My familiarity with the squatting scene grew gradually, and likewise the tramp fraternity and the Bohemian café scene.
One of the characters -or figures rather- I got to know, and who was living in the squat up the road, I had been observing since my early teens.
He was to be the initial conduit into the ‘Underworld’ that opened up beneath, and all around, and above me - like a glorious Labyrinth in the Spring of 1976, that year of the long hot summer and drought.
I first encountered him seven years earlier, when at the age of 15 I tended a stall during a jumble-sale held in the Unitarian Church off Roslyn Hill, which I could see from my room at home. I often attended events at the Church, which being highly non-conformist, and ecumenical, I actually didn’t mind too much - even if I had no Religious belief as such. And occasionally, I’d lend a hand as well.
I forget what the items were. But I was under strict instructions, not to let anybody haggle with me over prices. And then in came this utterly extraordinary person - who I had previously seen in Hampstead, and been very struck by. He was literally dressed like a cowboy, with a wide-brimmed, Texan-style hat, a grey long-coat that was rather stained, and boots that weren’t Stetsons, but at a glance could have been mistaken for them. And he carried a couple of plastic carrier-bags. His face had a youthfully ragged look about it, with a very sharp expression of native cunning - and intelligence, as I learnt later.
He was clearly what in those days was still called a ‘Gentleman of the Road’.
I watched him go from stall to stall, twitching occasionally, and looking furtively around him, as though he couldn’t stay still for long. Every now and again his attention would fixate suddenly and very intently on some item or other. And he’d then engage the stall-holder in conversation - which I couldn’t quite make out. But judging by his hand gestures and general body-language he was trying to, er well, haggle with them! And then he came on to my stall. I immediately noticed that he stank of tobacco, though not alcohol, nor sweat, nor dirt. And he spoke with the kind of London accent that I would have imagined an 18th century Cockney visionary talking in - someone like William Blake. It managed to be rough, soft, and deep all at once, with a timbre of such resonance, it seemed to be echoing from the Past.
One of the characters -or figures rather- I got to know, and who was living in the squat up the road, I had been observing since my early teens.
He was to be the initial conduit into the ‘Underworld’ that opened up beneath, and all around, and above me - like a glorious Labyrinth in the Spring of 1976, that year of the long hot summer and drought.
I first encountered him seven years earlier, when at the age of 15 I tended a stall during a jumble-sale held in the Unitarian Church off Roslyn Hill, which I could see from my room at home. I often attended events at the Church, which being highly non-conformist, and ecumenical, I actually didn’t mind too much - even if I had no Religious belief as such. And occasionally, I’d lend a hand as well.
I forget what the items were. But I was under strict instructions, not to let anybody haggle with me over prices. And then in came this utterly extraordinary person - who I had previously seen in Hampstead, and been very struck by. He was literally dressed like a cowboy, with a wide-brimmed, Texan-style hat, a grey long-coat that was rather stained, and boots that weren’t Stetsons, but at a glance could have been mistaken for them. And he carried a couple of plastic carrier-bags. His face had a youthfully ragged look about it, with a very sharp expression of native cunning - and intelligence, as I learnt later.
He was clearly what in those days was still called a ‘Gentleman of the Road’.
I watched him go from stall to stall, twitching occasionally, and looking furtively around him, as though he couldn’t stay still for long. Every now and again his attention would fixate suddenly and very intently on some item or other. And he’d then engage the stall-holder in conversation - which I couldn’t quite make out. But judging by his hand gestures and general body-language he was trying to, er well, haggle with them! And then he came on to my stall. I immediately noticed that he stank of tobacco, though not alcohol, nor sweat, nor dirt. And he spoke with the kind of London accent that I would have imagined an 18th century Cockney visionary talking in - someone like William Blake. It managed to be rough, soft, and deep all at once, with a timbre of such resonance, it seemed to be echoing from the Past.
His hands were dark brown with stains. And his eyes were an uncanny shade of grey-green. And it wasn’t long before he started talking prices: Could I lower them? Just for him! And I came under a sort of weird spell, as I found him rather intimidating - although there was no physical threat as such. But he was so unusual, I couldn’t really comprehend him. He was completely outside my experience of Humanity. And If I remember rightly, I allowed him to buy one item at a fifty percent reduction - making up the difference with my own pocket money in the end, when I handed in the takings. And as I agreed to his request, he said in a very knowing and mischievous manner: ‘Ah! Now you’re speaking my language!’ And I never forgot it. And then he was gone, hurrying out like a thief on the run. After that I saw him often, sometimes with small groups of other equally outlandish-looking people, who seemed to revere him, like a sort of Oracle among Outcasts. And I resolved to get to know him somehow, as I realized he held the key to a remarkable ‘world’ that I knew nothing about, but yearned to know as an infinitely more revealing substitute for the Bourgeois world I had grown up in and had come to loathe. But I didn’t really get my opportunity to effect an introduction until the Spring of 1976.
I was walking down Hampstead High Street one evening - with lots of people milling about, and the night-life getting underway - when I saw him hurrying up the hill with his bags, which he always had with him. He was a great walker, I had noticed, as he probably could never afford to use public transport. And as I drew close to him, for some insane reason, I suddenly hit on the idea of just asking him for a fiver!! Of all the absurd things!
I didn’t mean it seriously of course. But it was a way of creating an impression - and also of sending up the obvious. But far from wrong-footing, or upsetting him in any way, he reacted as quick as a flash, with a witty gambit of his own: ‘Oh, that’s funny - I was just about to ask you the same question!’ And THAT was the beginning of the most incredible, randomly auspicious adventure in my entire life! And yet all I’d done, on the most prosaic level, was introduce myself to a down-and-out. But I was also - on a much loftier level - about to embark upon a veritable Odyssey, through the Oceanic chapters of an Alternative History! Anyhow, once we had both swiftly established that I was possessed of rather more pennies than he was, never mind pounds, it was agreed that I’d be buying the drinks. Except it turned out that he didn’t drink alcohol. At a glance some people might have thought he was a wino. But he was in fact strictly teetotal. And neither did I drink alcohol of course. Tea was his tipple - and I had no aversion to that. And in those days Cafes stayed open late in London, until 10 or 11 o’clock, or even later on weekends. You could eat as well, and maybe drink alcohol. But teas and coffees were still served at those hours as if it were only 5 or 6 p.m. which is when Cafes close in London nowadays, and everyone goes to Bars and Restaurants, etc. In that respect, Hampstead was still like Vienna. And Vienna‘s still like Vienna, in that respect. Or it was just over a decade ago - when Raffaella and I last visited that city. Whereas Hampstead was already ceasing to be like Vienna in that respect, by the 1980’s. And I loved that culture! So it seemed did my new friend. We went across the road to a Cafe called Cyrano’s, which I knew well already. It was a classic and unforgettable gem of high and low Bohemianism. It stayed open way past midnight - and past 1 a.m. on weekends. The atmosphere was truly exhilarating. Absolutely anyone was welcome in there - as long as they more or less harmonized with the general aethos, and spirit of the place. And only a psychic cripple wouldn’t - that, and an avaricious caterer! And you could just order a tea and sit there for hours if you wished. It was run essentially on a not-for-profit basis.
I was walking down Hampstead High Street one evening - with lots of people milling about, and the night-life getting underway - when I saw him hurrying up the hill with his bags, which he always had with him. He was a great walker, I had noticed, as he probably could never afford to use public transport. And as I drew close to him, for some insane reason, I suddenly hit on the idea of just asking him for a fiver!! Of all the absurd things!
I didn’t mean it seriously of course. But it was a way of creating an impression - and also of sending up the obvious. But far from wrong-footing, or upsetting him in any way, he reacted as quick as a flash, with a witty gambit of his own: ‘Oh, that’s funny - I was just about to ask you the same question!’ And THAT was the beginning of the most incredible, randomly auspicious adventure in my entire life! And yet all I’d done, on the most prosaic level, was introduce myself to a down-and-out. But I was also - on a much loftier level - about to embark upon a veritable Odyssey, through the Oceanic chapters of an Alternative History! Anyhow, once we had both swiftly established that I was possessed of rather more pennies than he was, never mind pounds, it was agreed that I’d be buying the drinks. Except it turned out that he didn’t drink alcohol. At a glance some people might have thought he was a wino. But he was in fact strictly teetotal. And neither did I drink alcohol of course. Tea was his tipple - and I had no aversion to that. And in those days Cafes stayed open late in London, until 10 or 11 o’clock, or even later on weekends. You could eat as well, and maybe drink alcohol. But teas and coffees were still served at those hours as if it were only 5 or 6 p.m. which is when Cafes close in London nowadays, and everyone goes to Bars and Restaurants, etc. In that respect, Hampstead was still like Vienna. And Vienna‘s still like Vienna, in that respect. Or it was just over a decade ago - when Raffaella and I last visited that city. Whereas Hampstead was already ceasing to be like Vienna in that respect, by the 1980’s. And I loved that culture! So it seemed did my new friend. We went across the road to a Cafe called Cyrano’s, which I knew well already. It was a classic and unforgettable gem of high and low Bohemianism. It stayed open way past midnight - and past 1 a.m. on weekends. The atmosphere was truly exhilarating. Absolutely anyone was welcome in there - as long as they more or less harmonized with the general aethos, and spirit of the place. And only a psychic cripple wouldn’t - that, and an avaricious caterer! And you could just order a tea and sit there for hours if you wished. It was run essentially on a not-for-profit basis.
If it’s true, then it’s something I’ve been able to live with. In Bronco’s case, if true, it would have been far more serious, to the point where it cut him off entirely from Society. And I soon suspected that there was terrible trauma there too. Goodness knows what had happened in his early life, to cause him to turn out in the way he had. It didn’t bear thinking about, except I could always bear to think about such things. I was making it my business. But in his case I should never know, because he would never say. And yet he was an absolutely fascinating enigma. And I learnt that huge numbers of other people in and around Hampstead found him equally fascinating. As we talked in Cyrano’s during that first meeting other people came in and greeted him and he’d say: ‘Hullo there, Steve, Anna,’ or whoever it might be; ‘This is Adam here. He lives in a posh house down the road. But he’s alright. He’s one of us!’ ‘Hi, Adam!’ they’d retort. ‘So you’re part of the scene now, are you?’ ‘Am I?’ I replied, puzzled. ‘Well - if Bronco says so, then you are!’ one of them insisted. And Bronco was looking at me, with a curiously conspiratorial expression on his face. ‘What ‘scene’ is this, exactly?’ I asked him. ‘Why? The Hampstead scene of course! What else? You’ll soon find out what it is. It’s like The Underworld. Just wait till I introduce you to Dave Peters and Joshua, and others. Then you’ll understand.’ Then I knew I’d walked into some mysterious infernal mafia-like trap, that might be spell-bindingly exciting, but also potentially dangerous. And Bronco - for all his alien detachment - was at the centre of a Dantean as well as a Gogolian and a Dostoyevskyan web of invisible Antinomian intrigue. And yet he was also an absence - because he didn’t appear to be committed, or even connected, to anybody. He was like an atomic particle, that attracted only to repel - so as to avoid its own extinction. I then asked him how he basically survived. ‘I have my ways,’ he replied, but would give no detail. Sometimes he wouldn’t answer questions at all but just shook them off like an animal swishing a fly with its tail. Or he would answer, but only obliquely. But he seemed to be as intrigued by me as I was by him. Maybe because he quickly came to the conclusion that I was an ‘intellectual’. And intellectuals were ‘OK’! He would even introduce me to people later on by saying, ‘This is Adam. He’s an intellectual.’ This was cringe-making. But I was able to pass muster in most cases. I asked him how long he’d been in Hampstead, and why he’d chosen it as a place to live in. And he then astonished me by saying: ‘Forever. Because I am Hampstead!’ And I knew then I was cultivating a kind of untutored native Genius: a Genius loci indeed. He then got up to leave quite suddenly, saying: ‘Thanks for the tea, Adam. It’s good to get to know you. But I’m just off to the toilet. So I’ll see you around. Be sure.’ And before I could respond, saying how much I had appreciated this out-of-the-ordinary encounter with him, he shot off into the back of the building. I expected him to re-trace his footsteps later. But rather oddly he didn’t. He just vanished into the night. I learnt later there was a back-exit which he’d used, and he knew every such (47) exit in every watering-hole in Hampstead. And his means of escaping from any situation was to say: ‘I’m just off to the toilet.’ Even if he didn’t need to use one. Although at times he’d stay in toilets for long periods of time - not for any disreputable reason, I hasten to add! - but simply to be alone with his thoughts. I noticed he hadn’t arranged to meet me again, although he obviously intended to.
But that was what might be called Bronco’s Law: One should only meet people by chance-encounter. But for a magician like him, chance-encounters could be engineered. And in fact, I met him next the following day. And I was to meet him very frequently after that - and would then meet lots of other at least equally extraordinary people through him. And then becoming a part of the ‘scene’ certainly did something to me: no question about it. It CHANGED me profoundly, and in just about every way. But looking back on it all now, even if in one sense I really was throwing my life away, I don’t regret it for a moment. In fact, if I could have my life all over again, I wouldn’t miss that period for the world! It was the best time of my life. Even if I did pay a heavy price for it all later on when I finally accepted that I couldn’t just carry on living on the dole, and I had to work - and look after my mother to some extent, after my father’s sudden and unexpected death - I scaled the heights of a vagabond Vision I have never quite reached since. And it vouchsafed my Vocation. Enough said. Readers at this point might wonder why I was spending so much of my time in one place, or area of London. There was a big, wide world beyond its boundaries, and why wasn’t I seeing more of it? Fair question. And there are a number of ways to answer it. Actually I did travel occasionally. I’ve already mentioned my life in Italy during the summers, and other holiday-breaks in Walberswick. And there was even a visit to Vienna when I was 9 - where we rather crazily spent Christmas that year in sub-zero temperatures. We’d also spent it in Brighton two years earlier - in The Metropole Hotel, which was bombed by the IRA many years later. And I’d been to Bath - and Bournemouth of course! And I knew much of East Anglia well. In London, I knew the Notting Hill scene quite well, and even the Brixton one to a lesser extent. Black culture generally greatly interested me. And I knew the Camden Town and Chalk Farm scenes very well indeed. I got to know Speaker’s Corner well. East London I knew less well, although I attended the famous Rock against Racism Concert in Victoria Park with a few friends. Dulwich I got to know as my brother moved there after he left home and began his career. And so on. But the one thing I didn’t do - as many of my generation did of course - was to put a pack on my back and hitch-hike around the world, or go on the Katmandu Trail, for that matter. For one thing, I was totally im-practical. Had I attempted to do anything like that, I might have ended up being killed or getting lost without trace, presumed dead in the wilds of Anatolia or whatnot. And I had no money. My parents would not have given me money, because they knew I would have blown it on a total disaster-trail - and I have to say, they were right about it. But also I wasn’t even all that interested in travel. Or not then at any rate. I became so years later - especially after I had learnt to drive. And I didn’t pass my Test till I was 31. But my head was constantly in books, or clouds of ether. I was like Des Esseintes in Huysmans’ A Rebours, who decided against visiting England because he already knew all he needed to know about the country from reading the novels of Charles Dickens. Enoch Powell - who I hasten to add, I was in no way ‘with’, or certainly not on Race, and Immigration issues - who was a brilliant Classicist, A.E. Housman’s prize-Student at Cambridge in the 1930’s, was flying back to England from Australia once and the plane stopped off at Athens Airport for a few hours to re-fuel. The passengers were encouraged to get off the plane, then do some sight-seeing. But good/bad old Enoch refused. The reason? He didn’t want his mental picture of Ancient Athens to be in any way spoiled by an (48) encounter with Modern Athens! Classic English Eccentricity! I always enjoyed listening to old Enoch whenever he wasn’t talking about Politics - especially Race. On other subjects he was fascinating. The last time I saw him on Television, he was discussing the perhaps spuriously vexed question of the authorship of William Shakespeare’s plays. In his Periclean diction, with the famous prophetic gleam in his eyes, he proclaimed that they were written by a Committee! He then added, that he could enlarge. But the interview then had to be cut short. So I never learnt why he thought that. Personally, I don’t believe that for one moment. Along with A.L. Rowse et al, I’d say the author of William Shakespeare’s plays was - William Shakespeare. Period. But I’m sure, however wrong he was, old Enoch would have had a wonderfully ingenious theory of his own - that I for one would have relished hearing. Yet on the subject of Race, he sadly had a missing brain-part. But I digress again. The old cliché that ‘Travel broadens the mind’, was like a Reader’s Digest platitude. Travel only broadens the mind of anyone who has a mind to broaden, is the only intelligent riposte. And most people who travelled scarcely had minds at all. So it really didn’t mean all that much to me. And moreover I was discovering that Hampstead had just about everything to make up a world, if not the Cosmos. And so I was happy to spend much of my time in, and around it - chiefly in Cafes and Bars, Libraries and Cultural Venues - and the Streets. Also the Heath of course. I really didn’t feel I was wasting my time, or missing out on anything far more interesting or exciting elsewhere. The best adventure could be had right there. Even the Revolution could be launched from there! Everything happening there could, and would, spill over into the rest of London and well beyond. Cafes like Cyrano’s, were the engine-rooms of Change. And apart from sex - which I was getting more of, albeit not in lasting liaisons just yet, which didn’t bother me particularly - my main pur-suits were intellectual, cultural, political, creative, spiritual, and occult. Tea and talk, became my speciality. Action happened at a distance - to a large extent - although I was up for marches, and demonstrations, wherever they happened. But the street-theatre that we created in and around Hampstead in The Scene was action enough or so I thought. All aspects of the Radical Alternative Scene, the Counter-Culture, the EPO, Books and the Arts, Music, Esoterica - although I was highly sceptical of most if not all of that - and spontaneous eruptions in our midst, became my daily diet from then on. And I threw myself into it all - like a Desperado on devil-dust. I didn’t care if Society didn’t know about me, or the others I was mixing with. We were above Society, as I saw it. And I didn’t wish to be a part of it. I was in a superior space, in a state of suspended animation. And to become any sort of Celebrity was the worst offense. We were a resolutely defiant, Celebrity-free zone and no respecters of reputations. We took no prisoners in boxing parlance. We terminated! Our Arrogance was Absolute: off the scale! We were the Anti-Civilization, propelling Progress!
But that was what might be called Bronco’s Law: One should only meet people by chance-encounter. But for a magician like him, chance-encounters could be engineered. And in fact, I met him next the following day. And I was to meet him very frequently after that - and would then meet lots of other at least equally extraordinary people through him. And then becoming a part of the ‘scene’ certainly did something to me: no question about it. It CHANGED me profoundly, and in just about every way. But looking back on it all now, even if in one sense I really was throwing my life away, I don’t regret it for a moment. In fact, if I could have my life all over again, I wouldn’t miss that period for the world! It was the best time of my life. Even if I did pay a heavy price for it all later on when I finally accepted that I couldn’t just carry on living on the dole, and I had to work - and look after my mother to some extent, after my father’s sudden and unexpected death - I scaled the heights of a vagabond Vision I have never quite reached since. And it vouchsafed my Vocation. Enough said. Readers at this point might wonder why I was spending so much of my time in one place, or area of London. There was a big, wide world beyond its boundaries, and why wasn’t I seeing more of it? Fair question. And there are a number of ways to answer it. Actually I did travel occasionally. I’ve already mentioned my life in Italy during the summers, and other holiday-breaks in Walberswick. And there was even a visit to Vienna when I was 9 - where we rather crazily spent Christmas that year in sub-zero temperatures. We’d also spent it in Brighton two years earlier - in The Metropole Hotel, which was bombed by the IRA many years later. And I’d been to Bath - and Bournemouth of course! And I knew much of East Anglia well. In London, I knew the Notting Hill scene quite well, and even the Brixton one to a lesser extent. Black culture generally greatly interested me. And I knew the Camden Town and Chalk Farm scenes very well indeed. I got to know Speaker’s Corner well. East London I knew less well, although I attended the famous Rock against Racism Concert in Victoria Park with a few friends. Dulwich I got to know as my brother moved there after he left home and began his career. And so on. But the one thing I didn’t do - as many of my generation did of course - was to put a pack on my back and hitch-hike around the world, or go on the Katmandu Trail, for that matter. For one thing, I was totally im-practical. Had I attempted to do anything like that, I might have ended up being killed or getting lost without trace, presumed dead in the wilds of Anatolia or whatnot. And I had no money. My parents would not have given me money, because they knew I would have blown it on a total disaster-trail - and I have to say, they were right about it. But also I wasn’t even all that interested in travel. Or not then at any rate. I became so years later - especially after I had learnt to drive. And I didn’t pass my Test till I was 31. But my head was constantly in books, or clouds of ether. I was like Des Esseintes in Huysmans’ A Rebours, who decided against visiting England because he already knew all he needed to know about the country from reading the novels of Charles Dickens. Enoch Powell - who I hasten to add, I was in no way ‘with’, or certainly not on Race, and Immigration issues - who was a brilliant Classicist, A.E. Housman’s prize-Student at Cambridge in the 1930’s, was flying back to England from Australia once and the plane stopped off at Athens Airport for a few hours to re-fuel. The passengers were encouraged to get off the plane, then do some sight-seeing. But good/bad old Enoch refused. The reason? He didn’t want his mental picture of Ancient Athens to be in any way spoiled by an (48) encounter with Modern Athens! Classic English Eccentricity! I always enjoyed listening to old Enoch whenever he wasn’t talking about Politics - especially Race. On other subjects he was fascinating. The last time I saw him on Television, he was discussing the perhaps spuriously vexed question of the authorship of William Shakespeare’s plays. In his Periclean diction, with the famous prophetic gleam in his eyes, he proclaimed that they were written by a Committee! He then added, that he could enlarge. But the interview then had to be cut short. So I never learnt why he thought that. Personally, I don’t believe that for one moment. Along with A.L. Rowse et al, I’d say the author of William Shakespeare’s plays was - William Shakespeare. Period. But I’m sure, however wrong he was, old Enoch would have had a wonderfully ingenious theory of his own - that I for one would have relished hearing. Yet on the subject of Race, he sadly had a missing brain-part. But I digress again. The old cliché that ‘Travel broadens the mind’, was like a Reader’s Digest platitude. Travel only broadens the mind of anyone who has a mind to broaden, is the only intelligent riposte. And most people who travelled scarcely had minds at all. So it really didn’t mean all that much to me. And moreover I was discovering that Hampstead had just about everything to make up a world, if not the Cosmos. And so I was happy to spend much of my time in, and around it - chiefly in Cafes and Bars, Libraries and Cultural Venues - and the Streets. Also the Heath of course. I really didn’t feel I was wasting my time, or missing out on anything far more interesting or exciting elsewhere. The best adventure could be had right there. Even the Revolution could be launched from there! Everything happening there could, and would, spill over into the rest of London and well beyond. Cafes like Cyrano’s, were the engine-rooms of Change. And apart from sex - which I was getting more of, albeit not in lasting liaisons just yet, which didn’t bother me particularly - my main pur-suits were intellectual, cultural, political, creative, spiritual, and occult. Tea and talk, became my speciality. Action happened at a distance - to a large extent - although I was up for marches, and demonstrations, wherever they happened. But the street-theatre that we created in and around Hampstead in The Scene was action enough or so I thought. All aspects of the Radical Alternative Scene, the Counter-Culture, the EPO, Books and the Arts, Music, Esoterica - although I was highly sceptical of most if not all of that - and spontaneous eruptions in our midst, became my daily diet from then on. And I threw myself into it all - like a Desperado on devil-dust. I didn’t care if Society didn’t know about me, or the others I was mixing with. We were above Society, as I saw it. And I didn’t wish to be a part of it. I was in a superior space, in a state of suspended animation. And to become any sort of Celebrity was the worst offense. We were a resolutely defiant, Celebrity-free zone and no respecters of reputations. We took no prisoners in boxing parlance. We terminated! Our Arrogance was Absolute: off the scale! We were the Anti-Civilization, propelling Progress!
