Fragment 23: The Life & Times of a Social Experiment
Lovestruck to Dumbstruck. With a co-operative interlude.
My trip to Rupert’s retreat house in Sussex happened one weekend in late summer or early autumn, 19681. The journey was without incident and, when we arrived, George and Nellie were shown to their room, and I to mine. We were then invited to come to a communal area to meet others.
A half dozen people were present. As far as I was concerned, there was only one. She was called Libby. It was one of those moments that poets and authors and artists have striven through the ages to communicate and express. As ever, Shakespeare’s attempt comes high on the list:
Romeo [to a servant]: What lady’s that, which doth enrich the hand / Of yonder knight?
Servant: I know not, sir.
Romeo: O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear;
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!
So shines a snow-white swan trooping with crows,
As this fair lady o’er her fellows shows.
The measure done, I’ll watch her place of stand,
And, touching hers, make blessed my rude hand.
Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight!
I never saw true beauty till this night.2
This specific reaction, I suggest, occurs only once in a lifetime, some time during the teens or early twenties. Later love is different: by definition, more mature and, arguably, richer. But, once experienced, that first intense, piercing, painful reflex can never be forgotten. Nor should it be.
Libby was a slim blue-eyed blonde. Some time afterwards, when I read Farewell My Lovely, I smiled at the precision of Chandler’s metaphor:
It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.3
She and I were the same age and had a special connection in that we were both waifs that Rupert had taken under his wing. Up until this time I was entirely unaware of her existence but, it transpired, she had benefited in the same way that I had from Rupert’s care to help ameliorate a deprived home life. She was, at this time, a student at the Royal Academy of Music, training as a concert pianist, no less.
So, that was the weekend. That’s it. That’s all I remember. Of whatever else might have happened I have absolutely no recollection. For me, it was all and only about meeting Libby. She and I talked, and talked, and talked. Although there was no opportunity to do anything more than talk, except for a stolen kiss, it felt so right. We agreed to meet, soon, in London.
When the time came to return to Leicester I was on Cloud Nine. All the way back I thought of nothing but her. I delivered George and Nellie to their flat and went on to the bedsit in Ratcliffe Road where I continued to think of nothing but her. And, that night and the following morning I carried on thinking of nothing but her. Finally, because I could think of nothing but her, I phoned and made arrangements to visit her in London at the first available opportunity - the following weekend. This left me with the difficult task of getting to the next weekend without thinking of her to the exclusion of all else. I feared I’d go mad. Or madder.
Well, soap powder was a distraction and, after all, my P&G call routine had to be maintained. But, apropos my customers, something else exercised me. It had to do with the very large number of shop conversions going on at the time. This was peak period for grocery shops converting from counter service to self-service. Co-operative shops in particular seemed to be frantically pursuing this modernization.
Back then, the Co-operative Movement stood for something, particularly in the working class world in which I grew up. Members of the Co-op earned a dividend (the “divi”) on purchases - the first ever loyalty scheme, I suppose! - but it was about more than that. I guess it started in the Augustan Age in England - the first half of the 18th century - when thinkers and writers like Hume, Dryden, Locke, Swift and Addison defined and promoted a humanitarian approach to life; and, picking up on startling new scientific developments, recognized that knowledge is based upon that which humans experience via the senses (empiricism).
As part of this stream of thinking, in the 19th century, a bunch of Oxford thinkers came up with “The Eighteen Propositions of Oxford Liberalism”. Here’s No. 18:
Virtue is the child of Knowledge; Vice of Ignorance: therefore education, periodical literature, railroad travelling, ventilation, and the arts of life, when fully carried out, serve to make a population moral and happy.4
In sympathy with this, the Rochdale Pioneers, who started the co-operative movement and opened their first shop in 1844, had declared in their prospectus:
The objects of this Society are the moral and intellectual advancement of its members. It provides them with groceries, butcher’s meat, drapery goods, clothes and clogs.
The Co-operative stores that were opened across the nation over the next fifty or a hundred years made a huge contribution to the welfare and well-being of the poorer members of British society. But, then, in the 1960s they did something which, in my opinion, ran counter to their philosophy.
They just smashed up and threw out the fixtures and fittings from hundreds of shops. This included, most notably as far as I was concerned, beautiful, large mahogany counters. It really got to me. I thought it an appalling act of wanton destruction.
Okay, that’s calmed things down a bit so let’s risk moving on to the fateful weekend.
At this stage of my life I was not yet familiar with London so it was all exciting and confusing in equal measure. Anyway, that Saturday I pointed the Cortina down the M1 and managed to rendezvous with Libby, as planned, around lunchtime, outside the Royal Academy of Music. She suggested we go for a drink and a snack and provided directions that took us to The Windsor Castle on Campden Hill Road in Notting Hill.
