Chapter 10: Day Four (Wednesday, 14th September)
Likely lads, drug fiends and cocaine knights

I have not been as angry with another human being as I was, right at the end of the week, with Redman. After various racist and imperialist comments and personal insults had come over the microphone, and at the personal and even deeper insult of depriving Primary School education of a charitable donation in favour of the Countryside Alliance, against an agreement that we had made, that is liable to wind anyone up, is it not? I never came close to wanting to hit him. It never got to a point where I thought, "I really want to bury my fist in your gob." Never. Not once. Well.... perhaps for a few seconds on one occasion but we'll come to that later. Hitting him would have been lowering myself and I could do far more damage with my brain. Which is not what Working Class, or semi-Working Class blokes, even with my education, are expected to do in conventional society.

I cannot deny that when we got there, I rang a number of close friends and whoever I ended up talking to, I needed advice quickly.

'Do I bring a convoy of travellers onto this land and take it over, on telly?' I asked them. 'Is that justified? Would it make more of this opportunity?'

To a man, to a woman, to everybody, they told me the same.

'No, don't do it!'

Yet that I would do this was the overwhelming fear of the boss man. He thought that I could have done that and he was right. I could have done that. I could have got a massive sound system in. I could have had a week long party. There would have been bloodshed. The camera crew would have pulled out immediately. The police would have moved in and the likes of my good self, and everyone we knew would have gone through another round of demonisation where our opponents would have made so much press out of it and got so much sympathy that Gerard would probably have been given a load of taxpayers' money in reparation, plus a knighthood, no doubt, for bringing us miscreants to justice. So I do not usually like to think that I adopt too many of Gandhi's ideals, especially as my missus is very much pissed off that Gandhi gets all of the credit for the emancipation of India, but when you do see bloodshed, when you do see violence, it is horrible. If there is a way of solving a problem without using violence, it should always be pursued.

You would see many differences in opinion between Kiran and myself which any couple should have if there is to be healthy debate. I think she felt we should have just smashed the place up, got hold of the shooters and run amok. In hindsight, she probably would not admit that. I read that J.G.Ballard wanted that to happen in the first series of Big Brother. Not with guns, because he knew they did not have any, but since confinement leads to violence, he hoped they might make a point and to say, in effect, "We're not playing your game, we're having a microcosmic revolution." He said that they had all the opportunities to do that, to declare independence and have an orgy, both political and sexual, but they did not do it. I thought, you're right mate, that's the Ballardian future and anyone who goes on a programme like that and never puts a chair through a window is a slave.

However, Redman made two jokes during the week that meant I was not going to prove him right and act like a thug. I was going to mentally demolish him for being wrong and being very, very naughty, even though he had been programmed to be. He was wrong! He was naughty, he was getting a slap, but it was happening from inside his mind and nowhere on his body.

The first came in the middle of the week, at a time when I had no key to get into the mansion.

'Well,' he said when he found out about it, 'I thought you would have made an easy fist of breaking into a house like that.'

'Are you calling me a thief?' I said.

He chuckled. He thought he was being witty. That was what Working Class people would be witty about, in his mind. He did not intend it as an insult but I took it as one.

'Excuse me,' I said. 'How to get through a closed window is not common knowledge, mate. Yes, personally I do agree with robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, but I would rather not rob anybody unless I were getting something back that had been robbed off me or the people around me. And, fortunately, I haven't had to house-break in my life, ever.'

Those stupid, stupid fools thought Kiran and I were going to try and lift something from the house and make quick, easy money out of the situation.

The other thing he said to wind me up was after I had been discussing our youth and how we had had a common interest in the models of cars we admired at the same time in our lives. I told him that I was a boy racer and that I had gone charged around in the same vehicles he had, albeit in a different way and in a different part of the country. Then he introduced me to one of his friends.

'Oh,' he said, 'Craig thinks he's got a lot in common with us and I can't deny it has been an education. Craig in his youth was one of those joyriders.'

'What did you say?' I said.