I soon found out that Bronco had hardly ever left Hampstead in a decade! And he wasn’t to do so for the rest of his life. There was a plan at one time to raise some funds to give him a break in Paris for a couple of weeks or so - a lifetime-treat in a city he dreamt of. Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London could have been written for him. And he knew it well. But sadly it came to nothing in the end. He was remarkably well-read, albeit after a quirky fashion. He loved Sherlock Holmes and knew his Jack London, George Orwell - and Colin Wilson. But he especially loved cowboy-novels - and Westerns. And why ever not?! Nothing wrong with that. Wittgenstein’s favourite form of re-laxation after brain-storming sessions was to watch Westerns and allow his mind to melt away into the mists of one of the most powerful fantasies ever - The Wild West, and the pushing back of The
49.
Frontier, which had its parallel in the Human Mind. It may have been myth - but what a myth! And what was good enough for old Ludwig certainly was for Bronco. He was a gifted musician too, who I learnt was hired as a piano-player by The Villa Bianca, a smart, white table-cloth Restaurant, based in Perrin’s Walk, off Hampstead High Street. Where he got his training I do not know. He was also a brilliant harmonica-player, who often accompanied the buskers in Cyrano’s. And he was to be sure the last person I ever saw playing the spoons - a lost art nowadays. He was like a walking treasure-trove of Folkloric talents - very like Iron Foot Jack, the legendary King of Bohemia in Soho. He even bore a slight physical resemblance to him. In fact, he was even more mysterious, because Iron Foot Jack wrote an autobiography. So more is known about him - even if he was a teller of tall tales. But Bronco just seemed to be creating himself as he went along. He was like the Harlequin of the hope-less, and the magician of moods. To paraphrase Stanley Spencer: ‘his life was tragic, but he wasn’t.’ He had the ability to lift someone out of the dumps in a split second, by the very announcement of his presence or by the spectacle of his endless street-theatre. And he could have spawned a whole doctoral industry. Local writers and academics were bemused and transfixed by him. His personae were legion: in addition to Bronco the Tramp and Squatter, there was Bronco the Existentialist Anti-Hero; Bronco the Ragged-Trousered Philosopher - in the pay of Philanthropists! - Bronco the Street-Performer; Bronco the Cowboy with no Name; Bronco the mad Minstrel; Bronco the Great Gad-Fly; Bronco the Knight of Knaves; Bronco the Saviour of lost souls; Bronco the Soul of lost loves; Bronco the Wizard of money-finders; and so on. He was even dubbed The Minister for Tea by the late Peter Cook, of Beyond the Fringe and Establishment fame - who got to know him through George Weiss, aka Captain Rainbow, who contested many elections in the wake of Screaming Lord Such. This was on account of his Encyclopaedic knowledge of tea. He could drink twenty cups a day - beating Tony Benn no doubt! He was in the habit of going into Cafes and asking for a pot of boiling hot water. He would then get a packet of tea out of his pocket, and make his own brew on the premises, because he thought the tea served in most Establishments was filthy. I know he was a thief - but a harmless one, as I once saw him pocket a huge bowl of sugar in Café Rouge in the High Street. The staff didn’t see him, but I did. Then he hurried out and would have gone straight back to his squat to empty the sugar from his coat-pocket. And then he would have had it with his teas, till it ran out. And then he would have repeated the exercise. It was such a wonderfully picaresque gesture and executed with such speed and aplomb after a swift scanning of the assembly, that I didn’t have the heart to report him. One story about him, which of course he would never affirm or deny, was that he had worked as a tea-maker on a building-site once - hence his knowledge. He’d even threatened to dive-bomb Hampstead from a great height, with ‘swarms’ of tea-bags! And he always had them in his bags, as well as his pockets. It’s widely believed that Peter Cook and Dudley Moore based the character E.L. Wisty on Bronco. And he even figured - albeit very briefly - in a Film made about Cook. And Weiss, who probably knew more about Bronco than anyone else - in so far as anyone ever knew anything about him! - and who eventually paid for his funeral, which astonishingly was attended by about 70 people, including myself, once invited Cook and Bronco round to his flat for supper. And sneakily he tape-recorded their conversation - having already secured a slot for a programme based on the re-cording on Radio Four. I missed it unfortunately, as I was in Italy at the time. But I believe one brief excerpt can still be found on YouTube. So Bronco’s extraordinary voice can be heard, and he had his moment of History. The content of the conversation was completely bizarre. Even a man of Cook’s (50) comic genius was utterly bewildered by Bronco’s stuttering Gnomic utterances, and broken streams of consciousness. He even described Allen Ginzberg as an accountant at one point! I’m not sure how he felt about Weiss’s subterfuge when he found out about it. Weiss was a rather rum character him-self. I never really knew him, although I used to see him around a lot and spoke to him on just a few occasions - including at Bronco’s funeral, where the 1960’s singer, now dead, Ronnie Carroll, sang a very moving version of Danny Boy, substituting the words Bronco John for Danny Boy. It seems John Cork was his name - or so I was told after his death, by a nurse at the Royal Free Hospital, where he died. But I don’t know how anybody - even Weiss - found that out. And Weiss thought Bronco was 63 when he died. I should have said he was in his seventies. Weiss is still alive in sheltered accomm-odation in East Finchley I’ve been told. But as I didn’t particularly warm to him - in spite of his well-known eccentricities - and I think the feeling was mutual - I haven’t sought him out to try and verify anything about Bronco. He was a gambler, and might have been the last person to see Lord Lucan in the Mayfair Club that gilded Set frequented, before he went off to commit his foul deeds. Weiss got a large sum from his absentee-landlord, which enabled him to come out of rented accommodation. But eventually he blew it all gambling and ended up a pauper again. He has apparently developed a philosophical system of his own. Though I once overheard him being interviewed in The Coffee-Cup - another famous Café in Hampstead, on the High Street - about it, and it sounded about as sophisti- cated as handing the Planet back to trees! Though he is I suppose to be applauded for his support of Bronco. But the Bronco I knew most probably was not the Bronco he knew, as Bronco was like a cos-mic chameleon, who could change persona in different settings with different people, depending on who they were and what they were like. And the question: ‘Would the real Bronco please stand up?’ was not really pertinent at all, because he was equally present, and absent, in all of his personae. As for Peter Cook, who lived in a Regency Gothic house in Perrin’s Lane off the High Street, I never once spoke to him, but I often saw him around.
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Frontier, which had its parallel in the Human Mind. It may have been myth - but what a myth! And what was good enough for old Ludwig certainly was for Bronco. He was a gifted musician too, who I learnt was hired as a piano-player by The Villa Bianca, a smart, white table-cloth Restaurant, based in Perrin’s Walk, off Hampstead High Street. Where he got his training I do not know. He was also a brilliant harmonica-player, who often accompanied the buskers in Cyrano’s. And he was to be sure the last person I ever saw playing the spoons - a lost art nowadays. He was like a walking treasure-trove of Folkloric talents - very like Iron Foot Jack, the legendary King of Bohemia in Soho. He even bore a slight physical resemblance to him. In fact, he was even more mysterious, because Iron Foot Jack wrote an autobiography. So more is known about him - even if he was a teller of tall tales. But Bronco just seemed to be creating himself as he went along. He was like the Harlequin of the hope-less, and the magician of moods. To paraphrase Stanley Spencer: ‘his life was tragic, but he wasn’t.’ He had the ability to lift someone out of the dumps in a split second, by the very announcement of his presence or by the spectacle of his endless street-theatre. And he could have spawned a whole doctoral industry. Local writers and academics were bemused and transfixed by him. His personae were legion: in addition to Bronco the Tramp and Squatter, there was Bronco the Existentialist Anti-Hero; Bronco the Ragged-Trousered Philosopher - in the pay of Philanthropists! - Bronco the Street-Performer; Bronco the Cowboy with no Name; Bronco the mad Minstrel; Bronco the Great Gad-Fly; Bronco the Knight of Knaves; Bronco the Saviour of lost souls; Bronco the Soul of lost loves; Bronco the Wizard of money-finders; and so on. He was even dubbed The Minister for Tea by the late Peter Cook, of Beyond the Fringe and Establishment fame - who got to know him through George Weiss, aka Captain Rainbow, who contested many elections in the wake of Screaming Lord Such. This was on account of his Encyclopaedic knowledge of tea. He could drink twenty cups a day - beating Tony Benn no doubt! He was in the habit of going into Cafes and asking for a pot of boiling hot water. He would then get a packet of tea out of his pocket, and make his own brew on the premises, because he thought the tea served in most Establishments was filthy. I know he was a thief - but a harmless one, as I once saw him pocket a huge bowl of sugar in Café Rouge in the High Street. The staff didn’t see him, but I did. Then he hurried out and would have gone straight back to his squat to empty the sugar from his coat-pocket. And then he would have had it with his teas, till it ran out. And then he would have repeated the exercise. It was such a wonderfully picaresque gesture and executed with such speed and aplomb after a swift scanning of the assembly, that I didn’t have the heart to report him. One story about him, which of course he would never affirm or deny, was that he had worked as a tea-maker on a building-site once - hence his knowledge. He’d even threatened to dive-bomb Hampstead from a great height, with ‘swarms’ of tea-bags! And he always had them in his bags, as well as his pockets. It’s widely believed that Peter Cook and Dudley Moore based the character E.L. Wisty on Bronco. And he even figured - albeit very briefly - in a Film made about Cook. And Weiss, who probably knew more about Bronco than anyone else - in so far as anyone ever knew anything about him! - and who eventually paid for his funeral, which astonishingly was attended by about 70 people, including myself, once invited Cook and Bronco round to his flat for supper. And sneakily he tape-recorded their conversation - having already secured a slot for a programme based on the re-cording on Radio Four. I missed it unfortunately, as I was in Italy at the time. But I believe one brief excerpt can still be found on YouTube. So Bronco’s extraordinary voice can be heard, and he had his moment of History. The content of the conversation was completely bizarre. Even a man of Cook’s (50) comic genius was utterly bewildered by Bronco’s stuttering Gnomic utterances, and broken streams of consciousness. He even described Allen Ginzberg as an accountant at one point! I’m not sure how he felt about Weiss’s subterfuge when he found out about it. Weiss was a rather rum character him-self. I never really knew him, although I used to see him around a lot and spoke to him on just a few occasions - including at Bronco’s funeral, where the 1960’s singer, now dead, Ronnie Carroll, sang a very moving version of Danny Boy, substituting the words Bronco John for Danny Boy. It seems John Cork was his name - or so I was told after his death, by a nurse at the Royal Free Hospital, where he died. But I don’t know how anybody - even Weiss - found that out. And Weiss thought Bronco was 63 when he died. I should have said he was in his seventies. Weiss is still alive in sheltered accomm-odation in East Finchley I’ve been told. But as I didn’t particularly warm to him - in spite of his well-known eccentricities - and I think the feeling was mutual - I haven’t sought him out to try and verify anything about Bronco. He was a gambler, and might have been the last person to see Lord Lucan in the Mayfair Club that gilded Set frequented, before he went off to commit his foul deeds. Weiss got a large sum from his absentee-landlord, which enabled him to come out of rented accommodation. But eventually he blew it all gambling and ended up a pauper again. He has apparently developed a philosophical system of his own. Though I once overheard him being interviewed in The Coffee-Cup - another famous Café in Hampstead, on the High Street - about it, and it sounded about as sophisti- cated as handing the Planet back to trees! Though he is I suppose to be applauded for his support of Bronco. But the Bronco I knew most probably was not the Bronco he knew, as Bronco was like a cos-mic chameleon, who could change persona in different settings with different people, depending on who they were and what they were like. And the question: ‘Would the real Bronco please stand up?’ was not really pertinent at all, because he was equally present, and absent, in all of his personae. As for Peter Cook, who lived in a Regency Gothic house in Perrin’s Lane off the High Street, I never once spoke to him, but I often saw him around.
He frequently looked drunk and raddled in his later years, as the work dried up, or he could no longer be bothered to work. He was probably incapable of it by then, although had enough money put by not to need to. However he had been a highly original and genuinely subversive comic talent and thinker. And he spent a lot of his time on his roof-terrace with friends like Weiss and Moore and Bronco, imagining they were all in some parallel-universe, or alter-nate reality - which they could mentally bombard Hampstead, and London and the rest of the world with, from a great height. He no longer cared about his career by that stage, or what people thought of him, which in a sense was to his credit. Why did he have to play the game? Stephen Fry was very protective of him on that point, slamming people who piously and priggishly dismissed him, as just a wasted talent. One of the funniest stories about him I recall concerned an occasion when David Frost - the man of whom it was once said, that ‘he rose without trace’! - rang him up to invite him out to dinner one evening. Cook replied, or in words to this effect: ‘Right, David - I’ll just go and fetch my Diary, to see whether there’s a clash of dates. Wait a mo - ‘ And then he waited by the phone for ten seconds or so, before saying: ‘Well, David - I FIND that on that evening, I’m watching Television! So I’ll have to turn you down, I’m afraid. Bye-bye!’ Wonderful! But his early death from a heart-attack at 57 didn’t really come as any great surprise. And Goodness knows what state he would be in now if he was still alive. In some cases, as Nietzsche said, people benefit from ‘dying at the right time.’
I was sure Bronco was from East London. But one chap I knew, thought he had a Hampshire accent, curiously. I didn’t get that at all. Though speculating about his past was not actually as interesting as trying to make sense of his antics in the present. There are so many anecdotes I could tell about him (51) that I shall have to restrict myself. But one of his regular habits around Hampstead - as indeed his ‘name’ suggested! - was to literally canter, if not gallop, up and down the High Street, like a Rodeo-rider. And he would be yelling ‘Yippee!’ and ‘Rawhide!’ Not once was he stopped by Police. In fact I remember reading an interview with the Chief Sergeant at Hampstead Police-Station after Bronco’s death when there was a lot of local reminiscence about him, and he said in all the years he’d known him - about 40 - he’d never once thought it necessary to formally question him about anything. Al-though I knew he was a thief - and lots of other things too. But his behaviour was just accepted by people: ‘Oh! There goes old Bronco - up to his tricks again!’ they’d say. And he was of course, hil-ariously funny. So it was almost as if he was tolerated as a sort of Shakespearean jester. But a Fool he wasn’t. He was as bright as a button. And when he was still comparatively young, he was quite a big and imposing figure. He appeared to shrink as he got older, as many people do I daresay. But I remember him seeing off a gang once who were baiting him, raising his trouser-leg like a gypsy and roaring at them in a quite terrifying manner. Although I never once saw him engaged in actual phy-sical violence. But it was as if he had a whole archive of inner Archetypes he could draw upon in his idiosyncratic DNA, to deal with absolutely any kind of scenario and person. Not without reason did one other extraordinary person - who I met through Bronco of course - describe him as ‘the last of the Baroque Geniuses’. Another favourite ‘trick’ of his, was to stand outside posh Restaurants and Bars that wouldn’t let him in and then press his face against the windows, apeing a whole gamut of grotesque expressions to terrify the customers! This was his almost unique, personal way of spiting the Bourgeois. Occasionally customers would complain to the managers - ‘Can you please remove that filthy tramp out there?! He’s seriously disturbing us!’ - and they’d go out and have a firm word with him. But he’d just say: ‘It’s a free country. I can do as I please. I’m not vandalizing anything, or hurting anybody. If they can’t take a harmless joke, they shouldn’t be seen as being as important as they think they are. And I wasn’t even insulting them. I didn’t say a word. I was just looking at them. Since when was that a crime?’ A good and rather clever response I thought. But he was always very careful not to overstep the mark completely. And so he’d move on before hanging himself with the granted slack rope, if only to repeat the trick and others, elsewhere. It wouldn’t be strictly accurate to describe him as a sort of ‘Fagin’ figure - and not just because he wasn’t Jewish. Although he did certainly have his ‘network of associates’ shall we say - if not partners in crime. And some of these people were living in the squats, or else they were homeless as he was periodically. In fact he often slept in St. John’s Churchyard, in Church Row, off Heath Street, whenever he was homeless. It was the main Parish Church, in Hampstead - where coincidentally, I myself had been Christened. But I have never slept rough there - I just bathed in the Font for a few seconds! But others were actually working, in the various local businesses. Quite how he managed to ingratiate himself with so many of those people I never fully understood. He could hardly have been giving them kickbacks. Maybe they took pity on him. But more likely, they came under his inimitable ‘cunning man’ spell. And he got free food and drink, pretty well whenever he wanted. And a bit of piano-playing was probably the only ‘favour’ they ever asked of him. And so he never had to claim benefits. And his only ’fixed addresses’ were, of course, the Squats that he temporarily graced. And he certainly never worked - or not in any conventional sense of the word! - when I knew him. And who would have employed him? Although come to think of it, he would have been an excellent ‘Durdles’ - the grave-digger in Dickens’s Edwin Drood, had he ever sought ‘proper’, if not gainful employment! But then even old Durdles might have blanched like a ghost at the prospect of sleeping on the premises!!
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One example of his magician’s skills lay in his remarkable capacity for finding money in the streets. In those days it was far more common for people to drop money in the streets of course. I myself once found thirty five pounds that way. But whereas most people when they walk anywhere in the streets look straight ahead of them as they go about their business whatever it might be, and every now and again look all around them - Bronco would often walk with his eyes glued to the ground or the pave-ments. And so he would miss nothing. His eye for money was as sharp as any animal’s eye for food. And when he suddenly spotted coins or notes, without a moment’s scruple he’d swoop like an eagle and snaffle the beggar’s gold up into his seemingly infinitely capacious pockets and bags, which lurk- ed invisibly in the bottomless pits of The Great Survivor’s Circles of Hell. Occasionally I saw him doing this, studiously oblivious of others around him. Then I realized that since he knew every square inch of Hampstead so well - his Spiritual Manor, which he traversed in Geomantic Zodiacs every day - he was quite content to spend a considerable amount of time peering at nothing more fascinating than stretches of pavement. Yet it appears he profited from it enormously. Although he always pleaded poverty, and effortlessly charmed charity out of people - including me - after his death it was found that he had five thousand pounds in cash hidden inside his bags! Whether he had hoarded it all for a long time, slowly building it up, or it was all in a short time’s work, I do not know. But it could well be that he accumulated much more than that in all the time he panned for accidentally discarded Alms, and blew it freely on tea - and Goodness knows what else. A far more dramatic, or psycho-dramatic, turn of events occurred, when a rare relationship he had with a girl turned sour - Michelle. The said girl, who I myself knew quite well, was a Jewish Doctor’s daughter from Golder’s Green. She was in-telligent, but had had a complete schizophrenic breakdown. She was so trustingly transparent it was as if she had no skin. And amazingly she established such an intimate rapport with Bronco that some sort of relationship did actually appear to be happening between them. And they were seen walking about hand-in-hand. His clothes were pretty filthy at the time - it was thought that he rarely if ever changed them, or washed - and he even smelt at times. And his face was permanently stubbly, and pock-marked. And the tobacco-stains were rotting his teeth. Even though when in repose he looked what might be called barbarously handsome. And in her split state of mind, she accepted him. She’d been living in squats for some time, in between periods of sectioning n psychiatric wards, and struck me as being remarkably tough in spite of her troubles. She was plump and no beauty, but had an all-comprehending and all-forgiving sweetness about her, that drew Bronco like a leper to a saviour. So he became besotted, and wildly protective - and possessive. And then I and others started to hear stories about him keeping her imprisoned in a room in a squat in West Hampstead. He’d lock her in and just leave her there, while he went out for the day. He also blocked the bog in the squat - often. Eventually the other squatters broke the door down and released her. And she ran screaming from the building. When Bronco returned, they barred his access, and threw his things out in the garden. He managed to find another squat - through his network. But Michelle was then ‘re-claimed’ by her parents, who had heard what was happening, and were on the war-path. She had really hated them originally. But they sought ward of court, and got it eventually. So she was never seen again around Hampstead. And poor old Bronco - even though he had behaved in a manner, that should have got him jailed nowadays - was left completely bereft, and inconsolable. And his subsequent behaviour became potentially, dangerously psychotic. Though he was never sectioned, or not then at any rate. That only happened shortly before his death. What ensued was utterly extraordinary however.
