Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [50]
What I liked most about Hurtwood was the solitariness and the peace. I also loved the road that led to it, which went from Shere to Ewhurst and at one point, in a place called “The Cut,” became single-lane and looked like a riverbed dug down between sheer, high rock walls. It appeared to be thousands of years old, and I heard all kinds of myths about it having been a smugglers’ route. In the winter, when snow clung to the overhanging trees, it was like being in a white tunnel. When I drove down there, I felt like I was entering Hobbit land. I decided very quickly that this was the place where I would live for the rest of my life. I was absolutely sure of that.
I moved in very quickly, with my guitars, a couple of armchairs in the living room, and a bed upstairs. I also had a 1912 Douglas motorbike, which I had bought at a shop in Ripley. It didn’t actually work. I just pushed it around, and eventually I stood it in the middle of the living room like a sculpture. I gave myself one other expensive present, a pair of huge six-foot-high cinema loudspeakers, made by Altec Lansing, called The Voice of the Theatre. Made of wood, each one had a metal trumpet on top, and they gave my music system a great sound.
After a few months of living at Hurtwood in a very spartan way, I decided it was time for a change. Around this time in London, a new group of people came on the scene, aristocratic “hippies” of the upper classes, who had dropped out and were living a kind of gypsy life. The leaders of this set were Sir Mark Palmer, who ran the English Boys modeling agency, Christopher Gibbs, an antique dealer who had designed the sets for Performance, and Jane, Julian, and Victoria Ormsby-Gore, the elder children of David Harlech, British ambassador to Washington during the Kennedy era. Stylish in dress and leaders of fashion, they were surrounded by artistic and interesting people and used to hang out in a lot of the places I frequented, like Granny’s, the Chelsea Antique Market, and the Picasso. We had a mutual friend in Ian Dallas, whom I had met at the Pheasantry and who was very interested in Sufism. One night he took me down to the Baghdad House, an Arab restaurant on Fulham Road, the basement of which was decked out like an oriental bazaar and was an ultracool hangout, often frequented by various Stones and Beatles. There I was introduced to an up-and-coming young interior decorator named David Mlinaric. His nickname was “Monster.”
At my request, Monster, who had done a lot of work for Mick Jagger, came down to take a look at Hurtwood, which I had been trying to furnish. I wanted it to have a Spanish or Italian feel and had been buying furniture from antique shops in Chelsea and Fulham, eighteenth-and nineteenth-century pieces, but without good advice I was being ripped off right, left, and center. The house had central heating, so the furniture would warp and crack and began to fall to bits. I also had some Arab furniture, some Indian carved chairs, and a big old refectory table in the hall, so there was a funny mixture of bits and pieces. Monster called in Christopher Gibbs to help, and, bit by bit, they turned it into something nice. They put some woven carpet in the front room, which made it more comfortable, and a lovely old four-poster in the bedroom, and lots of Persian and Moroccan hangings,