His friend was looking a bit shocked but Redman was still grinning because I think the upper crust like criminals and housebreakers on some level, like with Princess Margaret's mates in the sixties, exciting tales of gangster behaviour. They made an innocent semantic error based on a mindset that the bloody bloke had of me.

'Excuse me,' I said, 'I am not into nicking cars. I have not stolen a car in my life. I may have bought some dodgy motors in my time, but I do not approve of car theft. You don't have to steal cars in order to become a 'boy racer'. Obviously some of our races were a bit dangerous but the roads were a lot less congested. I couldn't imagine having a race with someone across Hammersmith Bridge in this day and age.'

The thing that they do understand is that people who think like me and Kiran represent a larger percentage of the British public than they do. On any council estate, or in any suburban or semi-suburban, urban or rural part of Britain, you will find households who share very similar beliefs and cultural interests to ours. Just up the road, we know people who think just like us. The ruling class are more spread out, separated by distance, regardless of their helicopters and their jets but they are a dwindling force, one that is getting smaller and smaller however oligarchical our society still is. We were merely representatives of a wider body of people than the media gives us credit for. Redman knows that. Like the Battle of Jericho, if I had brought my band on stage, the walls would have come down. They were not stupid enough to let that happen. "Don't let them get their trumpets out! When everybody's dancing, they aren't fighting. We have to keep them fighting!"

When he got hold of the microphone on the final night, he was worse for wear with alcohol. I would say the amount of alcohol these Establishment types can take without becoming anti-social is a lot less than the average teenagers on a council estate in Peckham. All of the businessmen, the millionaires and their wives, the supermodels, the sporting elite, polo-players, judges, military officers, fox-hunters, shooting club members, the whole pantheon of upper class twits were there and as soon as they started drinking they became hideous. The naïve ones, like the supermodel and her sister who came to the ball, they were not involved in any discussion on politics. To them, it is not a woman's role to decide on the bigger issues.

A lot of people at Ingols Hall were as ignorant of the repercussions of their beliefs as people further down the ladder. Some of them are not, but I have this problem: I could not tell which were which. If somebody is doing something particularly barbaric or knows about something particularly barbaric they are not going to bloody say, in the same way that I did not confess that my second girlfriend was an active member of the Animal Liberation Front. If they knew the true nature of my beliefs and some of my personal experiences and I knew theirs I think there would have been a communication breakdown of such magnitude that it might have unhinged the whole thing.

Jake and Gladys put themselves out for us, but there was nobody there willing to sacrifice themselves for anybody else at all. I saw that in spades up at Ingols Hall. Even though they say that they would sacrifice themselves for the Queen, well, so far as I could see that was it! They had subordinated all of their sacrificial instincts to one person, the Queen. For them, there is no other human being on the planet worth sacrificing anything for but the Queen, not even their own families. That has to be the most unhealthy ethic any human being can come up with. I do not want my daughter thinking like that. No wonder the Ingols Hall contingent all hated each other. It was a very unhealthy environment to grow up in.

Gerard could not adjust to our environment at all. Not only did he burn the beans, he left our boiler on. We had given him a very specific set of instructions about what you should and should not do. If you leave our boiler on and have all the flames from the coal fire powering the boiler, it builds up a head of steam. There is a switch that mans a pump that pumps the water out of the boiler around the system. If that is not on and you have got the fire blazing away, the boiler can blow up. That is one of the big don'ts of a flat like that. Gerard completely forgot it. The boiler got to a point where it had overheated so much that all the water was coming out a dark brown colour. He had inadvertently cleaned the inside of our boiler for us. But then they had no running water that they could use in the flat. We suspect that they ate out a lot and it wasn't filmed. How could they be that unable to adjust? They're supposed to be higher bred, a superior community. I know what it is like when that happens, because I nearly did it myself. It started going, "bang, bang, bang, bang, bang," and I thought "someone's car's blowing up outside." Then I realised what I had done and I turned the switch off.

'What did you do?' I asked Gerard, when I finally met him.

