Greene Remembered Hill
by
Pete Rozycki
| When John Timmins
asked me to write a piece about my experiences since
KHS for the 2007 Christmas special I had some reservations.
My stay at KHS was 1960 - 1967. I was always on the edge
a bit and felt slightly the outsider at Kingham particularly
in the 6th form. So while I feel somewhat privileged
to have been asked, and owe an enormous debt to KHS,
I feel it wasn't a bed of roses then or after I left,
and I still am considered "Mr On The Edge" (mainly health
and financially) by my old art college mates. Anyway
some of the following I hope will be perhaps interesting
warts'n'all, induce a few winces, grimaces and larfs
too. |
|
John asks the surname origin. Rozycki
is Polish. I discovered only about 7 years ago when visiting
my dad's old Polish paratroop buddy who looks like Charles
Bronson with a knuckle crushing handshake at the age of 80,
that there's an acute accent over the "o" and a dot over the "z", but I've never worked out how
to do it on my Apple Mac keyboard - if anyone knows please
tell me.
Trekking across land
from (then) USSR where he and his family had fled when the
Germans invaded Poland, the story of that incredible journey
by my dad amongst many others is the subject of "The Long Walk", published by Constable & Robinson.
According to my dad's army buddy, it would be very similar
to the one on the BBC
website.
My dad became a paratrooper in the 1st Independent Polish
Parachute Brigade after they were released from the camps when
Russia entered the war alliance, a resistance battalion of
free Poles, fighting alongside the Allies in the heroic but
doomed Operation Market Garden at Arnhem and then in Italy,
after training in the UK. I've read that a large number of
the Poles at Arnhem were killed before they even reached the
ground.
A foundry worker while in a labour camp in the USSR, hazards
of the smelting processes were the radioactive gases. They
gave him the throat cancer which eventually cut his life short
as a young man, coincidentally, on my 7th birthday, and yet
ironically allowing me a later, relatively privileged, education
at KHS. Needless to say, he was and is my ultimate hero, a
modest and educated man himself. When I see old footage of
WWII, I picture him with his young mates, that Band of Brothers
waiting at the jump hatch looking anxiously down in the incredible
roar of the engines and rush of the wind.
Slow zoom in and focus blur as the roar increases.
Segue to a pull back into focus, the roar of an army lorry
replacing aircraft engines and a similar bunch of lads, Band
Aid Brothers with comically askew berets, vacant expressions,
freshly picked noses and old WWII uniforms. CCF cadets from
Kingham Hill, we were trundling through the Scottish Highlands
at Arduous Training en route to a new trek starting point for
the day. Some of the pics accompany this article with the comments
I put on the back of the pics at the time.
Aye - them were 't days, men were men.
Sadly we were boys and it was all a bit of a lark. It's a
bit of a haze but I remember some incidents. What happened
in which year I don't recall, but I don't think we'd be left
on our own without supervision in these days of health & safety
rules.
There was the time in a white-out blinding
blizzard we walked single file, frozen and wet with only
chocolate bars as the soup had run out, able to see only
a few feet ahead. Then suddenly "Whoa!".
We'd carefully walked straight up to a sheer drop and the lead
boy (Was it Budge?) would have fallen a hundred feet one more
step further on and more of us probably following blindly.
Click on any of these images
to show pictures with
comments
that
I
put on the back of the pics
at the time.
Then the time Grandsoult discovered
we could use our packs to sled one at a time down a long
snow slope and stop just short of an icy stream by using
our heels. Only one lad couldn't use his heels - I can't remember who - as
his pack turned 180 degrees so he hit the stream head first
and went in almost up to his waist. The laughter of boys
can be so cruel. I was pretty useless with a compass as can
be seen from my notes on one of the pics, showing we were
hacking our way through dense spiky undergrowth and forest
for a mile or so, not realising a small side road ran parallel
to us until a car drove past.
After leaving Kingham in '67 I went
to Bretton Hall Teacher Training College, located in stunningly
beautiful grounds near Wakefield in Yorkshire with a massive
old mansion, huge Adam landscaped grounds and two lakes,
separated by ornamental cataracts. To give you an idea of
the beauty and scale, the grounds were used in Ken Russell's
film "Women in Love" during the holiday
period of my 2nd or 3rd year. The whole site is now the well
known Bretton Sculpture Park.
