UPON BEING FERAL

It's early spring of 1971. Two teenage boys (17) and (18) pose in a suburban garden 30 miles north of London. They're on the threshold of adulthood and don't quite know what to do with it. The one on the left is at college, the one on the right has already been at work for over two years. Having quit his job as a labourer on a pig farm in Essex, he's temporarily out of work. He's turned up at his friend's place with no more than a bag of clothes and an electric guitar. He wants to write songs and eventually, he hopes, to join some sort of a band.

He doesn't really live anywhere and generally he sleeps on the floor of whichever room in the house it was where he was hanging out the previous night. He doesn't go to pubs or drink alcohol. He considers alcohol to be his father's drug of choice. He despises it. So he smokes dope sometimes, if he can afford it.

Despite a highly rebellious attitude and an already well-developed bohemian outlook, the incongruity of a strong work-ethic is hard-wired into him. One morning, about three weeks from now, he will wake up on the living room floor with his back aching. In the early morning quietness of the house, with its fellow inmates all still sleeping, he will wash, shave and exhume from a plastic bag stuffed into a cupboard under the stairs, a late 1960s suit.

Now he will walk into Harpenden Labour Exchange and ask for a job. The first clerk will immediately and assertively tell him that he's not entitled to any benefits yet. He will say defiantly, " I don't want money. I want a job." Since he doesn't have any qualifications or references, the next clerk, a kindly middle-aged woman, will stare doubtfully at him. She'll tell him that there's a kitchen-portering job, about 4 miles away. A country hotel near a village called Redbourn.

He says, "I'll go for it." She asks him how he will get there. He takes the card, from her and declares. "Walk." He thanks her . She gives him the bus fare from her purse. He thanks her again and for a moment remembers his mother, whose parting words to him before he walked out were, "You may be my son. And I love you. But at the moment I don't LIKE you." He takes the bus, alighting from it a stop too early. He marches half a mile through lanes to the hotel. It's called the Aubrey Park. Sent round the back to the kitchens, he sees the head chef. "When can you start? " the chef asks. "Tomorrow!" says the boy.

The boy on the right of the picture begins working as a kitchen porter. Which he likes. Now he has money and rents a room in the house where he's previously been dossing. This is about to become one of the best summers of his life.

No one's on his case anymore. They've all given up on him. At 18, no one's asking him what he's going to DO with his life anymore. Because he knows. This will be the first of a long series of happy, dead-end jobs which he will do part-time, until such time as his talent is recognised and he actually gets paid for what he creates. He has no career path, no notions of ownership and no desire for any more education. He only wants to write stuff and play stuff and be paid. He'll get what he wants. Eventually. It will be a fucking long ride.