London 1980

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London 1980

It was almost compulsory to go and spend a year in London after school finished when I was growing up in Australia.

I had a scrap of paper that a friend had given to me with someone that I should contact. I gave them a call and got a cheap bottle of wine and rocked up to the address, and then found out they lived opposite Harrods in a very elegant three-story apartment. It was embarrassing about the wine and I was thinking I should have got something better.

The man of the house, if we can call him that was an ‘Industrialist’ and clearly saw himself as a Bastion of English Society and after a while I realized he still thought Australia was a colony. It was like ‘Tell me Old Boy, do the Aboriginals till throw boomerangs down there’? I just pretended it wasn’t happening and I was thinking I bet he owns cotton mills where everyone gets paid 5p a month. But it was a big and extended family there.

I was really getting on well with one of the people there and we were bonding. And I was thinking he is real. And then I was mortified later in the night when I realized he was actually a servant who had been embedded into the family. I thought he was an uncle or a cousin or something like that but he just started serving everyone. I was getting nervous at this place. Then the Head of this Family started talking to me again. And then he said something like ‘Tell me old boy, what do you think about the Falklands War’?

I knew this was a dangerous question. The Falklands War had just started. I was thinking The Falkland Islands seemed suspiciously close to Argentina, more so than to England, but my mother had said I always have to be polite, and they had been very hospitable, and it was best to be diplomatic, and so I was stalling because I really know what to say. And then he said ‘Well the answer is obvious, we should nuke them’. And that threw me, so I said ‘That sounds like a good idea’.

Then I was thinking let me get this straight he wants to nuke the whole of Argentina because they want to get their island back which was just off their coast. This could be one of the craziest things I have ever heard. And later I was happy to get back out onto the street again.

I was going from one misadventure to another when I first got to London. Not long after that I went into a record shop on The Kings Rd in Chelsea to get a copy of Pink Floyd’s new album ‘The Wall’. Then I saw a beautiful girl who was looking for records in that shop and I went up to her and asked her ‘Do you know where I could find the Pink Floyd albums’? And she said something like ‘'Ýes, they are probably in the section under P’. And then I thanked her very much.

We ended up striking up a conversation. She was from Chile. We were getting on well. She said ‘Come around and meet her family one day. Which I did a week or two later, but my mouth fell open when I realized her Father was one of Pinochet’s General’s in London. I looked at her and then looked at him and I was starting to feel torn or aware of some moral dilemma. There was a part of me that could have started talking up the Military Junta. I was thinking this could be one of the worst things that has happened to me.

Then I had a big experience of karma about two weeks later. I said to her over the phone I couldn’t go out on the weekend because I wasn’t feeling well. It wasn’t true. I was mostly imagining her Father ie .one of Pinochet’s General’s having me thrown out of a plane over the White Cliffs of Dover or somewhere. Anyway, we didn’t go out that weekend and I met up with a friend from Australia and we went out drinking all day and then we went to a party. And you wouldn’t believe it, but when we got there she was at the same party.

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