Fifty years ago today

Fifty years ago today I woke up in Saffron Walden, last morning of a stay with school friend Sue, a stay which both underlined to some extent my social ineptness, compared to hers, and included several ‘firsts’ - pubs and snogging against a wall with just-met strangers  -  all taking place against an insistent, ever-repetitive, slightly whining,  ‘From a jack to a king.’ 

Fifty years ago today, the bus ride home, Saffron Walden to Bishop’s Stortford and a second bus from there to Hunsdon, and me so filled with a heightened sense of  ... of something ... that I still recall the sensation, that fizzing self-awareness as I looked south across the valley of massed trees in Much Hadham to the space where the turreted fairy-tale castle was no more.   (This castle re-inserted itself into my head last year, become inspirational  background to a to-be-written novel, subsequently a found Flickr photo of its ruined state connecting me to a boy I sat beside in primary school, much more than fifty years ago;  the novel is now one-third writ.)

Fifty years ago today I dressed for the youth club visit (the reason for my earlier than otherwise intended return home) to the ‘59 Club’, in Hackney Wick, knowing only that  it’s leader was the ‘Ton-up vicar’, in brown shoes, mustard colour dress and nearly-black stockings which I still have, the rip reminding me of an unthinking trip on a rose-bush.

Fifty years ago  we travelled there by coach, me sat next to Gillian, and there, in semi-shadowed, high-ceilinged dustiness, I danced and talked to Steve, marvelling at the antics of the hunch-shouldered mods, gloomy circling round handbags and dressed in polka dots;  unexpected in a bikers’ club;  we snogged all the way home.