later it was the grand romantic gesture – a second home before we even lived together in a first. I bought my half when I was flush, over-reaching myself as one always does in those circumstances, and now all the cash is spent and I can’t pay my rent on the poky boxroom in London any longer, it’s still the grand romantic gesture, in another kind of way: I dream of eking out the rest of the long lean summer in this hut, living on Weetabix and digestives, with five quid fish’n’chips as my treat; I daydream of dangling a line off the dock wall at high tide and waiting for a crab, taking him home in my bucket, cooking him on the Campingaz stove, cracking him open and eating him – one of the sea’s great bounteous luxuries for nowt; in this way beach-hut life transforms poverty into something glorious; the hut was the glory of my flush, flashy times, and now it’s the glory of my poverty.
I have no electricity: the emails remain unread, the mobile phone stays off. Candlelight is fine. The sea is as good a bath as any. I like to imagine I am thick in the heart of this solitude, like Thoreau thick in the heart of his forest, far from the entrapments of modern society, but this of course is not true – I am a ten-minute walk from the Co-op, which shuts at ten, which I can stroll up to for fresh supplies of millionaire shortbread or raspberry pop. I am five minutes from the Old Neptune pub, where I can sup a Guinness watching some gnarly old Kentish blues band. Kate comes at the weekend, and brings kindness and food. But still, amongst these comforts that keep me joined up to the world, the effect is the same: I am alone, with the space to find a kind of peace for myself, which is also where the words come.
I lived a solitary seaside existence marked by poverty once before, when I was young, and lost, and didn’t know what to do; this time round is markedly different in one important respect: the wind howls, the walls creak like they might cave in, the candlelight flickers, I write all this down, and I am happy. I thank my lucky stars for this seaside retreat – the lucky stars that line up in the vast, sprawling estuarine sky and stand guard above my tiny weather-beaten hut.
On the Road to
Damascus
Bill Drummond
It is normal for young folk to have infatuations with people of the opposite sex, or maybe with their own sex. These infatuations can be with real flesh-and-blood people they see in their day-to-day life, or with a film or pop star. You know this, we all know this.
But I seem to have missed out on these sorts of infatuations. Not that my sex drive has ever been less than driven, you understand, and I am as boringly heterosexual as you can get, it’s just I’ve never been tormented with infatuations in a boy–girl sort of way. But infatuations are still something that from time to time inflame my urges and desires. In a non-sexual way, you understand, but infatuations all the same. When I was much younger it maybe was a certain species of fish, say the Perch or Brown Trout, or maybe a bird – my infatuation with the Black Cap lasted at least a decade. But I’ve only ever had one infatuation with a variety of fruit. And this infatuation lasted almost twenty years. It is only comparatively recently that I may have been getting over it. The fruit in question is the Damson. And I can pinpoint the occasion when it began. It was in the early ’80s. My then wife and I were spending a night in a rather dark and dreary hotel in Gloucestershire. We were returning to Liverpool from a holiday in the West Country. We had our evening meal in the hotel. I think we were the only people in the dining room. For pudding I chose the special, without even asking what it was. What was placed in front of me was a small glass dish filled with a creamy, purply substance and a teaspoon. Some sort of up-market Fool, I guessed. A custard-based Rhubarb Fool had been a staple in my home as a child. But on the loaded spoon entering my mouth I knew I was tasting a taste I had never experienced before. And there is no way I have the literary skills to describe that taste without sounding totally pretentious. But it is definitely the taste highlight of my life. It is up there with seeing The Clash at Eric’s on 5 May 1977 for great life-changing moments. After that first taste, nothing would be the same again for me on the taste front. And I am already sounding pretentious. Up until that evening I had never tasted a Damson before, had no idea what one looked like, or even what family of fruit it belonged to.
A few months later, we moved from Liverpool to the Vale of Aylesbury to start a new life. Part of the new life was to be able to spend much more time wandering about the countryside, as I had in my youth. Come the first early autumn I noticed in the hedgerows amongst the usual Blackthorns and Hawthorns another odd-looking tree, one hanging heavy with a plum-like fruit. They were somewhat larger than the Sloes on the Blackthorns. However deadly a fruit might look I can never resist the urge to put one in my mouth. And anyway there was no serpent up the branches trying to tempt me, so what could the harm be? Just one bite and I knew it was the same fruit that had been used in the dessert in that dark and dreary hotel. A Damson. And there were thousands of them on this tree. It only took a few minutes for me to fill my haversack to the brim.
These initial ones were stewed. They went well with my morning bowl of porridge. A crumble was baked on the Sunday. Over the following two or three weeks I came across numerous more of these Damson trees, in the hedge-rows across the Vale of Aylesbury. And nobody else seemed bothered about harvesting this abundant and free wild fruit. The usual types would be out picking Blackberries, but they would all pass the Damsons by. Did they not know what they were missing, or was my palate markedly different to my fellow ramblers and bramblers? The rest of my family did not particularly share my need for a daily intake of Damsons.
But it wasn’t just the taste of the Damson, it was the look of the fruit, its blush of pectin on the dark purple skin; the way they hung together in clumps on the bough, almost like bunches of large black grapes.
Over the coming year I would mark with a cross on my six-inch-to-the-mile Ordnance Survey maps of the Vale, whenever I came across a Damson tree. The dozens soon climbed into scores and it was not long before there was a gross of these trees marked on my maps. Far more fruit than even a legion of Drummonds could get through.
Then as I was out walking early one September morning I came across a whole field of them. The trees had been planted purposefully in rows – an orchard of Damson trees. But half the trees were dead or dying. And on those still living the fruit was being left to rot. Further on in my morning walk I came across more of these orchards, all in the same state of neglect. This led me to believe that at some point in the not too distant past there must have been a thriving demand for this prince amongst the plum family.
This was all back in the 1980s when there was no Google to type the word Damson into and learn all there was to know and much else beside about the fruit that so fired my passions. Around that time, when I was not off coercing Echo & The Bunnymen or locked in a recording studio with Jimmy Cauty, I would be spending my working time in the Aylesbury library writing and researching. It was here that I learnt the name of the Damson comes from the name of the city of Damascus, the ancient and modern capital of Syria. That it is believed it was around this city, over 2,000 years ago, that man started to hybridise various types of plums and wild cherries to arrive at this smallish, dark and packed-with-flavour fruit. The biblical story of Saul, on his way to Damascus to persecute Christians, falling to the ground after being blinded by the light and his epiphany and conversion was one that had held a grip on my imagination over the years. I had often wondered when my own road to Damascus epiphany would happen, if not a full-blown conversion of some sort. And when it did, what changes would it make to me? And would I have to change my name like Saul did to Paul or Cassius to Muhammad?
Sitting in the hushed library, my mind was often in a state of being highly inflamed. This could be in regard to planning the Ocean Rain tour, or concerning strategies that The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu might take, or writing my half of the Bad Wisdom books. But back to Damsons. In the extensive local history shelves of the library I learnt the cultivation of the Damson was once a large-scale local industry, an industry confined to only a few parishes of the Vale of Aylesbury and nowhere
