A Photographic Memory #8
eidetic • /aɪˈdɛtɪk/
Anarchy at the Seaside. Part eight of my memory backup…
I often contemplate my far more adventurous nature as a much younger guy. I’d never think twice about jumping onto a ferry embarked for some other land, with just a vague notion of where I’d stay on arrival. One such adventure began with a chance lunchtime meeting in London’s Hyde Park.
At the time, I was still working at Carlton (see previous post), and I’d befriended the guys in the design department situated on the floor above the photographic studios. They did most of the design and layouts for the ads and catalogues, and I took the following photo as a bit of a joke.
In reality, they were a lively bunch, and you could guarantee they’d be playing some really good music during a studio visit.
As Hyde Park was just across the road from our workplace, the summertime gave us the incentive to take the short walk for our lunch break and sit under one of the trees to eat our sandwiches. They were fun times, and one particular day, we were approached by some young female tourists from Belgium who wanted to know what other sights in London they should visit. We ended up chatting with them for most of our break, after which they suggested exchanging home addresses.
In 1980, in fact, anytime before the advent of the internet and social media, having what we called pen friends, or pen pals, was quite usual, and writing letters back and forth with people from other countries and different cultures was an enjoyable and educational pastime. I already had a pen pal from Marseille, called Marie-Cécile, a music student I met on a train in the South of France, so having another was very welcome, and so I began to exchange letters with Anna from Belgium.
One Sunday afternoon, I was sitting at the kitchen table eating lunch with the family and my girlfriend, Marian, when the phone rang. I went into the hallway to answer and was surprised to hear Anna calling from a payphone in Belgium. She told me that she and some of her friends were going to be staying at her parents’ holiday apartment by the seaside, a place called Westende, and asked if I’d like to join them. I could tell she was about to run out of coins for the payphone any minute, so we hurriedly arranged to meet at a Westende tram stop at 5 p.m. the following Saturday; an absolutely bonkers, rash decision by me, which naturally didn’t go down well with Marian, but it was a chance for travel to a country I’d never visited before, and in those days I was much more free-spirited and hungry for adventure than I am now.
Thankfully, Marian was cool with it after I’d explained my reasoning, and there was no way I’d jeopardize what we had, because she was simply the best, so I arranged to take the week off from work, bought my ferry tickets, and packed my rucksack with my essential (by now) US Army shirt and camera gear. I packed a sleeping bag and a tent that I’d used for my previous trips. When I think about it now, that was an extremely cautious thing to do considering I was supposed to be staying in a holiday apartment, but it turned out to be incredibly forward-thinking.
I don’t remember much about the ferry from Dover to Belgium, but I do remember the tram ride to where I was supposed to meet Anna and her friends. There were a couple of punkish girls on the bus wearing very cool-looking wraparound shades who let me photograph them. I hadn’t had my Nikon FM for long, and I was obsessed with photographing everything!
I arrived at our meeting place ten minutes prior to our agreed time, and I sat and waited… and waited, aaaand waited. To my abject dismay, nobody appeared.
What the #!@$%!!! I couldn’t believe I’d traveled all this way to be stood up, so after giving it an hour, which I figured was ample time, I decided to start scouting around for the apartment. I need to add here that I had no ‘holiday apartment’ address to look for, and only Anna’s surname to go on. This was, of course, absolute insanity! At this moment I was thankful for bringing my rucksack and tent, because dusk was surely but slowly creeping my way.
After the fifth or sixth apartment building, checking the names on the mailboxes, I figured enough was enough, and gave an exasperated call for help to the universe. It must have been about three minutes later I heard running footsteps and three faces peered around the corner. One of the voices tentatively called out, ‘Steve?’
Oh, joy!!! I couldn’t believe it. What a relief! As Anna and her three friends showed me to their apartment, it all became abundantly clear. Belgium is on a different bloody time zone to Britain, specifically one hour ahead!
Belgium uses Central European Time, while Britain uses Greenwich Mean Time, so our watches showed an hour’s difference. They’d turned up to the meeting place at the allotted time and gave up when I didn’t show, thinking I’d changed my mind… fair enough!
By pure chance, they’d all been sitting by the window of their apartment and one of them had looked down and spotted a little blue rucksack wandering around the streets checking mailboxes.
After they’d shown me around the apartment, we went and had pizza and some beers at one of the café’s downstairs. I was introduced to a good-looking French guy who was dating one of the girls and was also staying at the apartment. I wish I could remember everyone’s names, but I can’t. I mean, we’re talking about 46 years ago, here!
