World in My Eyes: The Autobiography Page 6

In October 1972 the college was approached by RAF Brize Norton who was trying to obtain permission to use our pool. The Royal Air Force was embarking on a program to train its aircrews from 10 Squadron and 53 Squadron in sub-aqua (SCUBA) skills to increase their comfort level in the ocean in the case of a “pilot down” or an open-water landing situation. As captain of the swim team they were passed over to me to handle.

  Their request was simple. For the next twelve weeks they wanted to use our pool twice a week for two hours at a time to train their pilots and aircrews in sub-aqua skills. They were flexible with both days and times. Could I find some empty slots to fit them in?

  I said it would be no problem but asked one favor of them in return. I had always loved Jacques Cousteau and had wanted to dive since being a little boy. And it wasn’t just me. Four of us on the swim team also wanted to learn how to use sub-aqua gear. If they could fit us into their classes then I could find them time in our pool. A deal was struck and for the next three months my three teammates and I went through full military SCUBA training.

  These guys were not messing around! We had two weeks of classes and theory before we were even allowed to get our toes wet. We learned first from the lectures the physics and biology of SCUBA including nitrogen build-up times as they relate to depth, decompression sickness and how the body responds under pressure. Armed with that slightly scary knowledge we finally were allowed in the pool where we were told what to do. And I do mean told.

  Our instructor was a no-nonsense sergeant who would bark orders to us.

  “Put the bloody regulator in your mouth and don’t take it out until I say you can!”

  We were all more scared of him than drowning so we did as we were told.

  As we became more confident underwater, all kinds of tasks and obstacles were presented to us. He would swim up from behind and rip off our masks and turn off our air without warning. If we surfaced we were done for the day. We would have to sink to the bottom, find the mask, replace and clear it, shrug off our gear, turn the air back on using the valve at the top of the tank then replace all the gear and continue on.

  Other times he would obscure our masks with duct tape then throw all the equipment into the deep end and have us dive down, find it, turn the air on and then don everything completely blind without surfacing.

  Perhaps the toughest of all the exercises was drownproofing. We would have to tread water in the deep end of the pool while Sarge watched from the side. After fifteen minutes, just as we were starting to get tired he would hand down to each of us a ten-pound cinder block which we had to hold above our heads for another ten minutes while we kicked frantically to try and stay afloat.

  As our legs cramped up from charley horses that knotted our calf muscles and stabbing pains shot through our entire bodies he would yell out encouraging words to us like “Don’t you dare get that bloody brick wet. I’m going to be using it tomorrow to build me wife a new shed.”

  Those ten minutes lasted an eternity as the weight of the concrete blocks would inevitably force our heads to sink underwater and we’d kick desperately to get back to the surface for just a moment to take a gulp of life-giving air.

  When the time was finally up we would gratefully hand him back the cinder blocks and crawl painfully out of the pool rubbing our burning, swollen legs.

  “I’m doing all this so you are prepared,” he explained as we lay there on the pool deck, too exhausted to stand. “What are you going to do if you end up in the water with heavy clothes on and they start dragging you down? You’re going to fight to stay afloat, to stay alive, that’s what you’re going to do. It won’t always be easy. You do what you have to do to get through it.”

  His intense training had me convinced that in the event I was diving one day and a fish swam up with a roll of duct tape, covered my mask, hid all my dive gear under a coral reef and handed me a brick then I would know exactly how to respond.

  Our first ocean dive was at the end of November in Weymouth. We met on the base at RAF Brize Norton and were loaded into two green military trucks and headed 130 miles to the south. The trucks were not designed for comfort and for three hours we bumped and banged around on the two wooden benches that ran the length of either side of the military transport.

  It was drizzling when we reached the coast and we could hear the surf pounding onto the beach as we were ordered out of the trucks. The waves were nearly six feet high and smashed relentlessly on the rocky shoreline. It was, to say the least, intimidating.

  “Here’s what our plans are for today,” the sergeant barked, “get kitted up, put your regulator in your mouth and hold your flippers in hand. Don’t bloody let go of them either or the quartermaster will wreak havoc with me and then I’ll have to take it out on all of you. We’re going to walk straight into the water, get past the waves then slip the fins on our dainty feet and go for a nice little dive.”

  As we stared at the angry ocean I think he could sense the reticence among not just us four Westminster students but also the combat aircrews that were gathered there.

  “Is there a problem? Did I just waste my time teaching you how to breathe bubbles the last two months? Anybody want to tell me they signed up for the wrong course? If you do then I think a saw a pub down the street that has a beer garden perfect for little girls. You could go there and wait for the rest of us divers. Have a bag of crisps and a nice lemonade shandy and sit in a deck chair as you miss out on all of the fun. Who wants to go?”

  I did, but as no one else was moving I stayed put.

  “Good, let’s all get ready then.” He turned and watched a massive breaker roll in and explode on the shore sending spray twenty feet into the air, “Bloody lovely day to go diving.”

  Amazingly despite the pounding surf and hideous visibility underwater we all survived the dive. On the way back to Oxford we compared bruises that our tumbles on the rocks had given us, but we were all still breathing and ready to go on our next adventure.

