Faith - Lesley Pearse [46]
The day he first met them.
It was right at the end of July ’72, a warm, sunny day on the west coast of Scotland, by Castle Douglas. A week earlier he’d finished his five-year apprenticeship as a joiner and he had to decide whether he was going to start up on his own or join another company. It seemed a good idea to have a bit of a holiday first, so he hitch-hiked over to Castle Douglas to look up some old friends who were squatting in an old house there.
It was a disappointment to find all but one of his friends had moved on to Ibiza. Only Ewan was left, and the others had been replaced by a bunch of English hippies. Ewan had always been mad as a bucket of frogs: small and stocky, with flame-red hair which he’d started growing at fifteen and had never cut since. He embraced the whole peace and love thing chapter and verse. He ate brown rice, grew his own dope, consulted the Tarot cards at least once a week and believed every way-out philosophy going. Yet give him a few whiskies and he’d revert to early programming from his father, and he would fight anyone.
The house was not the sturdy, small stone cottage Stuart had expected either, but a rambling, dilapidated old farmhouse at the end of a long rutted track. The London hippies were a welcoming bunch, though, if a little spaced out, and the weather was good, so Stuart thought he might as well stay for a while and help Ewan fix up a few things around the house.
Stuart knew that he was often referred to as a part-time hippy by those who considered themselves the real thing. He wore his hair long, he had the obligatory cheesecloth shirts and flared loons, smoked a bit of dope and listened to Cream, Traffic and Led Zeppelin. But he had always had a work ethic; he had wanted to be a joiner like his father since he was six and old enough to hold a saw. He would hitch-hike to rock concerts and drop a bit of acid now and then at the weekends, but nothing had ever got in the way of going to work and serving his time, for he believed having a trade was all-important
Yet that first week in Castle Douglas, he lay around like all the others smoking dope, listening to them talking about going to Marrakech, or overland to India, and for the first time ever he considered dropping out as they had done.
He was weary of being treated like a kid by the older men at work, of the jokes about his long hair, his girlfriends, and the kind of music he liked. He was an oddity because he didn’t down eight pints of beer after work or get into fights, and there was a faint implication that this made him unmanly. But he didn’t need alcohol to make himself feel good, he felt that way by doing a job well, by walking through the park, reading a book or playing his guitar. At work the other men had no real conversation and he was often frustrated and irritated by their narrow views. It would be so good to travel, to mix with people with broader outlooks and who wanted to challenge the old regimes.
The day that his life changed for ever started early. He was sleeping on an old mattress on the floor of one of the outhouses, and as there was nothing over the window, the sun came in and woke him just after five. The day before, he’d scrubbed out the room and painted it all white, and as he lay there looking around him, he thought he’d better get up on the roof and check there were no loose tiles, otherwise it would leak when it rained.
All at once he was fired up. If he could get some work near here he could save enough money to travel next winter. Josie, the girl who looked like a Red Indian squaw, had already asked him if he’d like to go to India with her group of friends.
He was still up on the roof