1 Gambolling Baby Boomers
Birth of a Rock'n'Roll Child
I was born Friday 7 October 1955 close to the undistinguished source of west London's Goldhawk Road and my first home was in Bulmer Place near Notting Hill Gate. My brother was born two and a half years later, by which time my parents had bought their own house in Bedford Park in what was then the London Borough of Acton, and suburban west London was marked by a homespun simplicity back then that we can only dream of today. By '63, with my brother and I safe in South Kensington’s French Lycee, social change was in the air, though in truth it had been for some time, especially in Britain and the USA, at least since the rise of Rock'n'Roll, and youth culture, whose watershed years were '55 to '56, but for all that England in '63 was still apparently in black and white, and the first shaggy-haired beat groups fitted quite snugly into this innocent time of Norman Wisdom pictures, of the well-spoken presenters of the BBC Home Service, Light Service and World Service, of coppers, tanners and ten bob notes, tuck shops and tuppeny chews.
On this day, NOI leader Elijah Muhammad reached the age of 58, psychologist RD Laing, 28, while Beat poet Amira Baraka, revolutionary leader Ulriche Meinhof and Falklands hero Major Julian Thompson all hit 21. The future Colonel Oliver North celebrated his 12th birthday, Judee Sill her 13th, Paul Weyrich his 8th, Vladimir Putin his 3rd. It was a day marked by an event which had a monumental influence on the evolution of our culture, when at San Franciso's Six Gallery about 150 people gathered to witness readings of poems by Allen Ginsberg, Phillip Whalen, Phillip Lamantia, Michael McClure and Gary Snyder. All went on to be leading lights of the Beat Generation, as did Jack Kerouac the shy Canuck from Lowell, Massachusetts who attended the reading as a well-refreshed cheerleader. His "On the Road" published a year later, and dealing with his wanderings across America with his muse and friend Neal Cassady remains Beat's most famous ever work. After the Six Gallery reading, the Beat movement which had existed in embryonic form since about 1944, left the underground to become an international craze, with the Beatnik taking his place as a universally recognised icon with his beret, goatee beard, turtle-neck sweater and sandals.
1955 was also the year in which Rock'n' Roll assaulted the mainstream thanks to hits by Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and others, although it's "The Blackboard Jungle", which, released on the 20th of March, is widely credited with igniting the Rock' n' Roll revolution, indeed late 20th Century teenage rebellion as a whole. It did so by featuring Bill Haley & His Comets's "Rock Around the Clock", over the film's opening credits. Originally a rather conventional blues-based song recorded by Sonny Dae and his Knights, Haley's version, which was remarkable for its earth-shaking sense of urgency, ensured the world would never be the same after it. In August Sun Records released a long playing record entitled "Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill", featuring the so-called King of the Western Bop who went on to become Rock's most influential figure apart from the Beatles. Then James Dean died in September after having made only three films, the greatest of which, Nicholas Ray's "Rebel Without a Cause" came out about a month afterwards. It could be said to be the cinema's defining elegy to the sensitivity and rebelliousness of youth, with Dean its most beautiful and tortured icon. As such his image has never dated, nor been surpassed. The modern cult of youth was born in the mid 1950s.
Many theories exist as to how the staid conformist fifties could've yielded as if my magic into the wild Dionysian sixties, some convincing, others less so. For me, if a little leaven is present in a theory for me it leavens, or spoils, the entire lump, even when much of it may be sound. As I see it, the Western cultural revolution of the last half century or so was not a sudden, unexpected event, given that tendencies hostile to the Judaeo-Christian moral fabric of our civilisation reach all the way back to the Enlightenment from which so much anti-Christian thought stems. That said, their true source was the Serpent's false promise to Eve that through defiance of the Creator of the Universe she and Adam could be as gods, knowing good and evil, and which is at the heart of all vain, humanistic philosophy. What happened in the 1960s was simply the culmination of many decades of activity on the part of revolutionaries and avant gardists, especially since the First World War. Even Rock, a music which the American evangelist John MacArthur once described as having a bombastic atonality and dissonance was foreshadowed at its most experimental by the emancipation of the dissonant brought about by Classical composers of various Modernist schools. And yet for all the change that raged around me in the sixties, my own little world of the leafy suburbs of outer west London was a largely innocent and even idyllic one which'd hardly changed from the day that I was born, Friday 7 October 1955, when the Victorian spirit was still more or less intact in England.
Phyllis, Carl, Pat and Ann
By the time we'd moved to Bedford Park, My father had a successful career as a classical violinist behind him, and so was in a position to ensure that my brother and I enjoy far safer and more comfortable lives than he'd ever known. He'd been born Patrick Clancy Halling in Rowella, Tasmania and raised in Sydney as the son of a Dane, my namesake Carl Halling, and an English mother. She came into the world as Phyllis Mary Pinnock possibly in the Dulwich area of south London and sometime around the turn of the 20th Century, but she was always known to my brother and I as Mary. According to my great aunt and Mary' sister Joan, her maternal grandmother’s maiden name had been Butler, name which allegedly links the family to the Butlers of Ormonde, a dynasty of Old English nobles of Norman origin which'd dominated the south east of Ireland since the Middle Ages, and so making it a lost or discarded branch. Mary grew into a beautiful young woman, with dark hair, green eyes, high cheekbones and an exquisitely sculpted mouth. After losing her fiancee in the First World War, she married an army officer by the name of Peter Robinson, and they had two children in quick succession, Peter Bevan, and Suzanne, known as Dinny. At some point between Peter’s birth and that of his younger brother Patrick, she travelled with her husband to Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, with the purpose of working as a tea planter. There she met a Dane, fluent in Sanscrit, and with a deep love and knowledge of the spiritual traditions of the East, by the name of Carl Halling. What followed next I can't say for sure but through family sources, I've been led to believe that at some point after becoming pregnant with her third child, Mary fled with Carl to the island of Tasmania where my dad was born, although he was raised, as Carl’s son, in Sydney, New South Wales. It was in Sydney that Carl contracted multiple sclerosis, after which I believe Mary made some kind of living as a journalist and teacher. In the meantime, according to what Pat has told me Carl embarked on a desperate spiritual search taking in Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science in the hope no doubt that this'd yield a miraculous cure, but sadly it was unavaiing and Carl died just before the outbreak of World War II. According to his wishes, he was buried in his native Denmark.
