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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781771612388 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Mosaic Press |
| Publication date: | 08/17/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 260 |
| File size: | 12 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
If I had known in advance about all of the hardship, extreme poverty, close encounters with death and evenings spent nail biting with worry, I think I never would have bought a one-way ticket to London. Instead, I would have just hidden under the bed in fright. Like "clever Tony" in Evelyn Waugh's Handful of Dust, I was blissfully unaware of what lay ahead in my life, and just like him I was headed for trouble, destined to find things out the hard way.
Then again, if I hadn't been brave enough, or stupid enough, to undertake such an adventure, I would have missed out meeting some incredible people and barrels of fun in some faraway places. So maybe I was lucky to have no means of escape from the events I inadvertently set in motion when I purchased that ticket.
* * *
I had a load of stuff with me for somebody who didn't really have a forwarding address. Just like Waugh's Tony again I suppose ... except I wasn't rich and I didn't have any porters. I wasn't headed for "deep Africa" either (like he was), though in some ways I might as well have been.
I'd brought a 1973 Gibson Flying V guitar, a 1970s Guild D-40 acoustic guitar (one for each hand) and a black army surplus trunk with enough clothes stuffed in it to last a year.
Most of my clothes were things I could use to work in the service industry: dickybow ties, dinner jackets, white shirts, singlets and pointy black shoes. They all fought for space inside the trunk and competed with jeans, t-shirts, and as many pairs of black pants as I could muster. It was jam packed. I had crammed as much as my 56 kilo luggage limit would allow. I suppose I thought I was getting my money's worth but in hindsight it is hard to recall why I really thought I needed all those things.
56 kilos was a hell of a lot of stuff, but that was international air travel back in the '90s. It was a different world to travel in those wonderful pre- September 11th days. The trunk was heavy as a small elephant. You needed a baggage trolley to move it through the concrete jungle of the airport.
Being a musician, I'd brought along a bewildering array of master tapes and other geegaws. Analog and DAT production masters (the expensive pre-CDR industry standard of the day). All of the records I'd made up to that point were nestled inside that trunk. I had audio masters for the first two Cakekitchen albums, three This Kind of Punishment albums, the TKP EP, my Messages For the Cakekitchen solo album and all but three of the ten Nocturnal Projections songs recorded at Auckland's Stebbings Studio in 1982 and '83. I also had actual slugaboutable vinyl copies of all of this stuff too, and some uncopied video masters to boot.
I remember I even brought a crescent spanner with me. It was packed into a small black travel case that also contained a quarter inch reel-to-reel tape editing block, splicing tabs, a chinagraph pencil and a pair of flea market surgical scissors that somehow used to belong to the Wellington Public Hospital. Why I thought England didn't have any spanners I can no longer remember. Perhaps it was because tools (and indeed editing blocks) in the '90s were so expensive in New Zealand that I treated them like gold.
* * *
So there I was at Gatwick Airport on the 4th of August 1990, scissors ... spanner ... guitars ... ready to activate my four year British patriality visa and apply in-person for permission to live and work in England.
There had already been a fair amount of rigmarole with the whole process just to get me to this point. My grandfather on my mother's side of the family was English, and according to UK law, I was entitled to live and work in the UK because of this connection. My connection to my father's Irish mother strangely didn't apply. You had to be male, and have a male grandparent, to make it work. Imperial ties to the colonies were swiftly eroding. For some reason I never thought about asking my father's father. He was from the Isle of Man. The Jefferies' name descended from that tiny rock wedged between Ireland and Wales. Our archetypes all descend from those sturdy and stubborn pilgrims born between a rock and a hard place. Perhaps that's what always made us such difficult (or at least unforgettable) customers.
I handed over my passport to the unsmiling lady at Gatwick Airport and self-consciously fiddled with my luggage. After what seemed like a lot of mumbling, a bit of throat clucking and a considerable amount of tut- tutting, the matronly English customs officer rubber stamped me with a sigh. Oh Monopoly board victory.
Passport control to Major Tom! Take your stuff with you and wheel your elephant on.
"Next please!" she said, in a loud authoritative voice.
