Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

London was too dirty and overcrowded for the liking of Chrissie and Aece and they didn’t stop for long. The summer they spent in the caravan was to prove more idyllic.  
     
   Aece and Chrissie still kept up the contact with ‘the Garden’ and reality took a jolt one day when they went to visit Muz in Notting Hill; Don and Little Johnny were along for the ride. Little John, being a midget, was somewhat nonplussed when John Hurford, the artist, answered the door, for he too was a midget. And this was Gandalf's Garden - Hobbitses everywhere!

    Aece also organised a Gandalf’s Garden Benefit at the Civic Theatre where the Third Ear Band played to a fairly packed crowd. The civic nature of the venue struck the gathered throng as highly amusing and Gog set up a ‘Hit and Trip’ shop behind the counter of the cloakroom.

     The support band were a local outfit called ‘the Artist’ and, given their name, it was decided that Aece could team up with them to good effect. And so it was in a night-club in Colchester where, during the gig, Aece painted an American soldier on stage. At the climax of the act, Robin, the guitarist, swapped his guitar for an older one and the road manager Barry produced an axe as the two of them set about smashing the painting to pieces. Although these were the Anti-War years, Colchester is a Barracks town and the whole show broke out in uproar. The group figured they were lucky to get out alive! Robin didn’t have enough guitars to repeat the idea but a highly amusing night was had by all.

     Aece fared much better with murals. He designed a regular change of fashion paintings on windows in a chain of boutiques that Chrissie worked in, after the Wimpy interlude, and a flight of stairs into a subterranean record store that specialised in the new strands of psychedelic music. A carrier bag design went with the work for the record store and a poster went with the boutique work. With Dodger and Ingatestone Chris,  he worked on poster poems.

     All the local hippies came and stayed at the caravan and many country walks, under the influence of pot and acid, took on the dimensions of a ‘Lord of the Rings’ adventure. It was handy having a policeman as a father-in-law, as the local Drugs Squad tactfully phoned Chrissie’s father and told him that they thought that the couple were entertaining drug users and the Drugs Squad were going to visit the caravan. They never did. It was just to put the frighteners on. It worked to some extent, as it caused everyone to be more careful. Nevertheless, some friends were being pulled in by the Old Bill. It was not surprising when one, at least, showed that the mentally unstable should not seek escape through drugs when he imagined he was Jesus and could walk on water — only to drown during a second attempt, after his arrest involving the first.

     In London and Chelmsford, people were having to flee. A good friend in London managed a rock group as a front for moving cannabis and acid around in an empty speaker. You could go around to see him and find well-known movie actors there. When the drugs squad did descend, there was about 12lbs of cannabis, 100 tabs of acid and £5,000 in cash on the premises. ‘Es’ would never deal in hard drugs. It was a different ball game. He got bail anyway. The model, Chrissie Shrimpton, put up the bail. Within two weeks, Es had made enough to pay her off, buy forged passports for himself, wife and family and left for more exotic surroundings.

     A forged passport allowed Gog, from Chelmsford, to follow a similar course, after a minor, but second, bust. He did do dome ‘time’ eventually, when customs found some grass inside carpets he was taking across a country borderline. Mercifully, he was repatriated to serve three and a half years. He then became a non-user and perfectly straight businessman, but benefited by his international experience.

     All good things come to an end and the idyllic summer in the country was halted by the offer of work. Chrissie’s dad turned up at the caravan with news that one of Aece’s friends from college was setting up a business as a silk screen printer and had been looking for Aece to offer him a job, helping out. They packed their bags and left in the dads’ car that night.

Back in Colchester, Chrissie and Aece soon picked up the dangling ends of friendships they had made at the college and in the Newmarket Tavern. Chrissie soon found work in a boutique and, although Aece’s pay was not too brilliant and paid cash in hand, they quickly moved into a flat of their own, close to old friends like Chris from Ingatestone, who at the time was living with a Drama Student called Candy. The dramatists and artists rubbed up well against each other. A better flat  followed near Les and Jeff from Art School. Jeff started as a painter, swapped to textiles and applied to University in Leeds to do their textiles course, instead of going on to another Art School. Once in Leeds, he promptly changed to Comparative Religion and Sociology, only to wind up teaching English in a comprehensive school in Basildon. It’s nice to be versatile! Les and Jeff shared the same interests as Aece in mystical philosophy and they all devoured great tomes on Theosophy, Quabala, Witchcraft and Oriental Philosophies. Les and Jeff went on to join a coven, do nude modelling at the college and join the local naturist club. Dave, the Blues Guitarist and Spiritualist cum Macrobiotic Diet Freak cum Maharishi Meditator cum Acupuncturist and his wife Margaret often made up a hexagonal mystical group.