All three children had earlier displayed considerable musical talent, Patrick as a violinist, Peter as a cellist and Suzanne as a pianist. By the time Pat was nine years old he was already the soloist for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, with all his wages according to him being redirected by Mary into the family account. Soon after Carl’s burial, Mary set off for London with her three children in order that they might further develop their musical careers. Pat studied at the Royal Academy of Music, and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and joined the London Philharmonic 0rchestra while still a teenager during the Blitz on London, serving in the Sea Cadets as a signaller, and seeing action as such on the hospital ships of the Thames River Emergency Service. By this time my mother the former Miss Ann Watt was already a highly accomplished and successful singer of both classical and light music, notably with Vancouver's legendary Theatre Under the Stars. She'd been born Angela Jean Watt in the city of Brandon, Manitoba. However, while still an infant she'd moved with her parents and four siblings to the Grandview area of east Vancouver. Grandview's earliest settlers were usually tradesmen or shopkeepers, in shipping or construction work, and largely of British origin. My own grandfather James Watt a carpenter by trade had been born in the little town of Castlederg in County Tyrone, Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Her mother Elizabeth was from Glasgow, Scotland, having been born there to an English father hailing either from Liverpool or Manchester, and a Scottish mother. She was the youngest of six siblings, namely Annie-Isabella, Robert, James, Elizabeth (who died in infancy), Catherine and herself, and the only one of her extended family to emigrate to the mother country, although Isa's only son Don was resident in the UK for a good many years in the early '70s, which she did shortly after the end of the war. She could just as easily have ended up in the US, but a ticket came up for her to travel by boat to the UK and she couldn't resist it. Within a short time of arriving she met my father through their shared profession, and they married in the summer of 1948. Seven years later, they decided to have their first child, and so I was born at the former Hammersmith site of Queen Charlotte's Hospital on October the 7th 1955.
I was articulate and sociable from the outset, walking early, talking early just like my dad before me, but agitated, unable to rest, what they might call hyperactive today. And at some stage in the early to mid sixties I became a problem both at school and home: a disruptive influence in the class, and a trouble-maker in the streets, an eccentric loon full of madcap fun and half-deranged imaginativeness. My striking thinness was offset by the crew cuts my dad liked my brother and I to sport, and the fact that we were routinely dressed in lederhosen can hardly have moderated our unusual appearance. I'm not sure when we were allowed to shed these, and let our hair grow just a little. From the time I was a small boy, I divided my time between the Lycee Francais de Londres, where I became bilingual while little more than a toddler, and my stomping ground of Bedford Park, Chiswick, Hammersmith, and so on. I took Judo classes at the Budokwai in South Kensington, where one of my teachers, a former British international, said he always knew that it was Saturday when he heard Halling's voice. I was known as Alley Cat by the other kids at the Budokwai, after my surname of Halling, and it was a pretty apt name when you think of it. Later, I took classes at the Judokan in Hammersmith, where I tried to make life hell for its owner, a one-time captain of the British international team, but he knew how to handle me, which was not surprising given that he'd served as an air gunner with 83 squadron during World War II, later holding Judo classes in Stalag 383. Perhaps it took a man like him to know how to control a boy like me. My Lycee teachers weren't so gifted, and one of them once informed my poor mother that I gave her nightmares. More than once she drove me home in tears.
Bedford Park was a semi-Bohemian, artistic quarter of London on the outskirts of a rough district of the western suburbs, Acton. Therefore, my boyhood surroundings were half Boheme and half hoodlum. The hoodlum influence was stronger than the artistic, which could account for the frequent street feuds, stone and stick and dirt fights that took place, and the day I stole magazines out of my neighbours' letterboxes, and mutilated them, before putting them back, and the day I informed my best friend's mother, from one end of the street to the other: Robert is a f****** b******. Those words caused a long and furious confrontation to take place between Robert's mother and mine on the doorstep of our house. Frightful day, which I regret...even to this one. I was a member of the 20th Chiswick Wolf Cub pack, and how I loved those Wednesday evenings at the cubs, I remember the games, the pomp and seriousness of the camps, the different coloured scarves, sweaters and hair during the mass meetings, the solemnity of my enrolment, being helped up a tree by an older boy, Baloo, or Kim, or someone, to win my Athletics badge, winning my first star, my two year badge, and my swimming badge with its frog symbol, the kindness of the older boys. 1963...and I was a Beatlemaniac, singing yeah, yeah in the car with my brother in the back of our dad's car. That year I think it was, I had a grudge against an American boy Robert who later became my friend. I used to attack him for no reason at all, like a dog does, just to assert my superiority. One day, he gave me a rabbit punch in the stomach and I made such a fuss that my little girlfriend Nevine wanted to escort me to the safety of our teacher, hugging me, kissing me on my forehead, eyes, nose, cheeks. She forced me to see her: Carl didn't do a thing, said Névine, and Robert came up an gave him four rabbit punches in the stomach. But Robert Graham wasn't punished because the teacher knew what a little demon I was.
