Before we Left

Packing to go on a fortnight vacation is a pretty straight forward thing. Fourteen T-Shirts or vest tops, a pair of swimming shorts, a couple of pairs of shorts, the contents of your underwear drawer, some suntan cream, diarrhoea pills, a jar of paracetamol, a pair of night club trousers and a shirt, condoms and you’re pretty much sorted. A couple of books if you are that way inclined or some personal music device (Walkman/Discman back then) to entertain you. Add in your Passport, Sunnies, Ticket and some spending money and what can possibly go wrong?
Packing to go away for nine months or more is a totally different ball game. There are all those hidden extras you have to remember. Marmite, tea bags, writing materials, and spare guitar strings, a first-aid kit that is a bit more substantial than a box of sticking plasters and a jar of paracetamol. Then you have to make space for more suntan cream, more of everything in fact as you have no idea how long you might be gone for and supply lines to the mother-country might be compromised.
Take condoms as an example. For a two week stay in Spain, there are those who take a packet of three and feel lucky if they get to use them all.  Some of us feel lucky if we get to use one, but that is another story. Then there is the eternal optimist who packs a box of twelve.
So how many does one realistically take for a nine-month stay?
Well in those crazy days before the onset of AIDS it was pretty much up to you. And we will park that subject there.
Another thing to remember on your packing list was a Ghettoblaster. We packed one each. Not because we envisaged arguments over what music we would listen to, or that we thought we would be separating at some point during our stay. Each stereo unit was a sensible investment. You take a player with you, use it for the duration of your stay in Israel and then when the time comes for you to leave you to sell it to one of the kibbutz members at virtually the price you paid for it brand new on Tottenham Court Road.  Don’t ask me why that was the case, but radio cassette players at that time were very expensive to buy in Israel, and even if yours had been well used there would be a string of people queuing up to buy it off you as soon as you announced you were leaving.
Of course, this is not the case if the machine has been completely destroyed in a fire.
(More of that particular event and the fate of the box concerned in due course)

As you were heading for a hot climate a pair of shades and a cool looking sunhat were essential but at the same time, a sweater and some warm socks were also a good idea. Now, these items are not something you would immediately think of when you are visiting a country that is two- thirds desert, but it can get bloody cold and wet there in the winter, particularly at night. A good sleeping bag is also a must.
So like we were taught in the Boy Scouts we laid it all out on our beds took one look at our bags and went straight down the market and bought bigger bags. Chucked all the stuff inside, zipped them up and went down the pub for our last night in civilisation, which if you were familiar with pubs in Stevenage at that time, you would know is a major contradiction in terms.

Next Time – Off to the Airport – The Journey Begins.

This article was originally published on 31/5/2017

I must confess I do not remember much about the Kibbutz Representatives induction meeting. I know it took place in a Hall somewhere close to Golders Green Underground Station and a quick look at Google Map shows a Methodist Church nearby. Some vague memory seems to trigger that at the time I thought it was incongruous that a meeting for a Jewish Organisation was taking place in a Christian Church but to be honest I could not swear that this was the venue.
I remember a kind of church hall with hard back chairs and glasses of weak Orange squash or coffee. Given that the meeting took place on a Saturday I was probably dreadfully hungover anyway and weak Orange squash would have not been my poison of choice.  A couple of large whisky’s might have taken the edge off.
I know we had to complete some form of questionnaire and then we watched a movie about Life in the Kibbutz and what we could expect.  Again, memory is very fuzzy but I seem to recall thinking that the movie was probably shot sometime in the early seventies judging by the clothing and haircuts and seemed to bare little or no resemblance to the stories I had heard, or photographs I had seen from volunteers who had returned in the last couple of years.  The movie was all tie-die t-shirts, cheesecloth and denim with beards and leather headbands, daisy chains and flowers in your hair, all shot in soft focus. Did not really match up with the drunken debauched image I had conjured up in my mind from the stories I had heard of all night vodka and arac binges.
I guess that the only judgement I can make on the whole affair was if it was some kind of weeding out process or some form of test then both me and Dingo must have passed because within a couple of days we received our letters of recommendation and an introduction letter, written in Hebrew, to be presented to the Kibbutz Representatives Office in Tel Aviv.
That Letter in Hebrew could have said absolutely anything.  “Throw these two in Jail and lose the key”, or “Please place in the most dangerous situation you can find.” I didn’t read Hebrew at the time and even two years later could just about read my own name on the work sheet and write my name on the Guard sheet for an early morning wake up call.
I remember at the time Dingo was trying to teach me some of the basics of Hebrew and I think we had progressed slightly past the “Hi how are you” onto something slightly more advanced so maybe I knocked them dead with a quick Manish-ma.
In the end we were approved, we had our Introduction letters and we could go ahead and book flights to Tel Aviv and get on with the process of extracting ourselves from our everyday lives in London.