(------------------------------------------------)
One of the first people Bronco introduced me to in the Scene was a chap called Dave Peters, one of the few whose surname I did learn, because unlike some of the others Dave believed in being trans-parent about practically every facet of his identity and detail of his life, even if that meant being in a sense a slave to the ‘System’. It was almost as if for him you had to be a slave first before you could be or become meaningfully free. He was sitting on a bench that overlooked the High Street when I first saw him, whilst walking with Bronco, and he appeared preternaturally extraordinary. ‘There’s Dave, Adam! I’ll introduce you to him now. He’ll blow your mind!’. What I found myself confronted with, was one of the most singular Beings I have ever encountered. He was quite short and stocky, with shoulder-length hair of a strange, sandy hue. His facial features were quite chiselled, and he’d obviously shaved recently. And he had the most piercing blue eyes I’ve ever seen. His clothing was rough, and quite dirty. Although I don’t recall him smelling - or not then at any rate! But he wore a stained, light brown sort of raincoat, and thick trousers, and literal hob-nailed boots. And he had a
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large bag with him too. Anybody seeing him at first glance, would certainly assume he was a down-and-out, and probably also a wino. But bottles were conspicuous by their absence. Although he also had an aura of the Ancient Briton about him. In later times, he would grow a beard so bushy, it aug-mented this aura strongly. But he was going beardless at that time. And as I studied him, I observed there was a biro behind his right ear - a frequent concomitant, it transpired. And there was a sober sharpness of perception in him that was laser-like. In short, he appeared self-possessed to a degree that was quite uncannily paradoxical in somebody who was otherwise so dispossessed. Bronco went through his familiar rigmarole: ‘Hullo, Dave! This is Adam. He’s an intellectual. And he wants to meet you. Adam, this is Dave. He’s not like anybody you’ve ever met.’ He was like a mysterious master of ceremonies, bringing two highly unusual strangers together from entirely different backgrounds, for an undivined - if not undivinable - purpose. Dave gazed very quizzically at me, smiled knowingly, and said: ‘Hullo, Adam. I’ve heard all about you. And you’ve no doubt heard all about me.’ His voice was very much a Proletarian one - yet distinctly different from Bronco’s. It was stronger, and much more direct - but similarly steeped in echoes of Antiquity. I motioned to shake hands with him, mindful of the grime on his stubby digits. Then he started: ‘No! We don’t shake hands in Albion! We gaze, and nod, and raise a hand. And if we have staves, we cross them. But we don’t touch.’ ‘Oh, I see,’ I said, suddenly non-plussed. This was to be one of Dave’s many extreme eccentricities, which I learnt later on had profound thinking behind them. So, I withdrew my hand. And the conversation that ensued was indeed mind-boggling - if not blowing. Although Dave was friendly, there was something highly challenging about him that I had rarely if ever encountered before. And he had very strange idioms, and core-preoccupations, and it must be said some very extreme prejudices. I immediately felt I was in the presence of an incredibly powerful mesmerist, or hypnotist - of an exceptionally peculiar, and possibly sinister kind. I obviously can’t recall everything that was said on that first occasion, or later ones. I wasn’t tape-recording the conversations, or taking minutes. There are no textual sources in any of this process of reconstruction of ultra-bizarre happenings and liaisons: only my own episodic, and occasionally imaginatively enhanced, recollections. And I had no idea of course at the time that I would be writing this account now. I didn’t even know with any clarity or certainly that I would be-come a writer. That idea only crystallized in my mind much later on, after I had absorbed masses of outlandishly esoteric raw material. There were however odd snippets or snatches of Dave’s diction I can just about reproduce verbatim here. At one point he spoke abruptly and rather brusquely about Bronco, who was looking askance and mootly mischievous as he spoke: ‘Nobody knows who Bronco is! You can’t ever get to know him. He is a terrified child. But he is an endlessly fascinating enigma. I feel as if I know him less well now than I did when I first met him, even if I see him nearly every day. I’d like to reach into his brain, then pluck it out and examine it. But I couldn’t do that without killing him!’ Sudden shock-statements like that were a speciality with Dave. Another eccentricity I noticed was his tendency to sometimes deliberately not focus on what people were saying but on their non- -verbal behaviour. He might then cut across their speech with a statement that bore no connection to it, like: ‘My grandmother was deaf.’ And people would say, as I did on that occasion: ‘What’s that got to do with what I was just saying?’ And he’d then stare for a while before saying something like: ‘I have inherited my grandmother’s deafness, but selectively.’ Or: ‘Were you aware that your hand-movements as you were speaking just now were revealing to me what you were trying to hide from me?’ Alternatively he’d say, apropos of anything: ‘It’s all Welsh, you know.’ And this would just stop people dead in their tracks, so he could steer conversations in any directions he chose. And yet one
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of his main obsessions, was exposing and confronting people, who tried to exert control over any-body in any way or context, especially when aimed at him And he could be truly terrifying when-ever he did this. And he claimed he could outstare anyone across a table as long as they remained absolutely still and didn’t resort to violence. Although there was a great psychic violence coiled up inside him, to my perception. And he turned out to be full of cosmically splitting contradictions.
In the course of a couple of hours or so during that first encounter, when we just stayed put at the bench rather than go for a coffee or tea as we had no money for a drink - a common occurrence in the Scene, when we’d simply stand on pavements or anywhere else for hours on end just talking or creating street-theatre, attracting strange looks which we ignored - I learnt a lot about Dave, as he revealed himself to me, as if to Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor! He had grown up near Dunstable, and had steeped himself in the Archaeology and Mythology of the ancient landscapes all around it since childhood. He was working-class, and convinced that he was a Genius. And so he developed his own way of ‘seeing’, and thinking about the world. But it soon became obvious to him that his parents had no interest in his abilities and education, assuming he’d work in a factory after he left School. And so at the age of 15 in 1956 he took the extraordinary and drastic decision to just leave home and never return! He literally gathered up his most treasured possessions and walked out of the front door - just like Cendrars at the same age, if it really happened. To prevent panic, he’d left them a written explanation. So there was no Police-search for a missing minor. And then he simply took to the Road, becoming a Gentleman of the Road. And he set about systematically unlearning just about everything he’d been taught and teaching himself in Public Libraries chiefly, building up his own ‘universe of knowledge’. In fact he spent five or six hours a day in Libraries, reading every-thing he could get his hands on. He could recite reams of Shakespeare from memory; had learned about Physics and Chemistry; and had pored over maps, especially Medieval ones. He knew Scrip-tures by heart, and was very well-versed in Philosophy, Psychology, and the Occult. All manner of quirky History fascinated him, especially secret societies or hidden influences behind the worlds of Politics and Current Affairs. But his real passion was for Geography, and what would nowadays be called Psycho-Geography, although that wasn’t really a term in use when he first started doing it in his own highly original way. And his speciality was ley-lines, which nowadays are well-known. So in the Scene he was known as Ley-Line Dave! And he was also known as Shaman Dave - claiming that he had Shamanic powers. And even Dancing Dave, on account of his skill in Pagan dancing. He was also of Welsh Druidic descent, and had Romany-Gypsy ancestry. He was a tremendous walker, and had truly trodden all over Britain in the previous twenty years - barely missing a single square mile! He was an extremely well-seasoned rough sleeper and a highly adept survivor who insisted that he could eat anything! Therefore, not only did he not need a roof over his head, or a job, but he didn’t need Benefits either. He was completely self-sufficient, like the human equivalent of a Beast of the Field. And he had been developing his own theories - about the nature and origins of language, the workings of the human mind, the propensities of the body and the meanings inherent in landscape, including urban landscape. He was like a unique Diviner or Seer who could read signs everywhere in his own mental script as it were. He was totally extraordinary! Unfortunately he was also very racist and intensely homophobic. And he was drawn more to fascistic than communistic ideas. But I could overlook all of this because of his most singular, and brilliant, cast of mind. He had written reams of note-books over the years, some of which he had lost - or had stolen as he believed. So he’d have to
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re-write them. He claimed he had worked in a chemistry laboratory, which I found hard to believe. But I am not aware he had had any other job. Or rather - his ‘job’ was to fathom the secrets of the world, the human race, and the cosmos. And no theory was off-limits, however weird or wacky or conspiratorial. And yet he appeared to understand Science - and even Mathematics. But his main ‘skill’ was in anatomizing Language - by using a Methodology of Symbolic ‘translation’, drawn from different Mythoses. His notebooks were full of arcane notations for breaking down, and analyzing, and transposing etymological derivations which looked like extra-terrestrial languages almost. And one very unusual feature was that letters were for him units of meaning as well as words. And the shapes of configurations in landscapes provided the Templates for linguistic signs and symbols. He also maintained that written language preceded spoken language, which I don’t believe to be true. But what was remarkable, was the sheer force of his conviction over the matter. The Ancients had been Scribes before they became chanters. His Dogmatism was Absolute, but his reasoning, which was partly diagrammatic, was ingenious. He was completely locked into his own world - as though he were simultaneously in Antiquity and the Present. There was a profound pathology in him how-ever, as he admitted he’d been both in mental hospitals and in prison. Though I can’t recall why he was ever sent to prison. Nothing was too weird or heavy or extreme for hm. Every abnormal state had to be experienced. Although he paradoxically prized normality! He thought most people were very unevolved, and even subhuman. And so he fearlessly opposed and exposed everything - from stupidity to its manipulation. All Politicians were tyrants and thickies. All Priests and Teachers were homosexuals and pederasts. All Businessmen were crooks. The Police bizarrely were ‘clear’. Spooks were clearer still. Scientists and Technologists were the clearest of all. All Psychiatrists were mind-interfering perverts. All parents were monsters. Practical Engineers and Builders were ‘Geniuses’. Occultists were finger-pointers at the Moon - and to go beyond the Occult, one had to be an Astral rocket-scientist venturing into the Sun. All Socialist Revolutionaries, Anarchists et al, were Infantile Regressives. All Vegetarians and Vegans were repressed cannibals. And so on - and so forth!
Meeting Dave was a bombardment of the brain in every sphere, and I gradually gained a sense of my wanting and needing to not only befriend, but also monitor and study, such specimens for a purpose that I couldn’t yet fully comprehend. But it would become clearer later on. Dave was an Exemplar of Meta-Man - and a True Egregore. And he was sleeping in a Graveyard! He had trained himself to lie down like a fakir on gravestones, and auto-hypnotize himself into a state of deepest dream-sleep, in which he could commune with the Spirits of the Dead - including Medieval Kings! He was very tough, like a latter-day George Borrow, the pugilist scholar-gypsy and tutelary spirit of Wild Wales. He drank from basin-taps in Public Conveniences, and ate discarded food. He washed and shaved only on rare occasions. And he hadn’t changed his clothes for as long as he could remember. He was perennially penniless, yet never begged. Though he accepted charity if it was offered, especially cups of tea and coffee. But like Bronco, he never touched Alcohol. Beer was ‘bottled piss!’. There was barely a drug he hadn’t taken however. But he’d rendered himself immune to their effects. He never used Public Transport. He’d talk to anybody high or low, and treat them just the same. He’d grace communes to raise consciousness only, or blast people with his own explosive brand of enlightenment and ecstasy. Otherwise he was a true Scion of the Solitary Path. I was to meet him regularly after that, both on his own and with others. And it was never what I would call a comfortable liaison. At times it was tense and we came close to falling out. But on the whole it was a roller-coaster ride into the lowest depths
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of the Inferno, and the uppermost echelons of the headiest Ether. In The Nameless Revolutionary, I based a character on him called Ley-Line Rod - aka The Druid. He claimed he had mapped all the ley-lines across Britain on his travels and they had become his ‘possessions’. I was rather sceptical about them, thinking them quite subjective. But he finally persuaded me there really was a Geomantic Grid of forces, or energies, like Telluric currents, governing different sites and pathways between them in deeply significant and timeless ways. He once showed me a particular spot on East Heath, quite near Whitestone Pond, which he described as a ‘magnetometer of forces’ governing London. It was at the high point of London of course. And he was convinced that it was an Ancient Druidic site. This might have been true, although there’s very little Archaeological evidence to support it. Though it’s widely believed that there were open-air Druid Parliaments, and communities, on Hampstead Heath, which practised sun- and oak-worshipping rites, and also performed sacrifices - possibly human, as well as animal ones - to gods of harvest and plenty. The height of that Hill - the highest around, for twenty miles - would have drawn the ancient mystic pilgrims, and settlers, long before Hampstead became known as Hampstead. For it would have symbolized in their eyes a Sacred Summit close to the gods. Many years later I was to write a manuscript called The Grimoires of Ham’stede, in which I imagined a scene where a gruesome sacrifice took place at exactly the spot Dave showed me and the skeleton of the victim was found thousands of years later by a Satanist sleuth, who subsequently dies himself at the site - then becomes one of the Undead in the Underworld of the Heath. So I reckoned I owed the idea in part at least to Dave himself. He based his theory on psychometric perception. Although I never got it published of course - and never told him about it. He’s still alive by all accounts, living in some sort of Commune down in the Forest of Dean. But I haven’t seen him for many years now.
The last time I did see him, he appeared severely paranoid - wild-eyed, and hirsute. He claimed that London was being controlled by a cabal of Nigerian criminals who were trying to murder him as he a-lone knew of their plot! And they’d already stolen his bicycle!! So he had to get out of London. And a week later he did - never to return. Some years after I first met him, he married a girl with multiple schlerosis called Corinne, who I’d had a brief fling with. Although I couldn’t cope with her symptoms, and abandoned her: she collapsed once on a dance-floor in a Disco. He was convinced he could cure her with his Shamanic powers, but first had to get her away from her family, who I had met. He then took her down to Wales. But her family, thinking he had kidnapped her, tried to track him down and rescue her. But they didn’t succeed and she actually wanted to stay with him. For some years his att-empts to cure her actually appeared to be working. They were living in a wooden cabin which he had built on a plot of land in Pembrokeshire, about fifteen miles from the sea, that belonged to a farmer. They didn’t pay rent. And he foraged for food. But then the inevitable happened, and she went into a terminal decline and died. And so he came back to London and was sleeping rough in the Gardens behind the Camden Arts Centre. And he said he would only return to Wales when he found another woman, which for a long time he didn’t. For some of the time he was married to her they were back in London, living in one of the very worst squats that I have ever seen in Parkhill Road, Belsize Park. I visited them there, and they were ensconced in the basement-flat surrounded by mountains of junk and rubbish - crawling with insect-life. I could barely sit anywhere. And Goodness knows where they were sleeping. The building was a structurally hazardous ruin and the roof had substantially fallen in, leaving a literal pigeon-loft on the top floor, which was occupied by the only other squatter there: a complete lunatic - who was so bestialized he couldn’t really speak any longer. He raved, and wailed.
I was sure Bronco was from East London. But one chap I knew, thought he had a Hampshire accent, curiously. I didn’t get that at all. Though speculating about his past was not actually as interesting as trying to make sense of his antics in the present. There are so many anecdotes I could tell about him (51) that I shall have to restrict myself. But one of his regular habits around Hampstead - as indeed his ‘name’ suggested! - was to literally canter, if not gallop, up and down the High Street, like a Rodeo-rider. And he would be yelling ‘Yippee!’ and ‘Rawhide!’ Not once was he stopped by Police. In fact I remember reading an interview with the Chief Sergeant at Hampstead Police-Station after Bronco’s death when there was a lot of local reminiscence about him, and he said in all the years he’d known him - about 40 - he’d never once thought it necessary to formally question him about anything. Al-though I knew he was a thief - and lots of other things too. But his behaviour was just accepted by people: ‘Oh! There goes old Bronco - up to his tricks again!’ they’d say. And he was of course, hil-ariously funny. So it was almost as if he was tolerated as a sort of Shakespearean jester. But a Fool he wasn’t. He was as bright as a button. And when he was still comparatively young, he was quite a big and imposing figure. He appeared to shrink as he got older, as many people do I daresay. But I remember him seeing off a gang once who were baiting him, raising his trouser-leg like a gypsy and roaring at them in a quite terrifying manner. Although I never once saw him engaged in actual phy-sical violence. But it was as if he had a whole archive of inner Archetypes he could draw upon in his idiosyncratic DNA, to deal with absolutely any kind of scenario and person. Not without reason did one other extraordinary person - who I met through Bronco of course - describe him as ‘the last of the Baroque Geniuses’. Another favourite ‘trick’ of his, was to stand outside posh Restaurants and Bars that wouldn’t let him in and then press his face against the windows, apeing a whole gamut of grotesque expressions to terrify the customers! This was his almost unique, personal way of spiting the Bourgeois. Occasionally customers would complain to the managers - ‘Can you please remove that filthy tramp out there?! He’s seriously disturbing us!’ - and they’d go out and have a firm word with him. But he’d just say: ‘It’s a free country. I can do as I please. I’m not vandalizing anything, or hurting anybody. If they can’t take a harmless joke, they shouldn’t be seen as being as important as they think they are. And I wasn’t even insulting them. I didn’t say a word. I was just looking at them. Since when was that a crime?’ A good and rather clever response I thought. But he was always very careful not to overstep the mark completely. And so he’d move on before hanging himself with the granted slack rope, if only to repeat the trick and others, elsewhere. It wouldn’t be strictly accurate to describe him as a sort of ‘Fagin’ figure - and not just because he wasn’t Jewish. Although he did certainly have his ‘network of associates’ shall we say - if not partners in crime. And some of these people were living in the squats, or else they were homeless as he was periodically. In fact he often slept in St. John’s Churchyard, in Church Row, off Heath Street, whenever he was homeless. It was the main Parish Church, in Hampstead - where coincidentally, I myself had been Christened. But I have never slept rough there - I just bathed in the Font for a few seconds! But others were actually working, in the various local businesses. Quite how he managed to ingratiate himself with so many of those people I never fully understood. He could hardly have been giving them kickbacks. Maybe they took pity on him. But more likely, they came under his inimitable ‘cunning man’ spell. And he got free food and drink, pretty well whenever he wanted. And a bit of piano-playing was probably the only ‘favour’ they ever asked of him. And so he never had to claim benefits. And his only ’fixed addresses’ were, of course, the Squats that he temporarily graced. And he certainly never worked - or not in any conventional sense of the word! - when I knew him. And who would have employed him? Although come to think of it, he would have been an excellent ‘Durdles’ - the grave-digger in Dickens’s Edwin Drood, had he ever sought ‘proper’, if not gainful employment! But then even old Durdles might have blanched like a ghost at the prospect of sleeping on the premises!!
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One example of his magician’s skills lay in his remarkable capacity for finding money in the streets. In those days it was far more common for people to drop money in the streets of course. I myself once found thirty five pounds that way. But whereas most people when they walk anywhere in the streets look straight ahead of them as they go about their business whatever it might be, and every now and again look all around them - Bronco would often walk with his eyes glued to the ground or the pave-ments. And so he would miss nothing. His eye for money was as sharp as any animal’s eye for food. And when he suddenly spotted coins or notes, without a moment’s scruple he’d swoop like an eagle and snaffle the beggar’s gold up into his seemingly infinitely capacious pockets and bags, which lurk- ed invisibly in the bottomless pits of The Great Survivor’s Circles of Hell. Occasionally I saw him doing this, studiously oblivious of others around him. Then I realized that since he knew every square inch of Hampstead so well - his Spiritual Manor, which he traversed in Geomantic Zodiacs every day - he was quite content to spend a considerable amount of time peering at nothing more fascinating than stretches of pavement. Yet it appears he profited from it enormously. Although he always pleaded poverty, and effortlessly charmed charity out of people - including me - after his death it was found that he had five thousand pounds in cash hidden inside his bags! Whether he had hoarded it all for a long time, slowly building it up, or it was all in a short time’s work, I do not know. But it could well be that he accumulated much more than that in all the time he panned for accidentally discarded Alms, and blew it freely on tea - and Goodness knows what else. A far more dramatic, or psycho-dramatic, turn of events occurred, when a rare relationship he had with a girl turned sour - Michelle. The said girl, who I myself knew quite well, was a Jewish Doctor’s daughter from Golder’s Green. She was in-telligent, but had had a complete schizophrenic breakdown. She was so trustingly transparent it was as if she had no skin. And amazingly she established such an intimate rapport with Bronco that some sort of relationship did actually appear to be happening between them. And they were seen walking about hand-in-hand. His clothes were pretty filthy at the time - it was thought that he rarely if ever changed them, or washed - and he even smelt at times. And his face was permanently stubbly, and pock-marked. And the tobacco-stains were rotting his teeth. Even though when in repose he looked what might be called barbarously handsome. And in her split state of mind, she accepted him. She’d been living in squats for some time, in between periods of sectioning n psychiatric wards, and struck me as being remarkably tough in spite of her troubles. She was plump and no beauty, but had an all-comprehending and all-forgiving sweetness about her, that drew Bronco like a leper to a saviour. So he became besotted, and wildly protective - and possessive. And then I and others started to hear stories about him keeping her imprisoned in a room in a squat in West Hampstead. He’d lock her in and just leave her there, while he went out for the day. He also blocked the bog in the squat - often. Eventually the other squatters broke the door down and released her. And she ran screaming from the building. When Bronco returned, they barred his access, and threw his things out in the garden. He managed to find another squat - through his network. But Michelle was then ‘re-claimed’ by her parents, who had heard what was happening, and were on the war-path. She had really hated them originally. But they sought ward of court, and got it eventually. So she was never seen again around Hampstead. And poor old Bronco - even though he had behaved in a manner, that should have got him jailed nowadays - was left completely bereft, and inconsolable. And his subsequent behaviour became potentially, dangerously psychotic. Though he was never sectioned, or not then at any rate. That only happened shortly before his death. What ensued was utterly extraordinary however.
