Ian Marchant - A Hero for High Times: A Younger Reader’s Guide to the Beats, Hippies, Freaks, Punks, Ravers, New-Age Travellers and Dog-on-a-Rope Brew Crew Crusties of the British Isles, 1956–1994

Deep in a wood in the Marches of Wales, in an ancient school bus there lives an old man called Bob Rowberry.

A Hero For High Times is the story of how he ended up in this broken-down bus. Its also the story of his times, and the ideas that shaped him. Its a story of why you know your birth sign, why you have friends called Willow, why sex and drugs and rock n roll once mattered more than money, why dance music stopped the New Age Travellers from travelling, and why you need to think twice before taking the brown acid.

Its the story of the hippies for those who werent there for Younger Readers whove never heard of the Aldermaston marches, Oz, the Angry Brigade, the Divine Light Mission, Sniffin Glue, Operation Julie, John Seymour, John Michell, Greenham Common, the Battle of the Beanfield, but who want to understand their grandparents stories of turning on, tuning in and not quite dropping out before they are gone for ever. Its for Younger Readers who want to know how to build a bender, make poppy tea, and throw the I Ching.

And its a story of friendship between two men, one who did things, and one who thought about things, between theory and practice, between a hippie and a punk, between two gentlemen, no longer in the first flush of youth, who still believe in love.

Ian Marchant is originally from Newhaven in East Sussex, and now lives with his family in the no longer extant Welsh county of Radnorshire. He has published seven books, including the travel/memoirs Parallel Lines, The Longest Crawl and Something of the Night. He is a sometimes presenter of documentaries for BBC Radio, and has appeared numerous times at festivals (including Glastonbury, Secret Garden Party and Wilderness) as one half of semi-legendary hippie cabaret duo Your Dad.

Violet and Grace,

this book is for you.

It is called

A Hero for High Times

(Being an account of the Life and Times and Opinions of Mr Robert Rowberry)

Or, A Younger Readers Guide to the Beats, Hippies, Freaks, Punks, Ravers, New Age Travellers and Dog-on-a-Rope Brew Crew Crusties of the British Isles, 19561994,

together with an Epilogue, entitled

How to Get Your Head Together in the Country

and an Appendix and an Afterword

It is by me,

Ian Marchant,

and I am your grandfather.

This book, my darling granddaughters, is mostly about a small group of people who called themselves Freaks. They have called themselves many other things over the years. The Beats, the Hippies, the Punks, the Ravers, the New Age Travellers. Freaks will do for them all.

The Freaks thought the world was broken, and that they might have found a new way of mending it. They wanted freedom, and happiness, and a world in which people could be themselves, which meant that there would be no war, no famine and no disease.

The Freaks thought that in order to make this happen, everyone and everything needed to change. And to change everyone and everything, the Freaks were going to teach the world to play.

The Freaks wanted everybody to look at everything in a new way.

A new way which allows people to live their lives how they choose, no matter what anybody else thinks or says. A way where we can dance and sing and play all day. A way where Love is the most powerful force in the universe, and where people see that the world is a wonderful, magical place. A way where we all realise that we are in the here and now, just this once, just in this pregnant moment of the eternal creative life of the cosmos, and that we are the eyes and hands and souls of Creation.

It didnt work, my darling girls, of course it didnt. But between about 1956, when your grandmother Rowan was born, and about 1994, when your mummy was fourteen, the Freaks tried to make it work.

Lots of my friends were Freaks. You can read about one of them called Bob Rowberry in this book. I was a Freak, too still am and Im sorry it didnt work. Sometimes it even looks like we made things worse.

Just like every other human in history, you have been born into a world that is broken. I dont know if the world can be mended. On the evidence of what Ive seen, I almost want to say it cant be. But I still believe with all my heart that the world is worth trying to mend. The thing is to try. It is always hard, so trying may be your only reward.

I hope you will try one day, and that your way, whatever it might turn out to be, will be better than ours.

Presteigne, Radnorshire, July 2017

You know, there really exist certain people to whom it is assigned, at their birth, to have all sorts of extraordinary things happen to them.

Mikhail Lermontov

Deep in a wood in a valley in the Marches of Wales, alongside a long-ago abandoned railway line, there lives a seventy-five-year-old man called Bob Rowberry. His home is a superannuated school bus, now painted battleship grey, whose engine has died and whose wheels have fallen off.

This is the story of how he ended up in this broken-down bus, on this abandoned line, in this lost and forgotten part of the world.

Ive come up here today pulled up a farm track off the A44 onto the old permanent way, driven along the rutted trackbed between overhanging trees, and parked up alongside the corrugated-iron shed where Bob keeps his tools and parks his quad bike to see if he can mend my writing stool.

I write sitting on a 1960s draughtsmans stool. I am a big lad. Yesterday part of the base snapped, and it has felt unsafe all morning. Bob will be able to mend it, I know. Hes a travelling metalworker; from the roughest blacksmithing to the most delicate jewellery, Bob can make and mend pretty much anything. Hes a highly skilled man. Besides, I want to talk to him. I have had an idea.

He says hes always pleased to see me, and I trust him. I know Im always pleased to see him. He looks at the stool, and props it up on his bench.

You big fat fucker, he says. Come and have a coffee and Ill fix that in a minute.

A third of the bus is filled with Bobs bed, a ginger cat dozing on the Afghan throws that cover it. The rest is part kitchen, part metalworking shop. A box full of lettuce seedlings sits on top of the dashboard. Next to the bed, a wood-burner smoulders, even on this muggy late-summer day, with a kettle keeping warm on top. The bus smells of hot metal, coffee and woodsmoke. And Bob. Smelling like Bob is a good thing, to judge from his startling success with the ladies. Perhaps it helps that he is officially a gypsy; Powys County Council designated him as such a few years back, so that he can continue to live in this wood, which he rents from a homeopathic vet for 5p a year. Hes a looker, even at seventy-five; he looks a bit like David Essex might have, if David had dressed in Hereford Hospice Shop chic and actually lived a great deal of his life outdoors hitting hot metal.