A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Etheses - Queen Margaret ...

229
Well, it was fab... it was (sighs)… a lot of fun… people from all different times and
areas of my… of my life and er … it was a very nice atmosphere, you know… it was
just … made loads of food, put it out there and let everybody get on with it really
and er… the weather was just absolutely perfect and it was just very chilled out and
er… a warm, sunny time … just a real privilege to be able to share some time with...
er … you know, people who‟ve been very dear to me at different times in my life
through my… (l.3:406ff.)
From about 4.20pm those with furthest to travel home started to head off. Others stayed
around and sat in groups, talking, laughing, reminiscing, smoking, drinking. At around 5.50
we were asked very politely if we would leave as a theatre group had to set up in the area for
an open-air performance of Goldsmith‟s She Stoops to Conquer that evening.
An old man at the flats came out to complain about the remains of the party moving to the
communal garden. “You can‟t come here with a dog!” he objected. Brian grew quite irate.
“I‟m fifty now! I can do what I like!” he responded (l.3:141ff.)
Brian had planned that anyone still around later on in the evening, including myself as a
researcher, should head off to a Sixties nightclub. As he explained to me the following day:
I felt I wanted to do something a little bit different … I have always loved clubs …
nightclubs … in the past, not that I have huge experience of the places, but … er …
not having been to one for about … four years or something, I just quite fancied just
… going out and having a bit of a dance… even… even though it‟d be a... a
standing-still dance… (l.3:529ff.)
The hot Brighton night at 11pm heaved with noisy, jostling crowds of mostly young people
out on the piss. Scantily-dressed women in their late teens and twenties, in their gangs of
three or four or twelve, eyed up the well-groomed packs of casual young men. The men eyed
them back. Movement was all around, people coming, going, passing, stopping to look,
being left behind and catching up. A sense of raucous, boozy enjoyment was mixed, I
sensed, with a testosterone-filled threat of unpleasantness (though talking over this with
Brian the following day, he said he had felt no danger in the air). A heavy-built bouncer
admitted us into The Pavilion Tavern, a crowded bar with a shabby grandeur (that had
obviously seen better days) in North Street. The disco was to take place upstairs, but would
not start till 1pm. Two hours more of drinking first.