Where the Halling Valley River Lies - Carl Halling (lightest ebook reader txt) 📗

a tall redhead of about 26 who looked a little like Edward Fox in “A Day of the Jackal”.
Like David, he loved music and fashion and the Soul Boy and Punk scenes, and they hit it off from their very first meeting back at HMS Ministry.
He later confided in David about his early life which had been marked by one family tragedy after the other; and his reserve masked a troubled inner life. But he was not a man to flaunt it…nor an ability to handle himself in any situation. Such as the time an intoxicated sailor took a sudden, violent dislike to David in a south coast bar, and was clearly keen to do some serious damage to his pretty cherub’s face. At which point Damon placed himself between David and his aggressor, before telling him to back off in no uncertain terms.
Doubtless, though, there were those who wondered how such a natural-born gentleman ended up on the lower deck…such as the guys from another division altogether, based far away from the fleshpots of London where a simpler, harder way of life prevailed who sailed with them that summer to the port of Ostend in Belgium.
And when some of them were squaring up with some locals who had somehow offended them, Damon and David made it clear they had no intention of joining in.
Which prompted one of their number, a little waiflike sailor of about 16 or 17, to turn to them and ask, "What's wrong with youse guys?” with a look of utter bewilderment on his beardless face. But Damon simply didn't see the point of fighting for the sake of it. While a secret inner fortitude would eventually see him being commissioned as an officer in the Royal Navy, which had been his destiny all along; but not David’s.
His time with the Thames Division, RNR came to an end in late 1977 with a surprisingly positive character report. And if military life had never been for him, it became an important part of his identity nonetheless.
Even later in the summer, he joined the former Merchant Navy School in Kent as a trainee Radio Officer.
He formed several close friendships there; but closest of all was with Jayant, from Gravesend, a tough Thameside town in North West Kent with a large Indian community. And for a time, he and David were inseparable.
And it was through Jay that David started going to discos at Gravesend’s Woodville Hall.
And pretty well every week for a while, a gang from the college would take the train to Gravesend, to be treated like visiting royalty by the - mainly white and Asian - kids, whose outfits stood out in such striking contrast to the industrial bleakness of their surroundings.
For English suburban life in those days didn't include mobile phones or DVD players, personal computers or the world wide web, and so was a fertile breeding ground for way out youth cults such as the Punks and Soul Boys.
There were girl in chandelier earrings, wearing evening dresses and stiletto heels, which were in stark contrast to the hair colours they favoured, such as jet black or bleach blonde, with flashes of red, purple or green. Some wore bow ties, while others hanged their school colours around their necks.
The boys all had short hair, wore thin ties, mohair sweaters, thin ties, baggy, well-pressed peg-top trousers of red or blue, and winkle picker shoes. And when they took to the floor to pirouette and pose, they could forget the ordinary cares of their working class lives and become superstars for a brief few hours.
David enjoyed his time at Merchant Navy School and made several good friends in addition to Jay, but ultimately had to realise it wasn’t for him.
And soon after returning to London, he auditioned for a place on the three year drama course at the Silverhill School of Music and Drama in the City of London, which was really where he’d wanted to go in the first place.
And Silverhill took him on, which was a bit of a surprise to him to say the least, seeing as he'd already failed two earlier auditions for the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.
Yet, it failed to prevent him sinking further into the nihilistic Punk lifestyle. And having been blown away by the hairstyle of one of a small gang of Punks he knew by sight from nights out in Dartford, he decided to imitate it a few weeks later:
It was spiked in classic Punk style, with a kind of a halo of bright blond taking in the front of the head, both sides, and a strip at the nape of the neck. And if you chose to chose to flaunt such a style in those days, you lived in constant fear of attack or abuse. For Punk's culture of insolence and outrage was extreme even by the standards of previous British youth cults; such as the Teds, the Rockers, the Mods, the Greasers, the Skins, the Suedeheads and the Smoothies.
And at the risk of being fanciful, it could be said that to some extent, Britain was a nation still under the sway of the moral values of the pre-war years, so that a cultural war was being fought for the soul of the nation. While the Punks were the avant-garde of a new Britain in a way that would be impossible today. And this may go some way towards explaining the incredible hostility Punks attracted from many ordinary members of the British public.
But David was determined to be part of the revolution. And to this end, he saw local Punk band Sham ’69 in a hall above the Surveyor, a pub in the heart of the Molesey Industrial Estate some 12 miles from the centre of London.
