozade. Or a joint.

Meanwhile, we’re on the other side of the fence…

Positional Diagram

We’ve handed in our tickets and received a rubber stamp in return. We’ve picked our way through the crowd, mumbling schoolboy apologies every time we missed the patch of open grass we were aiming for with our desert boots. We’ve met our friends (somehow this always happens, even in a crowd of 200,000 people) and claimed the ribbon of ground on which we will spend the next 14 hours by spreading bags and blankets in every direction. We’re near the front: we can actually pick out faces on the stage. We’ve succeeded in scoring more dope, though it’s quite probable that some of us at least will have forgotten to bring food. Soon this will necessitate pushing and stumbling and wobbling back through the crowd, crushing fingers and coke cans all the way, to visit the hot dog stall (round about the same time, Libby and Liney will discover a stall where they’re selling vegetarian nutloaf, and of course they will be making the correct purchase decision). When we return we’ll discover that the ample space we thought we were sitting in has miraculously shrunk to something you’d be hard pushed to lay an A4 envelope on. Any connection between this effect and the hot dogs is strictly coincidental.

But we won’t mind. We'll draw our knees up to our chin and wait, knowing that sooner or later the guy in front will have to trudge off to the toilet, and then we’ll take back the ground he stole from us with his three-ton rucksack and half dozen plastic bags full of provisions. Meanwhile the air is full of the scent of patchouli and hashish, and if you look back over the crowd and squint your eyes it feels like you’re floating in an ocean of hair, and over there on the stage people are banging and muttering into microphones and this means that very very soon Tim Buckley will be on.

I’m going to try not to turn into some kind of nerdy critic here. I hate that. But I’d spent the last six months at Victory Square listening to Greetings from LA, and it had rapidly become one of the half dozen albums I intended to take to my grave. Still is, come to that.

By way of explanation, in reverse order of importance:

1/ It’s one of the most out-and-out sexual albums ever made. I’ve never forgotten the look that came over Dave Walkling’s face the first time he realised Buckley really was singing ‘I wanna lick… all around the stretch marks.’

2/ The music was funky as hell. I can't think of a better way to say that.

3/ Tim Buckley had the most extraordinary voice. The full five octave range, and every one with its own colour, so he could go all the way from a Nat King Cole baritone to a Little Richard squeal in a single phrase, and nobody ever got bored. It could rip your heart out.

The only other person I ever heard who could sing like that came twenty years later, and only made one album: Tim’s son Jeff.

Apparently the crowd at Knebworth was still settling in, and not really very interested in a minority interest sixties folk singer trying to revive his career with an electric band. I don’t know. I was too busy hanging on every note. And the notes I hung on most of all actually came before the band even started playing: two and a half minutes of acapella that I’ve seen described as a ‘vocal warm-up’ but I distinctly remember hearing as Buckley tuning the band to his voice, string by string.

Then he played Nighthawking and Sweet Surrender. You know how it is when a musician plays exactly what you want to hear.

Within a year he was dead. The Buckleys, father and son, are the saddest story in rock and roll.

And a gift from God. Boy, this day was off to a good start…

The Great Escape

2005-05-01T16:08:00.000Z

‘By the time we got to Knebworth
We were half a million strong
Oom gneeaow da chunga thrum
Ooom gneeaow da chunga chungthrum…’

(Connoisseurs will immediately recognise the superior Crosby Stills Nash and Young version, slightly reworked)

Actually it was more like ten or a dozen. In the truck, at least. But we’d been driving for an hour which (in a confined space) is more than enough time to get extremely stoned. So it probably felt like a little bit of Woodstock back there. Without the tailback on the New York State Thruway, obviously.

There may have been a tailback where we turned off the A1 into Knebworth Park. Certainly we slowed down. Obviously we turned down the stereo. Undoubtedly we opened the windows wide and flapped at the air with our hands to make the smoke go away.

None of these measures would have been enough to mitigate the paranoia. Not once we’d spotted the one thing you always find on the approach road to any self-respecting outdoor event especially the type that involves loud music and hedonistic behaviour.

Lots of police.

What’s the worst way to enter a rock festival with your pockets full of hash?

The absolutely worst way you can imagine?

You got it. Show up in an earthtruck with two foot high sun mandalas on the side and smoke billowing from the windows.

I could say we kept our cool. I could say we’d hidden our stash so expertly that it would have taken a whole pack of expert canines to track it down. I could say Yaya rolled down the window and charmed the policeman so expertly with his best public-school subtly authoritarian greeting that the poor chaps just shrugged their shoulder and waved us on.

Or I could say we panicked. Probably closer to the truth.

Fortunately we had a trump card. Bertha had an escape hatch. Right there in the middle of the floor, about six inches by twelve. Can’t imagine why it was there, but I suspect the Navy ambulance people probably needed somewhere to dump the yucky stuff whilst patching up horribly mutilated marines.

The hatch opened right onto the road. And that’s where the last of the dope went.

Now you may call this the result of awfully bad planning. I prefer to think the opposite: that in point of fact we knew something like this was going to happen and consequently made a heroic effort to smoke the lot before we got there, knowing full well we’d be offered some more forty times between parking and claiming our patch of grass in the arena.

We’d just miscalculated, that’s all. I like to think some footsore hippy with a heavy rucksack who'd spent the whole morning hitch-hiking from Kirby Muxloe and was now trudging up the approach road in our wake was about to get very lucky.

As it happened, the police just shrugged their shoulders and waved us on anyway. That’s paranoia for you…

Technical Update #4. Posted by: Mark

2005-04-30T08:24:00.000Z

Why am I doing this?

Because memory is random. I’ve got snippets in my head, you’ve got snippets in yours. They’re not the same.

Because sometimes I get so frustrated by the loss I want to smash a fist through my eyes and scoop out all the memories like gunk from a clogged drain.

Because of Mr and Mrs Hobson:

My Ghosts

These people are my great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. It’s hard to believe from looking at them, but we share genes.

That’s about the only thing we share. I know they lived in the North, and I know the names of some of their children because I looked them up on a census site. But that’s it.

Apparently genealogy is the second most popular activity on the internet, after sex. All those millions of people floundering about in the archives trying to learn something more about their own Mr and Mrs Hobsons, and 999 times out of a thousand all they come up with is a list of names.

We have a family bible, handed down through the generations. It has a list of names hand-written on the frontispiece: all the people who’ve had charge of it down the years. It starts with the bald statement:

‘Richard Tomson bought this book for Mary his wife (daughter of Commodore Fox RN and Susan his wife; and only sister and heiress of Rear Admiral William Fox) in London in 1765’.

I’m haunted by that one small fact, because it describes a man going into a bookshop and coming out with something special for the woman in his life. Did he do it because he loved her? Because he thought she needed religious instruction? Because he wanted to impress her influential relatives?

Who knows? All Richard Tomson bothered to tell us was he bought the damn book. And the people on the list that follow are even less help: they just tell us who got it next.

When I pass the bible on to my eldest daughter, it’s going to have a 200-page appendix with cross-references and photographs and internet links and probably a couple of CDs sellotaped in there to boot. Just to give my great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren a fighting chance.