(------------------------------------------------)
One of the first people Bronco introduced me to in the Scene was a chap called Dave Peters, one of the few whose surname I did learn, because unlike some of the others Dave believed in being trans-parent about practically every facet of his identity and detail of his life, even if that meant being in a sense a slave to the ‘System’. It was almost as if for him you had to be a slave first before you could be or become meaningfully free. He was sitting on a bench that overlooked the High Street when I first saw him, whilst walking with Bronco, and he appeared preternaturally extraordinary. ‘There’s Dave, Adam! I’ll introduce you to him now. He’ll blow your mind!’. What I found myself confronted with, was one of the most singular Beings I have ever encountered. He was quite short and stocky, with shoulder-length hair of a strange, sandy hue. His facial features were quite chiselled, and he’d obviously shaved recently. And he had the most piercing blue eyes I’ve ever seen. His clothing was rough, and quite dirty. Although I don’t recall him smelling - or not then at any rate! But he wore a stained, light brown sort of raincoat, and thick trousers, and literal hob-nailed boots. And he had a
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large bag with him too. Anybody seeing him at first glance, would certainly assume he was a down-and-out, and probably also a wino. But bottles were conspicuous by their absence. Although he also had an aura of the Ancient Briton about him. In later times, he would grow a beard so bushy, it aug-mented this aura strongly. But he was going beardless at that time. And as I studied him, I observed there was a biro behind his right ear - a frequent concomitant, it transpired. And there was a sober sharpness of perception in him that was laser-like. In short, he appeared self-possessed to a degree that was quite uncannily paradoxical in somebody who was otherwise so dispossessed. Bronco went through his familiar rigmarole: ‘Hullo, Dave! This is Adam. He’s an intellectual. And he wants to meet you. Adam, this is Dave. He’s not like anybody you’ve ever met.’ He was like a mysterious master of ceremonies, bringing two highly unusual strangers together from entirely different backgrounds, for an undivined - if not undivinable - purpose. Dave gazed very quizzically at me, smiled knowingly, and said: ‘Hullo, Adam. I’ve heard all about you. And you’ve no doubt heard all about me.’ His voice was very much a Proletarian one - yet distinctly different from Bronco’s. It was stronger, and much more direct - but similarly steeped in echoes of Antiquity. I motioned to shake hands with him, mindful of the grime on his stubby digits. Then he started: ‘No! We don’t shake hands in Albion! We gaze, and nod, and raise a hand. And if we have staves, we cross them. But we don’t touch.’ ‘Oh, I see,’ I said, suddenly non-plussed. This was to be one of Dave’s many extreme eccentricities, which I learnt later on had profound thinking behind them. So, I withdrew my hand. And the conversation that ensued was indeed mind-boggling - if not blowing. Although Dave was friendly, there was something highly challenging about him that I had rarely if ever encountered before. And he had very strange idioms, and core-preoccupations, and it must be said some very extreme prejudices. I immediately felt I was in the presence of an incredibly powerful mesmerist, or hypnotist - of an exceptionally peculiar, and possibly sinister kind. I obviously can’t recall everything that was said on that first occasion, or later ones. I wasn’t tape-recording the conversations, or taking minutes. There are no textual sources in any of this process of reconstruction of ultra-bizarre happenings and liaisons: only my own episodic, and occasionally imaginatively enhanced, recollections. And I had no idea of course at the time that I would be writing this account now. I didn’t even know with any clarity or certainly that I would be-come a writer. That idea only crystallized in my mind much later on, after I had absorbed masses of outlandishly esoteric raw material. There were however odd snippets or snatches of Dave’s diction I can just about reproduce verbatim here. At one point he spoke abruptly and rather brusquely about Bronco, who was looking askance and mootly mischievous as he spoke: ‘Nobody knows who Bronco is! You can’t ever get to know him. He is a terrified child. But he is an endlessly fascinating enigma. I feel as if I know him less well now than I did when I first met him, even if I see him nearly every day. I’d like to reach into his brain, then pluck it out and examine it. But I couldn’t do that without killing him!’ Sudden shock-statements like that were a speciality with Dave. Another eccentricity I noticed was his tendency to sometimes deliberately not focus on what people were saying but on their non- -verbal behaviour. He might then cut across their speech with a statement that bore no connection to it, like: ‘My grandmother was deaf.’ And people would say, as I did on that occasion: ‘What’s that got to do with what I was just saying?’ And he’d then stare for a while before saying something like: ‘I have inherited my grandmother’s deafness, but selectively.’ Or: ‘Were you aware that your hand-movements as you were speaking just now were revealing to me what you were trying to hide from me?’ Alternatively he’d say, apropos of anything: ‘It’s all Welsh, you know.’ And this would just stop people dead in their tracks, so he could steer conversations in any directions he chose. And yet one
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of his main obsessions, was exposing and confronting people, who tried to exert control over any-body in any way or context, especially when aimed at him And he could be truly terrifying when-ever he did this. And he claimed he could outstare anyone across a table as long as they remained absolutely still and didn’t resort to violence. Although there was a great psychic violence coiled up inside him, to my perception. And he turned out to be full of cosmically splitting contradictions.
In the course of a couple of hours or so during that first encounter, when we just stayed put at the bench rather than go for a coffee or tea as we had no money for a drink - a common occurrence in the Scene, when we’d simply stand on pavements or anywhere else for hours on end just talking or creating street-theatre, attracting strange looks which we ignored - I learnt a lot about Dave, as he revealed himself to me, as if to Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor! He had grown up near Dunstable, and had steeped himself in the Archaeology and Mythology of the ancient landscapes all around it since childhood. He was working-class, and convinced that he was a Genius. And so he developed his own way of ‘seeing’, and thinking about the world. But it soon became obvious to him that his parents had no interest in his abilities and education, assuming he’d work in a factory after he left School. And so at the age of 15 in 1956 he took the extraordinary and drastic decision to just leave home and never return! He literally gathered up his most treasured possessions and walked out of the front door - just like Cendrars at the same age, if it really happened. To prevent panic, he’d left them a written explanation. So there was no Police-search for a missing minor. And then he simply took to the Road, becoming a Gentleman of the Road. And he set about systematically unlearning just about everything he’d been taught and teaching himself in Public Libraries chiefly, building up his own ‘universe of knowledge’. In fact he spent five or six hours a day in Libraries, reading every-thing he could get his hands on. He could recite reams of Shakespeare from memory; had learned about Physics and Chemistry; and had pored over maps, especially Medieval ones. He knew Scrip-tures by heart, and was very well-versed in Philosophy, Psychology, and the Occult. All manner of quirky History fascinated him, especially secret societies or hidden influences behind the worlds of Politics and Current Affairs. But his real passion was for Geography, and what would nowadays be called Psycho-Geography, although that wasn’t really a term in use when he first started doing it in his own highly original way. And his speciality was ley-lines, which nowadays are well-known. So in the Scene he was known as Ley-Line Dave! And he was also known as Shaman Dave - claiming that he had Shamanic powers. And even Dancing Dave, on account of his skill in Pagan dancing. He was also of Welsh Druidic descent, and had Romany-Gypsy ancestry. He was a tremendous walker, and had truly trodden all over Britain in the previous twenty years - barely missing a single square mile! He was an extremely well-seasoned rough sleeper and a highly adept survivor who insisted that he could eat anything! Therefore, not only did he not need a roof over his head, or a job, but he didn’t need Benefits either. He was completely self-sufficient, like the human equivalent of a Beast of the Field. And he had been developing his own theories - about the nature and origins of language, the workings of the human mind, the propensities of the body and the meanings inherent in landscape, including urban landscape. He was like a unique Diviner or Seer who could read signs everywhere in his own mental script as it were. He was totally extraordinary! Unfortunately he was also very racist and intensely homophobic. And he was drawn more to fascistic than communistic ideas. But I could overlook all of this because of his most singular, and brilliant, cast of mind. He had written reams of note-books over the years, some of which he had lost - or had stolen as he believed. So he’d have to
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re-write them. He claimed he had worked in a chemistry laboratory, which I found hard to believe. But I am not aware he had had any other job. Or rather - his ‘job’ was to fathom the secrets of the world, the human race, and the cosmos. And no theory was off-limits, however weird or wacky or conspiratorial. And yet he appeared to understand Science - and even Mathematics. But his main ‘skill’ was in anatomizing Language - by using a Methodology of Symbolic ‘translation’, drawn from different Mythoses. His notebooks were full of arcane notations for breaking down, and analyzing, and transposing etymological derivations which looked like extra-terrestrial languages almost. And one very unusual feature was that letters were for him units of meaning as well as words. And the shapes of configurations in landscapes provided the Templates for linguistic signs and symbols. He also maintained that written language preceded spoken language, which I don’t believe to be true. But what was remarkable, was the sheer force of his conviction over the matter. The Ancients had been Scribes before they became chanters. His Dogmatism was Absolute, but his reasoning, which was partly diagrammatic, was ingenious. He was completely locked into his own world - as though he were simultaneously in Antiquity and the Present. There was a profound pathology in him how-ever, as he admitted he’d been both in mental hospitals and in prison. Though I can’t recall why he was ever sent to prison. Nothing was too weird or heavy or extreme for hm. Every abnormal state had to be experienced. Although he paradoxically prized normality! He thought most people were very unevolved, and even subhuman. And so he fearlessly opposed and exposed everything - from stupidity to its manipulation. All Politicians were tyrants and thickies. All Priests and Teachers were homosexuals and pederasts. All Businessmen were crooks. The Police bizarrely were ‘clear’. Spooks were clearer still. Scientists and Technologists were the clearest of all. All Psychiatrists were mind-interfering perverts. All parents were monsters. Practical Engineers and Builders were ‘Geniuses’. Occultists were finger-pointers at the Moon - and to go beyond the Occult, one had to be an Astral rocket-scientist venturing into the Sun. All Socialist Revolutionaries, Anarchists et al, were Infantile Regressives. All Vegetarians and Vegans were repressed cannibals. And so on - and so forth!
Meeting Dave was a bombardment of the brain in every sphere, and I gradually gained a sense of my wanting and needing to not only befriend, but also monitor and study, such specimens for a purpose that I couldn’t yet fully comprehend. But it would become clearer later on. Dave was an Exemplar of Meta-Man - and a True Egregore. And he was sleeping in a Graveyard! He had trained himself to lie down like a fakir on gravestones, and auto-hypnotize himself into a state of deepest dream-sleep, in which he could commune with the Spirits of the Dead - including Medieval Kings! He was very tough, like a latter-day George Borrow, the pugilist scholar-gypsy and tutelary spirit of Wild Wales. He drank from basin-taps in Public Conveniences, and ate discarded food. He washed and shaved only on rare occasions. And he hadn’t changed his clothes for as long as he could remember. He was perennially penniless, yet never begged. Though he accepted charity if it was offered, especially cups of tea and coffee. But like Bronco, he never touched Alcohol. Beer was ‘bottled piss!’. There was barely a drug he hadn’t taken however. But he’d rendered himself immune to their effects. He never used Public Transport. He’d talk to anybody high or low, and treat them just the same. He’d grace communes to raise consciousness only, or blast people with his own explosive brand of enlightenment and ecstasy. Otherwise he was a true Scion of the Solitary Path. I was to meet him regularly after that, both on his own and with others. And it was never what I would call a comfortable liaison. At times it was tense and we came close to falling out. But on the whole it was a roller-coaster ride into the lowest depths
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of the Inferno, and the uppermost echelons of the headiest Ether. In The Nameless Revolutionary, I based a character on him called Ley-Line Rod - aka The Druid. He claimed he had mapped all the ley-lines across Britain on his travels and they had become his ‘possessions’. I was rather sceptical about them, thinking them quite subjective. But he finally persuaded me there really was a Geomantic Grid of forces, or energies, like Telluric currents, governing different sites and pathways between them in deeply significant and timeless ways. He once showed me a particular spot on East Heath, quite near Whitestone Pond, which he described as a ‘magnetometer of forces’ governing London. It was at the high point of London of course. And he was convinced that it was an Ancient Druidic site. This might have been true, although there’s very little Archaeological evidence to support it. Though it’s widely believed that there were open-air Druid Parliaments, and communities, on Hampstead Heath, which practised sun- and oak-worshipping rites, and also performed sacrifices - possibly human, as well as animal ones - to gods of harvest and plenty. The height of that Hill - the highest around, for twenty miles - would have drawn the ancient mystic pilgrims, and settlers, long before Hampstead became known as Hampstead. For it would have symbolized in their eyes a Sacred Summit close to the gods. Many years later I was to write a manuscript called The Grimoires of Ham’stede, in which I imagined a scene where a gruesome sacrifice took place at exactly the spot Dave showed me and the skeleton of the victim was found thousands of years later by a Satanist sleuth, who subsequently dies himself at the site - then becomes one of the Undead in the Underworld of the Heath. So I reckoned I owed the idea in part at least to Dave himself. He based his theory on psychometric perception. Although I never got it published of course - and never told him about it. He’s still alive by all accounts, living in some sort of Commune down in the Forest of Dean. But I haven’t seen him for many years now.
The last time I did see him, he appeared severely paranoid - wild-eyed, and hirsute. He claimed that London was being controlled by a cabal of Nigerian criminals who were trying to murder him as he a-lone knew of their plot! And they’d already stolen his bicycle!! So he had to get out of London. And a week later he did - never to return. Some years after I first met him, he married a girl with multiple schlerosis called Corinne, who I’d had a brief fling with. Although I couldn’t cope with her symptoms, and abandoned her: she collapsed once on a dance-floor in a Disco. He was convinced he could cure her with his Shamanic powers, but first had to get her away from her family, who I had met. He then took her down to Wales. But her family, thinking he had kidnapped her, tried to track him down and rescue her. But they didn’t succeed and she actually wanted to stay with him. For some years his att-empts to cure her actually appeared to be working. They were living in a wooden cabin which he had built on a plot of land in Pembrokeshire, about fifteen miles from the sea, that belonged to a farmer. They didn’t pay rent. And he foraged for food. But then the inevitable happened, and she went into a terminal decline and died. And so he came back to London and was sleeping rough in the Gardens behind the Camden Arts Centre. And he said he would only return to Wales when he found another woman, which for a long time he didn’t. For some of the time he was married to her they were back in London, living in one of the very worst squats that I have ever seen in Parkhill Road, Belsize Park. I visited them there, and they were ensconced in the basement-flat surrounded by mountains of junk and rubbish - crawling with insect-life. I could barely sit anywhere. And Goodness knows where they were sleeping. The building was a structurally hazardous ruin and the roof had substantially fallen in, leaving a literal pigeon-loft on the top floor, which was occupied by the only other squatter there: a complete lunatic - who was so bestialized he couldn’t really speak any longer. He raved, and wailed.
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He was quite short and small, but wiry and even a bit stocky. He was dressed in appalling clothes and shoes that looked as if they’d fall off him at any moment. He had streaky, shoulder-length, grey hair, and his face was broken down and bulbous - his eyes staring out of his head like exploding stars. Not even Dave could communicate with him. He was a true outcast to the most superlative degree of all. He carried a beaten-up old pram around with him, all the time - like a Diabolical child. Nobody could get near him. On one occasion, I saw him in the streets wailing so dispiritedly, I thought he was going to tear himself apart. And I don’t know what happened to him in the end: he simply vanished. But he wasn’t the only one to do so. Yet at that time, he was still somehow managing to survive beyond the clutches of Society in general - and Psychiatry in particular. There were rumours he’d been a soldier, or a commando, who’d seen and done terrible things and had never been able to re-adjust to civilian life, and had gone totally insane. And yet he was still such a tough and an adept survivor that he was just clinging on to the jagged cliff-face of Civilization - if not by his finger-tips, then by his teeth. But I haven’t a clue whether that was true or not, as I could never speak to him. He had the look of a man who had forgotten everything about himself, and was no longer a man therefore in a way, but a kind of animal. And yet he was living in what had once been a smart town-house in N.W.3. Dave married a second time, bizarrely to an academic philosopher at Cambridge. She obviously found him as extra -ordinary as I had and took him to live with her up in Cambridge, where he was simply left to his own devices - like Swinburne at Oxford, long before him. He set about studying Cambridge - psycho-geo-graphically - spending huge amounts of time in the Libraries there. Otherwise he’d walk everywhere, as per usual. And then occasionally he would attend lectures and seminars - chipping in with oddball contributions from time to time. But he wasn’t expected to follow a curriculum of any sort. And then the relationship eventually came under severe strain, and they agreed to an amicable separation and divorce. So Dave then returned to London, and as far as I know never found another woman. Whilst I loop back to the Dawn of the Scene, he will of course, make many important appearances amongst the dramatis personae in the various ‘Acts’ that took place. But I’ll conclude this preliminary portrait of him with just one further anecdote, that quintessentially summarizes him. I’ve already mentioned that he claimed he could eat absolutely anything, and I was sceptical about that. Well - one evening, when we were standing on the pavement in Hampstead High Street, extemporizing as ever on issues temporal and spiritual with a heavily heretical hue, I decided to challenge him on the matter. And he gave me a very searching glare before exclaiming: ‘Ye of little Faith!’ He then pointed at a box of dis-carded curry leaning up against a nearby wall, and said: ‘You see that box of curry over there? Well - I’m now going to prove to you that I’m not a liar. I’m going to pick it up and then consume it in front of your very eyes. So just you watch me!’ And he then proceeded to do exactly as he had promised! And he literally downed all of the contents, which were stone cold - and to my perception, inedibly and untouchably filthy. But then something occurred that completely unnerved me. He started ex-periencing violent stomach-spasms, then doubled up, roaring in evident agony. And all I could think of saying was: ‘Should I call an ambulance, Dave?!’ And he yelled at me: ‘No! It’s not necessary! This is nothing! I’ll be fine in a moment!’ And then suddenly, he stopped squirming, straightened himself up, stretched and said: ‘Right! That’s all gone down the hatch then! And I’ve suffered far worse than that, I assure you. So NOW do you believe me?’ ‘Er - yes!’ I retorted, staggered in disbelief. He then grinned and said: ‘You could do that too. And then you would be FREE - like me! It’s merely a matter of training, that’s all. I even ate a rat once. It made me a bit ill, but it didn’t kill me.’ This was a quite
65.
horrifying spectacle, but also for me a compellingly fascinating one. And it proved to my satisfaction that Dave was an exceptional specimen of potential if not actual Meta-Humanity, as I later called it. Many people would simply dismiss such an episode as suicidally mad, and stupid, and obscenely dis- gusting. And I suppose it was all those things. But it was also transcendently courageous and heroic, and transgressively sublime. Extremes transfixed me and I had just witnessed a pure demonstration of an Extreme. And I was to witness many more, of all kinds. A colony of monsters was opening up before me, whose Sisyphean torments were transmuting into Promethean triumphs! But, needless to say, Dave and I received some seriously strange and hostile looks from passers-by as this remark-able ‘performance’ took place. Not only were they looking at Dave with horror - but they were also looking at me with incredulity, as if to say: ‘How on earth could a reasonably decent- and civilized-looking person like you be associating with a hideous reject like him?!’ And not only had I changed so much that I couldn’t have given a flying fuck what all those vile, Hampsteadian, Bourgeois swine thought of the situation, but I positively delighted in spiting them so shamelessly! I had crossed the threshold of Transcendental Nihilism at that critical point, and had well and truly enjoined with the Egregores. And so Dave and I just laughed at all those death’s heads like Nietzschean lions.
Not long after my first encounter with Dave Peters, I met another Giant amongst the local Outcast-Elect, as I came to regard them. Bronco introduced me to Joshua. Ah, yes - Joshua! Joshua. He was a one indeed. The One! I had actually seen him around a few times and it may be that I had already introduced myself to him once; or alternatively, I re-introduced myself to him, after Bronco had al-ready introduced me some time before. But my memory is somewhat hazy on this. Yet meet him I did! And he was, without question, one of the most extraordinary Beings I’ve ever encountered in my entire life. I was walking down Finchley Road one evening with Bronco in the late Spring or the early Summer of 1976, when a figure emerged in the distance coming towards us. He looked to be swathed in reddish brown robes and had very long reddish brown hair, and an almost equally long beard. He was walking barefoot - as you do, in First Century Palestine! And under his right arm he was carrying a huge wad of papers. He was fairly short, and quite thin, but had an aura about him that was massive. One knew instantly as he hoved into view that one was in the presence of a rare individual: a True Somebody who yet was a Nobody. But he was definitely not somebody that one passed in the street every day of the week! To call him prophet-like or Messianic was true enough, although somewhat clichéd - especially at that time, when the long-haired Hippies of the late 60’s were still very much in evidence on the Streets of London. But there was still something different about him: special, even unique. I could see the visionary gleam in his blue eyes as he drew close, and Bronco then said: ‘Ah! Here comes Joshua, Adam. I’ve been meaning to introduce you. Now’s my chance.’ And Joshua recognized him of course and with a tone of voice that sounded as world-wearily and ironically Olympian as it did dartingly eager, he got his greeting in first: ‘Hullo, Bronco. And who’s your friend here?’ Bronco then went through his usual rigmarole: ‘Hullo, Joshua! This is Adam. He’s an intellectual. And he wants to meet you. Adam, this is Joshua. He’s a Genius.’ A look of the wryest amusement slowly flickered across Joshua’s face as Bronco retreated into his mental box and allowed us two contrasting Titans to negotiate our initial familiarization. Joshua extended his hand - unlike Dave! - and in an incredibly knowing long drawn out accentuation, said ‘H-U-L-L-O A-D-A-M!’ Not to be Rhetorically upstaged in the mind-games of that moment, I studiedly, if more swiftly retorted: ‘Hullo, Joshua!’ We shook hands, and I could sense the enormity of his mind in his eyes as they focussed on me. As a twenty two year old idealistically disillusioned Philosophy Graduate,
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I immediately sensed that Here was a Being I had envisioned: as a New Type of Human for the Present and the Future; as Nietzsche did with his Overman; and Dostoyevsky did with his God-Man/ Man-God; and Ouspensky found, or thought he had found, in Gurdjieff; and Samuel Johnson found, in Richard Savage, etc. And there was no small talk with Joshua. After our introduction was over, he proclaimed: ‘This is incredible! I was just on my way to a Squat, to tell the people there of my latest discovery, when who should I meet on my travels but a fellow-Seer as singular as you. I can see it in you! I know a true fellow-Spirit when I see one! The Light expands!’ He really did speak in this vein quite a lot of the time, as it transpired - just like a Biblical Prophet, re-incarnated in a contemporary cycle. His whole body galvanized as he spoke, and his hands rose as if he were saluting the sun. ‘Let us talk, my friend. Where shall we go to?’ ‘Can you spare the time?’ I countered. His eyes widened: ‘The Time?! But there is all the Time in the world! Time is in our Gift, my friend!’ Bronco then cut in: ‘I know a café just up the road. Let’s go there for a tea.’ So off we went, a spontaneously assembled Unholy Trio, about to commence a form of life, discourse, and action, that would consume us totally for years to come in the mighty, Weltanschauungen-spouting watering-holes of endless tea and talk. The café we went to has long gone now, like nearly all the others in that whole area. But as we sat in a triangulating prism of conjoining and fusing life-forces, we informally inaugurated a magical forum of minds that presaged great things ahead: the prospect of a Truly Trans-Historic attainment!
