TO THE PUNKS OF DAWLISH
"Against the Bourgeois!" you raise your lip
& dandy costume
Against the Money Establishment you pogo to garage band
After humorous slavery in th' electronic factory.
I can’t remember the exact order of things, because I was
on a magic trip from the night before. There was a gang of us, me, Evo, Donna,
Cathy, Handy, Hyde. We got thrown out of Timepiece. We went to a house party by
the Prison. We shared tea made from two hundred mushrooms, which we drank cold
out of a little glass bottle. The Fall was on a stereo in the corner. No
Christmas For John Quays. I’ll have twenty No.6 for a headache.
I think I caught a glimpse of the Astral World, then I
disappeared through the centre of a vortex, through the hub of a spinning
wheel. I stood open mouthed in the centre of the room while everybody laughed
at me. Evo pushed me over and I broke a low table, and my wrists started to
pulse with a dull throb. I was wearing combat trousers that I’d soaked in the
bath with two tubs of black Dylon. I was only a kid, just fifteen. On the wall
was a poster of Colonel Kurtz, with helicopters on the horizon, coming in
against a red apocalyptic moon.
We got kicked out by an angry biker from the flat upstairs,
while his girlfriend looked down from the bedroom window in her nightgown. Evo
and Handy pulled each other into a privet hedge, shouting.
We wandered into the Centre, 2am, shoving each other all
the way over Exe Bridges. I looked up at the flame coloured leaves of a tree
under the streetlight in the shopping precinct, dancing in the wind. A chill
ran through me. Wisha wisha.
I could see faces in the tree, city hobgoblins. A gang of men started on us in
Cowick Street. They came over and asked for a light, ‘Fucking COME ON then
mate’. My heart started thumping.
One of them tried to butt Evo, saying he supported the IRA.
He misjudged and caught his nose on the crown of Evo’s head, effectively
butting himself. He was bouncing up and down on his toes in a kind of boxing
pose, and when he took a boot at me his trainer came flying off, leaving him
with his white tube sock trailing on the concrete. One of the men had a fucking
screwdriver in his hand. Another man was just standing there, eyes like slits,
out of it. Apart from us the streets were empty. The man with one shoe had
blood running down his wispy moustache. ‘I’ll shove that up your arse,’ Handy
told the one with the screwdriver. Someone grabbed my jacket and broke the zip.
I fell to the floor and spilt my can. They tried to stamp my face in but I curled
into a ball. A woman came out of her house and said she was going to phone the
police, and we legged it over the bridge to the Station laughing our heads off
all the way. No real damage done. My favourite Clash song: Complete Control.
We sat outside the station. I got really cold. The sun
rose. We sat silently for a while and watched the seagulls pick at the remnants
of discarded Saturday night chicken bones. We smelt fresh bread from the
bakery, heard a van throw down its stack of Sunday magazines with a startling
thump. Birds began to sing. I was heavy eyed, with the taste of blood and
tobacco in my mouth, like cream. When I looked at the sky I could see tiny
specks of light darting about. Vitality globules; the Fiery Lives. I thought of
what my grandmother had said to me when I had got roughed up in the doorway of
Dolcis, walking home from school one afternoon, broad daylight.
‘Getting beaten up is part of growing up.’
It was 1979. School was out for the Summer. We
sat on the steps of the station waiting for the morning train. Evo was called
Evo because he sniffed tubes of glue out of a plastic bag. It was a habit that
would eventually kill him. He died in a squat called The Pig and Bailiff, which was a fun place to go while it lasted,
next to Wat Tyler House. Evo
came from Dawlish and his mother was a magistrate. He stunk of glue all the
time. He always wore the same Crass shirt with blimp burns down the front. I
now realize he was committing slow suicide. His father would stumble home drunk
when the pubs closed at eleven, the nasty authoritarian boss of his
dysfunctional family, kids upstairs in the dark listening to it all going off. Boom
Boom. No wonder the shadows
cast by passing cars turned into incubi, crushing the breath out of them in
their nightmares.
Like I said, Evo died. His brothers were really, really bad
at the funeral. His dad wasn’t invited. They would have fucking knocked him
out. They played Straight To Hell by the Clash on a portable tape player, and said it’s what
Evo would have wanted. It’s not what he would have wanted. It’s not what anyone
would have wanted.
We waited for the train at St Thomas, with the rose
coloured rays of the early morning sun shining in our eyes. Evo was being a bit loud, singing a
mantra over and over; harry
rag, harry rag, I’ll do anything just to get a harry rag,’ fixed in our minds
like you’ll fall asleep hearing it, and you’ll wake up hearing it.
A station guard gave us a disapproving look but didn’t say
anything. Saturday night turned into Sunday morning and suddenly everything
looked different.
We all crashed into the seats on the train to Dawlish
Warren, shouting and laughing and drinking cans of Special Brew. A young couple
with children moved to another carriage where they could read their books in
peace. Then it was just us, sitting opposite a bald man with thick-rimmed
glasses and a heavy curly beard.