The people who scour the internet looking for their ancestors aren’t looking for a list: they want to know who their predecessors were. What they loved, what they admired, what they feared, what they did. I don’t mean ‘did’ in the sense that I know Mr Hobson was a shopkeeper – I mean ‘did’ in the sense of the stories they made of their own lives. The random snippets they kept coming back to, replaying like a looped tape in their heads until the day the power finally shut down.

I was talking to Pat on the phone the other day. We were trying to remember who’d been at Knebworth in 1974. We didn’t stick to Knebworth: reminiscing isn’t like that. 1974 was also the year of the flat in Colliers Wood; and the Grateful Dead at Alexandria Palace; and for me at least the first time in my life when education made absolute sense, after two failed college courses and a year sweeping Bishops Stortford hospital; and the first year LCP field trip to Ireland when fifteen odd-looking photography students descended on Dingle Bay to discover what Guinness really tastes like; and even only a few months off the best concert any of us can remember going to: Little Feat at the New Victoria Theatre.

And Bertha, of course. 1974 was a heck of a good year.

Of course you can’t pin it on the year. And you can’t really pin it on the weather or the music or the government of the day or even the age group. There’s something awesome about being 22 years old and untroubled by mortgages and children and thoughts of mortality, but good memories can accumulate at any part of your life.

You can pin it on the people. For sure you can pin it on the people.

I wonder if Mr and Mrs Hobson ever had a really good year? One that was packed with friends and adventures and wild schemes and learning and music with the power to make you dance or break your heart?

I’ll never know. That’s why I’m doing this.

(Normal service will be resumed shortly. This story was never going to be linear. Besides, I'm hoping some Knebworth pictures will show up soon)

A Nice Day Out

2005-04-28T16:14:00.000Z

Sometime in late June or early July I was relieved of my duties in the best job I ever had, working the night shift in the Car Park at Stansted Airport.

I can only assume some regular member of staff came back from holiday. I’d been a very good car park attendant up to that point. Cashed up properly and everything. I don’t think anyone had actually noticed me sleeping on the job.

No problem. There’s always another job when you’re 22. Which I needed because we only had a couple of weeks to go and I was worried I might not have enough money to make the trip.

So I asked around. First stop the M11 road-building project up at Start Hill. Obvious choice, really. Everyone else had done it, loads of money if you put in the overtime, and I could even get a lift with Delta Charles. We’ll call him Delta Charles in here because he has at least two other names and I don’t want to place an already confused passenger manifest under any more strain than is necessary. For further information on how the M11 was built, please see the parallel blog. Frankly, the fact that those guys helped construct several of the bridges does not fill me with enormous confidence in our motorway infrastructure.

Delta took me down the site in the morning, in his little Fiat 500, and introduced me to a foreman. Delta drove off, in the company Land Rover, to do his chainman thing. Whatever that was. The foreman took one look at my hair and decided I wasn’t going to be a lot of use to the motorway-building profession. He handed me a broom, pointed to a distant nissen hut, and told me to sweep it.

I swept it. For a whole day. By five o’clock it was the best-swept hut in the history of public works. Not that anyone would have noticed because nobody came to see how well I’d done, or ask how I was getting along, or even tell me where to get a cup of tea. At five past five Delta Charles re-appeared in the company Land Rover, and I left the hut, placing the broom neatly by the door. We drove home in the Fiat 500 – and I never went back.

To hell with the money. I’d been treated like crap because I looked a bit odd.

So I asked around again. This time I went somewhere were everybody looked a bit odd: the grass-cutting gang run by Tylers on behalf of Uttlesford District Council.

The foreman of the Tylers gang was a skinny Irishman with a nervous disposition called Niall. He was probably nervous because he was on some sort of piece work and had somehow got himself lumbered with a gang that included four odd-looking hippies who were only there for a few days more and kept talking about what they were going to do when they got to Istanbul.

The odd-looking hippies in question were Stu, Mark F, Paul, and now me. I don’t remember anyone else being in the gang but I can’t believe Niall would have suffered his job with just us for company. It took considerable expertise to operate a lawn-mowing gang. You had to know how long it took you to get from one village green to the next, and how long each green would take to cut. You had to know which mowers were in the Transit and which in the flatbed truck, and you had to know how to fix them all. You had to know exactly which type of mower was appropriate for which type of vegetation. And you had to know exactly which type of hippy was appropriate for which type of mower.

In my case, it was almost always wrong mower, wrong grass, wrong operative, bang. They never let me near the ride-on machines. Probably wise.

And I was only there for a week or two. I can date this to early July, and not just because it was hot. On the 19th we all gave up our jobs, and on the 20th we went to Knebworth in Bertha.

Here’s the programme:

The Festivities

I know. Doesn’t give much away, does it? This was long, long before Virgin and Coca-Cola felt the need to get involved in these things.

Here, on the other hand, is the line-up:

- Tim Buckley

- The Sensational Alex Harvey Band

- John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra

- Van Morrison

- The Doobie Brothers

- The Allman Brothers

(I know what I’m doing with these point sizes, by the way)

In point of fact they could have included Gary Glitter and the Bay City Rollers: we’d probably still have gone. Because we were going on Bertha's inaugural ride.

Actually that's not strictly true. Bertha had been out before. Yaya and Simon had driven her up the M1 to deliver some furniture to Simon’s sister’s house or something. I’d write about this but neither of them remembers a thing about it.

In any case, it couldn’t be an inaugural ride till Bertha was fully furbished. No way, no sirree. This was the best damn freak-wagon in the British Isles, she was going to be publicly unveiled at the summer’s best damn gig - and everyone was invited.

- My brother Mitt came. I think with his girlfriend Penny. Passengers of privilege, because they’d painted the two-foot high sun mandalas on the sides of the bus (amphetamines may have played a part in the high production quality of said mandalas, but all artists have to suffer for their work).

- Mike Benton came. I know this because Mitt remembers him being there. It could be true.

- Yanni Flood-Page came.

- Andy came. Just back from York, I suspect.

- Me and Paul and Mark F and Stu came. Dammit, this was our bus.

- Actually it wasn’t. It was Yaya’s. Not just on the bus, but at the wheel.

Then there were the others. Not on the bus, but joining us in the arena.

- Libby and Liney came.

- Simon came. Probably with Martin, possibly without a ticket. The story goes that he paid Steve Yates to drive him to Knebworth even though he didn’t want to come; then they broke through the fencing just like you were supposed to do at rock festivals.

- Pat came. Probably with Andy Bunny, also from the LCP. These two were going to be my new flatmates when we got back to college. We were organised like that. Just hadn’t found a flat.

- Now I come to think of it, Dave Walking and Flash and Stewart Craig from Victory Square were there too. And Viv and Oz. And lord who else besides.

Christ, there were hundreds of us.

And the stereo blaring, all the way from Stortford to Stevenage. Where, quite properly, I imagine we turned it down a bit sharpish…

The Spirit(s) of the Times

2005-04-25T18:47:00.000Z

Some posts are short, some posts are long. Rather like listening to a JJ Cale album, in fact.

Tonight’s post is the textual equivalent of End of the Line, from JJ’s 1989 Silvertone album Travel-Log. It’s shorter than most, slightly off-key, and yet somehow strangely pertinent to the whole project.

