Where the Halling Valley River Lies, Carl Halling [urban books to read txt] 📗

neighbourhood.
And one of his mother's closest friends expressed concern over David’s association with Paulie, as if he might end up going to the bad. And incredibly, she was not alone in thinking this. For far from being some latter day Jack Dawkins, David was just a lovable little imp causing mayhem in a leafy London suburb…wasn’t he? And he had such a tender side; in fact, he was one of those prematurely romantic kids who never go through a phase of detesting the fair sex. To say the least…he adored them from the outset.
And if ever proof was needed that puppy love can be as agonisingly painful as its adult counterpart it came in the shape of his adoration, as a fantastically skinny nine year old, of a young blonde girl of about his age with a strong London accent whom he met through no fault of his own in the midst of that most mythologized of decades of recent times.
It was the year of ’65; and he knew this to be an absolute fact thanks to certain songs which, even when played in the early 2010s, took him violently back to the time of his love for little June Cassidy.
And each and every one of these tunes, such as the Fab Four’s “We Can Work it Out” and Pet Clark’s strangely bitter-sweet “My Love”stemmed from that most totemic of years when Pop started mutating piecemeal into Rock; and London was in mid swing with Carnaby Street as its trendy epicentre.
She announced herself to him with a radiant smile one afternoon while they were both attending classes at their local swimming pool soon after asking him whether his name was David. After he’d confirmed to her that indeed it was, she confessed her reason for having so unexpectedly entered his world:
“My mum knows your mum”, she chirpily informed him, before explaining that her mother Maryanne had become friendly with David’s own mother through their mutual attendance of a sewing class in what would have been a local education centre. She then turned to her friend and, still smiling, more or less reiterated what she’d told David:
“My mum knows his mum”.
But if she was overwhelmingly friendly during that initial meeting, she was never so pleasant again, but the more David was ignored, the more he adored. And on one occasion, he may have tried to attract her attention by swimming ever so close to where she was sitting on the edge of the pool with a friend, only to get caught up in the splashing of her feet; but he could have sworn she smiled to her friend at this point, and he clung to the hope that this smile indicated some kind of affection for him.
But such hope was forlorn, for she never spoke to him again, and he was driven to distraction by her indifference, even to the point of looking up her mother’s name in the telephone directory. And oh with what joy he saw it clearly written there, Maryanne Cassidy, and it restored some kind of control to him, so that the intensity of his love was somehow mitigated thereby.
In fact, it consoled him to realise that should he so desire, he could call her, and speak to her, but what would he say? After all, they weren’t friends; in fact, she didn’t even seem to like him, so he let it go, and in time, his love receded.
Yet he carried its memory far into adulthood, despite the fact that were she still alive, she might have grandchildren of the same age she’d been when she’d so enchantingly introduced herself to David in that totemic year of ’65:
“My mum knows your mum!”