By the end of '63, I was frequently involving myself in arguments with people who tried to say that some secondary Beat combo or another was destined to swamp the Beatles. No, I disagreed. Only one new group truly roused my interest, though not immediately for I was disappointed by a rough and sullen performance of "Not Fade Away" on Top of the Pops, having heard so much about the Rolling Stones. Public opinion, however, swayed me, and discussing Pop music at the end of '64 with some of the new breed of English roses with their mini-skirts, kinky boots and Marianne Faithfull tresses or Twiggy crops, the Rolling Stones were my new favourites. I loved the martyr Mick, bathed in light with surly, ever-defiant lips, surrounded by his frenzied slaves.
The piece below describes the arrival in the dirty alley at the back of our house of someone who was a terrifying figure to us. He lived virtually opposite me in Bedford Park, and yet he was from another dimension to me altogether. He was a rough kid, a cockney kid, someone who looking back on him today seemed to belong on the bomb sites of post-war London. For all that, however, he became a very close friend, in fact pretty much my best one for a time. He was, as the piece makes clear, a "bully with a naive and sentimental heart...", and I wish him well wherever he might be today.
Wicked Cahoots
When he made
his first personal appearance
in the dirty alley
on someone else's rusty bike,
screaming along
in a cloud of dust
it rendered us all
speechless and motionless.
But I was amazed
that despite his grey-faced surliness,
he was very affable with us...
the bully with a naive
and sentimental heart.
He was so happy
to hear that I liked his dad
or that my mum liked him
and he was welcome
to come to tea
with us at five twenty five...
Our "adventures" were spectacular:
chasing after other bikesters,
screaming at the top
of our lungs
into blocks of flats
and then running
as our echoed waves of terror
blended with incoherent threats...
"I'll call the Police, I'll..."
Wicked cahoots.
This Glam Rock Nation
In September 1968 while still only 12 years old I became the youngest cadet at the Nautical College Pangbourne, a naval college situated near the little Thameside village of Pangbourne in the county of Berkshire. This probably made me the youngest serving officer in the entire Royal Navy at the time. Founded in 1919, she was still known by her original title of the Nautical College Pangbourne, but by 1969 this'd been abbreviated to Pangbourne College. However, the boys retained their officer status and spent much of their time in full naval officers' uniform. What's more, naval discipline continued to be enforced, with Pangbourne providing the hardships both of a military college and a traditional English boarding school. In 1996, she became fully co-educational. The Pangbourne I knew had strong links to the Church of England, and so was marked by regular if not daily classes in what was known as Divinity, morning parade ground prayers, evening prayers, and compulsory chapel on Sunday morning. If you missed any of these you would've been seriously punished, although not necessarily with the cane. I was however beaten on numerous occasions although with never more than four cuts, or swishes of the cane. I was heavily disciplined from my very first term in fact; but I'd like to go on record as saying that I'm indebted to Pangbourne for the values it instilled in me if only unconsciously. They were after all the same values that once made Britain strong and great; and yet, by the time I joined Pangbourne, they were under siege as never before by the so-called counterculture. While failing to fully understand the implications of the cultural revolution of the late 1960s, I passionately celebrated its consequences, and took to my heart many of its icons both artistic and political, Che Guevara being my hero for a good long time. Needless to say, he no longer is.
My parents, brother and I had moved to a little working class suburb about a dozen miles from the centre of London in 1970, which made me something of a fish out of water once I finally left Pangbourne in the summer of '72, after a decision had been made involving my poor dad and those directly responsible for me at the college. After all, I was no longer either in west London where I grew up, nor at the school that'd been my whole world for four long years and where I'd formed some of the deepest friendships of my life. 1972 could be said to be the year in which the seventies really began as the excitement surrounding the alternative society and its happenings and be-ins and love-ins and free festivals and so on started to fade into recent history. For my part I couldn't wait to get to grips with the dismal new decade even if for the first two years, I'd despised the rise of the new commercial chart Pop and its teenybop idols. I was of the school of Hard and Progressive Rock...Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Yes and so on. But I was changing. For better or worse, this was going to be my era. In late '72, I saw former Bubblegum band the Sweet on a long-forgotten teenage programme called "Lift off with Ayesha", and with all the passion of a former enemy I fell in love with their new camp image, all eye-shadow and glittering outfits and massive stack-heeled boots. Several months later a certain Rock chameleon appeared on the chat show Russell Harty Plus in January 1973 with his eyebrows shaved off and my devotion to the strange culture taking over the land making even former skinheads want to look like Charlie George or some other flash dressing hard man became total. So many of the popular songs of the era were like football chants set to a stomping Glam Rock beat. It was was the golden age of the long-haired boot boy and every street seemed to me to be pregnant with menace in this Glam Rock nation, as if the spirit of Weimar Berlin with its unholy mix of violence and decadence had been resurrected in stuffy old England. It was a terrible time to be young; but I of course loved it, lapped it up.
