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Friday 18 July 2008

Around the bend

Jeremy Clarke reports on his Low Life

I have a recurring nightmare. I’m driving or walking or cycling, I’m not sure which, up a winding, muddy country lane. At a sharp, uphill bend, I’m overwhelmed by terror of what lies beyond and can go no further. Freudians, I imagine, would interpret this as a psychic utterance of repressed homoeroticism.

I know exactly where this bend in the lane is, oddly enough, though I haven’t seen it for 35 years. When I was at school, the family home was briefly on the outskirts of an Essex village right on the edge of London. (Although our house was surrounded by fields, and felt sufficiently rural, after dark the western sky was apocalyptically ablaze with energy and light from the metropolis.) The bend in the lane was on the bus route on the way home from school. It marked the point at the end of the journey where I pressed the bell and went forward in good time to stand at the front of the bus, ready to alight.

Last weekend I drove up this lane for the first time since we left there. I came up from Devon for a 50th birthday party at the nearby golf and country club. My friend Cass Pennant has had an interesting half-century. From Barnado’s boy, to leader of West Ham’s notorious hooligan gang, the Inter City Firm, to prisoner, to doorman, to head of a large security firm, to successful publisher. He’s been shot numerous times, and even run through with a sword, though none of these incidents, I believe, has so far involved rival publishers. A lavish biopic is in the can and about to be released. I had a birthday card and a tray of caramel- coloured Maran pullets’ eggs gift-wrapped on the back seat.

I easily recognised the left-hand turn in the road that has been troubling my sleep for over three decades, but felt nothing. I turned the corner. Nothing. It was a piece of cake. A hundred yards further on, next to the bus stop, is the centuries-old pub where I used to earn pocket money at the weekend ‘bottling up’. I had an hour to kill. A queasy nostalgic impulse made me turn into the car park and pop inside for a pint.

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