THE STORY CONTINUES. 2 The Disco

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I’d not done much the first year at ‘uni’, as I now called it Aussie style, except study. For one thing, I was nervous about picking up academic work again after four years. Could I still do it? And on top of that I’d had two years to do in one.

    So it hadn’t mattered that I was a few years older than most of the undergraduates. In any case, I wasn’t at uni for the social life this time round. I was there to get a qualification.
    Now, in my final year, I had the spectre of exams in eight months’ time. Another reason to keep my head down.
 
The carefree days of Australia already seemed a long time ago. The memory lodged inside me like a golden egg and sometimes I wondered if I’d ever feel like that again.
  

Alison had been my neighbour in a block of university flats during my first year.

    As we shared our new house together I grew to know her a little better, but whenever I told her bits and pieces from my past she was shocked and said she didn’t want to know.

    She was ‘saving’ herself for her husband, when she found him. She believed in true love.

    Oh well. She made me feel a little grubby but all the more reason to keep myself to myself.

 

Graham, one of the men in the house, was a postgraduate, studying for a doctorate in the physics department of the university. He was therefore older and I felt a kinship with him that I didn’t feel with other students. Experience perhaps.

    He asked me to accompany him to a physics department ‘disco’ and, in spite of my priorities and a reluctance to give him the wrong idea about our relationship, something made me say yes.

The disco, a get-together for staff and students, was held in one of the nightclubs on Exeter’s Quay. Graham and I arrived early.

    The DJ wasn’t in his booth yet and a music tape played softly over an empty dance floor. A mirror ball revolved above it sprinkling snowflakes of light.

    Without the usual press of people to disguise it, the rest of the place was far from salubrious: threadbare velvet upholstery, mirror-shiny tables and a stench of cigarettes, sweat and beer.

    I excused myself and went to the Ladies. I wanted to establish my independence. I wasn’t Graham’s girlfriend and I didn’t want to be.

    In any case, I was having my usual wardrobe crisis. With my fluctuating weight there was no point buying clothes and today I was wearing an ancient summer skirt, held up with safety pins which were digging into me. I needed to make some adjustments.    

    When I emerged I could see Graham standing next to the dance floor talking to someone who was waving his arms about in agitated fashion. He had a mane of dark wavy hair reaching to below his shoulders, and a bushy black beard. As I drew closer I could see that he was wearing a faded blue and white tie-dyed shirt, so threadbare it was almost transparent.

    ‘They made me leave my cloak in the cloakroom,’ I could hear him gabbling. ‘It’s my cloak. I can’t be separated from it. They made me leave my cloak in the cloakroom. They don’t understand. They made me leave my cloak in the cloakroom.’

    Graham and I exchanged a look. I wondered how long the man had been going on for.

    And then I realised who it was. It was the man in the red cloak whom I’d seen in Cornwall House the other night. It had to be. Who else would wear a cloak?

    Perhaps I could break his flow. Someone had to bring order to the proceedings.

    ‘But why do you wear it anyway?’ I interjected, remembering the dichotomy I’d noticed in his behaviour. ‘Is it that you want people to look at you or is it that you don’t?’

    The man stopped dead and stared at me. For a moment, he appeared almost normal. And then he spoke, in an almost normal voice, but slowly and carefully as if he was only then learning how to speak.

    ‘That . . .depends . . . on who it is.’

    His eyes were fixed on mine and now it was my turn to stop dead.

    I knew this man. I knew everything about him. I’d met him before in a previous life, in previous lives. They stretched out behind me in an echoing corridor.

    It was like falling off a precipice. I couldn’t breathe.

    I grabbed Graham’s arm. ‘I need a drink.’   

‘Who was that,’ I asked as I dragged Graham away.
    ‘Him?’ he said. ‘Oh, that’s John. He works in the department. Bit of an idiot.’

THE STORY CONTINUES. 1 Cloak-man

By popular demand, I continue here the story started in my recent ‘Australia 1975’ series of posts. If you haven’t read that yet, you'll find the first instalment here.

As ever, let me know what you think of this, and whether you want me to continue.

 

 Autumn 1977
 

The first time I saw him was in the bar of Cornwall House where I was sipping warm white wine with my friend and housemate Alison.
 