I looked at my brother.  He was stood in the doorway of my cellar room. He had called me this morning when he had finally made it in to work and arranged to come by and meet me for a late lunch.  Being in the “fashion business” suited my brother and by loose association me as well.  This particular arm of the “fashion business” was a gentleman’s outfitters with a shop right in the centre of the highly trendy Covent Garden complex.  The shop was one of those places that displayed no prices on the items  in the store.  The owner followed the thought process that if people needed to know the prices before they came into the shop then they couldn’t afford to be there in the first place.

Most of the clothing was aimed at the type of people who lived in Chelsea or the Royal Borough and made a Bee-line for the M3 or the M4 on Friday afternoon in their Chelsea tractors, putting behind them their jobs as Stock or Bond traders and donning their green willies somewhere around junction 6.

Obviously not the usual place for a couple of loutish twenty something’s from a Hertfordshire new town to go shopping, but then a staff discount is a staff discount and a monthly free staff clothing allowance was also not to be sneezed at.

What we had managed to do was to blend certain items from the store into our existing wardrobes to create a kind of country gent meets urban decay kind of look.  It was almost the diametric opposite of the crumbling country pile.  Those who come from the landed gentry often dress impeccably but live in a crumbling mansion where the roof leaks and the central heating packed up sometime before the Great War; we just felt we bought the mansion with us in our style of dress.  Take my brother as he stood before me in the doorway.  On his feet was a pair of handmade leather black boots that retailed at about £200, a pair of Levi jeans that had definitely seen better days, a cashmere sweater, a battered biker’s leather jacket and slung casually over his shoulder was a designer raincoat.  My own attire was similar, although I had been working inside and it was hard physical labour humping heavy boxes of sheet music around so I was wearing a handmade linen shirt instead of a cashmere sweater.

It all added to the confusion whenever we were out together. Girls like to be able to spot class or money in a guy and this analysis process often starts as soon as you walk into a place.

So these two guys walk into a bar. What they are wearing or some of it at least could pay the month’s rent on their one bedroom flat in east Ham and the rest should be confined to a dustbin. So what exactly are they facing here? A couple of very rich guys who are slumming it, or a couple of poor guys who have knocked over a designer clothing store?

A charge that was levelled at the two of us on one occasion by two policemen when we were apprehended leaving the vicinity of Covent Garden at five thirty in the morning both carrying canvas holdalls containing crowbars, pump screwdrivers, hammers and a whole range of other tools.  Oh did their collective eyes light up.  You could hear them both mentally sharpening their pencils and trying to remember whether or not there was one or two e’s in the word “proceeding”.

We had to let them down gently and told them that we had just finished work at a theatre in Drury Lane where we had just spent the last day and a half demolishing a set and packing it into trucks and if they both didn’t mind we had about four hours off before we were due to be back in the theatre to start construction on the new set for the next show and we wanted to get home, have a shower, change our clothes and get our heads down for a couple of hours. A quick phone call to the stage door keeper, who was thankfully still at his post, confirmed our story and we were back on our way in search of a night bus, with a grunt of disapproval from the two friends in blue and not a hint of an apology from either of them.  This particular incident had happened a few years before, now we had both given up the theatre work, instead preferring to go out in the evenings and simply confusing the hell out of women and not suffering too much from all the attention.

My brother stands a little shy of six feet and from his long blond hair to the tip of his expensive handmade boots he was a heartbreaker.  This had been the major reason I had stood aside when we had formed our first band together, that and the fact that he had the better singing voice.  Until then I had always been the front man and lead singer in any band I had been a member of.  Stepping to one side and taking over the backup vocals and rhythm guitar duties had somehow improved my song writing.  It seemed that in some perverse way I still had to be the leader.

At just under five foot eight and with dark hair and dark eyes I offered the Mediterranean option, for girls who like the dark mysterious man.