'I forgot about why it was happening,' he said, 'and I sat down and I just panicked and it just started rumbling and banging and banging and banging and there was this noise that just went on for ages.'

'Well, you'd have been good in the Blitz, wouldn't you?' I thought. 'You bloody idiot!'

Honestly, the conventional British upper classes! They really have not got the most basic survival skills. If you have seen the film The Admirable Crighton, you will understand. That's it! I thought I was lousy at tying a reef knot, but on a desert island like that those fools would be relying on the likes of you and me to stay alive. So I think their reason for hunting is to make up for the inadequacies that they feel when they look at our behaviour and realise that we all know a lot, lot more about even elementary first aid.

Gerard's staff, his PA and his business manager, were discussing such things with me after the board-meeting. Just after I said I would get Skip in to paint the Pegasus picture, I thanked them for having stirred the conversation up to have it so.

'What will Gerard be doing while you are here?' they asked me.

'Have you no idea whatsoever?'

'No, no, no. We haven't a clue.'

So, I told them and, basically, they were shocked.

'He will be taking his son to our local playgroup that we go to,' I said. 'He will be visiting an organic farm where our veg is produced that we get at the local post office. He will be hearing about some of the local concerns of the village we live in he will be sort of spoken to in a mixture of Welsh and English which is quite ironic, in view of the Afan Valley project, he's getting a bit of free research in here isn't he?'

Anyone might think this has been constructed for our benefits, but I think a lot of it was stuff that no-one expected. Well, I know the director was shocked, he did not know he had interests in Wales.

'He will be helping clear footpaths with my mum and dad,' I told them.

I later found out that he thought that would mean trespassing and disobeying the law. He had no idea that a lot of the farmers are involved in projects like this and they are not like him and his attitude towards the countryside. A lot of Welsh farmers believe that people should be allowed to walk around in the countryside. I think hitherto he had believed that people should not be allowed to walk around his or any of his friends' land, ever, under any circumstances. A lot of the things around his house were really insulting to people like me. Anti-hunt protesters were little rats in cloth caps, going "gor blimey, let's kill the toff!" Things on mugs, pictures on walls, a lot of very derogatory cartoons anti-hunt and left-wing activists are all portrayed as little Cockney rats. The fox, is, in fact, a gentleman in the cartoons and there were different things where, as I have said, their prey is them, embodies them in dress and all that and animals that are not worthy enough to hunt for sport, like rats and weasels and lizards and stuff like that, are the proletariat, just like in The Wind in the Willows! I find that book repulsive, by the way, concluding as it does that the upper classes are mad, crazy eccentrics, but at worst the working class are murdering weasels. I might have to start a band called The Murdering Weasels.

"Gor blimey, I'm an evil Cockney stereotype, I am! I'm gonna shag yer dog, I'm gonna kill yer goat an' I'm gonna run amok, 'cos that's what gives me a bit of a thrill. Bullseye! Bullseye! Nancy, Nancy, come 'ere, I wanna beat yer!"

There was evidence of these stereotypes all around his house. I think he was shocked because he had done a footpath clearance and found that all these people were country lovers who knew more about it than him. He tried to lord it over a couple of women who have got horses. It appeared that he knew less about horses than they did according to my mum & dad. They gave up trying to talk to him because he was not listening.

I told the PA & the business manager he would be clearing footpaths, he would be helping prepare banners and artwork for an all-night rave which would involve live musicians.

'Oh, will he?' said the business manager. 'That's interesting.'

'And he's got to learn how to play a bit of percussion,' I said, 'and do a bit of singing and then he has to perform in a band in front of a few hundred hardened party-goers at some point in the wee hours of the morning, on a stage, with a psychedelic light show, in a tent, surrounded by travellers vehicles.'

'No!' said they.

'Yeah!'

'Oh, wow! Well, that'll be exciting for him.'

'I should jolly well hope so,' I said. 'It is always exciting for me.'

'And he's supposed to be organising that just as you're supposed to be organising the polo club ball?'