After a non-stop thirty-six hour flight from Auckland (via Hawaii and Los Angeles) and all the stress of leaving New Zealand, I should have been hopping like a spring rabbit to finally arrive in the UK. Yet the long, claustrophobic and seemingly escapeless corridors of Gatwick squeezed all the victory juice out of the lemon of contention required to engage with British international authority.
I was pretty frazzled and was dying to feel a bit of sun on my face. The flight had been exhausting. Thirty six hours in a tin can, drunk on red wine, legs crushed. A hole burnt in your stomach from the microwaved food you ate too quickly. How could it be otherwise?
Your first international flight from one side of the world to the other is the worst jetlag you will ever experience. For one, there is the instant change of seasons. I had gone from a New Zealand winter to a sweltering English summer. Maybe that's why airlines get you drunk. When I finally wheeled my burden out into the blistering midday sun, my goose was well and truly cooked.
Although it seems hard to believe now, I had scant idea of what I would really do in London - no plan as to where I would live or how I would survive. The early '90s wasn't the information age we take for granted these days. Ashamed as I am to admit it, I had absolutely no real knowledge of the inner city of London and knew next to nothing of what to expect from life in England. As it turned out, I didn't even have a single valid contact in the city when I got there. The two addresses I had tucked safely under my belt for security were both hopelessly out-of-date.
When the taxi driver asked me "Where to?" it took me quite a while to give him a good answer. My initial reply was: "Take me into London please."
"Yeah, but whereabouts?"
I realized that I didn't really know. I told him that I wanted to stay in the inner city for a few days, or perhaps take the train up to Scotland. We agreed that Victoria Station would be the best place for me to go. Trains and coaches left for lots of different places from there. It was as good a place as any. It was the longest I had ever been in a cab in my life.
I had been told to allow about £50 for a cab fare to the inner city but it came closer to £60 when I was finally dumped outside a B&B near Victoria. It looked like such a flea pit that I tried one around the corner, a little closer to Sloane Square. This one also looked like a flea pit but had at least been freshly painted. By then, it didn't really matter so much.
In those days, the exchange rate was shocking. It took $3 to buy £1. No matter how much you had squirreled away, you were instantly skinned upon arrival in the UK. A quick calculation led me to the shocking realization that it wouldn't be long before I was broke. From my £800 life savings stashed in secret compartments, £100 was already out the door just to get into town and find a place to sleep.
I felt totally exhausted, yet totally wired. My God, I had just immigrated! I'd left a country of three and a half million people to a city of over twelve million, and on a one-way ticket to boot.
I was given a room on the second-floor of an old three-storey building. The carpet dust and grime would have made George Orwell suspicious, but I was glad to take it. I showered, locked my stuff inside the dust pit, and went for my first walk in England.
London was in a heat wave. Everything was sticky. I realized later on that English summer only lasted three weeks (and then it rains for the rest of the year) but at that moment, I was beginning to wonder what I had got myself into.
Though I was almost too tired to stay awake, I was too awake to contemplate sleep and dying to have a look at the place. Wasn't I meant to be off on a big adventure? I must have looked weird walking down the street staring at everything with bug eyes, because I was stopped by two policemen on Buckingham Palace Road less than five minutes after setting forth.
"Hello, hello, hello, what's all this then?" they said.
Unaware of how out-to-lunch I must surely have appeared, I went straight from the tea pot and into the frying pan. I asked them if they knew where I could find a chemist. This wasn't a good question to ask a policeman. Soon I was rolling up my sleeves so they could examine my arms for holes. I told them I had just arrived in London that very minute and wanted to purchase some vitamins because I wasn't feeling 100%. "It's for the jet-lag officer. You know how it is Sir?"
"What sort of bloody smart arse goody two-shoes have we got here then?" they must have thought.
I had no idea that the equivalent of what a Kiwi called a chemist shop was called a pharmacy in England. Lucky for me, I had my passport and visa date stamped for that morning. I suppose the British class system had led them to expect all sorts of unimaginable rubbish from the colonies to materialize asunder every now and then.