Bretton was my first contact with aliens in the form of girls.
Apart from very occasionally my entire period at KHS was devoid
of contact with girls at school and home, which was a small
Wiltshire village. I think my odd behaviour at Kingham in the
last couple of years reflects that 7 year abstinence at a time
which is pretty pivotal for the average adolescent male, and
the new playground at college was a real eye opener for which
I wasn't prepared.
This was 1967, the Summer of Love,
so the shock was so much the greater and gone was the grey
school uniform (I came back to grey years later, especially
in these silver years) in favour of loon pant flares with
extra wide sewn in patches and frayed bottoms, baseball boots,
a woman's ankle length dark fur coat with padded shoulders
picked up for £5 in Barnsley market
and hair which eventually stretched almost to my waist. Sartorial
excellence. Cool? Eat yer heart out, Jimmy Page - I did it
it first!
It was culture shock in more ways than
one. The place was very left leaning and Dickie Durrant's
best efforts cut no ice there, nor did my KHS education full
stop. I was deemed one of the priviligeratii being privately
educated and to get grades - I was doing an Art and English based Primary/Secondary
education 3 year course - I had to dumb down my attitudes,
shed my traditional art methods as per Dickie Durrant and go
modern as otherwise I was marked down grade wise. The Head
of Art, a goateed grandee 60 year old guard with the suicidal
name of Theo Olive, fought a rearguard hoping I'd help him
uphold the old traditions. Frankly I was with him but I was
also naïvely caught up in in the politics and swept along
by the zeitgeist. We even had our own student rebellion in
'68.
Despite the freedom of sorts it was a kind of indoctrination
prejudiced against my KHS education. Some other ex-Public School
students had it worse than me and in retrospect I'm astonished
the college didn't recognise this while ostensibly promoting
an open minded liberalism in education.
I was quite involved in sport, captain of the college basketball
team and participant in rugby 5-a-sides though resisting a
lot of pressure to become a full rugby 1 st XV member. I felt
increasingly however that teaching wasn't for me and I became
more and more hippy. My relationships weren't terribly successful.
Yes there was a lot of free love but I handled the personal
side poorly and after a disastrous and obsessive affair with
a girl older than me I had a breakdown, not even turning up
for final exams and declining to sit them later.
I returned to our village Minety, but the
strain financially and probably physically was too much for
my widowed mum who also had the early signs of arthritis, and
I was booted out. That was roughly 1970. For a month or two
I slept rough in derelict buildings, municipal tennis pavilions
and bus shelters, doing runners from curry houses and the like
to survive, with a small amount of money that slowly ran out,
hungry a lot of the time but not poor enough not to buy alcohol
and pot.
A room was found with a schizophrenic
great uncle with my bro Andy and we worked in labouring jobs
in council parks, pretty hard physical work - but we slept
well from exhaustion at least.
The great uncle was quite a character, often leaving for days
on end despite the efforts of the police to find him. He sometimes
didn't recognise us and would burst into the room at 3 a.m.
with a bread knife and ask why was it so dark for the time
of the day. He had a scary habit of turning on the gas cooker
then going to find a box of matches. The first time I twigged
was after he'd asked me for a match and I raced after him just
in time to see a beautiful fluorescent wave of gas ripple round
his waist while every object in the kitchen visibly jumped
an inch.
Originally a watchmaker, he had a huge pile of thousands of
beautiful half repaired timepieces chaotically piled more than
knee deep in one room of his house. Old fob watches, rotary
movement clocks, tiny pendant watches were all mixed up like
some kind of treasure trove, glittering like jewels and doubloons.
He really needed better care than we were able to provide
and it could be pretty harrowing as we had jobs to hold down.
We eventually decided to leave after coming downstairs and
finding a neat but smelly something on the bottom step. Falling
between two stools is one thing, falling in them is another,
and we sought professional help for him and left for a working
men's hostel.
Full mainly of old single ex WWII Poles it was strange that
I knew no Polish but these people might have known my dad,
though their own English was sometimes non-existent. It was
much like I imagine a prison type environment and mealtimes
were taken in the canteen to a musical background of hacking
bronchitic coughing.
