Monday 11 July 2016

Ho Ho Ho Chi Min...


Another 1968 John Walmesley photo. I was there (an art gallery in London) when it was taken. It was the first (and last) time I met John Lennon, but the second time I had met Yoko Ono. She did a lot of visiting lecturing around the South of England at the time, and had been to Guildford in that capacity.

This exhibition - which was for the benefit of the sacked tutors of Guildford - was attended by loads of celebrities, including David Hockney and Kasmin, who owned the gallery. We had asked John for money toward our campaign, but he refused and explained the refusal in the song, 'Revolution'.

They put me in charge of the bar for this event. Big mistake. The drinks menu consisted of a vast quantity of Thunderbird wine, and nothing else. I remember thinking how lovely it tasted, and the more you drank, the lovlier it became. Everyone else spat it out, so I and a handful of fellow students more or less drank the lot.

At the end of the event, we piled into a black cab and raced through London. One - mad - girl suddenly  opened the door of the cab (which you could do in a moving one in those days) and fell out into the road at high speed.

The driver did not notice this happen, so we banged on the glass and got him to turn round and go back to her. She was lying motionless in the street with cars going round her. I ran up to her and heard her making strange gurgling noises. She was laughing. I asked her why she jumped out, and she said that she wanted to know what it felt like. She had got away with a bruising.

Her sister worked for the BBC, so the next morning we went for breakfast in the Broadcasting House canteen. It was very strange to be sitting having eggs and toast, surrounded by famous actors and newsreaders all doing the same thing.

Yesterday I listened to Ruald Dahl's wartime memoires of being an RAF fighter pilot. I remembered arguing with parents and uncles who had all been involved with the nastiest aspects of war, and who said that they fought for my generation's benefit - a concept which I was very dismissive about at the time, the Vietnam War being the only one actually running which I had to try and make sense of as an adult.

They could not understand what we had to complain about, especially since Britain did not get involved with combat in Vietnam. We didn't even have to do National Service. In their eyes, we were spoilt brats, and I think they had a valid point.

17 comments:

  1. Such a lucky girl Tom to only have bruises. I always felt sorry for Yoko Ono...people were so cruel to her about her impact on the fab four, and true or false it must have been hard to deal with.

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    1. Oh she dealt with it ok. She is tough. She had to be, growing up in Japan in the aftermath of the war, eating nothing but rice in small quantities.

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    2. Oh and the girl who fell out of the taxi had to promise the driver that she would not do it again before he let her back in!

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  2. Interesting. I am at work so only picking up on the Roald Dahl bit. His war time memoires are a good read, as is his entire childhood before it, all written in two small volumes. They often, if not always, turn up in the Children's book section in charity shops but are anything but children's books. Excellent read they make in a refreshing way of looking at life in the 1920s and 30s and his wartime as a fighter pilot.

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    1. Hearing them has given me a better respect for him. I always found him a bit of a pain before, for some reason. Not now. I saw him in Bath once - he was extremely unusual looking - 6' 7" and gangly.

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    2. I felt the same way until i read these two books of his early life. If you ever see them i recommend reading them. He had a very unusual childhood.

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  3. How different were our parents' lives. When four students were killed at Kent State in 1970, and more wounded my father (an Army man in the twenties and thirties) said, "They disobeyed orders!" I said "They did nothing they deserved to die for." We never exchanged another word on the topic. i will read some Roald Dahl.

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    1. They stuck flowers down the barrels of the National Guard's rifles, I seem to remember.

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    2. That was DC, the iconic march on Washington.

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    3. Oh - Kent State seems like that as well.

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    4. I stuck some flowers in rifles in Washington, D.C. -- it was when Martin Luther King died and there were riots going on...

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  4. But it's always the way. If you can't be a spoiled brat when you are 18 when can you be.

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  5. Was that the "You are here" exhibition? I visited it in 1968. The place was empty. I helped myself to a white badge from a jar by the door. It had " you are here" printed on it. I've still got it somewhere. There was a large white canvas with just these words on it. Not much else of any interest as I remember. I thought it very disappointing compared to the very exciting art that was emerging and available all.over London at the time. I was an impoverished student then but only five years later my clever young husband was scooping up pop art canvases at Sotheby's for peanuts. Been better than a pension fund.

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  6. I remember some student falling out of a van on our way back from an exhibition in an Officer's Mess in Aldershot. She was pissed too; we all were.

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