'Yes,' I said. 'Isn't that weird? Almost diametrically opposed events, similar in form but not in content and they're both to do with the end of the summer and ritualistic in a lot of ways.'

Then they looked at me.

'Well, Craig,' they said, 'from what you have said, we have got to ask this. Will he be close, in terms of proximity, to some wacky and some pretty hard drugs?'

'Well,' I said. 'I can't really comment on that.'

'So that's a "yes" then is it?'

Then they started laughing.

'Gerard in that environment! That will be interesting!'

Gerard Braughn does not smoke dope, or take cocaine. He is a very upright, staid individual on that front, which, to me, is odd for a man of his age and status. I would have thought that most rich men like him would have an interest in certain drugs, but he may have been shrewd and thought he might be caught out and kept all of those secret. I was expecting to hear some story of him going on a drug-debauched bender with the likes of Alice and Bertie, who were looking after him and who do that every day anyway, but when I got back I was surprised to find he had avoided everything they had. MDMA powder, cocaine, amphetamine sulphate, LSD, magic mushrooms, alcohol, marijuana... He could have got just about anything he had wanted there. Even when they got him on his own in the backs of vehicles and there were no camera crew around, nobody whatsoever, save people getting stoned in front of him: he refused it all. He drank constantly, though. This was something the film crew said to me. He drank alcohol from dawn till dusk. He was never without a beer. I had a joke with him about that when I finally met him, because the same happened to me.

'I don't normally drink in the mornings,' he said to me, 'but for some reason I couldn't help it.'

'Same here,' I said. 'Isn't it weird? Should we have ended up with a career in film we would have been alcoholics without any shadow of a doubt.'

It is all this stopping and starting that does it, the stopping and starting and, "Craig, now we're having a ten minute break," and being left, because they're sorting out bits of technology, looking at plans and so on. Now, at these times, you cannot go and read a book, because there is not enough time. You cannot engage in conversation because your mind has been a bit blown by the fact that you have been allowed to have so much conversation and everyone is so interested in what you have to say. It is dead time, but what happens is that because you have been given so much attention, you are hungry for more. It is an instant junk habit. You are not sated. You want to do it again, and again and again and so between doing what you do in front of a camera, you need a surrogate fix, a "pleasure me, pleasure me, pleasure me..." How can I be pleasured? Well, I cannot run off and have a shag. I cannot jump into the pool, because I am going to be expected in ten minutes. What can I do? I know! Drink. Smoke. Eat. It was simply a gratuitous attempt to lessen the pain of not being attended to and even though he is a heavy drinker, as am I, I found a ridiculous amount of alcohol in his kitchen. As with everything else, he hoards it. With people I know, on our budget, any alcohol in their house barely lasts twenty-four hours, but this man, Gerard, he hoards it. He had three giant cupboards in which I would say he had about three hundred cans of a generic bitter, with widgets, which to my mind is one of the most horrid and artificial bloody soups you can put down your neck and having very little intoxicating effect into the bargain. I wondered if he had shares in the company that made it.

'Oh no,' said Gladys, 'that's what he drinks most of the time. Warm!'

Yes, the proper Englishman does drink warm beer. The huge double door fridge, on the other hand, was full of champagne, and seventy quid bottles of wine.

It was not a functional kitchen because Gerard did not cook. There was no separation of bins for glass or anything but by the end of the week, Kiran had rearranged the estate to an extent that there were separate bins for glass, paper, plastics and so forth. She had discussed arrangements for a company to come and collect certain things. She had put plans into motion for an organic veg company to deliver all the vegetables so that none of it would come from supermarkets and she had got Gladys into the idea of only buying meat from free range farms. There are plenty of those in Yorkshire, so there was no excuse for not doing that. She had converted the housekeeper, who, basically, ran the mansion, into an eco-zealot by the end of the week. Yesterday was Botox. Today we are separating glass, paper and organic waste. She was already discussing with the staff the possibility of having their own landfill site for organics in the area and creating compost out of it which is not only very efficient but which would save Gerard money!