He left the Lycée in the summer of 1968...before spending a few months at a crammer called Davies so as to become sufficiently up to scratch academically to pass what is known as the Common Entrance Examination.
Taking the CE is a necessity for all British boys and girls seeking entrance into private fee-paying schools, including those known as public schools, which are the traditional secondary places of learning for the British governing and professional classes.
And the vast majority of those who go on to public schools begin their academic careers in preparatory or prep schools, and so for the most part leave home at around eight years old.
The school his father had selected for him was the Nautical College, Welbourne, and somehow, he managed to pass the CE, so that at still only twelve years old became Cadet David Cristiansen 173, the youngest kid in the college, and an official serving officer in Britain's Royal Naval Reserve.
Founded at the height of the British Empire, Welbourne still possessed her original title in ’68, while her headmaster, a serving officer in the Royal Navy for some quarter of a century, wore his uniform at all times.
However, in ’69, she was given the name Welbourne College, while the boys retained their officer status, and naval discipline continued to be enforced, with Welbourne serving both as a military college and traditional English boarding school.
The Welbourne David 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.
Later in life, he felt indebted to her for the values she’d instilled in him if only unconsciously, even though, by the time he joined Welbourne, 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, David was to passionately celebrate its consequences, and take to his heart many of its icons, both artistic and political.
Yet, from the outset, he desperately wanted to distinguish himself at Welbourne...and especially at sports, starting with the great ruffianly game for gentlemen of Rugby Football...and oh with what longing he gazed at the sight of colours on the blue blazers or striped blazers of those who'd earned them on the playing fields of Welbourne.
Traditionally awarded in public schools and universities for sporting excellence, colours weren’t everything David desired; but for a few years they came pretty close.
But he’d not been born into a typical British family, and so attended a prep school…as has ever been the case for the vast majority of those destined to pass into the public school system.
Although, it would be false to assert that Welbourne was exclusively composed of the sons of the privileged, because she wasn't. And neither was she a narrowly Anglo-Saxon institution, because during David's time, he knew American, West Indian, Middle Eastern and South African cadets as well as British ones, and several of these were close friends of his.
What's more, she was supplemented in the autumn of '68 by cadets from a recently dismantled training ship, founded in 1885 by a wealthy businessman and keen yachtsman for the rescue of London slum boys who would then be trained for service in the Royal and Merchant Navies.
Most fitted in well, as indeed did David, but he was never going to be one of Welbourne’s wonder boys…despite his having been kept back an extra year in the third form, which should have put him at an academic advantage; but didn’t. And he may have done so partly in response to the meningitis he succumbed to in Spain during his first summer vacation. And which necessitated his being hospitalised for a time in Zaragoza, where he became the white-haired boy of several of the medical students, who hailed from such diverse regions of the Spanish-speaking world as Peru and Puerto Rico.
Yet, there were those teachers and pupils who insisted that while criminally idle, he was also intelligent…a bit of a fraud then, or what the French call a fumiste; but for all that, his behaviour did sometimes verge on the medically alarming.
On one occasion, for instance, he went for an eye test in the village, only to return to college without having taken it, before announcing that he’d forgotten why he’d gone into town in the first place. As for his hygiene, at one point it was so minimal that the bottoms of his feet were literally as black as soot, as if someone had painted them:
“Talk about ‘Paint it Black’, Cristiansen…”
“When did you last wash your feet?”
But he never stopped longing to be recognised as being good at something, even going so far at one point as to become a member the college boxing team. As such, he suffered punch-drunkenness at Eton at the hands - or rather fists - of an elegant young adonis with a classic Eton flop. He later commented on an especially cruel blow he'd inflicted on David with a certain degree of remorse…and how deceptively graceful he was, this flower of Eton...king of all public schools.
However, around ‘69, some time after having seen a TV programme about young revolutionaries who idolised Che Guevara, David became a Che acolyte himself, and one of the greatest accolades he ever received while at college came in consequence of a short story he wrote about a young man who becomes involved with Che in his revolutionary activities in South America.
And following on from his infatuation with Che, he came to fancy himself as a full-blown Communist, covering various items with the hammer and sickle, including at various times, a school notebook, and his own hand, which provoked an older, far larger boy into setting about him in a spirit of mock-outrage...but he'd fallen hard for the Hard Left and that was that.
In fact, his time at Welbourne coincided with the counterculture being at its point of maximum intensity, which is to say between the infamous year of rioting and street fighting of 1968, and that, four years later, when the sixties really and truly came to a final close and which was defined in Britain at least by the artifice and decadence of Glam Rock.
And one sweet afternoon, David found himself longing to join the Hippie throngs he saw flocking in all their ragged multicoloured glory to the Reading Rock Festival from the window of a college coach. For rebellion was everywhere in a desperately imperilled West, and several of David's circle dreamed of a world of Bohemian freedom lying only just beyond the confines of their college, while intensely close friendships were forged in secret wooded places where they were united by a love of Rock music and its icons with their defiantly androgynous clothes and floating, flouting hair.
Yet, by the early 2010s, David would insist if he possessed a single quality that might be termed noble, such as patience, or self-mastery or consideration of the needs of other people, then he owed this blessing to his education. Within this sphere, he’d place the four years he spent at Welbourne, whose authorities extended him a fair and decent report following his premature departure in the summer of 1972.
They also gave him a good send-off in the college magazine, mentioning his time in the Boxing and Swimming teams, and his tenure as 2cnd Drum in the college band. And so he’d bless his old friend and sparring partner, and wish her long life in her sylvan sanctuary deep in the Arcadian heart of the English countryside.

But some forty years theretofore, he moved back into his parents’ home in West Molesey, a small industrial