After a couple of drinks she provided directions back to her bedsit in North Kensington, in an area that shortly thereafter was to be radically changed when the new, elevated Westway was constructed, like something transplanted from Houston or Los Angeles, forming the first part of a new, fast, east-west route connecting London with Birmingham via the new M40 motorway.
The most conspicuous thing about Libby’s bedsit was the baby grand piano that dominated the space. Which, in the interests of decorum, is as much as I shall reveal of the remainder of that weekend. Suffice to say, I was deliriously happy.
In the weeks and months that followed I made regular visits to London, and she to Leicester. And before I knew it I was rethinking everything.
Most important, I wanted to be near Libby and realized that, because of her special musical talent that meant I had to go in her direction rather than vice versa. Anyway, London was growing on me. It was truly exciting. And, of course, the shine had come off my P&G career - I was increasingly bored with going through the routine of selling soap. So, what about a change of work?
But if I changed jobs what should I do?
What came back to me, of course, was the time that I had spent on the Ariel launch project: the rudiments that I had learned of Marketing; the bits I had learned about advertising agency work; the excitement of the product launch with its mixture of business and theatre.
So, responding to an advertisement in the Daily Telegraph, I applied for a marketing role with Hertz Rent a Car. Shortly thereafter I was called for interview and when, subsequently offered the job, I accepted.
Libby had been supportive throughout this whole process and now, when I confirmed that I would be moving to London, told me that she knew of just the place for me to live. She took me to a four-storey-plus-basement Georgian house on the east side of Regents Park. There, in Colosseum Terrace, Albany Street, I was introduced to Libby’s friend, Judith, and a deal was struck enabling me to lodge in the basement and eat with the family. It all seemed so easy!
The house was home to Judith and her husband, Nick, a well-known heart surgeon, and their five children, ranging in age from 16 down to 5 years old. Judith and Nick were both about 40 years old.
So, I resigned from P&G and prepared to go to London.
It was then that Libby told me she would shortly be marrying … someone else.
Finally, if it’s okay with you, here’s a gentle advertisement. I think Substack is a truly remarkable venture in that it is attracting all manner of fascinating and talented contributors and I’d like to introduce one of them.
It’s a chap that I have only met through this channel, so we have never spoken directly with one another, but, from what he writes, and the way that he writes, I feel that we are kindred spirits. And when I was writing about Co-op shops, fifty years ago, smashing up and throwing mahogany counters onto rubbish tips, it went through my mind that, “Walter would have known how to put the materials to good use.”
writesWhy not take a peek? I’d be interested to hear what you think.
Thanks for reading.
In Fragment 22 I incorrectly put it down as early 1969.
Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet, Act 1 Scene 5 (1597)
Chandler, Raymond. Farewell My Lovely (1940)
Newman, John Henry. Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864)
"The measure done, I’ll watch her place of stand,
And, touching hers, make blessed my rude hand."
A beautiful love story.
And then she says WHAT !?!
How could she?
[hmmm ... impatiently waiting for next installment ... she better have a damned good explanation]
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Interesting also about the founding of the Co-op. I'm curious about this: "It provides them with groceries, butcher’s meat, drapery goods, clothes and clogs." Clogs -- as in wooden shoes? Did they use them in England back then? If so, I'm pretty sure they didn't jam them into the machinery like their French brethren, heh!
I'm reading an interesting book by a Norwegian historian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terje_Tvedt) writing about the industrial revolution and why it took off in England as opposed to any of the other likely places / countries. His thesis, in short: The industrial revolution was, contrary to received wisdom, not initially steam powered, but rather driven by water wheels -- watermills. Steam came later. England's advantage lay in a steady supply of rain that created a network of stable rivers, in a 'soft' landscape amenable to digging canals where great quantities of coal, ore and finished goods could be easily barged around -- preferably to one of several good sea-ports for export. Makes sense, no? Interesting stuff :-)
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I'm rambling as usual. Must go to work. And thanks for the recommendation!
I missed that romantic phase of my life and I have always had a tinge of regret. My romantic liaisons were limited to helping my future wife's farmer father deliver various animals wearing a suit that was essential wear in my day job, which was an engineer for a large American company that had started in this country. I did this to impress him as he had no time for this fancy new technology and I had a feeling that I was going to end up married to this girl, although it had never been discussed.
My night job was playing guitar in local rock bands, where the compensation had initially been money, then booze, then escalated to groupies and drugs, and then to negotiated deals where the booze, drugs, and girls became a package.
I woke up one morning with an unknown girl in bed beside me and was so aghast it was the end of my rock and roll career.
So I returned to my home town, seriously interested in this farmers daughter, and over the next few months persuaded her to stop her father from polishing his gun whenever I showed up, and asked her to marry me.
She has not one jot of romanticism in her body but we are still together after 58 years. But I sometimes dream of a romantic liaison ...