Sticky Fingers, Pt 6. On The Road.

Right. Five chapters in and what have we got? Waffle that's what. Time to get serious. I'll try to stay out of it.

Imagine you're a young backpacker. It’s your gap year and this is your first time in Bangkok. Oriental city. You’re keen to see the sights. But you’re adventurous. Not for you the usual tourist traps. You want to see something a bit different.

So one day you bravely leave the familiar comfort of your guesthouse on Khao Sarn Road and work your way across the city to Sukhumvit. You aren't sure why. A girl in the guesthouse advised against going there. It's a very bad area she said. So off you go.

You negotiate the Skytrain OK, get off at Nana, surrender your plastic ticket at the exit and walk down the steps to the street. The first thing you notice is the vendors everywhere, blocking the pavement, selling the same stuff you saw on Khao Sarn Road. T-shirts, CDs, sunglasses, knives. Touristy crap. Who buys all this stuff you wonder.

Now you're walking past a sort of bar with loud music. You notice the bar is full of Thai girls and middle-aged foreign men with big bellies. What’s going on here? Suddenly it dawns on you! Sex tourists!

They're everywhere! Paunchy men with girls walking hand in hand. Negotiating on street corners. Getting in and out of taxis. It's disgusting. Look at that skinny old geyser over there waiting to cross the road, scruffy suit, white hair, stooped shoulders, little Thai girl on his arm. No way is she his daughter. He must be one of those old perverts you've heard so much about. Where’s he off to then? Where does he come from? Who is he? What’s going on in his head? Is he thinking about his next meaningless, ephemeral sexual encounter or is there more to this old fart than meets the eye?

Well it so happens the old fart's name is Arthur. He's English, 65 years old, and his mind is a seething mass of great ideas and unrealized dreams. Hard to believe looking at him but Arthur had been young once too. In fact when Arthur was in his last year of Grammar school he'd played washboard in a skiffle group! That's probably why he didn't do well in his A levels.

The Thai girl’s name is Nok. It means bird. She’s a student at Chulalongkorn University. Studying computer science. There’s a handbag at the Emporium she likes the look of but she needs another couple of thousand baht so she was hanging round by a bus stop waiting for someone like Arthur to wander along. She gave him her best smile and his heart melted yet again. Not that he’s much interested in sex these days. And not because he doesn’t want to be unfaithful to Duan. It’s more because the mechanics of it seem increasingly ridiculous, the grunting and groaning and gasping. He does keep some Viagra handy for such occasions but basically he just wants to gaze at her naked body. Why? Hormones.

What was a skiffle group you ask? It was a primitive sort of folk music group you could say. Popular in England in the late 50's among a few early musical pioneers. Arthur's friend Simon started a skiffle group at the Grammar school they both attended. Simon knew 3 or 4 guitar chords, Arthur couldn’t get the hang of tuning a banjo so he played washboard and a fellow called Dave who wore white socks played tea-chest bass until he got dragged off to do his National Service after which a bloke called Pete with a serious case of acne took over but he got nicked for car theft and the skiffle group broke up. We will be taking a closer look at embryonic musical trends somewhere down the road. And we won’t be needing the imaginary young backpacker anymore thanks. I think I’ll send him off to the Full Moon Party on Koh Phangan. He’ll like that.

Simon used to write things in notebooks. Even in those days. What kind of things? Nobody was sure. Poems perhaps. He didn't show them to anyone. Not even Arthur.

One day Arthur met a girl on a train from Victoria. Not totally by accident. Her name was Alice and she lived on a council estate. She changed her hairstyle almost every day. Sometimes she was a Bo (Bohemian) with a fringe and a Brigitte Bardot ponytail. Then she'd cut it short in a sort of pixie look. Then she'd let it grow again. She even tried different colours, pink, orange, blue. Alice was what you might call a proto-punk. She was ahead of her time. Her father, Ernie, had fought for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Got a bullet in the leg at the Battle of Jarama. Alice worked for The Daily Worker. There was nothing bourgeois about Alice.

Arthur and Alice used to go to the pictures and snog. One time, when they were watching James Dean in 'Rebel Without A Cause', Alice let Arthur play with her tits. And that was just the beginning. She came round to his house the next Sunday afternoon, when his parents were out, and let him have a look at them. She even slipped her knickers off, but not all the way. Arthur got his cock out and they were, as the News of the World liked to say, intimate, on the living-room sofa. Something happened, something moist. Arthur wasn’t sure if it had been the real thing or not.

