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

through to his bones, he hit the dance floor possibly with a cigarette smouldering elegantly in his hand, and he was in his element. But within a short time of his having done so, the up tempo songs gave way to a long series of slow tunes, and he began to scan the departing dancers for a partner.
Soon his unfeasibly long-lashed blue eyes fell upon a slim girl with a head of bobbed curls of a striking yellowy blonde, who was frantically shooing her friend away in order to make room for David; and he walked up to her and asked her to dance. She agreed, and they danced, wordlessly, for what must have been a full half hour, until, exhausted, David’s new found companion informed him she had to rejoin her friend, which she did, leaving David at a loss as to what to do next.
The bond had been broken. But then, as they’d not exchanged a word despite having been intimately locked together for aeons, there’d barely been one to begin with. And then he spied her at the bar, conversing with her friend, and he acted cool towards her, as she did him, and they made no effort to approach each other, and the moment was gone for good.
Perhaps David then returned to the floor to dance alone as he’d done earlier, like some kind of Mod, lost in a narcissistic reverie.
But David was no refugee from an age when peacock males were supposed to have been more interested in their beautiful images than any romantic experience with a woman. For later that night, while a power boat was ferrying him out to his ship in the glittering Pool of London, he announced to one of the officers onboard:
“I’m in love!”
At which point the officer, a tall languorously elegant man with a charming, approachable manner, graciously replied:
“That’s good news.”
But if he’d divined the condition of the handsome sailor’s soul, he’d have spoken differently. Yes, David was in love, but his love was nowhere to be seen, and he’d returned from his night of dancing desperate to be reunited with the slim blonde angel he’d held so close for a blissfully brief thirty minutes or so, only to lose her forever.
But that was David, and he’d be back on that disco floor again before too long, risking his heart again before too long, dying a little of his solitude again…before too long. And oh how he loved to dance.

