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

suburb close to the Surrey-London border where they’d relocated from Bedford Park at the start of the decade.
Their own street was quite gentrified, and their two closest neighbours, businessmen with roots in inner West London…Jack at number 12 being the son of a former boy soldier during the Great War; while Johnny at number 16 was the product of what he proudly called “abject poverty” in Shepherd’s Bush.
He was still a hippie at heart; and yet 1972 could be said to be the year in which the androgynous 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.
The golden age of the long-haired boot boy had lately come to pass, and every street seemed to David to be pregnant with menace in the Glam Rock nation he’d returned to, while so many of the songs were like football chants set to a stomping Glam Rock beat. It was as if the spirit of Weimar Berlin with its unholy mix of violence and decadence had been resurrected in stuffy old England.
Such a terrible time to be young; but for better or worse, it would be David’s era, and he’d come to love it, lap it up…
And a change came over him in the summer of ‘72, which may have been caused to some degree by the prevailing zeitgeist, but which can also be traced back to a single defining incident.
This took place in a bar in the little former fishing town of Santiago de la Ribera, close to the Mar Menor, a large coastal lake of warm saltwater off Murcia's Costa Calida in southeastern Spain, where he'd been vacationing with his family since about 1968.
It involved a young man he'd idolised for several years, and who incarnated a kind of old-school Iberian macho cool. He was quite fair of complexion, as opposed to swarthy, as might be expected, and stocky, with muscular arms. And if he'd worn a medallion and identity bracelet, he'd have been typical of his kind.
By that summer, he was sporting collar length hair, which was still quite rare among Spanish men, as well as large-collared shirts, which he elected not to tuck into his trousers. The style of these meant that his hair would occasionally get caught between neck and collar, which necessitated his flicking it out with a sweep of his hand, and coquettishly tossing his head. This he did one evening in full view of Castilla's clientele.
While these gestures seemed perfectly in keeping with his swaggering machismo in David’s besotted eyes, there was another of Castilla's patrons who was less impressed, and he duly muttered his misgivings. But rather than put David off, he came to covet the notoriety that had suddenly been afforded the young Spaniard.
Yet while this incident may have marked the beginning of the end of his identification with undiluted masculinity, his interest in the opposite sex was no less forceful than that of any other male in late adolescence. And if an attractive female happened to speak to him in a public place, he'd be in acute danger of falling in love on the spot. In fact, he didn’t even have to be spoken to:
It was on the ship Patricia while travelling back from vacationing in Spain late in the summer of ’72 that he fell in love by sight with a fellow passenger… a young Spanish girl he saw several times about the ship but was too frightened to approach. So he became obsessed by her, even to the point of roaming the streets of London for several days in succession in the vain hope of somehow bumping into her.
Two songs especially served as the soundtrack to this irrational spell of romantic insanity; and these were “Betcha by Golly Wow” by the Stylistics, and “Last Night I Didn't Get To Sleep At All” by the 5th Dimension. And like all the loves he’d ever lost, they’d remain with David for the rest of his inchoate life.
As would the vision of a seventeen year old, sauntering late one afternoon in the receding sun, his quest in tatters, yet, who is suddenly drawn to a girlish voice floating downwards from an apartment of a lofty dwelling in the heart of the ancient city of his birth, causing him to ponder, if only fleetingly…”could that be she?”