In late '72 I was launched by my dad on an intensive programme of self-improvement. Through home study and with the help of local private tutors I set about making up for the fact that I'd left school early at 16 with only two GCE (General Certificate of Education) exams to my name; at ordinary level, of course, which is why they were called "O" levels. I studied various martial arts at the Judokan in Hammersmith, west London. Among my fellow students were shaggy-haired hard cases who may have been influenced by the prevailing fashion for all things Eastern, what with the cult of Bruce Lee and so on. Some of them had feather cuts as I remember. Perhaps they'd seen Rod Stewart strutting on Top of the Pops with one singing "Maggie May" or "You Wear it Well". I also went to swimming classes at a local baths. I had a fierce crush on one of my fellow swimmers. She looked a little like a skinhead girl with her cute short haircut; but my heart wasn't in the swimming, and one of the teachers told me so, wondering why I was wasting my time even turning up. She had a point. I learned how to play basic Rock guitar from a kindly soft-spoken man who taught Rock guitar from his little house near the Thames in suburban Surrey, and who looked so square with his short back and sides and baggy dad-style trousers; but he loved his Rock'n'Roll. He taught me the basis of the Rock solo, which involved going up and down the Blues scale in whatever key you chose. I was a lazy pupil in this as in all things, but I probably learned more from that man about the guitar than anyone, with the possible exception of a Pangbourne friend called Steve, whose songs I stole with their simple chord progressions...C, A minor, F, G and back again to C and so on. And then there was Deep Purple's "Black Night", whose simple bluesy riff I'd once played to a pal at Pangbourne, at which point the kid turned to whoever else was present and announced something: "Hey guys, we've got a natural here!".
Then in late '72 I joined the London Division of the Royal Naval Reserve as an Ordinary Seaman, attending classes once a week on HMS President on the Embankment. At some point soon after this, it became clear to me that I'd been noticed for my angelic good looks. I think this came as a bit of a surprise, but I was flattered rather than offended, as if a seed of narcissism had somehow become implanted within me in late adolescence. I can only wonder what effect this had on my healthy development as a normal male human being. It's not that I wasn't aware of being good-looking before '72, because there'd been occasional comments about my looks by female friends of the family for some time, and I'd even been aware of being handsome as a very young child. But none of that had ever meant much to me. In my early to mid teens I'd been quite a typical boy in a lot of ways, friendly, feisty, self-confident and so on, but I'd never gone through a phase of finding girls drippy or whatever, in fact from as far back as I can remember I'd been prone to falling hopelessly in love with them especially if they were somehow unattainable to me. I was a born romantic, cherishing a grossly sentimental streak all throughout my teens that may've placed me at odds with my peers. While still only about fifteen and pretty thuggish for the most part I nonetheless was capable of becoming entranced by notorious weepies such as "South Pacific" which I saw with my mother at the cinema. John Schlesinger's film version of the Thomas Hardy novel "Far from the Madding Crowd" which I saw at Pangbourne was another film that affected me very deeply indeed, too deeply perhaps for an adolescent boy and it may've been partly responsible for an obsession with lost love and high romantic tragedy that remains with me to this day. I'd a dreamy almost mawkish side to my character even as an adolescent and this must surely have exerted some kind of influence on the course of my life. But in no way was I a typical delicate sheltered milquetoast, far from it. For this reason, to realise that I was perceived by certain other men as a pretty boy genuinely took me back, and I'd not seen it coming, although I can't emphasise this enough, it was a source of delight to me, not shame. Not to put too fine a point on it, I was where it was at, and that was cool by me. The cult of androgyny was a powerful force in the Britain of the early 1970s, and to a lesser extent all throughout the West, having been incubated by sixties Mod and then Hippie culture, and Rock acts as diverse as the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, Alice Cooper, Marc Bolan and David Bowie. It'd been some ten years since this Rock'n'Roll child had first been first confronted with male androgyny although subtly in the shape of the Beat groups of the Mod era but by '73, certain Rock stars were flirting with out and out transvestisism in defiance of the Bible's strict warnings about adopting the clothes and mannerisms of the opposite sex. In the mean streets of London and other big British cities, however, youi took your life into your hands if you chose to parade around like Bolan or Bowie, and therefore few did. One of my big heroes as a boy had been all-American actor Steve McQueen, who incarnated an uncompromising tough guy cool. And yet in '73, many of my new idols were "prettier than most chicks" as Marc Bolan once described himself. I can only wonder what effect this had on my healthy development as a normal male human being, and the same goes for all of those who worshipped at the altar of Glam.
I was born Friday 7 October 1955 close to the undistinguished source of west London's Goldhawk Road and my first home was in Bulmer Place near Notting Hill Gate. My brother was born two and a half years later, by which time my parents had bought their own house in Bedford Park in what was then the London Borough of Acton, and suburban west London was marked by a homespun simplicity back then that we can only dream of today. By '63, with my brother and I safe in South Kensington’s French Lycee, social change was in the air, though in truth it had been for some time, especially in Britain and the USA, at least since the rise of Rock'n'Roll, and youth culture, whose watershed years were '55 to '56, but for all that England in '63 was still apparently in black and white, and the first shaggy-haired beat groups fitted quite snugly into this innocent time of Norman Wisdom pictures, of the well-spoken presenters of the BBC Home Service, Light Service and World Service, of coppers, tanners and ten bob notes, tuck shops and tuppeny chews.