Once they had established that I wasn't trying to take the piss out of them, and was about the biggest greenhorn you could find, they got bored with me and let me go, like one of the manky and unlovable pigeons in Trafalgar Square. Chuntering away to themselves, they went back on their beat. I grumbled to myself about police harassment and civil rights, and made a mental note to watch my step with the boys in blue in my new country of residence.
It took me a long time to adjust to living in a city of that size. Sometimes I wonder if I ever really adjusted. Although our senses are set to detect the world we live in, an equal part of them is concerned with blocking out the magnitude of impulses and enticements that constantly invade our senses from the outside world. A New Zealander in London is like a horse that has had its blinkers suddenly removed. Adjusting to living in the sweaty, gritty and uneasy inner-city lifestyle of London took some getting used to.
I can distinctly remember being totally phased by the absolute topographical difference between London and any New Zealand city. I literally stared manically at street signs, strained my head forward and peered too-closely into shop windows looking for identifiable landmarks that seemed unreachable. On my second day in the city, I went exploring and got lost within three blocks of my B&B. It took me two days to find the bus end of Victoria Station, and another day to find the entrance to the Tube.
New Zealand has no subway. I had seen tube trains on TV, but had never equated them with inner-city life. I will never forget my first journey to a tube station. I stood outside the entrance to Sloane Square, reading the notice boards and advertisements, and asked a passer by "What's in there then?" When he explained that it was the Tube, with electric trains that ran underground, I wasn't sure whether I should believe him or not. I hadn't considered the prospect of such things existing before. Since New Zealand doesn't have underground trains why should anywhere else? He might be pulling my leg. He must have thought I was taking the piss.
Much to my surprise, the guy wasn't lying. I bought a day pass and took the plunge. What strange unexpected glee to find the model railways of colonial childhood realized in life-size. Later on, upon closer inspection, I decided that the train system was pretty horrible and that the mass of never-to-be-untangled wires and filthy tunnels that constitute the British public transport system of Central London was a thing of misery. Initially though, I was all for it.
After a few laps on the Circle Line, I got brave and headed for Oxford Circus. I was curious to find some of the streets I had seen on the Monopoly board growing up. I arrived at Oxford Circus around 1pm. It was rush hour on one of London's busiest shopping streets.
It was murder. I had never been amongst so many people in my life. My born-under-a-big-sky Kiwi antennas felt extremely aware of the closeness and magnitude of the sheer number of bodies, cars, newspapers, trucks and hubris going on around me. I was on edge, uncomfortable, stuck in the busy two-legged rush hour world of Central London.
I've lived in a lot of other foreign cities since my three years in London, but out of any place or country that I have set up camp, I think London was the hardest one of any to live in. I would hate to get old there. I am sometimes surprised that I lasted as long as I did, or that (even worse) it took me so long to escape. I never really felt very comfortable there. I arrived in the city at the end of Thatcherism. Morale, hope and dignity were at an all-time low. But as I said before, if I had known what I was about to get myself into, it might have been better to hide under the bed and count myself lucky.
* * *
A renewed calculation of my quickly diminishing cash flow revealed my prospects were even worse than I first though. I had to do something pretty quickly or I was in trouble. If I didn't make a concentrated "Hurry up Harry" effort on the job front my £20 a day B&B would eventually lead me to be a hungry and homeless. I had so much stuff with me too. I needed some sort of solution to a B&B or I would end up out on the street and probably lose the lot.
I had done a training course as a barman in New Zealand before coming to England, so with a shirt and tie on (in the middle of a heat wave) I wandered from pub to pub asking for a job. After a few days, and close to 50 rejections, I got lucky. I scored a job behind the bar in one of the endless watering holes in the West End. But this still wasn't really a solution. It wasn't full-time, and I wanted to work in a bar I could also live in so I could have a place for me and all my junk.
A week later, I found a live-in job at another pub and moved in. It was a £2.60 an hour, six days a week job on the edge of Piccadilly Circus. It was there that the long hand of fate dealt me an unexpected bit of luck, and where I made a connection that set an unexpected chain of events, and a whole way of life, into motion.
On my way to the post office outside of Tower Records on a lunch break, I bumped into former Chills bassist Martin Kean by absolute chance.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Time Flowing Backwards"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Graeme Jefferies.
Excerpted by permission of Mosaic Press.
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