     Yet another move took Chrissie and Aece down to  Wivenhoe where all the University of Essex crowd, past and present, hung out with the rest of the drop-out crew. Several celebrities favoured the riverside port cum village, too. A group of Aece’s friends were quite amused to be smoking a very large joint on the quay right beside the actor who played Sergeant Lynch in ‘Z Cars’. After visiting his mother, Aece boarded a train in Chelmsford that had come from Liverpool Street, en route to Wivenhoe, and come face to face with the unmistakeable face of the painter, Francis Bacon. Frannie had a couple of boyfriends living in Wivenhoe and with one of these and Isabel Rawsthorne, whose tall stature and wrinkled skin had made her the subject of paintings by Frannie and Picasso, as well as a sculpture by Giacometti, Frannie set about a drinking binge in one of the local pubs. This was conducted, John Wayne fashion, with a bottle or two or three of spirits and three glasses. At closing time, the three of them staggered back, arm in arm, to Frannie’s boyfriend’s cottage. Aece thought to himself, “If that’s what it takes to be England’s foremost artist, I could manage that!”

     Greg and Leroy were two other interesting characters around Wivenhoe. Leroy was convinced that there was a coven of Black Magicians in the village, when Dennis Wheatley still fuelled people with paranoia. Greg took a temporary job in a vegetable canning factory, and had to pick out rotten peas on a conveyor belt. No one was watching, so he thought “I don't need to do anything”. But when he got bored and was searching for something to do, he decided that picking out mouldy peas was the answer. A true Zen realisation!

     At the silk screen studio, things were not taking off as planned. Aece had managed to transform a couple of his ink drawings into multi-coloured prints and annoy the head of Co-op advertising with a really lousy drawing of a Christmas turkey. When John, the boss of the studio (and the Kinks ex-Road Manager), pointed out that Aece was a vegetarian, the Co-op man was not amused. John’s partner was an ex-Anglia T.V. Newsreader and they went out for a Christmas drink together leaving Aece to print the January Sales banners, some six feet long, on an enormous screen. This required a great deal of cleaning with the lethal Screen Wash which, in pre-solvent abuse days, was set to have your head reeling at the best of times, even with an extractor fan on. That day, the studio was like a London smog when John returned, half cut, from the pub and it took him about two minutes to be overcome by the fumes and retreat to the toilet to get on the great white telephone to God. There he stayed all afternoon. Aece took this as a sign to take the afternoon off, meet Chrissie from work, and for them to have their own Christmas Eve celebration. After a bottle of wine in the park, they returned to the studio to find John still slumped in the loo. They managed to revive him sufficiently to get home.

     The local rival studio, who only did Design and not printing, realised that they were losing trade to John’s ‘Mirage Design’ so they set about a good demonstration of Free Market Economy ethics and put a lot of work his way for printing. They failed, however, to pay their bills, knowing full well that John needed the money for more materials. He worked all God’s hours but ultimately had to close down. Some time before this, Aece had been laid off but John’s partner, Pat, also worked in car sales and got Aece a job valeting cars at the garage he worked for. This paid the bills but there was a bit of a problem as Chrissie was pregnant and, although this was pretty well planned for, working now  as a car cleaner seemed not to be a good way to enter parenthood. So Aece set about applying to go back to college.

     He had missed the boat for admissions to Art Schools of any stature for that year, so applied for convenience to the nearest Teacher Training Colleges in Brentwood and Clacton. He got an interview at Brentwood and was accepted even though the interview panel thought him a little strange, like most artists. They asked him what papers he read and when he said “None, because you can pick up enough news off T.V. and radio” they were somewhat non-plussed.

“You do read though, don’t you?’

“Oh yes, I’m a voracious reader.”

“What periodicals do you read?”

“International Times, Oz, Gandalf’s Garden.”

     They obviously hadn't heard of any of these but International Times must have sounded impressive. If only they had known what the true content was!

     The Housing Officer at the college found a nice bungalow for the couple to share with another couple, in a village called Doddinghurst, and Aece moved in at the beginning of term, but Chrissie stayed at her parent’s place until the end of her pregnancy. Aece was busy having to hitch hike from Brentwood to Chelmsford to see his mother and then to Colchester and back again. One time, he had a group of other students back from college to the bungalow and all had gone but one, a girl called Sue, when Chrissie and her parents arrived for a surprise visit. Things did not appear the way they were!

     Neya was the name they decided to call the baby girl that appeared at sunrise, while the moon was still in the sky, at Colchester Maternity Hospital that January, amidst much huffing and puffing and gas and air. Sun and Moon were both rising in Aquarius that morning; quite a combination, quite a morning. Neya had been conceived at the foot of Glastonbury Tor.

     Soon Chrissie and Neya joined Aece in the bungalow but things did not work out too well in the country, for Neya became covered in eczema. Had they but known it, she was allergic to  most animals, trees, grass and shrubs at that age. This meant mittened pyjamas at night, lots of creams by day, and alternate nights sleep for the parents. This did little to cement their marriage.