Tomorrow is calling with
Promises new
I hear the echo of
Yesterday’s blue…

2
The Cave Dwellers

  It’s strange to think: That just a week ago to the day, prior to meeting the strange girl on the sands..
I had met up with my friends at our usual haunt, the Cave, which is situated in the cellar beneath the Haven Café on Tynemouth’s Front Street.
  And whilst not as large or as famous as Liverpool’s Cavern, has acoustics enough to reverberate ‘The Shape of Things To Come’ ‘The Eve of Destruction’ and ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ through the soles of the soul all the way down Front Street; and my moccasins being literally holy, that was some profound and meaningfully cosmic experience, until that is, the Greasers put Freddy and The Dreamers on the jukebox.
  All of us post-war ‘Baby Boomers’, there our respective affinities ended.
  The ‘Greasers’ being the short haired, leather clad crowd at the Cave, with the names of ELVIS, BRANDO and HOLLY studded onto the backs of their jackets, that Broooomed in on motorbikes..
As opposed to our crowd, the long haired, frayed jeaned, peace sign saluting C.N.D. badge wearing ‘Flower Children’; whose alternative Jesus was Ché Guevara, whose principles were calm Utopian, and whose existential music envisioned Armageddon..
......Oh mother tell your children
       Not to doooo what I have done
Spend their lives in sin and misery
       In the House of the Rising Sun.......
.. and there’s a particularly favourite ditty cranking up through the asphalt to put a spring in one’s arrival.
  Hal, one of our crowd, stood outside, leaning against the café window.
  Wearing his full-metal-jacket of badges, he beamed a greeting on catching sight of my approach, and pointed proudly at his collar:
  ‘Got another one today, what do you think?’

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  ‘Whadoaa think? That having Marilyn Monroe at yer necks gotta cause a boy discomfort.’
  ‘Ha Ha, she does that all right! But what can I do when these sex-goddesses keep attaching themselves to me.’
  ‘In yer dreams Hally-boy.’
  ‘Oh, now I’m wounded..’
  ‘Is it any wonder with her and, her and, her and, her at yer neck, notwithstandin’ halfa ton of tin with pins on your person.’
  ‘Ouch! Ha Ha, I think that this one looks like you.’
  ‘Getaway, the only Italian sexpot I see when I look in the mirror’s Julius Caesar.’
  ‘Yes.. Now that you mention it! Ha Ha let’s go inside and I’ll buy you an orange juice.’
  Walking through the door, a group from our crowd got up from their seats at the back table and came over..
  ‘Hi Beautiful!’
  ‘Halo muchmore Beautiful!’
  My friend Ethel and I being a mutual appreciation society, she and I always breaking off conversation or dancing with all others, to mosh together to Hang On Sloopy, and sing to each other Sorrow, my verse being about her long blonde hair, and she alternating with, ’With your long black hair..’
  ‘Hello, TROUBLE!’
  ‘Halo, JOOOLIE.’
  Bomma, ever the realist. The Peter Noone/Kieth Relf look-alike who rued the day when he let it slip that his real name was, Julian.
  ‘Hello gorgeous! Where were you last night?’
  And John, ever sweet but decidedly blinkered to reality.
  And running up the stairs two at a time..
  ‘Is that Beth that’s come in?... BEEETH, OH I’M SO GLAD YOU’VE COME….’
  .. Dorothy, who with eyelinered eyes and bouffanted hair swathed in black chiffon is a combination of Hepburnesque cute meets sultry Greco.
  ‘So where were you last night, Beth?
  ‘We thought you might’ve been at the Spanish Battery with your school friends again, and looked all over for you..’
  ‘SCHOOOOL friends! Haa Ha, how can she have school friends when she’s nevva there?’
  ‘Button it, Jooooolie..
  ‘I was babysitting last night, John.’
  ‘Well why didn’t you say? We could’ve come along and babysat ya.’
  ‘Ha Ha, and I could’ve put my sister-in-law’s soup-can rollers in yer pretty yella hair for ya, Jooooolie.’
  ‘WOE!... Wanna orange juice?’
  ‘Hal’s got one for me over there…… ‘
  And it was then that a Marianne Faithfull song plaintively drifting up from the jukebox usurped into the playful rib-taking banter and created a collective pause..

I’m staring at the setting of the sun
For I know my time with you is almost done
And the minutes oh so special
Yes each and every one...


..and looking around at the faces of my friends, each and every one, an inexplicable feeling of sadness washed over me, so I laughed and clowned and ruffled their hair in one’s usual mode of reverse-psychology; persuading Bomma (too easily) to put his hand in his pocket and go change the tune to the, Pretty Things..
Don’t bring me down, maaan
Don’t bring me down.....

