This posting is a follow-up to yesterday's pic of the Eel Pie Island Hotel. Following is a chapter from my memoir/haibun Eel Pie Island Dharma. I self-published it in 1990 with Unfinished Monument Press. Fellow Eel Pie survivor Weed posted it online in the early 2000s, and Tai Grove published a professional edition with Hidden Brook Press in 2012.
Chapter 6 - Meeting Eel Pie
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"Out of college, money spent see no future, pay no rent all the money's gone no place to go ..." Abbey Road, The Beatles |
I caught the double-decker bus to Twickenham, and quickly found the arched footbridge which led to Eel Pie Island. It was about two hundred feet across the little bridge, with a beautiful view of the Thames. When I had reached the island I felt I had entered a special place. A footpath lined with neat little cottages wound through the centre of the island. There was no missing the old hotel at the end of the footpath. It was derelict, and I just walked in where the grand front entrance had once been.
Without any problems I quickly located the founder of the commune. Cliff was an artist/cartoonist and an anarchist. He was living with his American girlfriend, Ame, in a large room on the second floor of the hotel. Cliff was a big bear of a man by English standards. He had long, strawlike brown hair and an unkempt beard. With his granny glasses he looked like a professor gone bad. Ame was an All-American girl - fresh-faced and clean limbed with glasses - a professor's wife gone bad.
Cliff's easel and layout table and supplies spilled over one half of their large room, and in the other half was a big old mattress on the floor covered with quilts and blankets. The scene was artsy and cozy and there was the musty smell of Thames dampness pervading.
It looked like an enticing way to live, very bohemian and independent and countercultural. As I introduced myself to begin the interview, I was compelled to say, "I'm really a poet, not a reporter."
"What kind of poetry?" Cliff wanted to know. "Mostly haiku poetry, it's a Japanese style," and I dug into my dolly bag to give them a copy of Cricket Formations.
"We want to build a commune of artists, especially politically conscious artists," Cliff explained. "Why don't you pick out a room to use as a study and you could live here as part of the commune. Only a couple of people have moved in so far. You'd have your pick of rooms."
This was too good an offer to resist. I dashed around the hollow building. Too Much! There were no flats available in the Greater London area. I had been turfed out of two bedsitters in a week, and here I was being offered a room of my own in this picturesque setting. Thoughts of the interview were forgotten. I was a poet again.
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EEL PIE ISLAND At first there were only a handful of hippies in the derelict hotel and I got a room instead of a story when I said I'm really a poet not a reporter Two years of my life sleepstoned hiding from the clammy Thames fog only our black and brown hashish smoke holding up the crumbling walls It's all so trite ten years later so far out and away from the foggy decay of spunksoaked mattresses Dougie, Crippled Eddie, Lorna Scotch John, Seamus Angie - Dominic Where are you now as the world discos towards 1984 to lift my head off the floor hand me a fuming chillum to kiss me tonight |
Eel Pie Dharma is protected by international copyright laws. Individuals may print off a copy of this work for personal use only to facilitate easier reading.
Eel Pie Dharma - contents | previous chapter (5) | next chapter (7)
Eel Pie Island (words & pics) | Cliff Harper - The Education of Desire
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