Chapter 9 Life with Kevin.
It’s not easy to hitch-hike as a couple with a dog so it took us some
time to get up to Nottingham. On the way we got over a fence and had a
swim in someone’s pool, Kevin’s idea of course.
On arrival in Nottingham Kevin had the daunting experience of
immediately meeting George, my ex, who’d moved in next door. The
next day he encountered two other men who seemed on very good
terms with me. I wouldn’t have liked it in reverse.
The Goose fair was just setting up down the road and Kevin went off
and secured a job there working on the roundabout the one with the
bright shiny horses with real horse hair tails and big cockerels, with
music from an organ where the tunes were on big cards with holes in
and it seemed almost always to be playing ‘On Mother Kelly’s doorstep’.
I had never been on one of these roundabouts before but now I got
unlimited free rides. Kevin was such a good worker that the family that
ran the roundabout asked him to come with them as a permanent fairground worker, and I would be welcome also.
It was a wild idea, but I didn’t really consider it, I wanted to complete my
degree. Kevin was happy enough not to go, he found work here and
there. He changed tyres on tractors and came home on his motorcycle
with a rabbit for dinner stuffed into his overalls and then he tried to stuff
its head but it got magotty and had to be discarded.
Kevin got used to coming into the art college, met all the students and
helped me with the sculpture I was making of ‘urban grass’ which was
made of long thin sections of ply wood attached to bricks. He pointed
out helpfully that the reason I could not saw the plywood effectively was
not as I assumed because I was useless at woodwork but because the
saw was blunt and the woodwork assistant was too lazy to help. He got
a wonderful wild-looking sheepskin coat, grew his hair a bit longer, went
to french films and Warhol’s ‘Chelsea Girls’ and ate frquently at the
University.
One day we were going to make love with me dressed in very liitle but
a feather boa when Kevin remembered he had to collect a motorcycle
part from a nearby garage and it would be shut soon, so he said to wait
there on the sofa and he’d be back in a jiffy. While he was out he forgot
all about me waiting and ran into an unpleasant liitle bloke who also had worked on the fair and asked him back for tea.I heard him coming in
talking and flew across the room to stop them coming in.
Occasionally I went over to see my parents, without Kevin. Our
relationship was a secret, which Kevin wasn’t happy about.
I was in the kitchen chatting to my Mother when the doorbell went and
Kevin staggered in, drunk as a skunk. He confronted my surprised Dad
and slurred out that he was living with me, he loved me and he wanted
them to know. My Father went silent and sank into his chair as if he’d
been hit. It seemed he could not speak. My Mother said she’d known
there was something going on in Brighton. As it happened I’d been
telling her about a friend who was living with her boyfriend, seeing how
she took it, which was quite calmly, she was aware that times had
changed.
However, Dad didn’t seem to be aware of this. Eventually he said, ‘In
my day some people did things like that but we simply didn’t speak to
them”
I was happy, proud of Kevin in a way, even if he was pissed as a newt. It
was sweet the way he said he loved me. He’d already asked me to
marry him, even more since we’d been to Dick and Helen’s wedding,
friends from across the road. They got married in the register office in
Shakespeare Street near the art college. They were outside chatting to
us waiting for their turn and missed it and had to be hurriedly fitted in
later. In the confusion, I got into the room and Kevin was left outside. I
witnessed Helen start crying when she came to her bit to speak,
remembering what a mistake it had been the first time.
The entrance where Kevin was waiting was all covered in highly
coloured faience art nouveau glazed tiles. Helen and Dick were planning
to go to South Afica with her daughter, which upset me a lot. How could
they go and live in a country like that with apartheid? Here their little
girl’s best friend was a nice black boy called Barrington. How were they
going to explain the awful difference in South Africa? Kevin had been
brought up in Rhodesia with black servants and he’d never thought
about all this but now he began to. I photographed him in the city
posing near all my favourite Victorian buidings and next to my finished
urban grass exhibit in coleege and next to a graffitied wall that said ‘War
is not healthy for children and all living things’
Generally we had a lovely time. We left my parents to their aghast old
fashioned attitudes, well Dad anyway, and went back to Nottingham
hand in hand.
It suited me to be settled and I was able to work. Kevin took an
interest in my art and in art in general and in music and in being part of
the scene. He got work as a taxi driver. One night he told me he took a
customer round to a brothel and the young woman called out that she’d
take the driver for free. Kevin was cheerful, brown, lively and got on well
with everyone.
That summer we’d bought a van to go to the Isle of Wight pop festival
again and then on to Cornwall. My father was now tolerating the
regrettable situation, which in his eyes was even worse as Kevin wasn’t
even studying at the University but was just a working man like himself.
Dad thought Kevin wasn’t too bad one day, he told me much later, when
he helped Dad move a couple of rhododendron bushes in the garden.
Dad could see Kevin was devoted to me, but he was disappointed and
he was now again aghast that we were taking off tfor the summer, Kevin
outrageously giving up work for the entire summer.
Just before we went off in the A55, I found I’d won a prize. As we
hadn’t enough money I’d taken to doing competitions. One was called
‘A New Start In Life’, you could win £1000, then a year’s wages. I
answered the questions candidly and wrote a slogan about needing to
be brave to have a successful relationship.
A man came round to interview me, I was short listed. Unfortunately,
having entered at least two dozen competitions, I couldn’t remember
what I’d written. I tried to see what he had on his clipboard but he
wouldn’t let me see. My replies therefore were not very satisfactory and
I didn’t win first prize. Instead I was informed I would get a colour
television set. In the rules it said we couldn’t have the money instead but
I wrote off and said we didn’t even have a black and white set, we were
poor students and could we have the cash? They relented and were to
send a cheque for £350, but we had to set off without it or we’d miss the
festival.
Police frequently stopped us in our van, two hippies with a dog. It was
a time of lots of police stop and searches. Once at a party twentyfive
police arrived, tipped off to look for hard drugs. The guests were all lined
up to be searched, men in one room, women in another. Even the ashes
were taken from the hearth and the host had to go to ask for the dustpan
back the next day.at the police station. The police dog ran around with
someone’s underwear in its mouth. There were no hard drugs there and
a couple of people who had a small quantity of dope were able to thow it
out of the toilet window so no one was even prosecuted.. One guest had
known to demand a search warrant which held the police up for a few
moments at the start.
Anyway we set off and caught the ferry over from Portsmouth. As we
had a van we gave other people lifts.
A whole boat load of police went over to keep things in order and waved
cheerily to us all. At night the people who hadn’t paid to go in were all on
the hill opposoiite so they could see as well as hear everything and they
lit matches so thousands of tiny flames were appearing and
disappearing in the dark.
Bercause of inhaling something I fell asleep and woke up to find
everyone roaring approval and Bob Dylan just giving his last song, “Lay
Lady Lay’ I’d missed it all and he was off, circling in a helicopter.
The dog went a bit funny at one point, shivery and strange as if he’d
been affected by some narcotic. But he was o.k. after a while. The
competition cheque could not be picked up without returning to
Nottingham but we decided to carry on to Cornwall, live in the van and
seek work.
Back in Portsmouth Kevin disppeared round a corner and came back
with my name tattoed on his arm. What a mad thing to do and it hurt,
what a sign of committment. Once later after a row he tried to cut it off
but it survived intact. MARY.
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