On this day, NOI leader Elijah Muhammad reached the age of 58, psychologist RD Laing, 28, while Beat poet Amira Baraka, revolutionary leader Ulriche Meinhof and Falklands hero Major Julian Thompson all hit 21. The future Colonel Oliver North celebrated his 12th birthday, Judee Sill her 13th, Paul Weyrich his 8th, Vladimir Putin his 3rd. It was a day marked by an event which had a monumental influence on the evolution of our culture, when at San Franciso's Six Gallery about 150 people gathered to witness readings of poems by Allen Ginsberg, Phillip Whalen, Phillip Lamantia, Michael McClure and Gary Snyder. All went on to be leading lights of the Beat Generation, as did Jack Kerouac the shy Canuck from Lowell, Massachusetts who attended the reading as a well-refreshed cheerleader. His "On the Road" published a year later, and dealing with his wanderings across America with his muse and friend Neal Cassady remains Beat's most famous ever work. After the Six Gallery reading, the Beat movement which had existed in embryonic form since about 1944, left the underground to become an international craze, with the Beatnik taking his place as a universally recognised icon with his beret, goatee beard, turtle-neck sweater and sandals.
1955 was also the year in which Rock'n' Roll assaulted the mainstream thanks to hits by Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and others, although it's "The Blackboard Jungle", which, released on the 20th of March, is widely credited with igniting the Rock' n' Roll revolution, indeed late 20th Century teenage rebellion as a whole. It did so by featuring Bill Haley & His Comets's "Rock Around the Clock", over the film's opening credits. Originally a rather conventional blues-based song recorded by Sonny Dae and his Knights, Haley's version, which was remarkable for its earth-shaking sense of urgency, ensured the world would never be the same after it. In August Sun Records released a long playing record entitled "Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill", featuring the so-called King of the Western Bop who went on to become Rock's most influential figure apart from the Beatles. Then James Dean died in September after having made only three films, the greatest of which, Nicholas Ray's "Rebel Without a Cause" came out about a month afterwards. It could be said to be the cinema's defining elegy to the sensitivity and rebelliousness of youth, with Dean its most beautiful and tortured icon. As such his image has never dated, nor been surpassed. The modern cult of youth was born in the mid 1950s.
Many theories exist as to how the staid conformist fifties could've yielded as if my magic into the wild Dionysian sixties, some convincing, others less so. For me, if a little leaven is present in a theory for me it leavens, or spoils, the entire lump, even when much of it may be sound. As I see it, the Western cultural revolution of the last half century or so was not a sudden, unexpected event, given that tendencies hostile to the Judaeo-Christian moral fabric of our civilisation reach all the way back to the Enlightenment from which so much anti-Christian thought stems. That said, their true source was the Serpent's false promise to Eve that through defiance of the Creator of the Universe she and Adam could be as gods, knowing good and evil, and which is at the heart of all vain, humanistic philosophy. What happened in the 1960s was simply the culmination of many decades of activity on the part of revolutionaries and avant gardists, especially since the First World War. Even Rock, a music which the American evangelist John MacArthur once described as having a bombastic atonality and dissonance was foreshadowed at its most experimental by the emancipation of the dissonant brought about by Classical composers of various Modernist schools. And yet for all the change that raged around me in the sixties, my own little world of the leafy suburbs of outer west London was a largely innocent and even idyllic one which'd hardly changed from the day that I was born, Friday 7 October 1955, when the Victorian spirit was still more or less intact in England.
Phyllis, Carl, Pat and Ann
By the time we'd moved to Bedford Park, My father had a successful career as a classical violinist behind him, and so was in a position to ensure that my brother and I enjoy far safer and more comfortable lives than he'd ever known. He'd been born Patrick Clancy Halling in Rowella, Tasmania and raised in Sydney as the son of a Dane, my namesake Carl Halling, and an English mother. She came into the world as Phyllis Mary Pinnock possibly in the Dulwich area of south London and sometime around the turn of the 20th Century, but she was always known to my brother and I as Mary. According to my great aunt and Mary' sister Joan, her maternal grandmother’s maiden name had been Butler, name which allegedly links the family to the Butlers of Ormonde, a dynasty of Old English nobles of Norman origin which'd dominated the south east of Ireland since the Middle Ages, and so making it a lost or discarded branch. Mary grew into a beautiful young woman, with dark hair, green eyes, high cheekbones and an exquisitely sculpted mouth. After losing her fiancee in the First World War, she married an army officer by the name of Peter Robinson, and they had two children in quick succession, Peter Bevan, and Suzanne, known as Dinny. At some point between Peter’s birth and that of his younger brother Patrick, she travelled with her husband to Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, with the purpose of working as a tea planter. There she met a Dane, fluent in Sanscrit, and with a deep love and knowledge of the spiritual traditions of the East, by the name of Carl Halling. What followed next I can't say for sure but through family sources, I've been led to believe that at some point after becoming pregnant with her third child, Mary fled with Carl to the island of Tasmania where my dad was born, although he was raised, as Carl’s son, in Sydney, New South Wales. It was in Sydney that Carl contracted multiple sclerosis, after which I believe Mary made some kind of living as a journalist and teacher. In the meantime, according to what Pat has told me Carl embarked on a desperate spiritual search taking in Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science in the hope no doubt that this'd yield a miraculous cure, but sadly it was unavaiing and Carl died just before the outbreak of World War II. According to his wishes, he was buried in his native Denmark.