This might sound like preposterous fantasy to some readers. But perhaps for the first time in my life I felt - and sort of knew - that I was in the presence of the kind of Radical Philosopher that I had been seeking for many years. Also the fact that Joshua was about as completely detached from the entire social system, not to say official Reality, as could be, in no way detracted from his stature as such. On the contrary, I thought that reinforced it. I might qualify this statement now, but in his case only very slightly. Obviously I can no more fully remember everything, or even much, of what was actually said during our initial encounter than I could with Dave, and the others I was later due to meet. Although I do of course remember odd comments and certainly characteristic mannerisms that struck me with great force. But chiefly I got an impression of the essence of the man as somebody who could be ex-tremely important if he chose to become better known - yet who could still, and even as a complete unknown in Bob Dylan’s immortal words at least outside the mainstream establishment, as he was in fact very well-known in certain quarters of the broad counter-culture, spearhead The Revolution and an Evolution to boot! And I exaggerate not. In retrospect, this may sound extremely naïve. But at the time, as I’ve stressed already, I still felt a Revolution was possible in Britain - if not elsewhere. And it was certainly desirable, if not necessary, by whatever means. Of that I was, rightly or wrongly, Absol-utely convinced. So much so that I was I suppose what in Religious terms - albeit I was totally hostile to all forms of Religion, or certainly Established Religion - would be called ‘touched’. I could actually envision another ‘Reality’ in which The Revolution had already happened. And I thought of it as a fait accompli - only a matter of mere time before it was of necessity achieved. Such was my own Radical intensity. The World around me, was the dregs of its pseudo-Platonic Form! And I could see through and beyond it. And by Jove, so could Joshua - even farther! And failure was unthinkable. The Change HAD to happen! And it WOULD! SOON! So the heady excitement of the encounter was of the highest order of magnitude - even if it was powered by total fantasy. I came to see Joshua as an unorthodox Saviour of the World - as did many others, I discovered. He really was like Jesus Christ in that sense, except he was also a complete Heretic! One of the many things I learnt about him in that first meet-ing was his utter repudiation of the tenets of Theology. ‘Theology doesn’t emancipate us, it enslaves
He was quite short and small, but wiry and even a bit stocky. He was dressed in appalling clothes and shoes that looked as if they’d fall off him at any moment. He had streaky, shoulder-length, grey hair, and his face was broken down and bulbous - his eyes staring out of his head like exploding stars. Not even Dave could communicate with him. He was a true outcast to the most superlative degree of all. He carried a beaten-up old pram around with him, all the time - like a Diabolical child. Nobody could get near him. On one occasion, I saw him in the streets wailing so dispiritedly, I thought he was going to tear himself apart. And I don’t know what happened to him in the end: he simply vanished. But he wasn’t the only one to do so. Yet at that time, he was still somehow managing to survive beyond the clutches of Society in general - and Psychiatry in particular. There were rumours he’d been a soldier, or a commando, who’d seen and done terrible things and had never been able to re-adjust to civilian life, and had gone totally insane. And yet he was still such a tough and an adept survivor that he was just clinging on to the jagged cliff-face of Civilization - if not by his finger-tips, then by his teeth. But I haven’t a clue whether that was true or not, as I could never speak to him. He had the look of a man who had forgotten everything about himself, and was no longer a man therefore in a way, but a kind of animal. And yet he was living in what had once been a smart town-house in N.W.3. Dave married a second time, bizarrely to an academic philosopher at Cambridge. She obviously found him as extra -ordinary as I had and took him to live with her up in Cambridge, where he was simply left to his own devices - like Swinburne at Oxford, long before him. He set about studying Cambridge - psycho-geo-graphically - spending huge amounts of time in the Libraries there. Otherwise he’d walk everywhere, as per usual. And then occasionally he would attend lectures and seminars - chipping in with oddball contributions from time to time. But he wasn’t expected to follow a curriculum of any sort. And then the relationship eventually came under severe strain, and they agreed to an amicable separation and divorce. So Dave then returned to London, and as far as I know never found another woman. Whilst I loop back to the Dawn of the Scene, he will of course, make many important appearances amongst the dramatis personae in the various ‘Acts’ that took place. But I’ll conclude this preliminary portrait of him with just one further anecdote, that quintessentially summarizes him. I’ve already mentioned that he claimed he could eat absolutely anything, and I was sceptical about that. Well - one evening, when we were standing on the pavement in Hampstead High Street, extemporizing as ever on issues temporal and spiritual with a heavily heretical hue, I decided to challenge him on the matter. And he gave me a very searching glare before exclaiming: ‘Ye of little Faith!’ He then pointed at a box of dis-carded curry leaning up against a nearby wall, and said: ‘You see that box of curry over there? Well - I’m now going to prove to you that I’m not a liar. I’m going to pick it up and then consume it in front of your very eyes. So just you watch me!’ And he then proceeded to do exactly as he had promised! And he literally downed all of the contents, which were stone cold - and to my perception, inedibly and untouchably filthy. But then something occurred that completely unnerved me. He started ex-periencing violent stomach-spasms, then doubled up, roaring in evident agony. And all I could think of saying was: ‘Should I call an ambulance, Dave?!’ And he yelled at me: ‘No! It’s not necessary! This is nothing! I’ll be fine in a moment!’ And then suddenly, he stopped squirming, straightened himself up, stretched and said: ‘Right! That’s all gone down the hatch then! And I’ve suffered far worse than that, I assure you. So NOW do you believe me?’ ‘Er - yes!’ I retorted, staggered in disbelief. He then grinned and said: ‘You could do that too. And then you would be FREE - like me! It’s merely a matter of training, that’s all. I even ate a rat once. It made me a bit ill, but it didn’t kill me.’ This was a quite
65.
horrifying spectacle, but also for me a compellingly fascinating one. And it proved to my satisfaction that Dave was an exceptional specimen of potential if not actual Meta-Humanity, as I later called it. Many people would simply dismiss such an episode as suicidally mad, and stupid, and obscenely dis- gusting. And I suppose it was all those things. But it was also transcendently courageous and heroic, and transgressively sublime. Extremes transfixed me and I had just witnessed a pure demonstration of an Extreme. And I was to witness many more, of all kinds. A colony of monsters was opening up before me, whose Sisyphean torments were transmuting into Promethean triumphs! But, needless to say, Dave and I received some seriously strange and hostile looks from passers-by as this remark-able ‘performance’ took place. Not only were they looking at Dave with horror - but they were also looking at me with incredulity, as if to say: ‘How on earth could a reasonably decent- and civilized-looking person like you be associating with a hideous reject like him?!’ And not only had I changed so much that I couldn’t have given a flying fuck what all those vile, Hampsteadian, Bourgeois swine thought of the situation, but I positively delighted in spiting them so shamelessly! I had crossed the threshold of Transcendental Nihilism at that critical point, and had well and truly enjoined with the Egregores. And so Dave and I just laughed at all those death’s heads like Nietzschean lions.
Not long after my first encounter with Dave Peters, I met another Giant amongst the local Outcast-Elect, as I came to regard them. Bronco introduced me to Joshua. Ah, yes - Joshua! Joshua. He was a one indeed. The One! I had actually seen him around a few times and it may be that I had already introduced myself to him once; or alternatively, I re-introduced myself to him, after Bronco had al-ready introduced me some time before. But my memory is somewhat hazy on this. Yet meet him I did! And he was, without question, one of the most extraordinary Beings I’ve ever encountered in my entire life. I was walking down Finchley Road one evening with Bronco in the late Spring or the early Summer of 1976, when a figure emerged in the distance coming towards us. He looked to be swathed in reddish brown robes and had very long reddish brown hair, and an almost equally long beard. He was walking barefoot - as you do, in First Century Palestine! And under his right arm he was carrying a huge wad of papers. He was fairly short, and quite thin, but had an aura about him that was massive. One knew instantly as he hoved into view that one was in the presence of a rare individual: a True Somebody who yet was a Nobody. But he was definitely not somebody that one passed in the street every day of the week! To call him prophet-like or Messianic was true enough, although somewhat clichéd - especially at that time, when the long-haired Hippies of the late 60’s were still very much in evidence on the Streets of London. But there was still something different about him: special, even unique. I could see the visionary gleam in his blue eyes as he drew close, and Bronco then said: ‘Ah! Here comes Joshua, Adam. I’ve been meaning to introduce you. Now’s my chance.’ And Joshua recognized him of course and with a tone of voice that sounded as world-wearily and ironically Olympian as it did dartingly eager, he got his greeting in first: ‘Hullo, Bronco. And who’s your friend here?’ Bronco then went through his usual rigmarole: ‘Hullo, Joshua! This is Adam. He’s an intellectual. And he wants to meet you. Adam, this is Joshua. He’s a Genius.’ A look of the wryest amusement slowly flickered across Joshua’s face as Bronco retreated into his mental box and allowed us two contrasting Titans to negotiate our initial familiarization. Joshua extended his hand - unlike Dave! - and in an incredibly knowing long drawn out accentuation, said ‘H-U-L-L-O A-D-A-M!’ Not to be Rhetorically upstaged in the mind-games of that moment, I studiedly, if more swiftly retorted: ‘Hullo, Joshua!’ We shook hands, and I could sense the enormity of his mind in his eyes as they focussed on me. As a twenty two year old idealistically disillusioned Philosophy Graduate,
66.
I immediately sensed that Here was a Being I had envisioned: as a New Type of Human for the Present and the Future; as Nietzsche did with his Overman; and Dostoyevsky did with his God-Man/ Man-God; and Ouspensky found, or thought he had found, in Gurdjieff; and Samuel Johnson found, in Richard Savage, etc. And there was no small talk with Joshua. After our introduction was over, he proclaimed: ‘This is incredible! I was just on my way to a Squat, to tell the people there of my latest discovery, when who should I meet on my travels but a fellow-Seer as singular as you. I can see it in you! I know a true fellow-Spirit when I see one! The Light expands!’ He really did speak in this vein quite a lot of the time, as it transpired - just like a Biblical Prophet, re-incarnated in a contemporary cycle. His whole body galvanized as he spoke, and his hands rose as if he were saluting the sun. ‘Let us talk, my friend. Where shall we go to?’ ‘Can you spare the time?’ I countered. His eyes widened: ‘The Time?! But there is all the Time in the world! Time is in our Gift, my friend!’ Bronco then cut in: ‘I know a café just up the road. Let’s go there for a tea.’ So off we went, a spontaneously assembled Unholy Trio, about to commence a form of life, discourse, and action, that would consume us totally for years to come in the mighty, Weltanschauungen-spouting watering-holes of endless tea and talk. The café we went to has long gone now, like nearly all the others in that whole area. But as we sat in a triangulating prism of conjoining and fusing life-forces, we informally inaugurated a magical forum of minds that presaged great things ahead: the prospect of a Truly Trans-Historic attainment!
This might sound like preposterous fantasy to some readers. But perhaps for the first time in my life I felt - and sort of knew - that I was in the presence of the kind of Radical Philosopher that I had been seeking for many years. Also the fact that Joshua was about as completely detached from the entire social system, not to say official Reality, as could be, in no way detracted from his stature as such. On the contrary, I thought that reinforced it. I might qualify this statement now, but in his case only very slightly. Obviously I can no more fully remember everything, or even much, of what was actually said during our initial encounter than I could with Dave, and the others I was later due to meet. Although I do of course remember odd comments and certainly characteristic mannerisms that struck me with great force. But chiefly I got an impression of the essence of the man as somebody who could be ex-tremely important if he chose to become better known - yet who could still, and even as a complete unknown in Bob Dylan’s immortal words at least outside the mainstream establishment, as he was in fact very well-known in certain quarters of the broad counter-culture, spearhead The Revolution and an Evolution to boot! And I exaggerate not. In retrospect, this may sound extremely naïve. But at the time, as I’ve stressed already, I still felt a Revolution was possible in Britain - if not elsewhere. And it was certainly desirable, if not necessary, by whatever means. Of that I was, rightly or wrongly, Absol-utely convinced. So much so that I was I suppose what in Religious terms - albeit I was totally hostile to all forms of Religion, or certainly Established Religion - would be called ‘touched’. I could actually envision another ‘Reality’ in which The Revolution had already happened. And I thought of it as a fait accompli - only a matter of mere time before it was of necessity achieved. Such was my own Radical intensity. The World around me, was the dregs of its pseudo-Platonic Form! And I could see through and beyond it. And by Jove, so could Joshua - even farther! And failure was unthinkable. The Change HAD to happen! And it WOULD! SOON! So the heady excitement of the encounter was of the highest order of magnitude - even if it was powered by total fantasy. I came to see Joshua as an unorthodox Saviour of the World - as did many others, I discovered. He really was like Jesus Christ in that sense, except he was also a complete Heretic! One of the many things I learnt about him in that first meet-ing was his utter repudiation of the tenets of Theology. ‘Theology doesn’t emancipate us, it enslaves
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us!’ he quietly thundered, drawing attention from the staff, who were possibly wondering if he was some kind of ‘Visitation’. He then added the rider: ‘I don’t seek the Disestablishment of The Church of England. I seek its Total Dissolution!’ There was a palpable fire in him as he spoke, like a Mystical Purgation, as much Pagan as Religious - or purely Cosmic, and transcendently immanent or imman-ently transcendent, but in terms that defied all Theological approval. And this brought me on to his name, because he occasionally referred to himself by other names: Jeshua, Yehoshua, and even, it must be said: Jesus! But Joshua seemed to be his ‘main’ name. I took it for granted he was Jewish. Although an old mutual friend has always doubted this. And I quickly realized that one could never interrogate or probe Joshua about such matters, or anything else that didn’t pertain to the Present Moment, which was infinitely elastic in his eyes, and his general thinking. ‘Facts’ about himself and his past were an irrelevance. In this regard he was similar to Bronco of course, who listened to us in reverential yet distanced silence for much of the meeting - apart from the odd quirky aside. But he was far more intellectually sophisticated than Bronco, and his rationale for this extreme peculiarity was clearly driven by a philosophical system of a sort rather than by mere trauma as such. But then when I made the mistake as it turned out of asking him firstly whether there was any significance in his name and secondly what his surname was, I was immediately exposed to his volcanic wrath - al-beit only momentarily. He stared fiercely at me, and then simply said: ‘Zero.’ I tried again, as Diplo-matically as possible, only to be countered by a louder ‘Zero!’ So I got the message and apologized. He then said with cryptic brilliance: ‘Bohemians don’t do surnames.’ And I’ve never forgotten that! He then further added: ‘And Joshua is my name for now.’ ‘Right you are!’ I retorted, cherishing the ‘for now’. Very consistently, he didn’t ask me my surname. I was going to ask him whether, as I be-gan to suspect, he was modelling himself - up to a point, at least - on the Old Testament Prophet, notwithstanding the unaffordable expense of the trumpets! But I already knew better, than to en-quire. Though it seemed a plausible conjecture. And later on, there were occasions when he’d talk with the most extreme fervour, of ‘raising a multitude and marching on Downing Street!’ One only had to exchange ‘the walls of Jericho’ for Downing Street, and one had it. He certainly LOOKED the part. And I learned that he could more than PLAY the part too. The ‘Zero’ gambit - or defense - was used in other contexts too, such as whenever somebody asked him his age. On one occasion, I saw him repeating Zero five times, louder and louder each time, until the person finally relented. Thus, being ‘Zeroed’ by Joshua became a well-known ritual - and running joke - in the Scene.
Although I learnt nothing about Joshua or his past, I got an insight during that first meeting into his whole way of thinking and speaking as he touched upon many subjects, from Politics to Philosophy, Science to History, Religion to Mysticism and the Occult, the state of Society and the World, and in the immortal words of Lenin: ‘What is to be done?’ I recognized he was a Giant of quirky erudition, and a highly original thinker: a true self-created Being. He seemed to have read everything. And he never stopped thinking - out loud. And yet he also manifestly LIVED his Ideals. In fact, I have never since met anyone who has lived their ideals - however insanely and unrealistically, and I don’t even care about that - more than he did. To say compromise was not a word in his vocabulary would be the understatement of all time. There was a TOTALITY about him that was truly awe-inspiring. And this was just the kind of person I’d been seeking for years - and couldn’t quite be sure if they could actually EXIST or not. And yet THERE he was, right before me - like the embodiment of the Deus Ex Machina, in apparent human flesh. Not that he was seeking Disciples. He was the very antithesis of the then still trendy ‘Gurus’. He was the ultimate Anti-Guru - or a Meta-Guru more like. He wanted
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to encourage everyone to think for themselves, and not to follow others, least of all himself - which made him hugely appealing to somebody of my own innately anti-authoritarian cast of mind. But he was a classic exemplar of what Russian Philosophers would call a ‘Cosmist’ - although I can’t actually recall him ever using that term to describe himself. Cosmists aren’t necessarily religious or moralistic in any Orthodox sense. But they’re not mundane Secularists either, not even Humanists necessarily. They are like grand, free-thinking, usually highly radical metaphysicians, who on the one hand Hymn the Cosmos, and on the other hand promote ingenious Rationalistic solutions to the problems of the world. They can also come across as being totally cracked! And this actually summed up Joshua to a T. He was like a combination of Jesus Christ, Karl Marx, Leo Tolstoy, and Buckminster Fuller all rolled into one! And he resembled the Ultimate Messianic Californian Hippy to boot. As for the matter of his sanity, or otherwise - that, er, was an interesting question. As the meeting progressed, I realized it would be superficially tempting to simply dismiss him as a complete lunatic. There was an unden-iable urgency in his whole manner and speech - as though Absolutely Everything had to be achieved immediately to avert Total Catastrophe. When he was in that mode he was supremely Dogmatic, al-beit almost irrefutable in his statements and arguments. He had a tendency to slow down his speech for emphasis as he raised his voice: ‘Y-o-u h-a-v-e t-o r-e-a-l-i-z-e, A-d-a-m, t-h-e-r-e i-s a T-O-T-A-L-I-T-Y t-o t-h-e f-o-r-m-s a-n-d m-a-n-i-f-e-s-t-a-t-i-o-n-s o-f t-h-e A-d-v-e-r-t-i-s-i-n-g H-i-e-r-a-r-c-h-y, u-n-d-e-r G-l-o-b-a-l S-t-a-t-e C-a-p-i-t-a-l-i-s-m, t-h-a-t j-u-s-t h-a-s t-o b-e S-M-A-S-H-E-D!!! I-t c-a-n-n-o-t b-e m-e-r-e-l-y r-e-f-o-r-m-e-d!!!’ And so on, and on, and on! But it was T-O-T-A-L-L-Y riveting. I based a character called Jez The Prophet on him in The Nameless Revolutionary, and I used this hyphenating device to illustrate his most frequent mode of speaking. But at other times he could speak more ‘normally’, speeding up. And behind the bewildering bizarreness of this Being, there was also an unmistakeable air of ‘effortless superiority’ that used to be regarded as the defining charact- eristic of the Oxbridge Intellectual Elitist. And although I was not an Oxbridge Graduate myself, I had grown up surrounded by such people. So I knew that characteristic well, when I saw or heard it. And indeed something of its influence had rubbed off on me. But then I didn’t want to risk being ‘Zeroed’ again by asking him. Though I found out later from an indisputably sane contemporary of his, that he was indeed a Balliol College Graduate - although he pronounced the word ‘Balliol’ with a hard rather than a soft ‘a’ vowel sound, which seemed suspect, but accorded with his oddball Phonetics. He also pronounced the word ‘Bourgeois’ - which needless to say he made frequent used of, and in the most contemptuous tones! - as Burrrgeois. But the man in front of me, could not have resembled a Balliol Graduate less, especially when you consider that College has boasted more prime ministers than any other. I couldn’t picture that notable Balliol man, Ted Heath, walking bare foot in ragged robes, with hair almost down to his waist! Though Joshua’s company would prove infinitely more fascinating and exhilarating than that of the frigidly queer, virginally neutered, possibly pederastic, One Nation Tory, EU-teet-sucking old fart Ted Heath, could ever have been. The robes by the way were so ragged that they had literally been filched from skips and messily stitched together into the most indigent patch-work-quilt imaginable. And he’d wear the same gatherings of garments until they practically fell off him. And then he’d very reluctantly don a new one. One of his many Personae was that of the Hyde Park Orator. And he once gave a four-hour speech, listened to by a spell-bound audience of about a hundred and fifty people, dressed only in a sack! It was possibly the most brilliant performance ever given there. And the Subject? The evils of the Vietnam War. As for his unshod feet, he had already
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abandoned shoes in the late 1960’s. And the soles of his feet were so hardened by the 1970’s, there was practically no surface he couldn’t walk on painlessly and at length, like a Fakir. I remember once walking with him through thick mud on a path near the Heath and he saw it as a great challenge. His feet were absolutely caked in the stuff. And as he didn’t wash frequently - ‘Socrates never washed!’ he once thundered at an ad hominem heckler at Speaker’s Corner, who made a dumb joke about his unfamiliarity with soap - he just allowed the mud to dry off and then peel away gradually over time. By the 1980’s he finally if reluctantly graduated to shoes. And though he certainly never dressed in a conservative way, he did start wearing two layers of clothing - as he had been taking grave risks with exposure. But I reckon it was too late by then, as I firmly believe that it killed him in the end. Yet he convinced himself that he’d conquered extreme cold, by controlling his metabolism. I once saw him charging up Hampstead High Street at 1 in the morning when the temperature was minus 5 degrees centigrade, and he was only wearing the thinnest shawl. He yelled Eureka! as he approached me and a few others standing opposite the Tube Station. He then proclaimed that he’d just attained ‘the bio-metaphysical breakthrough’! I fear it was a breakdown, although the effects didn’t kick in terminally for another twenty years or so. But it was more the sheer force of his mind that struck people.