The JJ moment looks like this (doubleclick for a shockkhorreur better view)...

21 Today!

The venue: Victory Square. You know all you need to know about Victory Square.

The occasion: Pat Chappelle’s 21st birthday party. Somebody has obviously given him a bottle of whisky. Let’s hope it alleviates the sulphate already showing in his eyes.

The other persons present:

- Your correspondent. I’m reasonably sure, though I’m not responsible for these photos. I may have been lying down somewhere by the time the pictures were taken.

- Yaya. Instantly recognisable. Even sat.

- Libby. That’s why I have a hunch I was there too.

- Simon.

- Pat. It's my party and I'll get wrecked if I wanna.

If you’re following the chronology, you’ll probably have worked out I’ve jumped back in time a bit. Pat’s a Gemini. That places these pictures in June sometime. Around about the time Bertha arrived on the scene, but before the major refurbishments were carried out.

Why, therefore, are these pictures relevant?

For one thing, they summon up the spirit of the times rather admirably. See the expression on Simon’s face. Also the stylish Victory Square party furnishings.

For another thing, they pretty much prove that Yaya and Simon were good friends even then. As they remain to this day, in 2005.

For yet another thing, they include Libby. Again. I’m still working that one out.

For yetayeta nother thing, they amply demonstrate that 21st birthday parties are not what they used to be.

They also give me a breathing space while I work up to the central quandary of the entire Bertha saga: the big decision.

Who’s on the bus?

We’ll find out. But first, a brief detour. To one of the best afternoons of music any self-respecting head could hope to experience…

Outer Space

2005-04-24T17:00:00.000Z

This is a map of Bishops Stortford. It’s at the time of writing, sadly, but all the essentials elements are there for a trip round town in 1974…

Yaya's Ride

This is the route Yaya used to take:

- Start in the top left hand corner, at the junction of Maple Avenue and the main road into town (marked green on the map and known as the Hadham Road).

- Career down the hill at high speed, testing the brakes all the way, past the entrance to Maze Green Road.

- Level out and stay with the green road as it curves all the way round the back of the town and along past the end of Bridge Street. Continue along the Causeway (the oldest part of Stortford) past the medieval castle on your left.

- Turn right at the bottom of Hockerill Street, before you go over the railway line. Continue parallel to the railway until the road loops back round towards the centre of town.

- Switch from green to yellow. Turn right into Potter Street, past Nail Lane and Apton Road. You’re in the heart of town. There’s lots of traffic here, and you may have to go slowly. Open your window and turn up the stereo.

- Turn left at the top of Bridge Street and engage a low gear. You’re going up Windhill, one of the oldest and most picturesque streets in town.

- Turn right at the top of Windhill, into Bell’s Hill. Remain in low gear, try not to wipe out the brakes or clip the wings of all the cars parked on the left hand side of the road.

- Turn left, back into Hadham Road. Continue to the bottom of Maze Green Road.

- Turn left up Maze Green Road. Turn up the stereo extremely loud. You are now travelling through your old school and there’s just a chance one of your old maths masters will be crossing the road.

- Turn right into Maple Avenue. Slow down to negotiate the potholes. Continue until you see the back entrance to 123 Hadham Road on your right.

- Park.

- Repeat (With minor variations) as the mood takes you.

Well wouldn’t you?

If you were at the wheel of a dark blue 1950s Royal Navy Ambulance, that is?

A Royal Navy ambulance with tinted windows?

A Royal Navy ambulance with a freshly-painted white roof (to cover the rust) and a roof rack custom designed and built by Stansted Engineering, no less?

A Royal Navy ambulance with exceptionally loud stereo speakers in front and back?

A Royal Navy ambulance with a spotlight over the cab, admittedly not functioning now but with the legend ‘Bertha the Earthtruck’ emblazoned on the glass?

A Royal Navy ambulance with a two foot high flaming sun mandala hand-painted on each side?

Of course you would.

You’d drive round town a lot…

Technical Update #3. Posted by: Mark

2005-04-24T16:20:00.000Z

My apologies for the slight hiatus. I’ve been installing a new computer which has taken up an inordinate amount of time. Music fans will be delighted to know that the new machine gives me access to the lovely iTunes (I’m listening to Sam Brown singing Stop as we speak) which is going to make things a heckuva lot easier when I finally summon up the courage to tackle the playlist…

Inner Space

2005-04-20T21:18:00.000Z

Gawd. You spend an afternoon labouring over a detailed written description of what Bertha was like on the inside: then you discover you could have saved yourself the trouble because a long-lost photo shows up…

Inner Space

You see? This is why we should take photographs of our lives. Because memory fails us.

Not forgetting that it also behoves us to describe what it felt like to be inside the memories. Otherwise the photograph fails us too.

Actually I’m thinking I didn’t do that bad a job. Seems I was wrong about the felt covering the foam. It looks more like somebody’s old military blankets from here. In grey and red, no less. Such colour sense. And I missed those cupboards too – looks like we even had somewhere to store our food.

This must be around the halfway stage of refurbishment. You can tell because there are still no tapestry curtains.

The bloke with the goatee beard demonstrating how not to fall asleep in a Bedford ambulance is Paul.

The bloke with the beard behind him who looks like Pat is in fact Martin of the waxed moustache.

The young lady peering coquettishly over the front bench seat is a bit of a mystery. My best hunch is Yaya’s on-off girlfriend Sally, who may (perhaps; possibly; never trust the memory alone) be about to play a small but pivotal role in finalising our passenger manifest…

Not Blogging. Blagging

2005-04-19T17:20:00.000Z

Aaaah, Brigitte. As fondly as I remember you, it’s time to shuffle you down the scrollwheel into the obscurity of the blog archives. Unlike 1974, we now have ladies on the passenger manifest, and if I keep you there much longer I’ll have to put up a picture of Jose Mourinho or Enrique Iglesias to redress the balance. And that would never do.

But before you drop off the screen let’s paint a picture of what’s around you. American readers more familiar with the luxury that is a Winnebago might be shocked by this but Bertha is actually furnished in a rather spartan style. To wit:

We haven’t bothered to repaint the interior. It’s already a fetching shade of hospital cream. It ain’t broke. Don’t fix it.

It has a sink. Connected to its own water tank. There’s a pump/compressor thingy somewhere under the truck that delivers cold water to the tap. Somehow we have deluded ourselves that this arrangement will keep seven strapping blokes clean and fragrant.

It has beds – or rather it has four metal frames – two on each side of the bus. The upper two are conveniently designed to fold down, flat against the wall. They’re a little uncomfortable at present, but we have a plan. All four frames will be lined with foam, thus turning them into:

A/ Four beds, when parked

B/ Two comfy bench seats, when on the road

(Doncha just love the way that reads? On the Road, man…)

It’s fallen to Paul to find the foam. By his own admission, Paul’s a man who likes to have a job to do. And it turns out he knows a couple of factories over on the industrial estate at Harlow that turn out foam for whatever reason factories turn out foam.

Paul’s got us lots of foam. Really more than we can ever use. Well you’d give away lots of foam if you were a factory owner in Harlow and this well-spoken persuasive sort of hippie chap turned up one day asking if you had any spare bits that he could use to line the walls of a playgroup for disabled children to stop them banging their heads, wouldn’t you?