All three children had earlier displayed considerable musical talent, Patrick as a violinist, Peter as a cellist and Suzanne as a pianist. By the time Pat was nine years old he was already the soloist for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, with all his wages according to him being redirected by Mary into the family account. Soon after Carl’s burial, Mary set off for London with her three children in order that they might further develop their musical careers. Pat studied at the Royal Academy of Music, and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and joined the London Philharmonic 0rchestra while still a teenager during the Blitz on London, serving in the Sea Cadets as a signaller, and seeing action as such on the hospital ships of the Thames River Emergency Service. By this time my mother the former Miss Ann Watt was already a highly accomplished and successful singer of both classical and light music, notably with Vancouver's legendary Theatre Under the Stars. She'd been born Angela Jean Watt in the city of Brandon, Manitoba. However, while still an infant she'd moved with her parents and four siblings to the Grandview area of east Vancouver. Grandview's earliest settlers were usually tradesmen or shopkeepers, in shipping or construction work, and largely of British origin. My own grandfather James Watt a carpenter by trade had been born in the little town of Castlederg in County Tyrone, Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Her mother Elizabeth was from Glasgow, Scotland, having been born there to an English father hailing either from Liverpool or Manchester, and a Scottish mother. She was the youngest of six siblings, namely Annie-Isabella, Robert, James, Elizabeth (who died in infancy), Catherine and herself, and the only one of her extended family to emigrate to the mother country, although Isa's only son Don was resident in the UK for a good many years in the early '70s, which she did shortly after the end of the war. She could just as easily have ended up in the US, but a ticket came up for her to travel by boat to the UK and she couldn't resist it. Within a short time of arriving she met my father through their shared profession, and they married in the summer of 1948. Seven years later, they decided to have their first child, and so I was born at the former Hammersmith site of Queen Charlotte's Hospital on October the 7th 1955.
I was articulate and sociable from the outset, walking early, talking early just like my dad before me, but agitated, unable to rest, what they might call hyperactive today. And at some stage in the early to mid sixties I became a problem both at school and home: a disruptive influence in the class, and a trouble-maker in the streets, an eccentric loon full of madcap fun and half-deranged imaginativeness. My striking thinness was offset by the crew cuts my dad liked my brother and I to sport, and the fact that we were routinely dressed in lederhosen can hardly have moderated our unusual appearance. I'm not sure when we were allowed to shed these, and let our hair grow just a little. From the time I was a small boy, I divided my time between the Lycee Francais de Londres, where I became bilingual while little more than a toddler, and my stomping ground of Bedford Park, Chiswick, Hammersmith, and so on. I took Judo classes at the Budokwai in South Kensington, where one of my teachers, a former British international, said he always knew that it was Saturday when he heard Halling's voice. I was known as Alley Cat by the other kids at the Budokwai, after my surname of Halling, and it was a pretty apt name when you think of it. Later, I took classes at the Judokan in Hammersmith, where I tried to make life hell for its owner, a one-time captain of the British international team, but he knew how to handle me, which was not surprising given that he'd served as an air gunner with 83 squadron during World War II, later holding Judo classes in Stalag 383. Perhaps it took a man like him to know how to control a boy like me. My Lycee teachers weren't so gifted, and one of them once informed my poor mother that I gave her nightmares. More than once she drove me home in tears.
Bedford Park was a semi-Bohemian, artistic quarter of London on the outskirts of a rough district of the western suburbs, Acton. Therefore, my boyhood surroundings were half Boheme and half hoodlum. The hoodlum influence was stronger than the artistic, which could account for the frequent street feuds, stone and stick and dirt fights that took place, and the day I stole magazines out of my neighbours' letterboxes, and mutilated them, before putting them back, and the day I informed my best friend's mother, from one end of the street to the other: Robert is a f****** b******. Those words caused a long and furious confrontation to take place between Robert's mother and mine on the doorstep of our house. Frightful day, which I regret...even to this one. I was a member of the 20th Chiswick Wolf Cub pack, and how I loved those Wednesday evenings at the cubs, I remember the games, the pomp and seriousness of the camps, the different coloured scarves, sweaters and hair during the mass meetings, the solemnity of my enrolment, being helped up a tree by an older boy, Baloo, or Kim, or someone, to win my Athletics badge, winning my first star, my two year badge, and my swimming badge with its frog symbol, the kindness of the older boys. 1963...and I was a Beatlemaniac, singing yeah, yeah in the car with my brother in the back of our dad's car. That year I think it was, I had a grudge against an American boy Robert who later became my friend. I used to attack him for no reason at all, like a dog does, just to assert my superiority. One day, he gave me a rabbit punch in the stomach and I made such a fuss that my little girlfriend Nevine wanted to escort me to the safety of our teacher, hugging me, kissing me on my forehead, eyes, nose, cheeks. She forced me to see her: Carl didn't do a thing, said Névine, and Robert came up an gave him four rabbit punches in the stomach. But Robert Graham wasn't punished because the teacher knew what a little demon I was.
By the end of '63, I was frequently involving myself in arguments with people who tried to say that some secondary Beat combo or another was destined to swamp the Beatles. No, I disagreed. Only one new group truly roused my interest, though not immediately for I was disappointed by a rough and sullen performance of "Not Fade Away" on Top of the Pops, having heard so much about the Rolling Stones. Public opinion, however, swayed me, and discussing Pop music at the end of '64 with some of the new breed of English roses with their mini-skirts, kinky boots and Marianne Faithfull tresses or Twiggy crops, the Rolling Stones were my new favourites. I loved the martyr Mick, bathed in light with surly, ever-defiant lips, surrounded by his frenzied slaves.
