The spring and early summer of 1973 passed by in a haze of hard and at times brutal work, with brief respite trips to London and a five week hitch-hiking sojourn to Denmark and back. Having surpassed my own low expectations by being offered a place on a Diploma in Communication Studies course at the Polytechnic of Central London in the autumn I set about getting myself my first job in England.

I moved to the Surrey town of Farnham, where my sister Jane was a textile art student and I found myself a tiny room to rent for £8 a week. Work came in the form of a job as a yard labourer at the firm of W.C.Ware & Sons on the Farnham Trading Estate. This was my harsh introduction to the world of work. A tough environment where I was expected to shift lengths of wood on my shoulder from place to place. The foreman was a brute, a former squaddie called Scouser Barry who particularly enjoyed headbutting anyone he didn’t like. Eventually he went too far and was escorted off the premises. I would walk home with splinters in my hands and sometimes in my neck. The concepts of protection and safety were far from anyone’s minds in 1973. Friday lunchtimes we were straight down the pub, but I did strike up an unlikely friendship with a young biker rocker called Sean. One particular memory was a three day job in nearby Guildford at another branch where I and one other were sent to pick up and sort out a giant bundle of lengths of wood that had fallen over. Giant pick-up sticks came to mind.

For music I had a small cassette player and I was listening to Lou Reed’s Transformer and Bowie’s Hunky Dory and much more as well as a lot of Radio 1 at the time. The house next door were friendly and I remember going with a couple of them to a windowless flat in Kensington to ‘score’ some consumables. I think the guy in the flat was the prototype for Presuming Ed, the dealer with the giant Afro in the film Withnail & I. I think I passed out after inhaling a few puffs.

I had saved enough money from the job at the timber yard to make the trip to Denmark with a local friend called Andrew, who like me was 18. He was half Danish and had some family members living there. We hitched to Dover, mostly in big trucks and got on a ferry to Ostend and arrived around midnight. We looked around in the dark for a park to pitch our tent and found what appeared to be one and scrambled over a low wall. In the morning we were woken up by a military guard and found ourselves in the grounds of a royal palace in Ostend and were swiftly escorted from the grounds with a flea in our ears. It took three whole days to reach Roskilde in Denmark travelling through Belgium, the Netherlands and West Germany. Many boring hours were spent at the side of the road, but there were moments of kindness when people helped us out. Sleeping on the side of the road with just a sleeping bag was not a great experience, although I remember one night in Holland we bunked off into the woods and set up the tent. It was a relief to get to our destination after three days and stay in a friends garden nearby in our little tent.
Denmark was full of Vikings, expensive beer and free festivals. (The first Roskilde festival where someone was handing out free beers and a lot of psychedelic blues. ) I didn’t know it at the time but this was my last year of eating meat and I indulged in a few of Copenhagen’s famous hot dogs at Tivoli Gardens with perennial wasps buzzing around. It was a surreal and carefree summer. To be continued…