The foam has turned the frames into four very serviceable beds. At the same time, we’ve constructed a wooden middle bit to fit between the bottom two frames. There are brackets to attach it to the frames, and as we’ve got all the foam we could ever need we’ve managed to cover the wooden part as well.

We’ve even come up with a load of felt to cover the foam so it doesn’t get itchy in the night. We can now sleep seven in comfort: two on the top bunks, and five more crossways on the bottom.
It’s a bit cramped down there, mind you. But only as far as Amsterdam.

Audiophiles will be delighted to hear we’ve also taken care of the other top priority: in-car entertainment.

It’s fallen to Paul to find the stereo. How could it not, when Paul’s dad runs an electrical/audio type shop in Dunmow? Paul’s been over there and blagged a state-of-the-art cassette deck with loads of cable so we can do a proper professional wiring job and no less than four speakers. Two in the front with the driver, two in the back with the gang. And he hasn’t mentioned the disabled children once.

We’ve drawn up a playlist as well. We're busy making tapes, back up in Stu's bedroom. But we’ll get to that in a little while. I'm superstitious about the playlist.

(I may never mention it again, come to think of it).

There’s storage too. Most of it’s going up on the roof or under the bottom benches with the wooden bit, but we’ve hung little nets above the windows just like those cargo nets you get in the boot of your SUV where we can stash books and Marlboro and snacks and stash.

And now the piece de resistance: as predicted in the comments column several posts back, we have tapestry curtains to draw a veil on the world.

None of us remember these curtains, of course. Or who ran them up for us. But here’s the evidence, folks:

Fixtures and Fittings

Oh, alright. Maybe tapestry is stretching it a little…

Technical Update #2. Posted by: Mark

2005-04-19T16:44:00.000Z

This site has spawned its first parallel blog. Courtesy Delta Charles, who was not on the bus but was instead squirreling away money for a great adventure elsewhere.

Do not be alarmed. This sort of thing may happen from time to time. If you experience any discomfort, it will only be the result of finding yourself simultaneously at all points in time and space, literarily-speaking…

A Crucial Decorative Item

2005-04-18T17:14:00.000Z

This (or something very like it) is what we hung over the sink:

Aaaaah, Brigitte

(My thanks to Ms.Mac for the inadvertent reminder)

I admit it. I’m giving the wrong impression here. The collective pin-up was probably the last interior fitting to be added. But I’m putting it first because:

A/ It lends a certain classy je-ne-sais quoi to the blog.

B/ I know we thought of it almost as soon as Bertha drew up outside.

Seasoned organisers of overland expeditions will note that we had our priorities very much in order…

Four Important Tasks

2005-04-18T16:17:00.000Z

OK. I’ve succumbed to procrastineurosis quite long enough. It’s time to get on with the refurbishment and let the truth take care of itself…

Time has moved on. Bertha has made the short inaugural journey from Vauxhall to Bishops Stortford. Yaya has stumped up the money and taken Simon with him to collect the vehicle of dreams. Doubtless fretting over every single clunk and rattle on the way.

Or they may have been too bombed to care. No-one can remember this part very clearly, which inclines me to the latter theory.

Whatever. Bertha is now parked out the back of 123 Hadham Road, drawing bewildered glances from the frankly well-heeled local residents every time they turned out of Maze Green Road to drive into town. Including, as it happened, my tyrannical ex-housemaster who lived a few doors down (this is a subject best avoided as it takes us four years back in the opposite direction and if I go there the narrative will start to resemble the universe curving in on itself and it will therefore become exceedingly tricky to write).

Stick to the subject, Mark. The truck is parked. The truck is attracting attention. The truck is about to be fitted out and painted and made thoroughly habitable by the sparing standards of the day and will therefore soon be attracting even more attention. We sincerely hope.

There are four of us at this point. Me, Ya, Stu, and Mark F. We have issued ourselves a challenge to come up with enough money to leave for Istanbul sometime shortly after the 20th July. We know that’s the target date because there’s no way we’re going to Europe in this thing without first parading it big time at Knebworth. Besides, we’ve all bought tickets.

In parallel with finding the money, we have four important tasks:

1/ Decorate Bertha.

2/ Make Bertha cosy, with enough beds to sleep six people. Seven at a pinch.

3/ Make Bertha practical. You know the sort of thing: storage space, spare tyres, oil, fanbelts, find out how the engine works.

4/ Figure out who else is coming with us.

Even at this early stage, item four on the list is presenting something of a challenge. There are, frankly, more candidates than there are places on the bus.

Here they all are:

- Simon. Already discussed. See above. Sorry, below. More to come.

- Martin. Simon’s best mate and full-time driver of the Pig. A master of leatherwork, woodwork, needlework, metalwork – in fact any kind of work you care to mention up to and including waxing-the-ends-of-your-moustache work. I’m not kidding. He could have entered competitions.

- Libby. See below. More to come.

- Liney. Libby’s younger sister. Always the fierier of the two. Future authentic Greenham Common woman. By which I mean the full nine yards: camped outside the airbase till they took the Cruise missiles away, or something. This has no bearing on the Bertha story but always impressed me: the best I ever managed was one crappy protest march.

- Paul. Another old friend. Currently working with Stuart for Uttlesford District Council, where they’re learning to clear all sorts of hideous blockages from the drains. To this day, Paul reckons he can find underground water with a bent coathanger.

- Andy. One-time leader (if I’m honest) and keyboard player in the strikingly-less-than-legendary Bishops Stortford band Brea Hill. I was the bassist. Currently studying something extremely academic at York University. In fact Andy may not even be a candidate at this point, since he's still away in York.

Pat. Fellow photography student at the LCP. Not strictly speaking a candidate, since I know he's planning to go to Amsterdam in the summer and I've already jumped the gun by offering him a ride. This makes Pat number-seven-at-a-pinch, thus simultaneously ensuring plenty of onboard space for the rest of us when we got to Mediterranean parts and compounding the selection problem because there are now only two berths left.

I have documentary evidence of Pat’s existence:

Pat

Eagle-eyed fashion obsessives will note the expertly-applied embroidered patches on Pat’s left leg. Otherwise, no further comment required. Unless you insist.

Meanwhile, much as we probably did at the time, let’s neatly sidestep the who’s on the bus problem and get on with the really interesting stuff: interior décor…

A Comedic Moment

2005-04-15T19:49:00.000Z

I'm having a slight crisis of confidence here. I need to establish some facts, mainly related to the temporary student employment market in 1974. This will involve a little fiddling around with tape recorders and pints of bitter.

I'll explain later. I hope. In the meanwhile, and strictly in the interests of journalistic veracity, here's a new and absolutely contemporaneous picture:

Your Fearless Correspondent

Draw your own conclusions, fellow travellers...

The Best Job I Ever Had

2005-04-14T21:28:00.000Z

I think the budget was around £300 a person. You had to have that sort of money if you wanted to go all the way to Istanbul without running out and upsetting your mates by bumming their cigarettes.

This meant work. No getting away from it, no escape. Some of us, like Yaya, were pretty much settled into the work ethic at this point, but I was used to getting up at 11am, so it was bound to be a bit of a culture shock.

As it turned out, I found a way to ease myself gently back into the labour market.

