Nick Drake (2 page)

During 1995 the Royal Naval College at Greenwich hosted an exhibition about Dr Robert Ballard's expedition which had discovered the wreck of the
Titanic
in 1985. Among the artefacts which had haemorrhaged from the ship there were surprisingly few monogrammed ‘Titanic'. Tableware and cutlery – expected to serve for any of the company's vessels – were stamped simply with the more prosaic ‘White Star'. But the knowledge that these items had been salvaged from the seabed, having lain four miles below the waves, undisturbed for more than eighty years, set off a shiver from across the decades.

The
Titanic's
bell had survived and been found, the one which Frederick Fleet had rung from his crow's-nest on that doomed night. And there it was, safe now in its glass case, brought up from the depths, shined and secure for all eternity. Even at the end of a century grown old and weary with larger and more inconceivable tragedies, the impact of the
Titanic's
loss still resonates.

There remains something quaintly romantic and chillingly symbolic about the loss of the
Titanic.
No disaster was ever better equipped to sail into myth than that ship's demise, and it haunts us still. I think of it again each time I think of my late uncle, James Wallace Lusk. My mother's older brother, Uncle Jim was a doctor, and when she was very ill he sat and wrote a memoir of their lives together. Jim and Hester grew up, along with their brother Ian and sisters Peggy and Madeline, the children of John Brown Lusk, a minister of the Glasear Presbyterian Church for forty years when he died in 1939.

Among the memoir's closely typed pages are photographs of the faces my mother and uncle had known as children. They are unmistakably from another time, faces with more in common with the distant, dusty world of the young Queen, Victoria, and of
Tennyson, than the era of Edward VII and Rupert Brooke into which my mother and uncle were born. I remember my Aunt Madeline talking, before she too was taken, of an abiding memory she shared with her brother Jim; and sure enough, there it was in his memoir:

‘The Titanic had been launched from Harland & Wolff's yard in Belfast… Aunt Isabel was housekeeper to Lord Pirrie, the chairman of the firm, and got us tickets for the launch and I saw the great Titanic slide into Belfast Lough dragging huge piles of enormous chains to slow her entry into the water. I also remember seeing Lady Pirrie clad in long silken robes and an enormous feather boa, cleaving her way through the crowds like one of her husband's liners.'

So there he was, my Uncle Jim, on the day the
Titanic
inched into the water. Half a lifetime later, and far from Belfast Lough, Uncle Jim was to touch on my life again. For James Wallace Lusk was the doctor who delivered Nick Drake into the world …

The only conversation I can remember having with Uncle Jim about music concerned his high opinion of Val Doonican's talents as a singer. Music – rock ‘n' roll music – wasn't something that you talked to your uncle about. And though his music is soft and gentle, acoustic and folk-oriented, Nick Drake is rock 'n' roll. That is something my uncle might have had a problem with. His was a life formed by a childhood in rural Ireland during the adolescent years of this century, far removed from the neon chaos of London and the music industry.

On returning from Burma after the war, Uncle Jim became a GP in Weymouth in Dorset, and spent much of his spare time fashioning a book –
A Fresh Look At The Brontës And Their Ancestors In Ireland.
Brontë biographer Phyllis Bentley described the fiction of the sisters as ‘a Yorkshire tune played on an Irish harp'. But it was a book by Dr William Wright,
The Brontës In Ireland
, published in 1893, which first revealed the extent to which the Irish ancestry of the novelists played a role in the creation of their fiction.

Delving further into the Brontë background in Northern Ireland, Uncle Jim unearthed strange patterns of behaviour in the Brontë family over three generations. These discoveries, and his comments as the doctor who knew Nick Drake as a small boy, may perhaps have some bearing on Nick's short, sad life: ‘The causes of mental disturbances are usually multiple,' wrote my uncle, ‘and in addition, the patient reacts to his own disturbance in his own way. One also may think of the patient suffering from society, and society may suffer from the patient.'

Journeys into the mind are now commonplace, but at the time Uncle Jim began his medical studies Freud had yet to enter the mainstream. His world, and that of Nick's father, Rodney Drake, sprang from a sense of tradition and moral certainty: a belief in the right of Empire and the duty of the British to serve that Empire. For men born as the twentieth century turned, there was little doubt and few questions.