Many thought he was completely insane. But I took the view that if so, then it was only in Hamlet’s sense: nor nor east - or sou sou west, as I once quipped. There definitely were occasions when he became so supra-animatedly charged that he literally overtook himself and then spoke in ways that sounded like Hegel on angel-dust: Divine gibberish! But for much of the time, to my perception, he was astonishingly in command of his truly extraordinary thought-processes - managing a dizzyingly high level of almost acrobatic rationality, articulating ideas that appeared to come from Absolutely Nowhere. And sitting in front of him in that café with Bronco I had the sense of someone who was single-handedly creating a movement all about him, like a cloaked Titan sweeping up the masses in his wake. We were suddenly truly in ‘a pre-revolutionary situation’ with someone like Joshua at the intellectual, and the spiritual helm! It was already HAPPENING! It was in the Cafes, Bars, and Pubs. It was in the Universities. It was in the Libraries, Halls, and Clubs. It was in the work-places. Above all, it was in the Streets! IT was everywhere, like Thunderclap Newman’s great 1960’s Song, ’Some-thing In The Air’. Except it was palpable now and all-emancipating. Joshua was the self-styled ‘King of the Squatters’, who had no fixed abode as he needed none. He was welcome wherever he went, in the re-claimed territory of ‘The Commons’. He’d been involved with the people who created the squatting movement in London, at 144, Piccadilly, which had been one of the Queen Mother’s offi-cial residences. Dr. John aka Phil Cohen, an academic now, was one of the leading counter-cultural figures in that squat, which was occupied by about 900 people at its peak. And I am certain that he and Joshua must have known each other, but have not been able to confirm that. Another famous Radical counter-culturalist, Tarik Ali, now a journalist, writer, and broadcaster, who was formerly a President of the Oxford Union, and at the L.S.E. must have come across Joshua too; they were both at the Grosvenor Square demonstration outside the American Embassy in 1968, which first brought Ali to fame. And they were both linked with the International Marxist Group later on. Ali associated with some pretty unconventional people, and in spite of his comfortable life-style retains his strong radical convictions to this day, refusing to denounce Castro for example. Joshua threw himself into every anti-establishmentarian movement and scene going: he was very well-known on the Festival Circuit, at Glastonbury and Stonehenge; the Notting Hill Carnival; Chalk Farm and the Roundhouse;
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Speakers’ Corner; the squatting scenes; the Teepee movement; the Free Universities; the Free High Thinkers; the English Socialists, Anarchists and Situationists; the Holist uniters of East and West; the demonstrators and marchers in all the Radical factions; and last but not least the Nudists. He was in California in the late 1960’s - calling himself Christian Christiansen on a passport - and founded two movements: the Immortalists and the Impossibilists. Haight Asbury didn’t know what was hitting it. After being talent-spotted while an undergraduate, he then did post-graduate research at the L.S.E. before entering the Civil Service - according to the barrister Delius James, his Balliol-contemporary, who was my ‘intelligence-source’ on Joshua - and learnt all he could about the internal workings of the Secret State. Then he caused a rumpus, like an early example of a whistle-blower, and was shot out. And after that he devoted himself totally to being a Revolutionist and am Evolutionist, taking a Tolstoyan ‘vow of poverty’. So he lived, ate, drank, slept, and breathed completely uncompromising Cosmism. He became nameless, ageless, homeless, workless, penniless, possessionless and identity- less. And the only official marker of his existence was his birth-certificate - which had he seen it, he would have torn to shreds and burnt. He had never claimed Benefits, but relied on charity, and even ate discarded food, like Dave - only fruit and vegetables, since unlike Carnivore Dave, he was a strict Vegan. He never went near Doctors, as he thought they were all murderers! And again like Dave, he was said to have been in Prison once. But he claimed he was fitted up. Psychiatrists had never been able to get hold of him however - unlike Dave. He had altered his body-clock, so he would sleep only when he felt like it, rather than just at night, like most people. He ate and drank when he felt like it - and relieved himself wherever he felt like it: once on a Tube-train when he couldn’t restrain himself, yelling: ‘Nature triumphs over Social convention!’ He even shat on the floor of a squat once, when I visited him, as there was no functioning lavatory. He took his clothes off in squats - and even in The Roundhouse once, during a spontaneous stage-performance. He claimed he had even done it in the streets once, but had been arrested of course. He was even held by Police in a cell once for a week, but refused to tell them who he was and they couldn’t find out. Then in exasperation, they released him without charge. He had his moment of Historic fame, when he stormed the Stage during a CND Rally in Hyde Park where Bruce Kent and the Radical Historian E.P. Thompson spoke, in protest over their invitation to an American General to share the Platform with them. And he knew the man had been a war-criminal in Vietnam and thought CND were selling out totally unacceptably. So when the man began speaking he made his move. Security-men immediately rushed him and muscled him off the Stage. But he was caught on camera, and the episode was briefly shown on Television. I missed it. But a mutual friend saw it, and thought it hilarious. Though he added that Joshua truly looked and acted the part. Some readers might regard this as either mad or sad - or both. But I would say that it showed fantastic courage - given that very few others were prepared to stand up for their principles in quite that way. He was always ‘up’ for an ad hoc public gesture - or spontaneous personal demon-stration - as when he marched into Swiss Cottage Library one day in the heatwave-summer of 1976, and made a very loud proclamation to all those gathered there to the effect that he was ‘controlling the drought!’, and by means of ‘spiritual as well as physical science’ he was ‘seeding the skies with a rainfall that would answer everybody’s prayers!’ Needless to say he was bundled out of the Building by staff. Although it took them several minutes to do this as he had surprising strength in his slender frame - especially when he was so Transcendently fired up. And he was yelling at them at the top of his voice: ‘Unhand me, you ruddy Fascists!’ Again I missed this gem of Joshua-Dramaturgy. But I had it on the very good authority of another mutual friend - who was in the Library at the time. And so it
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did definitely happen. And he was periodically barred from the place, as he was from many others. I’ll never forget the photo of him in the New Musical Express after the Summer Equinox one year in which he was shown seated upon the famous sacrificial stone at Stonehenge - surrounded by Holy hordes of stoned sons and daughters of the Stones, clad in red robes, and raising his arms aloft and chanting, as he stared into and seemingly through the Sun. A classic Joshua-act! I recall him raging at a man at Speaker’s Corner, who had the audacity to photograph him - which he hated: ‘Put that False Eye away, before I take it off you and smash it! This is not Hollywood, you imbecile! This place is the Font of a New Reality, in which photographs shall be consigned to the Dustbin of History!’ He glared at him like a rabid Ezekiel. So the poor man swiftly did as he was told and shortly afterwards slunk away with his verbally whipped tail between his legs. Other great ‘Joshua-Moments’, which I was privileged to witness, were e.g. when he balanced barefoot on the ledge of a skip at Speaker’s Corner wearing nothing but a battered old pair of jeans, and proclaimed to the crowds that he had been ‘Present at The Creation - and had seen fit to usurp God!’. He then proceeded to recount his ‘hijacking of History’ for the purposes of ‘securing a higher Human Enlightenment from the ravages of Barbarism!’. I was also present when he conducted his ‘Historic Climb’ - he was remarkably agile - up a drain-pipe running up the multi-storey, red-brick Victorian house in Netherhall Gardens, Frog-nal, where Sidney and Beatrice Webb had once lived, and broke into an upper floor flat, in order to ‘inaugurate’ a New Squat. There was no way I was going to follow him - I wouldn’t have lived to tell the tale - and I never lived there either. Although I did have one experience of squatting, during the summer of 1977, a year or so after I met Joshua et al. And readers may not believe it - yet as I can’t prove it photographically or documentarily, they will just have to trust me - but the ‘address’ of the Squat was none other than Millionaire’s Row, aka Bishop’s Avenue! I was inhabiting the large house on the corner of Bishop’s Avenue and Hampstead Lane - opposite the entrance to Kenwood - which has had a colourful history, to put it mildly. This was where Carlos the Jackal once turned up on the doorstep and shot the owner. More recently another tycoon was murdered there, and his wife ran out screaming into the street. It was also said to be very haunted. And there were rumours of black magicians carrying out sacrificial rituals in the garden. The Roger Bolingbroke Conspiracy had been perpetrated nearby, in a hunting lodge on the Bishop of London’s wooded estate in 1440, that had also involved Black Magic - a scene I invoked in my aforementioned Grimoires. When I first visited the Squat in 1976, it was occupied by some of the most exotic lunatics that I’ve ever encountered - Joshua of course being one of them. And Dave Peters was a frequent visitor, though as far as I can recall he never lived there. That might have been because he had a serious altercation with a man there once who threatened him with a knife. And to everybody’s astonishment Dave just fixed the man with the fiercest Shamanic gaze and shot out his hands in front of him. The man then crashed into the wall behind him, and collapsed to the floor in a state of galvanized shock and disbelief, the knife falling from his hand. It appeared he’d been able to summon some supernatural energy from inside him and project it at the man without touching him, like an internal Taser-gun. Dave told me later he had surprised himself as much as everyone else there, and could not entirely explain to me what in the spur of the moment he had been able to do. I know that in martial arts - which I myself learnt years later - there is a ‘force’ called ’Chi’ or ‘Ki’, which is probably only Kinetic Energy, or the energy of motion, which may at a very advanced level manifest in that manner. But Dave had never trained in martial arts. And so it was almost miraculous therefore. Lots of odd souls passed through the Squat - which had diabolically deranged graffitti on the walls, and bare boards, and was largely
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empty. The front door was permanently padlocked, so the squatters had to enter the house through an open side-window - which was covered only by a board. And so there was zero-security. But then some of the people living there were so supernally scary that no trespasser in their right mind would have gone anywhere near the place. There was an extraordinary ‘troupe’ of French travelling players based there, who all wore robes - cleaner and less threadbare ones than Joshua’s! - and had similar-arly long hair and beards. And they were presided over by a splendidly sinister chap, going under the name of Ahriman - the Zoroastrian name for The Lord of Darkness - who had hair as black as his ad-opted name, and eyes likewise. He was totally fluent in English. And he explained to me, that he and his fellow-actors had come over from France a few years earlier and had moved from squat to squat since, practising a mysterious art of self-sufficiency which involved spiritual fasting - though they did eat, as I saw them doing so, albeit only minute quantities of rice and such like - and had managed to live outside Society, devoting their time to rehearsing ‘invisible Dramas’ that would never in the end be performed. Then when they finally completed a rehearsal, they’d leave the squat they were living in, and move into another one. They didn’t have a ‘name’ as a troupe, but each of them had adopted names of their own, reflecting their chosen personae. And they could change their names at will. The dramatic scenes were totally unlimited, but then nothing ever happened in the sense of actual enact -ment. They would pose as ‘Ideals’ of themselves on shadow-stages. And nobody would watch them. Although others were living there, but in separate quarters, only coming together at certain times in the ‘Arena’ of the Common Room. I wasn’t allowed to see anything. Although there was one English fellow involved with them, who had latched onto them with their agreement in a previous squat - or incarnation. He reminded me slightly of myself. Only he had ‘dropped out’ even more than I had, far more - he was beyond reach. I never gathered his name. But I remember him dealing brutally with a a rather hoity-toity lady, who came round to the Squat demanding to know where her daughter was and what they’d done with her. He simply reiterated: ‘I do not know! And if I did, I would never tell you. She is a free agent, not your possession!’ Eventually, the horrified woman gave up and stormed out, never to be seen again. The girl in question was in fact hiding in an upstairs room and came out of hiding after her mother had left - saying she never wanted to see her or her father again. She was not the only stray wraith caught up with this weird caravanserai. Two bisexual girls called Esther and Elizabeth were involved, and another one whose name I never learnt, who brought stacks of ‘magic- mushrooms’ to the Squat picked on the Heath, and intoned mysteriously about our all living in ‘Geo-desic domes of the mind’. Elizabeth was a butch cropped-haired ginger-head. Esther was an auburn-haired Moonchild, who I developed a crush on, and then came perilously close to being the blood in the sandwich between her lesbian lover - Elizabeth - and a strange British Guyanan man called Fazil Bacchus, who practised a form of Voodooism, in which he undertook a ritual experiment, forbidding him to see daylight for a whole year -as you do! And he was also an Aikido expert. I saw him get into a fight with a gang once. And after he despatched them, two police-vans rushed to the scene, and it took at least a dozen officers to control him. And I acted as a witness along with two other friends in the local magistrate’s court when he was subsequently in the dock. He had certainly been provoked, and luckily he escaped with a probation-order. So I could have been in real danger - both spiritually, and physically. And so in the end I decided not to push the matter beyond the Platonic. I saw Joshua down a whole handful of magic mushrooms once - and a couple of hours later he was just the same! They apparently had no effect on him. An engineer called Jim was a frequent visitor, relating tales of his travels worthy of a latterday Robert Byron, or Richard Burton, the explorer not the actor. On one
us!’ he quietly thundered, drawing attention from the staff, who were possibly wondering if he was some kind of ‘Visitation’. He then added the rider: ‘I don’t seek the Disestablishment of The Church of England. I seek its Total Dissolution!’ There was a palpable fire in him as he spoke, like a Mystical Purgation, as much Pagan as Religious - or purely Cosmic, and transcendently immanent or imman-ently transcendent, but in terms that defied all Theological approval. And this brought me on to his name, because he occasionally referred to himself by other names: Jeshua, Yehoshua, and even, it must be said: Jesus! But Joshua seemed to be his ‘main’ name. I took it for granted he was Jewish. Although an old mutual friend has always doubted this. And I quickly realized that one could never interrogate or probe Joshua about such matters, or anything else that didn’t pertain to the Present Moment, which was infinitely elastic in his eyes, and his general thinking. ‘Facts’ about himself and his past were an irrelevance. In this regard he was similar to Bronco of course, who listened to us in reverential yet distanced silence for much of the meeting - apart from the odd quirky aside. But he was far more intellectually sophisticated than Bronco, and his rationale for this extreme peculiarity was clearly driven by a philosophical system of a sort rather than by mere trauma as such. But then when I made the mistake as it turned out of asking him firstly whether there was any significance in his name and secondly what his surname was, I was immediately exposed to his volcanic wrath - al-beit only momentarily. He stared fiercely at me, and then simply said: ‘Zero.’ I tried again, as Diplo-matically as possible, only to be countered by a louder ‘Zero!’ So I got the message and apologized. He then said with cryptic brilliance: ‘Bohemians don’t do surnames.’ And I’ve never forgotten that! He then further added: ‘And Joshua is my name for now.’ ‘Right you are!’ I retorted, cherishing the ‘for now’. Very consistently, he didn’t ask me my surname. I was going to ask him whether, as I be-gan to suspect, he was modelling himself - up to a point, at least - on the Old Testament Prophet, notwithstanding the unaffordable expense of the trumpets! But I already knew better, than to en-quire. Though it seemed a plausible conjecture. And later on, there were occasions when he’d talk with the most extreme fervour, of ‘raising a multitude and marching on Downing Street!’ One only had to exchange ‘the walls of Jericho’ for Downing Street, and one had it. He certainly LOOKED the part. And I learned that he could more than PLAY the part too. The ‘Zero’ gambit - or defense - was used in other contexts too, such as whenever somebody asked him his age. On one occasion, I saw him repeating Zero five times, louder and louder each time, until the person finally relented. Thus, being ‘Zeroed’ by Joshua became a well-known ritual - and running joke - in the Scene.
Although I learnt nothing about Joshua or his past, I got an insight during that first meeting into his whole way of thinking and speaking as he touched upon many subjects, from Politics to Philosophy, Science to History, Religion to Mysticism and the Occult, the state of Society and the World, and in the immortal words of Lenin: ‘What is to be done?’ I recognized he was a Giant of quirky erudition, and a highly original thinker: a true self-created Being. He seemed to have read everything. And he never stopped thinking - out loud. And yet he also manifestly LIVED his Ideals. In fact, I have never since met anyone who has lived their ideals - however insanely and unrealistically, and I don’t even care about that - more than he did. To say compromise was not a word in his vocabulary would be the understatement of all time. There was a TOTALITY about him that was truly awe-inspiring. And this was just the kind of person I’d been seeking for years - and couldn’t quite be sure if they could actually EXIST or not. And yet THERE he was, right before me - like the embodiment of the Deus Ex Machina, in apparent human flesh. Not that he was seeking Disciples. He was the very antithesis of the then still trendy ‘Gurus’. He was the ultimate Anti-Guru - or a Meta-Guru more like. He wanted
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to encourage everyone to think for themselves, and not to follow others, least of all himself - which made him hugely appealing to somebody of my own innately anti-authoritarian cast of mind. But he was a classic exemplar of what Russian Philosophers would call a ‘Cosmist’ - although I can’t actually recall him ever using that term to describe himself. Cosmists aren’t necessarily religious or moralistic in any Orthodox sense. But they’re not mundane Secularists either, not even Humanists necessarily. They are like grand, free-thinking, usually highly radical metaphysicians, who on the one hand Hymn the Cosmos, and on the other hand promote ingenious Rationalistic solutions to the problems of the world. They can also come across as being totally cracked! And this actually summed up Joshua to a T. He was like a combination of Jesus Christ, Karl Marx, Leo Tolstoy, and Buckminster Fuller all rolled into one! And he resembled the Ultimate Messianic Californian Hippy to boot. As for the matter of his sanity, or otherwise - that, er, was an interesting question. As the meeting progressed, I realized it would be superficially tempting to simply dismiss him as a complete lunatic. There was an unden-iable urgency in his whole manner and speech - as though Absolutely Everything had to be achieved immediately to avert Total Catastrophe. When he was in that mode he was supremely Dogmatic, al-beit almost irrefutable in his statements and arguments. He had a tendency to slow down his speech for emphasis as he raised his voice: ‘Y-o-u h-a-v-e t-o r-e-a-l-i-z-e, A-d-a-m, t-h-e-r-e i-s a T-O-T-A-L-I-T-Y t-o t-h-e f-o-r-m-s a-n-d m-a-n-i-f-e-s-t-a-t-i-o-n-s o-f t-h-e A-d-v-e-r-t-i-s-i-n-g H-i-e-r-a-r-c-h-y, u-n-d-e-r G-l-o-b-a-l S-t-a-t-e C-a-p-i-t-a-l-i-s-m, t-h-a-t j-u-s-t h-a-s t-o b-e S-M-A-S-H-E-D!!! I-t c-a-n-n-o-t b-e m-e-r-e-l-y r-e-f-o-r-m-e-d!!!’ And so on, and on, and on! But it was T-O-T-A-L-L-Y riveting. I based a character called Jez The Prophet on him in The Nameless Revolutionary, and I used this hyphenating device to illustrate his most frequent mode of speaking. But at other times he could speak more ‘normally’, speeding up. And behind the bewildering bizarreness of this Being, there was also an unmistakeable air of ‘effortless superiority’ that used to be regarded as the defining charact- eristic of the Oxbridge Intellectual Elitist. And although I was not an Oxbridge Graduate myself, I had grown up surrounded by such people. So I knew that characteristic well, when I saw or heard it. And indeed something of its influence had rubbed off on me. But then I didn’t want to risk being ‘Zeroed’ again by asking him. Though I found out later from an indisputably sane contemporary of his, that he was indeed a Balliol College Graduate - although he pronounced the word ‘Balliol’ with a hard rather than a soft ‘a’ vowel sound, which seemed suspect, but accorded with his oddball Phonetics. He also pronounced the word ‘Bourgeois’ - which needless to say he made frequent used of, and in the most contemptuous tones! - as Burrrgeois. But the man in front of me, could not have resembled a Balliol Graduate less, especially when you consider that College has boasted more prime ministers than any other. I couldn’t picture that notable Balliol man, Ted Heath, walking bare foot in ragged robes, with hair almost down to his waist! Though Joshua’s company would prove infinitely more fascinating and exhilarating than that of the frigidly queer, virginally neutered, possibly pederastic, One Nation Tory, EU-teet-sucking old fart Ted Heath, could ever have been. The robes by the way were so ragged that they had literally been filched from skips and messily stitched together into the most indigent patch-work-quilt imaginable. And he’d wear the same gatherings of garments until they practically fell off him. And then he’d very reluctantly don a new one. One of his many Personae was that of the Hyde Park Orator. And he once gave a four-hour speech, listened to by a spell-bound audience of about a hundred and fifty people, dressed only in a sack! It was possibly the most brilliant performance ever given there. And the Subject? The evils of the Vietnam War. As for his unshod feet, he had already
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abandoned shoes in the late 1960’s. And the soles of his feet were so hardened by the 1970’s, there was practically no surface he couldn’t walk on painlessly and at length, like a Fakir. I remember once walking with him through thick mud on a path near the Heath and he saw it as a great challenge. His feet were absolutely caked in the stuff. And as he didn’t wash frequently - ‘Socrates never washed!’ he once thundered at an ad hominem heckler at Speaker’s Corner, who made a dumb joke about his unfamiliarity with soap - he just allowed the mud to dry off and then peel away gradually over time. By the 1980’s he finally if reluctantly graduated to shoes. And though he certainly never dressed in a conservative way, he did start wearing two layers of clothing - as he had been taking grave risks with exposure. But I reckon it was too late by then, as I firmly believe that it killed him in the end. Yet he convinced himself that he’d conquered extreme cold, by controlling his metabolism. I once saw him charging up Hampstead High Street at 1 in the morning when the temperature was minus 5 degrees centigrade, and he was only wearing the thinnest shawl. He yelled Eureka! as he approached me and a few others standing opposite the Tube Station. He then proclaimed that he’d just attained ‘the bio-metaphysical breakthrough’! I fear it was a breakdown, although the effects didn’t kick in terminally for another twenty years or so. But it was more the sheer force of his mind that struck people.