The piece below describes the arrival in the dirty alley at the back of our house of someone who was a terrifying figure to us. He lived virtually opposite me in Bedford Park, and yet he was from another dimension to me altogether. He was a rough kid, a cockney kid, someone who looking back on him today seemed to belong on the bomb sites of post-war London. For all that, however, he became a very close friend, in fact pretty much my best one for a time. He was, as the piece makes clear, a "bully with a naive and sentimental heart...", and I wish him well wherever he might be today.
Wicked Cahoots
When he made
his first personal appearance
in the dirty alley
on someone else's rusty bike,
screaming along
in a cloud of dust
it rendered us all
speechless and motionless.
But I was amazed
that despite his grey-faced surliness,
he was very affable with us...
the bully with a naive
and sentimental heart.
He was so happy
to hear that I liked his dad
or that my mum liked him
and he was welcome
to come to tea
with us at five twenty five...
Our "adventures" were spectacular:
chasing after other bikesters,
screaming at the top
of our lungs
into blocks of flats
and then running
as our echoed waves of terror
blended with incoherent threats...
"I'll call the Police, I'll..."
Wicked cahoots.
This Glam Rock Nation
In September 1968 while still only 12 years old I became the youngest cadet at the Nautical College Pangbourne, a naval college situated near the little Thameside village of Pangbourne in the county of Berkshire. This probably made me the youngest serving officer in the entire Royal Navy at the time. Founded in 1919, she was still known by her original title of the Nautical College Pangbourne, but by 1969 this'd been abbreviated to Pangbourne College. However, the boys retained their officer status and spent much of their time in full naval officers' uniform. What's more, naval discipline continued to be enforced, with Pangbourne providing the hardships both of a military college and a traditional English boarding school. In 1996, she became fully co-educational. The Pangbourne I knew had strong links to the Church of England, and so was marked by regular if not daily classes in what was known as Divinity, morning parade ground prayers, evening prayers, and compulsory chapel on Sunday morning. If you missed any of these you would've been seriously punished, although not necessarily with the cane. I was however beaten on numerous occasions although with never more than four cuts, or swishes of the cane. I was heavily disciplined from my very first term in fact; but I'd like to go on record as saying that I'm indebted to Pangbourne for the values it instilled in me if only unconsciously. They were after all the same values that once made Britain strong and great; and yet, by the time I joined Pangbourne, they were under siege as never before by the so-called counterculture. While failing to fully understand the implications of the cultural revolution of the late 1960s, I passionately celebrated its consequences, and took to my heart many of its icons both artistic and political, Che Guevara being my hero for a good long time. Needless to say, he no longer is.
My parents, brother and I had moved to a little working class suburb about a dozen miles from the centre of London in 1970, which made me something of a fish out of water once I finally left Pangbourne in the summer of '72, after a decision had been made involving my poor dad and those directly responsible for me at the college. After all, I was no longer either in west London where I grew up, nor at the school that'd been my whole world for four long years and where I'd formed some of the deepest friendships of my life. 1972 could be said to be the year in which the seventies really began as the excitement surrounding the alternative society and its happenings and be-ins and love-ins and free festivals and so on started to fade into recent history. For my part I couldn't wait to get to grips with the dismal new decade even if for the first two years, I'd despised the rise of the new commercial chart Pop and its teenybop idols. I was of the school of Hard and Progressive Rock...Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Yes and so on. But I was changing. For better or worse, this was going to be my era. In late '72, I saw former Bubblegum band the Sweet on a long-forgotten teenage programme called "Lift off with Ayesha", and with all the passion of a former enemy I fell in love with their new camp image, all eye-shadow and glittering outfits and massive stack-heeled boots. Several months later a certain Rock chameleon appeared on the chat show Russell Harty Plus in January 1973 with his eyebrows shaved off and my devotion to the strange culture taking over the land making even former skinheads want to look like Charlie George or some other flash dressing hard man became total. So many of the popular songs of the era were like football chants set to a stomping Glam Rock beat. It was was the golden age of the long-haired boot boy and every street seemed to me to be pregnant with menace in this Glam Rock nation, as if the spirit of Weimar Berlin with its unholy mix of violence and decadence had been resurrected in stuffy old England. It was a terrible time to be young; but I of course loved it, lapped it up.
In late '72 I was launched by my dad on an intensive programme of self-improvement. Through home study and with the help of local private tutors I set about making up for the fact that I'd left school early at 16 with only two GCE (General Certificate of Education) exams to my name; at ordinary level, of course, which is why they were called "O" levels. I studied various martial arts at the Judokan in Hammersmith, west London. Among my fellow students were shaggy-haired hard cases who may have been influenced by the prevailing fashion for all things Eastern, what with the cult of Bruce Lee and so on. Some of them had feather cuts as I remember. Perhaps they'd seen Rod Stewart strutting on Top of the Pops with one singing "Maggie May" or "You Wear it Well". I also went to swimming classes at a local baths. I had a fierce crush on one of my fellow swimmers. She looked a little like a skinhead girl with her cute short haircut; but my heart wasn't in the swimming, and one of the teachers told me so, wondering why I was wasting my time even turning up. She had a point. I learned how to play basic Rock guitar from a kindly soft-spoken man who taught Rock guitar from his little house near the Thames in suburban Surrey, and who looked so square with his short back and sides and baggy dad-style trousers; but he loved his Rock'n'Roll. He taught me the basis of the Rock solo, which involved going up and down the Blues scale in whatever key you chose. I was a lazy pupil in this as in all things, but I probably learned more from that man about the guitar than anyone, with the possible exception of a Pangbourne friend called Steve, whose songs I stole with their simple chord progressions...C, A minor, F, G and back again to C and so on. And then there was Deep Purple's "Black Night", whose simple bluesy riff I'd once played to a pal at Pangbourne, at which point the kid turned to whoever else was present and announced something: "Hey guys, we've got a natural here!".
