Soft shoulder
From the novel TICKET OUT

For Stuart Watson (1947 – 2005)

It was midsummer, and a jazz festival was taking place in the seaside town of Skegness, on the Lincolnshire coast. My brother Russell gave me a lift to a roundabout about two miles out of town. He was under strict orders not to tell my mum that I was hitching alone. Mum thought Wilkin was with me but he had plans to follow later. I had a brief spasm of nervousness as Russell drove away, leaving me at the roadside, elated and scared stiff.

The open road lay before me, a sixty mile hitch to the coast. I had never traveled that far before, but here I was, ”in the early morning rain/with a dollar in my hand.” A thrill ran through me at the idea of living that line, if only on a small regional scale. I had a ten shilling note mum had given me, two half crowns from my stash in the sawdust of my egg box, and the sleeping bag she’d made from an old maroon blanket, lined with soft flannel. Big enough for two. Had she taken that into consideration, that it was large enough to share? It was like a small portable hotel room. Mum had simply grabbed what was available, this heavy wool blanket that Jake used in his truck when the heater was broken.

I didn’t know the first thing about jazz, except for the novelty act of Acker Bilk, whose freak hit song “Stranger on the Shore” had been in the Top Twenty for an entire year. It played constantly on the radio, a reassuring, unthreatening melody for adults to set against the onslaught of rock n roll beginning to take over the airwaves and the minds of their teenage children. But there were rock bands scheduled too. It was a brilliant excuse to get out of town.

I extended my thumb toward the traffic. Lorries and cars roared by, and after a long half hour, the beginnings of discouragement. Soon I’d be ready to turn around and go home to mummy, a plate of digestive biscuits and a nice cup of tea. I was about to cross the roundabout and start home when a small car pulled over. It was a Ford Anglia, standard family issue. I got in and threw my bag in the back seat. . The driver looked fairly normal, in glasses and a tweed suit. He identified himself as a traveling salesman named Brent, going to Spilsby, only a few miles from my destination. “Yes, Spilsby, that’s where I’ve beached, come to rest, with very few fragments to shore against my ruin,” Brent said, unprovoked by any rhetoric of mine. I moved closer to the window. This verbal flourish didn’t seem promising. It was the kind of language a queer might use. Though I had never met any, I had a formal dread of queers and perverts, of being abducted, raped and killed by them. These ideas had been initially introduced by my mother as standard tales of terror, of what would happen to any of us who strayed more than a hundred yards from the house. But then the Moors Murders occurred, only fifty miles away. The killers, who had just received life sentences for their crimes, were Myra Hindley, a trashy blonde who could have passed for a Nazi prison guard, and her lover, Ian Brady, who looked like the camp commandant. What shocked my mum most, apart from their geographic proximity, was that a woman had assisted in these terrible crimes. Together the sinister couple had abducted and killed at least five kids around my own age...not just killed them, but sexually abused them, made audiotapes of them begging for their lives –outlandish crimes and yet their perpetrators had originated from the banal surroundings of a housing estate on the outskirts of Manchester, an hour’s drive from where we lived.
“You never know,” I heard my mum say to Alvin the butcher, and she seemed to cast a sharp look at his giant hands, “you never know.”

Having perverts and murderers on the loose like this made hitch hiking a thrilling proposition, and cheaper than the few horror movies that made their way to the screen of the Majestic Cinema.

My driver looked harmless in his business suit and owlish glasses. Surely too well educated to be a killer. I could probably have taken him anyway. I was beginning to fill out, after that embarrassing Lilliputian period of my early teens. Growing tall and lean, with a savage right foot I wouldn’t mind using to kick him in the goolies if he got too familiar. If I could get the angle right in this little Ford Anglia.

Brent seemed genuinely interested in my gypsy inclinations, even if my trip was only sixty miles from start to finish. Now he was asking me about the jazz festival, and I was embarrassed to admit I didn’t know the names of any of the headlining acts. I knew nothing about jazz either. He sketched out a brief history, studded with names I had never heard of, including his all time favorite, Sidney Bechet.

“Sounds French...” I muttered, out of my depth.

“He’s a favorite of Larkin. Do you know Philip Larkin’s poetry? The Whitsun Weddings? Brilliant stuff. He teaches at Hull, just down the road from here.”

Christ I wish this guy would shut up and drive.

“You ought to know this one.

‘They fuck you up your mum and dad/

They may not mean to but they do-‘ “

“Hey, hey, language mate! Watch what you’re saying about my mam and dad. They didn’t fuck me up. “

It was shocking to hear somebody swearing in the service of a poem. But Brent just smiled and continued for two more brief stanzas.

“Yes, ‘get out early/while you can.’ Sound advice, that is. ‘Leave father and mother and cleave unto the muse!’ That’s Pope by the way.”