If you wanted a job in those days, you got yourself over to the Labour Exchange at Oxford House in Bishops Stortford, waited around for a very long time, sat down with a bored looking clerk in a little cubicle made of that funny cardboardy stuff full of holes, announced you were a student looking for summer employment, watched them shuffle index cards for a while, and then with a bit of luck got sent off to Stansted Airport for an interview.

If you were unlucky you got sent to operate a lathe on the Raynham Lane industrial estate, but we won’t got into that now. Those memories really are too horrible to revisit.

Luck was on my side in June 1974. I got sent to Stansted.

Better still, I got sent for a night shift job. No getting up at 7am for me.

Even better yet, I got sent for a job as the night shift car park attendant at Stansted.

This was brilliant. We all know about Stansted Airport today. Fastest-growing airport in Europe, twenty airlines, twenty million passengers a year, grade A terrorist alerts every couple of months, swanky terminal designed by Sir Norman Foster. Even Germaine Greer was moved to write about how wonderful the place is.

In 1974, Stansted Airport looked like this:

Stansted

There were flights of course. Quite a lot of them, during the day. I mean we’re talking… oh, one hour intervals at peak times. Most of the planes seemed to be carrying crates of vegetables from Lagos, but none of us who worked there were particularly interested in the cargo. This was a proper operational airport, with proper operational jobs. The guys did the loading, the girls did the ground stewardessing, and the temporary students did the litter picking and the car park.

It quietened down a bit at night. Maybe a couple of flights to worry about.

That made the night shift car park job very cushy indeed. I’d get up there about ten, clock on, then spend a frantic couple of hours taking payments from about ten people going home after a hard day's work.

Between one and two am, I’d listen to the radio. I have a vivid memory of hearing some kind of Crosby Stills Nash and Young special on Radio Luxembourg and deciding there and then that they were the best band that ever existed and I would never ever listen to anybody else ever again. Maybe the atmosphere up there was rarified or something. It can’t have been from lack of sleep because from two to five am I slept. Like a log.

That was pretty much it. Round about five-fifteen, someone would usually tap on the window. The first of the night shift workers going home, I expect. Then it got busy for forty-five minutes. Maybe a half-a-dozen cars. Then I cashed up and went home.

I was making good money too. Well on target for the £300 Bertha Budget.

They don’t have car park attendants at Stansted Airport any more, they have machines. Machines never sleep…

Victory Square: A Guided Tour

2005-04-13T16:39:00.000Z

Another thing you could buy in 1974 was sarsaparilla. From a herbalist in the Walworth Road.

That always struck me as very odd. I’d probably heard the word sarsaparilla two or three times in my life, and only in very old cowboy movies. Now I was living in Sarf London, and I could buy sarsaparilla by the jugful in a shop five minutes’ walk from the Elephant and Castle. The kind of shop that had a dark stained wooden counter and rows of white jars on shelves up to the ceiling and little tubs of exotic stems and shoots and tablets dispensed into plain brown paper bags. There was a blackboard outside and you could always tell from a distance if sarsaparilla was available that day because they’d chalk up the price for you.

It’s not there any more, surprise surprise. Neither the blackboard nor the shop. If I want to drink a non-alcoholic cordial prepared from the roots of various prickly climbing plants of the tropical American genus Smilax I’ll probably have to fly to Arizona first.

I bet you can still buy 1950s Bedford ambulances. Probably for a lot more than £400. Back then it felt like a fortune. My entire year’s student grant was 600-odd, so it was pretty impressive when Yaya decided to stump up the money for Bertha.

Buying the truck, of course, was just the beginning. Now we had to do something with it.

I say ‘we’ because I don’t remember there ever being any doubt that this was a team project. Yaya was tall, but even he was going to rattle around in Bertha if he did it on his own. Stuart and Mark F were pretty much on the bus from the get go, and I’m pretty sure I was part of the planning as soon as I came home from Victory Square.

I came home for several reasons:

- I couldn’t afford the rent any more. Pitiful when you consider I was only paying £4 a week.

- I needed a job to pay for my forthcoming jaunt to Istanbul in Bertha. There was always work to be had at Stansted Airport, and it always paid better than anywhere else.

- If I was going to be on the bus, I had to work on the bus. That was the rule.

- I needed a bath.

Let’s consider that last statement. Victory Square was a terrace of tiny Victorian houses in a run-down corner of Camberwell that was waiting patiently for the bulldozers to show up and turn it into part of the Burgess Park Open Space (which they duly did a couple of years later). Consequently nobody thought it a very good idea to spend any money looking after their property. Instead they were either left derelict or let out to people who didn’t care: the very poor and students.

Number 1, Victory Square got the student treatment. There were three bedrooms upstairs and two bedrooms down. I lived in the middle upstairs bedroom with a table, a wardrobe, and a mattress on the floor. It was the smallest bedroom in the house but that was only fair: I’d arrived last. The view from my window consisted of the back end of a scrap yard.

Stewart Craig had the best bedroom. Front upstairs. he had a wall heater and everything. He’d bagged it for himself because he was the one who found the house in the first place. The arrangement backfired on him badly when the rest of the residents realised there was only one place to hang out and socialise at Victory Square: Stewart’s bedroom.

Apart from the bedrooms, there were only two other rooms in the house:

- A kitchen, downstairs at the back, where Flash deep fried his chips every evening. The rest of us lived on brown rice and vegetables, but Flash came from Newcastle and stayed loyal to his roots. Despite compounding a fire hazard already made lethal by a paraffin oil heater in every room.

- A scullery. Well, more of a corridor really. It had a door that led out into a back yard so tiny it really wasn’t worth going there, a sink (the square Victorian kind), and a tiny Belling water heater that generated just about enough hot water for one warm sinkful.

That was it. If we wanted to get clean – really clean – we went to the local public baths. No, not the swimming pool: a proper public bathhouse with spotlessly clean slatted wood flooring and
your very own cubicle with a cavernous tub that would have done Yaya proud and taps that poured in a boiling torrent.

All gone now, like the sarsaparilla.

The problem with the public baths, of course, was getting to them. I mean, we were busy students. We had projects to finish and pubs to live in and girls to pursue and all-night games of Risk to play. Fitting in a bus trip to the nearest bath-house took up valuable time.

Under the circumstances, we were lucky to have friends. And yet we did:

- There was the lot over at Kempshead Road. Which also disappeared, under the other end of the Open Space.

- There were all Pat Chappelle’s mates from Catford, who weren’t really students at all and tended to shun marijuana in favour of sulphate which meant that when they came to visit everybody stayed up for two days and a night talking about doing things that never actually got done.

- There were Libby and her sister Liney who’d just started running a stall under the Westway at Portobello Market which meant they dropped in at weekends. I’d spent the first six weeks of that year living in Libby’s hall of residence in Tooting, where she was studying dance at the Laban Centre, but it wasn’t really working out. Not just for lack of space: we’d started to stagger to the end of a long relationship, and I was making a very clumsy and immature job of bringing it to a close (I have a feeling I’m coming back to this later).

And there were Simon and Martin, driving by in the Pig (which we will also return to later, since it deserves a post all of its own).