I’d met up with my parents in Sydney and trailed round after them through a succession of lunches and teas with posh Australians who could have been English. They looked and sounded just the same.
    Why my parents wanted me there with them, I couldn’t imagine, as I didn’t contribute anything to the proceedings, feeling as alien as I always had both in England and with those sort of people. I didn’t condemn the people. I blamed myself. My head started to ache.
    I went with my parents to the airport to see them off and as we approached the departure gate both my mother and I started to cry. My father hovered awkwardly. He was obviously upset too but he was old-fashioned. It was women’s job to cry and men’s job to look after them.
    I returned to Hampo and Charles’s house where I was staying and spent a week or so writing off for work – probably being an awful nuisance to the family, but they never made me feel that way. But my heart wasn’t in it. Something had changed. Australia had lost its magic.

    Was it that I didn't feel safe any more, that even though Australia was the far side of the world I could still be found?

    Was it duty that called, pity for my parents?

    Or did I feel deep down that my time in Australia had come to an end, and that for some reason it was time to go back?

    Whatever the reason, I didn't think too much about it. I acted on instinct and followed my parents home.

 
England seemed very small and cramped after Australia – small houses, small people, small landscapes. Having been wearing sarongs and flip-flops for six months, I couldn’t get used to wearing proper clothes and shoes. It was so formal. So stiff. My real self began to retreat again.
    I did some temporary secretarial work, bicycling from my parents' house in Kent near London every day, and then got a summer job living in and working at a pub on the Norfolk coast in the east of England.

    After egalitarian Australia, the conditions were a shock. We were treated like serfs and not fed properly. My eating returned to being erratic, I filled up on bread and chips, and I started to put back on all the weight I'd lost in Australia.

Before I went to Norfolk, I tackled the load of stuff I’d brought back from London the year before and just dumped in my bedroom at my parents’. Everything, including a tottering pile of papers, was in a terrible muddle.

    As I went through the papers I came across a letter that one of my first-year university tutors had written to me after I'd dropped out.

    ‘We’re sorry to see you go, but if you ever change your mind, do get in touch.’
    Yes! I thought. What a nice letter. That’s what I can do – finish my degree.

Except when I was in Australia, I hadn’t stopped feeling bad for leaving ‘uni’, as I now called it Aussie-style. I'd seen it as a failure, even though with distance I could see some of the reasons.

    In any case, I'd realised that I had to have a degree if I wasn’t to carry on doing menial work for the rest of my life. Not that I'd minded menial work in Australia, but it wasn't the same back in England.

    I certainly didn't want to go back to London and I couldn't stay living at home. It was boring to the extreme.

    Perhaps I was stronger now. Perhaps I could redeem that chapter.

    

The university welcomed me back. I was to repeat year one and at the same time proceed with year two.
 
I was now at the start of my final degree year at Exeter university, living in a city house with four other students - Alison and three males.

    It was a rowdy night at Cornwall House, the university’s new social centre. Sound bounced off the high brick walls and the floor-to-ceiling windows. It was hard to talk.

    Alison and I sipped our wine in silence and watched the goings-on.

    At a nearby table a group of males – rugby types – were taking off their trousers and showing their behinds. They thought it was hilarious. But nobody else did. They ignored them.

    People hurried past to and from the library or their university accommodation, banging their way into and out of the cloakrooms and launderette next to us.

    ‘Anoraks’ (male science students with few social skills) and ‘wellies’ (rich students with cars who lived outside the city in country cottages). Denim and beige. Loud voices. Hellos and goodbyes.

    All the usual.

The man swooshed into a chair at an empty table opposite Alison and me. He was wearing a red-velvet floor-length cloak with a hood. He flung the folds of the voluminous garment around him and peeped mischievously out from under the hood, as if daring people to engage with him but keeping his options open by wrapping himself up. A few straggles of long hair escaped from the hood. He was on his own.

    Exeter was a small university at the time with probably only a few thousand students. Almost everything took place on the campus so you got to know most faces. I hadn’t come across this man before.
    And I hoped not to come across him again. A nutter, I decided. Best avoided.
    And that was that.
    Or so I thought.

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Ellie RIP

 23 June 2010 to 26 January 2026

Aren't I sweet

I just have to keep on digging, and I'll get there eventually

Why do I have to be squashed in the front of this car?

How do I get at those ducks?

This snow stuff makes me go a bit mad

There's nothing better than a good sleep . . .

. . . a good view . . .

. . . a winter's dawn . . .

. . . a friend . . .