Often in the middle of the night there'd be a commotion in
the corridor and a dead resident would be removed from one
of the rooms in our Nissen hut, each room being a ready made
coffin size. A single bed length with a shoulder width standing
space at the side, the huts were probably left over from the
war. There was a locker rather than wardrobe.
I had a small Morris 1000 van then
which I drove around untaxed and uninsured with a mattress
in the back. One night in Malmesbury car park I took some
LSD and climbed into the back to wait the effect. Amazing - it was as if the car park itself was
moving. Hang on - it WAS moving - and fast! I'd left the handbrake
off and had to dive headfirst over the seat to pull it on,
stopping a couple of feet short of the council building railings.
At that time I also had a nose job after
recommendation by a psychiatrist. One of the more unfortunate
aspects of the all boys environment at KHS was that my nose
was the subject of a lot of humour and my nickname was Beaky
Rozycki. I hold no grudges to anyone for that, but my self
esteem then and after took an enormous blow and I became quite
introverted, still am in many ways. In retrospect I can laugh
it off now and the operation was a genuine catharsis. I still
have a big nose but just the act of going under the knife was
enough to change my mind set. I'll never win any beauty contests,
as my last girlfriend pointed out, but I get along a lot better
with this hooter.
Bro and I moved from Swindon to a beautiful little gabled
flat in Cirencester roughly in 1971, dates are blurred as much
else, and while my bro worked nearby, I went on the dole.
After an argument over a girlfriend, bro left and I started
a big slide into petty theft, drugs, sleeping wherever and
with whoever in and around Swindon. There was some weird
stuff then, too much to mention, but strangely all this had
a kind of glamour that appeals to you when relatively young.
On one occasion, asleep in a derelict car
on some waste land in Malmesbury I awoke in the morning to
the smell of burning and saw a bunch of ten year olds had set
fire to the car, throwing stones at me inside. I was out pretty
fast through the window as the doors were jammed and despite
the bricks being thrown. My ex-army trench coat was slightly
singed as the flames hit the residue of the petrol tank and
the car turned into a ball of fire.
At another point, drunk, sick, starving, soaked and shivering
in the rain in the middle of the night I fetched up at the
residence of a vicar in Penhill, Swindon, the council estate
I'd grown up in before my dad died. Why I can't remember, but
probably to beg or scam for money. He took me in for several
days, keeping me in bed and his wife feeding me back to health.
On the third night I was asked downstairs to his study to
find it lit by dozens of candles like in the altar ritual bit
of a Hammer Dracula movie. He proceeded to tell me I was haunted
and possessed by the ghost of my late dad, and I needed to
be exorcised of his ghost.
Having been through quite a bit I wasn't
actually that freaked out, but probably that night learned
the meaning of the saying "No
such thing as a free lunch" and so I submitted with resignation,
which involved much drama and admission of stacks of guilt
some of which wasn't even mine but hey, it's a life of sorts.
A month later I saw him smiling on TV and noted he'd become
a bit of a celeb, doing a good line in council house exorcisms.
Well why shouldn't he I suppose, it kept the bread on the table
and anyway I was no saint to criticise him for it.
In fact I've had to confess on more
than one occasion in return for money, food and even for
thanks for my lift in a Reliant Robin while hitch-hiking,
praying like the ultimate sinner at the driver's insistence
at the top of my voice with him - mainly
that praying was enough and I'd get to my destination without
harm. One lift was given by a woman in the middle of the night
with a maniacal laugh. I enquired cautiously whether picking
up men on unlit country roads at midnight was wise, but gradually
became aware it was a man in woman's clothes. Don't ask, it
suffices I survived the journey intact.
That period especially, but both before
and after, has taught me that NO ONE, however much in authority,
college principal, psychiatrist, policeman or priest is necessarily
as perfect as they seem and are prepared to bend their scruples
to fit their purpose, and in some ways it's been a kind of
alternative Pilgrim's Progress. I'd be specific except for
the libel laws. If you've seen Linsday Anderson's trilogy - If, O Lucky Man,
Britannia Hospital - there was more than a touch of realism
in them compared with my sometimes scarily similar experiences.
