Rayge wrote:Back tomorrow with more of this
Yere ’tis:
Part One
Print Scans
The Marlowe Years1976, I think, when I was working for the UK edition of
Reader's Digest: 168 Putney Bridge Road
TT - The Boho PhaseNow an urbane academic, broadcaster and man of letters, then a hard-drinking, hard-puffing man with terrible taste in ill-fitting hats.
Late 70s, early 80s
Friday Night at Vernon TerraceIn Bill's room in Brighton, wearing a tie, which suggest I came straight from work to Victoria, but clutching the Cocobong, so not planning to go back there anytime soon. But would I really wear a jumper to work? Maybe the early 80s, when I wasn't doing the salaryman thing any more, and I wore the tie as a form of disguise when carrying large quantities of hash about.
Calli in the MirrorCalli lived with me and three other guys at 23 Abbey Street – this old peach-coloured mirror had been abandoned in the back garden there – in the academic year 1971-72, around the time I acquired my first camera. This may have been the very first self-consciously arty picture I took, rather than simply snapshotting
A Day OutThe upright lady in the middle of the picture is my maternal Grandma, while on the left is my Aunt Cissie. I'm guessing from how old they look that this is from the 1930s, and probably from Camber Sands, where I know they holidayed more than once. From the fact that there's four chairs, and several abandoned pairs of shoes, I guess my ma's little brother Bill was probably there, too, and maybe my grandad (who died a couple of weeks before World War II broke out) took the picture.
Eddie and GeoffJeez, there was me thinking above, about a picture from the 1930s, that everyone I mentioned was dead before the end of the century, and here's another one of which the same could be said, taken 50 years later, on my wedding day, June 30, 1988. The blonde is Eddie Bear, sixties and 70s friend of Chip before emigrating to the USA in the early 1980s, taking in the wedding on a brief trip back, the only time I met him: he died in 1999 (I think), running his motorbike into a truck head-on at an intersection in an evocatively-named (but temporarily forgotten) town in Northern California after swerving to avoid a car that had run a light. He died outside a store called Bears, as it happened. On the right is Geoff, glamour plumber and importer of bespoke designer radiators from Switzerland, who was the younger son of the Head Keeper at London Zoo in the 1950s. Lung cancer got him in 1998.
Pic taken in Chip's garden in Mangotsfield.
All ChangeGlenwood Road, Tottenham, 1953-ish
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