Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [52]
Steve had a cottage at Aston Tirrold, in a remote part of the Berkshire Downs, where Traffic had written a lot of the Mr. Fantasy album, so I called him and started going over there. We’d drink and smoke and talk a lot, and play our guitars. I played him a song I had written about finding Hurtwood, “Presence of the Lord,” the second verse of which has the line “I have finally found a place to live just like I never could before.” For most of the time it was just the two of us hanging out, and we walked round the idea of forming a band without actually getting into a discussion about it. We were deliberately killing time, just having fun and getting to know one another.
One night Steve and I were at the cottage, smoking joints and jamming, when we were surprised by a knock at the door. It was Ginger. Somehow he had got wind of what we were doing and had tracked us down in spite of the fact that Steve’s cottage was way off the beaten track, surrounded by furrowed fields. Steve’s face lit up when he saw Ginger, while my heart sank, because up till that moment we were just having fun, with no agenda. I had been very cautious about not springing anything on Steve, just intending to let things evolve and see where we would go. Ginger’s appearance frightened me because I felt that all of a sudden we’d be a band, and with that would come the whole Stigwood machine and all the hype that had surrounded Cream. I remember thinking, “Oh no. Whatever’s going to happen now, I know it’s all going to go wrong.”
All these feelings I kept to myself, because I still hadn’t really found my voice. When things were going well, it was easy to go with the flow, but when things became difficult or disagreeable, I would feel a certain amount of resentment about what the flow was rather than try and do something about it, and then when I’d had enough I would just pull out or disappear without actually speaking up. Despite my concerns about Ginger, I was so keen to work with Steve that I compromised my intuition, thinking everything would turn out all right because he would see it through. I invested in his vision and, rather than stick my heels in, made the decision to just go along and see where we went.
As we began to give birth to a new band, an extraordinary girl brought down to Hurtwood by Monster came into my life. Her name was Alice Ormsby-Gore, the youngest daughter of David Harlech. Barely sixteen, she was hauntingly beautiful, with thick curly brown hair, huge eyes, an enigmatic smile, and a wonderfully infectious giggle. I thought she was astonishing, and though I was very taken with her, it never occurred to me then that anything could come from it. The age gap seemed enormous, and she seemed very fragile and slightly otherworldly. She asked me to go to a party in London with her, which kind of surprised me. I went and she completely ignored me all evening, even though, apart from Monster and Ian Dallas, I didn’t know a soul there.
For some reason in spite of myself, for we didn’t seem remotely compatible, I found her completely compelling. With her wistful quality and the Arab clothes she used to dress in, she was straight out of a fairy story. This fantasy was encouraged by Ian Dallas, who told me the tale of Layla and Manjun, a romantic Persian love story in which a young man, Manjun, falls passionately in love with the beautiful Layla, but is forbidden by her father to marry her and goes crazy with desire. Ian was forever saying that Alice was the perfect Layla, and while he thought Steve should be her Manjun,