VT Coughtrey - ice cold

NOTES	After a few weeks, attendance at rehearsals of the Metropolitan Jazz Band began to fall off, but those who turned up refused to pay any more towards the hire of the hall than they had already been paying each week. For a while I grudgingly made up the shortfall, but one week I was not prepared to do so, because by this time I had very little money left. In the break I explained the position to the landlord. He was furious and ordered us all out. That was the end of the Metropolitan Jazz Band. It was also the end of my dream of playing the banjo (or anything else) for a living.
	I continued to explore suburban parks and spend time in libraries, but I now had to do a lot of walking, rather than riding on buses, trolleybuses and Tube trains. I had somehow to hold on to enough money to go on paying my mother for my keep every Friday night until such time as I happened to chance upon a wealthy philanthropist with whom I could strike up some very unclear kind of working relationship. The belief that this was possible had its roots in what, at a much earlier age, had been my favourite sort of novel. These tales were usually set in London in the 1920s and 30s and the heroes were geniuses down on their luck (just like me). While wandering about in desperate straits, the hero would sooner or later bump into some eccentric celebrity who would introduce him into high society, where his talents would be instantly recognised. This theme made such a strong impression on me that it would be a couple of decades before I could altogether shake off the romantic notion that wealthy eccentrics lurked in all sorts of unlikely places, on the look out for intelligent dossers to rescue. The one big difference between the novels and my version of the story was in the ending. In the novels, high society, having recognised the potential of the hero, then gave him exciting and well-paid work to do. My belief, however, was that my personality and electrifying view of the world would ensure that I would be richly looked-after by the wealthy, famous and powerful just in exchange for honouring them with my presence. Of course, these were the very same people who would go before the firing squads, come the revolution that I was about to inspire with my writings, but I kept these two opposing faiths safely apart, in different compartments of my mind.
My last visit to the Heath was in 2012, when I was in London for my 70th birthday dinner. These pics were taken on the previous visit, in 2003.	According to the novels, two of the most likely places to meet those who would gladly introduce me into the right circles were Hampstead Heath and some of the more obscure little pubs of Soho. Hampstead Heath wasn't too much of a problem, as it was only about an hour and a half on foot from Barnet. This left me with ample time to comb the Heath looking for introducers and perhaps do a little revolutionary writing before having to embark on the walk back. Of course, it was still necessary to arrive home at just the right time for it to seem to my mother that I had come from work. I soon fell in love with the Heath and came to know it, its history and its problems intimately. For me, there was a sense of mystery about the place. There seemed to be some sort of magic in the atmosphere. I still get this feeling to some extent on the rare occasions when I visit it.
	However, no introducers appeared, just the occasional old man in search of young men, so I turned my attention to the Soho Pubs. This of course presented a big problem, insofar as they were out of walking range given the time available, and I would have to buy at least one drink in each in order to hang about in them. It was necessary to resort to drastic measures to get money, both to visit the pubs and, by this stage, just to be able to carry on deceiving my mother that I was still working. I remembered the ease with which had I effected my two breakings and enterings (see Chapter 15), and tried a couple more sorties in the small hours with burglary in mind, but to no avail. At one house a dog started barking as I was climbing over a fence into a garden from a field. At another a light suddenly went on just as I was testing windows, and someone shouted. In both cases I fled in abject terror and ran all the way home, where I discovered I'd sustained minor cuts and grazes in my panic. I decided that perhaps burglary wasn't my cup of tea after all. I considered lying in wait for women on lonely woodland paths and snatching their handbags, but then it occurred to me that they might cut up a bit rough, so that was the end of that idea.
	But at last I hit upon an idea which, although it required almost as much nerve as burglary and bag snatching, was a great success, at least initially. I started with Nigel. He was by now a student at Exeter University but had written to say that he was coming home for the vacation and had taken a holiday job. I hung around near his house on his very first payday then waylaid him and asked to borrow some of his wages. He seemed slightly put out, but nevertheless handed over some money. It was to be 42 years before I saw him again, in a reunion brought about by this website. It's a measure of inflation since 1961 that he was happy to regard a pint as repayment of the loan with considerable interest!
	Encouraged by the success with Nigel, I spent a few days calling on several of the leading lights of the Whetstone Crusaders (see Chapter 10), whose addresses I'd got from the phone book. I assured them that I was planning to became active in Cru again as soon as my dire financial situation was sorted out. This was, of course, a blatant lie. They lent me quite a lot of money between them, not a penny of which, perhaps needless to say, did they ever get back. I was thus able to carry out my plan of touring the most hidden of the Soho pubs, where I drank quite a lot of Guinness, but in perfect isolation. If there were any of the supposed introducers there, they were choosing not to single me out for social elevation after all.
	I expanded my search to take in the whole of central London and discovered some fascinating and well-hidden little pubs in the process. One or two of them still exist, but most, in common with the many City and West End bombsites spectacularly ablaze with fireweed and Oxford ragwort throughout each summer, succumbed to the horrors of 1960s and 70s 'redevelopment', which itself is already beginning to be torn down. Oddly, when I returned home each day during this phase, my mother appeared not to notice that I had been drinking. Meanwhile my father's condition was steadily deteriorating. When he first went back into hospital I visited him now and again with my mother, but the sight of my father, bright yellow, shrunken and slowly starving to death, as well as the fact that he could hardly speak, was more than I could take. It wasn't sympathy for my father so much as some sort of extreme embarassment and a dread of the realities of life. It made no difference that my mother said that my father was upset that I had stopped visiting him. In fact, when she added that he was disgusted by my beard, I privately used this as justification for not visiting him, even though I strongly suspected she had made this up to bolster her own campaign against the luxuriant ginger bush.
Since writing that, I've found his death certificate, which shows that he died in June.	One day I returned home from my ramblings and my mother said "There are just the three of us now". I angrily snapped back: "I can count!" and probably went up to my room to play records until tea was ready. The only thing that upset me about this news of my father's death was my mother's sentimental way of announcing it. It is quite astonishing to me now that not only did I neither visit my father for weeks prior to his death, nor offer my mother any support or comfort at any time during his illness, but I had no sense of loss at all until I reached middle-age, when I began to think a bit about my past. The fact that I can't even remember whether he died near the beginning of this period of roaming London, in the Spring of '61, or nearer the end of it, in the Autumn, is symptomatic of my icy lack of reaction.