Backblip

This one goes back 44 years to when I and my best friend, Stephen, ran away to London. We had just turned 17. I had been expelled from school and taken an awful job at the DNS calculating interest in bank books. One early spring morning I couldn't stand it any more and walked out. I got a train up to my old school and found Stephen in the art department. I told him what I'd done and said I was going to run off to London. "Not without me," he said. We were playing in a band at the time and when we told the other two in the group they decided to come with us. So we loaded up the group van with our equipment, left notes for our parents and drove off into the night.

We spent a week sleeping in the van in parks and backstreets, trying during the day to get an agency to take us on. Without luck. The only money we made was from busking. Of course, we ended up arguing and Stephen and I split from the other two and found ourselves sleeping on the floor of Euston Station. I think I can make the claim that I took this photograph of us, because it was me who pushed our last half-crown into the money slot in the photo booth.

We were wearing the same clothes we had run away in. I have a sort of memory of people giving us a wide berth. In the end, filthy and starving, we made a reverse charge call to Stephen's uncle in London. He came and picked us up and we were able to bath and put on clean clothes and get a decent meal. The uncle put us on a train to Glasgow where we were met by our respective fathers at Central Station. (It all came back to me very vividly last month when I had an unscheduled overnight in Glasgow and wandered around the city at first light on the Sunday morning, ending up in Central Station, which seemed still haunted by the memory.) Our fathers must have been wondering how to deal with the situation. In the event, they shook our hands and said, "Well done boys, we're glad you had the courage to come back."

So this is how we looked at our lowest ebb. And I'm thinking it would make a great album cover for the CD we are writing and recording together all these years later.