My mother had aspired to the ‘American Dream’ for decades. Like millions of others after the War, she believed that “every person has the freedom and opportunity to succeed and attain a better life” and has the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" [Wikipedia]. What was unusual was that my mother had been born into a British working-class family in a small town (population 16,477) thirty miles west of London … and had never visited America.
Maybe her enthusiasm had been stirred as a pre-teen when she would cycle a mile from home up the steep hill of College Ride to the prisoner of war camp for captured Germans on Old Dean Common. During most of the War, this site had served as a training camp for exiled French Resistance fighters, occasionally visited by General Charles de Gaulle, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Lady Churchill (who spoke perfect French). Then, between 1944 and 1945, its Nissen huts were turned over to war prisoners whom mischievous local kids would taunt through its perimeter fence.
My mother recalled regularly chatting with “American soldiers” guarding the ‘Old Dean Common Camp’ who were more likely to have been members of the Number 2 Canadian Special Infantry Battalion stationed there. Its troops marched past her front garden in huge numbers to join a parade along Camberley High Street, past the greengrocer where her mother was employed [see blog], to hear a welcome address by the town’s "mayor" (more likely the chairman of Frimley & Camberley Urban District Council) during Canada’s Thanksgiving week in 1945. Off-duty Canadians would frequent the town’s coffee bars and pubs, mixing with locals until this camp was demolished after the War to make way for new ‘overspill’ public housing. Eerily, amidst the resultant sprawling Old Dean Estate’s 2,000-odd homes, the former camp’s documented co-ordinates [Ordnance Survey National Grid reference SU 884 617] are those of the semi-detached house in which I would be born the following decade.
These early exchanges with foreigners fuelled my mother’s desire to travel and explore the world beyond Camberley. After leaving school in 1950, she planned to study agriculture in Denmark, inspired by her father’s knowledge of plants and flowers shared whilst they spent hours toiling on the family allotment off Barossa Road and their back garden’s vegetable patch. However, her mother refused to let her go abroad. She asked her parents for a mailed subscription to ‘LIFE’ magazine, perhaps as a result of one of the Canadians having given her an issue. Her parents agreed. Living in a home without television, LIFE’s remarkable photographic essays offered her a unique window into a colourful world far beyond the dull suburban existence she had lived until then.
The outdoor ‘Blue Pool’ on London Road was the one place in Camberley where young people could hang out and meet without parental chaperones [see blog]. My mother having been a keen swimmer, it was beside the water’s edge that she met her tall, dark and handsome husband-to-be one summer. Together, they shared a love of all things American, whether watching movies at the local cinema, listening to the new rock’n’roll music or poring over the pages of LIFE. Before long, they hatched a plan to marry and emigrate to Canada, despite knowing little about the country. It would be the escape from British suburbia that my mother desired. It would be the escape from a violent father that my father longed for.
In the summer of 1951, my mother visited the ‘Festival of Britain’ at London’s newly built South Bank complex, one of ten million paying attendees to view exhibits that “helped reshape British arts, crafts and design for a generation” and were intended “to give the British public a sense of recovery and progress after the devastation of the Second World War” [Wikipedia]. The impression it made on her was so significant that she would still talk glowingly about the event decades later. For the rest of her life, she subscribed to ‘modernism’, whether it was buying the latest household gadgets, cooking new convenience foods or pursuing contemporary fashion trends. All it needed was for my mother to spot an advertisement for some new product or design for her to rush out and buy it!
However, the young couple’s plan for the 1950’s had to be postponed due to world events. Though the War had ended a decade earlier, my father was conscripted into the British Army and sent to the Suez Canal. Despite no experience, he was assigned to drive trucks long distances across desert roads, then demobbed two years later with a UK Driving Licence without necessitating a test. It stirred in him a passion for driving at excessive speeds, subsequently with occasional predictable outcomes.
The 1950’s were years of continuing austerity, wartime rationing only ending in 1954. The decade started with my mother working in a chocolate factory [see blog] and my father serving an apprenticeship [see blog]. On his return from Egypt, they married, despite the disapproval of my maternal grandfather, and had their first child. The decade ended with them evicted from their council house for unpaid rent arrears [see blog]. Their plan to emigrate to Canada had to be put on hold.