Many thought he was completely insane. But I took the view that if so, then it was only in Hamlet’s sense: nor nor east - or sou sou west, as I once quipped. There definitely were occasions when he became so supra-animatedly charged that he literally overtook himself and then spoke in ways that sounded like Hegel on angel-dust: Divine gibberish! But for much of the time, to my perception, he was astonishingly in command of his truly extraordinary thought-processes - managing a dizzyingly high level of almost acrobatic rationality, articulating ideas that appeared to come from Absolutely Nowhere. And sitting in front of him in that café with Bronco I had the sense of someone who was single-handedly creating a movement all about him, like a cloaked Titan sweeping up the masses in his wake. We were suddenly truly in ‘a pre-revolutionary situation’ with someone like Joshua at the intellectual, and the spiritual helm! It was already HAPPENING! It was in the Cafes, Bars, and Pubs. It was in the Universities. It was in the Libraries, Halls, and Clubs. It was in the work-places. Above all, it was in the Streets! IT was everywhere, like Thunderclap Newman’s great 1960’s Song, ’Some-thing In The Air’. Except it was palpable now and all-emancipating. Joshua was the self-styled ‘King of the Squatters’, who had no fixed abode as he needed none. He was welcome wherever he went, in the re-claimed territory of ‘The Commons’. He’d been involved with the people who created the squatting movement in London, at 144, Piccadilly, which had been one of the Queen Mother’s offi-cial residences. Dr. John aka Phil Cohen, an academic now, was one of the leading counter-cultural figures in that squat, which was occupied by about 900 people at its peak. And I am certain that he and Joshua must have known each other, but have not been able to confirm that. Another famous Radical counter-culturalist, Tarik Ali, now a journalist, writer, and broadcaster, who was formerly a President of the Oxford Union, and at the L.S.E. must have come across Joshua too; they were both at the Grosvenor Square demonstration outside the American Embassy in 1968, which first brought Ali to fame. And they were both linked with the International Marxist Group later on. Ali associated with some pretty unconventional people, and in spite of his comfortable life-style retains his strong radical convictions to this day, refusing to denounce Castro for example. Joshua threw himself into every anti-establishmentarian movement and scene going: he was very well-known on the Festival Circuit, at Glastonbury and Stonehenge; the Notting Hill Carnival; Chalk Farm and the Roundhouse;
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Speakers’ Corner; the squatting scenes; the Teepee movement; the Free Universities; the Free High Thinkers; the English Socialists, Anarchists and Situationists; the Holist uniters of East and West; the demonstrators and marchers in all the Radical factions; and last but not least the Nudists. He was in California in the late 1960’s - calling himself Christian Christiansen on a passport - and founded two movements: the Immortalists and the Impossibilists. Haight Asbury didn’t know what was hitting it. After being talent-spotted while an undergraduate, he then did post-graduate research at the L.S.E. before entering the Civil Service - according to the barrister Delius James, his Balliol-contemporary, who was my ‘intelligence-source’ on Joshua - and learnt all he could about the internal workings of the Secret State. Then he caused a rumpus, like an early example of a whistle-blower, and was shot out. And after that he devoted himself totally to being a Revolutionist and am Evolutionist, taking a Tolstoyan ‘vow of poverty’. So he lived, ate, drank, slept, and breathed completely uncompromising Cosmism. He became nameless, ageless, homeless, workless, penniless, possessionless and identity- less. And the only official marker of his existence was his birth-certificate - which had he seen it, he would have torn to shreds and burnt. He had never claimed Benefits, but relied on charity, and even ate discarded food, like Dave - only fruit and vegetables, since unlike Carnivore Dave, he was a strict Vegan. He never went near Doctors, as he thought they were all murderers! And again like Dave, he was said to have been in Prison once. But he claimed he was fitted up. Psychiatrists had never been able to get hold of him however - unlike Dave. He had altered his body-clock, so he would sleep only when he felt like it, rather than just at night, like most people. He ate and drank when he felt like it - and relieved himself wherever he felt like it: once on a Tube-train when he couldn’t restrain himself, yelling: ‘Nature triumphs over Social convention!’ He even shat on the floor of a squat once, when I visited him, as there was no functioning lavatory. He took his clothes off in squats - and even in The Roundhouse once, during a spontaneous stage-performance. He claimed he had even done it in the streets once, but had been arrested of course. He was even held by Police in a cell once for a week, but refused to tell them who he was and they couldn’t find out. Then in exasperation, they released him without charge. He had his moment of Historic fame, when he stormed the Stage during a CND Rally in Hyde Park where Bruce Kent and the Radical Historian E.P. Thompson spoke, in protest over their invitation to an American General to share the Platform with them. And he knew the man had been a war-criminal in Vietnam and thought CND were selling out totally unacceptably. So when the man began speaking he made his move. Security-men immediately rushed him and muscled him off the Stage. But he was caught on camera, and the episode was briefly shown on Television. I missed it. But a mutual friend saw it, and thought it hilarious. Though he added that Joshua truly looked and acted the part. Some readers might regard this as either mad or sad - or both. But I would say that it showed fantastic courage - given that very few others were prepared to stand up for their principles in quite that way. He was always ‘up’ for an ad hoc public gesture - or spontaneous personal demon-stration - as when he marched into Swiss Cottage Library one day in the heatwave-summer of 1976, and made a very loud proclamation to all those gathered there to the effect that he was ‘controlling the drought!’, and by means of ‘spiritual as well as physical science’ he was ‘seeding the skies with a rainfall that would answer everybody’s prayers!’ Needless to say he was bundled out of the Building by staff. Although it took them several minutes to do this as he had surprising strength in his slender frame - especially when he was so Transcendently fired up. And he was yelling at them at the top of his voice: ‘Unhand me, you ruddy Fascists!’ Again I missed this gem of Joshua-Dramaturgy. But I had it on the very good authority of another mutual friend - who was in the Library at the time. And so it
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did definitely happen. And he was periodically barred from the place, as he was from many others. I’ll never forget the photo of him in the New Musical Express after the Summer Equinox one year in which he was shown seated upon the famous sacrificial stone at Stonehenge - surrounded by Holy hordes of stoned sons and daughters of the Stones, clad in red robes, and raising his arms aloft and chanting, as he stared into and seemingly through the Sun. A classic Joshua-act! I recall him raging at a man at Speaker’s Corner, who had the audacity to photograph him - which he hated: ‘Put that False Eye away, before I take it off you and smash it! This is not Hollywood, you imbecile! This place is the Font of a New Reality, in which photographs shall be consigned to the Dustbin of History!’ He glared at him like a rabid Ezekiel. So the poor man swiftly did as he was told and shortly afterwards slunk away with his verbally whipped tail between his legs. Other great ‘Joshua-Moments’, which I was privileged to witness, were e.g. when he balanced barefoot on the ledge of a skip at Speaker’s Corner wearing nothing but a battered old pair of jeans, and proclaimed to the crowds that he had been ‘Present at The Creation - and had seen fit to usurp God!’. He then proceeded to recount his ‘hijacking of History’ for the purposes of ‘securing a higher Human Enlightenment from the ravages of Barbarism!’. I was also present when he conducted his ‘Historic Climb’ - he was remarkably agile - up a drain-pipe running up the multi-storey, red-brick Victorian house in Netherhall Gardens, Frog-nal, where Sidney and Beatrice Webb had once lived, and broke into an upper floor flat, in order to ‘inaugurate’ a New Squat. There was no way I was going to follow him - I wouldn’t have lived to tell the tale - and I never lived there either. Although I did have one experience of squatting, during the summer of 1977, a year or so after I met Joshua et al. And readers may not believe it - yet as I can’t prove it photographically or documentarily, they will just have to trust me - but the ‘address’ of the Squat was none other than Millionaire’s Row, aka Bishop’s Avenue! I was inhabiting the large house on the corner of Bishop’s Avenue and Hampstead Lane - opposite the entrance to Kenwood - which has had a colourful history, to put it mildly. This was where Carlos the Jackal once turned up on the doorstep and shot the owner. More recently another tycoon was murdered there, and his wife ran out screaming into the street. It was also said to be very haunted. And there were rumours of black magicians carrying out sacrificial rituals in the garden. The Roger Bolingbroke Conspiracy had been perpetrated nearby, in a hunting lodge on the Bishop of London’s wooded estate in 1440, that had also involved Black Magic - a scene I invoked in my aforementioned Grimoires. When I first visited the Squat in 1976, it was occupied by some of the most exotic lunatics that I’ve ever encountered - Joshua of course being one of them. And Dave Peters was a frequent visitor, though as far as I can recall he never lived there. That might have been because he had a serious altercation with a man there once who threatened him with a knife. And to everybody’s astonishment Dave just fixed the man with the fiercest Shamanic gaze and shot out his hands in front of him. The man then crashed into the wall behind him, and collapsed to the floor in a state of galvanized shock and disbelief, the knife falling from his hand. It appeared he’d been able to summon some supernatural energy from inside him and project it at the man without touching him, like an internal Taser-gun. Dave told me later he had surprised himself as much as everyone else there, and could not entirely explain to me what in the spur of the moment he had been able to do. I know that in martial arts - which I myself learnt years later - there is a ‘force’ called ’Chi’ or ‘Ki’, which is probably only Kinetic Energy, or the energy of motion, which may at a very advanced level manifest in that manner. But Dave had never trained in martial arts. And so it was almost miraculous therefore. Lots of odd souls passed through the Squat - which had diabolically deranged graffitti on the walls, and bare boards, and was largely
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empty. The front door was permanently padlocked, so the squatters had to enter the house through an open side-window - which was covered only by a board. And so there was zero-security. But then some of the people living there were so supernally scary that no trespasser in their right mind would have gone anywhere near the place. There was an extraordinary ‘troupe’ of French travelling players based there, who all wore robes - cleaner and less threadbare ones than Joshua’s! - and had similar-arly long hair and beards. And they were presided over by a splendidly sinister chap, going under the name of Ahriman - the Zoroastrian name for The Lord of Darkness - who had hair as black as his ad-opted name, and eyes likewise. He was totally fluent in English. And he explained to me, that he and his fellow-actors had come over from France a few years earlier and had moved from squat to squat since, practising a mysterious art of self-sufficiency which involved spiritual fasting - though they did eat, as I saw them doing so, albeit only minute quantities of rice and such like - and had managed to live outside Society, devoting their time to rehearsing ‘invisible Dramas’ that would never in the end be performed. Then when they finally completed a rehearsal, they’d leave the squat they were living in, and move into another one. They didn’t have a ‘name’ as a troupe, but each of them had adopted names of their own, reflecting their chosen personae. And they could change their names at will. The dramatic scenes were totally unlimited, but then nothing ever happened in the sense of actual enact -ment. They would pose as ‘Ideals’ of themselves on shadow-stages. And nobody would watch them. Although others were living there, but in separate quarters, only coming together at certain times in the ‘Arena’ of the Common Room. I wasn’t allowed to see anything. Although there was one English fellow involved with them, who had latched onto them with their agreement in a previous squat - or incarnation. He reminded me slightly of myself. Only he had ‘dropped out’ even more than I had, far more - he was beyond reach. I never gathered his name. But I remember him dealing brutally with a a rather hoity-toity lady, who came round to the Squat demanding to know where her daughter was and what they’d done with her. He simply reiterated: ‘I do not know! And if I did, I would never tell you. She is a free agent, not your possession!’ Eventually, the horrified woman gave up and stormed out, never to be seen again. The girl in question was in fact hiding in an upstairs room and came out of hiding after her mother had left - saying she never wanted to see her or her father again. She was not the only stray wraith caught up with this weird caravanserai. Two bisexual girls called Esther and Elizabeth were involved, and another one whose name I never learnt, who brought stacks of ‘magic- mushrooms’ to the Squat picked on the Heath, and intoned mysteriously about our all living in ‘Geo-desic domes of the mind’. Elizabeth was a butch cropped-haired ginger-head. Esther was an auburn-haired Moonchild, who I developed a crush on, and then came perilously close to being the blood in the sandwich between her lesbian lover - Elizabeth - and a strange British Guyanan man called Fazil Bacchus, who practised a form of Voodooism, in which he undertook a ritual experiment, forbidding him to see daylight for a whole year -as you do! And he was also an Aikido expert. I saw him get into a fight with a gang once. And after he despatched them, two police-vans rushed to the scene, and it took at least a dozen officers to control him. And I acted as a witness along with two other friends in the local magistrate’s court when he was subsequently in the dock. He had certainly been provoked, and luckily he escaped with a probation-order. So I could have been in real danger - both spiritually, and physically. And so in the end I decided not to push the matter beyond the Platonic. I saw Joshua down a whole handful of magic mushrooms once - and a couple of hours later he was just the same! They apparently had no effect on him. An engineer called Jim was a frequent visitor, relating tales of his travels worthy of a latterday Robert Byron, or Richard Burton, the explorer not the actor. On one
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occasion I was myself threatened with a knife - not by the person who had threatened Dave, but by a visitor like me. So it was like a den of psycho-desperadoes. Joshua often strode around naked and chanting. While the troupe would sit in silence around a long table in the kitchen like French-Druidic counterparts to King Arthur and his Knights. At other times there were louder gatherings like Fluxus-style Crazies cavorting in the ultimate Beggars’ Banquet. Joshua would leap on the kitchen-table and exclaim divinely deranged cosmic agendas at the very top of his voice. And behind him on one of the walls in bold ink was William Blake’s famous line about it being better to murder an infant than have an unacted desire. And I swear, if there had been an infant there - which mercifully there wasn’t! - it might well have been slaughtered and eaten. And I was transfixed with fascination, as my core-ideas about strangeness, ultra-weirdness, Ontological Aliens, mythic outcasts, meta-humans, and above all the Nameless Revolution, began to take shape and intensify in my mind - even if I didn’t start writing about them, systematically, for another decade. That incubation-process was getting well underway. And I made no moral judgement about what I was seeing. The people before me just were what they were: extraordinary freaks of nature, in a self-sufficient ‘anti-society’ of their own. And that’s all that mattered. It could serve as a model, and a paradigm, on a collective scale. I had the feeling the Squat was the microcosm of the macrocosm on these occasions, the Great engine-room of Revolution and Transcendent Terror, with its echoes reverberating through its walls into the waiting worlds beyond, where they would Vulcanically transfigure the ‘global tyranny of prevailing conditions’. This ‘Eyrie of Egregores’ was the visionary vanguard of a Total Triumph - and a harbinger of a deviant New Order. And I felt myself simultaneously conjoined and detached - as I always had done ever since the Alien moments of my childhood. I’d stay there till 3 or 4 in the mornings sometimes, return home to crash out, and not get up till lunch-time. And then, one day, the troupe just upped sticks - and left! And I never saw or heard of them again. I really couldn’t help wondering whether I had hallucinated them sometimes. But I know I didn’t. The Squat then emptied apart from Joshua and a couple of others. It did in fact belong to Lord Sieff, the Chairman of Selfridge’s. But he owned so many other properties, including at least one other in Bishop’s Avenue, that he’d obviously taken his eye off the ball at some point. And so the squatters then took their chance. By the time I moved into the Squat - instead of going to stay for the summer-holidays with my family in Italy - Sieff was going into crackdown mode, using a Firm called Securicor to try and flush us out with scare-tactics, while he secured the eviction-order through the Local Council. My things were rifled by somebody once - I never learnt who. But that was inevitably par for the course in squats. So I quickly learnt to rid myself of my few remaining Bourgeois scruples. And one evening I went back there, to find nobody at home. I was all alone. The board, as ever, was loose over the side-window. So I climbed in, then hurried upstairs in the gloomy darkness of the vast, spectral interior - there being no electricity there. Only candles had been used. I didn’t even have a torch. And there was no running-water either. I had been using Public Baths, to wash and ablute in - and even Public Conveniences, like Dave. There were no keys for the locks. So I shut the door of my room behind me, and turned in, curiously feeling no fear at all. And then, in the middle of the night, I was woken up - by footsteps, loud ones! Whoever it was was downstairs, and stomping about in heavy boots. It couldn’t have been Joshua as he walked barefoot and soundlessly. And it certainly wasn’t any kind of ghost - except possibly a Poltergeist. Strangely, I still felt no fear. And I was very tired too. And as long as the footsteps didn’t ascend the staircase and then cross the corridor to my room - which they didn’t - I was unworried. I reasoned it must be a tramp sheltering from the elements overnight. And so I just drifted off to sleep again. The following morning, when I
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got up, and checked the rest of the house, it was completely empty. So whoever - or whatever! - it was, had gone. And he/she/it did not return. Not long afterwards, Securicor nailed the board to the side-window to lock us all out. But Joshua managed to do another of his ‘Historic Climbs’ to get into the house again through an upper floor window. But he couldn’t then open a door or window from the inside on the ground floor. And I’d got perilously stuck on a wooden beam inter-connecting two sections of a glass roof over the Garage, and honestly feared at one point I was going to fall through the glass and fatally injure myself. I couldn’t climb any further, but somehow managed to get myself safely back onto terra firma. Joshua then remained in the house. And I had to sleep rough outside. I had done that before on Nice Beach - as I mentioned earlier. And this time, I found a beaten-up old abandoned car on the sloping Drive of a neighbouring house in Hampstead Lane. I clambered inside and curled up on the back seat, then tried my best to lose consciousness. And needless to say, I just could not. It was about the most uncomfortable experience of my life. Though I don’t regret for one moment now having done it. Not many people from my background would ever have done anything like this and I feel proud I‘ve had my taste of sleeping rough. There was no-one about of course, and early the following morning in a state of near-hallucinatory exhaustion I struggled out of the car and staggered back to the Squat, calling out to Joshua. He opened a window and then enacted a reverse ‘Historic Climb’ with vertiginous tension down to the ground. ‘Hail, Brother!’ he declared on its com-pletion. ‘You’ve now joined the Ranks of The True Dispossessed - for one night!’ I laughed, retorting that I’d rather not extend my membership of that club for a second night. As luck would have it, the house next door, with the car on the Drive, was also empty. And that evening four of us managed to break in through the front door - using a hacksaw to break a padlock - and then secured it from the inside. But earlier that day, after Joshua had left to take London by spiritual and political storm in his customary and inimitable manner - walking Goodness knows how many miles in the process - I’d had to walk onto Hampstead Heath to find somewhere to catch up on sleep. I was carrying a big bag con-taining my things, including sheets - my last concession to Civilization! - and felt I then knew what it was like to be a dosser with his home on his back. Although I must confess here that a friend of mine was keeping a case for me in his flat, in Chalk Farm. Otherwise, I’d have been so weighed down that I’d have had to cast off some of my stuff. But then - one of the strangest things happened. I found a patch of long grass, in Kenwood - and it was a beautifully sunny day - dropped the bag, and literally slumped to the ground. And within what felt like seconds I fell into deep sleep. And the dream that followed has proven to be of the deepest significance: I entered the Underworld of the Heath. It was as if my ‘dream-body’ was diving down into the soil beneath the grass I was sleeping in and travelling down a series of tunnels like infernal echelons leading towards some gravitational epicentre, which I never actually arrived at. Instead, it was as though I was astrally abseiling through the Deep Earth in-to an eternity of blackness, in which my soul was being aetherially eviscerated, and Goodness knows what was my happening to my physical body up above. And yet I encountered no devils or monsters down there - no minotaur or Satan, nor other souls like mine - just more and more depth-dust, until finally and suddenly I woke up, shaking in the sunlight, feeling as if the dream was not only persisting Hypnogogically in my waking consciousness, but totally invading, and supplanting my whole Being. It has periodically haunted, but also inspired, me ever since. Although it doesn’t really trouble me that much now, even if it did in some strange sense re-define and even re-constitute me. And it did seem to confirm my childhood-conviction that I’d either been born a creature of darkness, or darkness had
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taken possession of me when alone at a very young age. If I haven’t entirely shaken this legacy off since, I’ve learnt to absorb it into a larger scale of propensities, good and evil - managing my ‘Self’ more fearlessly even than then. But in The Grimoires, I invented a ‘hermit’ - and hermits were em-ployed during the Middle Ages as toll-gate keepers, and ‘minders’ of manorial boundaries - who is stabbed, fatally, through the heart by an intruder in his Lodge close to the Heath, and his soul then becomes stuck in the same Underworld I’d entered, forever detached in a limitless limbo. And I felt I’d left some of my soul in the Heath too. Yet my body was unaffected and I rose hypnotically to my feet, and strode off with a new vision of the world and myself. Washington Irving had stayed in Jack Straw’s Castle, just up the road from there, in the late 18th century. And in his famous tales Rip Van Winkle, and Sleepy Hollow, he evoked similar dream-worlds. And the landscapes are very similar as well. So he might have been thinking of the Heath when he wrote those stories. Also, the nameless protagonist in The Grimoires - somewhat autobiographical! - ‘dies into’ the Heath at the end of the first volume, and then spiritually conjugates with the soul of Marjery Jourdain, the black witch who was used by Roger Bolingbroke in the conspiracy to murder King Henry the Sixth by occult methods, which I also conjure in another chapter of The Grimoires. Only I hadn’t yet found my Marjery. And I never did in name. The original Marjery - a real Historical person - was burnt at the stake. And so I imagined her charred soul-body secreting diabolical vengeance into the entrails of Hampstead: The Locus Universalis. The horse-box - where the failed conspiracy took place - stood in a spectral space less than a mile away from where I had had my dream. And the ‘spirit’ of the conspiracy had taken up residence in the Squats in my understanding, which would explain their dark history. When I die - if I die! - I want my ashes scattered on the Heath, my favourite place. The magician, Gerald Gardner, had his ashes scattered near Kenwood, a fact I didn’t know when I wrote The Grimoires. I didn’t tell anyone about my dream but kept it to myself. Back in the new Squat I didn’t realize initially that our days there were numbered. Seiff owned that property too, and so Securicor upped the ante, putting padlocks on the front door each night. We’d saw through them, and then leave early in the morning to escape detection. And then one morning they came very early, catching us. I was still asleep, and suddenly woke up to find somebody standing in my room dressed in a suit saying to somebody else: ‘And there’s another one in here too.’ Then a head, which I am certain to this day belonged to Sieff, popped around the door, and he said: ‘I see.’ I was then told by the henchman to get up, collect my things, and get out - for good. I did not remonstrate. I just assumed the eviction-order was in hand. And so my time was up - it had been fun while it had lasted. When I went downstairs, Seiff and his henchman appeared to have left. As had two of the other squatters, one of whom I shall be writing about shortly, as he was another extremely significant figure in the ‘Firmament of Freaks’ that I was gathering about myself. But Joshua was still there, locked in an almighty dispute with another man, who it transpired was a representative of City-Bank: ‘my arch-enemies!’ as Joshua told me later. He seemed very agreeable actually, and was expressing some sympathy and understanding of Joshua’s position, whilst at the same time affirming and re-iterating that we all had to leave. Or else the Law would have to be resorted to more firmly - and nobody wanted that, did they? He talked like a be-nign avuncular academic, who could see that we were both ‘polite students’ as Allen Ginzberg once put it. And so the exchange was remarkably civilized, at least in the sense that we were never going to come to blows - nor even toss expletive epithets at one another’s heads. Joshua was heated but rational - invoking International and Human Rights Law and arguing that the need for shelter in Law took precedent over corporate greed and private acquisition: to no avail. ‘But I’m afraid young man,
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much as I may see your point, the Law is the Law. And it must, in the end, be followed!’ ‘B-U-T M-Y F-R-I-E-N-D! T-H-E L-A-W A-S Y-O-U A-R-E D -E-F-I-N-I-N-G I-T I-S A-N A-S-S! E-V-E-N C-O-M-M-O-N L-A-W O-V-E-R-R-I-D-E-S I-T! A-N-D U-N-I-V-E-R-S-A-L L-A-W O-V-E-R-T-H-R-O-W-S I-T!’ ‘I’m sorry, but however interesting that may be in theory, in practice that really is not the case. Now I’m afraid I have an appointment to get to. But I have the keys with me here and must lock up after you. Good luck to you anyway. I wish you all the best in your endeavours to find a home and pursue your goals in life.’ And so Joshua had to admit defeat - short of raging like his Biblical namesake and oblit-erating the hapless official’s hearing at least with tinnitus-inducing blasts on an air-spirited Trumpet! Joshua had a pick of other squats to go to of course. But I however didn’t. And I didn’t fancy a season of rough sleeping. So I had to act fast. My money was running out, and I needed to claim Benefits if I was to avoid begging. And I was of no fixed abode. And so I had to walk all the way down to a centre that reminded me of the Monster Doss-House in Jack London’s People Of The Abyss in Whitechapel, an area I scarcely knew then. When I went in, the place was full of winos lying around on benches in varying states of demented inebriation. I sat down like a sore-thumbed toff in the midst of a ragged rabble of the Wretched Of The Earth. And I just looked down at the floor, tapping my feet to try and make myself feel at home. And although the gravity of the situation sank in, I must admit I was also finding it quite fascinating. Then when my turn came to be seen to, I went up to the counter and sat down in front of a woman who was probably only ten, or possibly fifteen, years older than me. And the moment I opened my mouth and my dulcet tones slipped out, she visibly did a double-take. She clearly couldn’t believe that someone speaking like me - though I looked quite scruffy and unshaven after my brief period of roughing it - could ever have set foot in that place! But there I was - in all my plumby-voiced picaresque paradoxicality. And so she simply had to deal with my case with the same degree of neutral bureaucratic efficiency as she did with the winos. And she fixed me up on the very lowest category of Benefit there was at that time - I forget its name - which amounted to £9 a week. But then before I left with a Giro-cheque, she looked me hard in the eyes in a rather matronly not to say schoolmistressy manner, and said: ‘Look here, young man. You can see those people over there, can’t you? The state they’re in?’ ‘ Er - yes,’ I replied, with tautological tentativeness. ‘Well, you don’t want to end up like them - do you?’ ‘Er - no,’ I retorted, with a chastened certainty. ‘So I suggest you get a grip and jolly well do something with your life. You have no excuse to be here. So when you’ve cashed that cheque, go to a job-centre and apply for a training-course. Off you go.’ I thanked her for her self-evident advice and walked out with a savagely sardonic smirk on my face. Of course, I could have got onto the Graduate Employment Register. But, as already indicated, I had other ideas. ‘Drift and paint’ was the old Hippie-cliché. In my case it would have been ‘Drift and write’. And Revolution was already happening - in my head. In the event, I was only on that category of Benefit for a week, as I quickly found a Room - advertised on a notice-board in Camden Town, above a Pub off Camden Road. So I was then put onto Supplementary Benefit - or whatever it was called - and received £11 a week. And £2 a week in those days in London made quite a big difference. It wouldn’t buy you much more than a chocolate bar nowadays. But then, it could still buy you four decent meals in a working-men’s café. And that was the kind of place I ate in - regularly. I’ll take up this chapter in my evolving anti-narrative later, as I want now to return to a year earlier when I made all of the life-changing en-counters I've been describing - none more so than Joshua: bearer of the strangest ‘Good News’.