In a letter written a few years before he died, my uncle asked me if I knew the work of a singer called Nicholas Drake; remembering the conversation about Val Doonican, I was relieved that I didn't. But he wrote again about this singer when a record called
Fruit Tree
was released, and it was then that the connection was made. A connection between a man born into the strict sepia world of an Edwardian manse and a lost child of more uncertain times.

Thanks to my uncle, James Wallace Lusk, there is a long unbroken link from the launching of the
Titanic
to the life of Nick Drake – a life begun in a Burmese hospital and ended in a quiet Warwickshire village.

The gravestone lies beneath an oak tree, just off the path which leads from the church to a gate into the open fields surrounding the village of Tanworth-in-Arden. The churchyard overlooks a curl of hill, the clipped fields sweeping into woods beyond. The horizon is topped by trees, and then dips down towards Danzey Green and Pig Trot Lane. The canvas-coloured headstone is weathered and worn, the inscription faded and, after little more than twenty years, surprisingly hard to read. But edging close and squinting, you can discern the epitaph: ‘Nick Drake, 1948-1974. Remembered with love.'

The passing years have seen Nick joined by his father Rodney (1908-1988) and his mother Molly (1915-1993). To the casual visitor, the Drakes' grave is simply another family plot, bordered by those of the Winwood family, of Mary Kathleen Whitehouse, the Tibbies family and Edward Rogers. There is something strangely comforting and consoling about a stroll around an ancient English country churchyard in the sunshine. There is some of Philip Larkin's ‘awkward reverence', but there is also history in every square foot of turf.

On a sunny day in mid-October, the graveyard of Tanworth-in-Arden's parish church is silent and undisturbed. The only sound is that of the wind, lightly whispering through the leaves of the oak, tinged with autumn brown, which are slowly falling to carpet the
graves. St Mary Magdalene is no bad place to end your days. Little disturbs the calm of the village. No car alarms shatter the serenity. And from inside the church the sound of Bach floats across the quiet churchyard; eternal music cascading gently into the silence.

Just above the organ's keyboard is a plaque which reads: ‘The sesquialtera stop was given in memory of Nicholas Drake and his music by his family in 1977.' Chris Langman, who was playing the organ that day, interrupted his Bach to demonstrate the stop. ‘It's not the most obvious choice,' he said as the empty church echoed to the high, keening sound. It was an eerie, solitary, ricocheting note. A lonely sound.

Outside, in the fresh autumn air, lie buried hundreds of souls, many whose whole lives were bordered by the boundaries of this tiny Warwickshire village. St Mary Magdalene has provided the final resting-place for many since it was built in 1330, and Nick Drake's is not the only famous name: the motor-racing champion Mike Hailwood is also remembered here. The graves are kindly tended; the grass, trim and neatly cut, does not intrude upon the solemnity of death. The leaves are raked, to leave the headstones clear and visible.

The cult of death snakes around rock 'n' roll like bindweed in the garland of a May Queen. But the grave of Nick Drake is not the graffiti-scabbed resting-place of Jim Morrison. The flowers around the headstone did not grow here; they are freshly cut, brought by someone who loves his music and was touched by his life. This is the grave of an only son, a lost boy, laid to rest in the village where he grew up: the only home he really knew.

Tanworth-in-Arden is picture-postcard pretty, a cameo of Middle England. The church's guidebook speaks regretfully of ‘unfortunate alterations' in 1790. There is a war memorial and a general store, an off-licence and a garage, a church school and a pub. Inside the Bell, people drawn by the music of Nick Drake often sit over a pint or a coffee, reflecting on what they have seen in the churchyard. But here in the pub another erstwhile Tanworth resident is the focal point: a notice informs the casual visitor that Jack London, British and European Welterweight Champion, 1926-1935, was the landlord from September 1939 to December 1972.

It was from Tanworth that Nick Drake set out on his short voyage into the outside world, and to Tanworth that he returned to die. It was only when my wife pointed it out that I saw the barely legible inscription, curiously located, almost hidden, on the back of Nick's headstone: ‘Now we rise and we are everywhere.' The words have a
Biblical ring, a familiar scriptural feel, and it was only later that I realized they came from Nick's ‘From The Morning' – the final song on the last album released in his lifetime.