Then in late '72 I joined the London Division of the Royal Naval Reserve as an Ordinary Seaman, attending classes once a week on HMS President on the Embankment. At some point soon after this, it became clear to me that I'd been noticed for my angelic good looks. I think this came as a bit of a surprise, but I was flattered rather than offended, as if a seed of narcissism had somehow become implanted within me in late adolescence. I can only wonder what effect this had on my healthy development as a normal male human being. It's not that I wasn't aware of being good-looking before '72, because there'd been occasional comments about my looks by female friends of the family for some time, and I'd even been aware of being handsome as a very young child. But none of that had ever meant much to me. In my early to mid teens I'd been quite a typical boy in a lot of ways, friendly, feisty, self-confident and so on, but I'd never gone through a phase of finding girls drippy or whatever, in fact from as far back as I can remember I'd been prone to falling hopelessly in love with them especially if they were somehow unattainable to me. I was a born romantic, cherishing a grossly sentimental streak all throughout my teens that may've placed me at odds with my peers. While still only about fifteen and pretty thuggish for the most part I nonetheless was capable of becoming entranced by notorious weepies such as "South Pacific" which I saw with my mother at the cinema. John Schlesinger's film version of the Thomas Hardy novel "Far from the Madding Crowd" which I saw at Pangbourne was another film that affected me very deeply indeed, too deeply perhaps for an adolescent boy and it may've been partly responsible for an obsession with lost love and high romantic tragedy that remains with me to this day. I'd a dreamy almost mawkish side to my character even as an adolescent and this must surely have exerted some kind of influence on the course of my life. But in no way was I a typical delicate sheltered milquetoast, far from it. For this reason, to realise that I was perceived by certain other men as a pretty boy genuinely took me back, and I'd not seen it coming, although I can't emphasise this enough, it was a source of delight to me, not shame. Not to put too fine a point on it, I was where it was at, and that was cool by me. The cult of androgyny was a powerful force in the Britain of the early 1970s, and to a lesser extent all throughout the West, having been incubated by sixties Mod and then Hippie culture, and Rock acts as diverse as the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, Alice Cooper, Marc Bolan and David Bowie. It'd been some ten years since this Rock'n'Roll child had first been first confronted with male androgyny although subtly in the shape of the Beat groups of the Mod era but by '73, certain Rock stars were flirting with out and out transvestisism in defiance of the Bible's strict warnings about adopting the clothes and mannerisms of the opposite sex. In the mean streets of London and other big British cities, however, youi took your life into your hands if you chose to parade around like Bolan or Bowie, and therefore few did. One of my big heroes as a boy had been all-American actor Steve McQueen, who incarnated an uncompromising tough guy cool. And yet in '73, many of my new idols were "prettier than most chicks" as Marc Bolan once described himself. I can only wonder what effect this had on my healthy development as a normal male human being, and the same goes for all of those who worshipped at the altar of Glam.
I fantasised about fame and adulation as a Rock or movie star as never before throughout the Glam era, and built an image based on David Bowie, spiking my hair like him, and even peroxiding it at some point. Not surprisingly then I didn't really fit in in my new home town, unlike my brother who was far more suited to the area than me with his strong London acccent and laddish ways, and he wasted little time in becoming part of a local youth scene centred mainly around football, traditional sport of the British working classes. For my part, I came into my own in Spain, or rather Santiago de la Ribera on the Mar Menor near Murcia, where the family had been vacationing since about 1968. I think it was towards the end of my summer '73 holiday that I finally started to be noticed in a big way by the local youth, most from either Murcia or Madrid, and so la Ribera became vital to me in terms of my becoming a social being among members of both sexes. A large variable group of us became very close and remained so for four summers running. Spain was such a sweet and friendly nation back then in the relatively innocent early seventies, and the youth of La Ribera as happy and carefree as I imagine southern Californians would have been in the pre-Beatles sixties. It was really a great time, and probably signalled the start for me of a lifelong love affair with the Spain and the Spanish people, indeed with Latin and continental Europe as a whole. In the early 1970s, everything seemed to be mine for the knowing, for the tasting, for the taking. It was a time of constant, frenetic change and I greedily eyed the fruits of a social revolution that had been all but bloodlessly waged on my behalf in the sixties. I was soon to feast on them...never once considering the welfare of those fated to follow in my wake, to come to maturity in a world in which baby-boomers like me had lately gambolled like so many senseless, sensuous fauns. Pity their poor souls.
Pat Halling 1940s?
Miss Ann Watt (r)
1950s
Pat, 1960s?
Mary 1960s?
1972
Pat, 1960s?Mary 1960s?1972- Posted by CarlHalling on 18/11/2008.
- CarlHalling's site
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