Chapter Two

Soon after returning from Spain in the summer of 1972, David Cristiansen was launched by his dad on an intensive programme of self-improvement.
Through home study and with the help of local private tutors, he set about making up for the fact that he'd left school at 16 with only two General Certificate of Education passes to his name, where a respectable amount would be no less than five.
He took Karate classes in Hammersmith, and among his fellow students were hard-looking young men – some of them flaunting classic ‘70s feather cuts - who may have been led to the dojo by the prevailing fashion for all things Eastern, such as the films of Bruce Lee, and the “Kung Fu” television series.
And while he enjoyed them for a time…in fact, far more than the swimming classes he attended weekly in Walton on Thames close by to his own little suburban village of West Molesey, they were destined to be short-lived.
This possibly due in part to his growing fascination with an androgynous way of life inspired by Glam Rock, which was yet quiescent in late 1972. While Classic Rock was still foremost in his affections if the earliest long players of his nascent record collection were anything to go by.
And he was successfully initiated into the basics of the Rock guitar solo by a shy and sweet-natured man of about 45 by the name of Gerry Firth, who gave lessons from a tiny little abode down an alley in the Walton. For it was there that he lived in apparent content with a much younger wife and golden-haired infant daughter.
While his profound love for the rebel music of Rock and Roll was wholly belied by an appearance which was almost militantly square, even by the standards of middle-aged men in those days. For he wore his salt and pepper hair in a severe short back and sides style, which he supplemented with shirt and tie and sleeveless sweater, and great baggy grey flannel trousers.
Was every inch the typical British seventies dad in other words; that is, on the surface of things, for the truth was infinitely different.
And on one memorable occasion, David tried to persuade him of the superior merit of Classical music on the basis that it’s “well-played”, which Gerry countered with:
“Well, isn’t Rock Music well played?”
David was baffled by his argument, because despite his own preference for Rock, he had no great belief in its artistic merits.
Another thing that bewildered him about Gerry Firth was his admiration for Marc Bolan of seminal Glam Rock band T. Rex, a man he’d always derided as much for his androgynous appearance as his simplistic three-chord Pop.
As to Glam, while it was a genre that veered wildly between Pop chart stompers by Bolan, and the more sophisticated decadence of major talents such as David Bowie and Todd Rundgren, it was yet to make any kind of impression on David. For he still favoured the hirsute macho men of the Heavy Rock movement.
“Don’t you find him effeminate?” David once asked him of Bolan, fully expecting Gerry to express due horror at the thought of Bolan’s startling choirboy looks, while continuing to enjoy his catchy tunes. But Gerry trumped him with an answer that caused his adolescent jaw to drop:
“Not as excitingly so as Mike Jagger!”
“Mick Jagger”, said David, correcting the older man as if in a trance.
“Mick Jagger”, Gerry conceded, still with the same stubborn fixed smile on his face.
By the following year, he’d become a massive Bolan fan himself. But at the time he was aghast at what he saw as the older man’s defence of what was still to him the indefensible.
Sadly, Bolan died in a car accident close to his home in Barnes, West London at just 29 years old. Yet, following his premature quietus, he underwent something a transformation both in terms of his persona and his music, both attaining classic status where they remain to this day.
For after all, he must have had something to have so delighted Gerry Firth…to the extent of making a sixteen year old look square for detesting everything he stood for. Quite a blow struck on behalf of the old hipster guard in the generation wars that were still being fought back then.
Late in the summer, David signed up for five years service with the Thames Division of the Royal Naval Reserve based on HMS Ministry on the Embankment near Temple station. And not long afterwards, it became clear to him that he was attracting some attention by virtue of his looks. But far from being offended by this development, he found it strangely flattering…as if a seed of vanity had been implanted within a boy who’d spent the last few years as a swaggering lout.
To a degree then, it was a case of an ugly duckling suddenly finding themselves to be a swan, and enjoying the resultant notoriety, such as that latterly conferred on the young Spaniard of the Bar Castilla.
Not that he’d ever been ugly…in fact, several of his mother’s female friends had already commented on his looks; but he’d never seen himself as any kind of Adonis. In fact, with his twitching head, greasy lank hair, bony round shoulders and splayfooted walk, he was more like the adolescent from Hell.
Having said that, though, he had nurtured a sentimental streak throughout his teens that placed him somewhat at odds with his peers.
It also made him susceptible to such notorious tear-jerkers as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s "South Pacific”, whose movie version, which he saw at the flicks with his mother at about 15 years old, had a life-changing effect on him.
And the same applies to John Schlesinger's stunning screen adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s "Far from the Madding Crowd", which may have initiated a lifelong love affair on his part with hopeless love and high romantic tragedy.
Yet, the softening process that took place in the closing months of 1972 was unprecedented in its sheer intensity, and can be at least partly attributed to the spirit of the times. For popular culture was changing, and hirsute Rock and Roll stars in scruffy denim flares were no longer the last word in cool. While the cinema was producing a new breed of film idol who was a far cry from the he-man of old.
It received a further boost when, towards the new year, he saw former Bubblegum band the Sweet on an afternoon Pop programme called "Lift off with Ayesha".
The Sweet had once incarnated all he detested about commercial chart Pop, yet, watching them prance around in high heels and make up, pouting and preening like a quartet of hysterical transvestites, he underwent what was little short of an epiphany.
Then, several months later, veteran hopeful Rock star David Bowie appeared on the chat show “Russell Harty Plus” with his eyebrows shaved and a glittering chandelier earring dangling from his left ear, and