The Sweetness of Wrens

A Surrey Idyll

1975 was the year I went back to school, or rather, Brooklands, a technical college secreted within the semi-rural beauty of Weybridge in the furthermost reaches of suburban south west London. There I enjoyed a very full and idyllically pleasant social life for nearly two years. My self-defence, guitar and swimming classes had long dried up, but I persisted with the private tuition, notably in Richmond, Surrey, with a charismatic Welsh Londoner, Michael G. who was a succesful musician as well as a teacher, and still is. He exerted a strong influence on me in terms of my already passionate interest in European, and specifically Spanish, literature. Michael was also complimentary about my writing style, encouraging me in a passion that was ultimately to career out of control so that I was unable to finish project after project due to my feverish cacoethes scribendi.

From Edinburgh to Amsterdam

1975 was also a distinctly maritime year for me, and no sooner had one sea voyage finished than it seemed that I was setting sail again. The first of the lengthy series of sea trips that punctuated the year was destination Amsterdam via Edinburgh and northern France on the square rigger TS Churchill of the Sail Training Association. Among my shipmates were, apart from my 17 year old brother, several young men from Scotland and the north of England, a couple of youthful naval ratings, perhaps more, a handful of "mates" who'd been given authority over the rank and file of deck hands, and the handsome, elegant captain, who also happened to be an alumnus of Pangbourne College. It was an all-male crew, and I was initially quite well-liked, but I struggled to maintain my popularity. However, a southern lad with dark shoulder length hair a little like the young Jack Wild remained quite loyal to me after we'd bonded over an attempt at romancing two girls during a brief stay in France. It was a tough experience...what with the storms, which saw young men sprawled all over the deck being violently ill attached to the ship only by safety belts, and which resulted in us being roused out of our hammocks in the middle of the night on more than one occasion to help trim the sails or something similar, but it should have been character-shaping, and probably was. However, I only climbed the rigging on a single occasion, and that was just before we entered the port of Amsterdam...which was marked by the kind of overt fleshliness I'd witnessed the year before in Hamburg. As for Edinburgh, I remember being warned not to sashay about in a striped college-style blazer with jeans tucked into long white socks, this either in our first or second stay in the city. Wise words of warning, because while Edinburgh may be one of the most beautiful and cultured cities in Europe, considerable poverty exists on the city's peripheries. However, I refused to heed them, and some time after having entered a pub, possibly of the less salubrious sort, I was greeted by a question on the part of a rough looking young man wearing what I remember to have been a truly menacing smile along the lines of: "Y'all right, shun, are you frae Oxford then?". Somehow I am not certain quite how, I succeeded in talking my way out of trouble.

In the Waters of the Kiel Canal

Within a few short weeks of our returning to London by train from Edinburgh, my brother and I were onboard ship again, this time a yacht taking us to the Baltic coast of Denmark via Germany's famous Kiel Canal as part of the Ocean Youth Club, and once more we were supervised by "mates", or the equivalent. We wasted little time in recruiting a kindly young man by the name of Simon from Wotton-under-the Edge in the county of Gloucerstershire as our closest friend, and soon after setting foot on Danish soil all three of us sought out the company of two classically Scandinavian blondes. This caused the Captain, who was a true character, warm, eccentric and funny, to remonstrate with us in a tongue in cheek manner about selfishly keeping our dates to ourselves. Little could he have known how innocent our efforts at romance had in fact been.
A somewhat less than sweet and innocent incident occurred towards the end of the trip, which saw me in pursuit of a pretty German girl, Bettiner. I liked her so much, and she clearly liked me, and yet I'd senselessly abandoned her for the sake of a night's drunken tomfoolery with my brother and Simon. Suddenly overtaken by desperate remorse, I set out to search for her, and at some point during my travels, while walking along some kind of wooden pontoon I lost my footing and fell fully clothed into the waters of what must have been Kiel Canal. I wrote to Bettiner, but she never wrote back, and I can't say I blame her.

The Sweetness of Wrens

It was later in the year I think that I took my friend Brenda, one of the London Division Wrens, the word Wren being derived from WRNS, or Women's Royal Naval Service, to a dinner dance at London's Walford Hilton Hotel.
She became incensed when a group of older seamen started teasing me from their table, but it didn't bother me that much, as I didn't see it as malicious or threatening because I was used to it, and it was all a big joke to me. However, she insisted that they were only doing it because I was "better than what they are", as she humourously put it possibly in imitation of their own broad London accents, her own being refined north country. At our table were two of Brenda's close friends, a fair, bearded man in a suit, and his dark, extrovert wife. The husband was one of those deeply gentle men I came across from time to time in the 1970s. They weren't all bearded, but I can think of two who were. Sensing my vulnerability, they behaved with special protectiveness towards me, and I can recall this particular man telling me that all my purported tormentors had to sling their arms around that evening were their respective pints of beer. The salts who taunted me that night did so in a pretty good-natured spirit, but that does not take away from the kindness demonstrated towards me by Brenda and her two friends. I wonder where they all are today. Wherever they may be...I wish them well.