Standing by his grave that autumn day, it struck me how short a distance Nick had actually travelled. But what a journey he had made. Largely ignored in his lifetime, with combined record sales barely reaching 20,000 copies, after his death Nick Drake has become the focus of a fascination which shows no sign of abating. And yet the mystery still remains: just what is it about this shy, introverted singer-songwriter, who made only three albums, that still draws people to his work?

Why, when they have their own idols and eloquent spokesmen, are the children of Nirvana and Oasis drawn afresh to Nick Drake? To begin to understand that, you have to go back to another place and another time. From the leafy tranquillity of the Warwickshire countryside to the steamy Far East. To the far reaches of the British Empire, to a city perched on the edge of Burma, close to the Indian Ocean, where Nick Drake was born half a century ago.

Teak first drew the British to Burma. A heavy, durable timber, it was much favoured in the building of ships at a time when the British needed more and more vessels to service their expanding Empire. Even when the wooden hulks gave way to steel dreadnoughts, Burma still had plenty to offer far-away Britain, not least the fruit of its rubber trees. Rich in teak forests, and with rubber plantations stretching to the far horizon, Burma enriched the Empire.

In 1824 a Burmese invasion of Bengal had led to fears of further incursions into British-ruled India, but the two nations managed to maintain their uneasy alliance for another sixty years until, in 1885, Burma's King Thibaw decided to confiscate the assets of the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation (BBTC), the leading Anglo-Burmese firm which would later employ Nick Drake's father, Rodney. This sequestration led to a full-scale invasion by 10,000 British and Indian troops, and by 1886 Burma had become a fully integrated part of the British Empire.

Long before Nick Drake was born there, and long before his father worked in the country, Burma was already the subject of fiercely divided opinion. Rudyard Kipling had written of his love of Burma in the poem ‘Mandalay'. George Orwell hated the place with a vengeance, having spent ‘five boring years' there between 1922 and 1927, as an officer in the Imperial Police. Burma may have disgusted Eric Blair, as Orwell was then known, but it inspired some of his best writing, notably the short stories ‘A Hanging' and ‘Shooting An Elephant'. In 1934 his first novel,
Burmese Days
, though enthusiastic
about the country and its landscape (‘It was a good life while one was young and need not think about the future or the past'), displayed real venom towards the petty snobbery and pinched racism of the expatriate British Empire-builders.

For the British inhabitants of Burma during the 1920s and 1930s it was a good life. Servants kept the mundane at bay during the day, while the evenings were spent socializing and fulminating against progress and native independence with those of a like mind. There was a prosperity in Rangoon and other capital cities of the British Empire which kept the expats buoyant. Back at home you might have been born to trade and struggling for acceptance, but in Burma you were unquestionably part of the ruling class. It could be an idyllic and undemanding life, with no reason to change. The Empire had survived a mutiny in India in 1857 and no other nation had since had the temerity to challenge decisions made in Whitehall on its behalf.

If you came from the top drawer, the product of a public school, the far-flung reaches of the Empire were a good place to finish your education, in the teak or rubber trade, or the Army. Clive and Livingstone, Rhodes and Wellington – these were the gods of Empire, in whose shadow you walked.

By 1937, though, another sun rising further to the East was beginning to cast shadows. Long-time British residents in the Far East had never paid much attention to the threat of Japan, dismissing the barbarities meted out by its army to the Chinese since 1931 as like against like. The British Empire surely had no reason to fear the tiny, rather jaundiced-looking troops of the Emperor Hirohito. Here was racism they would live to regret.

Just before eight o'clock on the morning of 7 December 1941, two years and three months after Hitler unleashed the Nazi blitzkrieg on Europe without warning or declaration of war, Japanese dive-bombers zeroed in on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. Within half an hour over two thousand Americans lay dead or dying, and the European conflict had exploded into a global war. Just three months later the Japanese had subjugated the Far East, and the Empire of the Sun had spread its tentacles from the tip of the Soviet Union all the way to Australia, thousands of miles across the Pacific.