We had parties too. Not the sort that require planning: to throw a party at Victory Square you put the word out, piled all your possessions (excluding mattresses – they had potential still) into Dave Minchin’s room at the back, handed the guardianship of the stereo to Pat, bought a couple of Party Seven cans for the people who were too stingy or broke to bring drink of their own, poured yourself into your cleanest loon pants, and prayed for a girl to notice you.

Mostly they didn’t. Even if you did manage to get off with someone, the only place to sleep was in a room laid wall-to-wall with mattresses. Usually my bedroom. Which was probably intended to induce the mood of a Roman orgy but in practice only led to embarrassed fumbling after you figured everyone else in the room had gone to sleep.

There was a TV comedy in the early 80s called The Young Ones. You remember: it pretty much launched Ade Edmonson and Rik Mayall. To this day I’m convinced they must have come to a party at Victory Square and borrowed the idea:

- The Young Ones weren’t very successful with women. Neither were we.

- The Young Ones didn’t bother with domestic repairs. Nor did we. One of our most entertaining evenings ended with someone being nailed into the loo. We let him out eventually, but the nails remained in the doorframe. Probably till they demolished the place.

- The Young Ones had an old couple living next door. So did we. Fortunately ours were deaf.

- One of the Young Ones played guitar very badly. So did I.

- One of the Young Ones had lank centre-parted hair that hung down to his shoulders. So did Flash.

- The Young Ones had a Russian landlord. So did we (that's the clincher, I’m sure you’ll agree).

In fact the only substantive difference between The Young Ones and Victory Square that I can remember is the livestock. They had rats. We had...

Eric

I know what you’re thinking. Cutesy-wutesy ickle puddy pussoo why don’t you come and purr on my lap cootchie-coo. But let me tell you: you’re looking at the hardest cat in Camberwell. A real Gilbert Shelton job. Dead mice on the doorstep. Crap on yer pillow soon as look at you. Upholstery shredded overnight. Or it would have been if we’d had any.

You’d be hard if you lived behind a scrap yard with real rats and the people who were supposed to look after you never emerged before 11 in the morning and fed you all manner of evil-looking leftovers at night. As for a litter tray – forget it.

Eric left round about the time I did. AWOL. One of the missing. Five grown men shedding tears in the square. Probably grew tired of cold chips and figured he’d do better hanging out with the rats next door.

The difference is, he came back. I was off to Istanbul. All I had to do now was find some money to pay for the trip.

So did we all, come to that…

Auntie

2005-04-09T18:55:00.000Z

You could get a lot of things in Bishops Stortford in 1974. A decent pint, a Grateful Dead album, a good selection of outdoor wear at Millets in the high street, and all manner of illegal stimulants. You could probably even buy a pretty useable working van - a Ford Transit, say - if you were so inclined.

What you couldn't buy there was a freak bus. No sirree. For that you had to go to London. To R&R Services of Vauxhall, no less.

Beats me how Yaya found them. In a newspaper, perhaps. The Ex-Military Echo or something. Or maybe someone at Stansted Engineering knew exactly where decommissioned Royal Navy ambulances could be tracked down. Whatever the source, I can remember him breathlessly explaining that he'd thought about it and thought about it some more and decided the only possible thing he could do with his accumulated van driving wealth was to buy a suitably sized military vehicle and what's more he knew the very place and would I like to drive there with him and check out the options.

‘Of course I would,’ quoth I, probably on the phone from Victory Square. Conveniently forgetting to mention pension funds and property investments and all the other wonderful things Yaya might have done with his money.

I've conveniently forgotten something else here. Victory Square didn't have a phone. Let’s be honest: it barely had plumbing. How on earth did we communicate before mobiles came along?

Payphones, that's what. And telegrams at a pinch. I have a faded yellow communication from Simon, sent to Victory Square sometime earlier that year, that perfectly illustrates why telegrams were simultaneously more fun and less reliable than texting. In fact I’ve posted it already. See below. I’ll try and figure out how to blog two images at once before I do that again.

It was an awesome concert, by the way. Alexandra Palace. I have a sneaking suspicion that the success of a Grateful Dead gig is measured in strict proportion to the amount of smoke in the air, but hey - there really is (was) nothing like a night out with the Dead.

So: I've no idea how we made the arrangements but I'm dead (pardon the pun) certain we drove to R&R Engineering, either from Bishops Stortford or down the road from Camberwell, in Yaya's other vehicle: Auntie.

Here's a picture of Auntie. You can see why Yaya dreamt of something cooler...

Auntie

Auntie was an Austin 1100. See my earlier observation on the British car industry if you haven't come across the brand before. I didn't drive at the time (in fact I was dead grateful pardon the pun for any kind of lift anywhere) but even I knew that Auntie was, frankly, a dog. And not even a particularly faithful one: she's broken down in the picture above, about 200 yards from the Chiswick roundabout on the North Circular.

Auntie's saving grace, for passengers at least, was her comical side. To understand this, you have to picture Yaya behind the wheel. 'Adequate legroom' is a meaningless concept when you're 6'8": in Auntie, Yaya often seemed to be steering with his knees. In the orthodox 'ten to and ten past' position, even.

You should have seen him in a mini.

Bertha, on the other hand, was Yaya’s ideal from the moment we saw her. There's a scene in a Furry Freak Brothers cartoon where the brothers decide to buy a camper van from a used lot full of shiny new Winnebagos. They’re undecided at first, but then the wily salesman takes them to the back of the lot and shows them a rusting vision with cobwebs hanging down and the wheels at funny angles: the 1930s Phutney-Screech Land Yacht. The freaks fall instantly in love.

It was a bit like that with Bertha. She was hidden away too, behind a wall of corrugated sheeting that faced onto the road away from Vauxhall Bridge round about where the pleasure gardens used to be in the eighteenth century but now consisted only of a long line of junkyards and Arthur Daley yards with ugly plastic lettering and those triangular flags they always use to brighten the frontage of places where old vehicles come for one last crack at life. There were all manner of jeeps and trailers and possibly even gun carriages in the yard as well. But there was only one truck to catch our eye: a 1950s Royal Navy ambulance with a six cylinder, 3.5 litre engine, four bed frames (oh all right - stretcher frames) in the back, windows at the side to look out on the world, and even internal plumbing. Our very own sink.

To Yaya's credit, he said he'd think about it. That might have been because we’d come in Auntie and didn’t want to offend her, but I suspect it had more to do with the £400 price tag.

You could buy a lot of Grateful Dead records for £400 in 1974…

Staying in Touch, 70s Style

2005-04-09T18:54:00.000Z

The Dead Booking

Free repetition of doubtful words, indeed. We'll come back to this in a moment...

Technical Update #1. Posted by: Yaya

2005-04-08T18:21:00.000Z

I've come in a bit late, I know, but on the other hand we haven't even bought the truck yet. I just feel that I need to add some details to an already engrossing story. And I've read the book…

Let me start with Stu's stereo. He actually built those speakers himself. They were so sturdy that believe it or not they still exist and are living in a very strange house in Southern France. I think their new owners have changed the front western bar motif which always seemed to me a weird choice when particularly stoned. But hey Stuart is a strange guy.