He embraced Total Freedom, beyond the reach of Power. And I felt, under his liberating influence, I would too. The world was opening up, into the realms of realizable unrealizabilities - to paraphrase
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Badiou. Nobody would ever have to work again, or be exploited. The Fruits of the Earth would from now on flourish and preponderate as if by magic. And human congress would break out of its bonds and endlessly elevate itself, in all its polymorphous diversity and perversity. To Hell with all Laws! as a writer whose name escapes me once thundered when Aleister Crowley announced himself to him with his infamous mantra: ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law!’ Joshua seemed to hold out the promise in his eternal Being, of such a glorious libertine world. I found myself hanging on his every word, and believing that the Unbelievable was indeed True. The three of us left the café when it closed, and continued conversing outside on the pavement like the floor of an open-ended Forum that signalled the complete reclamation of our birth-rights as free-born cosmic citizens, determining our own lives and destinies individually and collectively. Joshua shook his right hand triumphantly as we parted, exclaiming ‘Viva!’, as he was often wont to do I later observed. He then added: ‘Now you are part of The Movement, my friend! You will take The Great Leap Forward into The Emancipation!’ ‘Yes!’ I exclaimed, almost as loudly as him, his oratorical ebullience inspiriting me beyond all bounds of Bourgeois self-restraint. And I felt I was on The Path - but where it would lead to it I did not know. Although I wanted it to lead to an unimaginable Insurrection. And I didn’t care how violent it would be. Joshua was, principally, a Pacifist. But in so far as he resembled JC, he was more the JC who over-turned the tables of the money-lenders in the Temple than the JC who turned the other cheek in lieu of taking an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Peace had to be attained. It was not a given. And it had nothing to do with the Queen! And if the Peace of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity - and much more besides - would never be achieved without battling against the forces that militated against it, then so be it. Peace had to be predicated on war, if a Just one. And the knives were out, trumpets or no trumpets. And that unsettling tension between the Ideal of Peace and the unresolved violence of our distance from True and Full Peace, in the real or actual world, was present in Joshua to a degree and in a manner that I’m not sure I ever encountered in any other person before or since. I can recall him blowing up at somebody once because they presumed to consider their personal friendship with him more important than his political and spiritual ‘comradeship’ with the entire population of China more than ten thousand miles away. That’s how transcendently intense he could be. In the days and weeks after that extraordinary first encounter, and in the headiest atmospheric daze of the long, hot summer of 1976, I met Joshua many more times, occasionally alone and occasionally with others. I’ll pick up the threads of our evolving high conspiratorial solidarity later, as I now want to introduce yet another remarkable figure to my readers, who Dave Peters first introduced me to: Mike Bradley.
occasion I was myself threatened with a knife - not by the person who had threatened Dave, but by a visitor like me. So it was like a den of psycho-desperadoes. Joshua often strode around naked and chanting. While the troupe would sit in silence around a long table in the kitchen like French-Druidic counterparts to King Arthur and his Knights. At other times there were louder gatherings like Fluxus-style Crazies cavorting in the ultimate Beggars’ Banquet. Joshua would leap on the kitchen-table and exclaim divinely deranged cosmic agendas at the very top of his voice. And behind him on one of the walls in bold ink was William Blake’s famous line about it being better to murder an infant than have an unacted desire. And I swear, if there had been an infant there - which mercifully there wasn’t! - it might well have been slaughtered and eaten. And I was transfixed with fascination, as my core-ideas about strangeness, ultra-weirdness, Ontological Aliens, mythic outcasts, meta-humans, and above all the Nameless Revolution, began to take shape and intensify in my mind - even if I didn’t start writing about them, systematically, for another decade. That incubation-process was getting well underway. And I made no moral judgement about what I was seeing. The people before me just were what they were: extraordinary freaks of nature, in a self-sufficient ‘anti-society’ of their own. And that’s all that mattered. It could serve as a model, and a paradigm, on a collective scale. I had the feeling the Squat was the microcosm of the macrocosm on these occasions, the Great engine-room of Revolution and Transcendent Terror, with its echoes reverberating through its walls into the waiting worlds beyond, where they would Vulcanically transfigure the ‘global tyranny of prevailing conditions’. This ‘Eyrie of Egregores’ was the visionary vanguard of a Total Triumph - and a harbinger of a deviant New Order. And I felt myself simultaneously conjoined and detached - as I always had done ever since the Alien moments of my childhood. I’d stay there till 3 or 4 in the mornings sometimes, return home to crash out, and not get up till lunch-time. And then, one day, the troupe just upped sticks - and left! And I never saw or heard of them again. I really couldn’t help wondering whether I had hallucinated them sometimes. But I know I didn’t. The Squat then emptied apart from Joshua and a couple of others. It did in fact belong to Lord Sieff, the Chairman of Selfridge’s. But he owned so many other properties, including at least one other in Bishop’s Avenue, that he’d obviously taken his eye off the ball at some point. And so the squatters then took their chance. By the time I moved into the Squat - instead of going to stay for the summer-holidays with my family in Italy - Sieff was going into crackdown mode, using a Firm called Securicor to try and flush us out with scare-tactics, while he secured the eviction-order through the Local Council. My things were rifled by somebody once - I never learnt who. But that was inevitably par for the course in squats. So I quickly learnt to rid myself of my few remaining Bourgeois scruples. And one evening I went back there, to find nobody at home. I was all alone. The board, as ever, was loose over the side-window. So I climbed in, then hurried upstairs in the gloomy darkness of the vast, spectral interior - there being no electricity there. Only candles had been used. I didn’t even have a torch. And there was no running-water either. I had been using Public Baths, to wash and ablute in - and even Public Conveniences, like Dave. There were no keys for the locks. So I shut the door of my room behind me, and turned in, curiously feeling no fear at all. And then, in the middle of the night, I was woken up - by footsteps, loud ones! Whoever it was was downstairs, and stomping about in heavy boots. It couldn’t have been Joshua as he walked barefoot and soundlessly. And it certainly wasn’t any kind of ghost - except possibly a Poltergeist. Strangely, I still felt no fear. And I was very tired too. And as long as the footsteps didn’t ascend the staircase and then cross the corridor to my room - which they didn’t - I was unworried. I reasoned it must be a tramp sheltering from the elements overnight. And so I just drifted off to sleep again. The following morning, when I
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got up, and checked the rest of the house, it was completely empty. So whoever - or whatever! - it was, had gone. And he/she/it did not return. Not long afterwards, Securicor nailed the board to the side-window to lock us all out. But Joshua managed to do another of his ‘Historic Climbs’ to get into the house again through an upper floor window. But he couldn’t then open a door or window from the inside on the ground floor. And I’d got perilously stuck on a wooden beam inter-connecting two sections of a glass roof over the Garage, and honestly feared at one point I was going to fall through the glass and fatally injure myself. I couldn’t climb any further, but somehow managed to get myself safely back onto terra firma. Joshua then remained in the house. And I had to sleep rough outside. I had done that before on Nice Beach - as I mentioned earlier. And this time, I found a beaten-up old abandoned car on the sloping Drive of a neighbouring house in Hampstead Lane. I clambered inside and curled up on the back seat, then tried my best to lose consciousness. And needless to say, I just could not. It was about the most uncomfortable experience of my life. Though I don’t regret for one moment now having done it. Not many people from my background would ever have done anything like this and I feel proud I‘ve had my taste of sleeping rough. There was no-one about of course, and early the following morning in a state of near-hallucinatory exhaustion I struggled out of the car and staggered back to the Squat, calling out to Joshua. He opened a window and then enacted a reverse ‘Historic Climb’ with vertiginous tension down to the ground. ‘Hail, Brother!’ he declared on its com-pletion. ‘You’ve now joined the Ranks of The True Dispossessed - for one night!’ I laughed, retorting that I’d rather not extend my membership of that club for a second night. As luck would have it, the house next door, with the car on the Drive, was also empty. And that evening four of us managed to break in through the front door - using a hacksaw to break a padlock - and then secured it from the inside. But earlier that day, after Joshua had left to take London by spiritual and political storm in his customary and inimitable manner - walking Goodness knows how many miles in the process - I’d had to walk onto Hampstead Heath to find somewhere to catch up on sleep. I was carrying a big bag con-taining my things, including sheets - my last concession to Civilization! - and felt I then knew what it was like to be a dosser with his home on his back. Although I must confess here that a friend of mine was keeping a case for me in his flat, in Chalk Farm. Otherwise, I’d have been so weighed down that I’d have had to cast off some of my stuff. But then - one of the strangest things happened. I found a patch of long grass, in Kenwood - and it was a beautifully sunny day - dropped the bag, and literally slumped to the ground. And within what felt like seconds I fell into deep sleep. And the dream that followed has proven to be of the deepest significance: I entered the Underworld of the Heath. It was as if my ‘dream-body’ was diving down into the soil beneath the grass I was sleeping in and travelling down a series of tunnels like infernal echelons leading towards some gravitational epicentre, which I never actually arrived at. Instead, it was as though I was astrally abseiling through the Deep Earth in-to an eternity of blackness, in which my soul was being aetherially eviscerated, and Goodness knows what was my happening to my physical body up above. And yet I encountered no devils or monsters down there - no minotaur or Satan, nor other souls like mine - just more and more depth-dust, until finally and suddenly I woke up, shaking in the sunlight, feeling as if the dream was not only persisting Hypnogogically in my waking consciousness, but totally invading, and supplanting my whole Being. It has periodically haunted, but also inspired, me ever since. Although it doesn’t really trouble me that much now, even if it did in some strange sense re-define and even re-constitute me. And it did seem to confirm my childhood-conviction that I’d either been born a creature of darkness, or darkness had
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taken possession of me when alone at a very young age. If I haven’t entirely shaken this legacy off since, I’ve learnt to absorb it into a larger scale of propensities, good and evil - managing my ‘Self’ more fearlessly even than then. But in The Grimoires, I invented a ‘hermit’ - and hermits were em-ployed during the Middle Ages as toll-gate keepers, and ‘minders’ of manorial boundaries - who is stabbed, fatally, through the heart by an intruder in his Lodge close to the Heath, and his soul then becomes stuck in the same Underworld I’d entered, forever detached in a limitless limbo. And I felt I’d left some of my soul in the Heath too. Yet my body was unaffected and I rose hypnotically to my feet, and strode off with a new vision of the world and myself. Washington Irving had stayed in Jack Straw’s Castle, just up the road from there, in the late 18th century. And in his famous tales Rip Van Winkle, and Sleepy Hollow, he evoked similar dream-worlds. And the landscapes are very similar as well. So he might have been thinking of the Heath when he wrote those stories. Also, the nameless protagonist in The Grimoires - somewhat autobiographical! - ‘dies into’ the Heath at the end of the first volume, and then spiritually conjugates with the soul of Marjery Jourdain, the black witch who was used by Roger Bolingbroke in the conspiracy to murder King Henry the Sixth by occult methods, which I also conjure in another chapter of The Grimoires. Only I hadn’t yet found my Marjery. And I never did in name. The original Marjery - a real Historical person - was burnt at the stake. And so I imagined her charred soul-body secreting diabolical vengeance into the entrails of Hampstead: The Locus Universalis. The horse-box - where the failed conspiracy took place - stood in a spectral space less than a mile away from where I had had my dream. And the ‘spirit’ of the conspiracy had taken up residence in the Squats in my understanding, which would explain their dark history. When I die - if I die! - I want my ashes scattered on the Heath, my favourite place. The magician, Gerald Gardner, had his ashes scattered near Kenwood, a fact I didn’t know when I wrote The Grimoires. I didn’t tell anyone about my dream but kept it to myself. Back in the new Squat I didn’t realize initially that our days there were numbered. Seiff owned that property too, and so Securicor upped the ante, putting padlocks on the front door each night. We’d saw through them, and then leave early in the morning to escape detection. And then one morning they came very early, catching us. I was still asleep, and suddenly woke up to find somebody standing in my room dressed in a suit saying to somebody else: ‘And there’s another one in here too.’ Then a head, which I am certain to this day belonged to Sieff, popped around the door, and he said: ‘I see.’ I was then told by the henchman to get up, collect my things, and get out - for good. I did not remonstrate. I just assumed the eviction-order was in hand. And so my time was up - it had been fun while it had lasted. When I went downstairs, Seiff and his henchman appeared to have left. As had two of the other squatters, one of whom I shall be writing about shortly, as he was another extremely significant figure in the ‘Firmament of Freaks’ that I was gathering about myself. But Joshua was still there, locked in an almighty dispute with another man, who it transpired was a representative of City-Bank: ‘my arch-enemies!’ as Joshua told me later. He seemed very agreeable actually, and was expressing some sympathy and understanding of Joshua’s position, whilst at the same time affirming and re-iterating that we all had to leave. Or else the Law would have to be resorted to more firmly - and nobody wanted that, did they? He talked like a be-nign avuncular academic, who could see that we were both ‘polite students’ as Allen Ginzberg once put it. And so the exchange was remarkably civilized, at least in the sense that we were never going to come to blows - nor even toss expletive epithets at one another’s heads. Joshua was heated but rational - invoking International and Human Rights Law and arguing that the need for shelter in Law took precedent over corporate greed and private acquisition: to no avail. ‘But I’m afraid young man,
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much as I may see your point, the Law is the Law. And it must, in the end, be followed!’ ‘B-U-T M-Y F-R-I-E-N-D! T-H-E L-A-W A-S Y-O-U A-R-E D -E-F-I-N-I-N-G I-T I-S A-N A-S-S! E-V-E-N C-O-M-M-O-N L-A-W O-V-E-R-R-I-D-E-S I-T! A-N-D U-N-I-V-E-R-S-A-L L-A-W O-V-E-R-T-H-R-O-W-S I-T!’ ‘I’m sorry, but however interesting that may be in theory, in practice that really is not the case. Now I’m afraid I have an appointment to get to. But I have the keys with me here and must lock up after you. Good luck to you anyway. I wish you all the best in your endeavours to find a home and pursue your goals in life.’ And so Joshua had to admit defeat - short of raging like his Biblical namesake and oblit-erating the hapless official’s hearing at least with tinnitus-inducing blasts on an air-spirited Trumpet! Joshua had a pick of other squats to go to of course. But I however didn’t. And I didn’t fancy a season of rough sleeping. So I had to act fast. My money was running out, and I needed to claim Benefits if I was to avoid begging. And I was of no fixed abode. And so I had to walk all the way down to a centre that reminded me of the Monster Doss-House in Jack London’s People Of The Abyss in Whitechapel, an area I scarcely knew then. When I went in, the place was full of winos lying around on benches in varying states of demented inebriation. I sat down like a sore-thumbed toff in the midst of a ragged rabble of the Wretched Of The Earth. And I just looked down at the floor, tapping my feet to try and make myself feel at home. And although the gravity of the situation sank in, I must admit I was also finding it quite fascinating. Then when my turn came to be seen to, I went up to the counter and sat down in front of a woman who was probably only ten, or possibly fifteen, years older than me. And the moment I opened my mouth and my dulcet tones slipped out, she visibly did a double-take. She clearly couldn’t believe that someone speaking like me - though I looked quite scruffy and unshaven after my brief period of roughing it - could ever have set foot in that place! But there I was - in all my plumby-voiced picaresque paradoxicality. And so she simply had to deal with my case with the same degree of neutral bureaucratic efficiency as she did with the winos. And she fixed me up on the very lowest category of Benefit there was at that time - I forget its name - which amounted to £9 a week. But then before I left with a Giro-cheque, she looked me hard in the eyes in a rather matronly not to say schoolmistressy manner, and said: ‘Look here, young man. You can see those people over there, can’t you? The state they’re in?’ ‘ Er - yes,’ I replied, with tautological tentativeness. ‘Well, you don’t want to end up like them - do you?’ ‘Er - no,’ I retorted, with a chastened certainty. ‘So I suggest you get a grip and jolly well do something with your life. You have no excuse to be here. So when you’ve cashed that cheque, go to a job-centre and apply for a training-course. Off you go.’ I thanked her for her self-evident advice and walked out with a savagely sardonic smirk on my face. Of course, I could have got onto the Graduate Employment Register. But, as already indicated, I had other ideas. ‘Drift and paint’ was the old Hippie-cliché. In my case it would have been ‘Drift and write’. And Revolution was already happening - in my head. In the event, I was only on that category of Benefit for a week, as I quickly found a Room - advertised on a notice-board in Camden Town, above a Pub off Camden Road. So I was then put onto Supplementary Benefit - or whatever it was called - and received £11 a week. And £2 a week in those days in London made quite a big difference. It wouldn’t buy you much more than a chocolate bar nowadays. But then, it could still buy you four decent meals in a working-men’s café. And that was the kind of place I ate in - regularly. I’ll take up this chapter in my evolving anti-narrative later, as I want now to return to a year earlier when I made all of the life-changing en-counters I've been describing - none more so than Joshua: bearer of the strangest ‘Good News’.
He embraced Total Freedom, beyond the reach of Power. And I felt, under his liberating influence, I would too. The world was opening up, into the realms of realizable unrealizabilities - to paraphrase
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Badiou. Nobody would ever have to work again, or be exploited. The Fruits of the Earth would from now on flourish and preponderate as if by magic. And human congress would break out of its bonds and endlessly elevate itself, in all its polymorphous diversity and perversity. To Hell with all Laws! as a writer whose name escapes me once thundered when Aleister Crowley announced himself to him with his infamous mantra: ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law!’ Joshua seemed to hold out the promise in his eternal Being, of such a glorious libertine world. I found myself hanging on his every word, and believing that the Unbelievable was indeed True. The three of us left the café when it closed, and continued conversing outside on the pavement like the floor of an open-ended Forum that signalled the complete reclamation of our birth-rights as free-born cosmic citizens, determining our own lives and destinies individually and collectively. Joshua shook his right hand triumphantly as we parted, exclaiming ‘Viva!’, as he was often wont to do I later observed. He then added: ‘Now you are part of The Movement, my friend! You will take The Great Leap Forward into The Emancipation!’ ‘Yes!’ I exclaimed, almost as loudly as him, his oratorical ebullience inspiriting me beyond all bounds of Bourgeois self-restraint. And I felt I was on The Path - but where it would lead to it I did not know. Although I wanted it to lead to an unimaginable Insurrection. And I didn’t care how violent it would be. Joshua was, principally, a Pacifist. But in so far as he resembled JC, he was more the JC who over-turned the tables of the money-lenders in the Temple than the JC who turned the other cheek in lieu of taking an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Peace had to be attained. It was not a given. And it had nothing to do with the Queen! And if the Peace of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity - and much more besides - would never be achieved without battling against the forces that militated against it, then so be it. Peace had to be predicated on war, if a Just one. And the knives were out, trumpets or no trumpets. And that unsettling tension between the Ideal of Peace and the unresolved violence of our distance from True and Full Peace, in the real or actual world, was present in Joshua to a degree and in a manner that I’m not sure I ever encountered in any other person before or since. I can recall him blowing up at somebody once because they presumed to consider their personal friendship with him more important than his political and spiritual ‘comradeship’ with the entire population of China more than ten thousand miles away. That’s how transcendently intense he could be. In the days and weeks after that extraordinary first encounter, and in the headiest atmospheric daze of the long, hot summer of 1976, I met Joshua many more times, occasionally alone and occasionally with others. I’ll pick up the threads of our evolving high conspiratorial solidarity later, as I now want to introduce yet another remarkable figure to my readers, who Dave Peters first introduced me to: Mike Bradley.
SHORT BIOG.
Adam Daly grew up in Hampstead. Is a middle class drop out. Mixed with local outcasts in Hampstead from an early age. Has done odd jobs, struggled as an author and now self publishes. 'The Outcast's Burden' is another one of his works. According to Paul Newman(1) "Adam Daly is a transcendental nihilist". Adam is also an occasional Sohoite.
(1) Paul Newman an English writer editor of Abraxas magazine, author of A History of Terror, Dead since 2013. Fondly remembered by Adam Daly.
Adam Daly grew up in Hampstead. Is a middle class drop out. Mixed with local outcasts in Hampstead from an early age. Has done odd jobs, struggled as an author and now self publishes. 'The Outcast's Burden' is another one of his works. According to Paul Newman(1) "Adam Daly is a transcendental nihilist". Adam is also an occasional Sohoite.
(1) Paul Newman an English writer editor of Abraxas magazine, author of A History of Terror, Dead since 2013. Fondly remembered by Adam Daly.
All pictures by Pablo Behrens. Please credit if used.