The Genesis of a Gentleman

The following is an account concocted as accurately as possible, given that I was looking back at some three and a half decades ago, of how I came to be conditioned by my environment in the early 1970s, following my departure from Pangbourne College where I'd been a boarder between the 9th of September 1968 or thereabouts and the end of the summer term of 1972. It was a time of constant, frenetic social and cultural change in Britain, which couldn't help but exert an immensely powerful influence on an impressionable adolescent of 16 or 17, such as I was.

In the summer of 1972, it was mutually decided between my longsuffering father and the authorities of Pangbourne, a nautical college close by to the Thames village of Pangbourne in Berkshire that it was best I leave after a year in the fifth form and four years in the college itself.
1972 could be said to be the year in which the infamously anticlimactic 1970s began in earnest following the sixties twilight, and I was a little like a fish out water in that year's final few months, being no longer either in Chiswick where I grew up, nor at the boarding school that had been my whole world for four long years and where I'd formed so many intensely close friendships. My parents, brother and I had moved to a little village suburb some dozen miles from the centre of London at the turn of the decade.
The sixties were finally good and over and as absurd as it might seem today, for many the early seventies were like the hangover following a long wild party. Long hair was now omnipresent, and being sported by innumerous jack the lads across the land including one-time skinheads. Many of the popular songs of the era reflected this trend, being like football chants set to a stomping Glam Rock beat. I had long looked askance at commercial chart Pop, being a typical product of a boarding school background and thence a lover of Rock, and especially Progressive Rock; but little by little I was warming to the brash new epoch. I saw a former Bubblegum outfit I'd once scorned on a long-forgotten teenage programme in late '72 called "Lift off with Ayesha" and was fascinated by their prancing antics. And some time after watching a certain nascent Glam luminary on the chat show Russell Harty Plus in January 1973, I wholeheatedly entered into the spirit of this strange culture.

I'd been a would-be lad at Pangbourne, but were I to have attempted to play the clever boy in the London of '72-'73, I'd have run the risk of being soundly thrashed. The spectre of impending menace was omnipresent or so it seemed to me, fresh from a boarding school cocoon, this being the age par excellence of the newly hirsute soccer firebrand. I had to learn to know my place. At the behest of my dad I embarked upon a programme of self-improvement. For some months on a weekly basis from '72 onwards as I recall I studied various forms of self-defence in Hammersmith, west London in the company of, among others, tough-looking lads with distinctively styled tresses of hair...went to swimming classes at the Walton-on-Thames swimming pool...and picked up some guitar tips, also in Walton, from a soft-spoken man called Gary who still teaches there today. Furthermore, I set about atoning for the fact that I'd left Pangbourne prematurely with only two "O" levels to my name through intensive home study, with the help of local tutors. And in late '72 I joined the London Division of the Royal Naval Reserve as an Ordinary Seaman, attending classes once a week on HMS President on the Embankment. At some point soon thereafter, some of the older salts, Able Seamen perhaps, or Killicks, pointed the fact out to me that compared to them, I was distinctly cherubic of feature, like some kind of latter-day Billy Budd. This came as a shock as I'd always been seen as every inch the boy's boy, who poured scorn on softness of any kind. And yet when I surveyed my face in the mirror back home, I saw that the tars had a point. I was surprised, and not a little intrigued by the metamorphosis that had seemingly overnight transformed me from scrawny scruffy urchin into elegant ephebe. Not that that was actually the case: the change had of course been gradual, and there had always been a sensitive and refined aspect to my character.

The introspective tendencies that had probably been growing since the dawn of my adolescence became increasingly marked in 1972--73, and I dreamed of fame and glory as actor or Rock star more than ever before. Throughout '73, I constructed a foppish Glam persona, spiking my hair, and even at some point peroxiding it. I had also taken to daubing concealer on my face, which was troubled by acne blemishes.
My closest local friend was Cary, who lived pretty well opposite me. The son of a renowned cinematographer, he later went on to have a succesful career as a cameraman himself, marrying and raising a family in the U.S. I looked up to him because he was such a typical cool seventies suburban kid with his cheeky baby face, semi-cockney accent and long, feathery blond hair. We were pretty well inseparable for a time. Dane being a long-time football aficionado took to the area with far greater facility than I, and was part of a local youth scene until about the middle of the decade.
And then there was Spain, or rather Santiago de la Ribera on the Mar Menor near Murcia, where I'd been holidaying with my parents and Dane since about 1968. Towards the end of my summer '73 holiday, I had finally begun if I remember rightly to be noticed by the local young people, and la Ribera became vital to me in terms of my becoming a social being among members of both sexes. I fell in with a group of kids, mostly from Murcia or Madrid, who loved to hear me sing the Pop songs of the day, Gilbert O'Sullivan being a special favourite. Spain was such a sweet and friendly nation back then in the relatively innocent early seventies, and the youth of La Ribera as happy and carefree as I imagine southern Californians would have been in the pre-Beatles sixties. What a time it was. A gentleman had been born, who was charming, courteous and refined, although of course I had been capable of courtly behaviour before, but the terror in me had been somewhat sidelined, exiled, consigned to the wilderness for a while.