  Westminster College Sub-Aqua Club, 1973

  In December we received certification by the RAF and BSAC, the British Sub-Aqua Club, and in late January the Westminster College Sub-Aqua Club was officially started. The first four members being the survivors of the battle of Weymouth beach.

  The summer of 1973 was rapidly approaching and with it my first major exams. I had found an apartment of my own to rent in Torquay and would be returning to Soundwave Mobile Discos but before any of those good times were to happen I had to face the dreaded written papers in English, drama and history.

  My professors were expecting me to flunk two of the subjects and maybe scrape through with drama and I was tending to agree with them. The principal called me into his office and told me in no uncertain terms that he had been watching “my antics” for the past three years and as far as he was concerned I had wasted my time at Westminster. I had not been to church once and all I did was “swim, play music and run around to all the other colleges in Oxford every night.” Didn’t I know I was here to study?

  This conceited little man continued to lecture me and when he finally stopped his tirade he said, pointedly, “Well, so what are you going to do?”

  I looked at him and smiled.

  “I think I’m going to stay on another year and take my degree course,” I explained matter-of-factly.

  “I don’t think that’s going to happen,” he spluttered. “You’ll be lucky to leave here next month with a teaching certificate.”

  “But if I pass my exams you have to—”

  “If you pass your exams! But we both know the chances of that happening.”

  I walked out of his study determined to prove him wrong. I got to work and crammed three years’ worth of study into one week and hoped for the best.

  As the day of the first exam rolled around I entered the room more scared than I had been facing those monster waves six months before in Weymouth. It was history, the toughest of the three subjects. Here we were dealing with facts and dates. Whatever top
ic that had been chosen had already happened and it was up to me to know exactly when, how and why it had occurred.

  The only good news was the exams were not written by the college. They originated from the education board in London and would be sent back and graded there, so there was no personal bias against me.

  I opened the exam paper. The main question was on the rise of the House of Tudor and the formation of the Church of England. I knew this inside out—even if Bummer Stokes had mocked me about it.

  I wrote of the Wars of the Roses, how Henry the VII seized the throne of England and left it to his surviving male heir, Henry the VIII. I went into detail on Henry’s conflict with Spain over his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and his subsequent battles with the Vatican. I elaborated on the beheading of two of his wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard and his wars with France and his obsession to conquer territories there that he felt were rightfully his. I put my pen down and sat back. One down, two to go.

  Drama was next and a piece of cake. I had to review three of Shakespeare’s plays and explain the subplots and the importance of the secondary characters. As we had produced two of his plays at Westminster in the past two years, Hamlet and Macbeth, this was a gimme as well.

  Finally for English literature the question was to trace the evolution of a genre of literature of my choosing such as the romance, adventure or political novel.

  I took a chance on this and traced the development of the spy novel in European literature stemming back to Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities through to The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Thin Man and finally the James Bond series which marked the arrival of the anti-hero. I wasn’t sure if this would be too hip for the examiners but I was going for it.

  I called my parents and let them know the exams were done and I was fairly confident that I would get a passing grade and asked what was going on in Torquay. Dad told me that he’d had a meeting with one of the planners for SIS, Scandinavian International Summerschools, and they were looking for teachers of conversational English for their Scandinavian students for the summer. They paid well. Was I interested? My answer came in seconds.

  IN THE SUMMERTIME

  Summer of 1973 was a mind-blowing experience. Every morning from nine until twelve I would teach Swedish and Norwegian students conversational English and every evening I would DJ for Soundwave. Most nights I would take one of the Swedish girls with me and she would dance while I played the music.

  Brian Clifford landed the contract to install the sound equipment at a brand-new club in Teignmouth, just six miles from Torquay. He chose me to open the disco and be the resident DJ there. The club, Barbarella’s, bought full-page ads in all the local papers and I was thrilled to see my name spread right across the page. Unfortunately they did misspell it and for a brief moment I felt like dropping one of the p’s in Sheppard but thankfully common sense kicked in.

  My life became one continuous party and how I stayed away from drink I don’t know. Drugs were not a temptation; in the summer of 1973 they were virtually unknown in a little town like Torquay but alcohol was another thing all together. Many of my old school friends spent night after night in the pubs swilling back the beers and then staggering all the way home but that had no real attraction for me. My vices were girls and music.

  Just a week after the opening of Barbarella’s I had a call from the BBC. When I heard who was on the line I nearly had a heart attack, but sadly it wasn’t in response to any of the demo tapes I had sent them. Instead they had been doing their research to find which local DJs in each town were most popular and my name had come up when they were looking at Torquay.

  Opening for Emperor Rosko – Summer, 1973

  They asked me to ‘open’ for the BBC Radio One Roadshow when it came to Torbay. I would DJ for two hours and then they would go live on air with none other than one of my radio heroes, Emperor Rosko. It might not have been a radio gig but I was excited to do it.