In one end of his large bedroom there was a wardrobe in which my father used to keep his work suits. My father worked in the insurance business and hated it. As the evening progressed he would get increasingly edgy about the next day and around 11 o'clock he would drag himself upstairs to get his suit. Now invariably, in those days, there would be 3, 4, 5 very stoned freaks, lying round the room, not saying much. He would knock politely and then come in, give us all a cursory glance , at which point we would shuffle or cough in a welcoming manner. He probably couldn't see very far due to the smoke.

It was about twenty years later that he raised the question of the strange smell in the bedroom.

As for the bottle, it morphed into the bedrooms ashtray so that there was always the smell of stale fags in the air.

Anyway , back to Bertha. I was very excited at the prospect of travelling through Europe in such a cool pulling machine but I cannot take all the credit for the idea. It was the thing to do. What else? Unfettered and alive. The Champs Elysees! Tall dutch girls on bicycles! The road! The wisdom it would fill us all with.

None of us had any qualms, everything would be fine. One never ending, sunny, truck-luscious far-out summer ahead. To tell you the truth I thought this would last longer than just one season, but I was keeping that to myself.

Off to Vauxhall then. To R&R Services to find our baby...

That Classic 70s Look

2005-04-08T13:21:00.000Z

But first, a brief aside. I’ve just tracked down a picture of Simon from around that time…

Simon and Libby

The eagle-eyed reader I mentioned in the previous post will doubtless have noticed he’s with the same girl as Yaya (in a earlier picture).

This is no coincidence. Libby also has a part to play in the story. Not least because she too was not on the bus.

I’ll explain later. Meanwhile, feel free to let your eyes linger on the sumptuous clothing styles of the early seventies, and reflect on the possibility that home-made ponchos were once very much in fashion.

That used to be my mum’s blanket, now I come to think of it…

Work, Work, Work to Make it Work

2005-04-08T12:31:00.000Z

Now if we’d all been students, the Champs Elysee thing would have probably remained an idea. We’d all have come home for the summer, and found ourselves grunt jobs for a few weeks, and maybe even gone to Paris on a boat train for a while before we hurried back to the seat of learning to further improve ourselves. All would have been normal.

Trouble was, Yaya had a job. Not much of a job, as it happens (I’m 101% certain it wasn’t intended as a long-term career option), but proper full-time employment nevertheless, with wages that were good enough to develop a saving habit and everything. Rather than blow it all on blow.

Stansted Engineering. I doubt they’re there any more, tucked away among the council houses at the back of Bentfield End in Stansted, in the days when it was still Stansted Mountfitchet and not just the grubby little village down the road from Stansted-the-UK’s-favourite-international-airport. It was a tiny family firm, and I’ve no idea what they made. I suspect the product line consisted of frankly unidentifiable metal components that had something to do with the car industry and were shipped out in small cardboard boxes with a typewritten label stuck slightly askew on the top. Demand probably dried up when the UK car industry ground to a halt. We’ll get to one reason why a little later in this narrative.

Yaya did the shipping out. He was their driver.

The job meant Yaya could buy a bus. Sorry, truck. Which meant that the following conversation stood some chance of leading somewhere automotive…

(We’re back in Stu’s bedroom. Yes, I know this is taking a while)

Yaya:
‘Wouldn’t it be great to drive down the Champs Elysee with this on the stereo and all the windows wide open…’

Mark F:
‘Or something louder.’

Yaya:
‘Uhhh. Some Zappa.’

Mark F:
‘On your way to somewhere else.’

Stu:
‘Where are we going this summer anyway?’

Simon:
‘Wouldn’t it be great to drive down the Champs Elysee in an American school bus like Kesey’s with this on the stereo and all the windows wide open?’

Yaya:
‘It’d be cool to have a bus like that. Not just a Volkswagen camper. Something bigger.’

Mark F:
‘We could paint the sides.’

Stu:
‘And put beds in the back so you could live in it.’

Simon:
‘We could take it to Knebworth for the Allman Brothers.’

Yaya:
‘You could go round the world in a bus like that.’

Mark F:
‘Chuck us the skins. I’ll roll another…’

Eagle-eyed readers will notice a new character has crept into this idyllic domestic scene. Like me, Simon may not have been there for the actual idea, but I have a pretty big hunch he was around for a lot of the talking about it. We’d all read the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, but Simon was passionate about it. I suspect he can still quote key passages to this day. So if a trip round the world in a brightly-painted vehicle with loudspeakers pointing outwards was being debated, Simon had to be making a contribution.

And yet…

Simon was not on the bus. Sorry, truck. And that is going to take some explaining too.

Later. For the moment, let’s stick with Yaya, rolling up and down the A11 in a van full of tiny automotive parts. He’s thinking now. Wondering where on earth you might go to buy a second-hand vehicle of sufficient capacity to install beds and washing facilities for (say) half a dozen English hippies intent on driving overland to China. Or wherever.

In a dealer’s yard in Vauxhall, his dream vehicle is waiting…

'Wouldn't It Be Great If...?'

2005-04-04T20:00:00.000Z

Now there’s a question we’ve all asked at one time or another. Often in moments of excess consumption. There you are, sitting in the pub, chatting away, letting the cares of the world wash over you like dust in the desert, and some smartalec begins a question with ‘wouldn’t it be great if…?’

Happened to me just the other day, now I come to think of it. Wouldn’t it be great if we got in contact with Guy Clark and flew him over from Texas for an acoustic concert in the back room of a pub in Cornwall. A very nice pub, as it happens, and I’m sure Guy would have loved to do it, but the trouble with that sort of plan is carrying it out. The plot was hatched in December, the gig was planned for August, it’s now April, and I’m pretty sure the gig schedule of a country and western legend doesn’t allow him to drop everything and fly to distant Celtic Britain at a mere four months’ notice.

Especially when nobody’s given a moment’s thought to the money.

Maybe next year. We all have a ‘pending’ file somewhere in our subconscious for the long-term storage of harebrained schemes, purposeless plans, abandoned projects, and the 45 books we’re going to get around to writing if only we can find the time. Doubtless the Richard Bransons of this world are where they are because they have the knack of turning these daft ideas into money, but for most of us it’s usually a case of ‘do what you can and do what you must’. As Bob Dylan sang all those years ago.

Except sometimes the harebrained schemes get carried out. Especially when you’re young and stoned and fanciful.

It would have been Yaya who said it. He was the one who did most of the travelling, so it follows he did most of the thinking about travelling. Somewhere on my mothers’ bookshelves is a dusty copy of our school magazine from 1968 or something like that in which Yaya dutifully describes, in his best ‘edited to protect the sensibilities of parents and teachers’ style, how he and another boy hitch-hiked around Europe at the age of seventeen. Possibly younger: I may have got these dates wrong.

I know that’s not especially unusual these days. But it was a big deal at a minor boys’ public school in leafy Hertfordshire back in 1968. Christ, we’d only just persuaded them to abandon the collar studs and let us wear our jackets unbuttoned.

Since which time Yaya had also:

- Spent the best part of a year working on a Kibbutz in Israel.

- Travelled across North America and ended up working as lighting engineer for Canada’s leading pop group, Abraham’s Children.

Yes, I know no-one’s heard of them outside Canada.

Yaya’s a few months older than me. But at that point the best I’d managed was a one month Eurail Pass that took me and my girlfriend of the time to Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Cannes.

