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It was 1977. We were 16. Two schoolboys from a provincial town. But Britain had just voted ‘Remain’ in the first Brexit referendum. We had exams coming up and a long summer holiday ahead. And we were both obsessed by the idea of Europe.
Personally, I blame Ernest Hemingway. If we hadn’t just read For Whom the Bell Tolls, Markie and I would never have planned to hitchhike all the way to Spain, where we expected to find some life and death battle between right and wrong, and some gamin-haired girl for whom we’d make the earth move.
We’d sit on Markie’s veranda (his was a working-class family living in a detached middle-class house, while I was from a middle-class family living in a working-class terrace), smoking Gitanes cigarettes, strumming Am G F E on our Spanish guitars, before dancing around the electric fire with its fake-flame effect, imagining the real fires and shadows of flamenco.
The Italian film director Franco Zeffirelli is also to blame. Romeo and Juliet was our set text for exams that year, and we’d gone to the local cinema on a school trip to see Zeffirelli’s new version. So did the girls from the high school next door. While they guffawed and squawked at the actor’s codpieces, most of the grammar schoolboys were misty-eyed and mournful.Soppy romantics, Markie and I would finish our exams, and then onto Verona to fight for our lives like Mercutio in some hot dusty Italian square.
Forty years ago, Britain still had a manufacturing industry, and our London overspill town was ringed by light industrial estates. Markie got work in his dad’s aerial factory, bending bits of aluminium, plastic and wires together, while I got a summer job at a turned parts factory where my Dad was employed as a lathe operator after his multiple bankruptcies. They paid 50p an hour. After six weeks, we’d have enough to get across the Channel, and then flamenco and Juliet awaited.
But then along came Gunter Grass to ruin it all. I was in the town centre bookshop, warily looking for something to read. Back in those days, you couldn’t even open a book without being forced to pay for it. Then along came a social worker friend of my mother’s who pointed out a paperback with a golden cover. She knew I’d just finished the whole of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and told me that this was the closest she’d come to reading anything so fantastical.
“So you want to travel, to see the world… but you’ll learn…there’s nothing to see…” mocked the Man in the Brown Suit.
I bought it: The Tin Drum. It should have come with a health warning. Gunter Grass’ wartime classic was like a bad trip on cannabis resin – and I’d had a few of those. It started in Gdańsk on the eve of the German invasion of Poland with a dead horse’s head wriggling full of eels – and went downhill from there. I used to try to read it while cutting metal strips in the turned parts factory. I would look up from my book at the strange beauty of the light bouncing off steel rods from the grimy skylights of the factory. And regularly explode the circular blade in a spatter of coolant fluid and sharp metal.
After six or seven lost blades, the foreman was furious. He called me a “f*cking student” and explained how he’d gone to school with no shoes. My Dad kept quiet at his lathe, with his usual Buddha-like detachment. He’d risen up to being a management consultant and, after a series of disasters, was back on the factory floor.
The workers, wearing overalls and eating fish and chips in the canteen, were completely separated from the management, who arrived in flash Rovers, wore pastel shirts, braces and ties, and were served by waitresses in their own restaurant. I didn’t know how my Dad coped with the snootiness and segregation, having once promoted Scandinavian theories of small egalitarian work teams as a consultant. But he smiled enigmatically still turning the lathe and said “happiness can come from making a perfect cup of tea”. This was my Dad: a walking, talking copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. If I couldn’t read my book, I’d learn his way of alleviating the tedium.
They moved me on from breaking circular saws to polishing steel tubing. Every few hundred or so I’d select for special treatment, filing carefully so every edge was smooth to the touch, and burnishing so lovingly they shone like moonlight. Then I’d sneak them home. This was my revenge on class-ridden 1970s British industry. They’d make perfect slides for an American-style guitar. But, when I gave one to Markie, he pointed out that the steel was heavy for his finger, and made a wrenching sound on nylon strings like an exploding saw.
The tubes rusted unused in my bedroom. We had more important things to plan. Markie had nearly finished The Tin Drum and was trying to teach me swear words in German, Hungarian and Serbo-Croat. We agreed not to take our guitars because of the extra clutter. Rather than busking our way to Spain, we’d do some grape-picking near the Spanish border to top up the £120 we’d both saved. (Because of exchange controls, anything over £100 had to be stamped on the back of our passports.) I told my mother we’d be gone for about six weeks and we booked our ferry tickets.
Nothing would stop us now. We were making the crossing to that vast unexplored place: the Continent.
The Attack of the Killer Slugs
On the platform for the night ferry at Victoria station, I first saw her. It was just like Dylan’s song One More Cup of Coffee. Her skin was white, her hair was black and her eyes like two diamonds in the sky. But she wasn’t M