But we followed a set of hard and fast rules. We never made a play for the same women, and although there are probably a few women out there who can claim to have “bagged” us both, it was never at the same time.  Nor did we compare notes afterwards, except on one occasion, but I am not going to divulge any more details on that subject except to say that it was such a bizarre experience for us both that we felt we had to discuss it afterwards, if only to verify that what had actually happened, had actually happened.

“I’m off.”  A voice announced.
“And I thought it was the drains down here,” I replied.
I didn’t even bother looking up from what I was doing.  I knew my brother would be standing framed in the doorway, and that our quick repartee had kicked in automatically. Gleaned from hours of watching the real classic comedians like Morecombe and Wise, Tommy Cooper and the Two Ronnie’s, and pouring over their scripts and other scripts by the comedy greats of the last thirty years, learning the lines until they were second nature. Several years of working as stagehands in the theatre had exposed us to the great and the good of variety and given us an insight into the importance of comedic timing. Whenever one of us opened our mouth the other was not far behind with a stinging one-liner.
People who didn’t know us found it annoying, people who did, found it even more annoying and the people who knew us really well simply ignored us and let us get on with it.
“No, I really am off this time.  I have had enough of London.”
“Ah, but was it not Samuel Johnson who said, “A man who is tired of London is tired of life.”
“I’m not tired, I am pissed off. It’s not the same thing. And Thatcher is going to waltz back into power so no change there.”
Dear Maggie had just announced a General Election would take place in a month’s time.
“Couldn’t you just not go to the polling station or go and spoil your ballot paper like we did last time.”
“Nah I have got to get away.”

My brother had grabbed my attention and so I tossed the newspaper I was reading on the desk in front of me.    This was what passed for work in my world.  I lived a kind of half-life in a basement on Garrick Street in the heart of London’s West End.
I worked in the Music Publishing business, which sounded great as a chat-up line but to be more exact I packed bound published sheet music which was shipped out to schools, colleges and libraries throughout the country.  The basement was the packing room for Cramer Music and I was employed to put all the music in large brown cardboard boxes, wrap them in brown paper and packing tape and ship them out to the general public.
It was a long way from my original role in the Musical Instrument department of the Cramer Music shop on St Martin’s Lane.  But the shop had closed down and I was lucky that the company had a vacancy in another department.  Jobs were not in plentiful supply, particularly for retired stagehands with a degree in Archaeology.
It was true that the economy was improving and that unemployment had dropped below 3 million for the first time since 1981.  This was why Maggie had chosen to pin her colours to the mast and go for re-election.

As a student, a few years previously, I had stood up in front of the mic and sung “Cry for England”, a lament penned by a fellow student and band member in which we catalogued the many failings (as we saw them) of the Tory Government.  The lyrics pointed to such travesties as the Youth Opportunities Programme and the Suss Laws. It was hardly poetry but it got a raucous cheer in the Students Union when we played it.  I guess you could say that my politics had remained to the left of centre and the prospect of another term under the Tories, whilst it seemed inevitable, hardly filled me with hope.

I couldn’t say I hated my job. It frustrated me because all I wanted to do was to be a Rock Star and next door to my dingy basement Packing room was a fully equipped 24 track demo studio. The fact that it stood empty and dark for most of the time merely added to my frustrations but I never managed to pluck up the courage to go and see the big boss and plead my case.  I would probably have been laughed at anyway and then fired for my troubles so I kept my musical talents to myself and carried on packing the boxes.

But now Dingo the one shining light in my dark and frustrated musical existence, the singer of my songs was leaving.  I did not have to ask the question.  I knew where he was bound.  We had talked about nothing else since he had returned the previous year.  While I had been flying solo, and selling guitars to the great and the good, he had been out of the country on a fact-finding mission.

Until his departure the previous Spring, we had rarely been apart for any great length of time. When I secured a place at University I quickly acquired a semi-permanent weekend lodger and following Graduation we had both drifted in and out of the same dead-end jobs, interspersed with periods of work in the Theatre as stagehands or as Roadies on tours.

I looked over at my brother. He was stood in the doorway of my cellar dungeon.  Down here the drains did smell. I could look out the skylight at the far end of the room, occasionally there was an opportunity to look up a girl’s skirt but that was a time-consuming exercise and usually, the only result was a stiff neck. I had worked here for the last eight months and really my prospects were looking grim.

But this was to be our chance to start again. To pick ourselves up, put ourselves back together musically, write some new songs together, do a little work, do a lot of drinking and enjoy the sunshine.

We were going to spend some time on a Kibbutz in Israel.