We didn’t have tickets, but the train went all the way down
the coast to Plymouth, and you’d not see the conductor for at least half an
hour. Evo shoved me and I shoved him back. The man sat with his feet crossed
under the seat, observing our antics with a good-humoured smile. He had a book
on his lap, and was taking notes. He had bright dancing eyes.
‘What are you writing?’ Evo said, breathless from our
tussle.
‘Poetry,’ he replied, in an American accent.
‘You a poet?”
‘Uh-huh.’
‘You from America?’ I asked, and he nodded with a smile.
‘Write a poem about us then,’ one of the girls called out.
‘I will,’ he said, ‘But first how about a little smoke for
you sons and daughters of Albion, courtesy of a Texas marijuana farm?’
Albion, the giant son of Poseidon, who founded this
country in the sea.
He closed his notebook and rolled a large joint, which
silenced us all. He gave it to Evo, and then rolled another one. I got up and
looked out into the corridor to see if the conductor was doing his rounds.
Outside we hit a sparkling stretch of coast, past a stretch of old sea wall,
gulls reflecting in the spring sun, boats tied up in the sand waiting for the
tide to come in. For a moment it took my breath away.
‘Are you going to Plymouth?’ the poet asked.
‘Dawlish Warren,’ I replied.
‘Cursed tragic kids rocking in a rail car on the Cornwall
Coastline, Luck to your dancing revolution!’ he exclaimed.
Evo took a deep drag on the joint.
‘Marijuana rots your brains’ he muttered, ending the
sentence with a cough. ‘At least that’s what they say on the fuckin telly.’
‘The punks of Dawlish.’ The poet said. ‘Your rage is more
elegant than the purse-lipped considerations of Cambridge, your mouths more
full of slang and kisses than tea-sipping wits of Eton, whispering over scones
and clotted cream, conspiring to govern your music.’
We were all quiet. We realized we were in the presence of a
holy man. Albion was no longer a giant, he told us, but the sick man of Europe,
living out its winter of discontent. We were its children, born from a nuclear
womb.
We started to bask in the glow of the little guru, like
followers sat round a Maharishi. We absorbed parts of him, which can be a
dangerous thing to do, but not on this occasion.
‘I’ve got the start of a poem.’ Evo said to the holy man,
showing how young he really was underneath it all. ‘Maggie Thatcher, Pecker
Snatcher. That’s all I’ve got though mate!’
The poet laughed and called him Glad Day Boy.
We rattled along past Brunel’s sea wall, crumbling under
the waves. You could smell the breath of the ocean, mixed with cordite from the
train’s air brakes. The secret salt of nature, the herald of an early morning
heatwave.
I stuck my head out of the window, stoned, and watched the
rails curve their rhythmic beat around the coast. I closed my eyes against the
blustering wind. A torrent of rose coloured atoms danced behind my tears. Evo,
Donna, Cathy, Handy, Hyde and me, all laughing like madmen.
It was many years later that I read The Punks Of Dawlish on a second hand stall. It was a bit like
finding a lost super-8 film with yourself in it. Or perhaps more like seeing
yourself in the background of a movie you didn’t even know they were filming. I
showed Handy the book it was in: Collected Poems 1947-1980. He manages a betting shop now, and always
seems to be outside smoking on the street. He flicked through the book but
didn’t really read it. We got talking about the old crew. Cathy took over her
parents’ garage and is doing really well. Hyde moved to the Philippines and
built a house in the jungle that looks like something out of Brookside. It has
an English tiled roof and a car port, and apparently villagers come from all
around to laugh at it. I’ve got a photo he sent with a long horned cow chained
up outside the ridiculous house, near Bacalod, not far from Manila.
Donna never grew up. I saw her the other day
playing a penny whistle under the shelter of Tesco Metro, with a dog sat next
to her on a blanket. She showed me her teeth. One dentist said they’d all have
to come out, but another one claimed she could save them, not a problem. I had
my doubts about that.
Donna talked like she was speeding her tits off.
Forty-five years old now, with a son of her own, who had run away to live on a
traveler’s camp in Ireland because he couldn’t stand the string of pricks she
brought home with her.
She
was still punk though, still clutching a can of strong lager. I wondered if she
knew it was thirty years to the day since Evo had died?
Evo’s funeral ended up with some recriminations in the pub,
everyone holding each other back in ugly suits, spilling their drinks.
I prefer to remember my friend lying on his back in the
dunes at Dawlish Warren, the surge of the tide coming in, seaweed drying out in
the sand, gulls calling in the distance, families in their swimwear getting an
early start on the day. A pristine ice cream van parked by the beach huts.
And on the train, that little poet making his way to who
knows where, holy holy holy behind his typewriter. And me with my mouth of bad short stories. And the others
now dancing silhouettes on the shoreline, just distant echoes behind the white
shroud of time.
We were the children of Albion, becoming what we saw.
It would never
be like that again in a lifetime.
(First published in Riptide Journal Volume 7, alongside writers such as Sam North, Ginny Bailey and Luke Kennard.)
Full Volume available here:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Riptide-Volume-Journal-ebook/dp/B008F8RH1E
