To quote the Daily Mirror‘s Cassandra in 1945, as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted…. Five weeks ago serious illness (not mine)left me wondering when I would next work on the Fairey biography. A more stable situation means I have now returned to the project, albeit not being able to devote as much time as I would like. In consequence I have begun writing chapter 5, on CRF in the 1920s. I keep fine tuning the previous chapter, which now runs to more than 18,000 words. A commentary upon the years 1917-22 of such length suggests that treatment of a period twice as long will require not one but two chapters. So much happened in the history of Fairey Aviation, and its chairman/managing director across the postwar decade that I face a real test of synthesis and succinctness. The editor at I.B. Tauris, publisher of my last two books and most likely this one, having read chapters 1 to 3 asked for more of Fairey the man. This seemed to me a justified demand, which chapter 4 starts to address; but what I am writing at present approaches head on. There is so much I now know about Dick Fairey, and yet so much I still don’t. For example, I’m fully cognisant of the man devoted to field sports and sailing, but how did he relax when not out in the countryside or on the water? Did he read much, and if so what? I know he liked variety theatre, but did he enjoy serious drama? Did he have an ear for music, and was he a film fan? Jane Tennant, Fairey’s daughter, is the obvious person to ask about CRF’s domestic hinterland. Travelling to and from London, and spending so much time waiting around, across the past month and more has left me plenty of time for reading, with David Kynaston’s Modernity Britain The Shake of the Dice 1959-62 the current volume. David is now into a period of time for which I have crystal clear memories (probably clearer than my recollection of what happened yesterday); and the same of course applies to the author. The photographs of starkly contrasting scenes (ultra modern, or industrial landscape no different from thirty years earlier) highlight just how much a world which Ross McKibbin charts as dissolving away by the early 1950s was still very much present ten years later. Larkin was right in observing the 1950s as a long decade with national awareness of The Beatles in 1962-3 signalling the delayed onset of ‘The Sixties’, whether swinging or not. Aspirational middle class social mores and ‘standards’, consolidated in the 1950s, were resilient well into the succeeding decade and beyond – in our house swearing constituted a seismic shock, and I was expected to show due deference and respect to the ‘aunties’ and ‘uncles’ who were my parents’ friends – re the latter, I have passed on to David K my theory that our parents’ generation could no longer expect their offspring to address friends as Mr or Mrs, but were appalled by the notion of our using their first names (incidentally, writing ‘Christian names’ remains my male white middle aged first instinct). A distinctive mode of youth couture was emerging, but, with the exception of defined social groups such as teddy boys, in a pre-Mod era the dress of young people wasn’t radically different from that of their parents – in Martin Scorsese’s Dylan documentary, as late as 1966 footage shot by DA Pennebaker outside provincial venues for the ‘Judas’ tour reveal young people dressing in a surprisingly conservative fashion.
Further non-fiction reading has included Frank Ledgwidge’s Investment in Blood, as excoriating re British involvement in Helmand Province as Losing Small Wars was re the British presence in Basra, and Gregoire Chamayou’s brilliant philosophical and juridical commentary upon American military deployment of UAVs, Drone Theory, which should be required reading for every member of the Obama administration. Also ticked off the list is Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk – many readers, more articulate and insightful than me, have commented on how brilliant this book is; so suffice it for me to say that they’re right. Before my world was turned upside down on 11 January I had read Marcus O’Dair’s life of Robert Wyatt, Different Every Time. Apart from prompting me to revisit the great man’s masterpiece Rock Bottom as well as classics such as ‘Shipbuilding’ (a definite desert island disc), it left me reflecting upon Canterbury in its immediate post- Wilde Flowers>Soft Machine/Caravan (the latter remaining home town boys) era at the start of the 1970s. O’Dair argues persuasively that the rebellious Wyatt, with his Bohemian domestic background, was atypical when compared with Simon Langton Boys’ nice polite sixthformers like Mike Ratledge and the Hopper brothers. In other words, Canterbury in the 1960s wasn’t some sort of proto-hippy centre of the counter culture down the motorway from the swinging metropolis (an image that crossed the Atlantic, hence on the West Coast in 1976 one impressionable youth’s astonishment that I had travelled from Canterbury on a musical pilgrimage – why, he asked). If this sleepy cathedral city ever did acquire a patina of dope-induced cool then it was from the end of the 1960s. Photos of Kent’s students post-1965 suggest that they were scarcely in the vanguard of change, and the radical politics came later (the Cornwallis sit-in, the presence of the IMG not the International Socialist/SWP as the predominant far left party on campus, etc). Why did so many UKC graduates remain in Canterbury, with those who eventually left being so reluctant to do so? I suspect it was not because the city was the embodiment of cool, but because it was safe – a place where everybody knew your name, or at least you were guaranteed to meet someone you knew if ever you wandered down the then tourist-free, pre-pedestrianized High Street. That seductive blend of youthful radicalism and a feeling of security was a marked feature of Canterbury in the 1970s, and post-graduation affection for east Kent built upon the bonds of student days spent in a college system that was then very much alive. For all the unattractive nature of packed shopping-mall, tourist dense contemporary Canterbury (no nostalgia, no rose-tinted glasses, no desire these days to live there), the ties that bind – stretching back now over forty years – are astonishingly strong. When faced with a hugely distressing experience from the start of the year, my wife and I gained comfort and remarkable support from our closest friends and neighbours in Lymington, for which we shall be eternally grateful; but beyond that immediate love and kindness there was the reassuring concern – and boltholes – of friends made in Canterbury all those years ago; all of us sharing a particular kind of camaraderie and solidarity that remains rooted in the formative years that followed our leaving home. No doubt students all those years ago in York, or Brighton, or wherever, could point to a similar bonding; and yet there was something distinctive about the city Robert Wyatt fled as soon as he could, but in which I lived for over a decade, securing in that time three degrees, a teaching certificate, and most important of all, a partner for life.