Since 1974, David had worshipped at the altar of those artists who had either immediately predated the age of Modernism or been part of its Banquet Years, and beyond into the Golden Twenties and so on.
However, in 1976, a gaudy new era started to influence the way he dressed and acted, and for much of that year, he dressed down in a workmanlike uniform of red windcheater, white tee-shirt and cuffed jeans as worn by ‘50s icon James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause”.
Dean had died a week to the day before David was born in late 1955, and the 20th anniversary of his death appeared to exert a strong influence on rising Pop stars such as John Miles and Slik's Midge Ure.
Slik were one of the biggest bands in Britain in 1976 with an image straight out of “Rebel” or a dozen lesser fifties delinquent movies. Sadly for them, though, and for many other bands who'd surfed the Glam Rock wave or emerged in its wake, they would be unjustly ousted by the Punk uprising.
As entranced as David was by the fifties, there were still times when he reverted to the old escapist dandy image he'd adopted in defiance of what he saw as the leaden drabness of post-Hippie Britain, while discovering Modernist giants such as Baudelaire, Wilde, Gide, and Cocteau for the first time.
One of these occasions came during the dying days of a famous long hot summer, when he wore top hat and tails and his fingernails painted bright red like some kind of hellish vision from Weimar Berlin to a party hosted by a friend from Prestlands.
It was mid-September, and David would have been at sea at the time, serving as Able Seaman David Cristiansen on the minesweeper HMS Kettleton.
A day or so afterwards, there was an accident involving Kettleton and a far larger ship, which resulted in the loss of twelve men, most of whom he knew personally. Of the twelve who didn't survive, David knew three quite well, and they were all men of remarkable generosity of spirit and sweetness of disposition, and it broke his heart to think of what happened to them.
He so wanted to comfort his shipmates for their loss, to bond with them and be part of what they were going through. He wanted to have survived like them, and went over it all again and again in his mind, until he was driven almost insane with regret and grief. But he'd taken the easy way out, and this time it wouldn't be so easy for him to forget or explain away.
And the world took a darker turn for David Cristiansen…as the following year was marked by the irruption into the British cultural mainstream of Punk.
From its London axis, it spread like a raging plague…even infecting the most genteel suburbs with an extreme and often horrifying sartorial eccentricity, which, fused with a defiant DIY ethic and a brutal back-to-basics brand of hard-driving Rock produced something utterly unique even by the standards of the time.
David was assaulted for the first time by the monstrous varieties of dress adopted by the early Punks while strolling along the Kings Road the morning after a party in January 1977, and it would only be a matter of time before he too hoped to astound others the way they'd done him.
However, for most of ’77, he dressed in a muted form which first took shape as a pair of cream brogue winkle pickers. And which he went on to supplement with black slip-ons with gold side buckles, mock- crocodile skin shoes with squared off toes, and a pair of black Chelsea boots. All perilously pointed; in fact so much so that within a year or so, they’d finish up being jettisoned into the murky black waters of the Thames.
His new look evolved by degrees at the endless series of parties he attended as one after the other of his old Welbourne pals celebrated their 21st in houses and apartments in various corners of trendy West and Central London.
Of all of these, he was perhaps closest with future oil magnate Chris, who was still finding his feet in London’s most exalted social circles. These included Adrian Proust, a friend of Chris’ from the north of England who forged cutting edge images for some of the most powerful trendsetters in Rock music.
David joined them a couple of times at Maunkberrys in Jermyn Street; and apart from the Sombrero in High Street Ken, it was the classiest club his suburban eyes had ever seen.
Being the rube he was, he thought the style that dominated London's club land was somehow Punk-related, but he was way off the mark. While it was the antithesis of the hippie look that was still widespread throughout the UK, it was deployed not as a gesture of violent social dissent, but for posing and dancing to the sweetest Soul music.
It was partly the realm of the Soul Boys, whose love of Black Dance music was a legacy of the Mods and Skins that preceded them.
Yet while the Soul Boys were largely working class hard nuts from various dismal London suburbs, some Soul lovers were in fact not Soul Boys at all, so much as elegant trendies. But with a penchant for floppy college boy fringes, plaid shirts worn over plain white tee-shirts, straight leg jeans, and the by now obligatory winkle pickers. And these were the kind to be found at such sumptuous places as the Sombrero.
The Soul Boys also favoured the wedge haircut…which could be worn with streaks of blond or red or even green, brightly-coloured peg-top trousers and winkle pickers or plastic beach sandals.
Speaking of the wedge, it was taken up at some point in the late 1970s by a faction of Liverpool football fans who'd developed a taste for European designer sportswear while travelling on the continent for away matches. Thence, the Casual subculture was spawned.
And its passion for designer labels persisted well into the 2010s, being manifest in every small town and shopping mall throughout the land.
By the summer, David was working as a sailing instructor in Palamos on Spain's Costa Brava, although he lost his job after only a few months. But instead of heading straight back to London, he chose to stay on in Palamos, parading around town by day, while spending most of his evenings at the Disco dancing to Donna Summer’s “Love Trilogy”.
As much as he loved the party life, what he wanted most of all was to enjoy it as a successful working actor like golden boys Peter Firth and Gerry Sundquist, both of whom found fame on the stage before branching out into movies and TV, although Firth had began his acting life as a child star.
The problem was, he wasn’t really cut out for the task. Granted, he had the pretty boy looks, but very few actors, or even musicians, become truly successful on the strength of looks alone, and this was especially true of the seventies, an age without MP3s or My Space or endless TV talent showcases.
He'd had no acting experience to speak of, except a handful of roles at Welbourne, all but one of which involved him wearing women’s clothing.
The first was in Max Frisch’s “The Fire Raisers”, which saw him standing stock still as an old woman for a few brief minutes without uttering a single word.
The second, in a short play by George Bernard Shaw called "Passion, Poison and Petrifaction", saw him clomping around as a household maid in dress and studded military boots, and each time he spoke in the falsetto he’d selected for the part, the house erupted.
A third garnered some praise from one of the cadets for a convincing performance as a Holly Golightly style socialite; while his only male role was as psychopath Alec in a little known Agatha Christie one-acter called “The Rats”, one of whose key lines was:
“Darlings, how devastating!”
And if the praise of the college nurse was anything to go by, it showed real promise:
“What are you going to do with your life, Carl? You’re a good actor…”
But when all’s said and done, he was hardly a National Youth Theatre wunderkind. And in terms of his other "talents", he'd written a few simple songs on the guitar, but he still couldn’t play bar chords. Although he managed a passable take-off of Sinatra.
While as a would-be writer, he'd filled countless pages with endlessly corrected notes, but there was nothing tangible to show for it all. It could hardly be said then that his future positively glittered before him.

Chapter Four

David Cristiansen’s final trip with the Thames Division of the Royal Naval Reserve came towards the end of the summer of 1977.
And while his best oppo Lofty O’Shea wasn’t onboard, he had other mates to raise Cain with, such as Damon Cates,