It's a bit of a muddle after that. I know
I helped roadie and join in blues jams on my mouth organ (I'm
pretty good) for a friend who went on to become lead guitarist
with a band called XTC which had some chart success in the
80s, and I keep in sporadic contact with him. He has since
become a world renowned guitarist and even writes scores for
Radio 3 programmes, with his own following.
Eventually, however, the lifestyle took its toll again and
the final of my occasional sojourns in a cell resulted in a
small fine and leaving the police station with only one shoe,
a T-shirt and trousers.
Another very kind but pragmatic vicar gave me a pair of shoes
and found a place for me at Swindon Toc H, a kind of charitable
half way house which had some well to do residents. I couldn't
understand why they lived there as they had good jobs and no
problems but it added a kind of stability and the drink and
drugs became less obvious as I took a clerical job. I'm lucky
in that although the alcohol still takes a toll, I never got
into hard drugs like heroin and virtually all of the people
I knew from then are either dead from abuse or suicide, physically
or mentally damaged, or joined some religious cult.
Around 1972 while at Toc H I met my
future wife Joan Elizabeth Gwynne, the daughter of Anglo
Indians who had been wealthy and held important posts in
India, but had to leave at independence and only allowed £30
to take with them. Dignified, courteous and educated, they
were probably the kindest people I've ever met and Betty,
who had been only two when she arrived in this country, was
very pretty, vivacious and popular, a great counterbalance
for my own social inabilities.
We married in 1975 and I went to Swindon Art College, resuming
the training Mr Durrant had so ably started, in a Graphic Design
and Illustration course, with Betty's support and my holiday
jobs to supplement the income - and in those days a grant which
allowed a small VW Beetle runaround.
The course lasted 4 years and Mr Durrant's grounding put me
leagues ahead of my student peers who were mostly ten years
younger. At first dismissive of them as being very young, we
developed a camaraderie of art students with much larking about.
I keep in good contact with some of them now.
I passed the3rd year Diploma top student with a distinction
in 1978 and achieved the same in the 4th year. That S.I.A.D.
qualification in 1979, now converted to a B.A., as the S.I.A.D.
board has been dissolved, would be a B.A. Hons. 1st . However,
I had no confidence in my abilities and didn't even want to
submit my work in the final year, only doing so when a delegation
of 4 tutors came to my house to persuade me. The assessor offered
a personal recommendation for the Royal College of Art, which
in hindsight would have opened a lot of doors, but I was tired
of qualifications and felt I owed Betty for her unflagging
support.
In 1979 straight from college I was lucky enough to be offered
a job in the book cover design studio at Penguin Books in the
King's Road, London, then a highly sought after job, though
I really wanted to be an illustrator. I think the lost years
since KHS and the absence of encouragement in that area at
Bretton Hall slowed me down and it was a slog getting back
to my old standards of draughtsmanship so design suited me.
I spent 7 years in all at Penguin which was not without
incident but which gave me a very good apprenticeship, both
in design and editorially, and I became a member of the leftie
National Union of Journalists. I suppose my politics became
more left wing over that period too though I was pretty much
just along for the ride and the parties.
During one demo I offered to hold the
placard of a Trotskyite colleague for 5 minutes, whose politics
were too extreme for me but I could see the wind was blowing
the placard and he was tiring. Later that year we had to
do a book about the unacceptable face of union power - we were in Thatcher years now - and
a friend from the hardback studio came in with the photo
of a typical militant hard case Trotskyite union activist
he'd researched from a picture library. Yes it was me photographed
during that small 5 minutes of holding the placard and the
police obviously thought I was a hard leftie.
Then during the miner's strike I was at the famous big demo
at Trafalgar, standing on the railings as pickets and police
fought at my feet, taking photos of it all, really for the
excitement and some good action shots. There was a stand-off
and a gap between two groups held back by police cordons along
Whitehall. For some reason I was not stopped as I wandered
up and down in this huge empty space of Whitehall, taking shots.
I even got right up within touching distance close to the police
and march organisers as they stood nose to nose in tense negotiation
and reeled off some shots which I still have.