  That afternoon playing on the Radio One Roadshow stage on Torre Abbey green to 6,000 people was a thrill. I’d never been in front of such a huge crowd before and knowing that many of “me mates” were out there watching made me make sure that the music was rocking. Fortunately the British weather upheld its side of the bargain and the sun beamed down through my entire set and during the live broadcast.

  Watching the massive response and hearing the cheers that erupted from the crowd when Rosko strode out onto the stage made me want to really step up my game as a DJ and push hard for a job on the radio. I could only imagine how it must feel to have the audience scream for you like that.

  As the end of the summer approached I was called into the office of SIS at Castle Circus in Torquay. They wouldn’t tell me why they wanted to see me. My mind was racing. Had the parents of one of my girlfriends complained or worse, was one of the girls pregnant? I just knew it would be a bad meeting.

  Instead the director of operations sat me down and made me a proposal. He’d been going through my college paperwork and had heard from some of the other teachers about my DJing. His idea was that the following summer I teach only three mornings a week, lifeguard for the students on the beach five afternoons a week and DJ their dances three nights a week.

  I couldn’t believe my ears. SIS took over a section of a beach in Torbay for the summer every year and it would become semi-private, just for the students, and it was well-known that their dances were students only. You had to show an SIS card to get in; otherwise they were off-limits. But here I was being offered unlimited access to all of it along with the incredible nineteen- and twenty-year-old Scandinavian girls who were here for the summer as both their lifeguard and DJ! It was all I could do not to ask if I could have keys to the hen house as well!

  THE LOVE I LOST

  My final year at Westminster saw me spending only a few hours a week at Harcourt Hill for my academic studies. I had transferred to the degree course and was taking a Bachelor of Education in English at Exeter College, Oxford. The studies were dry and dreary, but fortunately were only three one-hour sessions a week; the rest of the time I was expected to be mature enough to study at my own speed. The big thrill was that my lectures were one-on-one with the professor of English and he made a point to tell me that the study where we had our meetings and the very chair I was sitting in had been used by J. R. R. Tolkien when he had studied there fifty years before me.

  Carolyn and I talked about what we would do when college was over. She wasn’t going to stay on a fourth year for her degree; instead she wanted to get a teaching diploma and find a great school to start her career as an educator. One night she unexpectedly exploded into tears. I wrapped my arms around her and asked what was wrong.

  “You’ve been so good,” she said, “but I haven’t. I saw someone this summer in Hong Kong. My parents took me water skiing and introduced me to one of the bank managers and it just happened. I’m so sorry.”

  What was I going to say to this wonderful, distressed person? Get mad? No, that would have been hypocrisy central. After all I had done how could I blame for one second this amazing girl for being human?

  I held Carolyn tight and whispered, “It’s okay. I love you.”

  I could feel her tears soaking through my shirt onto my shoulder and dreaded the moment we would inevitably break up. I knew our lives were destined to be so different that it could never work out, but until that time I would cherish every moment with her that the next eight months would bring.

  As with so many things that we adore and treasure, nature played her cruel joke and time sped up causing those months to race by in the blink of an eye and suddenly, before we knew it, it was late May of 1974 when, with all the exams finished, the third- and fourth-year students were bidding their final farewells to both college and to their friends. For me that meant saying goodbye to Carolyn forever.

  Carolyn hoped we would stay together, somehow make it work. We talked endlessly about how we were better together, how our love could overcome any obstacle,
how we could build a future as a couple. Even though those last nights were filled with tears and promises it was obvious to me that our ultimate fate was already, irrevocably out of our hands.

  I knew that once she was away from college her parents wouldn’t let her return to me. And my dreams were also pulling me from her. Many times over that final year I had thought seriously about marrying Carolyn, settling down and becoming a teacher. But I just couldn’t do it. I knew that pathway would ultimately lead me to unhappiness and I loved Carolyn way too much to have her stuck with a husband who came home each night full of regrets and discontent. Plus I needed to see where DJing would take me, and that was a decidedly uncertain future that the Wilson family would want their daughter to have no part of.

  We hugged, we cried and we held hands until her ride to the airport arrived and we were forced to let go of each other. Our fingertips brushed one final time and I watched as she climbed the three stairs onto the shuttle and prayed that she would find happiness. As crazy as I was when we were apart, Carolyn was more than just another girl; when we were together there was no one else in my life.

  My last glimpse of my first love was as she pressed her face against the window of the bus and waved sadly, desperately, as the engine of the old service vehicle grumbled into life and with a shudder, took her away from me in a choking cloud of black diesel smoke, beginning her long journey to the other side of the world and a new life that I would have no part in.

  As I lugged my bags to my little MG I stopped for a moment to take a final look back at Westminster College. I was leaving a place that had introduced me to the world of DJing, given me the opportunity to train and swim every day, taught me to SCUBA dive and allowed me to discover a great love like Carolyn.

  My farewells done, a wave of sorrow swept over me as I drove down Harcourt Hill for the last time. It was as though I had a hole in my soul, that I’d lost a part of myself. I slipped in a cassette of some of my favorite disco records to lift my spirits. The first song that came on was “The Love I Lost,” a track that I played at most of my gigs and it always worked as a floor-filler, but today it was as if I were hearing it for the first time.