Having taken and done well enough in my O Levels, I was expecting to move on to the sixth form, but instead my life took an unexpected turn when my father applied for and got a job at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. Soon after the end of the summer term of 1962, we vacated our house in Sevenoaks, which was rented out on our behalf by local estate agents and then we set off to Southampton to board the Cunard liner “Queen Elizabeth” to cross the Atlantic to New York. The trip gave me my first introduction to Americans en masse, who made up the vast majority of the ship’s passengers and there were plenty of things to do on board, making for a very enjoyable holiday. Most of the Americans, those from the northern states, a lot from New York itself, were easy enough to understand, but I will always remember being asked if I wanted to play a game of Ping Pong, i.e. table tennis by a young lad from Tennessee, whose Southern drawl was so pronounced, I had to get someone from New York to translate for me. One other thing I did was to learn how to play bridge, my parents being keen players and by the time we docked in New York, I had become familiar with the basics of the game.

 

On arrival we were then driven through the streets of New York to the appropriate railway station, where we caught a train down to Washington D.C., where we briefly stayed at a hotel and I first sampled the delights of television being on from morning until midnight, quite unlike the life I had left behind in England. Within days we had moved into a detached house in the Cleveland Park area of Washington, most of our neighbours being middle class white Americans and my sister soon became friendly with a young girl of roughly the same age as herself who lived next door. A few houses up the block was a man who came from Ecuador who worked at the Ecuadorean embassy and I soon became friendly with his son, Freddie and a few others of the children in the block, most of whom went to a local high school only a few blocks away.

 

Meanwhile my parents had arranged for my sister to attend one of the most pre-eminent girl’s schools in the city, the National Cathedral School for Girls, which was also then attended by Vice President Lyndon Johnson’s two daughters, and associated with the Episcopal Church in America, the equivalent of our Church of England. I meanwhile was sent to the nearby Maret School, which had been founded by three French sisters and which consequently had quite a Gallic feel to it, French being a subject most students took and it had a lot of French students, whose parents mainly worked at the French Embassy. But there was also a girl from Holland, one other English boy and the son of the Burmese ambassador, who became a great friend of mine and with whom I even enjoyed a meal with along with his parents at the Burmese embassy. There were also large numbers of Americans, nearly all white, and just one lone African-American boy, that I can remember.

 

Almost immediately after term started, the whole senior school was led into the gymnasium and we were instructed to stand near to the wall, facing it and then to kneel down and look down towards the floor with our hands close by our side. In retrospect this was clearly a dummy run in case we had a nuclear attack, though I was only vaguely aware of the Cuban Missile Crisis which blew up and then thankfully cooled down around this time.

 

I soon found I was somewhat of a misfit at this school. I was officially in the eleventh grade, but I was soon moved to do maths and science with the twelfth grade and English with the tenth, while I studied French and Spanish with classes comprising a mixture of grades including students from the 10th, 11th and 12th grades. How I could have usefully stayed on for a further year there, much as I would have liked to, was beyond me.

 

I did not really learn anything in the science and maths classes, since it was all coursework, that I was already familiar with having already studied it in England in earlier years. Meanwhile, just as I had hardly appreciated the finer points of English literature the previous year at Sevenoaks, the poetry of Walt Whitman was equally beyond me. On one occasion I volunteered my thoughts on a passage of his poetry. The poem, we were discussing had mentioned men of great power and not venturing into open spaces, so much to the class’s amusement, but not the teacher’s, I suggested to him that this essentially meant that one should not walk on the White House Lawns. That was the last time in that class my views on any matter of English or American literature were requested.

 

French I found particularly boring, having already passed my O-Level in it and having little further interest in the language, except as a means of conversing with people from that country, which I could just about manage on a rudimentary basis any way. Spanish however I was still intent on getting an O-Level in, so I plodded on with teaching myself and at the end of the year I was able to take my O-Level exam in it at the British Embassy and duly passed. The teacher we had at Maret, Senora Hernandez was a Cuban émigré, who had fled Castro and she decided it would be a good idea for everyone in the class to come up with an essay on some Spanish speaking country. I thought of my friend Freddy up the block and he came up with a book which gave me plenty of information on Ecuador for my essay, which Senora Hernandez duly praised. Then she wanted me to come up with some photographs of the country, but by then Freddy was on his way back to Ecuador. However to my parents displeasure, I had received some magazines that had been forwarded on from England from Radio Bucharest. So I cut this magazine up, stuck the photos in a scrapbook and a forest in the Carpathian mountains, became, so far as Senora Hernandez was concerned, a forest in the Andes. She was impressed, as were all my classmates who were in on the secret.