The 1960’s were kinder to their ambitions. The decade started with my mother working as bookkeeper for a nearby garage group [see blog] and my father launching his own quantity surveyor business from home [see blog]. Following intervention by my maternal grandfather, they now owned their own house (with a 1% Midland Bank mortgage) and car [see blog]. My mother passed her driving test and gave up smoking. My father wore a suit to meet clients, styling himself on Darren from the American TV series ‘Bewitched’, and began marketing himself as an ‘architect’ [see blog]. Their incomes began to offer opportunities to indulge their shared love of the North American lifestyle and modernism, even before their planned move to Canada.
My father bought a succession of American cars, saloon cars then station wagons after the birth of their second child and my mother’s purchase of a huge Saint Bernard dog [see blog]. Those cars, particularly the pink American Motors ‘Rambler 770’, were a rare sight in Camberley and attracted attention whenever they drove out. We had one of the town’s first colour televisions [see blog], a huge pink American fridge [see blog], a knocked through living/dining room in our semi-detached two up/two down house [see blog], a reel-to-reel tape recorder [see blog], a salon-style hairdryer, an infrared sunray lamp, a ‘slimming machine’ and a knitting machine, amongst other gadgets. They gave their two children North American names to better integrate them into Canadian life [see blog]. My mother watched all the American daytime soaps (including ‘Peyton Place’, ‘The Doctors’ and ‘Doctor Kildare’). My father took me to American-style weekend drag racing events launched in 1964 at nearby Blackbushe Airfield.
Religion was absent in our household. My mother, along with millions of other young adults, found the ‘hope’ she sought in the form of America’s Kennedy family. When John F Kennedy was elected American president in 1960, it was welcomed across the globe as a revolutionary change to the old war-torn world order, promising the dawn of a new exciting age. The Kennedys were young, they were good looking, they were stylish, they were smart and they made statements in a direct and passionate way about the issues of the day. They spoke about ‘the future’ and made it sound an exciting place where opportunities would flourish for ordinary people, social inequalities would be eradicated, and new technologies would radically change people’s everyday lives for the better. To my mother, this was the kind of life she craved. The Kennedys offered her ‘hope’ that such a modern life could be possible for her … and her children.
Kennedy as President heralded a golden age for LIFE as, unlike previous incumbents, he understood totally the need to project an ‘image’, opening his professional and private life to the media. Almost every issue of the magazine was filled with remarkably candid photos of him, his stylish wife Jacqueline, his brothers and their children living what seemed like the ‘perfect life’, jet-setting around the world whilst wearing the latest fashions. My mother loved these photographs of the Kennedys, sometimes tearing out pages that showed Jacqueline’s latest outfits which she longed to wear herself. She wanted a life like theirs.
Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 shocked the entire world. In its aftermath, my mother bought a huge gold coin, larger and heavier than the crown coin of the time, embossed with Kennedy’s portrait on one side and words in tribute to him on the other. She kept it on its own in a small white jewellery box and often took it out to explain to me who the Kennedys were and why they were so significant, not just to her but to people like us across the world. I was in awe of the impact this faraway American family had on my suburban mother’s optimistic worldview.
Although she continued to renew her annual subscription to LIFE, after 1963 there was an emerging sadness that partially erased some of my mother’s ‘hope’, compounded by the assassinations of Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr in 1968 plus the horrors of the escalating Vietnam war shown nightly on TV news. These world events were reflected in the increasingly dark, scary pages of LIFE whose recent issues now became less well-thumbed, stacked in a corner of my mother’s bedroom, rather than on the coffee table downstairs. The times were changing again, both for the world at large and for my mother.
Sometime between 1964 and 1966, my parents abandoned their long-held plan to emigrate to Canada. I never knew why. Instead, they were going to build a futuristic American-style home in Camberley, designed by my father with all mod cons [see blog]. Having watched them indulge so many North American enthusiasms during the previous decade, it was a shock to suddenly learn that we were destined to stay in Camberley. My brother and I had been saddled with American-sounding names that, for the rest of our lives, we would have to spell out to British customer service staff [see blog]. While my father was busy exploiting new earning opportunities with his increasingly dodgy business partners [see blog], I noticed my mother’s dreams for her family’s future start to wither.
