Patrick Lane's Memories of the Witches

Post date: 14-Apr-2020 08:16:40

It was in Paris that I had my first taste of hashish. Hervé’s elder brother, Henri, would take the two of us by train from Versailles, where they lived, to the narrow, cobbled streets of the left bank. The kebab-sellers had not yet taken over St. Michelle in the early sixties and Rue de la Huchette was still romantic and mysterious. Henri, who was a student at the Sorbonne, would huddle in a dark corner to make his purchase and then the three of us would descend the stone steps of the quays and sit beside the Seine, watching the dark river flow past while we passed the pipe back and forth. With a well-thumbed copy of Camus protruding from the pocket of his black leather jacket, his dark 6-o-clock shadow and his nonchalant sophistication, Henri remained my hero for many years.

Opium, absinthe, hashish – I wanted to taste it all and to escape the narrow, middle-class confines of my miserable, boring, suburban, bourgeois existence. I was a horrible teenager and I shudder when I think what my poor parents had to suffer. During the days I was forced to wear the brightly colored school uniform of Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School; a dark-blue blazer with yellow piping and the Queen’s coat of arms in gold, a peaked cap and gray flannel trousers. But as soon as I was home again I would change into my other uniform of black plastic sun-glasses, black turtle-neck sweater, black plastic jacket (I could not afford my dream of a leather one), black jeans and cowboy boots. I thought I looked pretty cool and all the people who made fun of me, starting with my family, were simply demonstrating their pathetic bourgeois prejudices.

I would ride my bicycle through the gloomy streets of Finchley all the way to Hampstead and, having hidden it around the corner, I’d casually saunter into one of the many coffee bars, like the Witch’s Cauldron or Moon & Sixpence, where the existentialists hung out. The guys all had real leather jackets and the girls had long silken hair, short skirts and long legs in black stockings. They arrived in MG convertibles with the hood down and they smoked French Gauloises cigarettes. I dreamed hopelessly of having one of those girls lean her head on my shoulder while I explained the theories of Jean-Paul Sartre between puffs of my Gauloises.

After indulging my fantasies for about an hour I would glance at my watch as though remembering a gallery opening I was expected to attend and would saunter out into the night.

“Who is that tall, dark haired man who sits all alone” I imagined the girls asking each other with hints of a French accent. “He seems to conceal some secret sorrow. There is a romantic mystery about him that I would like to explore.”

Back around the corner I would climb onto my bicycle and peddle furiously back to Barnet in a desperate effort to meet my parent’s mid-night curfew.

From Recollections of a Racketeer by Patrick Lane

Patrick Lane in 1969 at the Stones free concert in Hyde Park

I didn't meet Patrick until 1966 at the University of Sussex. Our paths had not crossed at the Witches or the Moon and Sixpence. But at Sussex he shone like a star and we have been friends ever since. I was dazzled by the audacity of his critical essay on Richardson's Clarissa framed as a dialogue between Mick Jagger and the Archbishop of Canterbury, used as representatives of the Diyonesian and Appolonian traditions. (PE)