Nick Drake (5 page)

Betjeman loathed his days at Marlborough; the old dining room, he later recalled, always smelt of Irish stew. The school spanned the main road through Marlborough, and the road was straddled by a bridge known to pupils as ‘The Bridge of Sighs', as it took them from the boarding houses into their classes.

During Nick's time the school's population was 800, all boys, all boarders, all away from home. Dennis Silk recalled the routine: ‘Classes until lunchtime, classes after lunch on Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Half holidays on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and after lunch on half days, games. So it was work, work, games, prep, house prayers, more prep, bed. We bored them silly.'

It was while at Marlborough that Nick really began to blossom and bloom. Here he was exposed to friendships and influences which would endure. Nick was one of a freewheeling group of pupils who shared a love of rock 'n' roll, smoking cigarettes and draught beer. There was a mutual antipathy to school regulations, lessons and homework. David Wright remembers listening with Nick to the Cassius Clay—Henry Cooper bout of 1963, on a transistor radio on top of the Mound, one of the many medieval sites which circle Marlborough.

Set amid the rolling Downs in the lush and still rural county of Wiltshire, Marlborough was another idyllic backwater. With a population of barely over 6000 in Nick's day, the town was quiet and untroubled. But by the middle of the 1960s, and to the delight of its schoolboy inhabitants, a mere three hours away, down in London, things were beginning to get seriously swinging.

At the school itself, Dennis Silk recalls, ‘We used to have a House Dance with a local girls' school, the usual sort of cattle market, and I
can remember one such occasion. It went like a dream. It was about 1964, when the House was still biddable, and we were still in charge. We had this dance, and ensured that no girls were hurt by being left on the side, and programmed dances, and every boy had to dance with every other girl at some stage of the evening. I can remember … lovely quiet music, “Sleepy Lagoon” and things like that, and my wife giving them dancing classes before.

‘A year later, the dispensation had changed, and against my better judgement, allowed electronic music. No one could speak to anyone at all, the records were so loud … The whole atmosphere of the House had changed, and we were no longer in control, we were swept away by this amazing new liberating thing.'

The public-school ethos hardly lent itself to the dropped aitch rowdiness and two-fingered rebellion of rock 'n' roll. Public-school rock 'n' rollers are at best a footnote to any rock encyclopaedia: Genesis first convened in the hallowed halls of Charterhouse, the school which would later offer house room to World Party's Karl Wallinger. Harrow played host to Island's Chris Blackwell; Peter
&
Gordon and Shane MacGowan attended Westminster; Roxy Music's Phil Manzanera and This Heat's Charles Hayward studied at Dulwich College; Kula Shaker's Crispian Mills was at Stowe. But in general there wasn't much room for the hoity-toity in the hurly-burly of rock 'n' roll.

The Beatles had rewritten the rule book. Far from trying to hide their provincial origins, they revelled in them, and theirs were the first defiantly regional accents to be heard regularly on the upper-crust BBC airwaves. One of The Beatles' oddest gigs was at Stowe. At the height of Beatlemania in 1963, following a request from a pupil, the Fabs played to a sedate, seated audience of public schoolboys. But The Beatles soon came to embody the new classlessness of the sixties: suddenly it didn't matter where you were from – only what you did. Cockney photographers and pop stars became the new aristocrats.

Jeremy Mason was Nick's closest friend during his early days at Marlborough. The friendship was forged over cigarettes, and as the two teenagers puffed away on Disque Bleu in ‘smoking holes' dotted around the college, the conversation invariably turned to the music they both liked: ‘At that time, Nick played the saxophone and the clarinet. The alto sax I think it was … Which meant that a lot of the music we liked early on was definitely sax-based: One of the records we liked was called
Giant Steps
by John Coltrane … But I remember going to listen to a John Coltrane record with Nick at Liverpool
Street Station, which must have been on the way back to school. I think it was called
Ascension
, which was one complete barrage of sound, and we rather lost interest.'

Michael Maclaran also remembered music always being a priority for Nick: ‘We spent hours in common rooms and studies listening to records (45s were 6/6d) and the Top 20 on Sunday afternoons.'