Later that week City Limits magazine (a breakaway mag from
Time Out) reviewed the march with particular criticism for
the way march photographers had been attacked by the police
while the official police photographer was given free space
to roam as he felt. They got it wrong as being me. So this
time, vice versa, the lefties thought I was police. It's par
for the course in my life. O lucky man.
Betty and I bought a house in Luton in 1980 and commuted in
every day in my Beetle. It was a huge strain and added sometimes
another full days slog on to a days work if there was bad weather
or there'd been an accident. I count something like 5 windscreen
shatterings which had to be punched out as I drove, one petrol
run-out with a faulty gauge as I was overtaking a bus uphill
and with an articulated lorry close behind in heavy rain, and
one back wheel on fire as I was doing 70mph, tipped off by
a passing driver who hooted and casually pointed at my back
wheel with a smile.
In Penguins I was rubbing shoulders with the progeny of politicians
and heavyweight academics and the upper middle classes. Great
in one way but I felt more and more socially inadequate, the
poor boy up from the sticks and although my design work was
ok there were constant upheavals and intrigue within the company.
The commuting took its toll and things became unpleasant between
Betty and me. We split and sold the house in 1985.
I went into the worst mental breakdown I've had then and almost
went back to the streets. Betty managed to buy a small flat
and though we saw each other for about 6 months more, I made
a decision to make the separation more final and haven't seen
or spoken since. Popular and sociable, I'm sure she has done
well. We never had children and have no regrets as I would
hate them to become used like tennis balls or treated like
property as their parents argued.
I think I've been spoilt in the girlfriends
I've had since then - though I have been pretty much celibate
since my last one about 9 years ago - a beautiful German
girl, also a designer, who eventually went back to her ailing
mum in Hamburg. It's true, the Germans do get up early - this
one at 5 a.m. with a workout before running to work at the
BBC in White City from Fitzrovia, a small rucksack on her
back.
The mental problems turned into physical
ones as I went veggie and lost masses of weight. I couldn't
actually perceive myself as too thin at the time so I think
I must have been anorexic, fit from all my cycling, but painfully
thin. I held on to the job at Penguin 'till 1986, oddly a highly
productive period, but eventually negotiated redundancy and
went freelance, commuting from a my flat in Figges Marsh, Tooting,
to a studio I shared with 2 other ex-Penguins in Chelsea.
One incident from this time sticks in my memory. After the
split up an extremely loyal friend from art college, a one
in a million, gave me enormous support, helping in practical
ways as well as personally. We went on holiday to Cornwall
and on our last day Mike remarked on how people are afraid
of different things. I was afraid of the narrow cliff paths
high up that he strode along like a mountain goat, he couldn't
handle at all cycling in the country lanes as I did and he
would get off his bike shaking and refuse to remount.
That day we went opposite sides round
the bay, he on a house-high rock photographing the sea as
it crashed in and the spray hit him, me round the other side
painting a watercolour of the rock I knew he was standing
on in the far distance. A lifeboat slipped out from beneath
me going across to Mike's side and I determined to ask why
when I saw him. Back in the caravan we waited for Mike but
he never turned up and we discovered he'd been drowned. It
was not pleasant realizing I'd actually painted him as he'd
drowned, In my emotional state I even believed I might have 'painted'
him dead.
Returning to my therapy group back in London to work through
this emotional setback and enormous personal loss, I discovered
my therapist had also been killed in a traffic accident. Something
clicked in me and I began to consider myself something of an
albatross, avoiding people and advising them to avoid me.
Life goes on however. I moved studio
premises to my own space in trendy Brick Lane with another
college pal 2 floors down below me. That was '87-ish when
Brick Lane WAS trendy and a good authentic curry cost a mere £2. I needed space for
the computers I'd started to use for illustration and design
and I had a fair amount of work, part-time Art Directorships
at Robinson Books and André Deutsch, visiting tutorships
at St Martins School of Art in Covent Garden and Holborn, and
CD ROM design which involved video, interactivity and audio,
as well as traditional illustration with paint or caran d'ache
or computer illustration sometimes using 3D programs. Good
fun though hard work.
Over time since then I've also worked briefly in-house at
ITN on web design, and designed interactive CD ROMs for people
like Ericsson and Castrol, and designed the UK's first interactive
in gallery catalogue for the South London Gallery in 1995,
as well as done some corporate design work and work for Oxfam
and other charities.