What did Brent have for breakfast, “The history of poetry”? He was bombarding me with obscure literary references for which I had no snappy comeback.

“Yeah maybe,” I replied, “I prefer Bob Dylan,”

Though in fact the hard-core rock’n roll of the Small Faces and the Rolling Stones was what moved me now.

“Well, the main thing is to get out of town, go to college if you can... I didn’t get out myself, never had the chance, but an education is the salvation of a working class lad like you –“

“What makes you think I’m working class?“

He laughed. “Well if you’re not, you must be faking that accent.“
I didn’t like the way this was going.

“Well what would you know about it? You look like you’re part of the bourgeoisie.”
Hoping he didn’t ask me for a definition of that group...

“Fair enough, I suppose I am. But you don’t have to have hair down your back to be anti-authoritarian you know.” He gunned the car up to seventy.

“I can make this bugger hum, she’s well tuned up. We’ll be in Spilsby in twenty minutes...”

“Hey, take it easy, you’ll get yourself a ticket.”

“Oh don’t worry, I go rallying on the weekends,” he replied as he drifted around a tight bend, of which there were many on this country road. Everybody I drove with seemed to fancy themselves as Stirling Moss, and none of them were.

But I was more concerned about somebody using ‘fuck’ in an otherwise ordinary sounding poem than crashing the Anglia. That was a shocker. And Brent’s assessment of the apparent futility of life out here in the sticks was fairly accurate. There wasn’t much happening.

We roared through a small village at far too rapid a pace. A dot on the map rapidly reassembling as a narrow street with two shops, a pub and a post office then gone again, back to the size of a dot.

Brent seemed energized by his monologue.

“See that, been and gone! No life anywhere in sight! I should talk, I make a living selling fucking caulking for houses!”

“Can you slow down a bit, we’ll get pulled over.”

“Ha-ha, some fucking Dean Moriarty you are,” he said with a harsh laugh, “up here’s where you get out anyway.” He slowed the car to a halt as we approached a roundabout.
“Here you go, Skeggy is about twenty minutes in that direction. Good luck, and remember, get out while you can lad, there’s nothing here for you.”

He drove off with a small wave that carried the weight of his tiny revolution. I stood at the side of the coast road, on the grim industrial outskirts of Spilsby. Dean Moriarty. Where did I know that name from? I felt suddenly lonely, undirected, some unnamable sadness raining down on me. Missing mum and dad already, no matter how much they might have fucked me up. I hadn’t even extended my thumb when a battered Zephyr Zodiac screeched to a halt. Two young mods sat in the front, very dapper in 3 button jackets over turtleneck sweaters.

“Seaside mate? Geddin!” the driver said. I tossed in my sleeping bag and folded myself into the back seat. We accelerated away at high speed. It was obvious my companions were under the influence of something stronger than Barnsley bitter, but I was too shy to ask them about their mental state, until I caught the driver’s wild eye in the rearview mirror.

“Wanna skaff, mate?” he said.

His partner turned and proffered a small yellow pill.

“What’s that then?”

“Skaffs mate, they’ll fucking get yer there!”

My mum had warned me a hundred times about needles but she hadn’t said anything specific about pills...

“What’s a Skaff?”

The driver had a cockney accent.

“Smith Kline and French, they make ‘em, S.K & F., Skaff innit? “Ere get the fucker in yer!”

”Oh.” I nodded as if I understood what he was saying, and took the pill from his palm.

“You lads not from round here then?”

“No fackin’ way mate! We come up for an all -nighter in Sheffield, Small Faces, we’re following ‘em around. Then we heard about the festival. In the fuckin’ sticks though, innit?”

”What’s London like?”

“London’s fackin’ great mate, nothin’ like it up here.”

They both had sharp, pointed faces, like friendly rodents.

“Neck that skaff, it’ll make things look all nice and shiny. And you won’t need that sleeping bag, ‘cos you wont be fackin’ sleepin!”

They both laughed uproariously. I pretended to swallow but palmed the pill, unwilling to give myself up to the lords of derangement quite so carelessly. And still not out of my mother’s all-seeing radius.

Twenty minutes later we were parked on the promenade, breathing in the sea air. Skegness really was bracing, just as the ads proclaimed. The two mods were chattering like teeth. The sky stretched out in a vast curve over toward Scandinavia. I was far from home and now I liked the feeling, travel already broadening my tiny mind. There was music coming from a large tent set up on the sands. The two mods, matching crow-like figures in their dark jackets and polo necks, shook my hand.

“I fink vat’s where the Faces are playing later. Maybe we’ll see you there,”
Said one of the speedy pair,

“And watch out for rockers me old lad, they’ll have yer nuts for garters,”
said the other, and they sloped off along the promenade.

