Читать книгу Fitting In - Colin Thompson - Страница 60

Beyond the cottages was the Eel Pie Island Hotel, which always looked like it was just about to start falling down. It had a wonderful ballroom with a sprung floor and every now and then, when everyone managed to dance up and down at the same time, it was like standing up drunk on a gigantic water bed.

And there, helped by cheap cider, I learnt to jive as Chris Barber played trad jazz until it felt as if all the air in the ballroom had been used up and we collapsed in the grass outside and watched the River Thames sail serenely by.

This wasn’t opera. The words could have been any words. It wasn’t what they said, but how they said it. And every note pressed buttons that made it impossible to sit still. It was like all the walls of my home had fallen down around me and the other houses had vanished and the trees and the shops and the cars and everything that had always been in the way had gone too, and now I could see, for the first time in my life, that if there was a horizon in the world, it was so far away that it might as well have not be there.

It poured colour over the grey world of post-war England, garish lurid fairground sparkle glitter paint that no amount of repression and criticism could wash away. It changed the world, and when Chuck Berry sang ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’, it was better than sex. At least, it was until I actually had sex.

At eleven o’clock we’d all stagger back over the bridge from the island into the real world and someone would say, ‘Let’s go down to Brighton.’

So we did.

We hitchhiked at midnight or scrounged a lift or drove our motorbikes the sixty-five or so miles down to the cold stony beach and all huddled together telling ourselves what a great time we were having, because we were rebel beatniks refusing to follow the rules, at least until we went back to school or work at nine o’clock sharp on Monday morning.

By the time we arrived in Brighton everything was closed and had gone to bed so we all tried to sleep, but it was usually too cold and when the grey daylight arrived, everything was still closed and in bed so we hitchhiked back to London or got cheap rides on the milk-train or kicked and swore at our motorbikes which were also closed and asleep.

And the wonderful ridiculous thing was that lots of us did it all over again the next weekend.