Brick Lane was the focus of right wing hostility and there
were some serious confrontations there between the local Bengali
community and white skinheads. One night I slept on the floor
of the studio as I had a tight deadline for a CD ROM and home
was south of the river, pretty much no-go for taxis then. I
was so tired I didn't realize till next day that the Dickensian
tenement next door, a Bengali Community Co-op, had been firebombed
and completely gutted in the night. The terrace had tall tinderbox
narrow staircases and I was at the very top. If the fire had
spread I'd have had no chance. Also my only window had thumb
thick iron bars screwed into the wall.
However one night they did need unscrewing. There was a violent
thunderstorm while working late again and the guttering which
had silted up with autumn leaves, started spewing water into
the building, running under my floor, bringing the ceiling
down below me and pouring through 2 floors into my pal's studio.
I phoned him and he arrived with girlfriend and another pal
and power screwdrivers. The only solution to prevent another
ceiling collapse would have to involve unscrewing the bars
and someone climbing out on to the slanting roof into the rain
and storm and crawling along to the outlet with a big stick
to push the leaves through.
Muggins nominated himself but the only pole
we could find was a 10ft piece of narrow copper tubing left
in the hall downstairs. It seems like almost incredible stupidity,
the rain was about as heavy as it gets and for ease of maneuverability
I just wore a T-shirt on top. As I pushed this gunk down with
the others watching, about 50 feet up, my glasses running with
water, I looked up and could see flashes of lightning constantly
and simultaneously all around on the rooftops. Yet there was
I holding a perfect lightning conductor waggling it up and
down against the lead guttering.
I'm still here (I think) but that was hairy! I was lucky even
not to have slipped off the roof and dislodged the loose slates
on their rotted nails as the rain and wind lashed the building.
I moved again after about 3 years to a great place in trendy
media Soho, getting a great deal for huge space in Golden House,
Gt. Pulteney Street. Martin Clunes and his Men Behaving Badly
chum ran their small film company from one of the studios just
above me and things were still good though very hard work,
juggling my various freelance, teaching and part-time design
jobs. I was there till 1999 and I was with my German girlfriend
then.
Pete Rozycki
I've developed an uncanny
likeness to Pete Townsend (in the right light) over the
years, not out of choice as he isn't exactly a portrait
painting, but that too has been a weird and quite intrusive
aspect of my life. My name is of course Pete which made
it worse - or
better, depending on your point of view. The pic enclosed
gives you an idea and above me is the 29 and a half
pound Pike caught by my great grandad at Blenheim in
1923.
As Pete Townsend I've been stalked
on the tube, where after several line changes over the
underground system I had to do the classic cinematic
thing where I got off and the stalker got off following
me, then jumping back on as the doors are closing and
waving goodbye as he dashed back to no avail and ran
alongside outside desperately trying to open the doors. |
Pete Townsend or Rozycki? |
I've been given meals by restaurant
owners keen for a photo to hang on the walls, signed autographs
on ferries and in nightclubs, been told by a girl that I'd
made love to her the previous weekend, almost come to blows
with Billy Connolly who had had an altercation with him previously
and then he'd mistaken me for PT. I've also had long conversations
with people about my 'musical oeuvre', and with people who
went to school with his daughter, and was once threatened
by a bag man who asked me to show him some guitar licks then,
when I wouldn't show him, told me I should be careful 'someone'
doesn't do a John Lennon on me. I was even 'recognised' by
a member of the 60s group Herman's Hermits who shook my hand,
and he was actually a personal friend of Pete Townsend.
Maintaining the conversations I found
not that difficult. Just say "Uh . . ." a lot. Like, "I went to school with your
daughter Pete." "What, you mean uh . . ? uh . . ?". "Yes, Mary,
Pete." In enthusiasm they fill in the name of anything I 'forget'
for me. However I never much liked it and always after a bit,
the longest was 30 minutes, I tell them who I am. I do sign
myself 'Pete' which is no fraud ,when asked, though I try and
persuade people I'm not him from the outset. It just falls
on deaf ears and one girlfriend of a bouncer even advised me
it was wise to sign an autograph for her to give him or he
might take against me in a certain clenched fist kind of manner.
