Free Nick Drake by Patrick Humphries Page A

with.’
    Nick’s final night at Marlborough was marked by a typical piece of teenage malpractice, and understandably Dennis Silk found him slightly less delightful that night: ‘I can remember having a flaming row with Nick on his last night in school, when he was up at three o’clock in the morning drinking and smoking — everything that boys do on their last night at school which housemasters are paid to try and stop.’
    To celebrate the end of A levels, Nick, David Wright and Jeremy Mason had sloped off into town, where they got spectacularly drunk on beer and wine. ‘On the last night of term he got awfully pissed …’ David recalls. ‘And my abiding memory of Nick is with a bottle of sweet white wine, probably Graves, absolutely out of it, completely cold, by the Music Block.’
    In an often-repeated quote, Nick is alleged to have described Marlborough as a place ‘where the sensitive experience a horrified dissociation from reality that can sometimes never fade away’. The words are those of Steve Burgess, in a May 1979 profile of Nick for
Dark Star
, in which he seeks to equate his experiences of ‘that evilBritish institution known as boarding school’ with those of Nick at Marlborough: ‘I know that Nick and I were of a piece …’ The truth is that Nick never expressed such an opinion — indeed all the contemporary evidence points to him having rather enjoyed his years at public school.

Chapter 4
    By the time Nick had completed his schooldays at Marlborough and was back at home in Tanworth in the early summer of 1966, The Beatles had released
Revolver
and Dylan unleashed
Blonde On Blonde.
Hazy and impenetrable as ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and ‘Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands’ might be, they were the writing on the wall. Back at Far Leys again, Nick practised the guitar, sitting for hours in his bedroom or downstairs in the living room, endlessly tuning and retuning his guitar, formulating a style which would become his own, lost in a reverie of sorts.
    There was more than a year to fill before he would go up to Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, in the autumn of 1967. In the limbo between school and university, his friends were still those he had made at Marlborough, and it was to them that Nick looked to occupy the time. With his newly acquired driving licence, a tent and Molly’s quaint little Morris Minor, Nick and three friends set off for France in July 1966.
    One of Nick’s companions was Michael Maclaran, who has clear memories of their journey: ‘Driving a heavily laden and underpowered car was a nightmare, and included such dramas as losing both wing mirrors at once in a head-on near-collision and scraping the entire contents of a traffic island in our path as we ploughed on, wheels locked. At least the Morris’s suspension was up to anything. After many weeks the car finally broke down nearing the top of a climb towards Grenoble. Short of mechanical skills, we stared under the bonnet. Someone spotted a broken spring, which was miraculouslyreplaced by an identical one from a nearby piece of farm machinery.’
    The hours Nick had devoted to learning the guitar had been well spent, for contemporaries began to notice just how proficient he had become on the instrument. ‘Wherever we went, the evenings were often the same with groups of people gathering around bonfires under the stars, on beaches, in woods or at camp-sites, to hear Nick sing and play his guitar,’ Michael Maclaran remembered. ‘The venues included Remoulins, near the Pont du Gard, where we stayed with some of Nick’s friends … They took us to the bullfight in Nîmes, but only after we had read Hemingway’s vital work on the topic. There we hit a spectacular candlelight “Quatorze juillet” party in the woods, which was a two-day hangover. And at St Tropez, amongst the luxury yachts and private beaches, it