A BUSTLE IN MY HEDGEROW

It's funny. I'm currently selling off old toy stall stock; vintage toys, games, puzzles, books, LP's, videos and comics. The attic is full to bursting. A long spring-clean seemed to fit Lockdown and now School's out for the summer I can't stop!

The house is choc-full as well as after 41 years together me and the Missus have assembled a whole pile of life in general.

Sometimes I wonder how we ended up with so much stuff and I'm sure this is a common experience for people like us well over 50. Working life is drawing slowly to a close and we've surrounded ourselves with a life's-worth of ornaments, books, mementos, collections, furniture, pictures, pots and pans. Its how we filled our days.

But there was a time when I had very little at all. Almost a blank page in comparison to today and I can now see that period as a base-level for the start of our current heap of things piling up!

It was when I left my home town in 1980. For a couple of years I'd had a day job to pay for amps and guitars for a local teen rock band I was in, but in the September of 1980 all the other three group members left for Uni. They were 18. I was a year older, renting a flat and with a hippy's head full of Gaia I had no thirst for more formal education. I needed 'to find myself' as we would have said back then.

So in the late winter of 1980 I quit my insurance job and with no fanfare left my home town of Preston for good. My destination, the Ouse Washes RSPB Bird Reserve in the Cambridgeshire fens, where I'd signed up as a volunteer warden for a year, something which fitted well with the 'long hair' I was as I turned 20 that December.

I took very very little to the fens. I couldn't carry much anyway on the train. A hold-all, the guitar and the clothes on my back and that was it. What  I did have left-over from my former life, my childhood, I'd left in a cupboard - electric guitar, amp, LP's, magazines, books and a a built-up Aurora Witch and a Dracula candle -  in my old flat, which my older brother now rented. I'd chucked some other stuff, some clothes and hippy posters like Jesus is Coming and Bombs for Breakfast?, which my brother wouldn't want.

Besides, the accommodation I was in on 'the Washes' was tiny, basically a large hut called Cygnus. There was a combined living space and kitchenette and two bedrooms containing two bunk-beds for four people.  There wasn't room to swing a wren round!

Probably the biggest single item in the hut was my 12-string EKO acoustic guitar, which took up far too much space in the cramped living area. I kept in on my bunk-bed when not in use. My stablemate, Dave, also there for a year on something called YTS, took up some more of the hut and I think his biggest possession was his telescope and tripod. He was a much keener 'birder' than me and very knowledgeable about wildlife. I got to know Dave really well.

The other two lower bunk-beds were for weekend volunteers, which the RSPB was well used to, unlike us year-longers, who were quite new. The weekenders - bankers, teenagers, birders and office workers all wanting to graft in a beautiful place for a while and do some birdwatching - didn't bother me. I got used to their comings and goings and enjoyed the fresh blood they injected every week. I was a vegetarian at the time and a terrible, almost useless cook, so if any of them made me a plate of grilled courgettes and cheese they'd be my friend for life!

The weekenders, on the other hand, drove Dave wild and to be fair he worked much harder than me on the reserve - I did a lot of writing in the bustling reeds when I should have been grafting! - and needed his own space. We coped though and got through the winter nights all together listening to the radio - the BBC aired Lord of the Rings - and I played songs on the 12-string. I remember a young punk rocker birder listening to me play and sing Space Oddity by Bowie. At the end he said 'not bad Hippy!'. It was like the peace-making of rival tribes in the shifting sands of rock!

Even though I owned hardly anything that year and lived on the dole [volunteering was aloud back then] it was without doubt one of the happiest years of my life. A stand-out year unlike any other before or after and marked a clear watershed between my former self and what was to come. I'm glad I had nothing except my guitar. I have to admit I miss those days a lot. 

I left the fens in the Autumn of 1981 on the back of a friend's motorbike. All I had was my old hold-all. My guitar was left behind as I plumb forgot to take it. I hope someone somewhere is strumming Space Oddity to the applause of punks!

Did you have very little when you left home readers?