LazySquirrel

With apologies to Hunter S.

We were somewhere around the Brenzett straight on the edge of the Dungeness when the Battenburg cake began to take hold. We can’t stop here, this is Trilobite country!; Shouted Pam Ayers through a mouth crammed with Battenburg, spilling sticky crumbs on the dashboard of my open top Morgan. Good people eat good cake! She continued, pounding the melamine dashboard for emphasis. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of Greatstone and the world. Whatever it meant. Strange memories on this nervous night in Romney Sands. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. Dymchurch in the middle nineties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . . History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened. My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Bailiff’s Sargent, half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big Austin Allegro, across the St Mary’s Bay drainage outlet at a hundred miles an hour wearing Flared trousers and tie dyed shirt jacket . . . booming through the Folkstone ring road at the lights of Brookland and Lydd on Sea, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . . There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across St. Mary’s Bay, then up the New Inn or down 101 to The City of London Pub. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . . And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . . So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Hythe and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

For anyone who knew me in Romney Marsh. See you on the other side.