With no television in the House in Nick's time, and Film Society shows limited to a couple each term, pop music was all-important. Nick's housemaster, Dennis Silk, couldn't help but notice the intrusion of pop music in his house: ‘It was as much as your life was worth not to know what was in the Top 20. You lost face terribly.'

Cigarettes behind the bike sheds and listening to pop records were crucial, but the public-school tradition of team sports was also an integral part of Nick's life at Marlborough. David Wright recalls that once on the sports field, Nick was an enthusiastic participant: ‘One thing Nick was very good at was running, he was very quick. While I was playing cricket, which he wasn't remotely interested in, he was on the athletics track. He was a very quick 100-yarder. And he used to play rugby, on the wing, because he was quick.'

Cricket has became irrevocably associated with the English public school, but the ponderous process of a cricket match held little allure for Nick. He would sprint in track events or tear off alone on the wing of the house rugby team, and on occasion he could even be found on the hockey field; but, perhaps surprisingly, cricket never appealed to him.

‘In the summers we used to meet on the athletics track for training and for competitions against other schools,' Michael Maclaran recalled. ‘No one liked to admit to having to train – it was assumed that natural talent would get you through. But Nick had good motivation and a competitive streak and achieved great success in sprinting, with his long stride, high knee action and powerful build.

‘Rugby was the main winter game, but I turned to hockey after some rugby injuries and often played with Nick for Marlborough Second XI. I think Nick played centre half, which was a key position, and he could hit the ball hard and well. He may well have been captain, because he had leadership qualities in a persuasive rather than dictatorial way, as well as talent.'

Confounding the familiar image of Nick Drake as a withdrawn and virtually catatonic individual, Michael Maclaran's recollection of his ‘good motivation' and ‘competitive streak' paints the very different picture of a vigorous, even ambitious teenager.

Nick's days at Marlborough were, by and large, happy ones. A bona fide rock 'n' roll rebel may have rejected the rowdy rugby field and striving for victory on the athletics track, but although he was shy and fairly quiet, Nick's instinctive sporting abilities enabled him to fit in quite happily. It was over short distances that Nick really excelled; not for him the sustained endurance of the marathon, rather the quick-burn glory of the sprint.

Dennis Silk: ‘He was a very distinguished sprinter. He played on the wing, away from the hurly-burly. It meant very little to him that he was a super athlete. He could have done anything athletically. He was very well made, tall — very tall, as a teenager about six foot two – strong, very quick. When he caught the rugger ball, he could run round the opposition. Dreaming a bit, he sometimes dropped it … He played rugger, I suppose you would say, apologetically.

‘Nick was a very poor cricketer, a joke cricketer. He found cricket rather amusing, but it would be six or out. He played in gym shoes rather than cricket boots. He was quite a good hockey player, and of course, Marlborough was the outstanding hockey school, and he played in the school team, as he did in the rugger side. But his real forte was sprinting. He was rather a stately sprinter. Very upright, not leaning at forty-five degrees … upright, and like a ship in full sail.'

As a member of C1 House, Nick was a member of the winning Senior team in the school's summer 1965 relay race. He also set a school record for the 100-yard dash which remained unbeaten for some years. The school magazine noted that: ‘In the Open Team, N.R. Drake is developing into a very useful performer over 100 and 220 yards.' The same account of athletics activities at Marlborough noted that M.A.P. Phillips, Captain of Athletics, had achieved a long jump in excess of twenty-two feet, before concluding: ‘N.R. Drake has been awarded his colours.' Seven years later Nick's exact contemporary, Captain Mark Phillips, would marry HRH Princess Anne.

Photographs of Nick during his years at Marlborough show a chubby-faced teenager, smiling – shyly but photogenically – at the camera. Invariably he is part of a group: whether displaying a rugged pair of knees in the 1964 photo of ‘C1 Cock House Upper League Rugby Team' or, the following year, celebrating victory in both the ‘House Shout' (a unison singing contest) and the Junior and Senior Relay Races. The N.R. Drake that stares at you from these photographs is no different from the boys around him, except that his rugby
kit is noticeably cleaner. He sports a Beatle cut, the fringe of his thick, straight hair almost reaching his eyebrows, but in deference to school regulations, the back and sides are well clear of his collar.