In search of something to eat, I stopped at an old bus converted into a snack bar, where I bought a buttered scone and a cup of strong English tea. Two young girls were sipping tea at the counter.

“Got room in that bag for us, have yer?”

They were saucy pretty things, they seemed like they might actually be willing to climb into the bag. It was indeed a handy attachment, despite its weight. The correct bohemian accessory -it stated my case, announced my freedom of spirit. Implied that I was on the road. I agreed to look for them later and wandered further down the seafront to a chip shop they had recommended. Then continued my leisurely stroll, a strange freedom opening up inside me. I didn’t have to be anywhere, at any given time. It had never happened before. I was on my own. At least until I met up with Wilkin, hopefully before dark. I strolled along, wolfing down the delicious fresh haddock and chips.

As I passed in front of a pub on the seafront, a sudden cluster of bodies came hurtling through the front door. I ran a few yards down the street and stopped to watch. An explosion of whirling figures shouted and grunted and fought their way out onto the seafront. Lads with short hair and parkas were battling greasy haired rockers, and in the middle of the fistic storm I thought I recognized the driver of the car who had given me a lift. He was head butting a longhaired youth in a leather jacket. Blood arced from the kid’s nostrils as his head jerked back then he was down, disappeared in the swirling ballet. The main cluster had divided into little pods of violent contact as combatants squared off against each other, sometimes two on one... in the midst of the melee I thought I saw Wilkin’s face, laughing madly at some event I couldn’t see...“Wilko!” I screamed across the crowd, and the figure turned but it wasn’t Wilkin, and he was quickly re-immersed in the mob, which was now moving slowly away along the promenade, a single great flailing organism. Minutes later the arrival of the police drained the energy from the combat, and the mob quickly dissipated.

The police soon left and a false sense of calm descended again on the sunny town. I sat down on the seawall and took a book from my rucksack. Penguin Modern Poets Number 19, Corso, Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti. These Americans spoke to me much more directly than Larkin, though I would have to read that poem of his sometime...I hadn’t even opened the slim volume when a musical voice said, “What’s that rubbish you’re reading?”

I looked up and there stood a pretty dark haired girl with a mouth shaped like a heart. Was it true that a girl’s mouth usually resembled that other mouth hidden between her legs? She had a musical name, Beverley Severner, and incredibly long hands. She was actually interested in poetry, though I had never heard of any of the poets she said she was studying in school.

Even though my heart was promised to Madge Hammer, I resolved to get Beverley in my sleeping bag at all costs. I must avoid Wilkin too, because if he saw Beverley he wouldn’t hesitate to take her from me by any means necessary short of a fistfight. The competition between us was fierce. But I had a huge advantage, provided by my own mum. A sleeping bag with a soft flannel lining. That would comfortably fit two.

Beverley was from Lincoln, the cathedral town fifteen miles away. She had taken the bus to Skegness with two girlfriends, but they had already separated. It occurred to me that we might actually spend the night together, lets spend the night together, the idea of doing simply that, made me dizzy. This day was historic, momentous, the beginning of something. Beverley removed her shoes, exposing long white feet, and we walked in the sand, past the pensioners dozing in deck chairs in the warm July sun, children splashing and screaming, building sand castles and mud pies. It was like being inside a pop song, astonishing and thrilling, slightly unreal. The tide was far out on the flat silky sands. I was receiving vague messages in a language I didn’t understand, like Esperanto. Home seemed distant, the crowded house, the raving dogs. Who would walk them since I wasn’t home? They needed closer supervision since they had almost savaged the choirmaster’s dog. He happened to be passing just as I opened the front door and the dogs roared out, a mongrel pack, and attacked his tiny dachshund. Fortunately I dragged them away and before any damage was done. But now I was far away. I would worry about the dogs and mum and home later, after dark, after spending time in the dark with Beverley.

The afternoon went rapidly by, and then it was dusk, the sun going down over the broad fields of Lincolnshire, Beverley was still with me, a girl walking by my side. From the tents a discordant jumble of sounds, presumably jazz, was breaching the night air. We hung around the doors of a pub and asked people going in to get us a pint and bring it outside. Nobody would, for a long time; we looked too young even for the seaside’s careless ambience. Finally a rocker and his girlfriend took pity on us, took my half crowns and came back with two pints. The beer put a sweet edge on this gleaming evening in the world.

Beverley had stopped looking for her friends. She couldn’t spend the night, but she had permission to catch the last bus back to Lincoln at eleven o’clock.