. . . a long walk on Dartmoor . . .

. . . a good paddle . . .

. . . having my picture taken . . .

. . . and being filmed

AUSTRALIA 1975. 10 'I'll be back'

My father worked as a commodity broker in the City of London in a family company started by his great-uncle Leo. Leo was a Jewish immigrant at the start of the twentieth century who went out to the South Seas, visiting all the islands and arranging to buy their ‘copra’ (part of the inside of the coconut) which he then sold to soap manufacturers for its oil.

    My father continued the practice, travelling round the Pacific every few years to renew friendships and contracts, sometimes with my mother who loved sun and heat like me. The islanders called him Mr John and still spoke of Mr Leo and Mr Roy (my grandfather). Australia was part of the itinerary.
 
The letter was from my mother.
    ‘We’re coming out to Australia,’ she wrote. ‘Your father’s doing one of his tours. Can we meet up in Sydney?’
 
What? This was the first I’d heard of the trip even though my mother and I had been corresponding regularly on thin blue ‘aerogrammes’ ever since I’d left the UK. My father’s trips took months to organise and were usually planned years in advance.
    They were coming out to get me back, I knew it.
    But how could I refuse to see them?
    I couldn’t.
 
All my friends came up to the airstrip to see me off and I hugged them all good bye.
    ‘I’ll be back,’ I called as I climbed into the waiting plane.
    Of course I would, one way or another. This was just a fleeting visit down south.
 
I watched out of the plane window as the moss-like archipelago faded from view, and steeled myself for the return to civilisation.

Next instalment

AUSTRALIA 1975. 9 The Letter

Christmas was approaching and each day the weather became hotter. Then the wind grew. And grew. A cyclone was on its way, due to hit us directly. The boats were moved round to the other side of the island and we were advised to go to bed with our clothes on. I took my notebook with me too, clutched to my chest. I wasn’t having anyone else getting their hands on that.

    The next day we woke to the world as normal. The cyclone had changed direction at the last minute and missed us.

    Having heard all about The Darwin Cyclone (which was presumably a particularly ferocious one as it was talked about so much), I was astonished at how calmly the whole incident had passed. Stalwart people, these Aussies.

 
A single cannabis plant grew outside the cabin I shared with Di. I had no idea how it got there as cannabis was not widespread. Alcohol was the drug of choice. Alan however usually had a stash in the caravan where he and Jayne lived and sometimes he shared it.
    One evening he and I lay outside looking up at the stars and had a cosmic conversation. I was thrilled. I’d been wanting cosmic conversations all my life. Ever since I was six in fact when I became terrified of eternity and wondered if God would make an exception in my case and allow me to be extinguished completely. Goodness knows what was going on there.
 
As the heat grew so did the guest numbers, and I fell ill, waking with dripping sheets every morning. On my third day in bed, Jayne came up to see me and said, ‘I’ve never known anyone spend so long in bed.’ I did feel bad about deserting the other waitresses just when they were at their busiest, but there was nothing I could do.
    When I recovered I’d lost half a stone and was now over a stone lighter than I'd been in London. My weight was almost normal. With no conscious effort on my part, it had been dropping slowly throughout my time at Lindeman. This was partly because there was no opportunity to binge-eat and partly because I didn’t want to. And the diet was healthy and simple. Australian beef – there was a whole room filled with carcasses tenderising, fish caught daily from around the island, and salads which we waitresses made every morning before breakfast.
 
For Christmas Day, I spent a chunk of my savings and booked a call home. On the day, I stood in line waiting for my turn at the island’s one telephone. The call woke my parents in the middle of the night but I thought they were pleased to hear from me even though my father passed me over to my mother as soon as possible, as he always did, and my mother spent the whole time crying.
 
After Christmas the rains began. Tiny yellow-green parakeets lay around on their backs, made drunk by the rotting fruit. A landslide deposited several inches of mud at the doors of the staff cabins. Guest numbers started to fall. Staff started to leave.
    I’d been in Australia ten months now. My working-holiday visa would expire in two but that didn’t matter. Many people were working in the country illegally (and a little later the government was to extend an amnesty to them all so that it could bring records up to date). I began to have vague dreams of a little house in the bush. Me writing.
    I had plenty of money now – more than enough to pay my father back for the plane ticket. Probably enough in fact to live for a year without working. So that part of my Australian adventure was done.
 
Then I received a letter.

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