 

Somehow my idiosyncratic nature must have appealed to my fellow students, since suddenly, halfway through the year, one of the two 11th grade representatives on the school’s Student Council resigned for some reason. The Student Council was a body comprising students and teachers, which met together in a typically American and democratic manner, and which even collectively passed judgement on some misbehaving students. To my complete surprise I was elected in her place and I duly behaved myself whilst proffering the occasional view during this body’s meetings. I also found myself on television for the first time in my life, in so far as the school was asked to come up with a team of three students to represent the school in a TV quiz, called “It’s academic”, which was just broadcast in the Washington area. However, I did not exactly distinguish myself, not concentrating at the one moment when a mathematical question came up, which in hindsight I could probably have answered.

 

America was also where the music I enjoyed so much came from and I particularly enjoyed listening to the local pop music radio stations and buying records at local shops, though I soon realised there was far more to be found downtown at what at that time I regarded as the most interesting place on Earth, the intersection in downtown Washington, where 13th Street crossed G Street, 13th & G, near which the capital’s discount record shops were all located. Around the corner from this junction, there was a department store where they not only sold the charts but packs of ten single records for a dollar. These often had a couple of hits I could remember as the two records one could see at each end of the pack, but when one bought a pack, one found all the other eight were obscure flops. At that point I realised there must be a business somewhere where they had large quantities of such surplus records from which they created these “bargain packs”. This was brought home to me again when I visited Glen Echo Park, the principal amusement park in the Washington area, when Dick Clark, the host of American Bandstand was appearing there. I queued up to meet him and was given another flop record the sleeve of which he autographed. Meanwhile the principal shop worth frequenting near 13th & G was Record City, and over the year and many visits to this corner of downtown Washington I had become friendly with Eddie, a black gentleman in his twenties who worked there as an assistant helping one find whatever records one might be looking for there. That friendship would prove to be more valuable than anything else that happened during my time in Washington. 

 

That summer we set off for Florida by car, going on somewhat of a detour taking in Huntsville, Alabama, where my father had to meet some people concerned with his work. I will always remember stopping at a service station in Alabama and for the only time in my life coming across four different toilets, for white males, white females, black males and black females. Down at a hotel on Miami Beach for a week, I enjoyed the company of more American boys and girls, who found me somewhat delightfully eccentric before we headed across the Florida peninsula so my father could enjoy himself fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, staying at a motel on a small island off the gulf coast.

 

Before I knew it though my life was about to change yet again, I had to get back to England, so I could take my A-levels, with a view to my applying to go on to university. So it was back to Sevenoaks School, this time as a boarder at Johnson’s boarding house. Suddenly I was just another schoolboy and a not particularly important one, even though I was in my A-level year and although my father came over and saw the housemaster at Johnson’s, a geography teacher, called Green, I was soon left to basically take care of myself. When I look back on my time there, I realise that Green was very patient with me, and I now look back on him with great fondness and respect, unlike the way I could regard any other teacher at Sevenoaks.

 

My studies proceeded reasonably well, but while I by the main carried on with my policy of keeping a low profile, there was one matter I felt I had to get right from the outset. I already found religion pointless and did not want to attend Sunday service with all the other boys, or rather most of them, a couple of Iraqi boys obviously did not attend Sunday service, so I decided the best way to deal with this problem was to be bold from the word go. So I had a chat with Green and explained that I was a Congregationalist and wished to attend that church. Green was very relaxed about it, but a few weeks later I realised I would be sitting opposite him for lunch on a Sunday and it occurred to me I had better be prepared in case he asked me about the service. So that morning I ventured down to the Congregational church, which was some distance from Sevenoaks School. I arrived some time before the service started, so I looked up what hymns would be sung and realised it was going to be a service about Harvest Festival, since there were lots of hampers of food etc. up by the altar. I wandered over and had a look at them, only to realise some lady was coming into the church with more food. Thinking, she would be wondering exactly what I might be up to, I felt somewhat alarmed, but soon recovered my composure, when she asked where I thought she should put the food that she was bringing. I suggested with all the rest of the food and she then thanked me. I replied that it was my pleasure and waited until she had gone, before quickly leaving myself. Ironically Green never asked me about my visits to the Congregational Church and so thankfully I never had to bother to go and visit it again.   

 

My only relation in England now was my grandmother, referred to by my parents simply as Jane, and on the few occasions when I was able to leave the boarding house behind me, I headed down by rail to stay with her. And come Christmas, since my parsimonious father was not interested in paying for me to fly back to America for the holiday, I spent the first half of the Christmas holiday with her. Unfortunately within a few days of my arrival in St. Leonards-on-Sea, I felt an awful pain in my stomach which taking bicarbonate of soda, did nothing to relieve. Eventually a doctor came and saw me and he realised I had appendicitis and needed to have my appendix removed as soon as possible. Jane was quickly persuaded to sign the relevant approval and I was whisked off to hospital. All I got in the way of presents on that Christmas Day was a box of soap from the hospital authorities, though my parents rang me from America and I did have a brief chat with them.