In June 1970, my mother purchased a vinyl album entitled ‘The Beach Boys’ that she believed was the group’s latest release. She was disappointed. It was a UK-only ‘Music for Pleasure’ discount compilation [MFP 1382] of older album tracks without a ‘hit single’ in sight. This California group embodied the 1960’s American Dream my parents had coveted. Between 1964 and 1967, the Beach Boys’ most popular songs had played on offshore pirate station ‘Big L’ whose American-style format was my parent’s radio choice at home and in the car. The themes of the group’s tunes – girls, cars, the sea, surfing, drag racing and music – echoed my parents’ preoccupations of the era. That very summer, my mother and I had stood frozen on the windswept beach of Newquay, watching my father struggle to stay upright on a hired surfboard being pummelled by massive waves.
I persevered with my mother’s album purchase and, amongst the early 1960’s cliched surfing tunes, discovered some more recent recordings that fascinated me. The production on 1968’s ‘How She Boogalooed It’ rejected the group’s close harmony sound in favour of a rough lead vocal and a fast rhythm track that would not have sounded out of place later in an Austin Powers movie. The section where the rhythm stops, to be replaced initially by a tinny handclap sound, then resumes with a bass-heavy harpsichord-type solo was pure genius (a foretaste of treble/bass reggae dub mixes the following decade). The “sock it to me” end line coincided with the segment of the ‘Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In’ TV show using that phrase that had launched the same year.
I was blown away by ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)’ from 1966 and it remains one of my favourite love songs. At a time when pop music was mostly novelty, my twelve-year-old self found its lyrics romantically appealing, having been raised in a household where physical contact had been noticeably absent:
Being here with you feels so right
We could live forever tonight
Let's not think about tomorrow
Don’t talk, put your head on my shoulder”
Inspired by this song, I could daydream about an adult life living by the California ocean, shared with a blonde California girl and a baby daughter named Scheherazade. Later, the appearance of Farrah Fawcett living in a San Diego beach home in 1975’s TV series ‘Harry O’ reinforced this teenage fantasy. These Beach Boy songs, along with 1968’s gorgeous ‘Anna Lee The Healer’ also on the album, convinced me there was more music worth exploring than the group’s poppy hit singles. I enrolled as a young fan.
On Thursday 17 December 1970, I accompanied my mother on the train from Camberley to London. She was clutching a ‘Fine Fare’ supermarket plastic bag containing the Beach Boys’ latest gatefold album release ‘Sunflower’ [Stateside SSLA 8251] she had bought. We were on our way to the group’s one-off charity concert at the Royal Albert Hall. This was the first music concert I ever attended. I carried my Kodak ‘Instamatic 126’ camera but it proved pointless taking photos from our seats up in the gods when the musicians were so distant. My mother had hoped to ask the group to autograph her album, not seeming to have anticipated that a 5,000-seat venue would have strict security protocols. In the next day’s papers, Princess Margaret had been photographed meeting the group backstage. It had been a great experience that whetted my appetite for live music (my next concert was to be James Brown at the same venue).
Ten months later, my mother gave birth to her third child [see blog]. Not long after that, everything changed. Forever. In 1972, my middle-aged father deserted our family to elope with a neighbour, recent teenage bride Suzie Anthony, who looked as if she had stepped out of a Beach Boys song [see blog]. They moved into a private estate in an expensive, exclusive part of Surrey [see blog]. My mother and her three children were left to survive alone in the custom designed house that should have realised what remained of my parents’ North American Dream [see blog].
My mother’s focus necessarily shifted from personal interests to the urgent upkeep of her family. She no longer had any time for the Beach Boys, or much anything else beyond day-to-day money pressures. I persisted. I found the group’s 1971 album ‘Surf’s Up’ [Stateside SSL 10313] patchy but loved the reflective mood of the title track and its ambiguous lyrics:
Beyond belief, a broken man
Too tough to cry
Surf’s up, aboard a tidal wave”
In retrospect, I think this song touched me because I had shed no tears following my father’s sudden departure and because I felt our family life had just been hit by a tsunami. I interpreted ‘surf’s up’ to mean that whatever had gone before was now over. It was like ‘time’s up’. The clock on my life had been unexpectedly stopped and then restarted, recent events having thrown me into a different existence [see blog].