Simon lent Arthur a book called 'On The Road' by somebody called Jack Kerouac.
"See what you think," said Simon, "it's definitely an improvement on his first effort."
"What first effort?" asked Arthur.
"It was called 'The Town and the City'," said Simon, "about two brothers. Good to see he got away from that Thomas Wolfe style."
Arthur wasn't sure what to make of it. It seemed so American. When he finished it he lent it to Alice who said, "Nothing bourgeois about that."

TV was in its early black and white days. Most people got their information from the radio or newspapers. The headlines blared things like 'ALLIED TROOPS TAKE SUEZ!! PROFUMO ADMITS GUILT!! KRAY TWINS JAILED!!!' Nuclear testing was hardly ever mentioned. World leaders in their wisdom had decided atom bombs were vital for the security of the world. Who was Arthur to argue? None of it seemed very important to him. He preferred the Goon Show and wanking. He didn’t see Alice for a few weeks. He wondered if she was pregnant.

So how did he hear about Aldermaston? From Alice of course. She told him about some kind of peace march. Britain had just carried out its first H-bomb test at Christmas Island in the Pacific. Everyone was going to walk from Aldermaston to Trafalgar Square, she said, to get rid of nuclear weapons. There would be music and refreshments. All Arthur would need to bring was his duffle coat and a sleeping bag. Simon agreed to come along so the three of them hitchhiked to Aldermaston and spent the night in a damp field. Next morning a few hundred people gathered outside a government research facility for a pep talk. Someone handed out hot chocolate in paper cups. Simon scribbled a few lines in a notebook. Then the march began.

There were several thousand people by the time they got to Slough. Quite a mixture of people they were too. Middle aged Bohemians, young mothers pushing prams, communists (old & young), veterans of foreign wars, art students, beatniks and assorted ravers. Normal people weren't much worried about Armageddon.

Arthur, Simon and Alice attached themselves to a like-minded group their own age. There they were. On the road. In the rain. It felt like the beginning of something. There was lots to talk about. The general feeling was that ordinary people were too caught up in eating, sleeping and working to care much about important things. If society was ever going to change then that cycle would have to be broken. The tide of materialism would have to be turned back. The times they were a changing.

At the end of Day 1 march organizers showed them to a church hall where they were to spend the night. They arranged their sleeping bags on the floor and shared what food they had. Simon introduced Arthur and Alice to a young fellow in a nicely tailored reefer jacket, cords and a tartan scarf. His hair was backcombed in a sort of neo-Regency style.
"This is Rod." said Simon. Arthur said hello to Rod.
"Don't let the Stewart tartan fool you," said Simon, "he's from Islington."
"Archway." said Rod. "Got any beer?"

There was no beer allowed in the church hall. There were no Marshall amps and no groupies either and nobody knew where to get drugs. But there was singing. A few people had guitars and soon the church hall was ringing to the sound of songs like 'Midnight Special' and 'If I Had A Hammer'. Rod had a raspy voice, not the sort of thing people would pay money to hear thought Arthur. But the crowd loved it. Specially the girls.

"We're still innocent." Simon muttered cryptically, "This is just the beginning. It will turn into something else."
Later Arthur noticed Rod arranging some sleeping bags in a corner and crawling under them with a couple of girls. That was the night Alice let him go all the way for sure.

The next morning Arthur, Alice and Simon shared a plate of egg and chips in a transport caff. Simon had his exercise book out.
"What are you up to?" Arthur asked.
"Oh, I don't know, nothing much." said Simon, "Just scribbling a few notes. One day, people might want to read about all this."

The march ended in Trafalgar Square where Bertrand Russell and other people delivered speeches. They didn't actually get any bombs banned but it was a start. And they'd had a good time trying. Arthur and his friends drifted away. They took the tube to Hampstead and saw a French film at the Everyman Theater. The film was called 'Jules et Jim'. Simon liked the way Truffaut mixed historical film clips into the narrative. Arthur found it a bit slow. Love triangle, said Simon, with the war as background. I see, said Arthur. Alice had a headache.

And I've got one myself. That was hard work.