 

However after this episode, I enjoyed the rest of the Christmas break up in Malvern with my godfather and his family before returning to Johnson’s for the Spring term. Having suffered somewhat during the holidays, I decided I must make the most of it, so I calmly told matron about what had happened and that consequently I could not do any sports that term, meaning in particular, that I could avoid cross country running, which bored me stiff. She calmly accepted this, when I showed her the scar from the operation and it was not until later in the term that she insisted that I needed to see a doctor to confirm this. He pointed out I should avoid rugby, but there was no harm in my doing cross country running, but by then most of the term was over. Meanwhile on games afternoons, I devoted myself to an unusual activity, going around local houses and asking people there to give me all there old newspapers and magazines, which we stored in a corner of an outhouse at the boarding house and which, near the end of the term, Green and I took over to a scrap dealer near Maidstone, for which we received a tidy sum which we then gave to charity. For this, later in the term, I then rather unusually received my house colours, which were normally given for sporting achievements. It was only after that that my mother received the lone letter that I wrote to her in which I was not clearly unhappy.

 

In the summer term I was busy studying for my A-levels and then one morning my life changed. In front of all my dormitory colleagues, I had my first epileptic fit. Only a few weeks later it was the end of term and I was able to fly back to America to be with my family. My mother now insisted on my father allowing me back for the two holidays the following year, but that year in England had changed me. I had learnt to live on my wits so I did not have to do anything I did not want to and while I had accepted that I needed to do well academically until then, I began to wonder what the point of all the studying and exams were for. I had developed a keen interest in modern history over the time I was in America and continued to read more and more books about this subject. I quite enjoyed chemistry, but physics left me cold, probably because it was what both my mother and father had studied at university. But my first love was popular music and the following year it became a passion in a new way.

 

After another holiday in Florida and an enjoyable break in Washington, it was back to Johnson’s. I was now in the senior common room, with other sixth formers who had been in Johnson’s for some time and normally I would have then been in charge of one of the dormitories. Green however decided, possibly because of my epilepsy, that that would be inappropriate for me, and so I found myself sharing a room with the house captain, a chap very keen on cross-country running and sport in general, called Peter Wigglesworth. This term I also found myself back in hospital, this time at Shooter’s Hill Hospital in South London, where doctors performed various tests on me to try and find out what was causing my epilepsy. In particular I remember them injecting some liquid near the base of my spine, which was then somehow pumped up to my head, where it then lodged between my brain and my skull. The doctor was then were able with X-rays to see the contours of my brain and in particular check whether or not I had a particular condition, which if I had had it, would have led to my death within the next year or so. Clearly, since I am still alive, I did not have it. Unfortunately, pumping this liquid up had the effect of giving one a headache, akin to that one gets from a hangover, and it lasted for several days. If I was bound to die anyway, had I had this particular condition, I wondered why they had bothered. Meanwhile, for all the time I was in hospital, my mother had come over to England and visited me regularly, which was a comfort, but I was soon about to start doing things my way.

 

After spending Christmas in Washington, where I looked up a few old friends, it was back to Johnson’s boarding house and now, for some bizarre reason, which I can now no longer even remember, I decided I had had enough of boarding and in my school uniform, I walked out of the boarding house and started hitch-hiking down the A21 to Hastings. I got to my grandmother’s house in good time, one lift even being from a former pupil of Sevenoaks School, with whom I was slightly acquainted. Once I got to Jane’s house. she wondered why on earth I was there, so we rang the boarding house and I took the train back to Sevenoaks the following morning. Green did not even raise the topic of why I had done this with me, which looking back on the event was very reasonable of him. The experience did however have one lasting effect on me. From that moment onwards, I almost completely stopped using British Rail to get around England. I started hitchhiking everywhere.

 

I spent the Easter holiday in America again and then after a final term at Johnson’s, my parents had returned from America and we moved back into our house in Sevenoaks. Whenever I had stayed with Jane, I visited all the record shops in Hastings and checked them all for overstock single records, being sold off at reduced prices. I had by now become a fanatical collector of pop records, particularly by a wide range of certain artists, ranging from the Everly Brothers and Roy Orbison to many of the Motown artists. My mother had even taken up listening to the radio stations I had enjoyed whilst in America and bought and sent me copies of those she thought I might like. And with only the odd exception, I have to admit, she had good taste, sending me quite a few gems.

 

After my bizarre evening spent running away from my boarding house, I had started hitchhiking down to Hastings when I went down there for the odd weekend, and en route I would now pop into record shops in Tonbridge and Tunbridge Wells, both of which were towns I found myself travelling through en route to Hastings and in which I was often dropped. I realised I had to keep studying, but other things began to matter just as much if not more to me, in particular my record collection.

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Chapter Two – Washington D.C. & Boarding back in England

25/07/2018