I couldn't persuade her I was just a substitute for another
guy.
Not being him has induced heaven knows
how much paranoia and I often have people look first at me
then around at other people with a smile. First off I check
it's not egg on the lip or a bogey, but usually they're wondering
if anyone has seen or are they the first - hey, it's Pete
Townsend! I do sometimes wonder if it's perhaps the nose
they're looking at.
The strangest case of mistaken identity was in my local in
Soho. I'd often drop in for a quiet pint but people would be
very strange for years till suddenly things seemed to settle
down. One day a stranger got into the usual thing and after
a few minutes when I told him my real self, the whole pub,
which had been very quiet and apparently not listening, burst
into laughter. I discovered after enquiry they'd all thought
I was a famous rock star for a year or more but wised up now
and were tuning in to our conversation that night. Won't get
fooled again.
The other bizarre thing is that I have enough
problems with who I am without some rock star hijacking my
personality. Maybe I should have taken up the offer of the
stunning model in The Sun and 13 Cantons pub in Soho who wanted
us to do a whistle stop tour of the US with me masquerading
as the big man. I know what would have happened. I wake up
on the last day with a massive hangover to find her, my credit
card and the dosh gone and me as usual with just the clothes
I stand in and with the local sheriff in the shades banging
on the door.
People have asked me if I kept up the Thespian thing after
school. Well ever since I was a young boy and I played the
Common Man (in A Man For All Seasons) being Pete Townsend has
been a relatively simple but unwelcome acting job, and maybe
I'll assemble a tribute band some day.
Pete Rozycki as The Common Man in A
Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt
I was introduced to a director of the
National Theatre just after leaving KHS by my mum's wealthy
employers who'd seen me in the above school play. She offered
me a 'starter' spear-carrier
type role in a big stage production. I turned it down . The
reason I said at the time was I wanted to make it on my own
terms, but the reality was and is acting is far too stressful,
the most stressful thing I've ever done. The applause etc.
is great but I'm really a bag of jelly underneath. Any moment
I think people will start booing. So no, I did no more thespianing.
And the lines to learn. I remember during The Alchemist at
KHS how I accidentally jumped a scene as the language was so
obscure I couldn't understand it myself let alone remember
it. As a hush came over the stage I saw the actors for that
scene putting on their costumes at hell for leather pace in
panic. I doubt anyone else noticed, it's a complex play.
I'll make all the rest a bit briefer now. I left London in
1999 after ongoing problems with my Tooting flat for 6 years,
virtually the entire inside collapsing with a loft tank burst,
and it declared unfit for habitation, rebuilt then partially
dismantled again and rebuilt again when the first repairs were
declared illegal. The landlord ended up with a conviction and
criminal record but that was no help to me. My teaching had
fallen through with college restructuring so part of my income
was lost and the design studio rent doubled with the influx
of Lottery funded small companies to Soho. Add to that some
crazy psycho was using a high powered air rifle with laser
sighting to shoot through my window with perfect grouping just
where my head would be as I watched TV on the sofa and I was
mugged late at night in Soho, leaving me in pretty much a coma
for 3 days in hospital and seriously rearranged features from
which I've never fully recovered. As I said, it's par for the
course in my life.
I returned, the prodigal, to my mum's in Swindon for 6 months
sleeping on a camp bed till I raised enough to move to Oxford
where I'd always wanted to live. I think the proximity of KHS
had a lot to do with that, the lyricism of the landscape, the
beautiful architecture and the creative intellectual atmosphere.
I could do much through the internet now so I worked from home.
Home was a small flat in Cauldwells Castle, photo enclosed.
I had the balcony flat, probably the only balcony overhanging
the river in Oxford. The place is a folly on an island, technically
an eyot, where Folly Bridge crosses the Isis, as the Thames
is called on its Oxford stretch through Oxford. Folly bridge
isn't named after the building though it stands where Roger
Bacon the 13th C alchemist and scientist had a folly, Friar
Bacon's Study, straddling the road at the southern entrance
to Oxford and the site of the original oxen ford whereby the
city gets its name. It's a great location though very noisy
and polluted with traffic and at night spooky with the ghosts
of alchemy. Google Earth it on postcode OX1 4LB.