A meaty bassline was pulverizing the air above the tents. The arena had been surrounded by a temporary chain link fence so we walked round the back and climbed over it, Beverley as limber and supple as an athlete. At the back of the main tent I pulled up the canvas and she slipped inside. I followed her. Nobody seemed to care about stragglers getting in. Onstage a band was playing very loudly, you couldn’t hear yourself speak. A mass of teenagers were swaying and throbbing to the music…I grabbed Beverley and held her close, a fabulous moment of intimacy as the music and the beer-maddened mob swirled around us. The excitement was electric, sexual if I had known what sexual meant. Our embrace was intimate yet public, but not at all embarrassing, other kids were doing the same thing. I looked around at the shiny, well scrubbed faces in various stages of ecstasy and inebriation. Nobody from Retford. Was I the only lonesome traveler who had journeyed here, to this gathering of the new tribes? That made it all the more triumphant somehow, though I would have liked to bump into someone I knew while this electric girl was attached to me. I looked down at her long fingers twined around my forearm. I wanted Wilkin’s company now, I could hold on to Beverley against his onslaught. And he was good company, tough enough to ensure that together we wouldn’t get hurt. Every town had its posses, hissing pockets of bother, local lads determined to subject outsiders to the fist and the boot. It must have been like that back when the Saxons were sitting around their smoky campfires and a group of Angles passed through. Defend the territory. Beat down the intruders with their funny accents.

Like the kids in our town when a rock band came through. Uncouth country bumpkins who would never have the ghost of a chance of doing what these lads were doing, playing in a band, going from town to town and getting paid for it. Driving the girls wild. They’ll never see the like of these lads again, so they will drop their knickers just like that. When their girls gave it up for these rock'nroll strangers it enraged their future mates, who responded by beating up the interlopers, sabotaging their battered old van parked outside the village hall where the band was playing. That whiff of freedom when a stranger came to town, a flash of the outside world. It scared the locals to death.

Beverley put her arms around me and pushed her slim body against me as the music scorched us, the bass line buckling my innards, can’t explain. Mum and dad and Retford seemed far away from this holy moment. The band on stage was playing really loud, punching the crowd into ecstatic dervish dancing. They were almost famous, they had appeared on Ready Steady Go, their record in the top twenty, beautifully dressed miniature mods, urging on these country bumpkins experiencing their first ear-shattering ideas of life elsewhere. When the Faces finished their set it was already 9.45, her bus to Lincoln left at 11, and I couldn’t persuade her to stay the night. We left the tent and got our hands stamped on the way out, proof of this initiation. Along the lighted strand, through the buzzing seaside night, the smell of candyfloss and hot dogs, throngs of people wandering dazed among the Dodgem cars and funfair rides. I didn’t have the budget for the fair, and I was anxious to get Beverley in the bag. The sea air was cooler now, cuddly weather. There was a little park across from the seafront that looked suitably dark.

In a secluded stand of trees, I dropped the bag from my shoulder and unrolled it with great ceremony. She climbed in and I got in after her. It was a good fit, we bundled up in the toasty red blanket with its flannel lining, she let my hand just graze her nipples but no more than that. We kissed for a long time, my mouth smeared on hers. I tried out several techniques I had previously only used on my arm, and she seemed to enjoy them. Our mouths were raw with kissing when the town clock struck the half hour. We lay there for a few more blissful minutes and then crawled from the bag. I walked her to the bus stop and she rode away into the future.

Now it was time to face the night. I strolled along the promenade for a while, hoping to see Wilko’s friendly face. But the day trippers had all gone home, and small knots of drunken youths wandered the sandy streets, looking for any kind of action. I returned to my spot, climbed in the bag and prayed for sleep and morning. The park was quiet except for a few couples finding a little privacy. I listened to one pair caboodle, hiding my head in embarrassment but excited at their proximity. The word ‘intimate,’ learned from the Sunday scandal sheets, popped into my head. What they were doing sounded very intimate.

Finally, I slept, unmolested, and woke at seven a.m., cold and ready for home. I missed me mam’s huge breakfast, my warm bed. With my last half crown I bought eggs and fried bread at a very dirty transport café, drank sour tea from a chipped mug, then made my way to the main road out of Skegness. Sixty miles seemed like six hundred. A strange vertigo descended as I began my journey. Lincolnshire’s wide, flat landscape made the sky seem huge, the size of it threatened to engulf me. My place in the universe was miniscule. How easily I might be crushed, like an ant. Before the sky could swallow me, a lorry pulled up and I jumped in. The driver was on his way to pick up a load of gravel at the quarry just outside my hometown. I tried to explain where I had been, sleeping under the stars, listening to rock and roll, but all he said was, “Don’t you have a bloody job?”
Two hours later he dropped me at the roundabout where a sign read,”Retford 4 miles”, a comforting marker for the weary traveler. I couldn’t wait to see my mum’s lovely face, my dogs, the jackdaw and the duck.

Max Blagg, Xmas 2008.