So Yaya tended to be more confident in all things international. This may have had something to do with altitude - Yaya’s principal distinguishing feature being his height: 6’8". Perhaps the world’s just a little less alarming for a 17 year old schoolboy when everyone’s just that little bit underneath you.

Here’s a picture of Yaya taken at around the same time, with some people of lesser physical stature. You get the idea.

Ya and Libs and Liney

We’ll come back to the 6’8" thing in a while (it has a small but significant part to play in this story). For the time being we need to imagine Yaya sprawled on a bed at 123, wreathed in smoke and with a giant doobie between his lips.

Who else is in the bedroom?

Stu is, for sure. It’s his room. He’s Yaya’s younger brother. For a comparison, mentally shave off 4".

Mark Fowler is probably there. He’s Stu’s best chum. We’ll refer to him as Mark F from now on, to avoid confusion with…

Mark G. that’s me. I might have been there. I could fictionalise myself into this little tableau, but it’s just as likely I was still off at college in London, where I was systematically helping to trash 1, Victory Square, Camberwell (another address we may return to later).

There are various other possibles, but it’s not important. For now let’s just focus on Yaya, legs akimbo and sucking in a great lungful of cannabis sativa and Virginia’s finest, at the very moment Joni starts to sing 'I was a free man in Paris…'

Da dee dah-di dah di-duuum.

‘Wouldn’t it be great,’ says Yaya, ‘to drive down the Champs Elysee with this on the stereo and all the windows wide open…’

Stu's Stereo

2005-04-03T10:05:00.000Z

I believe it was Yaya’s idea. Had to be really, since Bertha was his bus. I don’t remember the actual moment of gestation, but I can picture the scene…

We are almost certainly upstairs at 123 Hadham Road, Bishops Stortford. In Stu’s bedroom. The room is full of smoke, which means Monique and Rollo are out. The smoke comes variously from Marlboro reds, roll-ups filled with Drum halfzware shag, and a large joint doing the rounds.

The joint is filled with some crumbled green stuff, probably from Morocco, more tobacco than can possibly be good for us, and the folded-in bit that you find in the top of a pack of Marlboro reds which can be torn out to roll into a crude cardboard filter that invariably comes adrift and stays between your lips when you suck too hard.

Also in the room:

A Stereo

Stu’s stereo. A stereo made up of separate components, as was the fashion in those far off-days. I was always rather envious of Stu’s stereo, being a doshless student whose every spare penny was spent on film and albums (generally played on someone else’s stereo).

Stu’s stereo was particularly impressive. It had one of those decks you had to be very careful with. To start the record going you had to raise a little lever, and press a little button, and push the needle across on a spindly sort of arm, and press another little button to lower the point of the needle in exactly the right place on the record, before the music started. If you hadn’t first balanced the arm God help you, and your records. I never understood how to balance the arm on a record deck. Far too many tiny screws to worry about. Which probably explains why my last remaining 12" albums are all so covered with scratches that listening to them is rather like some sort of 60s audio art experience (and not the good kind).

Stu’s stereo had a proper separate amp, with a silver façade and lovely simple knobs that said volume treble and bass so you always knew exactly where you were. In my case, with the bass up just a little bit more than everyone else preferred.

It probably had a radio tuner as well, but none of us ever bothered with that sort of thing.

And it had speakers big enough to balance a mature pot plant on. White cabinets, parked on the floor in two corners of the room. The grilles covered, if memory serves me correctly, with a printed fabric cartoon scene of a Western bar. With a cowboy bartender and everything.

Records

Lots of them. All lovingly stored in plastic sleeves to protect the covers. We’ll save the playlist till later, but there must have been at least three milk-crates’ worth.

I’m going to have to explain the milk-crates, right?

Let’s just say it was our wont in those days to store records in bright red crates liberated from around the back of any local Unigate dairy. Not the ones the milk went in, obviously: they had partitions. We only took the ones the bread was delivered in. Exactly the right size for about fifty albums, they were.

Anyone who ever moved house in the 70s and had to pack up and carry the albums will realise immediately that these crates were a gift from God.

And if anyone from Unigate reads this, we’re sorry. We’d give them back but they were all thrown out when CDs came along.

A Bottle

It might have been whisky, it might have been wine, but it was one of those giant sizes. And it was almost full - of pennies.

Used to fascinate me, that bottle, in my stoneder moments. I’d love to know what happened to it. Or indeed how much it contained.

I wonder what Stu spent the money on?

An Ashtray

Overflowing, of course. Always an ashtray, wherever we went.

There you go. We’re in the room. We’re listening to Joni Mitchell. Court and Spark. Which means that sooner or later we’re going to hear the following:

‘I was a free man in Paris
I felt unfettered and alive
There was nobody calling me up for favours
And no-one’s future to decide
You know I’d go back there tomorrow…’

Dynamite stuff, when you’re young and stoned and fanciful...

Motives and Illusions

2005-04-02T10:50:00.000Z

There were six of us. Seven at one point. We’ll get to the introductions in a little while. First there’s the question of why six variously stoned and strapping English hippies should choose to spend the summer of 1974 travelling to Istanbul in an ex-military ambulance called Bertha.

Some possibilities:

- We’d all read Kerouac. And the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. If we couldn’t be on Kesey’s bus…

- We wanted to see the world. Well, doesn’t everybody?

- It seemed like a good idea at the time.

- Cheap transport. Pat was on board because he wanted a lift to Amsterdam. This really is beginning to sound like the 70s, isn’t it?

- We’d been working hard and needed a holiday. That was Stu’s story at least. I was a photography student. How hard is that?

- We were all seasoned travellers on the journey of life and the bus was just another illusion on the road to enlightenment.

All doubtless true, to some degree or another.

Me, I reckon we just wanted to get laid…

April Fool

2005-04-01T16:06:00.000Z

I lied. There are a few pictures. Here's one to get the ball rolling...

Bertha

Or in this case, not rolling.

It’s not much. Apparently your foreign correspondent was trying to do art in 1974. I’ve got a shot of a tree, and several rather moody shots of people in a railway station café, but none of the gritty portraits and action-packed decisive moments you really need to back up a story like this.

What the hey. We’ll try and do it another way. Starting as soon as I figure out where to start.

I’ve just realised. I began this blook on 1st April. It seems so appropriate somehow…

Not Quite According to Plan

2005-04-01T15:46:00.000Z

I’ve always had an ambivalent attitude to Istanbul. Part fear, part fascination. It’s possible this has something to do with seeing Midnight Express six times, but I prefer to think it’s because Istanbul was where Bertha was supposed to go.

Even if she didn’t actually make it.

All lives have their important moments. Births, fallings-in-love, honours, flashes of inspiration. The summer Bertha set off for Istanbul had none of these. Nothing much happened, nobody’s lives were changed, none of us achieved a state of enlightenment. It was just another holiday, in the grand tradition of British holidays that don’t quite go according to plan.

Nevertheless it seems worth writing down. Documenting, even – though I come to the task thirty-plus years after the event and it turns out there’s precious little documentation to work with.

I take full responsibility for this, by the way. I was the photography student on the bus, for heaven’s sake – so where are all the pictures?