I stayed there till about this time
a year ago last Christmas, when I decided to move to Plymouth
for the cheaper larger flat, the walks, and the sea - the views from my 2nd floor balcony
flat on Plymouth Hoe are stunning, to use that estate agent
cliché, whatever the weather and sometimes I get up
in the early hours just to see how the mood changes. Google
Earth PL1 2PL. It's very windy and if from the sea, a mild
wind in central Plymouth is always a gale up here, whistling
through the flat. I've converted one room to my studio.
I went back to KHS a few times in the 10 years after leaving,
visiting Mrs Snell once.
Looking back many of the staff almost
took me personally under their wings. Mrs Snell personally
took me to Cocteau films in Oxford Playhouse and to the Tate
at half term. Harry Wilkinson took me out alone to the stumps
evening after evening to coach me for the Captaincy of the
Plymouth House Cricket 1 st XI. Mr Kingsnorth used to personally
coach me for Poetry reading competitions and wrote a glowing
letter of praise to my mum for my part as Flute/Thisbe in
his production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. He was a very
strong role model for me and I was so sorry when he left
KHS. He and Mr Greene, his successor, laid the ground for
me to have auditions at the National Youth Theatre in London.
I can't deny this was a mixed blessing and though I was called
back some weeks later for a 2nd audition, I deliberately
flunked it as I didn't want to act. Also, not having been
in a big town, let alone a city, more than about 15 - 20
times since the age of 10, I was terrified.
And of course Mr Dickie Durrant put so much effort into teaching
me good draughtsmanship and appreciation of the renaissance
artists. I was more or less allowed to do what I wanted in
his lessons and copied works by the great masters, a method
I later learnt that their own apprentices used.
Well I think this is way too much for publication but I did
say . . .
I see that Nick Thompson wrote a piece
on the School Days site called 'Fishing Incident'. I can vouch for its veracity
as I was the boy from Durham and Maurice Grandsoult (a superb
athlete) was the Clyde boy. I still feel that sharp intake
of breath Nick as I read the letter.
I'm not sure the lake is correct, but below
is my memory of it. Incidentally the author of a series
of crime novels I design the covers for, David Dickinson (one
of those covers is included below [left] to show the kind of
stuff I do now plus another in a different genre showing a
SF computer illustration, created in a 3D program), was intrigued
enough to try and discover the house and lake I mention, as
he uses interesting locations for his books. We didn't find
it, but I'll check back about Daylesford Lake now Nick mentions
it.
Examples of Pete Rozyncki's
current design work
The lake and beautiful house on a slope above it had to be
approached through dense wood with the possibility of being
caught by the groundsman - who nearly did one day. It was like
going into a Narnia scene, everything landscaped, little lovers'
bridges, a gazebo in the lake with statue, a lovers' ornamental
rowing boat. Our whispers echoed back across the lakes it was
so still and quiet. We only caught one trout - but all we had
was a short bit of line, a cane, a bent pin and a dead bluebottle,
so it was amazing we even got that. I'd hold the pin carefully
behind Grandsoult who yanked the cane and the line flew out.
We caught a trout almost within minutes. As I say, I can't
work out exactly where it was from maps so perhaps it really
was a mystical place in another dimension.
When I read the letter I decided to run away from KHS and
ran down the hill to the gates sobbing and not knowing what
I'd do. Behind me a posse of lads, and I think a housemaster,
chased me, laughing - which made it worse. Then I think I heard
them say it was a joke, something stopped me anyway and I was
surrounded by laughing boys. Did I feel a prat - mainly for
breaking into tears?
I've included a couple of shots of the Hoe here, one from
the balcony showing the view of the foreshore when a spectacular
low cloud rolls in, leaving only the top of Drake's Island
and Mt Edgcumbe showing, and one along the promenade from the
old Eddystone lighthouse, now relocated on the Hoe. My flat's
roughly in centre of the tallest of the Victorian cream coloured
buildings.
Merry Christmas to all at KHS past and present
and maybe we'll bump into each other again sometime.
West Hoe, Plymouth with Drake's Island
and Mt Edgcumbe.
Towards
the promenade and Old Eddystone Lighthouse
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