The album’s other impressive song ‘Disney Girls (1957)’ more transparently articulated nostalgia for earlier, more innocent times. It was about maturing in the 1970’s, about the receding American Dream that had been so successfully propagated in 1960’s Beach Boys recordings. Until then, every Beach Boys album cover had featured photos of its happy, smiling group members. This record’s dark, brooding cover painting was based on the 1894 sculpture ‘End of the Trail’ by James Earle Fraser of a weary Native American carrying a spear and riding a tired horse, portraying “the suffering and exhaustion of people driven from their native lands” [Wikipedia]. The perpetually youthful girls, the surf, the cars, the ‘fun fun fun’ were nowhere to be found:
With dreams of you
And the warmth I missed
And for the things I wished
They're all coming true
I've got my love to give
And a place to live
Guess I'm gonna stay
It'd be a peaceful life
With a forever wife
And a kid someday”
I connected with this song because, although I had only just entered my teenage years, our desperate family circumstances demanded my life change drastically [see blog]. As the eldest child in a one-parent family, my responsibilities now had to be directed to supporting my mother and my one-year-old sister whose father had abandoned her. I was losing what should have been my childhood and forced into adulthood, sacrificing my own ambitions for a family that was receiving little practical help from elsewhere.
I must have been one of the fifty people who bought the 1972 album ‘American Spring’ [United Artists UAS 29363] recorded by Beach Boy Brian Wilson’s wife Marilyn and her sister who, in the 1960’s, had been members of girl group ‘The Honeys’ that Brian had written for and produced. I loved this new one-off project that, like ‘Surf’s Up’, included nostalgic glances at earlier, innocent times in songs like 1946’s ‘Tennessee Waltz’; 1961’s ‘Mama Said’; and 1963’s ‘Thinkin’ ‘Bout You Baby’ (written by Brian) and ‘Everybody’. The sadness evident in the previous year’s ‘Surf’s Up’ album was present in the 1969 songs ‘This Whole World’ (written by Brian) and ‘Forever’ (written by his brother Dennis Wilson), the latter’s lyrics mourning love savoured then interrupted:
Live in your heart and be forever
I've been so happy loving you
So I've gone away
But not forever
Gonna love you any old way
Forever”
Within weeks of Marilyn’s marriage to Brian in 1964, he had experienced a nervous breakdown, followed by drug use that strained their relationship. They finally divorced in 1979. The Beach Boys’ crash to earth from the innocent 1960’s to the harsh reality of the 1970’s echoed my family’s transformation during the same period. Things would never go back to the way they were. Instead of an evening out together at a music concert in London, my mother now asked me to accompany her to divorce drama ‘Kramer Versus Kramer’ at the local cinema. Our ‘happy families’ life was over. It was all about lawyers and law courts now.
During those 1970’s, I would sneak into my mother’s bedroom when she was out and take out her commemorative John F Kennedy gold coin from the drawer where it now lay untouched. I would sit cross-legged on her bedroom carpet and ponder the hope my mother had harboured during the 1960’s for a world that embraced the values the Kennedy family had extolled and the aspirations she had so often shared with me when a small child. Now, my father had been breaking into our home while we were out and stolen most of my mother’s cherished jewellery collection built up over many years. I too had lost treasured possessions to him [see blog]. Both of us were losing the ‘hope’ for the future my mother had fostered in my young self.
Decades later, after vinyl records were superseded by compact discs, I offered my mother to record songs by some of her favourite artists from the 1960’s and 1970’s onto CDR’s that were easier for her to handle. She accepted the offer for several artists she had loved. Would she want a compilation of her favourite tracks by the Beach Boys? She declined. I could sense it might be too great a reminder of a long-gone era when life had never seemed so good, now so far in the past that perhaps it might have been just a dream or have happened to somebody else entirely.
Since my mother’s death in 2021, I have belatedly curated a Beach Boys playlist on Spotify of their recordings between 1964 and 1973. Now, however, whenever it plays ‘Surf’s Up’, ‘Disney Girls (1957)’, or the wistful ‘Caroline, No’ about a couple’s relationship imploding, I weep a little. Partly because these are great songs. Partly for my mother and the dreams she had had that were destroyed. And partly for myself and the fall-out I endured from a family that disintegrated.
A eulogy to my mother, whom I loved dearly and hated to see so downtrodden from some poor life choices [see blog], would adapt words spoken at Robert F Kennedy’s funeral. The Kennedys had hugely inspired her hopes and dreams in a bygone era during which I was blessed to witness my mother so youthful, so beautiful, so optimistic and so full of the joys of life:
Beyond what she was in life
To be remembered simply as a good and decent woman
Who saw wrong and tried to right it
Saw suffering and tried to heal it
Saw war and tried to stop it.”