The girls all spoke the Flemish dialect and, thankfully, English, but the guy only spoke French, so conversations were interesting. It must have been the second or third day at the apartment when, quite unexpectedly, the doorbell intercom buzzed rather loudly. The look of sheer horror on the girls’ faces probably meant something was up, evidenced by the fact that they grabbed my rucksack, the French guy’s baggage, and frantically tried to stuff them into the closet. Next, it was me and the French guy, who were hurriedly forced into the rather tiny bathroom and into the shower, where they quickly closed the door after signaling for us to keep schtum!
Hiding in the shower with a guy I couldn’t actually converse with was not something I could have foreseen, and reminded me of the sort of thing you’d watch in a pretty lame tv sitcom, but as we glanced at each other, our eyes betrayed the fact that we both knew we were in trouble, as the voices of the girls’ parents announced their arrival.
For what seemed like hours, we stood there in the shower, silently hoping… praying, the parents would leave, when suddenly the door handle turned!
Thank fuck!!! It was Anna, with her finger pressed to her lips… ‘ssshhhhh’, quickly locking the door behind her, so the parents couldn’t use the bathroom.
Smart move.
As the three of us were now crammed in this tiny bathroom, trying desperately not to giggle, we heard the parents leaving, and that was thankfully the end of that rather tense scenario.
Having young males staying in their parents’ holiday apartment was clearly something that hadn’t been discussed with the parents, so without further ado, it seemed like the best thing to do was for me and the French guy to skedaddle.
So - this is where I thank my foresight for bringing a tent. With the sort of wages I was earning in 1980, a hotel was out of the question, but a campsite was easily doable, and there was one just down by the seafront. Staying in a tent meant that I had to carry my camera everywhere rather than risk leaving it in the tent, but that was okay because the next part of my trip turned into a self-imposed photography project.
I really can’t remember how exactly it happened, but I met a group of young punks on a group vacation, organized by a hippie-type couple who worked at some kind of residential institution. I can’t remember their names either, but they were very kind and were keen for their cohort to enjoy themselves.
The next few days and nights, I hung out with them, and we had a blast. We also went clubbing, and I took a lot of photos, some of which I’ll share here.
The interesting thing to me was that Belgium, it seemed, was just slightly behind Britain when it came to all things punk-related, and punks at the seaside seemed like an odd but interesting juxtaposition.
Having said that, The Blitz Kids were a group who frequented the Tuesday club-night at Blitz in London’s Covent Garden from 1979 to 1980, and were credited with launching the New Romantic scene. So the fact that Belgium’s The Lines billboard mentions Blitz in July of 1980 shows they definitely had their finger on the pulse.
The fact that I (annoyingly) hadn’t really documented much of the London punk experience inspired me to photograph the New Romantic scene that was about to make its mark.
The films I mostly used for this trip were the newly released AgfaPan Vario XL and Ilford XP1, the first black-and-white films designed for C-41 processing.
The day I was set to depart for home, I overslept and had to dismantle the tent and pack like a maniac, running all the way to the station. I made it with only minutes to spare. On the ferry home, I had my usual fear of none of the photos being exposed correctly or the impending film processing going horribly wrong, but I needn’t have worried; they turned out okay, and I would have been overjoyed to know that a few years hence I’d be able to skip the angst and see my photos the minute I took them on the back screen of my digital camera.
In the months that followed, we exchanged letters and I sent photos to the punk cohort, but as time passed and lives changed, we eventually lost contact.
Maybe they’ll come across this post one day. I hope so.
Next: (I’m sure I’ll think of something!)
Got a real sense of ‘time’ off the post: the liminal between posting a letter, and getting a reply; between making new friends, and managing to somehow see them again; between taking photographs and (like you said) receiving the magic of developed prints. Ultimately, of that unbidden, intoxicating place invaded by, and filled with, digital immediacy that (as Joni said) I didn’t know I had until it was gone. Of youth, and transience: expressive kids seizing their moment in the foreground, compared to the ambling adults of the background crowds. A moment, then we’re swallowed back into the river of time roaring on.
Oh, and the indelible, contrasting brilliance of two young punks against 70s wallpaper; the kind of which wouldn’t remain on walls as long anymore. I reckon there’s endless unexplored dimensions in those wallpapers (places, perhaps, to go find new antibiotics).
Apologies: getting over flu, so some wonky thoughts going on. But I found that post really moving, Steve.
Another classic Cook chronicle! Long before iphones, it's amazing how much photographic evidence you have for your past – and not blurry Instamatic snaps in a palette of orange and brown either. Lovely stuff.