Maggie & Kurt

I was aged 8 when I first heard this song and it became part of my divided childhood between Chelsea and being in the Tanat Valley with my Mum. It captured a particular time and place for me. Something happened that meant a lot to me. It touches me now for some reason. An age of expectancy and discovery. I started doing things I wanted to do. I was with my Mum and we were visiting her good friends Kurt and Maggie. They had a big country house with converted barns near Hay. My Mum and her friends were cooking steaming bowls of brown rice, tahini, soya and steamed vegetables and I just loved eating that  while sitting on a Persian rug next to a Moroccan table. (I know it sounds like a scene from Ab Fab.) It was so much better than rissoles and fish fingers at school. I decided to sleep in the car while we stayed with my Mum's country living hippy friends in Hay on Wye. I just loved that so much, me and my books, a torch, a radio, a cosy quilt inside a car with misted windows.  I stretched out and felt comfortable. A year or so later we had a summer trek in my Mum's gipsy caravan. Even better. That was so good and I never had nightmares which I often had at home. Once I thought I was flying and fell off the top bunk. I knew that I didn't want to sleep in the house even though it had big beds and warm fires. Then as sunrise came up, I was watching the changing light and feeling the changing hour. It might have been near my birthday. My new books were Aesop's Fables and Edward Lear's Book of Nonsense. 'The Pitcher and the Crow' by Aesop to my eyes was a wondrous story and showed how clever crows were.  This was just before I went to boarding school so the memory lingered for a while. I was also fascinated by tadpoles in jars and animal skulls I found in the wilds. I used to prepare rabbit skins by rubbing alum on them and then didn't know what to do with the skins.  Just making something felt good. Often I'd carry a rabbits foot in my pocket with my Swiss Army knife. I used to get into trouble with my knife, cutting squares into pillow cases on one occasion and  then trying to hide the evidence. Sometimes Mum would make us the classic dish 'Run Over Rabbit Pie' so I'd have the bunny skin and the feet.  We'd all enjoy the pie but my  younger brothers got fed up with road kill one winter when I was at school and refused to eat it any more. My Mum had to resort to this because my Dad sometimes forgot to send the money to my Mum after they got divorced. He sent it in cash in an envelope. I was sometimes sad for my Mum when she was short of money and things were a struggle. In London, living in Chelsea we didn't have smelly feet, warts or ringworm so much but I learnt far more from my time with my Mum and my 3 brothers. I kept myself busier in the country. You have to be a strong mother to bring up 4 boys and often there was no one else to help her. In London we had a nanny, or an au pair. Sometimes they were good but not always. One of them spanked me a great deal. My older brother Giles told my Mum what she'd been doing and the mean but attractive nanny was given her marching orders. I would often get unsettled by the changing of the nanny guard.

Concerning the song I've chosen, I didn't really know what it was about at the time but I did have an adventure with an older woman called Angie who took me off for a ride while I was at a party in the distant hills of Mid Wales aged about 12.  I had a good time, an innocent time so far as I recall, we just had fun and a laugh. I just loved talking to people who'd seen something of the world, had stories or were kind sympathetic souls. I was sometimes a moody moon child but I loved a party. In the morning she drove me back to the party. My Mum was furious with Angie Potter and always wanted to know what she was playing at. I don't think she asked me and I didn't say much.

Maggie May by Rod Stewart