This was shortly before they shot to fame after singer Jimmy Pursey was arrested on the roof of the Vortex Punk club in central London on the 23rd of September 1977.
Sham’s very name had been derived from the legend Walton and Hersham ’69, scrawled on a wall in Molesey’s sister town of Hersham, referring to the year she topped the premier division of the long defunct Athenian amateur football league.
David already knew Pursey by sight, having seen him mime a year or so earlier to Chris Spedding’s “Motorbiking” at the famous Walton Hop, supposedly Britain’s first ever discotheque, which held regular mime competitions for Hop regulars.
Pursey was such a regular, and the same could be said to a degree of David and his brother Dany. And on those nights they attended, David’s overwhelming obsession was finding a girl to dance with whenever the upbeat Soul gave way to what were then known as “slowies”.
But one evening, David and Dany and a friend considered taking part in the competition themselves; having selected “I Can’t Give You Anything” by the Stylistics to mime to; but at the last minute, they changed their minds, as they hadn’t even the trouble to rehearse.
While unlike the ditherer David, Pursey made it clear to all who witnessed his performances at the Hop he’d been born to be a star.
And sure enough, for a brief period, he was one of Britain’s leading Punk heroes. While his followers, the Sham Army, consisting of skinheads on both the left and the right of the political spectrum, became almost as famous as him. But after a riot at the Middlesex Polytechnic in North London, the first frenetic phase of Sham’s performing career came to a close. Although they continued having hits until in 1980, when they disbanded…until the inevitable reformation.
But 1977 was Punk’s year zero in the UK, and a far darker one than those immediately preceding it for that very reason.
From its London axis, it spread like a raging plague…even infecting the most genteel suburbs with an extreme and often horrifying sartorial eccentricity, which, fused with a defiant DIY ethic and a brutal back-to-basics brand of hard-driving Rock produced something utterly unique even by the standards of the time.

Around about this time, David was often to be found at the Surveyor on a Sunday night with Dany, and mutual friends.
On one occasion, the usual Disco or Pop gave way to a violent Punk Rock anthem which saw the tiny dance space being invaded by deranged pogo-dancers as if they’d been summoned by some malignant deity. On another, a Ted revivalist who favoured flashy fifties-style clothing, tried to start some trouble with him in the toilet, at which point Vinnie, another Ted who'd befriended him about a year previously when he looked like an extra from a ‘50s High School flick stepped in with the magical words: "He's a mate!"
Vinnie’s intervention may have saved him from a hiding that night, because Teds had a loathing of Punks informed by their essential conservatism. To them, Punks probably seemed to have no respect for anything.
The Teds, or Edwardians as they were initially styled, were widely perceived as folk devils when they’d first emerged in the UK in about 1952, with a look purloined from a small minority of upper class Guards officers who’d adapted the Edwardian fashion in the late 1940s in defiance of post-war austerity.
However, in comparison to the later Punks, they were a model of respectability, and that was especially true of the ‘70s, when a brief revival resulted in battles between Teds and Punks taking place on West London’s Kings Road all throughout ‘77.
They persisted into the ‘80s, only to all but vanish from the face of the globe with the passing of that last great decade of youthful eccentricity.
It may have been that very night that Vinnie the Ted almost imploringly asked him whether he into "this Punk lark”, and David assured him he wasn't. He may even have added he still loved the fifties, which was true to a degree, but that wasn’t the point. For the fact is he lied to him to look good in his eyes, which was a pretty low thing to do to a friend.
But given the times, young men like David were forced to learn certain survival tactics, such as the ability to flee at the first whiff of trouble, if they were to avoid the trouble they were constantly confronted with.
Yet, by the time of the internet revolution, Punk had become just another exhibit of the Rock and Roll museum, itself just another branch of the vast entertainment industry. And the culture wars of the late ‘70s had long since been quieted, while rebellion had become more or less fully co-opted by the mainstream.
To give Punk its due, that this situation had come about in the first place was at least partly as a result of its utter ferocity. Which is to say of its first serious assault on the mainstream, which targeted a Britain still desperately clinging to the final vestiges of its Judaeo-Christian moral fabric. And while it was rejected by the vast majority of British people - indeed the West as a whole - its influence went on to be little short of cataclysmic.
Yet, declared dead by about ‘79, it returned to the underground, where it set about fertilising one rebel movement after the other throughout the ‘80s. And so, Post-Punk, No Wave, Anarcho-Punk, Industrial and Goth all benefited from its ethos, until finally in the early ‘90s, the Alternative Rock revolution brought it fully back into