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.. defying sentiment to try that trick again.
  ‘SLURRRRRP.. right you critters, I’ve gotta..’
  ‘Hey Beth, why do you call us critters?’
  ‘Because you aren’t, no ladies..’
  ‘Haa Ha neither are YOU..’
  ‘Howsabout a soupcon of soup-cans, Joooolie?’
  ‘Beth, let’s go daaa..’
  ‘Whoa, before I go anywhere Dorothy, after four orange-juices I gotta GO…’
  After I’d (gone), so to speak, Dorothy was standing eagerly at the door..
  And the cranking up of the familiar chords of a Searchers’ song, suggesting she’d persuaded someone to put her coin in the jukebox on the wall in the middle of the stairs, Dorothy piped up ritually..
  ‘OH LISTEN WHAT’S ON! Oooh let’s go downstairs and dance, Beth.. HEEEE’s in!’
  HEEEE, being Willick. The Cave circle’s girls’ equivalent to moody mysterious pretty- pouting James Dean with a Mod cut. Whom tall and sleek and black-clad head to toe and chin aloofly high, would saunter on in wearing a purposefully bored discerning blue eye that like a Sultan, appraised the procession of comely young dancing-girl hopefuls almost contemptuously, from the stairs or from the darkest recess in the far corner of the Cave.
  And my friend Dorothy, three or so years older than I, tall and willowy and gamine as if she’d just stepped out of Breakfast At Tiffany’s , who overlooked that a Gargoyle’s poor substitute for her huckleberry friend to make her see the light, was near swooning in vapid raptures at the mere passing shadow of..
  ‘OH, GOD.. HEEEE’S GORGEOUS!.. OOOOH, ISN’T HEEEE ?…. GOD!’
.. And she’d’ve got an answer had one not been too busy holding her up, to genuflect.

I can feel a new expression on my face
I can feel a glowing sensation taking place,
Trumpets sound and thunder boo-oo-ooms
Every time that you, walk in the roo-oom..

  And my friend’s anthem in full swing, step by step I followed in her wake as she floated like a princess down the stairs. The desired effect by what I could gather was that every time the Searchers’ sounded out the fanfare of trumpets and booms, as if by magic the wondrous vision of dreamy loveliness would glide down the stairs, thus spellbinding the discerning blue eye of, GOD..
  ‘Is he looking at me Beth, is HEEEE?’
  Said Dorothy, cool beguiling and nonchalant from her dancing position on his toes. And never one to with-hold the truth from a friend..

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  Said Dorothy, cool beguiling and nonchalant from her dancing position on his toes. And never one to with-hold the truth from a friend..
  ‘Yes Dorothy, you’ve got his undivided attention.. In fact ‘es positively fixated by you.’
  ‘Oooh, I could just die!’
  And were they stiletto-heels on my moccasined friend’s feet, that would’ve been his line.
  And she swaying and swerving her stuff amidst the other seven dancing veils competing with Salome, I momentarily left her to go over and chat and have a laugh with my other friends, noting another’d just come in; just remembering to be back in time before the song’s last line..
Arriving back on cue, Dorothy whispered that we change places so’s she could gaze into the eyes of love’s proverbial young dream, and acquiescing to her wish..
  I then felt two arms encircle me from the deepest recess of the Cave, and spinning around found oneself eye to discerning blue eye and almost mouth to poutingly parting mouth with.. GOD!   And not waiting for the booms and trumpets to alert the searchers, I ascended the stairs faster than the speed of sound, bolted out the door and onto the street willing the ground to open up should the bus not turn up in time to make oneself, disappear.
  ‘BETH! BETH WAIT…’
And having no option but to hear my friend out as she hurriedly caught up with me, I decidedly red-faced and abashed blurted out that I was, sorry.
  ‘GOD, why be sorry Beth?.. HEEEE tried to kiss you. God I wouldn’t be sorry if that was me..’
  ‘I mean I didn’t mean for you to get hurt..’
  ‘You’re…. a strange one, Beth. But you’re my best friend here, so don’t let me lose you too.. Please.’
  Ending up hurting my friend two-fold; sadly some girls open themselves up to inadvertent hurt. And, some boys too if the shyness I perceived in the deepest recesses of two discerning blue eyes holds true..
For albeit freeze-framed in time and journal-pages where my friends remain there at our Cave by the long sands and, there skinny-dipping like laughing and howling water babies in the long sands’ sea..
With the exception of Ethel whose delightful surname’s, Hope; I would never venture amongst the crowd or to the Cave again.

I have my books
And my poetry to protect me
I am shielded in my armour…

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