He looks chubbier here than in the later, more familiar photographs, and a half smile is evident on the head emerging from the striped rugby shirt. We are so used to the image of Nick as a haunted and doomed figure, stalking the pop landscape of the early 1970s, that there is real shock value in these school photos. The face is recognizably his; the strangeness comes from seeing Nick in company, relaxed, smiling – in the mainstream of life and apparently enjoying it. In the later pictures Nick was always alone.

The year after Nick went to Marlborough, I followed my father and uncle by attending Dulwich College. Trying to pull together the strands of Nick's life, I found myself drawn back, rather reluctantly, to those public-school days. I was several years younger than Nick when I started, but lucky enough – and close enough – to be able to continue living at home. The similarities, though, were legion: the ritual formality of posed team photographs; the rigid etiquette of the school magazine; the dogged determination to preserve cherished traditions; the absolute refusal to concede that the world outside was changing.

Over the years I had grown familiar with the tales told of Nick by fellow-musicians and record company types, but talking to his schoolfriends for the first time, it seemed to me that they had known a quite different Nick. Musicians always admire Nick; they are often in awe of him and frequently perplexed by how he did what he did and who he really was. But listening to Old Marlburians talking, what struck me time after time was the warmth and genuine affection they had felt for him long before he was famous, or doomed.

Perhaps that old chestnut about the child being father to the man is more than usually valid when considering the life of someone who died so early. Nick survived only eight years after leaving Marlborough, and much of that time he was in the grip of an illness which all but blanked out his true self. Tempting though it is to blame the insensitivity of the archaic public-school system, or the trauma of being sent away from home at such an early age, for his eventual fate, all the evidence suggests that, for Nick, his schooldays really were the happiest days of his life.

The Officer Training Corps met weekly to drill Marlborough's young officers in the making. War Games were played, parades
undertaken, and the habit of accepting and obeying orders was hammered into the teenagers as they marched around the parade-ground in musty uniforms. Simon Crocker was in the Corps band with Nick and remembers them both hating it: ‘We managed to get out by going on a conservation detail at an old building called the Mount House in Marlborough. There were four of us, and we had to repaint it every year. They were the funniest afternoons … I just remember us spending the whole time laughing …'

Marlborough had suffered terribly during the First World War, losing more old boys than any public school except Eton. Between 1914 and 1918, 733 boys were lost, most barely out of their teens. Fresh-faced subalterns, straight from public schools like Marlborough, were hewn down in their thousands by German machine-guns during the Great War. The life of a Second Lieutenant on active service on the Western Front was estimated at a mere two weeks. Peter Parker's
The Old Lie
quotes old Marlburian G.A.N. Lowndes reflecting that early in 1915: ‘It was uncanny to look across Chapel to the back row opposite and realise that within six months probably half the boys there would be dead.'

The unflinching public-school code of honour fuelled the patriotic zeal which swept the nation during the summer of 1914. One of the first to enlist at the outbreak of the war was the poet and old Marlburian Siegfried Sassoon, though he would later come to question its inevitability. Sassoon's education mirrored that of Nick Drake — Marlborough and Cambridge — and Nick's housemaster, Dennis Silk, was a friend of Sassoon's and an expert on his work.

Another old Marlburian poet who died in the conflict was Charles Sorley. Barely twenty when he was killed in 1915, his only collection,
Marlborough And Other Poems
, was published posthumously. The old school was the only life the teenager knew when he enlisted in 1914, but soon he had discovered another, more brutal, existence:

When you see millions of the mouthless dead,

Across your dreams in pale battalions go …

Sorley's was a short life, and only the poems he left behind distinguish him from the countless others who foundered in the Flanders mud.

Though as distant as the Hundred Years War to the generations who have grown up with McDonald's and the Internet, the First
World War cast a shadow over the twentieth century which was long and searing. Such was the scale of the slaughter that death reached in and touched every community. Visiting Nick's birthplace, I paused by Tanworth's War Memorial, to find inscribed nearly forty names of men from that one village and its surrounding fields who fell in the Great War. Think of the losses in that tiny Warwickshire village, and in all the other hamlets which linked up to form the nation in the early days of this century, and consider the waste.